Noah Wolf Box Set 2

by David Archer

  Sarah looked at him for another moment, then took out her own cell phone and punched the icon for Marco. He answered after a couple of rings.

  “Marco, it’s Sarah,” she said brightly. “Hey, listen, Noah and I want to play some cards tonight. Do you think you can convince Renée to come along? It’d really mean a lot to us to have another couple there, and you guys are our favorites.”

  “Yeah, we were planning on getting together tonight, anyway. Want us to bring anything?”

  “Just be sure you both come,” Sarah said. “We really, really want to play.”

  “Well, then put some beer in the fridge. Oh, hey, what time?”

  “How about six? I’ll have dinner ready by then, okay?”

  “Six o’clock,” Marco said. “We’ll be there.”

  “He says they’re coming,” Sarah said to Noah. “I think he caught the hint that it was important.”

  Noah nodded but didn’t say anything. When they got back to the house, he stopped the Corvette beside Neil’s trailer and walked up to knock on the door.

  “Hey,” Neil said as he opened it. “Everything okay?”

  “I have to come up with a way to make it look like I killed Randy Mitchell. I’ve got Marco and Renée coming over this evening, and I’m hoping to recruit her to help us get anything we might need out of R&D. I need you to come help me figure out a way to pull this off.”

  “Right now? No problem, I was just loafing anyway. I’ll grab my computer and be right over.”

  Noah got back into the car and drove over to his own house, and Neil was walking across the yard as he and Sarah opened the door. The three of them went in and sat at the kitchen table, and Sarah put on a pot of coffee.

  “Okay,” Neil said, “I was actually kinda dozing on the couch when you knocked. Did you say we have to kill Randy, or make it look like we did?”

  “We need to come up with a way to make it seem like we did, but it’s possible the mole has other people within our organization who will be trying to verify. What I need to do is come up with something that will convince anybody that he’s dead, but without actually killing him. If we can’t come up with an answer, then I’ll be forced to put him down for real.”

  “Well, considering what he did to Sarah, I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep if that happens. Why are we going to any effort to keep him alive?”

  “Neil,” Sarah said, “the guy was blackmailed into doing what he did. If he’d done it for money, I’d probably volunteer to blow his head off myself, but all he was trying to do was protect his little sisters. As much as I hate what happened, I can understand why he did what he did.”

  “Besides which,” Noah said, “Allison thinks he’s still an asset. She’d prefer not to have him eliminated at this point, if we can come up with a way.”

  Neil rubbed his hands over his face, then looked at Noah again. “So, what are we thinking? Car bomb, maybe? Take him out on the boat and give him some concrete overshoes?”

  “Maybe nothing so drastic. In movies, they sometimes have a drug or something that makes people appear to be dead. Is there actually such a drug?”

  Neil’s eyebrows went up. “Well, yeah,” he said. “It’s pretty tricky stuff to use, though. Tetrodotoxin is what it’s called; it comes from the livers of puffer fish and the venom of the blue-ringed octopus. Just a minute, let me look it up.” He turned to his computer and started tapping on the keys. A moment later, he turned it around so Noah could see the screen.

  “It takes an extremely small amount to completely paralyze a human body to the point where the person would appear to be dead. No detectable pulse, no detectable respiration, body temperature starts dropping—the only problem is that there’s a very fine line between ‘he looks dead,’ and ‘oops, he really is dead.’ I don’t think there’s ever been any kind of study on just what the dosage should be to get the effect you’re looking for.”

  Noah stared at the screen for a moment, then looked up at Neil. “This is what’s so frustrating about having to be careful who knows what we’re up to,” he said. “If this were a sanctioned mission, I’d just go out to R&D and ask Wally. I’d be willing to bet someone out there knows exactly what dosage we should use.”

  “And they probably have some in a refrigerator out there,” Neil said, nodding. “Which, I suppose, is why you’re hoping to corrupt Marco’s girlfriend tonight, am I right?”

