Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

  Owen leaned back, as if he could distance himself from her ugly words. She wished she could do the very same thing, but neither one of them had any choice in the matter. Each in their own way, he and she were both committed to keeping Gabe alive, no matter what the risk to themselves.

  He bit out, “The tip about you came from within the Service. And yes, it was from high up.”

  Damn! Another major government agency with possible corruption at the very top! What was going on around here?

  “Please, Owen. I need a name.”

  He glanced over at Gabe, who nodded tersely, and then back at her. He hesitated a moment more, and then said reluctantly. “Porter. Alex Porter. He’s Deputy Director of the Secret Service.” Owen added angrily, “He’s a good man, dammit.”

  That remained to be seen. She stood up, too agitated to sit still any longer. “Look Owen, if you don’t trust me, kick me out of here. But for God’s sake, don’t arrest me. I’ve got to keep tracking down the third party who controlled Dunst and the Q-group while the trail is fresh, or he’ll slip back below the waterline and we may not ever get another chance at him.”

  Gabe stepped forward. “Diana, I don’t want you risking your life alone like this. It’s too big for you. Turn the investigation over to Owen’s men or the FBI.”

  She wheeled around to face him and said with terrible urgency, “There’s no time. I’ve got months’ worth of details stored in my head, and I could never share all those quickly enough with someone else to do any good. By the time I brought anyone up to speed on all this, it would be too late. Even if all you did was bring on board a support team for me, they’d still move too slowly. It has to be me who tracks this person down. And I have to do it now.”

  Gabe looked over at Owen and the two exchanged a long look of silent communication. In the palpable struggle of wills that ensued, Gabe came out on top, for Owen finally turned away and nodded shortly at her. He said bitterly, “Go.”

  She spun and headed for the door, but stopped with her hand on the knob. “Thank you,” she said earnestly to Owen. “I swear, I’ll do my best not to let you down.”

  He scowled. “Stay away from President-elect Monihan.”

  She nodded once. She paused just long enough to take one last, heartbreaking look at Gabe. Lord, she was going to miss him. She closed her eyes against the pain and stumbled out of the room.

  How she made it outside and to her car, she had no idea. But she knew she was going to find DiscoDuck and pluck every last feather out of his worthless hide.

  Too many coincidences had happened to her today. Too many seemingly unrelated occurrences that all added up to a big fat scheme to stop her investigation and to discredit her. This latest indignity of planting doubts about her in Owen’s and Gabe’s heads was the final straw.

  It was time to go on the offensive. And she knew just where to start.

  9:00 P.M.

  Diana punched Delphi’s phone number into her cell phone as she drove. Shoot, at the rate she was using this number today, she ought to put it on her speed dial. Delphi picked up on the first ring and didn’t bother to say hello. Obviously had caller ID.

  “I saw you on TV with Gabriel Monihan. Can I assume you had some part in foiling the latest assassination attempt?”

  “Yes. Richard Dunst is dead.”

  “Then Monihan is safe.”

  “No,” Diana replied sharply. “He’s not.”

  A pause while Delphi digested that. “Now who’s after him?”

  “Dunst’s boss. The same person or persons who were using the Q-group to get to Gabe. They’re still out there.”

  “And do you know who they are?” Delphi asked tersely.

  “No, but I plan to find out. That’s why I called you. I need an address. The guy’s name is Captain Hammersmith, and he’s with Army CID. I don’t know his first name. He’s stationed here in the D.C. area. Maybe attached to the Pentagon.”

  “That should be plenty to track him down with,” Delphi said mildly. “Let me put it into Oracle.”

  Diana drove west, vaguely in the direction of the Pentagon while Oracle did its thing. And in a few minutes, Delphi was back.

  “You’re correct. He’s attached to the CID unit at the Pentagon. Here’s his home address.” Delphi rattled off an address in Fairfax, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon. “Keep me informed as to what you find out.”

