The internet security routine was familiar to her by now. She was happy to discover the Tor browser already installed on the cafe’s computer. Apparently, Sam wasn’t the first customer concerned about masking her identity while online in Venezuela.
She double-clicked on the icon, and the ancient computer worked hard to open the browser.
Sam took the opportunity to scan the room for watchful eyes. Mostly strung-out teenage gamers, a few twenty-somethings with books opened near their keyboards, and a token middle-aged woman. Sam saw no telltale signs that any of them were surveillance assets monitoring her movements, but it was impossible to tell. It was unhealthy to assume that all of the people on her tail were as clumsy as the ones she’d witnessed outside DHS and at the Caracas airport, so she remained alert.
Motion caught her eye at the front entrance. Brock. He ambled to the back of the cafe and pulled up a chair next to Sam. He kissed her, tongue and all. “You’re hot when you’re running for your life,” he said.
She smiled and shook her head.
Sam typed in the IP address she’d memorized. It took her to a password page, where she typed FellatioKillsThinThroatedDebutante. Funny, Dan, she thought as the page chewed on the password her deputy had chosen.
Moments later, a page full of text appeared. It was complete gibberish.
At the top was a three-digit number, 432. Sam added the digits together to get nine.
Nine was the alphabet offset key. Alphabet offsets were ridiculously easy codes to break. One just wrote the alphabet in a straight line across the top of a page, then wrote a second alphabet beneath it, placing the second “a” beneath the letter corresponding to the key.
In this case, the second “a” would be written beneath the ninth letter in the first alphabet, “i.” To read the coded message, one would simply replace all i’s in the gibberish text with a’s, and so on, to reveal the message.
Except that this particular usage involved a clever twist, designed to slow down any unwanted decryption attempts. Both alphabets contained a space character after the fourth, third, and second letters, corresponding to the three-digit specifier, 432.
The twist would throw off anyone looking for a simple alphabet offset code. It wouldn’t stop a decryption algorithm for more than a few milliseconds, of course, but it would certainly slow down a human who didn’t understand the trick. It was a little thing, but sometimes the little things added up to make a big difference.
Sam copied the text from the browser window, and pasted it into a text editor. She made a key to translate from code to plain text, and used the find-and-replace function repeatedly until Dan’s message finally became legible.
“Time for the juicy stuff,” Brock said.
Sam whistled. If Dan’s report on Jarvis was correct, her DHS boss was dirty in an outrageous way.
“If you knew someone could read your keystrokes, would you type the same things?” Dan’s report began. “I think our guy TJ wasn’t paying much attention to the cyber threat updates.”
Thanks for the editorial.
“Of note,” the report continued, “is an account registered in the Caymans, used to siphon money to JIE Associates and Executive Strategies.”
It was a doozie of a find, but Sam wasn’t surprised. She’d thought of this earlier during her conversation with Ekman.
Speaking of Ekman, where the hell is he? Sam wondered, glancing at her watch. He was approaching twenty minutes overdue for their midnight rendezvous. She shook her head and got back to the report.
“He studied almost every document under the sun related to Operation Bolero,” the report read. “He deleted the report detailing the account linkages between JIE, ES, and the Caymans account.”
Evidence tampering. Known under the penal code as obstruction of justice. That’s enough for an arrest warrant, Sam thought.
“That’s enough for an arrest warrant,” the next line of Dan’s report concurred, “but there’s more.”
Sam’s jaw dropped when she read the next paragraph: “Jarvis contacted Fatso Minton at Executive Strategies and arranged a meeting in private about a matter of national security. Jarvis deleted the emails, but I was able to find them. Minton arrived in DC on Thursday of last week, two days before he bombed your house.”
“Bastard,” Sam said. “Jarvis took out a contract on our lives.”
Brock seethed. “I will kill him with my bare hands.”
“Not if I beat you to him,” Sam said.
