Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5)

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

He made himself focus.

  “Jefferson,” he said aloud, as if speaking the dead man’s name would summon some understanding of what was to come. Of who was to come.

  Wyland eased back from the keyboard and settled into his desk chair, thinking. About Jefferson. He’d been the project liaison for twenty years. It had become a large part of his life after his retirement from the FBI. The details surrounding that were murky in places, but enough had been learned through technical means to be certain that he’d had dealings with Simon Lynch just prior to his Bureau tenure ending. What cemented that belief were the multiple classified reports that existed referencing an ‘event’ that Jefferson participated in shortly before Simon Lynch dropped off everyone’s radar.

  But Jefferson had stayed connected to him.

  “This was personal to you,” Wyland said.

  A twenty-year top-secret volunteer assignment would point to that quite definitively, Wyland thought. So how do the powers that be go about replacing someone like that? This isn’t even a job on the radar of any agents. It’s a dead-end assignment.

  Another retiree?

  “No,” Wyland said, answering his own musing.

  He paused for a moment, backtracking in his process. Trying to figure out who was going to fill Jefferson’s shoes was a scattershot approach at best. Knowing when the baton would be passed, and how, was an approach more likely to bear fruit. Spies were not caught spying, he reminded himself. They were caught making dead drops, or contact with their handlers.

  “The handoff,” Wyland said.

  This was all very under the table. For two decades that was how Jefferson had operated, keeping connections to the government, and even the Bureau, at a distance to protect Simon Lynch.

  “He didn’t trust them,” Wyland suggested. Almost immediately a revelation struck him. “But he did trust someone.”

  Wyland leaned quickly back toward his desk and began typing commands into his system. He needed to know things quickly. Some information he’d already discovered in his previous dissection of Jefferson’s life. Now he needed to zero in on the most salient parts of the man’s existence—who mattered to him.

  “Come on,” Wyland urged himself as he checked the date. Jefferson had been dead for three days. They’d be planting him in the ground next to his wife in less than forty-eight hours. Putting assets in place in that time frame was doable. But those operators would need to be given information to complete their assignments.

  They would need targets.

  Four

  Emily walked across the browning grass, weaving her way through tombstones.

  They’d sent her to a cemetery.

  2 p.m. at Glen River Memorial. That was what had been written on the note Schur had handed her, with today’s date. A Bureau courier had dropped off a printed plane ticket later that evening. Why they hadn’t simply emailed her the document to print out herself she didn’t understand, though the desire to not leave an electronic paper trail did come to mind as a possibility. Why she warranted such a measure of security was ludicrous, Emily thought. She was a nobody Special Agent on a downward slope toward a career of throwaway assignments.

  How many of them would begin in graveyards she had no idea.

  Two people stood in the near distance amidst a gathering of tombstones. A man and a woman. He was older, pushing eighty, and tall as the day was long. She was younger, but not young. A good looking fortysomething, Emily thought. And familiar. She’d seen that face before.

  Whoever she was, whoever either of them were, Emily LaGrange was certain of one thing by just the looks of them—they were both Bureau.

  “Hello.”

  The woman greeted her. The man did not.

  “I know you,” Emily said to the woman. “I mean, I’ve seen you somewhere. At the Bureau.”

  “Quantico,” the woman said. “I gave a presentation on the links between corporate and international espionage to your class. Francine Aguirre-Welsh. I probably introduced myself to your class as Frankie.”

  “You did,” Emily confirmed, recalling the class during her time in the academy.

  “It’s been a while,” Frankie said.

  “The academy was five years ago,” Emily said, something beyond that mere quantification rising in her thoughts. “Five years and two lifetimes ago.”

  “I imagine so,” Frankie said.

  “You were ASAC in San Francisco,” Emily said.

  “I’m Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office now,” Frankie updated her, the Assistant gone from her job description when she returned to her old stomping grounds to lead the FBI’s presence in the City of Angels.

