Beneath the Surface

by Meredith Fletcher

  Well, that was almost true.

  “Who did you find?” Shannon had to struggle to keep from hiccupping in fear. The need to know what Drago had discovered almost leeched away the power her fear had over her.

  “Have I told you this is a really bad part of the city?” Rafe Santorini lay back in the uncomfortable seat of the Ford Taurus he’d picked up to use for the night’s surveillance. At six feet two inches tall, he couldn’t quite get comfortable in the seat. His bad knee still ached and the gun on his right side kept digging into his hip.

  “Yes,” Allison Gracelyn replied. “Several times.”

  “Maybe I just haven’t gotten through to you how bad this section is.”

  “I’m looking at it now.”

  That caught Rafe’s attention. Challenged, he stared around the neighborhood. Since Allison was somewhere at her desk, currently—or so she said—in Fort Meade, Maryland, he knew she had to have some means of electronic surveillance.

  Unless she was using satellite coverage. Knowing Allison as he did, Rafe wouldn’t have put it past her, but he knew she was wanting to keep this op on the down-low. Whatever business he’d bought into, it was personal to her.

  Allison was one of the best ELINT and SIGNIT people he’d ever worked with. Electronic Intelligence and Signals Intelligence were two huge fields in espionage. Usually a person didn’t overlap in the job. Allison did.

  “Tired of playing Where’s Waldo?” Allison asked.

  Rafe knew she’d caught him looking. “If I didn’t have to watch the bar so closely, I’d find it.”

  “There’s a drugstore on the northwest corner,” Allison said.

  Rafe squinted against the darkness and didn’t look right at the drugstore. Peripheral vision was stronger and clearer at night than direct line of sight. He spotted the familiar rectangular bulk of the camera bolted to the second-floor corner of the building.

  “Are you getting my good side?” Rafe asked.

  “No. You’re sitting on it.”

  Despite the long hours spent following his target around for the last few days, Rafe had to laugh. He’d met Allison in the flesh twice, but he’d worked with her a couple dozen times over the last five years. He’d been a field agent with the National Security Agency. Allison was tech support—on steroids. There didn’t seem to be any computer system she couldn’t hack or information packet she couldn’t sniff out. She wasn’t known for her humor, but—on occasion—he’d seen it.

  Rafe turned his attention back to the seedy bar and rolled his watch over to have a look. It was 11:28 p.m. His target had gone inside—

  “Seventeen minutes ago,” Allison said. Her voice was quiet and controlled coming through the earwig he wore in his left ear.

  It was creepy how she did that, but Allison was a queen at multitasking. Agents Rafe had talked to had been blown away by how she could enhance an op and build in rabbit holes when things went south.

  “Seventeen minutes is a long time,” Rafe said.

  “If you’re holding your breath, maybe.”

  “Vincent Drago isn’t a nice guy.”

  “I know. That’s why I asked you to look into this when I found out he was involved.”

  Maybe it would help if you would tell me a little more about what’s going on, Rafe thought. But he knew she wouldn’t. Agents learned to be careful with the knowledge they had. Information was currency of the realm for a spy, and they never spent it casually, even at home.

  In the handful of years that Rafe had worked with Allison, three of them spent before he’d ever gotten a face-to-face with her, she’d never asked for anything. She didn’t seem like the type. Her phone call to the rental house in Jacksonville, North Carolina where he’d been recuperating for the past eight months, had been totally unexpected.

  The fact that she was so grudging with the information had hooked him further. He’d known better, but he’d trusted Allison.

  And you needed to get out of there, he reminded himself. Don’t forget that. That oceanside rental was becoming as much a prison as the other place.

  For a moment Rafe didn’t see the seedy bar. He saw that small underground prison outside Kaesong, North Korea, where he’d been kept for five months. Cinder-block walls had threatened to crush him physically and spiritually every day. The long hours of torture and questions had rolled into one another until they’d become one long, unending nightmare.

