“Sayeed hired himself one smart defense lawyer — Max Scourby — and that SOB turned the trial into a circus and me into the clown in the center ring. He painted it that we were the bad guys and Sayeed was some poor persecuted martyr. Scourby played the trial like a virtuoso, dealing the graymail card, threatening to subpoena all the big shots in Ironwood and have them spill their guts about all the secret projects they were working on in the lab. Divulging intelligence damaging to vital national security interests. That was enough to make the government fold right there.
“Then Scourby got me on the witness stand and tore me apart, made me look like fifty-seven different varieties of horse’s ass. I helped him do it because, jerk that I was, I let him get under my skin. I knew he was trying to get me mad with his artful insinuations and snotty asides and smirks and winks to the jurors. I knew it but I blew my stack anyway and reamed him out good from the witness stand, and when I was done the case was sunk and my career along with it…”
Kling fell silent, brooding, and bitter. Jack prodded him to get him back on track. “But you came back to Ironwood all the same, you wound up working for OCI,” he pointed out.
“Not until later, much later,” Kling said. “That was Morrow’s doing. He got Hotchkiss’s job. Hotchkiss was his predecessor as OCI chief. Morrow was his number two man.”
“I know about Hotchkiss,” Jack said.
Kling fired back, “Then you know that he played his cards close to the vest and kept Morrow in the background as much as possible. Maybe he had an intuition that the Sayeed case could go sour and wanted to contain the damage. It finished Hotchkiss — hell, killed him — but Morrow was clean, none of that Sayeed dirt clinging to his skirts, so he got the top slot when Hotchkiss was forced into retirement.
“That’s how I saw it then but I was wrong. Morrow was a lot savvier than I figured. Hell, he reached out and contacted me to offer me a job in OCI. It wasn’t much but I jumped at it. I’d slid so far down the ladder that anything would have looked good. I was poison in the national security field. The jerk who’d torpedoed the biggest atom spy case since the Rosenbergs. Nobody in the private sector would touch me, either. The big corporations have no use for losers.
“Out of the blue came Rhodes Morrow with a job offer. I took it. It wasn’t until later, months later, that I realized it was all part of a plan.”
“A plan?” Jack prompted.
“Oh yeah. Morrow was better than me, better even than old Hotchkiss. Or maybe he just had more time to sift the facts and chew them over and dig deeper into them.
“He knew Sayeed was guilty but he took it one step further. By focusing on inconsistencies in the case, little odd details that didn’t add up, he discovered that Ironwood was penetrated not by one but by two spies,” Kling said.
He grinned wolfishly. “That’s right — two spies. Sayeed was one but not the only one. There was another.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. But Morrow was getting close. Closer every day. Two spies planted in the heart of one of Uncle Sam’s most advanced weapons research facilities. Two moles. Each buried deep, burrowing away. Each working separately, pursuing his own agenda. Maybe they were unaware of each other’s existence, maybe not.
“Sayeed was working for Pakistan’s ISI. They were too greedy for product and burned him, revealing his existence. He was the little mole. The other spy — call him Big Mole — was slicker. But not slick enough to stay hidden forever. Morrow figured out that Big Mole was a long-term penetration agent placed deep in the INL hierarchy. Someone with virtually unlimited access to all top secret classified data. He might be in research or security but he had to be one of the higher-ups. Someone who’s been at Ironwood for a long time, longer than Sayeed.
“Sayeed joined six years ago. Big Mole’s tracks go back much farther than that. Before Argus, even; back to the days when the lab’s top priority was overhauling the PAL codes.”
“Explain,” Jack demanded.
“I’ll tell you but you won’t like it. PAL: permissive action link. The digital codes that have to be input before a nuclear missile can be fired. An integral part of the fail-safe system to ensure no intercontinental ballistic missile is launched by mistake or design without proper authorization. The lab was assigned to overhaul the PAL codes and harden them against interference. Ironwood’s last big project before Argus.”
“My god,” Jack said softly.