  “Will do,” Diana replied. She punched the address into her car’s nifty navigation computer, and a map to her destination popped up on its display. For once today, she wasn’t under some horrible time crunch, and she drove at a sane speed to Captain Hammersmith’s home. She composed in her mind the speech she wanted to give him and practiced it a few times as she searched for his house. Ah. There it was. A modest ranch. With the cost of living in this area, it was hard to make a military man’s pay go far.

  She got out of the car and walked up the front sidewalk, which was neatly shoveled clear of snow and ice.

  A young woman answered her knock on the front door.

  Diana spoke politely. “Mrs. Hammersmith? Is your husband at home? I urgently need to speak to him about a military matter.”

  Mrs. Hammersmith looked surprised, but invited her in. One of the men who’d questioned her that morning rounded the corner into the front hall, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. He blurted out, “What are you doing here?”

  “I have a question for you. And it’s a matter of national security.”

  Hammersmith glanced at his wife. “Step in here.”

  He guided Diana into a small den off the front hallway and closed the door behind her. As soon as he turned around, he lit into her. “How dare you show up at my house like this!”

  Diana weathered the tirade in silence. When he subsided, she said quietly, “Are you done yet?”

  He blinked.

  “Look, I’m not kidding. Twice today I’ve barely managed to stop people from killing Gabe Monihan. But I still haven’t tracked down who’s behind these bastards. I need your help to do it.”

  He glared at her. “You’re delusional.”

  She yanked out the personal business card Gabe had given her that morning with his cell phone number scrawled on it. “Go ahead. Call him. Ask President-elect Monihan if I’m delusional or not.”

  Hammersmith stared hard at the small rectangle of white and said nothing, his mouth pressed into a thin, white line.

  “I don’t need you to believe me, Captain,” she said shortly. “All I need you to do is tell me who gave you and your partner the order to pick me up. Who tipped you off about me?”

  The guy looked up at her and back down at the card in his hand. Silently, he handed the card back to her, his expression defiant.

  She threatened with cool savagery, “I’m not leaving your house until you tell me, and you seriously don’t want to catch the heat I’m going to bring down on your head if you don’t cooperate. My grandfather was just the first of the big guns I can aim at you. You’ve gotten tangled up in something so much larger than you, I doubt you can even imagine it. You might as well just give me the name, because I am going to get it out of you one way or the other.”

  She saw him weakening. C’mon, Hammersmith. Break already. Time’s awasting here.

  She lightened her tone of voice to one of patient understanding. There was nothing like having to do a one-woman good-cop bad-cop routine. “Look. You can give me the name voluntarily, or I can call in someone way, way above you in your chain of command to give you an order. If you’d like, I can start with Gabe Monihan and let it roll downhill from there.”

  Hammersmith huffed hard. “Fine. A guy named Smith called us. Colonel Al Smith. He’s an aide to General Pace.”

  “General Eric Pace? As in the Army Chief of Staff?” she asked carefully. Holy cow!

  “Yeah. Satisfied now?” he snapped.

  “Yes, I am. Thanks. I’ll mention your cooperation to President Monihan when this is all over.”

  “Yo
u do that.”

  Not a happy camper. But she didn’t have time to care. Time to move on to her next interview. She left his house quickly and repeated her call to Delphi, this time obtaining the home address of FBI Special Agent Ronald Flaherty. He’d be a much tougher nut to crack if she didn’t miss her guess. The guy was a veteran agent. No way would she be able to bully him like she just had Hammersmith.

  She pulled up to his house, a rambling colonial on a tree-lined street only ten minutes or so away from her home. Nice place. She walked up to the wide, covered front porch and rang the doorbell, huddling deep in her leather duster. Man, it was cold tonight. Of course, some of the chill was probably coming from inside her gut. First, a high-level Secret Service supervisor fingered her, and then someone attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She dreaded hearing who’d sicced Flaherty on her.

