Smokescreen

by Meredith Fletcher; Vicki Hinze Doranna Durgin

  Tossing the files onto the interview table, Christie remained standing. Bao started to stand as well. She stuck a leg behind his, put her hand to his chest and shoved him back into his chair.

  “Class isn’t dismissed yet,” Christie said.

  Bao laughed, but anger glinted in his eyes. “What do you want, Agent Chace?”

  She questioned him for forty-seven minutes, straight and without finesse, hammering him with question after question. She covered the two murder cases, stated her convictions that Bao was part of the kidnapping and probably part of the later murders.

  Bao denied all of it. He admitted to knowing both the victims, seeming to take pride in the fact that she could come that close to him but no closer. He never once asked for his lawyer.

  Someone rapped on the door.

  “Come in,” Christie said, feeling frustrated but working hard not to show it.

  Agent Osborn, one of the newbies, stuck his head in the door. “D.O. says time’s up with this one. His lawyer is here making noise. Charge him or let him go.”

  Bao stood and smiled. “Well then, Agent Chace. This has been…interesting.” He shrugged. “Maybe next time we can do this at my convenience. At a place of my choosing. A lawyer will be of no use to you then or there, I assure you.”

  Christie intercepted Bao before he reached the door, stepping in front of him and going nose to nose with him. They were the same height so she stared him in the eyes.

  “Why did you kill Arturo Gennady?” Christie demanded. “He was an old man.”

  Bao returned her level gaze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You knew it was a sting,” Christie went on. “All you had to do was not show up.”

  Bao looked at the other two FBI agents as if wondering if they knew what she was talking about.

  Thinking about the dead agents and all the phone time she’d logged that morning and afternoon talking to grieving loved ones, Christie barely resisted punching Bao in the face when he turned back to her and shrugged. “You made a mistake. If you hadn’t tried to cowboy that stakeout and kill my people, we’d never have known who you were,” she said.

  “What makes you think it was me or my family?”

  “I saw the Bronze Tiger chops tattooed on one of the men.” It was the same lie Christie had told Fielding. And she was basing it all on No-Face’s word.

  “Other men wear such tattoos,” Bao replied.

  “No they don’t. Bronze Tigers don’t let anyone wear their chops. And if anyone tries to leave your family, you kill him.”

  “You must like fairy tales, Agent Chace.”

  “Only the ones where the good guys win.”

  “I’m surprised that you believe in bogeymen.”

  “They believe in you, too. I’m sure your soldiers told you about the masked man that was with me.”

  Bao’s eyes narrowed, showing the first sign of interest Christie had seen.

  “You don’t know who he is, do you?” Christie taunted. “But he knows who you are. And he doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who goes away until he’s finished with something.” Not at all, she thought, remembering those sea-green eyes and obvious combat experience. “I’m pretty sure he’s not finished with you.”

  “Mr. Bao, you don’t have to stay in there any longer.” The speaker was a young man in an expensive suit who stood out in the hallway holding on to an expensive PDA that he carried like a badge of office.

  Bao waved the young attorney away. He kept his eyes fixed on Christie. “You’re inventing another myth.”

  Christie gave him a cold look. “Am I? Your soldiers had us wired. I saw my picture on a vid-flash on the sleeve of one of them. You knew Gennady wasn’t giving in to the blackmail pressure from the Bronze Tigers. You knew my team would be there. You intended for all of us to die.”

  “Again, Agent Chace, I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you should feel inclined to talk to me about this matter in the future, arrange it through my attorney. I’ll make sure he leaves you his information.” Bao turned to go, then stopped himself. “One other bit of advice I would like to give you. Because you have been so charitable to me.”

  Christie waited. Every time he opens his smug mouth, he’s giving you information. Just remember that. Let him talk. Make sure you learn.

  “I heard about a woman in the media,” Bao said. “Her name was Katsumi Shan. Perhaps you’ve heard of her.”

  Christie waited.

