by John Nelson
12.
When I got home late that night, there was a note from Sherry saying that she had taken a few days off and was visiting her parents in Virginia. They lived in Charlottesville, which was only a hundred miles from D.C. and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was coincidental, given that I was traveling there in two days. I really didn’t like her parents very much; her father was a retired professor of anthropology from the University of Virginia and her mother, Millie, a retired PhD statistician. Needless to say, Thanksgivings were a real hoot at the Reynolds’ residence, or at least until I stopped going and Sherry would spend holidays there every couple of years by herself. Both my parents were deceased, and Sherry had hoped that I would develop some kind of surrogate bond with her parents, but that never happened. I’ll have to admit I was glad she wasn’t home and I didn’t have to deal with her resentment after another rather trying day. But, then I caught myself, saw how self-absorbed I had become. It did give me pause, but not for long.
At work the next morning, there was an email on my computer from FBI Agent Musgrave. He could have sent it to my remote, but it was coded for my office computer with no forwarding. I suspected it had something to do with my encounter on the train the previous night, but what was also unsettling was that they were sending a car to pick me up. Their New York offices were only fifteen blocks away and I could easily take a cab or even walk there. While I was thinking about my summons, Gene buzzed me and asked me to come to his office.
“Shut the door, Alan,” he said as I stepped inside his glass cubicle. He pulled out and turned on an electronic bug suppressor.
“What’s up, Gene?”
“You tell me. Did you notice the FBI agents staking out the building this morning?”
I sat down across from his desk. I had totally missed the stakeout. “No. But, I got a summons from Musgrave and a meeting with him across town.”
“What the hell happened yesterday?”
I wasn’t sure how much of my assignment I could share with him, but told him whom I had interviewed—if not the content or my conclusions—and my own interrogation by Ms. Irving, and the suspected shakedown on the train.
“Yeah, it’s you they’re covering. Must figure you’re a target, even from within our circle,” he said.
“My in-country assignment must be some hot potato.”
“Alan. Watch yourself. I don’t trust Klaus, or his recent dance with you. Politically things are more fragile than they let on, and they could be trolling for patsies.”
“Yeah, I kind of upset the applecart with my recent call on the Harkum case.”
Gene shook his head. “Don’t tell me anything else. Just watch yourself.” He stood up to indicate the meeting was over—very brusque treatment for my always cordial boss. This situation had unnerved him.
When I got back to my desk, there was a cryptic message from Jean Whatley, wanting to have lunch together. I told her I had a meeting across town, but would catch up with her later in the day. She replied that I should “watch my tail.” I suspected that she was being followed by the FBI and was wondering if they were targeting both of us. I didn’t want to alarm her, so I emailed her back and wrote that “my tail was just fine.” I was sure she got the message.
The car picked me up at 12:30; I assumed this wasn’t a lunch meeting, so I ate early in the cafeteria. I was somewhat alarmed when the car didn’t drive across town but out of Manhattan to JFK airport. The thought did cross my mind that I was being detained and flown somewhere for “interrogation.” I asked the agent about the detour, and he said that Musgrave had flown up from D.C. and wanted to meet on the Bureau’s plane to save time. I also noted that it would be a more secure location.
Musgrave met me at the top of the gangway and personally ushered me into the medium-size scramjet. The interior of the plane had few passenger seats and was mostly subdivided into cubicles for a flying office. Musgrave asked if I needed anything to eat or drink; I asked for bottled water and followed him back to his office at the rear of the jet. There were several agents and some clerical staff manning the workstations.
“Well, Alan. It’s finally nice to meet you in person. You really saved our ass with the Kohn leak.”
“Glad I could help.” There were cross-the-aisle cushioned divans on either side. Musgrave sat on one and I sat across from him.
“Imagine you guessed that this is about your little encounter on the train last night.”
“Yeah. Figured as much. What did they have to say for themselves?” I asked.
Musgrave smiled. “Alan, it’s always nice to work with pros like you. They were confined to your compartment and then taken off the train by our agents in New York.” He pulled up a file on his remote. “They’re a regular shakedown couple who’ve been working this corridor for a few years, but below our radar.” He looked across to me. “Suppose you figured they were hired by the Bradbury people?”
“Made sense. They didn’t like what I had to say about their precious neural processors, and there’s a lot of money at stake.”
“Well, they don’t know who hired them, and believe me, chemical interrogation gets the truth out of everybody. I called Klaus, and he’s been looking into it from that end.”
I smiled.
“Yeah, I know. He’s on the Board and has stock options, but there’s a lot more at stake here than money.”
“If not them, then who?” I asked.
“Well, Alan, that’s what I’m here to figure out.” He paused to get just the right tone for his next question. “You involved in anything … off-the-books, that would bring this kind of heat down on you?”
“Well, there was an unauthorized contact that I’m playing out.”
“Okay, we figured as much given … the holes in your work-home schedule.” He paused. “Anything you’d like to share?”
Since neural processors recorded travel like old-time GPS devices, I had flushed my processor after each excursion to the Kitty Kat Club, which would show up as holes in my timeline.
