Spy Thriller: The Fourteenth Protocol: A Story of Espionage and Counter-terrorism (The Special Agent Jana Baker Book Series 1)

by Nathan Goodman

  The elevator rose and a faint chime announced each floor.

  Ground, One, Two, Three, Four . . .

  Kyle assured him the guards would be changing shifts right at this moment. If the timing was perfect, they would get to seventeen without being seen. Cade’s chest heaved, a sure sign of nerves that had been fraying for days.

  Outside, HRT operators pressed headsets tightly against their ears. There were no fewer than twelve pairs of eyes. Each agent pair had a laser mic mounted on a heavy tripod pointed at the Thoughtstorm building. They listened with intent for any sounds inside the building that could signal trouble.

  Agent in Charge Murphy, the senior-most agent on the Hostage Rescue Team, whose earlier recording of Bastian Mokolo and William Macy had played so prominently in the case, broke into the silent radio.

  “All eyes, all eyes, this is Paula Deen. You are code yellow. I repeat, you are code yellow. Do not fire unless fired upon. Do not fire unless fired upon, over.”

  Each operator in the HRT team knew what that meant. Unless the yellow code status elevated, permission was required in order to discharge their weapons. One thing working in their favor was that the mirrored glass of the building was now completely translucent. The darkness outside the building and the brightness inside caused a reversal of the mirrored shine. They may not have direct communication with Agent Baker and Cade Williams, but on the first sixteen floors, they were able to see inside several interior spaces.

  An HRT pair stationed across from the southwest corner of the building had their laser microphone pointed at the uppermost floor. The building’s blueprints had revealed that to be the location of the elevator winch, and thus, the most likely place to detect elevator movement. The agent’s eyes were closed as he focused on the diminutive sounds emanating from his headset. He heard the distinctive sound of an elevator winch kick into motion and keyed his headset.

  “Paula D, this is nine. Paula D, this is nine. The grits are rising in the oven. We confirm vertical movement. I say again, the grits are rising, over.”

  Inside the elevator, the security camera mounted in a corner near the ceiling leered at them. Jana was unsure if the elevators were also bugged for sound, and she too felt very exposed.

  Five, Six, Seven . . . chimed the elevator.

  She whispered in Cade’s ear.

  “Relax, Cade. Whatever happens, it’ll be fine.” She smiled at him. “Remember, we’ve got heavy backup outside. There are more guns trained on this place than protecting the White House.”

  Eight, Nine, Ten . . . the elevator rose.

  Cade drew in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and held it.

  Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen . . .

  His ears began to pop against the elevation. He exhaled hard, blowing out as many jitters as he could.

  Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen . . .

  Jana squeezed his hand.

  Seventeen. Cade stopped breathing.

  Kyle crushed his hand against his radio earpiece. HRT operator nine said in a whisper, “Paula D, this is nine. The grits are scattered, smothered, and covered. Repeat, the grits are scattered, smothered, and covered.” Kyle shook his head. Jesus, these HRT guys must all be from the south. Only a southerner would be familiar enough with the Waffle House diner to understand grits humor. He smiled and began to appreciate the need to relieve a little tension.

  The elevator doors slid open into a vacuum of bleak silence. At the far end of the sterile hallway, the guard desk stood vacant as an empty chair swiveled, letting out a slight squeaking sound. The shift change was happening; the guard had just stepped out.

  Cade whispered, “I’m not sure having more guns pointed at this place than protecting the White House makes me feel any better right now.” To Cade, the tension was as thick as trying to breathe through a mouth full of peanut butter. They walked across the white tiled floor as the heels of their shoes echoed onto their own straining eardrums. Cade swiped his keycard against the thick metal security door leading onto the server floor. A digital beep was chased by the sound of the door’s steel throw-bolt sliding clear. Cade pushed his way through the door and was suddenly terrified that he would see William Macy standing with folded arms on the other side.

  Silence. Cade’s eyes darted from left to right praying no one would be there. The server floor was empty except for the hum of spinning hard drives and glowing light. Cade had never seen it so quiet. He felt very vulnerable as the pair walked in, Jana pulling him along.