Kling looked pleased — he knew he was getting through. “Scary, huh? It scares me, too. Just like it scared Morrow. He thought the PAL codes were Big Mole’s real target. That he was trying to crack them long before Sayeed was hired to work on Argus. That the Argus flap threw a scare into him and caused him to lay low for years. Now Big Mole feels safe enough to start up again where he left off.”
“I don’t buy it.” Jack didn’t want to believe it; the implications were too frightening. “Morrow tells you but not his bosses?”
Kling sat up a little straighter. “Sounds crazy. Morrow confide in a drunk like me? Sure, crazy like a fox. INL security is shot all to hell. Somehow Big Mole knew what was going on in OCI as soon as Morrow did. Morrow stopped inputting his notes on the mole hunt into his office computer for fear that the whole lab network had been compromised. He didn’t have any hard evidence, only a pattern of omissions and disinformation. That and the instincts of a lifelong spy catcher that a rat was loose in the corncrib.
“The Sayeed affair worked to Big Mole’s advantage by burning up the territory. INL’s contracting authority had a bellyful of bad publicity and botched spy hunts. No way were they getting back on that horse. Morrow wasn’t stupid. He saw what happened to his mentor Hotchkiss — yeah, and to me, too. He knew that the only way he’d get any action was by delivering Big Mole tied up in a nice neat package.”
“Who did he suspect? He must have had a few prime suspects in mind.”
“The key is in the chronology, Bauer. The window of opportunity. Big Mole had to be working steadily at Ironwood for the last eight years or more. Morrow started out with a list of persons of interest. On the scientific side, Nordquist, Carlson, Fisk, and Romberg. In security: McCoy. They were all in place during the PAL overhaul eight years ago.
“Since then the list has gotten smaller. And you know why.”
“The Ironwood kills,” Jack said.
Kling pointed a finger at Jack and mimed pulling a trigger. “Bingo. The chain of deaths that brought you here. See how it all ties together.
“Yan was the first. Dr. John Yan. Not a suspect, didn’t fit the chrono. He came in five years ago to work on Argus and then Perseus. But Morrow noticed some anomalies in Yan’s download files. Classified data was being downloaded from the mainframe to Yan’s computer at times when Yan was out of the lab. Someone else was using Yan’s password to access the files. Before Morrow could get around to asking Yan who that someone might be, Yan was dead. Heart attack, they said.
“That was six months ago. Fisk was the next to die. He’d worked on the PAL overhaul, Argus, Perseus. The grand old man of Ironwood. He was in his early seventies — Nordquist had the contractor waive the mandatory retirement age so they could have the benefit of his mathematical expertise. Fisk fell in the bathtub, cracked his skull, and drowned. That was two months after Yan. Morrow must have guessed the truth even then. Although he didn’t let me in on it until later.
“Freda Romberg was the third. That really blew the case wide open, at least as far as Morrow was concerned. She’d been at Ironwood the longest, close to twenty years. The deaths of Yan and Fisk must have got her thinking. She called to make an appointment to see Morrow. She wouldn’t say what it was about over the phone, but anytime a top researcher contacts the head of OCI it’s got to be important. In hindsight it looks like she’d gotten suspicious and discovered something she wanted to bring to Morrow. Morrow was away from his office at the time but his secretary took the call and made the appointment for later that day. Romberg w
as working alone in the LRF at lunchtime when the robot arm crushed her to death. Equipment malfunction, they said.
“That prodded Morrow into taking active measures. He had a two-part plan. Officially he started making noises that there was a possibility that the three deaths weren’t accidental but deliberate. He didn’t say it was murder, he only offered it up as a possibility for further study. He caught a lot of heat from management. The contractor didn’t want to rip the scab off the wound by setting off a new round of investigations, bad publicity, and headlines. Morrow tried to make his point without making waves but there was a lot of pushback from the governing directors on the board. He took his suspicions to the local representatives of the CIA and FBI–Lewis and Sabito — but they weren’t buying.
