The Discarded

by Brett Battles

  Vanessa considered her for a moment before picking up the money and stuffing it in her pocket. “I can do that.”

  __________

  ORLANDO MADE ABRAHAM wait until after they checked into the Embassy Suites Hotel to open the envelope.

  The moment they stepped into Orlando’s room, Abraham slit open the top and pulled out the piece of paper and memory card. Printed on the sheet was an address for a location right there in Tampa. Below this was a short, handwritten note:

  This first. Your answers start here.

  Eli

  “Well, that’s annoyingly cryptic,” Orlando said. She pulled out her laptop. “Give me the card.”

  As soon as he handed it over, she stuck it into a slot on the side of her computer. But before she clicked on the icon, she decided to check the address first, so she opened Google Maps, selected satellite view, and plugged in the information.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised.

  “Well?” Abraham asked.

  She turned the computer so he could see the screen.

  A red arrow was pinned in the middle of a large green area that could easily have been mistaken for a park if not for the identifier typed across it.

  GARDEN OF MEMORIES CEMETERY

  “You don’t think…” he said. “I mean, she couldn’t be…”

  “We don’t know anything,” Orlando said in a calm voice. “And until we do, there’s no reason to speculate.”

  She could see him struggling to accept her words and not think the worst. He didn’t quite get there, but at least his growing panic seemed to subside a bit.

  Clicking on the memory card icon brought up a password screen. She tried one of her decryption programs but the screen was proving difficult to crack. Given time, she knew she’d break through, but she thought there might be a quicker way.

  “Hand me that,” she said, pointing at the paper with the address.

  As soon as Abraham gave it to her, she reread Eli’s note.

  “‘This first,’” she read aloud. She turned to Abraham. “Do you think he’s saying we have to go here before we open the card?”

  “Possibly? I don’t know.”

  “We’re going to want to check this place out anyway. Might as well do it now.”

  “But it’s after midnight. It’s going to be closed,” he said.

  “When has that ever stopped us?”

  __________

  WHILE THE GARDEN of Memories Cemetery was indeed closed, it had no fence around it. All they had to do was walk in without drawing the attention of the small security staff.

  The street address on Eli’s note had a number at the end. When Orlando first saw it, she had taken it for an apartment or unit number. It was, in fact, the location identifier for a specific grave.

  Using an online map of the cemetery as a guide, they weaved their way around headstones, careful to avoid walking on anyone’s grave. They had to hide only once when a patrol vehicle came down one of the roads, but its headlights had given them plenty of warning and they were safely tucked out of sight as the car drove by.

  The grave they had come for was located near the eastern end, far from the main road.

  Orlando checked the map again before pointing two rows ahead and down to the left. “Should be over there.” She paused, then added, “Maybe I should go first. Check it out.”

  “No,” Abraham said. “We both go.”

  They moved to the appropriate row and passed grave after grave until they reached the one matching the number on Eli’s note.

  The name was not Tessa’s, but it was still surprising. Carved into the marker was:

  GAVIN CARTER

  “What?” Abraham said, astonished.

  “Look at the date,” Orlando said.

  Carter’s date of death was listed as two days after Abraham had handed Tessa over to the pickup team.

  Abraham stared at the marker, his lips moving but no words coming out.

  Orlando rubbed a hand across his back. “You told us you never heard from him again,” she said. “I guess we know why now.”

  Not sure he had heard her, she decided to step back and give him a moment.

  “I don’t understand,” he finally said. “What does this mean? Does his death have something to do with Tessa?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Using the night vision function on her phone, she snapped several photos of the grave and a close-up of the headstone.

  “Seen enough?” she asked.

  He looked at her, shell-shocked, and whispered, “Yeah.”

  She put her arm around his back and turned him from the grave. “Come on, then. We’ll grab some coffee.”

  __________

  THEY FOUND AN open diner a few blocks from their hotel and took a back booth far from the handful of other customers. Abraham was going to sit across from her, but Orlando patted the bench beside her.

  “Here,” she said.

  As he scooted in, Orlando told the waiter they’d have only coffee for now. Once their server was gone, she pulled out her laptop and inserted the memory card again. When the password box came up, she tried inputting Gavin Carter first, but after she hit ENTER, the box emptied and remained on the screen. She then tried Carter’s date of birth, but that didn’t work, either. Nor did his date of death. She decided to throw it all in there—name followed by date of birth followed by date of death.

  This time when she hit ENTER, the box disappeared. For a moment nothing happened, and then a window opened, listing the files on the card. Eleven total. One she recognized immediately. It had the same file name as the .xuki file she’d found on Eli’s laptop, only instead of ending with the virus extension, it ended with .tiff, indicating an image file. She clicked on it and a few seconds later, she and Abraham were looking at the same photo of the older Tessa.

  “Here you go,” their waiter said as he walked up. “Two coffees.” He set their cups on the table. “Anything else?”

  “I think we’re good for now,” Orlando told him. “Thank you.”

  “Give me a holler if you change your mind,” he said, then left.