  “I was told she was a very inquisitive woman, too. Always sticking her nose into business that was not hers. She was found hanging.” Bao smiled. “Evidently someone didn’t like her attentions. It is something to keep in mind.”

  “I won’t stop,” Christie said defiantly. “I don’t scare.” She tried to tell herself she wasn’t scared now, but she knew she was and accepted it. Her father had taught her to deal with fear. When you’re a cop, that’s one of the things that will be with you every day of your career. You want to know when to start worrying, Christie? The day you stop being afraid.

  “Good,” Bao said. “But you realize these men, whoever they are, that murdered your team probably would like nothing better than another chance at you.”

  Christie watched him walk away. She steeled herself until she was certain Bao was out of earshot. Then she cursed. That was something her father didn’t teach her and didn’t approve.

  When she had control of herself, she left the interview room and returned to her office. Seated at her cluttered desk, she breathed out. Then she closed her eyes, accessed the computer in the back of her head and started searching for information about Katsumi Shan. There had to be a tie. Bao had meant the information to be a lure.

  “I need one of the back rooms,” Dalton said to the young clerk behind the counter of the Internet café. He thought he spoke clearly, but it was possible that he hadn’t. He wasn’t at his best.

  “The back room?” the clerk repeated, acting like he didn’t know what Dalton was talking about.

  Dalton tried to control his anger. It wasn’t easy. He’d left the lab compound three hours ago with the intention of getting a handle on the can of worms he’d opened as well as the one that had already been opened.

  You should have just kept your damn mouth shut, he told himself. Maybe if you’d gotten some information from Grace things would have been different. But you didn’t. You should have known going in that Grace isn’t the kind of woman to crumble under pressure.

  As it was now, he still didn’t know anything, and Grace wasn’t talking to him. She’d gone to the lab and showed no signs of coming out anytime soon.

  Check that, Dalton told himself. You do know something. Bao and the Bronze Tigers threatened Michael. Not Grace. Michael.

  Once he’d been certain Michael was asleep, Dalton had assigned two men he trusted on the cottage, then had gone into Roanoke. He’d spent some time in the taverns, drowning his anger and fear and frustration the way he had back in the military. Drinking to excess was something he hadn’t done in almost three years. Then, half in the bag and royally pissed, he’d decided to take action.

  At the moment, he knew about Bao and the Bronze Tigers. But they were a known quantity. The offensive front that he didn’t know, and was certain would involve her at some point, was the FBI agent, Christie Chace. Since he’d met her in the warehouse last night, she’d seldom been far from his thoughts. Drinking put a curve in his thoughts that he couldn’t shake. The warrior part of him remembered that she was going to be a stubborn adversary, while the male part of him couldn’t forget what her lean, hard body had felt like against his.

  Maybe if you were sober she wouldn’t seem so damn attractive, he groused at himself. Emotions and whiskey were a bad combination. He’d gotten angry at the last bar he’d been in, almost let himself get sucked into a fight—which would have pleased him to no end for the moment, but would have upped the complications with Grace in geometric proportions—and had chosen to come
to the Internet café.

  Now the young Internet café clerk was leaving himself wide-open to attack.

  “Hey, Euclid,” a deep basso voice called. “I’ll deal with this one.” Kirk Brandt, the ex-Navy intelligence officer that ran the café, limped out from behind the bar. He was short and wide, built like a fireplug. His face was broad and friendly, even with the burn scarring that tracked his right cheek and chin and pulled at his right eye.

  Kirk had served as a submariner for twelve years before his boat had taken a direct hit from a pirate in the Indian Ocean. Nearly every man aboard the sub was lost. Few of them had escaped damage. Kirk had mustered out with a full pension, a background in encrypted communications and one leg short.

  These days he ran the Internet café for a straight job and contracted out for security testing for big corporations. The wounds he’d suffered had left his right leg a twisted mess of scarring and prosthetic from the knee down, but his mind was as agile as ever. Dalton had met Kirk at the arcades with Michael. They’d found similar interests in military strategy games, then progressed to sharing stories about their experiences in the service. By the time they’d finished that, they had a solid if casual friendship.