“Unofficially Morrow opened up a second front for direct action. He roped in me and Peter Rhee, brought us into the picture. I guess that’s what he’d had in mind all along when he hired me, bringing me in as a sideman. He knew I was clean and Rhee, too. Rhee was a new hire, brought in after Sayeed. Morrow arranged for the three of us to get together after work in a bar in the Hill. He didn’t even trust his own office to be spy-proof. Why not meet in the SCIF? Same reason! Everybody that uses it is logged in and out and he didn’t want to tip that the three of us were in cahoots.
“At the meet he laid it out for us. Gave us the briefing about Big Mole. He deputized us as his special investigators in the mole hunt. It had to be a completely off-the-shelf operation. Conducted in secret outside office hours. Confined to the three of us. He gave us the assignments and Rhee and I carried them out. We were his legmen.”
“He didn’t bring anyone else in OCI in? McCoy, Derr, any of the others?” Jack asked.
Kling shrugged. “If he did, he didn’t tell us. This spy hunt was no one-sided affair, though. Big Mole wasn’t sitting still while we were looking for him. He’s not alone. He has help on the outside. Killers on call. Yan, Fisk — and don’t forget Ernie Battaglia. He was a retired ex-cop turned SECTRO Force security guard. I knew him to say hello to and pass the time of day with. Nice guy. He was the next to die, ten days after Romberg. Killed in a hit-and-run accident — run over while he was out walking his dog. The car — stolen car — was found abandoned downtown by the city cops. The driver was never found. The cops figured some punk kid boosted the car for a joyride, then got scared after tagging Ernie and dumped the car fast.
“Morrow figured different. Battaglia was one of the guards on duty outside the Pit when Romberg was killed. Could be he saw or heard something that could prove that it was no accident but murder. Maybe even point back to the killer.”
“Why didn’t he report it, Kling?”
“Maybe he didn’t know the significance of what he’d seen. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything at all but the killer thought he had. Another promising lead turned dead end. But Battaglia was the tipping point. I don’t know about Lewis but Sabito was starting to come around. He wanted to get into it but his Bureau bosses wouldn’t let him. They’d already gotten burned from Sayeed and didn’t want to play with fire again.
“The kills had one positive effect. They narrowed the list of Big Mole suspects down to three. Nordquist, Carlson, and McCoy.”
“The last ones left alive,” Jack said.
“Then we got a break in the case. A new lead, a hot one. We didn’t have to go looking for it, it came to us. A walk-in. Phone-in, actually. Pete Rhee took the initial complaint but he had an idea it might be something so he kept it out of official channels and took it straight to Morrow. Morrow had Pete and me handle the investigation unofficially,” Kling said.
He went on. “That was about a month ago. Our new lead was starting to pan out. Then — disaster. Rhodes Morrow was killed. This time there was no attempt to frame it so it looked like anything but what it was: murder. You know the official story. Morrow was driving home late from work one night when he got a flat tire on a lonely stretch of road. Some crook or crooks came along and sized him up as an easy mark. Shot him dead and robbed him. His wallet and wristwatch were lifted to make it look good.
“Rhee and I knew better. Morrow’s death cut the heart out of our investigation. It cut the guts out of me. What little I had left. The one person who could tie it all together was silenced. Only Morrow could have proved that we were working for him on an official investigation and not just freelancing.
“Hell, I was scared. We both were. If they could knock off the head of OCI, where did that leave me and Pete? Sitting ducks. We didn’t know who to go to because we didn’t know who to trust. Surfacing the mole hunt might mean signing our own death warrants.
“And they were on to us. Somebody broke into my place and tore it apart. Looking for notes or files on the hunt. Waste of time. Morrow had them all. Where I don’t know, but either Big Mole found them or Morrow hid them so good they haven’t turned up yet.
“Pete thought he was being followed. I started seeing shadows everywhere I looked. I didn’t know if I was actually being tailed or just seeing things. Spooking myself. And then I saw Pete Rhee with his head damned near blown off—”
Kling was working himself up. The fear was on him. Jack needed to keep him thinking straight. He’d left things untold — important things.
“Kling! The hot lead you were talking about, the one you and Rhee were following up — what is it?”
