Simon Sees

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  He did. For just under a minute as he stood there, leaning on the kitchen counter for support. There was a solution to his problem. One simple way to alleviate the threat. In fact, it was the only logical choice.

  Give Damian Traeger exactly what he wanted.

  Making that happen was the trick, Breem knew. But if anyone could, if anyone had the capability to marshal forces toward a single goal, it was him.

  “You’re the goddamn Attorney General,” Breem reminded himself. “Make it happen.”

  * * *

  He’d thought his part in the operation to save Simon Lynch was over. He was wrong.

  “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen,” Sheila Reese told Michael Lane as he stepped from his car on the third level of the parking garage in Arlington, Virginia.

  “It’s over there,” he said, gesturing to a plain van backed into a space nearest the exterior of the five-story structure. Wind whipped through the open level, crafting a howl on occasion that mimicked some predator lurking in the evening shadows.

  “That?” Sheila pressed.

  “Yes,” Lane said. “Let’s go.” He started toward the van but stopped when she didn’t follow. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re participating?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he told her. “I have to have the information the second you get it.”

  “This isn’t the protocol,” Sheila warned him, glancing about the space. A few dozen cars were scattered about the level they stood on, a few owners visible heading to and from their vehicles, the flow of shoppers from the adjacent mall about normal for that time of night.

  Lane took a few steps back toward her. “We’re well past protocols now. In case you haven’t guessed, this is our swan song.”

  “It’s over?”

  He nodded. Sanders hadn’t said as much, but it seemed clear to the man from Justice that the very overt moves being made meant that some decision had been made to discard the old ways. Risks were being taken. All in pursuit of saving Simon Lynch.

  Michael Lane could tell Sheila Reese none of this. But he could be honest with her. As honest as circumstances allowed.

  “Let’s end it doing the right thing,” he said.

  He seemed so sincere, Sheila thought. So invested in…something. Whatever was happening above her metaphorical pay grade must be almost beyond importance. Vital might be a more proper term, she suspected. At least to her handler it appeared it was.

  “All right,” she said.

  A minute later they sat together in the back of the plain white van, the cargo area converted to a dead space on wheels, computers and communication relays arrayed about the boxy interior.

  “What are we looking for?” she asked Lane.

  “A location,” he said. “Pull up the Department of Justice database and query Art Jefferson.”

  Sheila did, the life history of the FBI agent at her fingertips. As was the report on his death.

  “At some point in the past few months he would have travelled to a location,” Lane explained. “Probably a place he was planning to go off grid. A hideaway.”

  “You have nothing more than that?” she asked.

  He looked to her and shrugged. “Maybe something with a Pittsburgh connection.”

  She shook her head at the scant offering and began running the information through the files and custom search. What she discovered wasn’t encouraging. “He was trying to not be found. Which makes this all the harder.”

  “That’s why I called on you,” Lane said.

  She didn’t react to the compliment. But she could feel him looking over her shoulder as she plied her trade—her second trade. Nursing came before cyber sleuthing for a nebulous non-governmental entity. She couldn’t put it on a resume, but there were worse things in life.

  Like failure.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got two hits in Pittsburgh when he traveled. You can’t get around TSA checks. Which, in this case, is interesting.”

  “Why?” Lane asked.

  “Because he arrived in Pittsburgh each time but never flew out,” she said. “He just ends up back in Chicago two days later.”

  “Okay,” Lane said. “What do you do with that?”

  “I look at rental cars,” Sheila said. “He drove from Pittsburgh to Chicago, I’m guessing.”

  “Two days?” Lane wondered. “That’s like an eight-hour drive. He had to go somewhere else first.”

  She nodded at the suddenly energized man’s assumption.

  “Nothing on credit cards showing a rental,” she said.

  “He had access to someone who might provide false identities,” Lane said. “Things like that.”

  “Can I have that name?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t really need it,” Sheila said, and Lane smiled at her back. “And…bingo.”

  “What?”

  “Airport traffic camera,” Sheila said, pointing to the screen of one computer. “That’s Jefferson at the wheel.”

  Lane leaned in and looked at the image, a triangular grid stitched over the man’s face. “You’re sure?”

  “No, but the computer is,” Sheila told him. “Ninety-eight-point-two percent confidence.”

  “So he arrives using his own identification, but uses fake documents and credit cards to take a car out of the airport. Does that get us anywhere?”

  “In a minute it might,” she said as she typed a series of commands into a program accessed through a joint FBI-CIA system. “We’ll just use PONG.”

  “What the hell is that?” Lane asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “You’re a financial crimes guy,” she said. “The Bureau and the Agency developed PONG to track an individual on the roads using traffic and other surveillance cameras along with vehicle recognition. A car drives somewhere and it ping-pongs from camera to camera. Hence the name.”

  “It’s a crappy name,” Lane commented.

  “It works,” Sheila said. “Have a look yourself.”

  Lane didn’t understand her direction at first, but when he looked to the screen he saw that a ping-ponging line had been created, linked by cameras located along the route leading out of Pittsburgh.