“I’m not sure what’s going on, but you’ll be the first to know,” I said.
“Okay. That’s fair. I like to give people like you a wide berth.”
“But then, my new in-country assignment, even though I haven’t been briefed, could be the nexus point of both.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. A rival faction or even a leak at our end. The borny revivalists know that the political climate is changing and nobody knows what that portends. If you’ve noticed, there’s been more anti-tech activity in the last few months.”
“Is that why you’ve started watching Whatley and me?” I asked.
He nodded his head. “Yes, after last night.” He smiled. “You didn’t spot us this morning, but she did. Quite a girl. Might recruit her myself some day.”
He stood up as did I. “So, until you’re deployed, you’ve got tails, and we’re flying you down to D.C. in the morning. A car will pick both of you up. We’ll email the times. See you in D.C.”
We shook hands and Musgrave’s assistant ushered me out of the plane and to my waiting car. I was a little alarmed that they had figured out the timeline holes for my excursions to the Kitty Kat Club, but even if they had questioned Bart, I had a plausible excuse. However, it made me wonder if these “holes” were the real source of their concern and not last night’s shakedown.
When I got back to my office and took the elevator, it stopped at the third floor and Jean got on. There were two other people in the car, and so she handed me a note and got off at her floor. I had no idea how she timed this rendezvous, since it would require some kind of external surveillance, or heads-up from someone else. I went to the Men’s Room and opened the note in a stall: “Dinner. 202 East 72nd Street, 302. Seven P.M. Tails not invited.”
This was interesting. How did she know that Emma was away and I would be free for the night? Another unanswered question. Well, after yesterday and today’s excursions, dinner and its trimmings with the lov
ely and engaging Ms. Whatley was just what the doctor or shrink had ordered. Or was it? I had to ask myself.
Chapter Five
13.
After work I thought about heading over to Jean’s apartment, but the fallout over last night’s marital quarrel soured that prospective “date” for me. I called and told her it would be better to skip a rendezvous this evening, especially since we were now scheduled to leave in the morning. She sounded disappointed but wasn’t insistent, and said she’d see me tomorrow. I have to admit that I was a little intrigued by Musgrave’s premise that I was being targeted by the opposition, whether they were the pro-religious or anti-tech factions. So, I decided to stroll around the city, and headed south toward the village to see what other tails I could pick up. After about an hour, I went into my favorite Chinese restaurant and sat on a stool at the counter. I could see my FBI guys staying well out of sight across the street at a news stand. I ordered the vegetable dumplings, and when they arrived and I was struggling with my chop sticks, Wu from the Kitty Kat Club strolled in and sat down next to me.
I immediately recognized her but didn’t say anything. She ordered the Won Tong soup and a foreign beer. After a while, she slipped her chop sticks out of their paper sleeve and reached over and took one of my dumplings. “It’s done this way, Alan. Lower stick firm, with the top stick mobile between the thumb and index finger.”
I looked over at her. “Ah, Wu, from the club.”
“Who did you expect? Emma?” Wu paused. “She’s a neutral, if you haven’t figured that out.”
“Well, I wasn’t expecting anybody. Just eating out by myself with my wife out of town.”
“And you just like walking around Manhattan on balmy nights?” she said.
It dawned on me that somebody had failed to compromise me on the train, and seeing my FBI tail, they arranged this little rendezvous. “So, what do you or your handlers want, Wu?”
Her soup arrived and she quickly ate it, like a woman who was used to eating on the run. “Alan, don’t go out in the field. You’re not welcome, and you’re compromised.”
At that moment my two FBI tails entered the restaurant and hurried over to us. “Ah, Ms. Ling. How nice of you to show up.” One of the guys picked up her purse and the other grabbed her by the arm. “Let’s go.”
The cook behind the counter yelled out. “Who pay bill?”
“I’ll cover it, Li,” I yelled back.
One of the FBI agents threw a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. “You might need this,” he said with a snicker.
Wu, or Ling, as it turned out, didn’t resist and went with them without saying another word. It was obvious that this was the Queen Sacrifice move by her faction. The stakes must be really high for them to give up such a prime operative, or so I figured at the time. After they left, my portable rang. It was Musgrave.
“Nice move, Alan. I assume this was your ‘unauthorized’ action?”
“Well, not … Ling herself, but somebody who used her to get to me.”
There was a long pause at the other end. “Another team will be there in five minutes to escort you home. Don’t leave until they arrive, and we’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
It was naive of me to hope this contact would cancel my borny village excursion; it just raised the stakes for them. Of course, my little off-the-books maneuver over the last two weeks was exposed, and my unauthorized contact with Emma would be highly suspect, despite Musgrave’s wide berth. On the drive back to my apartment in the FBI car, I wondered if he would accept that Emma was being used by one of the factions, and I was just playing it out, like I told him, to see where it would lead before reporting it. At that moment the driver glanced back at me in the rearview mirror. I wondered if they had the car wired for brain scans. No, too smart for them.
In the morning the car picked me up first, and then swung around to Jean’s place on East 72nd. She watched one of the guys load her excessive luggage into the trunk before she hopped into the backseat.
