by Cindy Gerard
B.J. forced herself to breathe deep, then exhale on a long, bracing breath. “That’s not how I remember it. That’s not how I remember him.”
“Because you were a child. You remember what you want to remember. You remember how he’d come home after a deployment, pat you on the head like a good little pet, and play with you like you were some pretty doll or a wind-up toy or something.”
It still hurt B.J. to know that her mother had been jealous of the time her father had spent with her. She’d never comprehend how a mother could feel jealous of her own child.
“You don’t remember that he was always more than happy to leave you over and over again,” her mother said.
It wasn’t me he was leaving, B.J. wanted to point out. He was leaving a wife grown sour with self-pity. Or maybe Janine Chase had always been angry. Maybe that’s why in between moving from base to base, B.J.’s father had volunteered for the long-term missions. The dangerous missions. Missions like the one that had gotten him killed the spring she had turned eighteen.
“Look. I’ve… I’ve got to get back to D.C.” She couldn’t do this anymore. She reached for her purse, pulled out her wallet, and counted out five twenties. “I’ll call, okay?” She tucked the bills under an empty wineglass.
Flat, dull eyes pinned her by the door. “Go,” her mother said with a dismissive lift of her hand. “Get outta here. Go do what you have to do. Run away. Just like he did. Damn if you’re not just like him. Always running away.”
B.J. paused with her hand on the door, wishing she could feel something other than relief at the prospect of leaving. Wishing her mother wasn’t right. She was running away. She’d been running her entire life. “Take care of yourself, Mom.” Without looking back, she walked out the door. She felt like she was walking out of a prison.
Her BlackBerry rang just as she hit the keyless remote and unlocked her new Jeep. She dug it out of her bag, recognized the office number, and frowned.
“I’m still on leave,” she snapped, expecting to hear Cathy Watson’s voice on the other end of the line. Cathy was the girl Friday, agent wannabe, chronic source of annoyance for her division of the DIA at the Department of Defense, where B.J. worked as a covert intelligence officer in the Defense Human Intelligence Service (DHS). Cathy was also a perpetual pain in B.J.’s side. Paperwork. The woman was a real stickler for it and although she was grades below B.J. on the pay scale, Cathy loved to lord it over B.J. that she wouldn’t get paid if Cathy didn’t sign off on the paperwork.
“How soon can you report?”
Whoa. It wasn’t Cathy’s smug little voice that greeted her on the other end of the line. It was her division head, Dale Sherwood.
She scowled down the street as she opened the driver’s-side door and tossed her purse across to the passenger seat. “Excuse me? You’re the one who insisted I take this leave,” she reminded him, although her heart clattered with excitement at the prospect of reporting for duty as she settled in behind the wheel.
She was on her first vacation since she’d signed on with DIA three years ago—though it was more of an enforced time-out. Of course, the fact that she’d made the trip to her mother’s pretty much told the tale. She was going stark raving mad without her work to keep her busy and her mind occupied. Not that she’d been idle. She’d used the time off to sharpen her tennis game, toning up her muscles and her evasion skills while dodging the advances of the tennis pro at the athletic club. There were only so many movies to see, she’d exhausted her interest in experimenting with new pasta recipes, and she still had three days of her two-week vacation left before she was due to report in.
“Consider it canceled. I need you back here, Chase. Give me an ETA.”
Big. This had to be big for the boss man himself to call, not to mention interrupt the leave he had mandated that she take because, in his words, “You’re turning into a damn drone. Go. Take some time off. Mingle with the masses. Discover what it’s like to have a life. See if you can find a sense of humor.”
She’d resented that last remark. She had a sense of humor. He just didn’t appreciate it, just like she hadn’t appreciated his parting jab. “While you’re at it, get over Caracas. It’s time to move on.”
Caracas. There it was again. She’d replayed that debacle in her mind a hundred times in the past three months. It always played back the same: She’d failed. And she had a hot Latino Choirboy and his band of merry men to thank for it. Sure, she’d gotten Eduardo, but he’d been pissed. And suddenly, her paid informant didn’t have one piece of information that could help them.
So get over Caracas? Yeah. That was going to happen.
“Chase?” Sherwood’s voice jolted her back to the moment. “I need an ETA.”
She checked her watch, then squinted against the sun as she buckled up. “I can be there in two hours if I don’t run into traffic.” And she wouldn’t if she left right now.
She was already cranking the key when Sherwood disconnected.
Lean, mean marines in sweat-drenched PT gear were running around a quarter-mile track when B.J. arrived at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center on the Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. Not far away, planes landed like synchronized wasps. She could see their reflections in the steel-and-glass structure as she let herself inside.
Bypassing a pair of Saddam Hussein’s gold-plated automatic weapons displayed in the lobby, she headed straight for the Scud missile erected beside the elevator bank and punched the up button.