  Kirk had also let Dalton know that he kept back rooms at the twenty-four-hour café that were heavily encrypted. Most of the front room computers were used by dedicated gamers who wanted to handle more machine than they could easily afford at home. Few used them for research or business, though there were some.

  “You, my friend,” Kirk said, “have been drinking like a man with a woman on his mind.”

  “It shows?” Dalton brushed at his chin, feeling stubble and the familiar creeping numbness that told him he was half-drunk.

  “Big time.” Kirk patted him on the shoulder. “C’mon back and let’s see what you need.”

  Dalton followed the ex-Navy man into the back room. Four sleek machines sat in the darkness. The walls were blank, devoid of distractions. Kirk gestured Dalton to one of the consoles, typed in a series of commands and brought the computer up.

  “I designed the search engine myself,” Kirk said. “You don’t use Google for anything back in this room. Too much spyware on the Net. My engine ducks it or kills it all.”

  Focusing on the screen with effort, Dalton looked for the keyboard.

  “Way behind the times, my friend.” Kirk slipped a wireless microphone over Dalton’s head. “You just have to talk to my babies.”

  Dalton frowned. “I don’t care for tech that much.”

  Kirk grinned sympathetically. “I heard there were a few people like you left in the world. Problem is, you’d still be writing on stone tablets if you had your way.”

  Probably be a lot safer, Dalton thought.

  “And you wouldn’t be able to do what you’re about to do,” Kirk said as if reading his thoughts. “You want me to leave?”

  “No.” Dalton wasn’t sure he could operate the computer by himself and get the most out of it. And there wasn’t anything in Special Agent Christie Chace’s background that he was afraid for Kirk to know.

  They started searching, saving files that Kirk promised to copy over to a memory wafer for Dalton later. Dalton was surprised at how much the FBI agent had been in the media. On the other hand, after seeing how she’d handled herself during the warehouse firefight last night, he had expected it. She’d been a key player in several operations against international gang members and foreign corporate espionage.

  “She’s Enhanced,” Kirk said when they came to a Viewpoint story about Chace’s joining the pilot FBI program for intensive immersion in the cybersystems. “That’s one thing I wish I’d been able to get while I was in the Navy. Of course, Command was only offering the systems to special ops guys serving on the front line, not to a guy wearing dolphins and working miles out.”

  “Where it was safe, right?” Dalton asked wryly.

  “Oh yeah. Couldn’t have been much safer.” Kirk unconsciously touched the burn scarring on his face. “You were a Ranger, Dalton? Didn’t they ever offer the Enhanced program to you?”

  “I turned it down,” Dalton replied. “Most of my squad didn’t.” For a moment, with the liquor working in him, the ghosts of those final days with the team haunted him. He held Mac again, his friend’s body riddled with bullets from a heavy-caliber machine gun, almost torn apart. “They died. All of them. Most of the rest of us that weren’t Enhanced got killed, too.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Kirk said. That had been one of the stories that Dalton hadn’t shared with the ex-Navy man.

  “Have you talked to the military guys who are Enhanced?” Dalton asked.

  “A few of them,” Kirk replied.

  “Ever notice how they seem…different?”

  “What do you mean?”

  With the whiskey in him, loosening him up, Dalton couldn’t seem to stay quiet. Or maybe Grace’s accusation had hurt him more than he was willing to admit to himself.

  “The guys who got Enhanced,” Dalton said, “didn’t think they could die or get hurt. Like they could stand there and the bullet would bounce off them, or like they could dodge out of the way of the ones with their name on them.”

  Kirk hesitated. “I don’t know that I would say that was true.”

  “You ever fought with guys who were Enhanced?”

  “No. Never saw any hands-on engagement action.”

  “Well,” Dalton said, “they are different. Not all the time. But sometimes when a firefight got at its worst and the squad needed to deliver the most, I’d see all the fear go out of them. Like someone had turned off a switch. During those times, our casualties ran high. They didn’t stop till they were dead.” He paused, remembering. “I’m not sure some of them stopped then.”