  “Jesus, it’s freezing in here,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, they keep it at fifty-nine degrees to keep the servers happy. Most days I don’t bother putting my lunch in the fridge.”

  They walked over to Cade’s desk. “Well, this is me. But over there is where we need to go. That’s Johnston’s office. Pray to God he left his laptop in there. Otherwise, we’re hosed.”

  “Remind me to get you a picture frame or something for your desk. Man, you guys have no sense of decoration,” said Jana, still clinging his arm.

  Across the radio outside, “All eyes, all eyes. This is Paula D. Any audible signs from the oven? Repeat, any audible signs from the oven? Over.”

  There was no reply. The skin coating the exterior of the seventeenth floor not only blocked laser mics but also reduced visibility to near zero. It was like looking into the translucent smoke of a forest fire and trying to see what was behind it. As far as knowing what was going on inside, HRT was dead in the water.

  In the command center, Agent Murphy leaned over. “Christ, this blindness is like waiting for Apollo 11 to clear the far side of the goddamned moon.”

  Cade and Jana approached Rupert Johnston’s office. Cade sighed in relief, halfway expecting the man to be sitting right there with a “what in the Sam Hill are you doin’” look on his face. The office was empty. On the dark mahogany desk, underneath a stack of loose papers, the black laptop sat sleeping, its lid closed. Cade darted behind the desk, opened the laptop, and held down the power button.

  “That smell,” said Jana. “It’s . . . it’s . . . bourbon or something. Damn, where’s that coming from?” Glancing in the oblong trash can under the desk, Jana had her answer. She reached in and pulled out the empty bottle of Jim Beam. The lid was on, but a drop of the Kentucky whiskey made an escape attempt down the side of the bottle.

  “That’s weird,” said Cade. “I’ve never seen Johnston drink. Then again, I’ve never seen him out of the office either.”

  “Cade, the smell is strong in here. I don’t see any spills anywhere. It’s like the smell is fresh.”

  “Well, let’s just get this over with,” said Cade.

  Just as little LED lights blinked to life on the laptop, the login screen appeared. Jana pulled out a lipstick, pulled off the top, and removed the gel copy of Johnston’s fingerprint. She slipped it on her index finger and swiped it over the laptop’s scanner. A message appeared on the monitor indicating the print had been authenticated. But then another login screen appeared—this one required a password.

  “Shit,” said Cade. “Fingerprint and password authentication.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I can get through it, but it’ll take a minute.”

  Cade inserted a thumb drive. Jana focused on the monitor, but became distracted by the array of loose papers fanned across the desk.

  “Man, look at all this stuff,” she said. “It’s all handwritten. Who handwrites anything anymore?”

  “Jana, even south Georgia boys know how to write. Check out his diplomas on the wall.”

  Running her hands through the papers, she said, “And look how old some of this is. These on the bottom of the stack look like they’re fifty years old. They’re all yellowed.” Jana fingered her way through the stack, up to the top. “And these on the top are much more recent. They’re all dated. It starts back in . . . 1965.”

  Without glancing over, Cade said, “Ah, kind of busy over here trying to steal the secret files, remember?”
/>   “There’s different handwriting on some of the older ones,” she said. “Wow, looks like these were love letters from his service in Vietnam. He must have had a girl back home. I feel like I’m invading something private here.”

  “What? Private? Oh, yeah, I think he started out as a private during the war.”

  “Oh, you aren’t listening to me.” Jana read on. Private or not, she was captivated. It was like peering into a little piece of history you weren’t supposed to see. Some of the passages revealed two young kids in love, separated by a god-awful war. A smile spread across her mouth, but as she flipped farther in the stack, her smile disappeared.

  “Cade?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look at these. Some of them have perfect watermarks on them. Someone’s tears fell on these letters. This one is still damp.”

  Cade looked up, but only for a moment. “Well, they couldn’t be Johnston’s tears, I can tell you that. I don’t think he has tears. And if he did, he’d probably kick his own ass just for crying.”

  The screen on the laptop went blue, and a message read “Boot from external drive?” Cade clicked yes.

  “What’s it doing?” said Jana.

