She was thinking about her recent rendezvous with Brock. There was just something about him that got her going. Pheromones maybe.
She loved looking at him, talking to him, spending time with him. His substance – intellectual, emotional, physical, philosophical, and everything else she could think of – fit perfectly with hers. Their life together was effortless; they understood each other implicitly, and over the past four years together, Sam had felt her heart unlock for the first time in her life.
Their chemistry was more blowtorch than spark. She had been around the block enough to know a good thing when she found it, and the past four years had been incredible, despite all the pain in their lives. They loved the same foods, intense workouts, offbeat movies and books, and otherworldly intimate encounters.
Was there something more in store for them? Very possibly yes, she thought with a smile.
She took out her phone and typed. “I can’t wait to get home to you.”
14
The Maple Center, Crystal City, Virginia. Friday, 2:37 p.m. ET.
The elevator finally reached the parking garage of the Maple Center. Just like its ascent twenty minutes earlier, it hadn’t stopped at any other floors on the way down.
Senator Frank Higgs was grateful for the privacy, as he wasn’t much in the mood for conversation.
The doors opened, and he shifted his weight as he headed toward the Suburban.
Crack, crack, crack. The air in front of him seemed to come alive with small explosions. Patches of textured plaster covering the concrete parking garage structure to his right leapt at him in violent waves. He vaguely registered a silenced handgun’s distinctive pop-pop somewhere off to his left.
Before he could move, a hand slammed into his chest from beyond the elevator frame.
Higgs flew backward into the elevator, his head pounding into the handrail. He saw stars, then felt the weight of another body fall on top of him.
He felt a sharp pain in his back and tailbone as he landed hard on the elevator’s metal floor, and the wind escaped his lungs as the man’s elbow drove into his sternum.
He heard a loud ping-ping as a slug ricocheted off the metal elevator frame and steel handrail. The man on top of him let out a groan.
“Goddammit! Go!” The voice was familiar despite the din of gunfire. Another large, familiar frame appeared from the far side of the elevator lobby. Ian Banes’s big, laconic sidekick, Paul, aimed a semiautomatic pistol and fired three quick shots toward someone Higgs couldn’t see, then ducked into the elevator.
The doors, which had just begun to close, reopened as the big man paused in the entryway to fire two more shots into the parking garage. The gunshots were unimaginably loud in the tiny metal elevator car.
Ping! A bullet bounced off the elevator’s metal frame. Higgs felt a hammer blow in his right shoulder, followed by a painful, burning sensation. He brought his left hand up to his injured shoulder, and it came away bloody.
He glimpsed Paul pounding on the elevator’s controls a few feet away. The doors again began their glacial movement toward the closed position as concrete shards flew into the elevator car, stinging Higgs’s face.
He tried to roll out of the way of the flying shrapnel, but looked down to see Ian Banes still sprawled across his lower body, pinning him in place. A patch of red had appeared on the back of Banes’s tailored white shirt.
“Use the key, Paul, you lummox.” Banes’s voice was strained.
Paul was already inserting his key into the fireman’s lock, frantically turning clockwise. He punched the “3” button four times. After an eternity, the elevator doors finally closed.
Higgs heard the two men breathing heavily over the sound of the oddly cheery music in the elevator.
“My dear Senator,” Banes said between breaths, “that was quite exciting, but perhaps you lot should reconsider your position regarding an armed citizenry. Damned if I won’t need a stitching.”
“Jesus, Ian, I never pegged you for the heroic type.” Higgs pressed the hand towel hard against his shoulder. “And I take back all the bad things I’ve said about Paul, lower primate that he is.”
The three were on a hidden floor in the Maple Center spaces, but it was a floor that Higgs had never seen before. The décor was roughly the same as on the floor he had visited infrequently over the years, which was “owned” by Executive Strategies, a semi-private shill corporation that employed assassins, spies, and mercenaries.
ES was funded by a complicated web of laundered money that ultimately led back to the US federal government, with additional and substantial contributions from various interested parties, many with shareholders.
But Higgs had no idea who owned the spaces in which he and his two British friends were currently holed up, tending to their wounds.
“No trouble, really. Besides, it’s worked out quite well. A scar with a story works wonders with the fairer sex. Though it would make my day if the ruddy thing would quit leaking quite so profusely. I’m starting to feel a bit dodgy.” Banes lifted the hand towel from his lower back and a flood of dark blood coursed from the wound. He swooned visibly and his face lost its color.
Paul’s expression was serious. “Perhaps a visit from a local shaman wouldn’t kill us, would it? Someone with a cork to keep your insides from leaking out, maybe?”
Banes smiled weakly.
“Most of us keep important stuff inside our skin, my friend,” Higgs offered, reaching into his pocket for his phone. “We should probably follow Paul’s advice. I know a doc who can check you out quietly.”