  “Is that where I’m being shuffled off to?” Emily pressed, an edge to her question. “Three thousand miles from the suits in DC that don’t know what to do with me?”

  Frankie let the young agent’s animus settle for a moment. She had a head of steam about her, one that had been contained. For too long, it seemed.

  “If the Bureau didn’t know what to do with you they’d send you to an RA in Wyoming,” the man said, finally speaking up.

  The man looked as though he thought she might very well belong in a Resident Agency, a satellite location often far from the nearest Field Office. She could be easily put on ice in such a hell hole. Out of sight and out of mind.

  “This is Bob Lomax,” Frankie said, offering the introduction.

  “Bureau?” Emily asked, almost challenging the man to confirm his place in the exchange that was taking place.

  “Retired,” Lomax told her. “Happily.”

  “You’re just off a long UC op,” Frankie said.

  “I am.”

  Emily added nothing to her response. No detail. No appraisal.

  “Walk with us, Emily,” Lomax said, then turned and headed off through the tombstones without waiting.

  Frankie followed after a second, glancing back to see if the young agent they’d been sent to meet was going to join them. For a moment, Emily fought the ‘flight’ urge. That had been so deeply ingrained in her as a survival strategy that she felt it reaching up from dark places within. Places her psyche had constructed to hold close the things she’d had to do. The things she’d had to see done.

  “Emily…”

  Frankie’s gentle urging pierced the stillness that briefly bound her, and Emily began to walk. Lomax led them past grand markers, where families were memorialized in sculptured stone, names chiseled on their elaborate foundations. A few minutes on, the big agent stopped and faced a more modest marker.

  The earth was fresh where they stopped. A recent burial. Already, though, a headstone marked the grave. Or one of the graves.

  “Anne Jefferson,” Emily read, leaving the rest out. Daughter. Wife. Mother. Grandmother. Doctor. That epitaph was set into one half of the large piece of granite. The other was blank. Waiting.

  “You’re familiar with Art Jefferson?” Lomax asked.

  Until the question had been posed, Emily hadn’t made the connection between the similar name on the headstone and how any of this might relate to her in even the most tangential way.

  “He was Bureau,” Emily said.

  “He was my friend,” Lomax added, irked at the cold label she’d placed on the man he’d known since they were street agents in Chicago.

  “Agent Jefferson took his own life a week ago,” Frankie explained, stating simple facts. If she’d tried to do more she might have exhibited the opposite of Lomax’s muted anger. Art had been her partner. Her friend. In many ways, her savior as well. Only after the fact had she learned that her selection as SAC in Los Angeles had come about when Art, medically retired and free of any requirements that he maintain decorum in matters of FBI business, had told the Bureau’s director that she’d be a damn fool to appoint anyone else. Whether his support had been the deciding factor didn’t matter to Frankie. That the man she thought of as a near father figure had expressed his full confidence in her did.

  “I didn’t kn
ow that,” Emily said, drawing on the old well of manners and decorum she’d mostly abandoned while on assignment.

  “His wife passed away several years ago,” Frankie said, nodding toward the headstone. “In the past year he’d started to withdraw from old associates. Friends.”

  Emily nodded. “From you.”

  “Yes,” Frankie confirmed.

  She feels guilt…

  The assessment came without desire or request. It was an innate reaction. One Emily had developed during her years in the proverbial wilderness. Then it had been honed as a tool of her trade. Now she wielded it reflexively, her brain, perhaps, treating this exchange as something to be figured out. To be classified as mundane or dangerous.

  All other considerations stripped away, Emily LaGrange just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

  “Just what does Agent Jefferson, or any of this, have to do with me and any assignment?” Emily asked, bringing her curiosity out into the open. “I mean, this is not usual Bureau procedure. You’ve got to grant me that.”

  “No,” Frankie agreed. “It’s not.”

  “You still hold a security clearance,” Lomax said.