  The only reason he hadn’t told his inquisitors what they’d wanted to know was because he hadn’t known. He was certain they’d known that, too.

  For a moment fear touched him intimately. It was strange how he’d accepted his death after the first few days of imprisonment yet had been more filled with fear after he’d returned home. Well, not home exactly. After being released from Walter Reed Hospital, he’d tried to go home and ended up renting that summer home in Jacksonville.

  He’d gone armed every day. Even though he’d tried to sit in the sun and find that piece of himself that hadn’t been shattered by his experiences, he hadn’t been able to. He’d been more at home in the night and in the bars.

  Come back, he told himself. You’re not there anymore. You’re here. You’re helping a friend. Stick with the program.

  The gnawing pain in his right knee helped him focus. He absently reached down and massaged it. Kneading the flesh was hard to do through the orthopedic brace he wore.

  “Are you doing okay?” Allison asked.

  Rafe was embarrassed and irritated at the same time. She’d caught him. He didn’t like dealing with weakness or infirmity. The injuries he’d sustained had kept him out of active duty.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Are you still taking your meds?”

  Rafe blew out his breath slowly, aware that she’d be able to pick up the sound over the earwig if he didn’t keep it quiet.

  “Yes,” he lied.

  A buzzer rang in his ear.

  “Wrong answer,” Allison said. “I checked with Medical. You haven’t refilled your pain pills. If you were using them the way you should have been, you’d have run out forty-one days ago.”

  Despite his irritation, Rafe had to grin. Only Allison would know so much. Or would even think she needed to know so much, he amended.

  “The pills weren’t working very well,” Rafe said. But that was a lie. The pills had been working entirely too well. He’d only noticed that problem when he’d started using alcohol with them. When he’d caught himself doing that, he’d poured the pills down the drain and hadn’t touched so much as another beer. He’d seen what liquor and pills could do to people.

  “Maybe you need something different,” Allison suggested.

  Maybe I need to work again, Rafe thought angrily. Then he realized that Allison’s favor had been a chance to do exactly that. He relaxed a little when he figured out that she wasn’t passing judgment on him. She knew exactly what she was doing. More than that, she’d figured him out, too.

  “Why are you smiling?” Allison asked.

  “Man, that camera is good if you can see that well in the dark.”

  “I’m running a vision-enhancement-package upgrade on it that I designed. The software takes the available picture, repixelates it based on available light and light sources and reinterprets images.”

  “Very techie.”

  “Very techie,” she agreed. “The hardest part was collapsing the size of the program so it would run in real time. By the way, you evaded the question.”

  “Have I told you how much I appreciate you letting me do this?”

  “You’re doing me the favor.”

  “Seriously, I think it’s the other way around.”

  “Even if it turns out to be a glorified babysitting job?”

  “If you’d thought it was going to be a glorified babysitting job, you wouldn’t have asked me to look into this.”

  Allison sighed. “You’re right. So stay sharp out there.”

  “I think I’m going to recon the bar
.” Rafe checked the pistol in its holster. When he thumbed the restraint aside, the weapon came free effortlessly. He opened the door and got out. The leg ached, but it moved easily and held his weight just fine. That was encouraging. Of course, that was with the leg brace—and the NSA wouldn’t have cleared him for fieldwork while wearing it.

  “Getting antsy?” Allison asked.

  “It’s been twenty-three minutes. Aren’t you?”

  “Twenty-two minutes. And, yes, I am.”

  Rafe pulled at the black beanie that covered his dark hair. Gold-lensed wraparound sunglasses covered his eyes. He’d left the semibeard he’d been growing the last few weeks. He wore jeans, boots and a loose gray chambray shirt over a Toby Keith concert T-shirt. Totally suburban ghetto rat. He blended into the neighborhood.

  He tucked an expandable Asp baton into the holster on the left side of his belt. Closed, the baton was only seven inches long. Under his shirt it wasn’t noticeable.

