He shuffled forward a few feet, and stopped in front of a table where a young guy of about twenty sat in front of a pile of chemistry and math books.
“Excuse me,” Abraham said in a tired old voice. The kid looked up. “You wouldn’t happen to be leaving soon, would you?”
“Uh, oh, um, no,” the guy said. “Sorry. I’m…I’m studying. Big test coming up.”
“Of course. I understand.” Abraham took a step back. “I hope you do well.”
“T-thank you.”
He gave the kid a smile, and then turned and looked around again. As he knew would happen, he caught several of the other customers looking at him again. While most immediately glanced away again, another guy about twenty years old didn’t break his gaze soon enough and had no choice but to acknowledge Abraham’s hopeful smile. The guy had a book bag at his feet that hinted at his own need to study, but there were no books on the table, only his hand holding the phone he’d been smirking at and typing on since Abraham had walked up.
“Are you leaving?” Abraham asked.
“Um…” The guy looked like he was trying to come up with any response that would allow him to stay, but finally his shoulders sagged. “Sure. Just…two seconds, huh?”
“Oh, wonderful. Take your time. And thank you.”
As the kid returned his attention to his phone, Abraham moved to within a foot of the table and stared down. When the kid realized he was being scrutinized, he stuffed the phone in his pocket and stood up.
“All yours,” he said.
“Thank you again,” Abraham told him.
Orlando walked over a few minutes later with a couple cups of coffee. “Nice table.”
“Just good timing,” he said.
“Is that what you call it?”
She arranged her computer so that the screen faced the wall and only she and Abraham could see it. She then did the same with Eli’s machine.
When his old friend’s computer came to life, it asked for a password. Orlando reached over to pull the laptop in front of her but Abraham said, “I can get this.”
She looked at him. “Are you sure? There’ve been a lot of advances in the decade you’ve been gone.”
“First of all,” he said, centering the computer in front of him, “it hasn’t been a decade, and second, do you think I’ve just been sitting around doing nothing?”
“Oh, so they teach advanced hacking at the old folks’ home nowadays, do they?”
“My fellow active seniors and I are insulted by your terminology. Now quit wasting time talking to me.”
With a smirk, she turned her attention to her own screen.
Abraham couldn’t help but smile himself. It felt good to be working with Orlando again. He’d had three different apprentices over the years, but she had been, by far, his favorite and best.
Whip smart. Funny. Perceptive.
And above all else, caring.
He had missed that. So much.
Focusing on the computer screen reminded him why she was sitting next to him, and it wiped the smile from his face.
Eli.
Dammit.
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to set his feelings aside so he could work.
“Need a little help already?” Orlando asked.
He opened his eyes again. “Absolutely not.”
Perhaps Orlando could have broken through the security screen faster, but Abraham was satisfied with getting past it in only a couple of minutes. “Done,” he said, turning the screen so she could see.
“Nice. May I?”
“Have at it.”
She leaned over and accessed the operating system. After a few moments of clicking and typing, she returned to her own laptop.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got it slaved and am cloning the drive to my cloud. Should be done in a few minutes, then we start with some global searches.”
“Sounds good,” he told her.
She pulled her backpack onto her lap. “In the meantime, we should look through these,” she said, removing the files and envelopes that had also been in the safe.
__________
GLORIA WAS ON the phone the minute they climbed back into their car.
“We did a complete search,” she told her boss, “but didn’t find anything useful.”
“No computer?” Boyer asked.
“No, but someone was in the house before us. They could have taken it.”
“What?”
“The door was unlocked and the alarm was off.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“Uh-uh. Don’t know how long ago they broke in.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“No clue yet.”
“Well, then, what’s your next move?”
“I have Becker’s clothes and bag. Want to get them scanned in case he hid anything in them. Thought we’d swing by the office and drop them off. After that, I thought I’d look into some of his colleagues. If it seems like one of them might know what he was up to, I’ll give them a visit.”
“I’m at the Ritz-Carlton for the next hour,” Boyer said. “You’ll save a lot of time if you can get them to me.”
McCrillis International’s office was way on the other side of the Capitol building. At this time of day with traffic, it would take more than an hour of travel time. The Ritz-Carlton, while still in DC, was much closer to her current location.
“Thank you, sir. That would be very helpful.”
“We’ll meet in the courtyard.” He gave her instructions on how to get in, then said, “Text me when you get there.”
__________
THE BLIP ON the tracking app headed south out of Bethesda on a direct course for Washington, DC. Once they were in the city, following the car at a distance would no longer be an option. Quinn and his team needed to be in sight of the car when it stopped so they could see where its occupants went.
“Let’s move into point,” Quinn said when they were still several miles outside the district.
With a nod, Nate depressed the accelerator and began closing the gap. “There it is,” he said a minute later.