  Orlando turned back to the computer, minimized the photo of Tessa, and scanned the rest of the files. Several documents and a movie were labeled: FOR_ABRAHAM. She clicked on the latter. When it open, it showed a still image of Eli looking straight at the camera.

  Before hitting PLAY, she dug a set of earbuds out of her backpack. “I only have the one,” she said as she plugged them in. “So we’ll have to share.”

  She gave one bud to Abraham, donned the other, and clicked on the PLAY arrow.

  “Abraham, hello. This is Eli…which, I guess, you can probably see. I’ve made this video in case we don’t have enough time to go over everything in person. As you know by now, I’m going to disappear for a while, and you should do the same. At some point, they will find out about you, like they found out about the others. I can’t deny that I’m annoyed with you for dragging me into this.” Eli sighed. “But I realize you couldn’t have known. If you did, you would have given up the hunt a long time ago.

  “Here’s a confession. The last few times you called me, I really didn’t do much checking at all, just enough to make me feel like I was doing something. This whole business seemed a waste of my time. When you called last week, I did what I always did—put out a few anonymous feelers, did a minor data check, and, well, that was actually it. I found nothing new so I didn’t lie about that.

  “The day after I told you there was no news, I got a message. Only it wasn’t from one of my sources. It was from an e-mail address as anonymous as the one I was using. I tried tracing it using some resources at work, but it just led to a dead end.

  “The message itself contained a name, an address, and a link to a Flickr account that contained only one photo. You’ve seen the picture by now. It’s your girl, Tessa. She looks a lot older than the four-year-old you transported, so I guess she did live.

  “The name and address,
you’ve also already figured out. If you haven’t, I’m talking about Gavin Carter. A dead Gavin Carter. And in case you doubt it’s him in the grave, don’t. I confirmed it. He wasn’t killed in the field, per se. Car accident. Hit and run. Autopsy photos, the whole works. It’s him.

  “I’m sure you took special note of the date of his death. Suspicious, to say the least. That and the picture are what provoked me to see if I could find anything else out. Yeah, I guess you could call it guilt for having blown you off these last few times.

  “I started first by taking a deeper look into the members of Overtake that I had names for. Guess what? Three are confirmed dead. And two—Akira Hayashi, the head op in Osaka, and Desirae Rosette, the one in charge of the pickup team in Amsterdam—have been missing since the operation. You told me your name was kept out of the official mission report. I have a feeling that’s the only reason you’re not dead now, too.

  “You understand what went on here, right? A complete cover-up. I’d be willing to bet everyone associated with the job has been eliminated. I’ll get to who did it in a minute, but spoiler alert—I don’t really know.

  “Okay, so I decided to try again at prying something loose from the Overtake files in the CIA system, but it turns out the files are gone. You’ve been out of the loop, so I’m not sure if you heard about the dot-xuki virus. I’ll include a report about it with this video in case you want to read up, but the short story is, someone infiltrated the CIA data storage system and erased several drives. Included in this were all the files associated with Operation Overtake. Well, not quite all of them.

  “See, it would have been easy to assume the Overtake stuff had just been caught in the larger viral attack, but it felt screwy to me. There’s this girl I know who’s part of the computer network team here. A friend, I guess…I don’t know, whatever. Anyway, I got her talking about the attack, and after a while she tells me a couple files had been salvaged, only instead of their original designation, they’d been turned into dot-xuki files. She said the thought was, these were files the virus was trying to steal. After hunting around, I was able to find where one of them was being kept and downloaded a copy. It was an image file of the same damn photo of Tessa I’d received in the e-mail.

  “At first I thought if the dot-xuki virus was meant to get rid of all the Overtake files, then whoever was behind it must also have been responsible for the deaths of the Overtake team members. But the large amount of time between the events bothered me. I mean, the team members had all died or vanished seven years ago, and it’s only been a couple months since the dot-xuki attack. It got me wondering—if the girl was alive, which seemed so from the photo, then what if the cyberattack was carried out by someone who was trying to protect her? While the earlier deaths were conducted by someone trying to find her?”

  He ran a hand through his hair and looked at his watch. “Shit, I need to wrap this up, so whatever I have will be on the disk. See this?”

  He picked up a piece of paper off his desk and held it up to the camera. It was heavily creased but they could still make out the message written on it.

  Mr. Becker. Please call.

  Below this was a phone number.

  “I found this about twenty minutes ago. Someone had pushed it through my mail slot. I tried looking up the number but there was no listing for it. If you’re wondering if I called it, of course I did. There was a part of me that didn’t want to, but how could I not?

  “A woman answered. Don’t ask me how old she sounded, because I don’t know. She had a slight accent, European of some kind, I think, but she spoke perfect English. The moment she picked up, she said something like ‘You should have never looked into her history. You were not supposed to do that. Why couldn’t you have been satisfied? Why did you continue to look?’ Before I could say I had no idea what she was talking about, she went on. ‘If you stay in your house, they will find you. I can distract them for a few hours at most, but that is it. Be gone by then.’ I asked her who she meant, but she’d already hung up. I called back probably a dozen times, but the line would just ring and ring and ring.

