by Jack Mars
“I’ll put someone on it now.” The cop turned and gave the order into the radio.
Zero turned to Strickland, who seemed to be wincing with each breath. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’ve had worse.” He grinned. “The jacket caught both rounds. My ribs are going to be bruised to high hell and it’s going to hurt to breathe for a while, but I’ll live.”
Zero chuckled softly. Now that the adrenaline of the chase was wearing off, he could feel the dull pain from where his bicep had caught the impact of the Russian’s knife. He too would be bruised, but he too would live.
Far more concerning than minor injuries was the problem with his memory. He had forgotten, mid-chase, where he kept his LC9—and he still couldn’t remember. He searched the jacket’s pockets, patted his waist, and finally bent and checked his ankles…
Ankle holster. Of course. As soon as his fingers found the familiar shape, the weight of it there, the recollection surged back as if it had never left.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Strickland asked. “I’m not used to seeing self-pat-downs.”
“Just making sure I didn’t drop anything when those guards tackled me,” Zero said with a shrug. He tried to look casual, and hoped that Strickland didn’t think anything was amiss—but that was now the second time the younger agent had witnessed his odd behavior. It was only a matter of time before he started asking more probing questions.
As the cops and security continued their evacuation, guiding people out beyond the sawhorses, Zero turned his attention to the nearby police cruiser that held Scruffy and Maria. He thought he’d hear cries of pain, perhaps see some movement behind the tinted windows, but there was none. And after only a few minutes the door opened and she got out. Just before she closed the door again he caught a glimpse of the bearded Russian man—and he looked terrified.
Zero of all people knew that psychological torture could be at least as effective, if not more so in some cases, than physical. It was easier to train a body not to break than a mind.
Maria paused at the sergeant and said, “Tell EOD there’s a suitcase bomb in room 803. We have the detonator, but it’s still active.” Then she headed toward Zero and Strickland, not at all looking pleased.
“What is it?” Todd asked quickly.
“We stopped an attack,” Maria said dourly. “Just not the one we were hoping to stop.”
Zero frowned. That couldn’t be right; these had to be the same people. It felt random enough. It was a small team of Russians, with a woman. OMNI had picked up their chatter. Everything fit.
“What’s in room 803 that they want to bomb?” he asked.
“Not what,” Maria replied. “But who. Seems that a former member of Aleksandr Kozlovsky’s cabinet is holed up here at the Mirage under a false name while he brokers a deal with our government—Russian secrets in exchange for immunity and a new identity. Russia caught wind and sent these three, a KGB sleeper-cell in the States.”
KGB sleeper-cells in the US, Zero thought bitterly. Just add that to the long list of “last things we need right now.”
“They sent the woman to his hotel room disguised as a high-end escort,” Maria explained. “She planted the bomb and stole his phone. Then she passed it off to Scruffy, who had the detonator. He passed off both to the third guy, whose job was to confirm that the intel was on the phone before detonating the bomb.”
“What was on the phone?” Zero asked.
“A map,” Maria told him, “showing the locations of two dozen secret nuclear missile silos in Russia.”
Zero balked. That was significant intel to be keeping on a phone. “Did you know about this?” he asked her.
Maria shook her head. “Must be above my pay grade.”
Strickland frowned. “But why wait to blow it? The phone would have been destroyed in the blast anyway, right?”
“Because,” Zero said slowly as he worked it out for himself, “if the map was legitimate, any country that could afford it would pay tens of millions for that kind of information. I’m betting these three were going to defect, sell the intel themselves to the highest bidder.”
Maria nodded. “And I feel pretty confident that they have no idea about any ultrasonic weapon.”
“So this is all a dead end,” Strickland muttered.
“We still averted a major crisis,” Zero pointed out, though he was feeling much the same way. The group that attacked Havana and the tiny town in Kansas was still out there, and the Russians seemed to have no idea who they were.
“All I know,” Maria said as she looked up at the Mirage behind them, “is that we’ve done all we can here. And I could really use a coffee.” She waved down the sergeant, heading over to speak with him before they left.
Zero slung his gear bag over his shoulder. Something about this just didn’t seem right. Their assumptions so far, educated or not, were still guesses.
What if the Russians aren’t responsible for the sonic weapon at all? he wondered. That was the primary lead from which they were operating; being wrong about that meant going about the entire search wrong. What if this is a terrorist faction that just has Russian members?
He didn’t voice the thought aloud, since it was little more than a hunch. They were back to square one; they had no leads, no idea who they were chasing, and most importantly, no idea where to find them before the next attack.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Maria swirled her coffee with a plastic stirrer, watching the thin rivulets of cream blend into the dark roast, turning it mocha brown. She sat at a small round table in a chain coffee shop not three blocks from the Mirage. She told herself it was important to stay close, in case they were needed again—but the bitter reality was that she had no idea where to go from there.
“Hey.” Kent set down a paper cup and emptied a sugar packet into it. “Where’s Todd?”