  “Be careful in there,” Allison cautioned.

  Rafe smiled again as he crossed the street. “You’ve got my six. How much trouble can I be in?”

  “The scary part is, I don’t know.”

  Rafe thought about that. I don’t know wasn’t something often heard from Allison Gracelyn.

  Chapter 2

  D rago moved his hand up from Shannon’s neck and grabbed her chin. He turned her face up to his. She felt his breath hot against her cheeks. He stared into her eyes. Once again she was reminded how lizardlike his green eyes were. They were cold and incredibly clear, like the eyes in a taxidermist’s shop.

  “You don’t have a clue who you sent me after, do you?” Drago asked.

  Shannon didn’t answer. She hated to admit ignorance. The only reason people with secrets kept talking to her was because they wondered how much she knew of what they were hiding.

  “It was somebody big,” Drago said. “And they’re buried deep within an infrastructure I couldn’t even begin to get through. And I’ll tell you right now that they don’t build firewalls I can’t get through. Not until this one.”

  Excitement escalated within Shannon. Over the last few years her mysterious benefactor had supplied tips regarding political cover-ups, insider trading, blackmail and other problems involving political and economic leaders. Truthfully Shannon owed a big part of her career to whoever that person had been.

  Had.

  Shannon didn’t know why she kept thinking of the person in the past tense. There was nothing to indicate anything had happened to that person except for a months-long silence.

  Until June, the contacts had been sporadic, but they’d been there. After weeks of wondering about it, and starved for a juicy story, Shannon had left New York City and taken a meeting with Vincent Drago. She’d hired him to investigate the traffic going on over her ISP. Shannon had covered stories about Internet tracking and the information that could be out there if someone knew how to look.

  Vincent Drago was supposedly the best. The downside was his paranoia and violence. Scuttlebutt had it that he’d killed people.

  He wasn’t the kind of man Shannon would have ordinarily wanted to deal with, but he’d seemed the best for what she’d needed done. Now she found out he hadn’t been able to track the messages either.

  However, it was interesting that someone from the United States government—if Drago was correct—was involved. Her investigation was getting more fascinating all the time. She could almost see the consumer viewing points piling up. The story was going to be a good one.

  If you live long enough to finish it, she told herself.

  Drago’s eyes raked hers. “You didn’t know anything about any of this, did you?”

  Shannon decided to go with the truth. “No. What branch of the federal government did you bump into?”

  Drago laughed. “You don’t know that either? Damn, you’re not as intelligent as I thought you were, blondie. And I wasn’t thinking you were overly gifted in the intelligence department to begin with.”

  Thanks for that. Shannon’s anger nudged at her fear. She hated being taken for granted, ignored and downplayed because of her hair color. She was smart.

  “Look,” Shannon said calmly, “you don’t have anything to worry about where I’m concerned. I’m not here trying to trap you. I wanted to know where those e-mail messages came from. That’s all.”

  “Why did you come to me?”

  “They told me you were the best.”

  Drago grinned, but again there was no mirth. “I’m flattered to hear that.”

  “It’s not flattery.” Shannon knew her throat was going to be bruised for days to come. “I needed the best. I was willing to pay. I did pay.”

  “You don’t have any idea who wrote you those e-mails?”

  “No.”

  Drago shook his head. “There’s a lot of juicy information contained in them.”

  “I know.”

  “Most of them tie to stories you cracked on the news channel.”

  Shannon knew that, too. “I wasn’t able to prove everything.”

  “Did any of the people you took down know about these e-mails?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever stop to wonder where they came from?”

  “Yes. All the time. I couldn’t get any information.”

  “But you just kept using the leads.”

  Shannon shrugged. “They were good. Why shouldn’t I? Those people I went after? They needed to be exposed.”

  “But why?”

  “Because the public deserves to know.”

