Too Secret Service: Part Two

by Declan Finn

  What if…?

  She looked around one last time before reaching behind the bust’s armless torso. She tore away the taped piece of paper and quickly turned away from the statue. Despite her best efforts, she’d been seen.

  MONIAK watched from behind the altar, peering just over its golden tarp and under the equally golden cross. STRONGBOW had found something. What?

  He tensed and relaxed his grip several times on his gun. He had a continually bad feeling about where this led. Finally, he turned away and went out another door, a backpack strap over both shoulders. He’d taken it directly from Catherine’s trunk the night before, immediately after he’d left her.

  MONIAK had the bomb.

  * * * *

  Catherine patiently waited outside the cathedral. She brushed back a loose strand of black hair—a nervous tic she’d developed for this disguise. The old wooden door creaked open as Williams stepped out. She looked at him with questioning brown eyes.

  The Secret Service agent shook his head. “Doesn’t have any designs for any structure outside of Ireland. Did you find anything?”

  “Only where the next bomb is.” She jerked her head toward a waiting taxi. “We’ll talk about it on the plane.”

  The two agents were seated at the very back of an airplane an hour later. It was the hourly shuttle to London—they’d missed the last one by about five seconds and one passenger seat. Wayne had to leave his gun in the hotel room. There had been no chance he could—unlike the assassin—get his weapon past airport metal detectors, and his Secret Service ID held no clout in a foreign country.

  “Worried about not having a gun?” Catherine asked after they’d taken off.

  Wayne sunk his head deeper into the headrest. “It’s not that. In fact, I’m certain I can get something better in London. My father knows one or two people over there who deal in such things.”

  “What does he do?” she inquired.

  “American Liaison to those bastards of the British SAS.” He met her eye briefly. “No offense, but some of those British Army guys are real scum.”

  “Some of the US Army guys aren’t much better.”

  Wayne didn’t know whether it was appropriate to laugh. “I seem to recall a movie called The General’s Daughter that focused around the premise.”

  She giggled. “Oh, yeah, that was realistic. Like any general would cover up his daughter’s rape in basic training. He’d have them all shot!”

  “They only shoot people for treason, nowadays, and I have doubts about whether or not that still applies.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “And Stonewall Jackson was ‘accidentally’ shot in the back by one of his own men. Trust me, Wayne, fragging an officer isn’t original.”

  * * * *

  There isn’t much to be said about Downing Street, and less to be said about the street running perpendicular to it. All the buildings were brown, dry, and terminally British—which is to say: ugly. The only noteworthy part to be said about the cross street is the giant gate and the police car stationed outside the entrance to Downing: there because of a mortar attack on #10 Downing Street over a decade before.

  As was said, rather dull.

  Catherine Miller walked alongside Wayne, wearing her dark blue “BEEN THERE DONE THAT” New York sweater; more artificially tan than she’d ever been in reality, wearing a brown wig. She remembered not liking London: too depressing. They had their thousand monuments to past glories, with their millions of gift shops as a permanent reminder that they were merely a tourist attraction now. There was talk of Disney buying the city; half of the commercialization had been done for them.

  Wayne pushed open one of the short, black rail-iron fences and waved her ahead of him. She just glanced at him and shook her head. “You’re the only one they’d let in, remember. You first.”

  He shrugged and walked inside, holding the fence open with one hand until he was certain that she had a grip on it. He climbed the stairs two at a time, briefcase in his left hand. She patiently walked after him, shaking her head at his boyish enthusiasm. He sharply wrapped on the door. He was hardly finished with his third knock when the door flashed open, revealing a copy of Wayne.

  Catherine glanced between Williams and his father. There were only slight differences in the otherwise mirror image. Williams had an inch on his father, but the older Williams had a wider shoulder span. Where Wayne had on a suit, his father donned a red polo shirt and blue jeans. Except for the captain’s blue-green eyes, their faces were identical. All the older man needed was a dye job to conceal his age.