“Stepped out to make a quick call.” At his raised eyebrow she added, “His dad, I think. It’s still Thanksgiving, you know.”
“I guess it is.” He sat across from her and watched the steam curl from his cup. He had that distant look in his eye; she’d worked with him long enough to know he was either working out the details of the op, or he was thinking about his kids back home.
“You want to talk about it?” she prodded.
He smiled, but shook his head. “Not really. You?”
“Not really.” The truth of the matter was that she didn’t understand why she felt so low. They’d missed their mark, but in doing so had stopped another attack. They’d kept a man from getting killed, and possibly some innocent civilians. She should have felt some sense of pride or accomplishment—but all she felt was pending dread. Those people and their sonic weapon were still out there. They could be anywhere. Another attack could be happening at that very moment, for all she knew.
Maria had fully expected a call, at least from Director Shaw and possibly even from President Rutledge, yet her phone remained silent. There was no doubt they were aware of what happened at the Mirage; aware that she and her team had, so far, failed.
That’s what it was. That’s why she was feeling the way she was. It was the sting of failure, a feeling she wasn’t accustomed to.
“I think I’m just struggling to understand these people,” she admitted finally. “Their motives. What they’re after. Why two attacks so close together, and silence ever since.”
Kent nodded slowly. “I think,” he said, “that’s the point.”
“What is?”
“Psychological torture.” He had that faraway look in his eye, the one that suggested he’d been thinking about it already. “The locations of the attacks don’t make sense to us. But they’ve managed to prove that they can get into our country, the heart of it, and strike quickly. They don’t have to rush into a third attack, because now we know what they can do. Just the knowledge of that is enough to scare us. To keep us making guesses and frantically try to find them. I don’t think they knew what was happening her
e today… but I think they assumed we’d move fast and make a misstep.”
As frequently and irritatingly as he was right, she understood. She’d just used similar tactics not so long ago on the scruffy Russian. She didn’t need to lay a finger on him to get the information she wanted; as KGB, the man was familiar with the CIA black site in Morocco called H-6. To someone like him, Hell-Six as they called it would have been a ghost story.
And all you had to do was make a ghost story a little more real to put genuine fear into someone.
But even if that was the right answer, it was all the more frightening than any that she could discern, because it meant that these people weren’t likely to make demands or show their hand. They wanted to incite fear and panic.
Kent gestured to the tablet in front of her. “Any more hits from OMNI?”
She shrugged. “They picked up a few suspicious snippets here and there. But the NSA is looking deeper into each, after all… this.” They’d been too hasty, assuming that the Russian female they’d picked up was the same one they were after. “Nothing legitimate yet.”
She glanced down at the dark-screened tablet, as if she could will it to spring to life with an update, a lead, somewhere for them to go. Getting back on the plane and returning to Langley felt like a waste of time—and she didn’t want to face whoever might be waiting for them.
Maria felt his hand on hers, and she flinched, almost pulling her hand away. But she didn’t; his fingers felt warm and familiar. He gave her a small squeeze and said, “We’re going to find them. We always do.”
She nodded, but her mind wasn’t on the sonic weapon and the mysterious Russian woman anymore. The warmth from his hand felt like an electric tingle, running up her arm and into her heart. She’d had a lot of complicated relationships in her life, family and friends and former boyfriends, but Kent was by far the most complex.
She very nearly blurted out, What happened between us?
They’d been through so much together. They’d come up as agents together; they’d saved each other’s lives countless times. They’d been coworkers and friends and lovers. For a while, they were nothing. Then Kent came back from the dead and they were coworkers and friends and lovers all over again.
And now they were… friends? Superior and subordinate? She didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that she thought she knew what she wanted—a family and a steady career and a house in the suburbs—but when he was there, sitting in front of her, holding her hand, smiling as if everything was going to be all right—all those other desires and dreams fell away.
“I think,” she said slowly, “when we get back, we should talk.”
“Yeah? What are we going to talk about?”
“About…”
Her phone rang, and she cursed silently. Not just for the awful timing of it, but because of the stern chewing out that she feared it to be.
But no. It was Bixby.
Maria put the call on speaker for Kent’s benefit. “Do we have a hit?” she asked immediately.
“Yes,” said the engineer. “Well, no. Sort of.”
“Bixby,” Maria said sternly.
“Not a hit through OMNI,” he explained rapidly. “Something else. The tech team has been sifting through any available data from the Midwestern attack, but there wasn’t much to go on; no traffic cams, barely any security footage, nothing useful. But then we realized that a whole bunch of people must have been taking photos and videos with their phones.
“It’s taken a better part of the day, but I’ve been collecting several videos that people were taking of the parade from cell phones. I’ve extrapolated still images in the moments just before the attack began, and sort of ‘stitched’ them together into a panorama shot of ground zero. Here, take a look.”
Her tablet chimed, and Maria swiped at the screen to open the image Bixby had just sent. It looked eerily similar to the scene from the video they’d watched just after the attack occurred, but on a much wider scale—she could move the image left and right to see the scores of people lining the streets, the storefronts behind them, obscured only by thin hazy lines where Bixby had hastily put together various images.
