Simon Sees

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  Light suddenly filled the space, the leader’s helmet camera adjusting to the brightness with a quick flare on Wyland’s laptop screen. When the images resolved once again, the man who’d been seated was standing, talking with members of the entry team as they lifted a bullet-riddled mannequin from the floor and repositioned it.

  “What happened?” Wyland said into the small microphone six inches below the earbud.

  The view swung sharply as the team leader removed his helmet and whipped it around so that his face, with several days’ growth of a beard, was facing the camera.

  “The flow is wrong,” the team leader said. “We’re running it again.”

  The hastily constructed replica of the facility which house Simon Lynch had been slapped together with plywood and shipping containers, affording the operators contracted for the mission to practice in as realistic setting as possible. Three times they’d run through the entire operation already, but not once had they carried through to the extraction phase.

  “We don’t have unlimited time,” Wyland told the man.

  The team leader glanced away from the camera briefly, looking back again with a humorless smile. “Do you want your prize dead, or alive?”

  Wyland didn’t bother with an answer. The man couldn’t see him through the one-way video link, but it wouldn’t surprise him if the team leader knew precisely what effect the choice he’d posed was having. A sheen of sweat had begun to build on Wyland’s brow. He reached up and mopped it with the back of his shirtsleeve. Dead was not an option. But ‘alive’ had to be a result he could share with Traeger soon. The man’s patience wasn’t infinite, particularly now that the weight of the entire effort to secure Simon Lynch was on his shoulders.

  ‘Happy birthday to little Charles…’

  “It needs to be perfect,” Wyland told the team leader, and the man nodded. “Failure is…”

  “Not acceptable,” the team leader finished for him. “I know.”

  Wyland killed the video feed, wanting to watch no more, and not wanting to correct the operator thousands of miles away, because failure most certainly was not an acceptable outcome, but it was also something else—a death sentence.

  * * *

  He was fifty-seven now and looked it. That’s what Emily thought as she watched the man leave the grocery store, his too small tee shirt straining to cover a too large gut. He’d never been an Adonis, if the photos from his arrest twenty years earlier told the full picture. Thinning hair that was on the long side of shaggy, pale skin, ruddy blossoms on his cheeks. Those features had only seemed to magnify with the passage of time.

  “Excuse me,” she said, stepping from curb where she’d parked her rental. “Mr. Gant?”

  Kirby Gant stopped, shifting the bag of groceries from one arm to the other as he eyed the woman. It didn’t take him more than a microsecond to know that she was the law. Federal law, he was certain. She had that look about her—hard and certain. Like she had the backing of an army at her beck and call, which she did.

  “I’m just shopping,” Gant said, tipping the bag toward her to reveal the contents. “No booze. Okay?”

  “I’m not your parole officer,” Emily told the man, briefly showing him her Bureau credentials. “I’m here for other reasons.”

  “What reasons?”

  “Art Jefferson,” she said.

  Kirby’s Gant’s face flushed. His eyes darted past Emily, scanning their surroundings. Then, without responding to what she’d said, he moved past her and began walking up the block.

  “I’ll walk with you,” Emily said, matching the man’s pace.

  “I’m staying out of trouble,” Gant told her.

  “I’m not here to monitor your parole. I’m here to talk about Jefferson.”

  “What about him?” Gant asked, going on before she could reply. “It was a long time ago that I did that stuff against him. I’ve done my time. Paid my debt.”

  “I assume so,” Emily said. “Why else would Jefferson come to see you before he died?”

  Gant stopped, eyeing her and the neighborhood again, his nerves showing.

  “Jefferson was dumping connections to the world,” Emily said. “Getting rid of email addresses, bank accounts. Removing his digital footprints. It seems he might seek help in doing that sort of thing.”

  “Look,” Gant said, showing Emily his left wrist, a plain analog watch circling it. “That’s all I’m allowed. It’s a condition of my parole. No electronic devices unless used in the presence of an authorized federal agent. I don’t have so much as a cell phone.”

  “I’m sure you don’t, Kirby. But what about Rothchild?”

  Gant turned from Emily and continued walking up the street, hugging his bag of groceries as he fished through his pocket with his free hand.

  “I’m a federal agent,” Emily told him as she kept up alongside.

  “Not the authorized kind.”

  “Was Jefferson the authorized kind?” Emily asked.

  Gant stopped but didn’t look at her. He brought his hand from his pocket, a ring of keys in in it, the small bits of cut metal jiggling as he played nervously with them.

  “That’s a lot of keys for a parolee living in a crappy apartment,” she said, stepping in front of the man now, making him face her. “Jefferson didn’t try to go off grid on his own, Kirby. He had help.”

  Now he looked to her, but without any defiance. Sadness was plain on his face. Even regret.

  “Why don’t we talk so you can get it off your chest,” Emily said, gesturing to the weathered brownstone walkup they stood in front of. “Let’s go inside.”

  Gant thought for a moment, glancing past Emily, his gaze playing over the street beyond as he slipped the keys back into his pocket.

  “Let’s keep walking,” he said, then stepped around Emily, looking back as she hesitated. “Come on.”