  “We don’t have Johnston’s password, so I loaded an NT boot registry app onto the thumb drive. The laptop is booting from there.”

  Jana shook her head at the technobabble. The farther she thumbed forward through the papers, the more recent the dates on the papers became. Jana skimmed faster and faster through the stack and started to realize this was more than a collection of love letters.

  “Cade, it’s like the rest of this is a journal or something. This part starts about a year ago . . . it’s like he’s recording all his work.”

  “His work? What work?”

  “His work here. Here at Thoughtstorm,” she said. “Holy shit, he’s documenting his work here. My God, look at this! Dates and times of e‑mail campaigns, names of recipient lists . . . this part talks about some kind of . . . encryption . . . wait, look at this! CIA! Oh my God. He’s recording conversations he had with the CIA. Jesus Christ, Cade, this is evidence. This is like, this is like . . . finding the damned Rosetta stone. This is the key to everything we need to tie this all together.”

  For once, Cade looked up at the papers. His mind was trying to concentrate on two things at once, and it wasn’t working.

  Jana dug her fingernails into his arm, “Where’s the copy machine? I’ve got to copy this right now.”

  “Ouch. My, we are old-school, aren’t we? There is no copy machine. Server dudes don’t copy anything. Here, take out your phone. Use the camera and take pictures of all this stuff. I’ve got to crack into this damn laptop. Those papers might be the Rosetta stone, but it won’t help us much without the actual data.”

  “Kyle has our phones.” Jana’s eyes ran across the page at the very top of the stack, the most recent writings. She turned her back to the desk and leaned against it.

  “This, this . . . was written today,” she said. “He’s talking about . . . about . . . it’s like he’s conflicted. He’s talking about blowing the lid on the whole thing, the whole cover-up. But wait . . . look at that. He sounds desperate to blow the whole thing wide open, but he knows he can’t. It doesn’t say why.”

  She lowered the stack and said, “He knows he can’t? What does he know that we don’t know? What’s the laptop doing now? You said something about we didn’t have his password. That thumb drive thing, it’s going to crack his password?”

  “No, not exactly. It’s going to bypass his password and allow me to set a new one. In the morning, when Johnston logs in, he’ll be asked to reset his password. We have to reset our passwords monthly anyway. There’s a chance he won’t suspect a thing.”

  Just then, a towering, hoarse voice exploded from the doorway. “Won’t suspect a thing!”

  Jana and Cade froze in terror, wide-eyed at the oversized man blocking their only exit. It was Rupert Johnston.

  “What in the Sam Hill are you doin’ at my computer, Williams?! And who in the hell is this?!”

  Thoughts raced through Jana’s head. Should I draw my weapon? Should we just take the laptop and run for it? Then, a horrifying thought popped into her head from all those months of training at Quantico. Her instructors practically beat it into her head. “If you ever use your weapon, one shot, one kill.” The voices echoed like the beating of a drum.

  “Uh, ah, um . . . yeah, ah, Mr. Johnston . . .,” babbled Cade, “no, ah, well, see we were just in here and . . .”

  Johnston was furious, yet his eyes were swollen and brimming with tears.

  He yelled, “I said, what in the Sam Hill are you doin’ on my computer!”

  Then his eyes locked on the papers Jana was holding. “Them’s, them’s personal!” He lunged forward; his left hand grabbed her neck and wedged her against the wall. The papers splayed out onto the floor.

  “Mr. Johnston! No!” yelled Cade, jumping up, his hands on Johnston’s crushing, steely forearm.

  But as quickly as the rage started, it stopped. Johnston released his grip on Jana’s neck and looked at his left hand as though it were a beast beyond his control. Jana coughed violently.

  He reeked of bourbon. “I, I . . . I don’t even know who I is anymore,” said Johnston still gazing at his hand. He stumbled backwards and fell into a heap on the ground, his salt and pepper hair jarring in the process.

  Jana’s initial shock faded as she regained her composure and cleared her throat. Without anyone noticing, she slipped her firearm back into its holster. She had nearly pulled the trigger at point-blank range. She shook herself off and stood tall. It was like looking at a cross between a petite young woman and someone who’d just faced down insensate evil. The terrified young girl crumpled into ashes and the agent emerged. Jana had crossed over.