  Emily couldn’t tell if he was questioning her about that fact, or questioning the propriety of the fact itself. Had the Quantico headshrinkers who’d met with her after she’d been pulled from her undercover assignment put something in her file that might affect that clearance? Maybe. She didn’t really know, and she truly didn’t care. If the Bureau wanted her gone, she would gladly shuffle off to someplace where security clearances and false identities existed in spy novels, not real life.

  “I haven’t heard otherwise,” she said, gesturing to their surroundings. “Is that something I need in this place?”

  Lomax didn’t react to her quip. But Frankie did.

  “Glibness is a highly overrated defense mechanism,” she told Emily. “And you suck at it.”

  It was Emily’s turn to choose silence as Lomax turned half away from her, trying to conceal the sudden grin curling his lips.

  “You’re here because you have nowhere else to go,” Frankie said, injecting some honesty into the conversation. “No one wants you after the way your last assignment ended.”

  There was no flash of memory to accompany the harsh, and accurate, assessment. No words bubbling to the surface to haunt her at the moment. They came when they came, at their own time. Perhaps her psyche wanted her fully focused on this very unusual appraisal.

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference.”

  Emily looked. It was Lomax who’d thrown her that lifeline. Or attempted to.

  “Agent Jefferson was serving as liaison to a national security project in his retirement,” Frankie said.

  Emily processed the statement for a moment, but couldn’t find the logic in it. Liaison between who?

  “It was an unusual arrangement,” Frankie said.

  “An extraordinary arrangement,” Lomax added. “One that Art made his own.”

  “I’m not following,” Emily said.

  “There’s a boy,” Lomax said, catching himself immediately. “A man. He was a boy when this all started.”

  “He’s special,” Frankie said.

  “Special,” Emily parroted. “Special how?”

  Frankie looked to Lomax. He gave her a quick nod.

  “Keep your security clearance in mind,” he cautioned Emily.

  “Twenty years ago, a teenager named Simon Lynch broke the NSA’s billion-dollar code,” Frankie explained. “It was called Kiwi.”

  “He broke it wide open after seeing it in a puzzle magazine,” Lomax added with a disbelieving head shake.

  “The NSA would covertly slip bits of code into puzzle magazines to test them against the human factor,” Frankie continued. “And this young man solved the puzzle.”

  “Was he some high school math whiz?” Emily asked, intrigued at what was being revealed to her.

  “He’s autistic,” Frankie told her.

  “Autistic?” Emily asked, checking to see if she’d heard correctly.

  “Yes,” Frankie said.

  “The kid wouldn’t write the letter ‘e’,” Lomax shared. “Couldn’t look you in the eye, but he could crack a crypto system that took years to develop. And he did it in the time it takes to blink.”

  “There were forces, both inside and outside of our government, who had designs on Simon,” Frankie said. “They either wanted him, or wanted him dead. Art became his protector, and he nearly lost his life in the process.”

  “He was hurt bad,” Lomax said. “Shot in both arms.”

  “He retired on a medical,” Emily said, and Frankie nodded.

  “When it was all over, Simon was moved to a secure location to be cared for, and protected,” Frankie said.

  “And studied,” Lomax added, more than a hint of disdain in how he spoke the words.

  “Eventually Simon was placed in a facility designed just for his needs,” Frankie said.

  There was an unspoken addendum to that statement. Emily decided to speak it.

  “And the government’s needs.”

  “She’s caught on already,” Lomax said.

  “Art was concerned,” Frankie said. “He didn’t want Simon to end up like some test subject to be constantly probed and prodded so scientists could figure out how he ticked. He made a lot of noise within the Bureau about Simon. I think they just wanted to shut him up, so they created a position for him.”

  “Liaison,” Emily said.

  “He would visit Simon twice a month at the facility and make sure that he was being treated well,” Frankie explained. “That he was having an actual life. As much as he could.”

  “Where is this facility?”

  “I’m not privy to that information,” Frankie answered.