  Drago snorted derisively. “Save it for the sound byte on the autobiography, blondie. It doesn’t wash with me. Those people you took down, they could have paid blackmail for the information you were given. As a matter of fact, I’d be willing to bet my eyeteeth they were.”

  Shannon had guessed that, too. She really wasn’t stupid.

  Drago traced a forefinger along Shannon’s chin. “Do you know why a blackmailer would give up a cash cow? And most of these people were cash cows.”

  “Because they stopped paying?”

  “Very good, blondie. And to make an example for other people that are being blackmailed.” Drago smiled. “But there’s one other reason.”

  Like a good captive audience, Shannon waited. Maybe you can ooh and aah and gush over how smart he is and he’ll let you go. She was prepared to do that if she had to. As to the other reason, she’d already thought of that, too.

  “A blackmailer would burn a victim if it somehow netted him more,” Drago said. “Did you ever think about looking into what these people had in common?”

  Shannon had. She’d looked. There were so many and they were so disparate that she hadn’t been able to get a handle on a theory.

  “I thought you could just find whoever was giving me the information,” she said. “That seemed to be the easiest way.” That way had also seemed the most dangerous. That was why she’d exhausted every avenue open to her before she’d gone to a major creep like Drago.

  “If the Feds hadn’t wanted in on the play, it probably would have been,” Drago agreed. “Whoever you’re after is good at computers, but I’m better. I would have beaten that firewall.”

  “I can pay you more,” Shannon offered. Greed was always good leverage.

  Drago shook his head. “Sorry, blondie. But this looks like the end of a beautiful relationship.” His eyes dropped to her cleavage. “Having you around to tie me to this thing isn’t my idea of fun.”

  Shannon’s fear crystallized inside her in that moment.

  “I’ve got to tell you,” Drago said, “I think it’s a damn waste.”

  A million questions popped into Shannon’s head. She’d always experienced that when new situations and people had come her way. That tendency was one of the qualities that had propelled her television career. She wasn’t one of those reporters that simply regurgitated scripted questions and punch lines.

  How can you just kill me? What makes you th
ink you’re going to get away with it? Is it that easy for you to kill someone? How many people have you killed? How did you kill them? Why hasn’t someone caught you? How are you planning on killing me? What are you going to do with my body?

  When she got to the last two questions, Shannon knew she was thinking way too much. She needed to be moving.

  “Bye-bye, blondie.” Drago smiled and his finger tightened on the trigger.

  When Rafe entered the bar, he got the immediate sense that he’d invaded a private party. Every eye in the place turned toward him.

  The bartender stood behind the scarred bar on the other side of the room. He had one bar towel slung over a shoulder and used another to dry beer mugs. He was a big, wide guy, an athlete that had gone to seed. The football pictures above the liquor bottles on the wall behind him offered a clue as to which sport he’d played.

  “We’re closed, mac,” the bartender said.

  Rafe looked at the other occupants of the room. There were three of them. They were all in their late twenties and early thirties. Their attire wasn’t far removed from his. One of them wore a Hispanic kerchief wrapped around his head.

  All of them gazed at him with predatory interest.

  Shannon Connor was nowhere in sight.

  “Door’s open,” Rafe responded. He pointed to the window. “Sign’s still on.” He spread his hands. “Look I only want a beer. I just climbed out of one of the warehouses down on the river. My boss nominated me to repack a few shipments going out in the morning. I’m hot. I’m tired. And I’m dry.”

  “Sorry, mac,” the bartender said. “Like I told you, we’re—”

  “Hey, Tommy,” the oldest of the men sitting at the small tables called out. “Man just wants a beer. Ain’t nothing. Don’t be a chump.”

  Grudgingly the bartender looked at Rafe. “What kinda beer do you want?”

  “Bottle. Domestic. As long as it’s cold, I don’t care.”

  The bartender reached below the bar and brought up a longneck. He placed it on the bar without a word.

  Rafe looked at the man at the table. “Can I get you something?”

  “Thanks. I’m good.”