  Memories washed over him, filled with visions of bursting artillery, shrill cries of wounded and dying men, the acrid stink of blood and gunpowder, the heat of mortars slamming the ground and the taste of dirt and smoke in the air.

  “My team’s last op was like that,” Dalton said. “We were hard up against it and should have pulled back to our last position. Instead, my commanding officer ordered us to take the site.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah,” Dalton said bitterly. “For about five minutes. We had enough time to evac our dead and wounded. It took that long because we had so many dead.” He’d carried Mac’s body to the evac helicopter himself.

  “Man,” Kirk said soberly, “that’s harsh.”

  “I lost my best friend there.”

  “That’s where you lost Mac?”

  At that point, Dalton knew he’d been talking about Mac, and he knew Kirk had been listening. “Yeah.”

  They stayed silent together, both of them struggling with their own demons and nightmares, but they continued to prowl the Internet for information about FBI Special Agent Christie Chace.

  “She’s a hotdogger,” Kirk said when they both agreed they’d exhausted the information pipeline three hours later. “She likes the action. And she’s good at it.”

  Dalton silently agreed. All the files in the FBI databases they’d ferreted out about the FBI agent had agreed on that score.

  “But she’s a total babe,” Kirk added, unconsciously shifting through the file he’d created on Christie Chace and stopping at one of the photos of Chace walking the perimeter of a terrorist bombing in downtown Washington, D.C.

  Dalton looked at the digital image and remembered again how the woman had moved with superhuman speed, how coolly she’d acted under fire. Bruising had already spread across his chest despite the Kevlar vest he’d worn.

  “You didn’t say where you’d met her,” Kirk said.

  “In D.C.”

  “I didn’t know you got up there much.”

  “I don’t.”

  Kirk shrugged. “You ask me, she’s a good reason to go back.”

  “I’m a loner. And my job takes up a lot of my time.”

  “Yeah.” Kirk gave Dalton a sidelon
g glance. “I can see that. How’s Michael?”

  “Michael’s good.” A sudden stab of fear raced through Dalton. He heard Grace’s threat again—And if you do anything, anything at all to jeopardize this situation I swear to God that you will never see Michael again. He closed his eyes for a moment, centering himself. He couldn’t imagine not being able to be there for the boy, couldn’t imagine a time when he’d have to ask, How’s Michael?

  The computer pinged for attention, jarring Dalton out of his dark thoughts.

  “Late arrival,” Kirk said, then called the media file into view.

  The piece came with digital images, showing FBI Special Agent Christie Chace taking alleged Bronze Tiger Triad gang member Sammy Bao from the Hong Kong Noodle earlier that day. In one of the images, she held a shotgun to a man’s nose as Bao was placed in handcuffs.

  “Damn,” Kirk said. “The woman’s got brass, you got to give her that.”

  “Yeah, but if she goes around acting like that, she’s gonna get her head blown off.”

  “I know. You don’t jack around with the Tigers unless you’ve already scheduled a trip to the crematorium.” Kirk gave Dalton a serious look. “Look, total babe or not, this could be one to stay away from, pal.”

  “Yeah.” Dalton realized that the effects of the alcohol he’d consumed were diminishing and it was almost 4:00 a.m. If he left now, he could get a couple hours sleep before Michael got up and started his day.

  He paid Kirk and thanked the man for his time, then headed up the street for his motorcycle. His thoughts raced inside his head. Somehow he had to make peace with Grace, and he had to pray that FBI Special Agent Christie Chace never found the trail that led to the lab compound.

  But he knew that was a vain hope. From everything he’d seen in the media files, Chace was as intelligent and driven as she was quick.

  Chapter 8

  “Christie.”

  Startled, Christie looked up at her father as he rummaged through the refrigerator at the family home where she’d grown up. The Chace family lived in a residential area in Georgetown. She’d attended Georgetown University, always staying close to family although she’d traveled a lot for her job at the Bureau. There was no place like home.