  “You don’t call, you don’t write, and you show up on my doorstep with a gorgeous woman on your arm, obviously to be married since you’ve got such good taste,” Captain Williams said lightning fast, with a light, jovially quality to his voice, which was tinted with a good pseudo-Jewish accent.

  Wayne grinned. It was either that or deck him. “Hi, Dad,” he said with unvarnished joy. The older man grabbed him in a bear hug. Wayne wrapped his one arm around his dad’s shoulder, careful not to drop the suitcase.

  His father pulled back, gripping his shoulders. “Well, looks like you haven’t thinned out too much,” he observed without an accent. “Have they finally let you out of the bogs?”

  “Sort of. Dad, I’d like you to meet Catherine Miller. She’s working with me for the time being.”

  Captain Williams gave him a hard glare. “A partner! You never needed a partner!” He turned his gaze on Catherine, scanning her up and down, and his face softened. He looked back at his son and nodded, letting his hands drop from his shoulder. “Although I can see why you’d make an exception in this case. Would you like to introduce us?”

  “Catherine, this is my father, Captain Wayne Williams Senior.”

  STRONGBOW cocked an eyebrow. “Senior? Then that makes you—”

  “Junior, I know,” he said.

  “We have a mutual agreement,” the captain said. “We decided it would be better if I didn’t sign my name as Senior, nor his as Junior. It could be twisted either way, and Wayne was bad enough as it was. Heck, you should see what he did to one kid on the playground in—where was it? Germany? One kid called him Jay-Ar and wound up with a mild concussion.”

  “That was, of course,” Wayne added, “while he was in mid-swing. I think I might have broken the baseball bat over his head. And, Dad, he was a teenager, not a ‘kid’, as you put it.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. You were the kid.” Captain Williams turned to her. “Wayne was only ten and he took out a fifteen-year-old. Come on in, no reason to let you freeze out here.” He stepped back to let the two pass into the hallway.

  MONIAK watched them enter.

  * * * *

  Winston Scofield glared across his desk at the almost pixie-like FBI-ITF agent. She was only 5’2”, with a round face that belied a thoroughly Italian ancestry. Her stark black hair—with matching suit—contrasted sharply with her milky white skin tone, unblemished by the sun—mostly because of florescent-light-only offices of the Internet Task Force. He could tell she enjoyed her work by the glow in her bright green—almost luminescent—eyes as she relayed her findings with a voice that sounded younger than she was.

  “Are you sure he’s in Ireland?” Scofield asked.

  Jennifer Lane (born with a name twelve syllables long and thereafter much shortened) nodded. “Positive, sir. After Agent Lansing was shot, we checked out his computer. We weren’t able to get everything, he’d triple encrypted some of it. There are some people in the NSA who are going nuts trying to break it. I’m not sure what he did, but they figure that they might as well try to break TAPDANCE.”

  TAPDANCE was the encryption code used in government communications: a system of random signals. No one had broken it for over six years. There had been a rumor three years before someone had cracked the system with a dozen supercomputers. The rumor died right after they confirmed that the only people who could afford that many supercomputers in the same room just happened
to be the US government…or Bill Gates.

  Mister Gates had been deemed mostly harmless.

  “Can’t you break it?” Scofield asked, keeping his voice calm. “You both work with the same software.”

  “Not that easy, sir. I work mostly ops for the ITF.”

  Winston forced a charming smile. “But I hear you’re one of the best,” he lied. Scofield had actually heard that she was the best.

  She smiled slightly. “Not compared with Lansing, sir. He jury-rigged his computer so many different ways, I only cracked one or two segments an hour ago. The credit search he ran on himself revealed that his credit card was used to wire ten thousand dollars to Williams, and then ordering a plane ticket to Dublin—which we both know that Lansing never got on.”

  “Does that mean Lansing—”

  “I doubt Special Agent Lansing had anything to do with Williams, sir. He could have easily memorized his credit card numbers, then handled it all by phone.”

