“They probably were going to use it to show he was losing it upstairs if they ever needed to explain his actions any further,” Gant said. “Virtually crippled old FBI agent takes Kung Fu lessons. That sounds sort of nuts, right? But everyone just bought the line that he killed himself because of losing his wife. They didn’t need to crazy him up.”
“Why Kung Fu?” Emily asked.
“To heighten his senses,” Gant explained. “So he could maintain his orientation when under that hood, among other things.”
Emily was beginning to understand, even if she couldn’t yet fully accept the feasibility of what the aging hacker was sharing.
“He knew he was heading south,” she said.
“He believed he was,” Gant partially corrected her. “Using what he’d learned, he was fairly certain. That fit with what I was thinking. The NSA’s monster data storage facility is outside Salt Lake City. They know the area. They’re comfortable with it.”
“Okay, so south. That only gets you a ninety-degree slice of the pie by cutting out north, west, and east. If that’s all a dozen sessions with some Kung Fu master gets you, that doesn’t seem to get you to Simon Lynch in any meaningful way.”
“You’re right,” Gant said. “But that heightened sense of internal direction also worked for something else.”
Emily waited while Gant pulled something up on a large display.
“Blueprints?” Emily asked.
“A basic floorplan and exterior of where they’re keeping Simon,” Gant explained.
Emily leaned closer to the screen, reaching to trace a line along a corridor with her finger.
“I was there,” she said.
Gant watched where her fingertip met the screen, an idea rising. A possibility.
“You remember other things?” he asked. “About the interior?”
“Some,” Emily said. “Why?”
“This was what Art was helping with,” Gant explained. “By maintaining his sense of direction inside the facility, he could come back to me and add bits of detail so this floorplan could be fleshed out.”
“And what does that get you?”
“If you figure out the interior, the exterior isn’t that hard to imagine,” Gant answered. But he could see from Emily’s hesitance to respond that what he’d said hadn’t clicked with her. “Have you ever seen two schools, say elementary schools, that look identical? You’re driving through some suburb and two miles from each other are two schools that are differentiated only by the name plastered on them.”
“Of course,” Emily said. “A school’s a school. Why reinvent the wheel?”
“Government works that way, Agent LaGrange. If you can use blueprints for more than one school, or more than one facility, you do so. Why pay an architect twice?”
Now she was catching on. And catching up. “You think there’s another building out there just like the one Simon Lynch is being housed in.”
“I’d say the odds are high. Art agreed.”
“And if there is, you pull the actual blueprints using your hacker magic, and that gets you to some food testing lab in Florida,” Emily said. “But not to Simon.”
Gant smiled. “You’d be surprised, Agent LaGrange, where certain information can lead you. But first, I need you to remember everything you can about where Simon is so I can flesh out this floorplan.”
Emily considered his energetic response to the possibility of completing the task he and Art Jefferson had begun. But that would never be completed—with him.
“And what happens if I can help you?” Emily asked. “If you can pinpoint Simon’s location.”
Gant slid his chair back from the long desk and swiveled it to face Emily, regarding her with a hint of amusement.
“Something’s funny?” she pressed him.
“You think sticking a pin in the map is where this ends for you?” Gant asked. “I don’t think you believe that for a second.” He leaned forward on his knees and stared hard at Emily. “You stepped into Jefferson’s shoes more than you had to, Agent LaGrange, and that wasn’t to do things half-assed. If we find him, you’re going to take him.”
He’d stated the obvious. She’d even entertained the idea at times, only to dismiss it as an absurd avenue of action. Art Jefferson, though, had apparently decided it was the only action that mattered. Now, what that man had begun, was hers to finish.
Jesus, Em, you’re gonna do this…
“How the hell was Jefferson going…how the hell am I going to get him out of that place if you locate it?”
Gant smiled and turned to face his systems again. “Art and I worked that all out. I’ll have to make a few changes to the plan, but it’s solid. Don’t worry.”
Don’t worry…
Why would she worry? She’d be possibly hundreds of miles from help, if there was any help to be had, with armed security everywhere. Regardless of their competence, she was no match on her own for what was arrayed to secure Simon Lynch. Then there was the small matter of getting him away from The Ranch.
“You know, before I pull the trigger on this, I’m going to need a bit more than ‘Don’t worry’.”
“We’ll get to that,” Gant said. “But first. Tell me what you remember.”
* * *
Andrew Wyland stood on balcony of his flat, the sound of his wife and son playing just inside warming him as London’s night air chilled his skin. He ignored the glorious lights of the city and, instead, stared at the phone in his hand, its screen dark. He needed it to not be that.
A moment later, it bloomed with color and buzzed in his hand, the ringer on silent.
“Yes.”
“I’m satisfied,” the voice said in a decidedly American accent. It was the team leader. The man who’d lead the entry team into the facility to bring Simon Lynch out.
“So you’re ready?”
“More than,” the American assured him.
“You weren’t so certain after the run-through I watched,” Wyland reminded the man.