  “He went north,” Lane said.

  “On both visits,” Sheila confirmed. “To a place called West Hickory on banks of the Allegheny River.”

  “Sounds bustling,” Lane observed.

  “The hundred or so people in East Hickory might fight you over such a claim,” she quipped.

  “So he went there,” Lane said.

  “And left there eight hours later each time,” Sheila added, pulling up a different PONG route showing Jefferson’s rental car leaving West Hickory and heading west, the track following him all the way to his home north of Chicago. “The last camera the system pulled was in bustling downtown West Hickory outside a post office, both in and out of town.”

  “Meaning he turned here,” Lane said, pointing to a line on the map overlay.

  “Fleming Hill Road,” Sheila said. “And now we have something to go on. You said he might have been going off grid?”

  “Yes.”

  “For practical purposes, you don’t do that in a tent,” she told her handler.

  “I already ran property searches on Jefferson,” Lane said. “So did the Bureau. He didn’t buy anything.”

  “Maybe,” Sheila said. “But let’s see if anyone bought anything near West Hickory in the recent past.”

  It took her a moment to penetrate the Forest County land assessor’s database which held records of property transfers. A few minutes after that she had four records which fit the search criteria she’d established.

  “Six more sales, but they are all too exposed,” she said. “Close to neighbors. These four have some acreage and are spread out.”

  “Who purchased them?” Lane asked.

  “A Mr. and Mrs. Hartwell,” Sheila began to recite. “David Ansarian, Walter Underhill, Clark—”

  “Wa
it,” Lane said, seizing on one of the names. “Walter who?”

  “Underhill,” Sheila said, the same flash of recognition rising, just a few seconds after her handler. “He’s in Jefferson’s file.”

  She pulled up the DOJ database again and queried the Bureau’s reports on Jefferson, multiple hits returning on a Walter ‘Pooks’ Underhill.

  “Jefferson busted him way back,” Sheila said.

  “There was a more recent connection,” Lane said, recalling what he’d remembered from his own perusal of the man’s file.

  “Right,” Sheila said, her brow furrowing as documents related to the most recent connection came up, most of each page blacked out. “Jefferson had some trouble twenty years back and Underhill was involved. It looks like he helped him, but the rest is redacted.”

  Pooks Underhill had helped Art Jefferson, Lane knew. And Simon Lynch. Snippets of that interaction were contained in other reports he’d accessed of his own accord once Sanders had sent him on this most recent mission. When he couldn’t use what he’d seen to track Jefferson, he’d called in his ace.

  Now his ace had been played and, maybe, had won the game.

  “Where is Underhill now?” Lane asked.

  Sheila ran a search through a series of federal databases closed to the public. It took no time to zero in on the man.

  “A nursing home in Chicago,” she said. “A nice one. I wonder who’s paying for that.”

  It would be Jefferson through some alias, Lane imagined. Probably arranged through Kirby Gant. And who would go as deep as they had to connect Jefferson to this piece of property through a ninety-year-old invalid in an upscale care facility?

  Someone might…

  “We have all we need?” Lane asked.

  “Address is all we need,” Sheila said. “From that we can get property records, maps, satellite imagery.”

  “Good,” Lane said. “Now erase everything at the source.”

  Sheila turned away from her display and eyed him with a harsh gaze. “Excuse me?”

  “Delete the source files,” Lane instructed. “The camera imagery. Database entries. Anything that you used to get us to West Hickory.”

  Now she turned fully to face him in the cramped van. “These are accessed by the big boys, Michael. The acronym gang. CIA, NSA, F—”

  “I know,” he acknowledged. “Wipe it all. On their servers and anywhere it was pulled from.”

  She continued to simply stare at him.

  “You can do this, yes?” he challenged her.

  “Destroy government property?”

  Lane nodded. “Exactly.”

  She shook her head at the directive, though not in defiance. It was more a reaction of awe. Whatever it was that had initiated this operation, it was huge. And huge meant important. Which was precisely why she’d signed on to offer her services—to make a difference.

  But was this the right kind of difference?

  “Tell me that this all matters,” Sheila said. “Tell me this is about something really, really worthwhile.”

  “Someone,” Lane said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Someone,” he repeated. “Not something. A person. A special person.”

  Sheila considered what he’d shared. It wasn’t much, but it was far more than he was supposed to. Which only added to her belief that this was off-the-scale important. Vital even. And at its center, according to Michael Lane, was a living, breathing person.

  ‘You fight for your country, and for the guy next to you…’

  One of her patients at Walter Reed had told her that some time back, and now she was reminded that, sometimes, great actions were taken on behalf of, and for, an individual.

  “Consider it done,” Sheila said, then turned to the computer and, as requested, set about erasing every bit of data which had guided them.

  * * *

  The Russian Attaché for Cultural Affairs arrived at the Georgetown bar just after nine, leaving his coat with the attendant at the door before making his way to the back of the establishment where the man who’d summoned him waited.

  “Mikhail,” Arthur Sato said, greeting the man from the Russian diplomatic mission.

