The team scrambled down the street, but it was already too late. The Jellys — nicknamed for the way their guts poured out when shot — had seen them and opened fire. Warning lights started popping up on the Mole’s screen as members of his team were hit.
“What’s wrong with you people?” the Mole yelled.
“They came out of nowhere!”
“That wasn’t my side to watch!”
“Ah, crap!”
“I don’t think this is realistic! They wouldn’t have just shown up like—” The game cut off Monty’s voice the moment a Jelly’s plasma ray ripped through his combat suit. Once killed, a player was dead until the end of the battle.
The Mole looked around. Only two others had made it to the safety of the building with him, and one of them was badly hurt. The Mole had played the game so many times, he knew it was impossible for his team to finish this level with so few members.
Five minutes later, he was proven correct as his screen flashed white and his voice was cut off. Since he’d been the last man standing, there hadn’t been anyone to talk to anyway.
With the whole team dead, the game reset, putting everyone back in the ready room and reactivating communications.
“Well, that sucked,” Red Dog said.
“Way to state the obvious, asshole,” Jasmine shot back.
There were a few other choice comments before Monty said, “So are we going again, or what?”
The e-mail icon on the Mole’s computer was still flashing. He frowned, wanting to keep playing, but he did have a business to run.
“Five-minute bathroom break,” he said. “Then we go.”
He pushed his headset down around his neck, minimized the game, and brought up his inbox. It contained several unread messages. Two were notifications from his bank about payments he’d received — nice! One was an auto-generated message, from a bot he’d sent out to dig through some secured servers in Texas for some information a client wanted. The rest appeared to be requests for his services. He was always ambivalent about new work. While he usually enjoyed the process, the people asking for his help were, more times than not, pains in the ass.
He checked through the requests to make sure nothing was pressing, and made it three quarters of the way through before a sender’s address caused him to stop.
Griffin.
Shit.
The Mole could go for months without thinking about that asshole. Months when he could just do his thing, and not worry that he’d find Griffin sitting in his room with a big knife in his hand, ready to slice the Mole’s throat from ear to ear.
But not only did Griffin know where he lived, he also knew the Mole’s real name. None of the Mole’s other clients had any idea. Well, Orlando did, but she was a friend, probably the only true one the Mole had, and she’d never used her knowledge against him.
Griffin, on the other hand, was all about using what he knew.
A sound of scratchy voices coming out of his headset broke the Mole’s trance. He pulled it back on.
“—keeping time?” Ivan said.
“Come on. Let’s go. We’re losing daylight.” This came from Red Dog.
“Change of plans,” the Mole said. “You’ll have to go on without me.”
“What are you talking about?” Jasmine asked. “I thought we all cleared our schedules.”
“Yeah, well, mine just got busy.”
“Serious, man?” Ivan said. “You’re going to screw us up.”
“Red Dog can step up to team leader,” the Mole said.
“Uh, sure. I can do that,” Red Dog responded.
Of course he could, the Mole thought. Red Dog had been dying to lead a mission ever since they all teamed up. Well, here was his chance. “Try to stay alive,” the Mole said.
He quit the game, and set his headset next to the vocal modulator box he plugged into anytime he talked to a client. It was light years better than the one Monty used, and gave the Mole’s voice a deep, haunting monotone that he augmented with a slow, uneven speech pattern. No need to use the unit at the moment, though. He didn’t want to talk to Griffin until he had the information the man requested. Besides, Griffin knew what his voice sounded like.
As he opened the e-mail, he automatically started up the familiar daydream of ways he could remove Griffin from his life. Most involved scenarios viable only in video games, but the truth was, the virtual world was probably the only place he could ever beat Griffin. The Mole was not a physically imposing individual. He could probably outthink the asshole, but—
He shook it off. He just needed to get the damn work done, and Griffin would be out of his hair.
For a while, anyway.
He read the message.
Identify. You have one hour.
Griffin
Four image files were attached to the e-mail. The first picture was of a woman in the passenger seat of a car. A Toyota Camry, by the looks of it. The second was of a man driving the same car. This one included a shot of the license plate. The subject of the third was another man behind the wheel of a BMW, and the fourth was the same man again, only this time he was looking directly into the camera in what was most likely a passport shot.
Identify.
No problem, that was right up the Mole’s alley. It was the second part of the message — the “you have one hour” part — that concerned him.
A good fifteen minutes of that hour had been wasted while his team of dweebs had offered themselves up for slaughter to the Jellys. Still, with clear photos, license plate numbers, and three quarters of an hour left, he should be able to get enough information to keep Griffin from getting angry.
Both license plates were from Washington, DC. Utilizing a hack he’d used a million times, he entered a national motor-vehicle database that linked information from all states and US territories. He selected DC, and decided to start with the BMW. Turned out it was registered to a corporation with a New York City address. He minimized the database window, opened a new one, and did a search on the company. It didn’t take him long to realize it was a dummy corporation.