“I wasn’t,” the American agreed. “I am now. We have everything dialed in. My people are ready.”
Wyland thought for a moment. It was his call. Success or failure would be his to own, the consequences his to bear. Behind, his son’s precious giggle reminded him that the later belief wasn’t entirely true. Others were at risk. Grave risk.
But doing nothing was not an acceptable path forward. He had to make the call. Had to believe that this was the most prudent course to take.
“Make it happen,” Wyland said.
“We’ll be on target in sixteen hours,” the American told him.
The call ended. That was that. In the dark of night the team he’d contracted would hit the facility and bring Simon Lynch out for Damian Traeger to do with as he pleased. It would be just before noon in London when it all would be happening. Wyland turned to look to his wife and son through the open balcony doors, sheer curtains billowing slightly from the cold breeze. Those two precious souls would be home, doing much as they were right now. But he would not.
He would be alone, watching his greatest success unfold, or the beginning of the end of life as he knew it.
* * *
“Shit…”
“What is it?”
Emily slid her chair closer to Gant. He stared at the screen and muttered the curse to himself again.
“Shit…”
“Kirby?”
She’d given him everything he’d asked for. Described every bit of the interior of The Ranch that she could recall. He’d used that information to expand the interior floorplan of the facility, and to refine a likely exterior footprint. That detail he’d fed into a search program which compared the layout to a constantly updated database of satellite imagery captured every hour of every day from the growing constellation of commercial sensors circling the earth. Something in that process, which had begun just ten minutes earlier, had elicited his plainly distressed response.
“What did you find?” Emily
pressed.
He looked to her, more worried than she’d seen him, even when first surprising him as he came out of the market in his neighborhood.
“I found it,” Gant said, his answer not matching the sudden shift in his demeanor.
“I don’t understand,” Emily said. “That’s a bad thing?”
He looked back to the display before him and brought up the rough blueprint they’d managed to come up with. “There’s our first match.”
She looked and saw an overhead image of a building with patches of snow on the ground around it, and a parking lot half-filled with a collection of civilian cars.
“You’re looking at the Bureau of Land Management district office in Fargo, North Dakota,” Gant explained. He pointed to a collection of data on the lower right corner of the screen. “The MAX-Two Twelve mapping satellite captured this five days ago.”
“Fargo isn’t south of Idaho Falls,” Emily said.
“No, it isn’t,” Gant agreed. “This just confirms my theory that they reused the blueprints.”
“And it confirms the layout,” Emily said.
Gant nodded, his mood still dark. He pulled up another image. One nearly identical to the Fargo facility, but no snow dusted the earth, and no parking lot indicating a public facility was apparent. Only the tawny hue of sand surrounded the sprawling single-story structure.
“Southeast of Salt Lake City,” Gant said. “No maintained road leading in, meaning it’s accessible only by air.” He widened the view. “If you look here you can see the outline of the road that was used when they built the place.”
Emily leaned a bit closer, studying the image, noting the faint outline of a narrow path through the desert, all but wiped away by purposeful act. “They erased it.”
Gant nodded. “This image was captured a week ago.” He entered a command and a series of nearly identical images cascaded on the screen like the pages of a flip book until it stopped on one. “This was the first in the image database.”
Emily looked to the date. “That’s six years old.”
“It’s been there at least that long,” Gant said. “In the middle of nowhere. Twenty miles from the nearest road.”
“This has to be it,” Emily said, excited and perplexed all at once. “You found it.”
Gant nodded. “Yes. And something else.”
He pulled up yet another screen, another satellite image showing a nearly identical structure surrounded by a desert landscape. “This was taken yesterday. In Northern New Mexico.”
The flourish of elation she’d felt melted quickly. “So there’s another one that matches. He could be at either.”
“No,” Gant said. He reentered the command to pull up previous images of the facility, but only two were retrieved. The third showed only a barren patch of scrubby desert terrain. “That blank spot was captured two weeks ago.”
“Wait,” Emily reacted. “What? Someone built the place, that entire facility, in two weeks?”
“No,” Gant told her. “That’s not a real building. Not in the sense you’d expect. It’s temporary. A mock up.”
“A mock up?”
“Yes,” Gant answered. “Look at the north walls. Some are bowed. It’s plywood over a skeletal frame. If no one tears it down the winds will knock it to pieces in a few weeks.”
Emily eased back in her chair, thinking. Within a few seconds she began to understand why Kirby Gant was so bothered by the discovery.
“Shit,” she said, parroting his initial reaction.
“You only build a mockup like that for one reason,” Gant said.
“To use it for training,” Emily said, her investigative brain kicking into gear. “Who owns the land where that was built?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gant said.
“Like hell. If we can—”
“It doesn’t fucking matter!”
Emily quieted and eyed the hacker who’d just exploded at her.
“My guess is the same people who were coming for Art are now ready to move on Simon,” Gant said. “Somehow they’ve located him. And that means we’re out of time. If we don’t get him out of there first, they will.”