  Agent Flaherty himself opened the front door. He took one look at her and growled, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Look. I’m sorry to bring work to your home like this. But I need to speak with you for a minute. I have a question for you. It won’t take long. I promise. It’s a matter of national security.” That phrase usually got to men like this, whose lives revolved around the idea of protecting that national security.

  Flaherty snarled, “Call me in the morning. At my office. And don’t ever show up at my house like this again, or I’ll arrest your ass so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  Damn. He wasn’t going to cooperate. She’d been afraid of that. She stepped forward aggressively, shoving her hand forward, still cloaked inside her coat pocket. She jammed the barrel of her Beretta into his ribs. “Don’t do anything sudden, eh, Ronald?” she purred.

  His eyes widened in shock then quickly narrowed in calculation.

  “Ever heard of a combat system called Krav Maga?” she asked casually. “Don’t try what you were just contemplating. At this point, I really don’t give a flip if I blow your head off or not.”

  Apparently he heard the menace in her voice of someone who wasn’t lying and who could, in fact, follow through on that threat to kill him. The fight flickered out of his eyes.

  “I respect your wish to protect your family. So why don’t you step outside onto the porch with me?” she suggested quietly. She stepped back a pace to give him room to join her. His gaze dropped to the front doorknob.

  She smiled coldly. “I’m telling you. Don’t try it, my friend. I only want to ask you a question, and then I’ll leave.”

  Flaherty stepped outside and pulled the front door closed behind him.

  She gestured toward the porch swing off to her left. “Have a seat.”

  Flaherty did as she directed. She moved around to his right side, partially behind him, in the best position to subdue him if he pulled any stunts. The way his eyes widened as his gaze followed her, he apparently recognized what she’d done. It was the move of a pro. Now that she’d established her seriousness with this guy, maybe they’d get somewhere.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  It was undoubtedly a delaying tactic to stall her and distract her. But she was willing to give the guy that information on the assumption that he’d report her visit to the very superiors who’d set him on her. She wanted them to get the message that she was closing in on them.

  “I work for Army Intelligence, and I’ve been investigating the terrorists who’ve been trying to kill Gabriel Monihan for the last several months. After they showed themselves today, I’m inches away from nabbing them. I’ve got names already, but I’m going to nail everyone in this conspiracy and put them all away for good. And I need your help.” There. That should put the fear of God in whoever it was she was chasing.

  Flaherty snorted. “That’s nuts. If there was a conspiracy to assassinate Monihan, we’d have heard about it and investigated it ourselves.”

  She retorted, “Since when do all the branches of the government, particularly the intelligence agencies, share their toys and play nicely with the other children? Even with the Department of Homeland Security in place, you know as well as I do that interdepartment rivalries are alive and well within the government.”

  Flaherty made a derisive sound of agreement.

  “Are you getting cold, Agent Flaherty? I figure in another ten minutes or so, frostbite’s going to hit and your fingers are going to start to freeze. You know, you could lose your field qualification if you lose the tip of your shooting finger.”

  He didn’t show any reaction to that one. Not that she’d expected him to. She spent a couple of seemingly endless minutes just standing there beside him in silence, letting him soak up the cold without distractions from her. She had a coat on. She could be patient. And silence was a hundred times more unnerving than a steady stream of conversation.

  Finally, when he was shivering violently, he broke the stalemate. His teeth chattered when he snarled, “What question is so goddamned important that you’d drag me out here at gunpoint to ask it?”

  “Who called you this morning and gave you instructions to detain me and interrogate me?”

  His lips, black in the scant light out here, curled into a sneer. “Why the hell do you want to know that?”

  He was delaying again. “Like I said, Agent Flaherty. It’s a matter of national security.”

  “Bullshit,” he spit out.

  “I’m not particularly interested in your opinion on the subject. I want that name. Now.”

  “Go to hell.”