  She didn’t have to follow the convicted felon, even though she’d sought him out. But in talking to him, in bringing up Art Jefferson’s name, she’d taken another step outside the bounds of her assignment. Not to mention outside the law.

  * * *

  “Welcome to my lair,” Kirby Gant said.

  He offered the term with no bravado. There was no hint in it that he was some supervillain who concocted his schemes in this secret place. It seemed simply that he’d found no other term which described the apartment four blocks from where he lived. The apartment where, when he crossed the threshold after opening four locks, Kirby Gant became Rothchild once again.

  He turned a light switch on and Emily followed him in. The first thing she noticed were the blackout shades taped over every window. The next thing was the array of powered-down electronics stretched across every wall, computers and monitors and peripherals she could not identify, cables snaking across the floor to connect one side of the space to the next.

  “Watch your step,” Gant said as he closed and locked the door behind them.

  “This is more than a digital watch,” Emily said.

  Gant faced her. He wasn’t a broken man, but he certainly seemed unlike parolees she’d encountered before. For certain he’d gone into prison as the most unlikely felon, one whose violence had been conducted through electrons racing along cables and through satellite connections. He’d come out with his skillset intact. And hidden.

  “You’ve done work for the government,” she said. “While you were behind bars and since your parole.”

  “That’s right,” Gant said. “But not from here.”

  She considered the hacker for a moment. He’d been instrumental in both putting Jefferson’s life in jeopardy, and in rolling back the accusations against the agent once he, himself, was in custody. He’d shared much with his government handlers, she suspected, but had obviously kept more to himself. The space in which they stood was testament to that fact.

  “I have to say, Kirby, isn’t trusting me this quick a bit reckless?”

  Gant thought on that for a moment, then shook his
head. “No. Because I know who you are.”

  Emily puzzled at the statement, but only for an instant as her gaze played over the technology surrounding him.

  “You know I replaced Jefferson,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  To Emily that meant one thing—Gant had been involved with the late agent on a level that sustained his interest even once the man was gone.

  “You met with Frankie and Lomax,” Gant said.

  “How do you…”

  She couldn’t help but probe, even though the man’s past actions had demonstrated an ability to secure data from sources that were not open to him. Legality, then, had not been an impediment. It didn’t appear to be any more so in the present.

  “It’s not magic,” Gant said. “Phone calls are made. Hotel reservations are extended. People linger for days after a funeral. For what purpose? Traffic cameras show them converging at a cemetery after the body is already in the ground. Traffic cameras show you coming to the same place, which puts you on the radar.”

  “On your radar,” Emily said.

  Gant nodded and powered up the systems filling the space, the glow of their displays tripling that which was put off by the dim overhead bulb.

  “Give me your phone,” Gant said.

  Emily hesitated.

  “If Lomax and Frankie signed off on you, that tells me I can trust you,” he said. “They were as close to Art as anyone. Now you have to trust me.”

  She had little to counter his statement, and had to rely on her instincts. Feelings in her gut had saved her before. Here, those same feeling were telling her to put her trust in Kirby Gant. For now.

  “Here,” she said, retrieving the device from her pocket and handing it over.

  Gant eyed the model and found the proper cable, plugging her smartphone into his systems and calling up a program which, to her, showed nothing but a cascade of nonsense code on the screen.

  “This room is shielded,” Gant said, gesturing to the walls, the ceiling, the floor. “Fine copper mesh is embedded in the plaster and under the floorboards. I did that before I plugged a single piece of equipment in.”

  Emily thought she followed what he was describing. One of the targets she had been investigating during her UC assignment would slip his cell phone into a metallic bag to prevent it from being tracked or traced. He’d been paranoid by nature, but apparently not stupid.

  “A Faraday cage,” Emily said.

  “Precisely,” Gant said as he focused on the screen, typing in commands and tweaking the code he was pulling from her phone. “Only problem with that is it prevents a signal from getting out if you need to. Like making a call or mapping directions.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “The next best thing to shielding your phone with conductive metal,” Gant said. “I’m locking out any external queries for data that are not initiated by…”

  His explanation trailed off and a smile built on his doughy face.

  “What is it?”

  He looked to her. “You’ve already been tagged.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Someone’s installed a service splitter in your firmware,” Gant said. “In essence, your phone has two users—you, and whoever compromised it.”

  “I’ve been hacked,” Emily said.

  “A little more sophisticated than that,” Gant told her. “This is government level stuff. NSA, CIA.”

  NSA…

  “You can’t tell who?”

  “No. But your phone has been sending voice and video to someone since…yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” Emily parroted, wondering who could have arranged such a thing. That curiosity lasted for only a few seconds.

  Sanders…

  “Would someone have to physically have my phone to allow it to be…tagged?”

  “It makes it easier, but, no,” Gant said. “If you’re sophisticated enough to manage this, you can do it across an air gap.”

  If the stranger had done this, what did it say about his motives? He wanted her to trust him, but, at the very same time, he was arranging covert surveillance of her every move, and every word she spoke.

  “They would have heard us outside,” Emily said.

  “That’s why I didn’t say anything incriminating,” Gant told her. “Not until we were in here.”