Exactly one hour and fifty-two minutes after Dale Sherwood had summoned her, she arrived at the briefing room. He did a double take when he got a look at her. She understood why. Professional white blouses and dark suits were her norm but she hadn’t wanted to take the time to stop at her apartment and change out of her tank top and shorts. She suspected, however, that it was her hair that threw him the most.
As a rule, she worked hard to control the unmanageable blond curls by clipping them at her nape or twisting them into a knot. Today she’d made do with a headband that simply held her hair away from her face, letting the thick, unruly mass of it fall in wild curls around her shoulders. She’d tried cutting it once. She’d looked like a blonde Little Orphan Annie. No. Thank. You.
“Thanks for coming in,” Dale said when she closed the door behind her.
“No problem.”
He grunted.
Okay. Her bad. There was a problem. Not a big enough problem to meet at HQ at the Pentagon, apparently, but big enough for Dale’s “end of the world” expression, which he generally reserved for budget cuts, or when the Homeland Security Alert Level elevated from orange to red, or, as had been the case in Caracas, when four of his best covert officers compromised themselves and blew a mission.
“You ever had someone piss all over your birthday party?” he asked abruptly as he pulled out a chair at the conference table and dropped heavily into it.
Hokay, she thought, narrowing her eyes and wondering where this was going. “Can’t recall that happening, no, sir.”
The fact was she’d never had a birthday cake, let alone a party, but she didn’t think he’d give a rat’s tail end about her “boo hoo” childhood. Just like she didn’t figure this was about a party.
On second thought, maybe it was. It was common knowledge that the grease that made the wheels run in D.C. was generally spread at cocktail parties, dinner parties, and yeah, the occasional birthday bash. D.C. parties were places to make contacts, share inside gossip, and drop bombs of unexpected info—like the one she suspected was about to be dropped on her.
“Turned sixty yesterday. The wife insisted on a ‘thing.’”
“You don’t look sixty, sir.”
Tired brown eyes cut straight to hers as she joined him at the table. “The world hates a smart-ass.”
She was being a smart-ass. The division head position had taken a toll on Dale Sherwood during his tenure. He didn’t look sixty—he looked closer to eighty. Fatigue and stress had dug de
ep hollows under his eyes and rounded the shoulders on his six-foot frame; his jowls had gone saggy and soft from too many hours spent behind a desk. His hair was as gray as concrete.
She waited, knowing he would get to the point in his own good time. She also wondered why she was the only intelligence officer present. Dale wasn’t prone to secrecy in the ranks. The system didn’t much allow it. As division head of DHS, he reported to the DIA director, a three-star general who would in turn report to Secretary of Defense Blaylock through the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“So anyway,” he continued, “the wife throws this party, right? More military brass than a band shows up. I spot this friend of mine—enough for you to know he’s a two-star, army. Was surprised to see him because last I heard he was in Afghanistan. Turns out he’s just back and he didn’t come to my party for the cake.”
B.J. could tell by the way Sherwood tapped his index finger on the glossy mahogany conference table that he was working his way up to agitated.
“Anyway, he corners me. Tells me he flew into Andrews three hours ago and that we need to talk. Alone. Fine. We go to my home office and he drops a MOAB at my feet.”
MOAB. The mother of all bombs. B.J. crossed her legs, kept her mouth shut, and waited.
“He tells me that he got this after-action report across his desk, right? Took a couple of weeks to get there but the gist of the report is the boys on the ground intercepted a supply truck—supposedly a Russian aid truck.”
“Russian aid,” B.J. repeated, mulling it over. “Major oxymoron there. And let me take a wild guess. I’m betting the truck wasn’t filled with Spam or bandages or contraband birth control devices.”
He swiped a hand over his jaw. “No, there was no aid on board. No Russians, either. Just your stock-in-trade Taliban sympathizer who blew himself up before they could question him. In the meantime, they found a helluva lot of munitions on the truck.”
This was not exactly an unheard-of event in Afghanistan. Terrorists hijacked aid trucks all the time. “And this is out of the ordinary because…?”
“It was out of the ordinary because munitions weren’t all they found.”
4
Sherwood paused, gave B.J. a long, hard look. “This stays between us, Chase.”
“Absolutely.” The affirmation came out with a calm she was actually no longer feeling.
“Does EPFCG mean anything to you?”
She’d had some classes in high-energy physics in college, and she’d retained some basic information. The info on EPFCG had stuck because it had scared her to death.
“Electromagnetic pulse weapon—EMP—explosively pumped flux compression generator.” She pulled the words slowly out of her memory banks. “More commonly known as an E-bomb. If I remember right, an E-bomb the size of a small suitcase could shut down a major city by essentially frying anything electronic. Cell phones, cars, computer networks, power grids.”