  “Abraham, she told me I should have never looked into ‘her history.’ She’s got to be talking about Tessa. I mean, who else would it be? And the people she’s warning me about? What if they’re the ones who killed Carter and the rest of Overtake?

  “I can’t ignore her warning so I’m leaving here right now.” Eli reached forward. “See you in Florida, buddy.”

  The video stopped.

  Orlando and Abraham stared at the screen, speechless. After several seconds, she backtracked the footage to the best frame of the piece of paper Eli had held up. She captured a clean image of the number.

  “We should call it,” he said.

  She closed the computer. “Yes, but not here.”

  They left cash on the table and returned to the Audi. Not wanting to chance someone overhearing them while they were parked in the lot, Orlando started the engine and headed out. At the first stoplight she opened her computer and handed it to Abraham. The image of the phone number was still on the screen.

  “Go for it,” she said.

  He pulled out his cell and dialed.

  Five rings.

  Six.

  Seven.

  Eight.

  “Abraham,” Orlando said softly.

  Nine rings.

  “Abraham.”

  He finally looked over as the tenth ring began.

  “They’re not going to answer.”

  “Just a moment longer,” he said.

  The twelfth ring cut out halfway through. Abraham leaned forward as if his wait had paid off, but the voice that came through the speaker was merely a recording. “Please try your call again later.”

  His shoulders sagged as he dropped the phone into his lap. Orlando gently took the cell from him and disconnected the call.

  After they were back in her room at the hotel, she said, “Why don’t you go and get some sleep? We can start fresh in the morning.”

  “I’m not tired,” he said, though clearly he was.

  She considered her next words very carefully, but even though she knew what his response would be, she had to say them. “Abraham, perhaps it’s time to drop this. The picture tells us that Tessa’s probably alive, so you know that much. But looking into this is what got Eli killed. It could happen to you, too. Maybe you should let it go and disappear like he suggested.”

  His jaw tensed. “Don’t you get it? The people who killed Eli and took your friend Daeng are hunting for Tessa. What do you think they’re going to do to her when they find her? I guarantee you it won’t be good. So tell me, if you were in my shoes, would you just disappear?”

  “No,” she said after a moment. “No, I would never do that.”

  “So why on Earth would you think I would?”

  CHAPTER 25

  VIRGINIA

  NEARLY FIFTY MINUTES passed before Gloria finally heard someone in the hall outside the observation room.

  “King? Ms. Clark?” Nolan’s voice. “Are you down here?”

  Gloria pulled the chair out from under the handle and opened the door.

  Nolan and Andres were in the corridor. They had turned at the sound of the door and aimed their guns at the opening. Once they saw it was Gloria, they lowered their weapons.

  “Thank God,” Nolan said. “Are you all right?”

  “Where’s King?” Andres asked.

  Ignoring the questions, she marched over to them and asked, “Where the fuck were you two?”

  “You found them,” a third voice said. “Good.”

  Gloria looked past her men toward the stairway. Standing near the entrance was Scott Foster, head of the McCrillis emergency response team. They had undoubtedly come in response to the call she’d made from the observation room.

  She turned back to her men. “Answer my question!”

  Nolan swallowed hard. “They knocked us out and tied us up.”

  “They knock
ed you out and tied you up? Are you serious?”

  Neither Nolan nor Andres said anything.

  From the stairwell entrance, Foster said, “What’s the word on the prisoner?”

  “Gone,” she told him.

  Foster frowned.

  “Hey, I’m not pleased about it, either,” she said. “But there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do when the people who were supposed to be watching my back weren’t doing their job.”

  In a hesitant voice, Andres asked, “Is King all right?”

  She glared at him for a second before nodding back at the observation room. “He’s in there.”

  When Andres caught sight of the other man’s body, he asked, “Is he dead?”

  “Out cold.”

  “So they got him, too,” Nolan said.

  “True, except he wasn’t supposed to be guarding the place.”

  She pushed past them and headed for the stairwell.

  When she neared Foster, he said, “Mr. Davis said for you to call in as soon as we found you.”

  “Davis isn’t my boss,” she said.

  “He is now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Davis will tell you.”

  Cursing to herself, she pulled out her phone and headed up the stairs. A moment before she hit the top step, the line was answered by one of the night operators.

  “McCrillis.”

  “It’s Gloria Clark. I believe Mr. Davis is expecting my call.”

  Hold music, low and unobtrusive.

  It had barely played two measures when—

  “Clark?”

  “Mr. Davis, you wanted to talk to me?”

  “What the hell happened over there?” he asked. Perry Davis was McCrillis’s vice president of general operations, a man who was reportedly a competent organizer. Gloria had no firsthand knowledge of this. Her work had never strayed into his arena before.

  She grimaced. It wasn’t his place to ask that kind of question. “We had an incident, sir.”

  “What kind of incident?”