“But why would Executive Strategies bomb your house?” asked Dan’s report rhetorically. “I think it’s because the Dibiaso coincidence made him think you were CIA.”
Sam was puzzled.
“Bolero wasn’t a Homeland op,” Dan’s report further explained. “It was an Agency op. Tom Jarvis accessed the information on the Agency’s secure server, using his CIA credentials.”
Click. It finally made sense in Sam’s head. Jarvis is a goddamned mole! All of those rumors were spot-on! But why would his CIA affiliation make him want us dead?
The answer came to her in a flash: Because he’s not just a CIA mole in Homeland. He’s also a VSS mole in the CIA!
Dan’s assessment seemed to agree: “It seems clear that the JIE Associates and Executive Strategies payments to dead spy Abrams and dead cop Cooper came at least in part from Tom Jarvis’ Caymans account. Abrams’ apparent affiliation with VSS made him a CIA target.”
They don’t much like double agents, Sam thought. They tend to execute them rather than arrest them. Ergo, the staged suicide of John Abrams.
All of that had likely made Tom Jarvis extremely nervous. He undoubtedly feared that the Central Intelligence Agency was about to blow the lid on some very central intelligence regarding Jarvis’ extra-curricular activities.
Entirely damned plausible, Sam realized.
She recalled the lengthy conversation in Jarvis’ office just a few hours earlier. Jarvis seemed to be genuinely confused about Sam’s role. She now understood that his confusion was pressurized by the Agency’s demonstrated willingness to thump one of their own, John Abrams, for dipping his hand in the Venezuelan cookie jar.
That kept Jarvis awake at night, because Jarvis’ hand was in the same cookie jar. Believing Sam to be another Agency mole, Jarvis thought she was getting ready to bump him off.
Which might explain why a milquetoast like Jarvis would do something drastic, like hiring an Agency asset to kill her.
In reality, Fatso Minton wasn’t a CIA agent. But Fatso and his company were employed exclusively by the CIA, which would certainly be a strong enough connection to make the bombing look like an Agency screw-up when the facts came to light.
And she could understand Jarvis’ reasoning for orchestrating the attack on her home. If she and Brock were CIA agents, as Jarvis apparently feared because of the Dibiaso connection, wiping them out was a terrific way of keeping them from discovering his affiliation with the VSS.
There wasn’t a great deal of downside to ordering the attack, Sam reasoned. Even if Jarvis’ suspicions turned out to be incorrect, which they were, and Sam turned out not to be a CIA asset, which she wasn’t, her death would just be a tragic mistake made by an agency known for its rogue actors and brazen disregard for the rule of law. Plus, the diversion might buy him enough time to outmaneuver the Operation Bolero investigation.
Certainly Jarvis knows by now that he had it wrong, Sam thought. That was probably why he spent so much time mulling things over during their recent showdown. The carpool coincidence with Dibiaso was certainly reasonable, if unlikely. Trouble was, it would have given Jarvis something else to worry about: if Sam wasn’t the Agency asset closest to discovering his duplicity, and maybe delivering his punishment as well, then who the hell was?
All of that considered, why was Jarvis still coming after Sam and Brock?
It didn’t take much of a mental leap to arrive at a reasonable explanation: Jarvis knew that she was likely to discover his culpability in th
e process of her own investigation.
Which would mean that he would probably feel the need to finish what he started.
Tom Jarvis undoubtedly still had a contract out on her life.
It would certainly explain the DC Metro Police attention she’d garnered since the preceding Saturday. Using the crooked cops to take her out was a risky move, but who was better positioned to cover up a homicide than the police department in charge of the homicide investigation?
Sam continued reading Dan’s report. “I’ve taken the liberty of submitting an arrest warrant for Deputy Director Jarvis,” the report said.
Godspeed, Dan. I hope you don’t get whacked in the process.
“Another development of interest: the partial prints found on the data disc in the music box belong to Avery Martinson. Orphaned at eleven years old, ivy league school, hired by the Department of the Interior right out of college. In other words, he’s CIA.”