Banes nodded and settled gingerly back on the floor. “I wonder who might be interested in taking out a . . . broken-down old mule like you.” Banes’s voice had started to become labored, and a wheeze began trailing his words. “I could be wrong, but I doubt it was our blokes just yet.”
“Maybe an ex-wife,” Higgs offered as the call rang through.
It drew a short laugh from Banes, interrupted immediately by a wince of pain. “Damn . . . cold in here, isn’t it? I feel a bit . . . faint . . . all of the sudden.”
Paul sprang into action, grabbing a blanket from a room nearby. He wrapped Banes in the blankets, and snatched the phone from Higgs. “Yes,” he said into the phone, “so sorry to barge in on your conversation. But his face is ashen, his core temperature is falling, and he’s losing a great deal of blood. I’m afraid we’re going to have to do this the noisy way. Can you send an ambulance? Maple Center, thirty-second floor lobby.”
Paul ended the call and threw the phone back at Higgs. “We’ve got to move him out of here and down to a public floor. Roll that chair over here, then help me lift him. Quickly.”
15
Department of Homeland Security, Washington, DC. Friday, 2:54 p.m. ET.
The ringing telephone interrupted Sam’s reverie. “Special Agent Jameson,” she said.
She listened for a moment. “That sounds messy. I’m sorry to hear about the tragedy, but is there a national security connection?”
She routinely fielded calls from local law enforcement officials and feds who had read a few too many spy novels, and who saw nefarious secret networks lurking behind even the most vanilla street crimes. A good portion of her job was figuring out which cases required her office’s considerable resources, and which were better left to other investigators.
“Hmm. That is a little unusual. I still don’t quite see the national security connection though.” She drummed her fingers on her desk as she listened politely.
Suddenly, her back straightened. “OK. I’m interested. Give me the address.”
She copied down the address, grabbed her cell phones, and headed out the door.
She glanced at her watch on the way to the elevator. The crime scene was down near Shirlington, just a few miles away from her office.
With any luck, she would still be home for dinner.
Washington, DC.
Mullah’s face fell as he read the message: “No luck
. Competition arrived first.” The day’s operation had been a failure.
Worse, someone else was after his quarry. He would have to tell the old man that the senator was still in play.
He hoped the bad luck wasn’t a harbinger of things to come. There was too much on the line.
He clenched his jaw and tried to think of his next move.
16
Alexandria, Virginia. Friday, 3:04 p.m. ET.
Detective Thierrot turned left off the residential street and drove into the unkempt parking lot of the Terrett Avenue Apartments, which was really just an old house that had been partitioned to create a number of oddly shaped living units.
The drive led between the apartment building and the neighboring house, and emptied into what had once been a backyard. The grass was long ago removed and paved over, though it was busy seeking revenge by pushing up through various cracks in the pavement.
The detective parked his car and walked into the office. It struck him as unusual for an apartment complex of this size to have an office, but he mused that it was likely only kept in service for business of the type he was currently conducting, rather than for tending to apartment complex business, whatever that might be.
It was little more than a shabby entryway with a small desk, a telephone, and a bulletin board festooned with random items.
There was no one in the office, but that was not a surprise. Thierrot wasn’t expecting to talk to anyone.
He looked closely at the desk for the duress signal, which was a code that would let him know if the dead-drop location had been compromised, and the servicing agent forced to place a false or misleading cue.
It was a bit of a silly concept, as Thierrot wasn’t aware of any compromised spy having ever successfully used the duress code to let his compatriots know that he was under the thumb. After all, everyone in the business knew about the technique, and it wasn’t terribly difficult to take precautions.
Still, it never hurt to check, and Thierrot’s diligence was rewarded with the expected result: nothing at all out of the ordinary.
His eyes turned to the bulletin board. He skimmed over sales sheets for motorcycles, boats, stereo speakers, and a few old cars, each with tabs containing the seller’s telephone number dangling beneath grainy photographs and poorly written hype.
He finally found what he was looking for, a page containing several photos of a cocker spaniel. “Have you seen me? My name is Trooper and I miss my family.” Only one telephone number tab remained at the bottom of the sheet. It had a DC area code. The rest of the tabs had been torn off.
Careful not to touch the surrounding paper or the bulletin board, Thierrot tore the phone number tab from the page, turned on his heel, and walked out of the office.
He returned to his car, started the engine, and checked the messages on his phone. He had already been out of touch with his minions for a couple of hours, which was unusual behavior for the lead detective in a one-day-old murder investigation, and people were starting to notice.
But it couldn’t be helped. There were more pressing matters in Detective Thierrot’s world. Like avoiding a jail sentence, for example.
Or much, much worse.
17
The Senior Quantum Compound, somewhere north of Las Vegas, Nevada. Friday, 1:54 p.m. PT.
Jonathan Cooper stooped a bit as he approached a closed door inside a large building in the middle of the Nevada desert. A blue identification badge hung from a lanyard around his neck. On it were his name, photo, and the letters “SQM” emblazoned in gray lettering.