Kent rounded the table and peered at the image over her shoulder, his breath light on her ear. Focus, she told herself. “Looking at it now,” she told Bixby. “Is there something we should be noticing?”
“Not at first glance,” the engineer said. “But based on the videos I saw—terrifying stuff, by the way—I reasoned that the sonic attack had to have come from behind the parade. Zoom in on the upper left quadrant.”
Maria did so, using two fingers to expand a quarter of the panoramic image, but all she saw were dozens of blurred faces and the beginning of the marching band coming around the corner. “I’m not seeing whatever I’m supposed to be seeing,” she said flatly. It looked like a real-life Where’s Waldo? to her.
“There!” said Kent suddenly, pointing at a spot in the image. “Zoom closer there.”
She did so—and sure enough, she saw what he saw. A flash of bright red hair. A slight figure. The profile of white skin. The woman was partially obscured by two people in front of her, but it was her. Or at least it looked like her.
“Could be our gal,” Maria admitted. “Or it could be any redhead that was there this morning.”
“This truck beside her,” Kent noted curiously. “It looks familiar.” The woman was indeed standing beside a box truck, but the panoramic image was taken from at least two blocks away; they couldn’t make out the logo. Only the bright green and orange swirl and vague white letters.
But it did look familiar. Maria had seen similar trucks on the highway before, had noticed them in passing. “That’s a food distributor, isn’t it?”
“Bingo,” said Bixby. “That truck is from Stay-Fresh Grocery Distribution. I took the liberty of contacting their headquarters. They do indeed have a truck missing, from a depot not far from Kansas City. They wouldn’t have even noticed until tomorrow, with the holiday.”
Maria’s heart leapt at the lead. “Tell me that truck has GPS.”
“Disabled,” Bixby told them, “along with the radio. But we have a license plate number.”
She mulled it over quickly. There was a good chance that Shaw and Rutledge would disapprove of what she was about to do, but this was no time to check in and wait for authorization.
“These people are smart enough to stay off of phones and radios,” she said. “Pull our NSA resources from OMNI. I want them looking for this truck—highway cams, toll booths, gas stations, any likely place. Have them start at Springfield and work out in concentric circles. Find the route they took. And put out an APB to every highway patrol unit in the country.”
Bixby was silent for a long moment. “Are you sure that’s the right move here…?”
“I’m not going to risk losing them again,” Maria said firmly. “Put out the APB with the license plate number—but make sure they do not engage. We want a location, and we want them followed if possible, but no engagement.” The APB was risky enough; forcing the Russians’ hand into using the weapon again would be entirely on her, and she was keenly aware of it. “I want to know the instant we hear anything.”
“On it.” Bixby ended the call.
Maria stuffed the tablet and her phone back into her gear bag and snatched up her coffee cup. “Let’s get back to the jet. I want to be ready the moment we hear something.”
“Hang on a sec.” Kent held up a hand, his brow furrowed. She knew that look too; he was working on some calculation—or perhaps an assumption—in his head.
“We’re not hanging on,” Maria argued. “We have a lead and we’re going to move on it. They’re transporting the weapon in that truck, Kent.”
“But why? There are probably a thousand trucks they could have taken. They knew they were attacking a parade, where people would be taking photos and videos, and they chose one of the most conspicuous trucks they could have chosen?”
Maria scof
fed in exasperation. “Are you suggesting they want to be found? If that was the case, they could have left the GPS intact.”
“No,” he said pensively. “Not that they want to be found… but not that they don’t want to be found either.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. We’re going.” She led the way across the coffee shop toward the exit, with Kent trailing at her heels. “It could have been a crime of convenience,” she said over her shoulder. “I can’t imagine that grocery distribution centers have intense security.”
“Maybe,” he replied dubiously. “But you have to admit, every time we get new information it feels like we’re left with more questions than answers.”
She didn’t like how doubtful he was being. She didn’t like his line of questioning, because it made her feel like he was questioning her. This was the right move. She could feel it; they were getting closer.
Strickland pulled the door of the coffee shop open as they reached it. “We’re moving?”
“Back to the jet. We’ve got a lead.”
Strickland turned on a heel and followed them as they strode quickly back to the borrowed cruiser. “What have we got?” he asked.
“A needle in a haystack,” Kent said lowly.
“That’s right,” Maria agreed, rather than argue. “And we’re going to jump right in and find it.”
She mentally dared Kent to say something further. He didn’t—but he didn’t have to. She knew him well enough to know the words that were right on the tip of his tongue.
Sounds like a good way to get pricked.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
President Rutledge sat alone in the Oval Office—though not behind the desk. He sat in one of the comfortable armchairs arranged in the room’s center, four of them facing each other in a circle. He couldn’t bring himself to sit behind the desk right now. It required a strength of presence that he simply couldn’t muster.
He glanced down at the carpet beneath his shoes and noticed a few stray hairs there.