“Hi, partner,” she said with a smile.
“Going for an extended vacation?” I asked. She looked puzzled. “I don’t think they’ll deploy us from D.C. Probably come back here first, resume our normal activities, and then we get picked up in the middle of the night.”
She snuggled up against me. “Then I’ll just try out my new wardrobe in D.C.”
They flew us down to Washington on a small jet with a dozen seats. The flight itself was only twenty minutes, and there were only twenty pages of briefing background for us to read, which we quickly scanned. Afterward Jean was very chatty, maybe just nervous energy, but I was still enmeshed in the implications of last night’s encounter with Ling.
“You seem a little distant, Alan. What’s up?”
“Oh, it’s my wife,” I lied. “She’s not very happy with me right now.”
“Well, boyfriends don’t mind, as long as there’s enough left for them, and there always is.”
“We’ll see about that,” I laughed, keeping up the pretense.
“That’s better, Alan,” Jean said and pinched my arm.
We landed at Dulles Airport, so I figure we wouldn’t be doing this briefing at FBI headquarters in town. Our two-car caravan headed west and pulled into a gated and wooded compound, with somewhat desiccated and stunted trees about thirty minutes later. A mile down the road, we came upon a series of rustic cabins and a reinforced concrete building, with an array of telecommunication towers on the roof. We were dropped off at our cabin and our bags unloaded, and told the first briefing would be in thirty minutes in the main building.
“Not much time to freshen up,” Jean complained. One of the agents snickered, slid back into his car, and they drove away down the entrance road. I figured they were headed back to D.C. or for another airport pickup, or other flunky work. They didn’t seem very high-level.
The cabin was quite spacious and high-end, and it had two bedrooms. We looked into both of them. “Let’s take this one. The windows are west-facing—less light in the morning,” Jean said.
I didn’t argue with the lady about sharing a bedroom; no need to keep up the pretense out here in the boondocks. I had wondered if Sherrie’s visit to Charlottesville was actually a ruse to track me down at my hotel in D.C. but that was foiled now. We unloaded our luggage, and I took a drawer and Jean took two and most of the closet, which still left one bag unpacked. She slipped into more comfortable shoes and we strolled over to the main building.
The small windowless briefing room was comfortable and high-tech. Musgrave and two of his men were seated on one side of a long wooden table and Jean and I sat directly across from this group. There was a huge vid screen on the wall, and it now flashed a picture of Ling and then a vid of her walking into the Chinese restaurant last night and sitting next to me.
“Su Ling is an operative for one of the anti-tech factions; in the past two weeks they’ve tried to compromise Alan by having him run an off-the-books inquiry for one of K Industries former agents, Emma Knowles, and Alan’s last in-country partner.” Her photo flashed on the screen. “We’re not sure if Knowles is working with them, or was set up to get to Alan and discredit him.”
Jean turned and stared at me, no doubt wondering if she should start distancing herself.
“Together with Bart Caruthers from K Industries Foreign Bureau, they set up a sting operation on their own at the Kitty Kat Club in the village and passed along some bogus info on Knowles’ probationary period.” Musgrave stopped. “Alan, this is what Caruthers told us; I assume it’s on-point?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what was going down.”
He nodded his head and continued with the briefing. “Apparently they had tried to trick Alan into further compromising himself, even tried a honey-pot scheme on a train, but to no avail. So finally in desperation, Ling followed him into a restaurant last night and kind of gave herself up, knowing all of this would come out into the open.”
“Was she top level?” Jea
n asked.
“It’s hard to tell with these independent cells, but we’ve now been able to connect her to two past operations that we know of, so she was no new recruit.”
“So I guess this pretty much cancels our operation?” Jean asked ruefully.
“Actually this plays right into our game plan, since we’re asking Alan to become a double agent.”
This caught me totally off guard. “You’re kidding?” I said before I could catch myself.
“In our next briefing we’ll get into the details, but I can say here that we’re not spying on the Midwest’s anti-tech movement and your last target, which Ling was trying to protect, but going after another faction based in the Southwest, with more of a shamanic religious focus.”
“And given my orientation, or leanings, you think I’d pass muster for their recruitment?”
“Yes, and since Jean is quite the opposite, she’s partnered with you to make sure you don’t go over the edge and into their camp.”
“Oh, a kind of yin/yang partnership, with me the yang element,” Jean said in a perky tone.
Musgrave nodded his head.
“I like that.”
“We thought you would, Ms. Whatley,” Musgrave added, as everybody but me had a good laugh.
14.
After this brief introduction, a Southwest desert community expert, Dr. Justin Holmes, a professor type with wire-rimmed glasses and bad skin, continued the briefing and gave us a rundown on the Southwest sector, which included the old four corner states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado plus Nevada. He told us that most of the big cities like Albuquerque, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Denver, were still cosmopolitan centers similar to those in the East. However, given their Native American and Hispanic populations, and historically the area’s independent streak, there were higher concentrations of alternative and borny villages and communities and some quite large like Taos, New Mexico and Sedona, Arizona. He briefly sketched out the economic forces and political agendas and their histories in this sector over the last fifty years.