Jarvis had flinched when she threw Avery Martinson’s name at him during their meeting, and now Sam understood how Jarvis knew Martinson: they were both Agency assets.
And Avery Martinson was Arturo Dibiaso. At least, that’s how he’d signed into the Pentagon visitor log.
What a yarn ball.
Another piece locked into place in Sam’s mind. Jarvis was extremely interested in their relationship with Fatso Minton, and she finally figured out why. It occurred to her that Jarvis was probably probing to determine whether there was merit to his suspicion about Sam and Brock’s CIA affiliation, again due to the Dibiaso link. Jarvis obviously knew that Minton’s bread was buttered with Agency money, and he wondered whether the personal connection between Brock, Sam, and Fatso would betray a professional connection as well.
But why wouldn’t Jarvis know who was on the CIA payroll, and who wasn’t? After all, before Tom Jarvis was a Homeland bureaucrat and a VSS mole, he was first an Agency asset.
The answer was obvious, of course. Stovepipes, security, and need-to-know. An agent couldn’t divulge what he didn’t know, so the Agency only told its people what was absolutely necessary in order to get the job done. That didn’t always include the names of other assets.
Plus, CIA was a big place, employing thousands of people. One could spend twenty years as an agent or case officer, Sam figured, and still only know a fraction of the people on the Agency’s roster.
Brock interrupted Sam’s cogitation. “Looks like that cell phone is still on, and it’s still at the same address,” he said, pointing to the last line of Dan Gable’s report.
Sam read, nodded, and pondered their next move.
“Suppose the warrant comes through, and Jarvis is arrested,” she said. “That doesn’t remove the threat. He still has people gunning for us.”
Brock grimaced. “Looks like we have to fight our way through.”
“I’d feel much better about that if we were on our own turf,” she said.
“At least there’s three of us now,” Brock said.
Shit. Ekman. Where is he? Sam looked at her watch: 12:39 a.m. Long after the rendezvous time. She had a sinking feeling that Ekman wasn’t just late. He was probably also in serious trouble.
She looked over Dan Gable’s message one last time to make sure she hadn’t missed any important details, and was about to close out the browser and turn off the computer to cover her tracks when a new page popped up on the secure sight. Dan had just posted something else. Apparently he was still at work.
“This was just sent to Tom Jarvis,” said the line of text at the top of the new page.
The rest of the page contained a picture.
Sam scrolled down, afraid of what she would find.
She heard Brock groan.
The picture was of Frank Ekman. He was slumped against a concrete wall, mouth and eyes open, jaw slack, an angry red entry wound near his right temple.
The left half of his skull was missing.
“Oh my God,” Brock breathed.
Sam felt her heart sink. Where does this end?
She emptied the memory cache, closed the browser, and turned off the computer. She grabbed Brock’s hand and pulled him toward the cafe’s back door.
“What now?” he asked as they stepped into the cool midnight air.
Sam’s face held grim determination. “I see no way out but through,” she said.
15
Peter Kittredge climbed into the taxicab as the sun peeked over the Caracas skyline.
Saturday morning.
Maria had awakened before dawn, fucked him goodbye, showered, dressed, and left.
“When will I see you?” he had asked as she prepared to leave.
“Not soon enough,” she’d said.
“Where are you going?”
She held her finger to his lips. “You frighten me with your questions.” She kissed him one more time and walked out the door of the apartment.
Kittredge felt an unreasonable sense of loss at her departure, as if the air had left the room with her. He couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d see Maria again at all. Hers was a brutal, deadly business, and she lived her life with the kind of abandon that could easily lead to problems.
He was unable to fall back asleep, and decided to head home, hoping to finish cleaning up the mess left by the unknown intruders who ransacked the flat he and Charley Arlinghaus shared together.
The streets were largely deserted, and the cabbie was making good time.