  “Only a few people in government are,” Lomax said. “Even Art didn’t know.”

  “Wait,” Emily said, confused. “You said Agent Jefferson visited him.”

  “They had a blind transport procedure in place,” Frankie said. She quickly corrected herself. “Have in place.”

  “Show up to a spot, they put a hood on you, and in a few hours you’re sitting with Simon Lynch,” Lomax explained.

  Emily waited for them to say more, but they didn’t. They simply stared at her. The reason was apparent, as it should have been from the moment they began describing Art Jefferson’s activities.

  “You want me to be the new liaison,” Emily said.

  “We’re just the messengers,” Frankie said.

  “You technically will be on the payroll of the National Security Agency,” Lomax said. “You’ll still be Bureau, with a twist.”

  “Your temporary assignment will be to the NSA’s COMSEC-Z,” Frankie told her. “That’s the group that developed the code he broke. Their mission since then has been to understand how that happened.”

  “For twenty years?” Emily pressed.

  “A lot of secrets are stashed in his head,” Lomax said. “Too many ‘hows’ and ‘whats’ to even imagine.”

  Emily considered all that she’d been told. And what was being asked of her. It seemed that this was not some opportunity—it was a take it or leave it proposition. She could do this, or she could separate from the Bureau. Leave the title of Special Agent behind.

  Maybe they wanted her gone, and this was the way to force that. Except…

  Except neither of the people who’d brought this assignment to her seemed like the kind who would participate in such an exercise. That, though, raised its own questions.

  “Why did they send you two?”

  Frankie nodded, understanding the suspicion.

  “Why didn’t Ed Schur just make the offer in Minneapolis?” Frankie asked rhetorically, her gaze shifting to Lomax.

  “Because I wouldn’t let them,” the big agent said. “And it’s not an offer.”

  “This isn’t just some duty you’re being shuffled off to,” Frankie said. “Maybe
people at the Bureau see it as a way to get you out of sight and out of mind, but that’s exactly what they thought about Art…about Agent Jefferson when he started making noise. But watching out for Simon, watching over Simon, was a calling to him.”

  “If you can’t see it as the same, then you can forget everything we just shared and get on with your life,” Lomax said.

  On with what life?

  Emily understood now. This was an interview. She was being judged as worthy or unworthy of filling the shoes of a Bureau relic who’d offed himself.

  “Do you have a long list of people you’re meeting with here?” Emily asked, glancing at the surroundings.

  This time Frankie didn’t have to offer any verbal rebuke. A look was enough to convince Emily that her sarcasm wasn’t wearing well.

  “Look, I’m here because some guy from Justice, who I don’t know from anywhere, slips me a note and has an airline ticket hand delivered to my apartment. I don’t really know either of you, and I have no idea what Agent Jefferson did, or why he decided to end his life, but I just came back into the real world. I don’t know if I can…stomach slipping back into all this covert, work in the shadows bullshit. I did my time. I did everything that was asked of me.”

  “And more,” Lomax said.

  ‘Pull the trigger!’

  Emily wanted to close her eyes. Wanted to slam them shut as the memory blasted through into her consciousness yet again. But she didn’t. She just let her stare fix on the big agent. On the man who’d obviously been briefed on every aspect of her undercover assignment. Every aspect.

  “Twice a month, Agent LaGrange,” Frankie said, drawing Emily’s attention off Lomax. “Call it two weekends. The rest of the time you have to yourself to get healthy. Back in the groove.”

  It was apparent to Emily that she’d been given the stamp of approval. Either that or their implied concern over who would follow in their late colleague’s footsteps was less critical than just getting a warm body to accept the assignment.

  “What’s it going to be?” Lomax pressed.

  Emily looked away from the agents. To the half-blank headstone and the rectangle of bare earth, squares of brown sod stacked nearby. Someone would lay that over the dirt soon so that Agent Jefferson’s grave could look as bleak as the next one. And the next one.