  She sighed. And leaped forward lightning fast, wrapping her right forearm around his throat and half lifting him off the seat with a vicious choke hold. With her left hand she grabbed his ear and, twisting it hard, forced his head to stay locked in a position that severely restricted his breathing.

  She murmured conversationally in his ear, “This is a basic Krav Maga choke. You know, those Israelis are mean bastards. They don’t care much if they kill the occasional punk in the name of doing their job. If I crank down this hold and shift it a bit, like this—” she tightened the hold across his throat and windpipe fractionally “—I can cut off your breathing altogether.”

  He gurgled beneath her arm and tried to struggle, but when she yanked hard on his ear, the shooting pain of it forced him to subside as it had been designed to do. She left the killer hold in place a few seconds more for good measure, then eased up with her arm enough for the guy to draw a partial breath.

  “Now where were we?” she murmured. “Ah, yes. You were about to tell me who gave you the order to mess with me this morning.”

  He drew in another rattling breath but said nothing. She started to tighten her grip around his throat again.

  “All right, all right!” he gasped.

  “Talk,” she commanded in his right ear.

  “Janelle Parsons.”

  “Who’s she?” Diana demanded.

  “Works in the office of the Director.”

  Crud! What was this with high-level orders to yank her chain? “What did she say to you, exactly?”

  “She said there was a loose cannon bombing around town causing problems. I was to detain you and question you, and arrest you if you gave me the slightest reason to do so.”

  Diana let go of him and stood up. He leaped off the swing and dropped into a defensive position before her. Didn’t want her to get an arm around his throat again, did he? “So why didn’t you arrest me?” she asked.

  “You saved that guard’s life,” he answered simply. “And I didn’t have due cause to arrest you other than some order from on high to harass you.”

  Dang. Under other circumstances, she could’ve liked this guy. Been honored to work with someone decent like him. Aloud, she said, “Thanks, Agent Flaherty. I appreciate the information. I’m sorry I had to rough you up to get it. But it truly is a matter of national security, and time is of the essence. When this is all over, I’ll be happy to sit down with you and tell you all the gory details.”

  He stared at her in open disbelief as she poli
tely excused herself and moved off the front porch. Of course, she wasn’t dumb enough to turn her back to him at any point, and she kept her hand in her pocket and on her pistol. She slid into the front seat of her car and backed out of his driveway fast, peeling away into the darkness while he still stood on the porch, staring at her. Whether or not he’d call the police and get an APB put out on her was anybody’s guess.

  She pointed her car toward home and her computer. She had a bunch of names to run through the Oracle database, assuming it wasn’t completely corrupted. The tampering she’d found had all been in analysis subroutines. Hopefully, the fact-correlation routines were still functional, and she couldn’t wait to see what they said.

  She parked in the alley behind her house, backing into the neighbor’s driveway in case Flaherty had, in fact, called the police. She could bolt out of her house and drive away fast if someone came knocking on her door. She made her way through her yard cautiously, keeping an eye out for any company. After scanning every dark corner of the yard and finding nothing, she slipped into her kitchen. Without turning the lights on, she moved into the living room. She closed the front blinds and then moved over to her computer and turned it on.

  She had a couple of incoming e-mails and she glanced through the addresses. Mostly from her family. They could wait. Nothing from the office or Oracle. She accessed the Internet and booted up the Oracle database quickly.

  She entered the names she had—Alex Porter at the Secret Service, Colonel Al Smith at the office of the Army Chief of Staff and Janelle Parsons at the FBI. The computer searched for several minutes, looking for significant connections between the three people.

  A response popped up on her screen. “Please enter more data to narrow the search parameters.”

  Damn. On a hunch, she typed in, “Find name of Richard Dunst’s last supervisor at the CIA.”

  A cursor blinked for a few seconds and then came back with, “Collin Scott.”

  She typed back, “Find Collin Scott’s supervisor when Dunst worked for him.”

  That name came back up almost instantly. She stared at it in dismay. Joseph Lockworth. Holy cow.