The letters verified his clearance to access all the information contained within the highly classified program named Senior Quantum.
He grabbed the badge and pushed it against a metallic keypad to the left of the doorframe. The keypad beeped once, and the small red light turned yellow. Cooper typed his six-digit personal identification number. The yellow light turned green.
The keypad beeped twice, and Cooper heard the familiar mechanical click as the electromagnetic security bolt inside the door lock retracted into the doorjamb. He turned the handle and walked into the “vault,” or classified work area.
A stereo speaker blasted white noise at the door. The idea was that the noise would mask the sound of classified conversations within the room, but Cooper knew that the noise would do little to discourage sophisticated digital filters from reconstructing entire conversations, should anyone with a recording device make their way inside the well-hidden compound in the middle of nowhere.
The door shut behind him, and he heard the latch click again.
He was alone in the vault, which wasn’t unusual. He worked a modified schedule of four ten-hour days each week, which allowed him to return home to North Las Vegas from the desert compound on Thursday evenings. He spent three days at home with his pregnant wife and young daughter each weekend, then returned to the desolate operations center again Monday morning.
But this week was different. He stayed on through Friday to finish up an important segment of computer code he had been working on.
At least that’s what he’d told his boss.
Margot, his wife, knew vaguely what he was up to. There was an approved cover story crafted for spousal consumption, but Cooper knew that she had grown weary of dropping him off at the North Las Vegas airport every Monday morning and not seeing him again until late Thursday night.
He thought about his daughter, who had recently begun speaking in complete sentences. Will there come a time when she learns what I’m really doing? What will she think?
It didn’t matter, really. A man must do what he must. It was what made him a man.
He spun the dial on the two-drawer safe in the corner of the room. The safe looked like a normal filing cabinet, except that it was made of exceptionally strong, hardened steel, and attached to its top drawer was a black spin dial. Atop the dial was a digital readout. Cooper spun the dial counterclockwise, and after a while the blank display came to life.
He meticulously entered the combination. The top drawer of the safe clicked opened, revealing eight computer hard drives, each with ominous-looking security stickers pasted to them.
He removed disk drive number five, walked to his desk, and inserted the drive into the waiting computer. He turned on the power.
He silently recited the string of numbers on the back of the Chinese fortune while he waited for the computer to boot up.
Being a scientist on the cutting edge of technological development wasn’t all glamour. In fact, it was mostly a bunch of slow, cumbersome computer programming work. He enjoyed the challenge of converting an idea into an algorithm, and an algorithm into a functioning module of code, but he most loved seeing evidence that the mountains of small tasks were beginning to add up to an amazing technological achievement.
He had been on the Senior Quantum team for many of the remarkable breakthroughs that led to Wednesday’s demonstration for Vice President Arquist.
A part of him wished he had never learned of the true purpose behind their work.
But you can never go back, he thought.
Especially not after what he was about to do.
The seemingly interminable boot-up sequence had finally run its course, and the blue government desktop stared blankly at him.
He opened up a text file containing a snippet of code he was developing, and searched for “*****”, which was the placeholder he had left to remind him where to place the access key code.
He deleted the string of asterisks and replaced them with the string of digits from the Chinese fortune handed to him by the Secret Service agent two days before. Then he saved the file.
Next, he opened a browser window and typed an IP address he knew by heart. Much like the address for a physical building, an IP address represented the virtual location of every web-enabled device on the planet, and knowing a machine’s IP address allowed one to communicate directly with that individual machine.
Cooper interfaced with t
his particular machine several times a day, as it served as the repository for all of the computer code used in the Senior Quantum system.
He copied the code from the text file on his desktop, opened the module named secure_admin_emer_access.dat, and pasted the code into the Senior Quantum operating system.
He took a breath, exhaled, and saved the file. The code snippet would soon propagate throughout the entire Senior Quantum network.
The beauty of the plan was that Cooper’s actions were nothing out of the ordinary. He had accessed the same file, on the same server, every week for the past year and a half, and he changed the access code as a matter of procedure every month.
With the notable exception of the particular number he had chosen for this month’s code, Jonathan Cooper could only be said to have been doing his job.
That thought didn’t stop his growing nausea or slow his rapid heart rate.
He would have a tough time passing his next lie detector test during his security clearance renewal, he mused darkly. “Are you affiliated with a group that advocates the violent overthrow of the US government?” He supposed that he could still answer truthfully in the negative—he didn’t plan to use any violence.
He smiled to himself, and felt the uneasiness lift a little.
He closed the security file on his computer and quickly opened another file that had occupied much of his time over the past six months. The beam-aiming algorithm had been an absolute bear, and he and his team were still struggling with a reliability issue.
Within seconds, Cooper’s mind was fully engrossed, and any residual anxiety vanished as he scrutinized hundreds of lines of computer code.
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