by Cindy Dees
Diana closed the door behind her and sat down.
“What’s up?” Sam asked.
Diana frowned. Now wasn’t that a good question? Aloud she answered, “I don’t know how much to tell you. If I say too much, I could put your life in danger. But, I need your help, so I owe you some sort of explanation.”
Sam grinned. “Sounds interesting. And I can handle a little danger.”
Diana grimaced. “This could be a lot of danger. I’ve already had my house broken into today, been arrested, been kidnapped and nearly shot twice.”
Sam’s eyebrows zinged up and her demeanor abruptly became serious. Focused. Intense, even. Sometimes Diana forgot just how smart Sam was behind all that exotic beauty. Diana continued. “Here’s the thing. I need to break into an office in this building and search it for some information. ASAP. That’s what I need your help with.”
Sam didn’t bat an eyelash. It confirmed Diana’s suspicion that she was a covert field operative for the CIA in addition to her overt duties as a linguist. No simple desk jockey reacted that calmly to a suggestion that she assist in a breaking-and-entering job.
“Whose office?” Sam asked.
“A guy named Collin Scott. Have you heard of him?”
Sam laughed. “It’s kind of hard not to have heard of him around here. He’s the number two guy in the Plans Section. Why on earth do you want to break into his office?”
“I have reason to believe he’s involved with a secret group called S.A.F.E.”
Sam chuckled. “I’m sure he’s involved with a number of secret groups. That’s his job.”
“How many of them are trying to kill Gabe Monihan?”
That sobered up Samantha in a hurry. “You think Collin Scott’s trying to kill the next President of the United States?”
Diana closed her eyes for a moment. Spoken aloud, it sounded absurd to her, too. “I don’t have time to go into the entire investigation I’ve done. But I think Scott is involved in a clandestine conspiracy of a few high-ranking government officials and civilians who want to kill Gabe.”
“That’s preposterous,” Sam retorted.
“So go with me to his office and see if we can find any information on this S.A.F.E. bunch.”
Sam asked thoughtfully, “What does it stand for?”
“Society for the Advancement of Free Economies.”
Sam stood up. “Honey, I’d love to help you, but I just can’t. Not on this one.”
Diana nodded in disappointed understanding. As she recalled from their martial arts training at the Athena Academy, Sam was as fast as greased lightning in a hand-to-hand fight. “I didn’t think you could help me, but it was worth a shot.” She stood up facing her old friend. “Just keep an ear to the ground, eh? If you hear anything about this S.A.F.E. group, could you give me a call? And be careful. They’re dangerous.”
She leaned forward to hug Sam. And chopped her across the back of the head beneath the back of her skull. Hard. Enough to knock her out. She caught Sam as she sagged, unconscious, and lowered her to the floor. God, she hated having to do that.
She taped Sam’s hands and feet behind her back using a roll of wide masking tape she found in Sam’s desk drawer. She put a couple strips of tape across her mouth, too. She taped Sam’s trussed hands and feet behind her to the legs of her desk, as well. That should keep her immobile for a few minutes. Working fast before Sam woke up, Diana tore off a strip of clear, cellophane tape from another roll of tape in Sam’s desk and pressed it hard against the pad of Sam’s thumb. She tore the tape off quickly and held it carefully, sticky side out. She grabbed Sam’s ID badge and fished in Sam’s pocket for the access card she’d used to get into this office area. Got it.
Last, she opened up the employee directory she found in Sam’s desk and thumbed through it until she found the name, Collin Scott. She noted his office number and located it on the map inside the back cover of the book.
She clipped Sam’s ID badge to her collar, picked up a stack of files off Sam’s desk and headed out. Here went nothing. A breaking-and-entering job inside one of the most secure buildings on the planet. If there was any doubt about her having completely lost her mind, this sealed the deal.