  “Yes. When we invited them over, I hadn’t really come up with an idea, but I was almost certain I’d need something from Wally’s department.”

  “But why involve Renée?” Sarah asked. “Why not just go to Allison and see if she can get it for you?”

  “No,” Neil said, “Noah is right. The Dragon Lady, if our mole has people inside, would be the main one he’d want them to watch. How often does she go out to R&D? The answer is just about never, because she doesn’t go into the field.”

  “Well, only when she’s going out to recruit someone, anyway,” Noah said. “No, the smaller the group that knows about this, the better. I’m taking the chance that Renée can become an unofficial member of the team, at least while the mission is to take down someone like this.”

  “Okay, I guess,” Sarah said. “I just wish we knew her a little better. I mean, if it was Elaine I wouldn’t hesitate, but we haven’t really spent that much time around Renée yet.”

  Noah looked at her for a moment, then turned to Neil. “Can you tap into her cell phone? If there’s even the slightest chance she’s been corrupted by the mole, then she’d almost certainly try to send some kind of message to him that she’s coming over here tonight, wouldn’t you think?”

  Neil rolled his eyes. “I could do that in my sleep,” he said. “Anybody got her number? I can use that to get her ESN, and then my computer can record every call or text or email, or anything else she does on it.”

  Sarah gave him the number while he called up the program he would use, and it took him less than half a minute to have it all set up. He looked at the screen for a few seconds, then broke into a big smile.

  “Check this out,” he said. “She’s got an app on her phone that already records every call, every text, every single keystroke. There’s about three gig worth of data stored, which would probably be about the last two weeks or so. I’m setting up a search algorithm to look for anything suspicious in it right now.”

  “How long will it take?” Noah asked.

  “That much data? Probably an hour or so, but it’ll tell us if there’s any kind of increased risk to letting her in on this. I can’t say for certain that not finding anything would mean she was clean, but I think it might give us a general indicator.”

  “Then do it. We need every indication we can get of who we can and cannot trust.”

  “It’s running. Now, here’s a question for you. Assuming we find some way to make Randy look completely dead without actually killing him, how are you going to get him to cooperate? I’m pretty sure he’s smart enough to realize that a slight miscalculation in the dosage might make him enter ghosthood a lot earlier than he wanted to.”

  Noah blinked. “Why would you expect me to let him in on the secret? If it did scare him, he just might go running straight to the mole to try to talk him out of it. That would ruin everything we’re trying to do.” He shook his head. “If we can get our hands on the drug, my next move is to find a way to deliver it without him seeing it coming. It’s got to be as much a surprise to him as to everyone else. Absolutely everyone outside of our small group has to think he’s dead.”

  “Then what’s going to happen to him?” Sarah asked. “I mean, he’s gonna be lying in a morgue in some kind of coma, right? How do we make sure he doesn’t get buried alive?”

  “That’s a good point,” Noah said. “I’m probably going to have to find a way to make his body disappear. We can’t bring anyone else in on this, so it would be strictly up to me.” He looked at Neil. “I’m assuming there’s a way to wake him up?”

  Neil s
hrugged. “Epinephrine, probably. I’ll see if I can find anything on the dark web about this. If anybody has ever used this stuff, that’s where I would find it.” He turned back to his computer and started tapping on the keys.

  Noah and Sarah sat and watched in silence as Neil worked his magic. Page after page of data rolled across his monitor, and the skinny young man’s fingers almost flew over the keyboard. He kept at it for more than twenty minutes without taking his eyes off the screen, then suddenly asked, “You guys got anything for lunch? I’m starving.”

  Sarah’s eyes went wide and then rolled sideways, but she got up and opened the refrigerator. It was a matter of only a few minutes to make sandwiches out of leftover steak and pile potato salad onto plates, and she set one at each of their places. Neil reached out and picked up his sandwich without appearing to even look at it first, took a huge bite, and then smiled.