The sedan was three cars ahead in the same lane they were in. It took another mile and a half for Nate to maneuver past the car without drawing attention to their SUV. He then increased the separation to nearly a block, at which point he eased back on their speed and matched the flow of traffic. Now, thanks to the tracker, they were following the sedan from the front.
“Do we have any idea what the deal is with this Tessa?” Daeng asked from the backseat.
“I told you everything I know,” Quinn said.
“Do you think Abraham is holding something back?”
“I doubt it.”
“How well do you know him?”
“Very. He was Orlando’s mentor.”
No one said anything for a few moments.
“I’m not sure I like this,” Nate said.
Quinn took a quick glance at his friend before looking back at the screen. “What do you mean?”
“The idea of anything having to do with kids. I just…I don’t like it.”
Quinn understood where he was coming from. The world they traveled in was full of pain and death. You could get immune to seeing the body of an adult who’d been terminated, but never that of a child. A few years earlier they’d been involved in an incident that had centered around the kidnapping of a busload of kids. There were moments in the months afterward when Quinn would catch Nate staring off into nothing, the potential of what could have happened undoubtedly still playing through his apprentice’s head. Hell, the scenarios had played nonstop through his own mind for a while there.
“We’re not dealing with any kids,” Quinn said. “We’re trying to make sure whoever killed Abraham’s friend isn’t going to come after him.”
“Really? Seems to me we’re trying to help him find out about her.”
“All right, yeah. That, too. But just information. That’s all.”
<
br /> Though Quinn couldn’t see Nate’s expression, he could feel the other cleaner’s sideways glance and knew Nate was thinking, Are you sure about that?
According to the tracker, they were less than half a mile from Washington.
“Slow down,” Quinn said. “Let them catch up.”
__________
THE FILES AND envelopes from Eli’s safe turned out to contain only personal items pertaining to his bank accounts, his townhouse, and a place in Kansas he had apparently inherited from his parents. The general search of his computer was equally unrewarding, returning no hits on any of the keywords used.
The lack of easily accessible data didn’t come as a shock, though. Eli wouldn’t have been so careless as to leave in plain sight something that had spooked him enough to make him flee his home.
That, of course, didn’t mean there was nothing to be found. Given Eli’s position at the CIA, he would’ve had the resources to securely hide information from prying eyes. Most of them, anyway.
Using her digital arsenal, Orlando scanned the drive for encrypted files, sifted through operating system logs for anything out of place, and did a sector-by-sector search for ghost data. As the last of these was completed, a dialogue box popped open with text reading: XJ982323/ubr2.xuki.
“I don’t recognize the extension,” Abraham said.
Orlando frowned. “Neither do I.”
A fact that troubled her.
She opened a program she’d dubbed Surgeon and used it to extract the file from its hiding place, and then copied it to an isolated partition on her own drive. Leaving the full file closed, she opened the metadata, but all she found was useless garbage.
What kind of file was a .xuki?
Not wanting to waste the time it would take to figure it out on her own, she opened her messaging program and sent a quick note to the Mole.
You there?
His answer came back within seconds.
Where else would I be?
She typed again.
.xuki—heard of it?
The Mole:
Seriously?
Orlando:
Seriously. Why?
Five seconds later, her phone rang. She donned her earpiece and answered, “Yes?”
“You’ve never heard…of it?” the Mole asked in his odd cadence, his voice electronically distorted into a metallic monotone as always.
“I wouldn’t be asking if I had.”
A pause. “You must have missed…it while you…were recovering.”
“Missed what?”
“The dot-xuki virus.” He pronounced the extension zoo-key.
Orlando frowned. While she had been out of the loop after she was shot, she had specifically worked hard to catch up on any important tech developments she might have missed.
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It was…hush-hush. Hit only…CIA data storage center outside Washington, DC….Inside source said only…three data banks…and their backups wiped.”
“That’s it? Just three data banks at one location? Didn’t show up anywhere else?”
“Nowhere.”
That was probably why she hadn’t heard of it.
“Why…are you…asking?” he said.
She looked around the coffee shop, but Abraham was the only one paying her any attention. “Found a dot-xuki file on a drive I’m looking through.”
“What drive?”
“That’s not something I’m prepared to share at the moment. Were the perpetrators caught?”
A hesitation, then, “Not…to my knowledge.”
“So it’s probably a good idea if I don’t open the file.”
“Can you…read me the…file name?”
She didn’t see the harm in that, so she did.
The Mole said nothing for several seconds, then asked her to read it to him again. After she did, he said, “Is the file…isolated?”
“Yes.”
“I have…a suggestion.”
“What?”
“Hold.” The pause that followed lasted half a minute. When he spoke again, he gave her a web location. “Go there. You will find…a conversion…program I would like…you to…try on the file.”
“Converting it into what?”
“Download the program…please.”