She walked back through the cubicles briskly, not looking at the people working at desks inside them. Out the door and into the hall. She oriented herself quickly and headed left. Up one more floor and down another long hall. Then, around one more corner. Bingo. There was the office she was looking for. She tested the door. Locked.
She pulled out Sam’s access card and swiped it through the magnetic lock pad. She started violently as a two-inch square pad lit up on the face of the lock and a voice intoned, “Right thumbprint, please.”
Diana pressed the piece of tape against the pad.
A green light flashed and the door lock clicked.
Holy cow. It had been a total long shot to try Sam’s access code here, but Diana wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. She stepped inside, closing the hallway door behind her. A secretary’s desk dominated the center of the room. A single door stood behind it. Colin Scott’s private office. With another elaborate electronic lock beside the door. No wonder it had been so easy to get into this outer office.
She took a look at the number pad beside this door. Similar to the one outside, except when she swiped Sam’s card this time, nobody asked for her fingerprint and the lock didn’t open. She pulled out her pocketknife and, using the screwdriver attachment, unscrewed the stainless steel cover over the guts of the electronic lock. Who’d have thought that her electrical circuitry class at the Athena Academy would ever come in so handy? She traced the circuit quickly and identified the wires that had to be crossed to open the system. Once she did that, though, she had no doubt it would trigger an alarm somewhere else in the building. She gave it two, maybe three minutes until someone would bust in here, guns blazing.
She organized herself quickly for the break-in. Her target would be any paper records Collin Scott had in his office. They were what she’d use if she were running a conspiracy to kill the President. Electronic files were just too easy to break into. He’d probably have a filing cabinet of some kind. And it would be locked. Agency policy was that all desks were cleaned off and all papers put under lock and key every night. The infamous policy had actually cost employees here their jobs.
She’d need a sharp, tough metal object of some kind to bust into the filing cabinet. She would never have enough time to pick the lock before security got here. She looked around the outer office. Perfect. A gold-plated shovel from some groundbreaking ceremony or other. It laid in a glass cabinet in the far corner. She snatched it out of its case and hurried back to the lock. Her other time constraint was Sam waking up and calling security. And that could happen any second.
Ready or not, here she went. She set her watch alarm for two minutes. And went to work. It only took a couple seconds to slice through the pair of wires, strip their ends and twist them together. A touch with the tip of her knife to the right switch, a spark, and the door lock clicked open. And the clock was ticking.
She leaped into the office, looking around for a filing cabinet. Bingo. In the corner behind the desk. She raced over to the two-drawer console. Top or bottom drawer?
Definitely a top-drawer kind of operation.
She smashed the shovel into the side of the cabinet. It dented and made a hell of a lot of noise, but didn’t give. Again. Paint chipped away and the dent got bigger. It took another half-dozen blows before the metal finally weakened and gave way. A tiny slit appeared in the cabinet. She slammed the shovel into it and pried the hole larger. One more big heave, and a piece of metal the width of the shovel peeled back to reveal the sides of several files stuffed with paper. Most of them were red. Probably indicated they were classified. She took the extra several seconds to widen the hole to the entire height of the drawer.
Then, frantically, she knelt by the cabinet and started pulling out files as fast a
s she could. She read the tabs at the top and tossed them aside by the fistfuls. Come on, come on. It had to be in here, somewhere. Please God, let the file not be in the bottom drawer.
The pile of papers lying all over the floor behind her grew, and the seconds ticked by. A quick glance at her watch. Thirty seconds to go. Oww! Slashing pain ripped through her left hand. She’d cut her hand at the base of her little finger on the ragged edge of the hole. No time to do anything about it. She continued yanking files out and tossing them aside.
Twenty seconds to go.
And then, without warning, there it was. A thick, red file marked Classified. The Initials S.A.F.E. were typed on the white label glued to the top tab. No time to look at it. She had to get out of here. She stuffed the file inside her coat and froze. A beeping sound came from the outer office. Someone was using the keypad to enter it from the hallway beyond.