  He chewed quickly and swallowed, then said, “I got it. TTX, tetrodotoxin, isn’t enough by itself, but a highly unethical and illegal study done by the Russians in the 1960s found that a cataleptic state—completely indiscernible from death, but from which the victim will awaken—can be induced by the injection of one milligram of TTX along with twenty milligrams of haloperidol for every forty-five kilograms of body weight. That equals about a hundred pounds, so somebody weighing 150 pounds would need roughly one and a half times that dose. The victim will be completely without signs of life, even though heart rate and respiration are still present, but faint, for up to thirty-eight hours. And no, there is no need for an antidote. The victim will slowly increase respiration and heart rate in the last couple of hours and should regain mobility around the same time.” He looked up at Noah. “One of the more interesting things they found was that the victims are usually wide awake and fully aware of their surroundings the whole time, but simply incapable of doing anything to let anyone else know what’s happening to them.”

  Noah considered all this information for a moment. “So, what you’re telling me is that Randy would be completely aware that he was being pronounced dead, but he wouldn’t be able to speak or move his eyes or anything else. Right?”

  “That about sums it up, yeah.”

  “But it won’t actually kill him?”

  “Well, not if you can believe the Russians. Remember, it was their military doctors who conducted these experiments.”

  “Then it would work. How hard is it going to be to get hold of the second ingredient, assuming we can even get our hands on the first?”

  “Well, if you were schizophrenic, you’d probably have it in your medicine cabinet. I’d lay odds Doc Parker probably keeps a big bottle of it somewhere around his office.”

  Noah blinked. “Well, him we can trust. Let’s find out if we can get our hands on the tetro-whatever, then we can ask him about haloperidol in the morning. If nothing else, he can probably figure out a way to get me some of it.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Neil said. “That only leaves the question of the vector. How do you intend to inject Randy with it, if you’re not going to let him in on the plan?”

  “Well, I’ve been giving that some serious thought. How long does it take for the paralysis to set in?”

  “According to this article, between seventeen and forty-six seconds. After that, the victim is completely cataleptic. He can’t move, he can’t speak, he can’t so much as open his eyes, or close them, for that matter.”

  “Then I’ll have to get to him when he’s completely alone, where no one else can possibly overhear, and then I’ll explain it to him right after I give him the shot. It’ll be too late for him to decline to participate, but at least I can warn him about what he’s about to go through.”

  “Okay, and then you’ve got about thirty-six to thirty-eight hours before he gets back on his feet and is really, really pissed off. Most of that time, he’s probably going to be in the morgue. How do you plan to get him out without tipping anyone off?”

  “Actually, I’ve got an idea on that. As an E & E operative, he pretty much belongs to the organization. Every once in a while, I’ve heard, R&D uses cadavers in testing some of their equipment. I’m going to find out from Renée how they go about it, but I would bet it’s just a matter of the Dragon Lady approving a requisition form for a corpse.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Since they were going to be discussing sensitive issues, Noah decided to forgo the grill and have dinner inside, and asked Neil to do whatever he could to make sure no one could possibly overhear them. Neil grinned and jogged over to his trailer, coming back a few minutes later with a couple of small suitcases.

  The first one he opened contained a device that could detect any type of radio signal, the same sort of device used by other federal agencies in sweeping for bugs. It took him less than ten minutes to pronounce the house completely clean, and then he opened the other case.

  Inside that one was the drone that Noah and Sarah had bought for him, equipped with a GoPro camera that was set to infrared. “This baby you got me is fantastic,” he said. “When it gets closer to dinnertime, I can use this to scan the area and make sure nobody is close enough to be aiming any type of listening device at us.”

  Sarah went all out, making pot roast with potatoes, onions, and carrots, while Noah and Neil made a run to the store to pick up beer, soft drinks, and snacks for after dinner. They were back in plenty of time, and at her insistence, both men helped Sarah give the house a thorough cleaning.