“Wonderful,” he muttered. While he had no doubt he could eventually track down the real owner, it would likely take more time than he had left. Best, he decided, to save the BMW for later.
He went back to the database and typed in the number for the Toyota. A part of him expected it to be owned by the same phony company, but when he hit ENTER, the response he got was:
NO MATCH
The Mole gave the database the benefit of the doubt, and reentered the plate number in case he’d mistyped.
NO MATCH
That couldn’t be right. He highly doubted the car’s owner had hammered out replica DC license plates. Perhaps the number had been altered in some way.
He brought the picture back to the front of the screen, enlarged it until the license plate filled the window, and examined the image. The magnification caused a loss of resolution, but he could still make out the letters and numbers, and, as far as he could tell, none of the characters had been tampered with.
So why wasn’t the plate in the database? A glitch, perhaps?
He accessed the source code, and quickly determined that while the software was not even close to being the best written one he’d ever come across, there didn’t seem to be anything blocking him from finding the info on this particular plate.
He checked the clock and cursed. No way was he going to make the deadline.
He switched over and checked the logs, not only the ones associated with the national database, but also those that were DC specific. With his trained eye, he rapidly scrolled through the data, looking for anything unusual.
He stopped on an entry from the previous day. A file deletion notice. In and of itself, that wasn’t unusual, but what had caught his attention were the last four characters of the file name. They corresponded exactly to the license number in the picture.
He followed the trail and realized the deletion had gone a lot deepe
r than just the DC and national databases. The worm that had removed the file had also gone through backup servers for both systems, destroying all previously saved versions.
The Mole’s fear of Griffin started to fade into the background as his curiosity grew. Why had someone felt it necessary to make this car disappear? He leaned back in his chair, thinking. There had to be somewhere else he could find what he was looking for.
Pistol, he realized.
He pulled his headset on, plugged it into the vocal modulator, and used one of his anonymous Skype accounts to make an audio-only call.
“Yay?” Pistol answered, his rough, smoker’s voice making him sound twenty years older than he actually was.
“It is…me,” the Mole said, falling easily into his work persona.
“Hey, buddy. What’s going on?”
“I…have a…question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Motor vehicle databases…do you have?”
Pistol was a collector, only he didn’t collect baseball cards or Star Wars action figures. He was interested in digital information, illegally obtained by hacking into databases and downloading them onto his own server farm. One never really knew what might capture Pistol’s fancy. Some things the Mole was sure Pistol would have? Turned out to be of no interest to him. While other things, esoteric crap no one would ever need, took up large chunks of space on Pistol’s drives.
“Depends,” Pistol said. “Are we talking in or out of the States?”
“In.”
“Hmm. Hit or miss. I got some, not all, though. Now, if you were interested in India, I got you covered. Of course, not everyone there registers their car.” He laughed.
“My interest is specific…to…Washington, DC.”
“DC, huh? Hold on.”
He was gone for less than a minute.
“You’re in luck,” Pistol said. “I do have it, but it’s about a year out of date.”
The car in the picture was considerably older than that.
“I…need you to…run a plate…for…me.” He gave Pistol the number.
“Hey, it’s not like I’m just sitting around, you know.”
“I will pay…you.”
“It’s a grand per request.”
“Understood,” the Mole said. Last time it had been only five hundred bucks, but a check of the clock told him he only had ten minutes left before Griffin’s deadline, so quibbling over fees was not a luxury he could afford. If he at least had the name of the woman, that might mollify Griffin.
He could hear Pistol enter the number on his keyboard. After a pause, the man said, “Here we go. You got a pen?”
The Mole had already opened a blank document on his computer screen. “Go…ahead.”
“The license plate belongs to a 1994 Toyota Camry. Color dark gray, no reports of accidents.”
“The owner,” the Mole said, impatient.
“Let’s see. It’s registered to Misty Blake.” He read off an address that was located in the Dupont Circle area of DC. “Anything else?”
“Hold…please.”
The Mole brought up the national auto database again, changed the search parameters from vehicles to licensed drivers, and entered the woman’s name.
Three seconds.
NO MATCH
Surprise, surprise.
“Is your…information…limited to vehicles…or do you have…driver…data also?”
“I got both,” Pistol said.
“Please…retrieve Misty…Blake’s information.”
“That’s another grand.”
“I am…aware.”
Pistol’s illegal database copy came through again. Instead of writing down the information, the Mole requested that Pistol make screen grabs of the data, and e-mail it all to him.
“That’s not covered under the retrieval cost,” Pistol argued.
“Two thousand…you are getting…I…believe…it is covered.”
Pistol grumbled for a few more seconds before saying, “Fine.”