  Scofield was taken aback. Did she just interrupt him? “Explain to me how someone could memorize all that,” he growled.

  “I do it all the time, sir,” she said innocently.

  Winston nodded cautiously. “Have you made any progress tracking down the name Williams mentioned to Lansing?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir. We’ve tried looking through criminal, even government files, and if Agent Lansing had found something, we haven’t recovered it yet.”

  “Explain to me again how he could encrypt his entire system after he’d been shot in the back?”

  “He programmed his computer so each individual file would encrypt when the screen saver kicked in. Each file is encoded differently, so each time we break through another one, it’s like starting another card game with a different set of rules and a different rigged deck.”

  Scofield pondered the information for a moment, and only remembered Agent Lane was still in the room when she asked, “Should I continue to break his system, sir? Or can I return to the team tracking down the origins of the email message?”

  Winston had an immediate answer. “Keep working on Lansing’s computer. Whatever he was working on got him shot. The only thing he’d been working on was the name Michael DeValera. If that information in his computer is retrievable—you did say he was better than you— then we’ll have a lead on these terrorists.”

  “And Williams, sir?”

  Now the smile was one of irony: “It seems, Agent Lane, I’m going to eat crow on the Hill.” He picked up a folder from his desk. “I just received a little bulletin about the shooting of SecTreas. Apparently, Secretary Stevens was shot in the back with a rifle bullet. No one in that entire parking garage had nor saw a rifle anywhere near Williams. Even worse, her car was hit with three rockets—while he was in the car. So, now I’m going back to the President, and say that my positive knowledge that Williams shot her— was wrong.” He gave a deep sigh and threw the file down with disgust. “Some days, I hate this job.”

  Chapter 23

  “The thing I hate about these urban British homes is that they’re so damned dark,” Captain Williams told his guests. He stepped down into the brightly lit living room. “I had to replace the lamps with track lighting so I could see where I was going.”

  “Your night vision going, sir?” Catherine asked.

  “It’s just fine, but even NVG’s need light to work. If the space to the next building wasn’t a millimeter wide, I’d have knocked holes into the walls and proclaimed them windows.” He laughed. “I’m sure I would’ve driven the tourist control board to a massive stroke, having some Yank poke holes in one of their historic homes. At one point, I was halfway tempted to paint this place in electric blue with yellow carpeting, if only to add some colors to contrast to all this black and brown.”

  He threw himself into his chair as though he were a relaxed civilian. Wayne knew the harmless facade. His dad had always been an actor, almost never holding himself with any proper military bearing in his home. As one of Wayne’s teachers said about such a scenario: “He must be wonderfully disassociated.”

  Wayne’s father leaned forward, rubbing his hands together, eager to begin. “Now, tell me, what’s up?”

  “Two days ago—” Catherine started.

  “Ten words or less, please,” he interrupted.

  “Someone is trying to start World War III,” Wayne stated.

  The Ranger paused, considered it, and then sat back in his chair. He steepled his fingers before him, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair. “My apologies for being rude, young lady. Could you start again? From the beginning, I think.”

  An hour later, Capt. Wayne Williams, Sr., USA (Ret.), looked at his son. “I turn my back on you for five minutes and you decide to have all this fun without me.”

  The Marine shrugged. “If I knew it would be more than simply strong-arming the IRA, I would’ve called you when I arrived in Europe. But you have to consider Scofield, Dad.”

  Capt. Williams nodded. “Which means I have to call my buddies at SAS to check the phone lines.”

  “What about Scofield?” STRONGBOW asked. “His influence stops at the US border.”

  “Think again, young lady,” the senior officer told her. “I’ve done some checking on our Mister Scofield. Apparently, he’s got more dirt on more people than Hoover ever did—you get the idea. So I don’t put anything past the little viper. There’s also about three years of his life I can’t account for in his time in the FBI.”

  “Where did you ‘check’ on him?”