  Marco and Renée showed up a half hour early, so they all sat out on the rarely used patio, just off the kitchen. Noah, Marco and Neil opted for bottles of beer, while the girls each took one of Sarah’s raspberry wine coolers.

  Marco was watching Neil, who was doing something with his phone. “What are you up to over there, Neil? Texting some new girl?”

  Neil only grinned and shook his head, but a moment later he looked up at Noah and said, “Boss, the only heat signatures within half a mile, other than us, seems to be a coyote and a couple of rabbits. I’ve also checked the house again for any new radio signals. We’re all clear, boss.”

  Marco and Renée glanced at one another, then Marco looked at Noah. “Boss man? Something going on?”

  Sarah spoke first. “Renée, how high is your security clearance?”

  Renée’s eyebrows rose half an inch, but she didn’t hesitate. “I have Q clearance,” she said. “Everyone in the offices at R&D has to have it. Why?”

  “Because the matters we are about to discuss would certainly be classified top secret, and probably with a restricted designation,” Noah said. “Do you know anything about the circumstances surrounding Sarah’s recent capture by the Chinese?”

  “The circumstances surrounding it? All I know is that she was captured by someone during a mission and ended up in the hands of the Chinese interrogators. Is there something more?”

  “Actually, there is. The fact of the matter is that a member of another team had been subverted by a CIA mole, and Sarah was targeted specifically because she is on my team. The Chinese, it seems, are doing everything they can to identify me, so when the mole found out where she was, he arranged for her to be grabbed and sold to China.”

  Renée turned and looked at Sarah, her eyes even wider. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Sarah, I didn’t know.”

  “That’s because we’ve been keeping it pretty secret,” Sarah said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m actually okay.”

  “Part of the reason it’s been so secret,” Noah went on, getting Renée’s attention again, “is that a decision was made at the main office to use that operative against the mole. He was given a file that seems to be about me, even though it’s completely fabricated, and has passed it off. The idea was to set a trap to catch the mole if he tried to contact or subvert me, but it didn’t work. He’s using some false information in the file to blackmail me into doing what he wants, and I have to do everything possible to convince him I’m playing along.”

  Renée was nodding. “And I guess yo
u need some kind of help from me, which means you need something from R&D but don’t want to go through official channels. Am I right?”

  Marco cleared his throat and touched Renée on the arm. “Before this goes any further,” he said quickly, “I had absolutely no idea this was going to happen tonight.”

  Renée smiled at him. “It’s okay, Marco,” she said. She turned back to Noah. “So? How can I help?”

  “The mole has ordered me to kill that same operative. The problem with that is that Allison believes the man is salvageable and still an asset. I’ve gone over this with her, and if there’s no other way, then I’m to go ahead and terminate him, but we’re trying to find a way to make it appear that he’s dead and then cover up the fact that he’s not.”

  Renée nodded slowly. “Maybe a bombing? Blow up his car and make it seem like he was in it?”

  Noah shook his head. “I had actually considered that gambit, but there needs to be an actual death certificate, and a body that someone—assuming the mole has subverted others inside our organization—could examine. Neil came up with an idea, but we’d have to get hold of something called…” He looked at Neil.

  “Tetrodotoxin, TTX.”

  “Is there any possibility that R&D would have some?” Noah asked.

  “TTX? Yeah, as a matter of fact. One of the labs is actually working on something that involves it, but I don’t know what.”

  “What about haloperidol?” Neil asked quickly. “Any of that out there?”

  Renee’s eyebrows suddenly lowered, and she looked at Neil suspiciously. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I handle the requisition forms, and that’s something else the same lab is working with. Did you already know that?”

  “No, but TTX and haloperidol are the magic mixture the Russians came up with for making someone seem to be dead, and that’s what we’re trying to do. When you said a lab was working with TTX, I just naturally figured they might be working on the same idea.”