Kling opened his mouth to speak but before he could get the words out his face fell. His startled expression was the tip-off. He’d seen something behind Jack that jolted him.
Jack wasted no time in asking questions. He threw himself out of the chair sideways, diving to the floor. Gunfire boomed behind him. Bullets passed harmlessly over him, tearing into the curtained front window.
Jack rolled over toward the rear of the apartment. Two shooters stood there, handguns blazing. Filling the space with gun smoke.
One was a gray-haired, horse-faced man; the other was young with a rooster tail haircut and thin, wispy mustache. The young one looked barely out of his teens. Horse Face stood at the fore, the other was behind him and to the side.
Jack fired from the floor, placing two shots into Horse Face’s middle. Horse Face crumpled up, backpedaling like he was bowing his way out of the room. He staggered into his partner’s line of fire. A round from the young one’s gun lanced into his back.
The young one shouted an obscenity.
Horse Face’s back bowed, thrusting his shattered torso forward. He stood with legs spread wide, swaying. Blocking Jack’s shot at his partner.
The young one retreated into the kitchen, gun barking, not scoring. He ducked behind a kitchen counter in time to avoid Jack’s shot; the round whizzed by so close that its passage ruffled his hair.
Horse Face was still on his feet. His gun hand fell to his side. He convulsively jerked the trigger, pumping a few rounds into the floor. He cried out, toppling.
The back door through which the gunmen had entered was wide open. The young one made a break for it, reaching behind him to throw more lead in Jack’s direction. Gun smoke hung in mid-air.
The young one went out the door, clattering downstairs. Jack rose, starting after him. Horse Face lay on his back on the floor, not dead yet. He raised his gun, straining as if it weighed fifty pounds. Jack shot him in the head, finishing him.
He glanced back. Kling lay flat on the floor belly-down, hugging the carpet. “You hit?”
“I’m okay, Bauer! Give me my gun!”
Jack wasn’t minded to have Harvey Kling at his back with a loaded gun. Kling was unharmed and would keep. Jack crossed to the rear of the flat. The stairwell was empty, the young one was already out the ground-floor door.
Jack went to the rear window, tore aside the red-and-white checked curtains. The young one was racing across the grassy strip between the two rows of buildings. Jack knocked out the glass pane with the gun barrel, reached outside, and fired at the fleeing form. Two shots, two misses. Though the second kicked up a tuft of grass and dirt a
t the young one’s heel.
The hammer clicked on empty; all the rounds in the cylinder had been fired. The young one halted, turned, and pointed the gun at the window. Jack dodged to one side, sheltering behind the wall. A couple of rounds tore through the window, ripping into the ceiling. Shards of glass fell out of the window frame.
Jack placed Kling’s empty .38 on the kitchen counter. He went out the door and down the stairs, taking them two at a time. He drew his gun and ran outside. The young one had reached the far side of the grassy strip. He darted between two buildings toward the street beyond.
Jack ran after him, rushing through the space between two buildings, breaking out into the open. The street was a duplicate of the one housing Rhee’s apartment. Parked cars lined the curb. Jack halted, crouching, trying to look everywhere at once. The young one was nowhere to be seen.
A car engine roared into life; a sleek silver coupe catapulted out of a parking slot, the young one hunched over a wheel. Tires shrieked as he whipped the car into a hard right-hand turn, wheeling it around a corner.
Jack ran after it, squeezing off a few rounds at the fleeing car. Its rear window shattered but the car kept moving, swinging behind the cover of a building at the end of the block.
A yellow station wagon stood at the curb with its engine running. Its rear hatch was open. Behind it stood a suburban matron who’d been unloading groceries from it. She was deathly pale; only her eyes were alive.
Jack holstered his gun and flung open the driver’s side door. The motor was running, the keys in the ignition. He gave the interior a quick onceover to make sure no kids were inside; no baby tucked in a safety seat in the rear. That would be all he needed, to pirate a car with an infant inside. The car was unoccupied.
24 Declassified: Death Angel 2d-11 Page 12