Once she had done so and opened it, she was presented with a screen containing two boxes and a button at the bottom marked ENTER. Written in light gray through the box on the left was SELECT FILE, while the box on the right held a pop-up list of three choices: EXECUTE, DOCUMENT, and IMAGE. She selected the .xuki file, but before clicking one of the options, she said, “Please tell me you wrote this program.”
“I did,” the Mole said.
“Which option should I try first?”
“I would only…caution that if…EXECUTE works, do not open…the file.”
“Gee, thanks.”
She decided to go ahead and try that one first, but the Mole’s program kicked back an error message reading:
UNABLE TO CONVERT. FILE TYPE UNKNOWN.
With some relief, she tried DOCUMENT and received the same response. When she clicked on IMAGE, instead of receiving an immediate error message, her cursor began spinning as it processed the file.
After several seconds, a new window opened and a picture appeared.
“Oh, my God,” Abraham said, staring at the screen.
The image was of a girl.
“Tessa?” Orlando asked.
“I think so. Yes…yes, it’s got to be.”
The girl in the picture was not the four-year-old he’d described. This one was older. If the picture was recent, she’d be eleven now. Her dark brown hair lay thick over her shoulders and down her back. Her eyes, also brown, were not looking at the camera but almost, as if someone standing near the photographer had called her name.
“Who…is Tessa?” the Mole asked.
“At the moment, it might be better if you don’t remember that name.”
A beat. “Understood. But I…take it that the conversion…worked.”
“It did. Thank you. I appreciate it. What I don’t understand, though, is why it was disguised with a dot-xuki extension.”
“Perhaps it was…not disguised. I have a theory that…the dot-xuki virus…was designed to do…more than just wipe the servers. What if…the destruction was…merely a way to cover—”
“Their tracks,” she said, seeing where he was going. “You’re thinking they were stealing data, aren’t you?”
“Yes…and did not want anyone…to know what they took. Once…they had the…wanted files, the drives were…wiped.” A process that could have happened in a matter of seconds, from virus arrival to total destruction.
“So the file I have here—” she said.
“Is one…that was extracted from…the CIA,” he finished for her.
“Thanks,” she told him. “I appreciate the help.”
“You know where…to find me…if you need more.”
Orlando slipped her phone back into her pocket and turned to Abraham. “You’re sure this is—” She stopped herself when she saw the streak of a tear across his cheek.
“I’m sure,” he said.
“At least you know she’s alive.”
“Yes. She is, isn’t she?” He continued to stare at the monitor.
Tentatively she asked, “Is knowing that enough for you?”
Even before he spoke, she could see in his eyes that it wasn’t. “Something must be wrong. Why else would Eli have been killed? We need to make sure she’s safe.”
Orlando squeezed Abraham’s shoulder. “Let’s see if Eli left us anything else, huh?”
CHAPTER 18
WASHINGTON, DC
QUINN HAD THE compact zoom attached to his phone’s camera before the sedan pulled past them a few short blocks before DC. He snapped pictures of each of the four occupants.
The results were far from stellar. The shots of the driver and the man sitting behind him w
ere completely useless, only a hint of a face in each. The photos of the woman in the front passenger seat and the man behind her were profile shots and therefore better, but—due to motion blur and the reflections in the window—not by much. Still, he texted them to Orlando, hoping there was enough for her to get a hit on at least one person.
They continued following the sedan past Tenley Circle, McLean Gardens, and the US Naval Observatory. When they reached Dupont Circle, the others drove only two stops around the arc before turning onto New Hampshire Avenue NW. At M Street, they turned right again and continued two blocks to 23rd Street, where they turned left.
By the time Nate turned the Explorer around the last corner, the sedan was three-quarters of the way down the block and slowing.
“Pull to the curb,” Quinn ordered.
Nate eased the truck to the side of the road.
As soon as the sedan came to a full stop, two of its doors opened.
“Daeng, you’re with me,” Quinn said. “Nate, you know what to do.”
“Stay in the car,” Nate said, pretending to be annoyed. In truth, if the sedan went anywhere, his job would be to follow.
Quinn and Daeng exited and quickly moved over to the sidewalk. Casually, as if they passed this way every day, they walked toward the other end of the block. Only two people had emerged from the sedan—the woman and one of the men. While she was empty-handed, her companion was carrying a small suitcase.
The driver’s window of the sedan was open and the woman was saying something to the men still inside. When she finished, the car pulled back into the street. Behind him, Quinn could hear Nate shift the SUV out of Park and take up pursuit.
“We’re eyes only,” Quinn told Daeng. “We find out where they’re going, get a few pictures, then we’re out.”
“Sounds like fun,” Daeng said.
Quinn had known Daeng long enough to realize his Thai friend wasn’t being sarcastic. Daeng was usually up for almost anything.
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