  “Arthur,” Mikhail Goldov said, taking both of the man’s hands and shaking them solidly. “It has been too long.”

  “It has, Mikhail. Sit. I have a booth for us.”

  A booth…

  Mikhail Goldov understood more fully now the wider reason he’d been called out of the blue by the American who, at best, existed on the periphery of his circle of connections. Even at the State Department, though, Sato would be informed enough to be privy to the true nature of his position as part of the Russian intelligence apparatus operating in the United States. It was the dance both nations performed, giving their spies innocuous cover assignments and titles.

  But Arthur Sato, as far as the Russian knew, was not some thinly veiled intelligence operative. His position at the State Department was quite real, and he’d performed his duties there for many years as an exemplary career diplomat.

  Yet he wants to speak to you here…

  The bar was a common place for meetings such as what he suspected this was. Neutral ground, so to speak. A place where those connected to the intelligence networks of their respective countries could gather and speak, freely, with no threat of surveillance. That had been the understanding for decades, and Mikhail Goldov doubted the rules had changed.

  But something had.

  “I’ve ordered us some wine,” Sato told the Russian as they sat, a hum of chatter from the few dozen other patrons filling the space around them like white noise. “I recall you mentioning a Seventy-Three cab you were fond of when we last met.”

  “Your memory is impressive,” Goldov complimented the man.

  Impressive, indeed. They’d conversed in passing for less than thirty seconds at an embassy reception for the new Indian ambassador a little more than a year ago, and Goldov was quite certain he’d never mentioned anything about the bold cabernet to the man. He had, however, discussed it, and other varietals he enjoyed, in some detail with an Australian diplomat. That told him several things. First, Sato had been listening in on his exchange, likely from a nearby group of attendees at the event. Second, the man who was not a spy was behaving very much as one. Both then and now.

  “So,” Goldov said, folding his hands on the table and smiling at Sato as they waited for their wine. He left it at that, waiting for the man from State to take the lead in the conversation.

  “Venn,” Sato said.

  Goldov eased his hands from the table and let them drift to his lap, out of view. He wanted to offer no visual tells that he was reacting to the mention of the fool’s name, though he realized that doing what he just had was likely the biggest tell of all.

  “You waste no time, my friend,” Goldov said.

  “Too much has been wasted already,” Sato told him. “That’s why there’s a smoking crater forty miles from here.”

  Goldov nodded and looked up as their waiter delivered two glasses of wine. The Russian took his and drank without waiting to sample the aroma. Sato left his glass sitting and stayed focused on the man whose nerves were working on him.

  “I need information regarding Stanislaw Venn,” Sato said.

  Goldov set his wine aside and considered the vagueness of the request. “Don’t we all.”

  Sato smiled. The Russian was playing it as he’d expected—slow. It was certain that the man from Moscow had no direct knowledge of the ongoing efforts by his own intelligence agencies to piece together all that Venn had done, and why. But it was also certain that he had heard things. Chatter. Even silence when words should be offered could be telling in his line of work.

  Just as it was here.

  “Venn blows a chunk of Siberia off the map, and then the same happens here,” Sato said, stating both the known and the implication that came with it. “The old saying is something about smoke and fire being in proximity. That’s
very apropos here.”

  “A dead man cannot do what was done in your country,” Goldov reminded the diplomat. But it was only a bit of mild deflection. In reality, he was stalling as he tried to read both the man and his motives. What was his purpose in inquiring about the dead physicist? There were already furious investigations underway, in both of their countries, with the assumption that Venn was somehow complicit in the Baltimore incident. Communications channels between their respective intelligence agencies, already in existence, were in constant use since that explosion occurred. So what was this man seeking that could not be sought through those channels?

  More importantly, though, who had sent him to do the asking?

  “Mikhail, we can play coy,” Sato said. “But we are not men accustomed to doing that. At least I am not. So I choose to be direct—who approved Venn’s access to the NSA program?”

  Despite his best efforts to conceal any reaction, surprise was plain on Goldov’s face. He hadn’t expected Sato to go there, mainly because there was no scenario he could envision that included the diplomat having any knowledge of what was known in intelligence circles as a new explanation for the secretive agency’s acronym—Now Selling Access.

  “You are at the embassy,” Sato said. “You are FIS. Any request to access the program would go through you, in both directions. It crossed your desk, Mikhail. You knew that Venn was involved. Your superiors knew his research.”

  The American was well informed. It might be by supposition, but Goldov did not think so. He was too certain, too confident, to be bluffing based upon to educated guess. No, Arthur Sato knew things. That could be dangerous. But, as Goldov suspected, he also imagined that the American knew that such knowledge also came with possibilities.

  “Who are you representing, Arthur?” Goldov asked, managing a smile as he slipped into the persona he’d worn like a familiar suit again and again over the years. “If you know things, we might do business.”

  Sato smiled back at the man and took a sip of wine. “Mikhail, we might do just that. You begin.”

  He could press the American for some hint of what he had to offer in exchange for information he could give, but a power deficit had already been established at the table, and he was on the losing end of it.