  So Sanders, in essence, turns her phone into a surveillance tool, then nudges her to meet with Kirby Gant. Was he trying to get something on the man she now sat with?

  No…

  Sanders would have known that Gant might take precautions, and that Rothchild definitely would. So, if Gant wasn’t the target…

  I am…

  Emily seethed quietly. Sanders was just the equivalent of some other acronym entity that was using her, regardless of what he claimed to be, or who he claimed to represent.

  “It could be that the NSA wants to keep tabs on you now that you’re connected to Lynch,” Gant suggested, though with little confidence in the possibility.

  “And connected to you,” Emily reminded him.

  Gant nodded, but seemed unconcerned. “Agent LaGrange, if they wanted to take me down, they would have followed you in the door. It’s not them who’s on you. It’s some other player that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me.”

  Or already knows you…

  “Here,” Gant said. He unplugged her phone and handed it back. “It’s clean now. I blocked any ability to repeat the same intrusion. Something different might get through, but you’re good for now.”

  Emily took her phone back and studied the disheveled felon. “Okay, I trust you, you trust me. Now talk to me about Agent Jefferson.”

  “Art came to me for help,” Gant said. “Like you thought, he wanted to sever every virtual link he had to his old life. He’d already started doing that on his own.”

  “The accounts,” she said.

  “Yeah, the simple things,” Gant explained. “Deleting those e-mail accounts he’d had. Liquidating assets. Closing bank accounts to go all cash. Stuff anyone could do. But it was the wrong stuff.”

  “What do you mean ‘wrong’?” Emily pressed.

  Gant gestured to the array of computers and displays and cables that surrounded them. “All this…this is nothing compared to what the black hats have. And the white hats. Systems are designed to detect variances. Odd behavior. Inexplicable actions. All Jefferson did when he tried to erase himself was create a big black hole that couldn’t help but be noticed. I told him to stop. I told him the only way to completely drop out was in one instant act.”

  “Wouldn’t that bring the same scrutiny?”

  “It would,” Gant answered. “But by the time that happened you’d be offline and out of Dodge.”

  “Out of Dodge? Was Jefferson afraid of something?”

  Gant shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know. He acted like he was.”

  “Black hats,” Emily said, then let the soft hum of the computers and fans fill the void of conversation for a moment as she let her thoughts simmer. Thoughts and questions. “How long before he died did he come to you?”

  “Five days,” Gant said, shaking his head. “If he’d come to me first, before he’d tried to do it on his own…”

  For a felon that Jefferson had helped put away, Kirby Gant seemed to hold an inordinate amount of affection for the man.

  “He was a good guy,” Gant said.

  He sat down in a wheeled chair that faced the array of terminals. In it he could slide along the twelve-foot desk crammed with keyboards and inputs devices, multiple monitors mounted to the wall above each. He motioned to a chair at the end of the workspace and Emily sat.

  “Watch the edge of the desk,” Gant cautioned her. “I’ve got to file the metal down. Jefferson cut himself good there.”

  Emily eased her arm back from the natural resting spot, noting a collection of dark spots on the bare wood floor below. He’d bled right there, where she sat. And five days later he spilled more, by his own h
and.

  “Do you really believe he was afraid?”

  Gant thought on that and, after a moment, nodded, the softer side of his personality showing. He shifted in his seat, almost squirming, the truer, deeper, more human part of him that was rising still difficult to experience. “He wouldn’t say that, or let on, but he was worried.”

  “About?”

  “Simon,” Gant answered. “And himself.”

  “I can’t say I disagree with him,” Emily said. When she caught a look of worry on Gant’s face she shook it off. “Not me. Simon. I saw him and that…place they have him.”

  Emily paused for a moment, processing what Gant had just shared with all that she’d gleaned on her own. Some made sense by itself. Some when combined with previous information she’d discovered. But holes still existed. Big holes. Particularly when she considered Art Jefferson’s link with Simon.

  If he was worried about Simon Lynch, if he saw himself as some protector, then why take his own life? Had the stress of his assignment in retirement, along with the passing of his wife, finally overwhelmed him?

  “Do you think Jefferson killed himself?” Emily asked Gant point blank.

  “That was the first thing I wondered when I heard,” Gant said. “So I went looking.”

  He gave her a second to understand what he was telling her, then, when she nodded approval, he turned to his keyboard, typing in a series of commands. Emily slid her chair close and watched as, within seconds, the digital copy of the Lake County Coroner’s Office report on Art Jefferson’s death appeared onscreen. Gant clicked through to the horror that was the man’s bedroom, photos from every angle showing the retired FBI agent’s body sprawled backwards across his bed, comforter soaked red. Blood splatters were prominent on the ceiling, and walls. And on the photo of his late wife where it rested on the night stand.

  “I haven’t seen any suicides,” Gant said. “But that looks like what I’d imagine one to be.”

  Emily stared at the cold and clinical photos. Closeups of the face. The bed. The body.

  “I have,” she told Gant. “And that is what they look like.”

  She eased back in her chair and Gant closed the report.

  “You’re not worried that they can trace your intrusion?” Emily asked.