“We,” Emily said. “You mean me.”
She wasn’t a hundred percent sure why she’d committed to such a risk. It was the right thing to do, for certain. But why was she so willingly throwing herself into the breach? For someone she’d met once. Some psychologist somewhere would probably say that she was attempting to make some internal amends for what she’d done at the end of her undercover assignment. That was the reason she hadn’t been trusted with a normal placement. There was an underlying fear that she would take some unnecessary action in a dangerous situation as an act of penance for her errors.
Except, there was no error. She had done what she had to do. Even in that terrible moment…
‘Pull the trigger!’
…she’d been in the right. And people had died.
“If not you,” Gant said, leaving the rhetorical suggestion open ended.
Emily considered his words for a moment, then nodded, as much to herself as for his benefit.
“You’re not due to head back there for another, what, six days,” Gant said. “I don’t know that there’s that much time.”
He was right. One look at the advanced planning that someone had undertaken, with clear haste, meant that they were talking days before Simon Lynch was under threat from outside forces. Maybe hours. Somehow, she had to get back there. More difficult still, it had to be on their terms. She could make no move until she was inside the lions’ den.
“They have to extend an invitation,” Emily said.
“And how are you going to make that happen?”
“I have a number I can call,” Emily said, thinking. “They gave it to me in case I had to cancel a visit due to illness or whatever. It’s an intermediary, but I have to think if I tell them something it will get to the powers that be out there.”
“Fine,” Gant said. “You call. What do you say? What gets you that invitation?”
She had an idea on that. A kernel of a possibility. Still, it made her smile.
“What?” Gant asked.
“I think my best shot is invoking the name they were glad to be rid of,” she said.
Gant understood right away. “Jefferson.”
“Even from the grave, the sonofabitch may still have some pull,” Emily said.
That, though, would only get her so far. If it worked, there was still the matter of getting the hell out of the place with Simon Lynch.
“I think you should fill me in on the rest, Kirby,” Emily said. “Everything.”
When Kirby Gant finished doing just that, Emily LaGrange briefly considered the odds she had of getting out alive with Simon Lynch. But words from the recent past seemed to make that exercise pointless.
‘Our side will kill him…’
That was what Sanders had assured her. If anyone, and she certainly qualified as that, attempted to take Simon Lynch, his protectors might very well become his executioners.
And hers.
Twenty Two
“We lost her.”
Ezekiel Sanders stared at the man who’d devoted his life to the security of his country’s intelligence secrets and let out a shallow breath.
“I’m sorry,” Porter said. “She’s bouncing all over the map. I just don’t have enough people.”
Sanders sat back against the stiff leather back of the booth. He’d sat with Miles Porter before in the very same place, near the front windows of the all-night diner just outside Arlington. Those times had been little different than their present meeting. A few moments to exchange information over cups of coffee as cars whipped past on the boulevard beyond the glass.
“There’s no one to tail her at the other end?” Sanders asked, though he suspected the answer already.
“The closest asset I have is six hours away.”
Sanders nodded. Emily LaGrange would be on the ground at
her destination hours before that person could be in place.
“What the hell is she doing?” Porter wondered and asked at the same time.
“Chasing something,” Sanders said. “A ghost, maybe.”
She’d zeroed in on Leah Poole after sitting down with Rothchild, and had then gone digging further, into things that Sanders had hoped she would not. None of what she’d found in Jefferson’s memo was remotely helpful for him, and his cause. The dead former agent had been angry, rightfully so in many instances, but the wrath he’d directed toward Mr. Pritchard’s completely noble and righteous aid some twenty years ago was misplaced at best. The damage, though, had been done, Sanders suspected. Emily LaGrange had not called him, and was, once again, jetting across the country. Retracing previous steps. Heading west.
“She’s not due there for another week,” Porter said.
“Yet that is where she is going.”
What was the reason? Had she found something? Was she meeting someone? Probing things related to the transportation between Idaho Falls and where Simon Lynch was housed?
“We don’t have her phone anymore,” Sanders said. “Rothchild took care of that.”
“That was a risk,” Porter said.
“Everything’s a risk now,” Sanders told the man, his words sharp and uncharacteristic. He seemed to have abandoned his cautious nature, in what he said, at least, if not in deed.
“She didn’t board with her laptop,” Porter said. “Or her sidearm. She probably left them with Rothchild.”
“Most certainly left them with him,” Sanders corrected.
“We could roll him right now,” Porter said. “He has to know what she’s up to.”
Sanders nodded. Rothchild, aka Kirby Gant, would, without a doubt, know precisely what Emily LaGrange was doing, and what her intentions were. She’d gone straight from his hideaway apartment to Pittsburgh International Airport, with only her coat and phone, apparently. Travelling light for a quick turnaround. That was what he thought.
But he’d been wrong about Emily LaGrange before.
“No,” Sanders said to Porter’s suggestion. “She has to come around. Maybe she already has.”
Porter eyed the man with doubt. “You can’t be serious.”
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