The e-mail containing the screen grabs arrived four minutes before the hour was up. The Mole quickly opened them and confirmed that the woman in Griffin’s picture was the same one on the driver’s license for Misty Blake. He still had no idea what this woman did or why she would be important, but he did have a name and address.
When the final minute ticked off, he expected ringing to blare from his computer speakers, but they remained silent. He waited a full sixty seconds before deciding he should use his time to see if he could find out anything more. He thought about starting in on the second man, but now that he had the woman’s license picture and name, he could check several other databases.
Since she lived in DC, he thought there was a decent chance she was a government employee. So that’s where he went first, typing her name into a system that would tell him if the US government paid her salary.
He found three Misty Blakes in public service. Two were on the West Coast — one in the forest service in Washington State, and the other an FDA inspector in Bakersfield, California. The third had switched jobs within the last year, moving into a support role at the Labor Board in DC. But her new position wasn’t the most interesting detail. It was the fact that the title of her previous role and the division she’d worked for had been redacted.
The Mole glanced down at the phone icon on his screen to make sure he hadn’t accidently turned off the ringer and missed Griffin’s call, but it was on.
He looked at Misty Blake’s picture again. So what exactly were you doing before?
He ran her name through a couple of the other databases he had access to, but came up with nothing new, so he decided to use his photo recognition software. It would search criminal, military, and intelligence databases for likely matches. To cut down on the search time, he limited it to Caucasian females between twenty-eight and thirty-six, living in the DC area.
After he started the search, he got up to take a leak.
He’d just flushed the toilet when his computer rang. He ran his hands under some water, and grabbed the towel to dry them as he sprinted back into the living room. Plopping down into his seat, he pulled on his headset.
“Hello?”
“Turn that crap off,” Griffin told him.
“What are you talking about?”
“That voice crap. Turn it off.”
The Mole realized he was still plugged into the vocal modulator. “Just a second.”
As he was shoving the jack into the direct connection at the bottom of his computer screen, his monitor dinged. He looked up. His face recognition software was designed to notify him whenever there was a hit, even if the search was ongoing. Apparently, a potential match had been found.
“Okay, I’m back,” he said as he clicked on the link to see what the program had come up with.
“Your hour’s up,” Griffin said.
“I realize that. These aren’t exactly…” He paused. How about that? The search had found her. He started to read the information under her name.
“Something wrong?” Griffin asked.
“What? Oh, no,” the Mole said. “I was just saying these aren’t easy searches.”
“Tell me you at least found something.”
The Mole opened his mouth to say he had, but the words died in his throat.
“Hey! Are you listening?” Griffin said, growing angry.
“Yes, sorry. I’ve been concentrating mainly on the woman, but, well, there’s a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“I ran the car through the DMV database, but it appears that it has been completely removed from the records. Even the backups.”
“There’s got to be something there. The files can’t be completely written over, can they?”
“Whoever did the removal was pretty thorough.” So far everything the Mole had said had been true. The next part, though, wasn’t. Which was why he hesitated before he spoke. “I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to dig somethi
ng up, but it might take me a little while.”
A pause. “And nothing on the men.”
It took all of the Mole’s will to keep his voice from cracking. “The men, no. The BMW, though, is registered to a—”
“I know about the BMW. I need to know who the people are.”
“I understand that. I was just thinking—”
“How much more time do you need?”
“Uh, well, a day would be good.”
“A day?”
“Like I said, these aren’t easy searches.”
“You have four hours,” Griffin said, then hung up.
What the hell am I doing? the Mole thought.
He knew he should have told Griffin what he had learned, but his gaze strayed back to the facial match result on his monitor. Misty Blake had indeed worked for the government several years before transferring to the Labor Board. The agency she had worked for, however, had been a semiautonomous one. It was this agency’s demise that had undoubtedly necessitated her moving to a new job.
The Office.
The Mole knew it well. While he had never worked directly for them, he’d done enough tangential jobs through third parties — mainly Orlando, and once for her partner Quinn — that a fair amount of the Office’s cash had passed through his accounts. He had talked once to Orlando about the sudden dismantling of the organization, and she’d been very sympathetic toward those who worked there, telling him they’d been given a raw deal.
Hey, maybe one of the men in the other pictures is the guy who used to run the place. What was his name? Paul? Peter? One of those apostle names.
He tried to concentrate on what he should do next. He had never met or talked to Misty Blake. He’d never had any contact with the guy who had run the Office, either. So, technically, he had no reason at all to protect either of them.
But they were Orlando’s colleagues, maybe even her friends. And Orlando was definitely his.
The Mole didn’t have a huge conscience, but he did have one. And before he sold anyone out to Griffin, he knew he had to talk to Orlando first.
He adjusted his headset and opened Skype again.
WASHINGTON, DC
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