  “They got their claws into me. I can’t even r’cognize muh-self anymore,” said Johnston, still staring off into oblivion.

  Cade was petrified.

  “Rupert?” The softness in her voice was like a fork cutting into Boston Crème Pie. She knelt down and put her hand on his shoulder. “Rupert,” she whispered, “it’s over now. It’s all over. You don’t have to be a part of this anymore.”

  As though he didn’t even hear her, he said, “She thought I was dead, ya see.”

  Jana and Cade looked at each other, bewildered. Johnston seemed to be in his own world where alcohol wedged itself between past and present.

  “Darlene . . . Darlene was, Darlene was a waitin’ on me.”

  Jana placed a finger against her pursed lips, signaling Cade to stay quiet. She circled around Johnston’s side, knelt down, and glided her hands across his broad shoulders.

  Rupert’s glazed eyes registered her presence but looked more like he was watching a movie.

  “She’s a waitin’. You’ll see. She’s just ’roun’ the bend up here. When this here bus stops, you’ll see. She’ll be a standin’ right there at the station.”

  Leaning behind him, Cade half-mouthed, “What the hell is he talking about?” but Jana held up her hand.

  “Tell me about Darlene, Rupert,” said Jana.

  “See, there was a mistake, see,” his speech slurred. “I had done lost a set of dog tags durin’ a firefight, and see, sumhow somebuddy foun’ them dog tags and thought I was dead, an’, an’, an’, they sent a chaplain to tell Darlene, an’, an’, an’ she thought I was dead. Truth be tolt, I thot I was dead a time er two muhself. And whut, with Jimmy Joe dyin’ right in front a me and that, that dollar bill a his.” He was still in his own world but focused on Jana now. “Jimmy Joe had this dollar bill in his pockit,” his inflection flared, “and when that grenade went off, well, Jimmy Joe was . . . was . . . all a mess.” Rupert burst into tears and leaned into Jana’s shoulder.

  Words choked out of him. “He was all blowed up. He was all over me. And that dollar bill a his . . . it . . . it was stuck to my leg. Just stuck there like sumbuddy done painted it
on me. It’s stuck on me, an’ I kent git it off.”

  Rupert began clawing at his left thigh at a dollar bill that existed only in his mind.

  “It won’t come offn’ me! I kin never git it offn’ me! Help me git it off!”

  Jana reached out to steady his hand, but it was futile against his drunken strength.

  Jana said, “Rupert! Rupert. Now you stop that. You just stop that.” Her voice was strong and firm.

  He looked up at her again as a slight glaze of terror melted from his eyes. Jana nodded to Cade and pointed to the laptop; she had Johnston distracted, and the twenty-five-minute timer was running.

  “You remine me of my Darlene,” said Johnston, the stony façade flaking away. “She was purty. I got a pitcher of us when I was jus’ shippin’ out. We was standin’ there at the bus stop when I was leavin’. She looked jes like you.” Rupert’s eyes wandered far away, and he said, “That pitcher I got. It’s like, like you kin jest see it. In our eyes, ya see. Like we was the only two people in the whole worl’. Two people who got the resta their lives in front of ’em.” Heavy tears rolled off his face and landed on his lap.

  Cade was making progress on the laptop. He looked at Jana and mouthed “almost there.”

  Jana looked back at Rupert and saw the shell of a man who looked like he had lost himself down a dark rabbit hole and found his way back up, but when he got there, the world had changed.

  “Rupert, it’s all over now,” she said. “It’s all going to be okay. Everything that’s been going on here. You don’t have to do it anymore. It’s over now.” She was stabbing in the dark, unsure of his reaction.

  Tightened ropes that streaked Rupert’s forehead loosened.

  Jana continued, “I want you to come out with us now. It’s time to walk away from all of this. It’s time to tell the truth and just walk away.” She stole a secretive glance at her watch.

  Johnston leaned in toward Jana’s ear. His whispering voice was almost childlike. “The doll’r bill, is it gone now?”