Sherwood nodded. “An almost-perfect weapon—fly one over, say, New York City or D.C. in a cruise missile, set it off, and that city will be reduced to the Stone Age with no real damage to the infrastructure.”
No. No damage to the infrastructure, but the chaos created by an electronic meltdown would be catastrophic, not just from a communications perspective but for commerce, health, and safety. Any cities within range could become one huge looting gallery.
She also remembered why she still slept—most nights, anyway. “But the technology to miniaturize an E-bomb small enough to deliver it… it’s still a long way from perfected. Right?” she added, not realizing until she’d asked how hopeful she sounded.
“Right. But we’re working on it. Us and half the rogue nations in the world. Supposedly we’re the only ones who have it developed to the point of testing.”
“Supposedly?” She felt her face drain of blood as the implication of that one word sank in. “Are you saying they also found E-bomb technology on that truck in Afghanistan?”
Dale looked worried. “Looking that way.”
“Holy God. In a truck?”
“The techno age hasn’t reached all of Afghanistan, you know that. The Taliban communication system is often rudimentary and almost uncrackable by satellites because they hand-carry messages. Battle plans, tables of organization, intel, and more are all stuffed in satchels and carried all over the country, sometimes by donkey, sometimes, as in this case, by a truck,” Sherwood pointed out.
“So who on the ground over there would even recognize E-bomb specs?”
“Most special forces non-coms have some EOD training—explosive ordnance disposal training,” he clarified unnecessarily then quickly apologized. “Sorry. Forgot who I was talking to. Anyway, they knew that what they were looking at was not status quo. Long story short, every piece of intel they recovered from that truck filtered up to the two-star, including the hard copies of the specs. Here’s the kicker. The plans look an awful lot like ours.”
“And ours are supposed to be top secret.” No wonder Sherwood looked like he’d eaten cactus for lunch. “So, we’re talking—”
“No,” he said, cutting her off. “We’re not talking. Not about any of this.”
Of course they weren’t. Welcome to life in the intelligence community.
“All the intel the military gathered on this is being run up the ranks but even with a top priority, it’s going to take a while to sort things out. In the meantime, copies of the E-bomb specs are being checked out at the Pentagon for authenticity.”
“So where do we fit in?”
“My friend, the two-star, trusts me to do a little behind-the-scenes work. He wants me to see if I can ferret out how plans with this type of top secret clearance got out and more important, how the breach got past NSA, before he takes it up the chain of command to the sec def.
“What I need from you,” Sherwood went on after a pause B.J. used to fully digest the magnitude of the situation, “are answers. I need an inside line to support or dispute whether it even is our technology. And if it’s ours, then I need to know if the reason NSA isn’t on top of the leak is due to negligence or because someone sold us out. And make no mistake—if NSA was aware of this, heads would have rolled by now.”
Silence rang hollow in the wake of his final statement and struck both terror and outrage inside her. He was talking about the possibility of there being a traitor. At the National Security Agency.
Jesus.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to give me a happy birthday, Chase. I want you to infiltrate the NSA, hook up with an agent inside, and find out what the hell is going on. Then I want you to report back to me yesterday.”
B.J.’s heart kicked her a couple of good ones. The NSA was the top dog in the intelligence community. He wanted her to spy on the super spies. “Okay. Wait. Let’s say there’s actually a leak and NSA should have plugged it. Who can we—”
“Trust inside?” he interrupted, anticipating her question.
“That’d be a start,” she said, unable to hide her incredulity.
“We start with a cryptanalyst by the name of Stephanie Tompkins.”
The name rattled around until it finally clicked like tumblers in a lock. “Tompkins? As in … ?” She let her question trail off and met Dale’s eyes.
“Yeah. As in her father, Robert Tompkins, was counsel to President Billings. And her mother, Ann Tompkins, is deputy attorney general. The family bleeds red, white, and blue. We can trust her. We have to trust her.”
B.J. sat back in her chair, processing everything Sherwood had just told her. Still, she didn’t want to believe what he was suggesting, yet she was afraid not to.
Traitor.
That one word stood out amid an ocean of information. They could have a traitor in their midst.
“I need to know if you’re up for this, Chase.”
She met his eyes and saw not only the challenge, but the quiet desperation and demand there.
“Yeah,” she said with a hard nod. �
��I’m up for it.”
The thing that always amazed B.J. about the intelligence community was how easy it was to gain access to the various divisions. Take the NSA. Following Sherwood’s instructions, she’d driven to Maryland two weeks ago, gone straight through security at Fort George G. Meade, and waltzed into the NSA building with a cooked-up order directing her to job shadow Stephanie Tompkins in the Signals Intelligence division.
That had been it. A scrawled signature on an official-looking document, her badge and ID, and she’d gotten in, undercover as herself—a DIA officer temporarily and reluctantly reassigned to the geek squad of the spy world.