She leaped to the inner door to the office, scooping up a clock from Scott’s desk on her way past. It was embedded in a grapefruit-size marble sphere. She stuck her arm out the door and slammed the marble piece down on the door lock to the inner office. Sparks flew and sizzled as she slammed the door shut. Good Lord willing, this door failed to a locked position. She tested the knob and it wouldn’t turn. Now she could only hope the security man outside had no quick way to override the fried lock. And then, of course, she had to figure out how in the hell to get out of a third-floor office of a supersecure facility like CIA headquarters.
Fists pounded on the door. She ignored them. Then a male voice shouted through the door. She ignored that, too. She turned on the overhead lights to better see any possible escape route, since it was no longer a secret that she was in here. No man-size ventilation shafts opened up onto this room. Just a couple small registers. The window didn’t open. She tested it with her hands. Not glass. It was no doubt made of tough, bulletproof polymers. She might conceivably be able to break it out of the frame, but the fall to the concrete below—or rather, the landing on it—ruled that out as an option. Bookcases lined both of the other walls of the office.
She was so hosed.
She was not going to get out of this one alive. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t get done what she’d come here to do before she went down in flames. She sat down at Collin Scott’s desk and pulled the S.A.F.E. file out of her coat. Working hard to ignore the heavy pounding on the door, she read as quickly as her eyes would travel across the pages.
In the very front was a CIA analysis of a legal treatise written by one Thomas Wolfe a decade ago, predicting the rise of global terrorism and criticizing the open society America maintained. He argued with great mental agility that the only way to defeat terror was with terror. He claimed that as long as law-abiding societies were constrained by law in their fight against terrorists, they were doomed to failure. The CIA analysis found the arguments sound.
Diana frowned. A lot had changed in the last decade. The rise of huge, powerful terror networks worldwide, 9/11 and the American overthrow of entire governments in response to terror. Huge armies of American soldiers had been thrown into the fight, along with billions upon billions of dollars of resources. Was Wolfe’s premise still valid? If she lived more than the next couple of minutes, she’d have to spend some time thinking about that one. She thumbed on to the next document.
Transcripts of a conversation Collin Scott had at a Defense consortium with a couple of the men on her list of S.A.F.E. suspects from Oracle. They expressed concern at the direction the United States was going with terror policy or its lack thereof.
She read on, tracing the evolution of S.A.F.E. from a loose bunch of like-minded people to a cautiously organized interest group to a conspiracy committed to action.
The pounding at the door became even louder. Heavier. As if they were using a battering ram of some kind. The entire wall began to shake, and a picture of Collin Scott shaking hands with a giant yellow duck wearing a polyester leisure suit fell to the floor with a crash. DiscoDuck. Collin Scott had to be DiscoDuck.
She skipped most of the rest of the file and moved close to the bottom of the stack of notes and documents. She stared in dismay at a note in the margins of a meeting transcript. “If Monihan and Wolfe win the election, Monihan must be removed from his position so that Wolfe may assume leadership of the nation.”
She stared in horror. There it was. Her proof. This group was behind the assassination attempts on Gabe.
She thumbed through the pages again, noting names wherever she spotted them. Janelle Parsons. Al Smith. And then another name started popping up. At least she thought it was a name. Freedom One. Whoever this Freedom One person was, he or she was clearly the engine that drove formalizing S.A.F.E. from a loose association of individuals into a full-blown conspiracy.
But who was Freedom One?
She thumbed through page after page, but nowhere was an actual name ever attached to that mysterious entity. She read further. Whoever he or she was, Freedom One was definitely the leader of this motley crew of sickos. Orders came down to the rest of the group from Freedom One. The purse strings were controlled by Freedom One, and operations like the two Q-group attacks were largely planned by Freedom One.