  Williams Sr. raised an eyebrow. “Dear woman, I served in Vietnam, so I had close contact with what we used to call ‘Crazy In the Army’, better known nowadays as the Central Intelligence Agency. Though I’m told they’re not much better now. Frankly, my very old friends tell me that Scofield frightens some of them. To have the information he’s rumored to have, he’d have to have contacts within the Company itself.”

  “Which sounds rather bloody impossible if you ask me,” Catherine replied.

  “Let me guess: You work for the CIA?”

  “Yes, and I have to tell you, we aren’t as bad as the media wants to believe, nor as stupid. The only reason they only hear about our screw ups is that we can’t advertise our wins,” she said with steel in her voice.

  The Captain agreed. “But what you fail to realize is that, while your ELINT outclasses everyone in the world—everyone knows the Electronic Intelligence Satellites are the best—our HUMINT still hasn’t recovered from the Clinton years. All you need is an Aldrich Ames or that schizo Feebie and poof, you’re screwed, pardon my German.”

  “And as far as I’m concerned—”

  Wayne loudly cleared his throat. “If you’ll both excuse me, I think I’ll step into the hall and make a quick phone call.” He walked toward the doorway and stopped at his father’s side, putting a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Dad, be careful, they got her out of the Rangers,” the Marine softly warned. “And not even I’d want to get into a fight with her.”

  The younger Williams continued walking into the small corridor between the hall and the door. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out the cell phone he’d stolen from Paul Brennan in Ireland. Wayne quickly tapped in the phone number for Blaine Lansing’s apartment. He watched his father and Catherine, half-listening to their conversation.

  The phone rang but once before a gruff voice answered, “Hello.” The word sounded so alien to the accent, he suspected someone’s superior was within earshot.

  “Sorry, I appear to have the wrong number. I was looking for Blaine Lansing.”

  “You have the right number. Who is this?”

  “Michael DeValera. I’m a friend of his. Who’re you?”

  “James Hathaway, FBI.”

  “FBI!” Wayne exclaimed. “What’s happened to him?”

  * * * *

  “So,” Captain Williams said, “what do you think of my son, Miss—… I’m sorry, but what is your rank??”


  “Captain.”

  His eyes widened a bit. “Then why were you calling me ‘sir’?”

  “Because you’re his”—she nodded in PHOENIX’s direction—“father and my host. It’s only polite.”

  They were both distracted by Wayne snapping the cell phone shut. He calmly jammed it into his pocket and came back to the living room.

  “What is it?” his father asked.

  “It’s the computer hacker I told you about. Something’s happened.”

  “What?”

  * * * *

  Blaine Lansing lay on the white sheets of the ICU, the heart monitor showing a slow and steady rhythm. His bland face was nearly as white as the hospital sheet. Next to him, a black woman in a dark suit sat, reading an article in TIME Magazine. In the left side of her double-breasted jacket was a gun. There would be no more attempts on his life today.

  * * * *

  “Apparently,” Wayne answered, sitting down, “someone tried to kill him last night. Two shots to the back, and no one thought to go for the head, or check his pulse.” He looked at Catherine. “Definitely not someone of your caliber.”

  She shrugged. “Who is?”

  Captain Williams looked from one to the other. “Did I miss an in-joke?”

  “Yes,” they said as one.

  Williams Sr. did a double take, and then shook his head. “So the little programmer who could has been shot: that means the FBI’s phone system has been breached, if you still maintain he was being tapped.”

  “Oh, I know he was being tapped. Might have even been from his own telephone company, if it was AT&T. They’ve been obliging since they held back an upgrade that would’ve made taps harder for the FBI.”

  “So DeValera’s friends do have contacts in the FBI, just like he said,” Catherine noted. “I hope you don’t have any friends there.”

  “No,” PHOENIX told her, “but just about anyone I’ve ever known probably has more taps than a dialog in Morse code. I doubt I’ll be calling anyone.”