Kittredge dialed the number of the Washington, DC hospital in which Charley was convalescing. A brutal attack in the airport parking lot had left him with a fractured skull and a swollen brain. A tired nurse answered the phone, asked Kittredge for his phone password – Boilermakers – and proceeded with an update on Charley’s condition.
He was improving, apparently, and the doctors expected him to regain consciousness any day.
That was good news.
But Kittredge’s stomach tightened. He knew that Charley’s awakening portended a conversation with a number of difficult topics. In the week since Charley’s attack, Kittredge had learned that their life together was unequivocally not the life that Charley had cast it to be, or the life that Kittredge had previously believed it to be.
Evidently, Charley was a CIA agent. A no-shit spy.
And Charley’s gentle manipulations, applied over weeks and months, had eased Kittredge’s journey toward a very precarious and ultimately untenable position. It was Charley who had introduced the notion that there might be money to be made by providing economic information to Exel Oil. It was Charley who had introduced Kittredge to Arturo Dibiaso. It was Charley who had shepherded the chain of events that ended with Kittredge selling secrets to Exel.
So what the hell was that all about? Did Charley know that would be the outcome? Was that the goal all along – to forcibly recruit Kittredge into the Agency ranks by engineering a situation where he had no other alternative?
Kittredge didn’t blame his own failings on Charley. But he was beyond angry at Charley for skillfully manipulating him into a situation where the darker elements of his own nature were far more likely to manifest themselves.
So the conversation with Charley wouldn’t be a pleasant one.
Assuming Charley can even have a conversation at all, Kittredge thought grimly. It was entirely possible that Charley might have suffered life-altering brain damage. That possibility could simplify things moving forward, Kittredge thought – he certainly wouldn’t be able to live a fulfilled life with a man who was a mere vestige of Charley, and he wasn’t sure that a purely homosexual existence was still in the cards for him.
But if Charley’s cognitive function was indeed compromised, Kittredge thought, it might prove exceptionally difficult to obtain the many answers he sought.
Kittredge’s phone vibrated, interrupting his thoughts. He glanced down at the screen.
His blood ran cold. Adrenaline slammed his veins. He felt slightly panicky.
A text: “Need a drop tonight. 6:3
0.”
The sender was Arturo Dibiaso.
Kittredge’s hands shook as he typed his reply: “Hard to do on a wkd.”
“Important.”
He considered. He would have to badge in to the embassy, retrieve the classified information from his office, sneak it out through security, and take a taxi across town to the drop location.
He would also have to notify El Grande. The contact procedures were convoluted and would add a couple of hours to his day.
So much for cleaning up the apartment.
“OK,” he typed as the taxi pulled to the curb in front of his apartment building.
Kittredge paid the cabbie, walked into the building, took the elevator to his floor, and wandered toward his door, completely lost in his thoughts. He barely noticed the cleaning lady, hunched over her bucket.
He faced his door, hunted in his pocket for the key, and reached to unlock the deadbolt.
A hand clamped around his mouth.
He felt a hard blow to the back of his knees, and his body twisted as he fell to the floor.
Kittredge landed hard on his chest. The wind fled his lungs in a loud grunt. He felt his arm being wrenched behind his back; pain shot through his forearm and shoulder, and he feared the bones would break.
The hand remained clamped over his mouth, pulling his head to an awkward angle, and he wondered in a panicked millisecond whether this was the end of his life.
“Stay quiet,” said a husky voice, speaking close to his ear, “or I’ll break your neck.”
Kittredge complied. He wouldn’t have had the leverage to struggle, even if he had the will.
He heard footsteps, then a deeper voice: “Now?”
“Quickly,” said his assailant.
Kittredge felt the sharp pain of a needle penetrating his right buttock, and a burning sensation followed.
Strangely, Kittredge began to feel as if he didn’t give a shit about the wrenching pain in his neck, the awkward, painful angle of his arm, or anything at all. The discomfort felt further and further away, stars appeared in his vision, and a smile crept across his face.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 39