She turned one of the sheets of paper over and began to write down on it every name she came across in the file. With a few exceptions it almost perfectly matched the list Oracle had given her. She ran across more names. Two in particular caught her attention. Richard Dunst and Tito Albadian. Bingo. Proof that her hypothesis had been correct. Both men were flunkies of S.A.F.E. and operating on that group’s orders.
And then a name she’d dreaded seeing started to pop up in documents dated just a few months ago. Joseph Lockworth.
She closed her eyes against the pain of a betrayal so deep, so close to her heart. She looked through the documents regarding him, but found no reference to any blackmail or coercion of her grandfather. Apparently, he’d approached someone in the group and expressed identical views to S.A.F.E.’s. Freedom One had dispatched several group members to approach him separately and see if he was S.A.F.E. material. It appeared Gramps had passed muster, because his name was included in all the most recent correspondence.
She jumped as her cell phone rang. She looked at the number on its face. Unknown Caller. She put it to her ear. “Hello?”
“Hey there, Diana. It’s Sam.”
Wow. She had sure gotten loose fast. But then, Diana expected no less of an Athena Academy girl. “Hi, Sam. Are you okay? I’m so sorry about bonking you like that.”
“No problem. I walked into the blow on purpose.” Sam had let her knock her out on purpose? Aloud she gasped in shock. “Why?”
“You’re an Athena girl. We stick together. You had to have some absolutely dire need to get into Collin Scott’s office or you wouldn’t have come here at all. I thought I’d give you a chance to find what you were so sure you would. But, while we’re on the subject, would you care to tell me what it was you were looking for so desperately?”
“Have they assigned you to be the hostage negotiator here?” Diana asked dryly.
Sam answered equally dryly. “Something like that. I’m supposed to distract you while they figure out a way to get through that door.” Diana heard a squawk of voices in the background at that one. Apparently, the real hostage negotiators hadn’t wanted her to share that tidbit of information. Not that it took a rocket scientist to figure it out.
Sam commented, “You really did a number on the lock.”
“Thanks. It’s all that wholesome Athena Academy training, you know.”
Sam laughed. “So. Can you tell me why you did something this crazy?”
Diana sighed. No harm in being honest, now. And, she could stand to do a little stalling of her own. She glanced around the room and found exactly what she was looking for. A fax machine.
She tucked her cell phone between her shoulder and ear while she dialed up Oracle’s fax number. She started feeding documents from the S.A.F.E. file into the m
achine while she spoke to Sam.
“I found the file on S.A.F.E. It’s all here in front of me. These guys are certifiable. They follow the writings of Thomas Wolfe from some years back when he argued that the only way to defeat terror is with terror. He proposed that the U.S. can’t win that war unless we resort to lawless violence ourselves. I’ve identified about a dozen guys in S.A.F.E. at a first glance through these documents. Wanna hear their names? It’s a Who’s Who of high rollers and big dogs. I figure I need to tell someone before the yahoos with you bust in here and kill me.”
“Sure,” Sam said cautiously.
Diana kept feeding papers into the fax machine, but rattled off her list of names at the same time. She finished her recitation and Sam was silent for long seconds. Finally her classmate breathed, “Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack,” Diana replied. “Do you think I’d be dumb enough to pull a suicide move like this if I weren’t certain of what I was going to find and that it was worth dying or going to jail over?”
She had about ten more pages to send to Oracle and Delphi. She needed to stall the crew outside just a few more seconds. Quickly, she asked Sam, “So, how many security thugs does a break-in to Collin Scott’s office rate?”
“A couple of dozen,” Sam answered.
Diana commented, “If I were the suspicious type, I might make note of who all responded to the break-in that weren’t strictly required to do so. Could be a second, lower layer of S.A.F.E. types. With four CIA agents known to be in the group, it would make sense that there are more where they came from in this spy palace.”
“A most interesting observation,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Duly noted.”
Five more pages to go. “Sam. Do me a favor. If I don’t make it out of this alive, tell Gabe Monihan thank you for me. For everything.”