by Regan Black
Once more, John was left searching for a good answer. “I’m a walking shield,” he said.
Ben flicked that away. “Scott may not be enhanced, but we’ve got our own skills. We don’t even know how UI messed with this Connolly. If there’s any place you’re needed as a shield, it’s right here.
“Keep your family and this place safe and let us deal with the rest of it,” Ben finished. Apparently convinced he’d made his point, his solid form started to blur at the edges.
“That’s what you want?”
“Yes. Plus it’s what all of us need. Get used to it.”
Ben was right. And after his first taste a few weeks ago, he knew he could get used to directing traffic rather than being out there in the middle of the action. It scared him and thrilled him simultaneously. He suspected it would be good training for fatherhood.
Chapter 2
FBI Special Agent Chloe Spencer was searching for a second wind as she set up her laptop on the work table centered in the conference room dedicated for this case. It seemed as if she’d been up and running full steam ahead for days, though it was only pushing twenty hours. This case was as slippery as oil.
She and her cyber-crimes response team had just returned to New York after two weeks in France conducting interviews, inspecting offices and computers, and hearing perpetual denials of wrongdoing. No time or opportunity for sightseeing in Paris, no chance to dip a toe in the water on the French Riviera. Someday she’d go back and do all those things. Someday soon, she promised her stiff back and aching neck.
What she wouldn’t give for an hour of yoga. That too would have to wait until they had a plan to move this case forward. Crossing the room to the windows, she looked out over the city. Even from this vantage point, removed from the noise and bustle of people determined to get somewhere, the energy was palpable, urging her on.
Putting her back to the view, she leaned against the sill and stretched out her legs, ignoring the urge to slip out of her sleek ankle boots. Staring at the board they’d created when this mess had landed on her desk, she searched for the missing piece. They’d surely missed something or they would have a lead by now. She and the other three people on her team knew how to winnow facts down to a short list of likely suspects.
“What do we know?” she asked the room at large.
An American-owned company had been negotiating on a power source for a new type of drone that could stay airborne for months at a time. The drone was initially designed in an altruistic effort to deliver internet access to rural areas. Naturally someone had seen a viable military application which could quickly change the direction of the product as well as the fortunes of the developers. The bid had been compromised, bad enough, but a watchdog group had somehow learned about the military interest in the new drone and broadcasted proprietary details to a wiki page.
Chloe rubbed at eyes that were dry and tired, pacing in front of the windows while her team rattled through the current status of the case. Two weeks of combing through data and they’d found no evidence of an attack on the company computer networks. They had even less evidence of any intel being accessed from within the secure network and carried out physically. They’d interviewed the eight key players in the project and honed in on the three people with full access to the bid details within the company.
Unfortunately hearing the recap aloud didn’t change the facts: they were at a stalemate on this one. She sat down at her laptop, hands on the keyboard to make additional notes. No new thoughts came to mind.
Though none of them had talked about it on the commercial flight back to the states, she knew they’d all been mulling over the questions, answers and data logs looking for the leak. Not one of them had come up with any new insight.
“It’s impossible that everyone is clean.” She propped her elbows on the edge of the table and speared her fingers into her dark hair. Tugging gently, she massaged her scalp. It wasn’t nearly enough to stir up a credible theory of the crime. “The drone they’re developing is smart, but it didn’t talk to a wiki page on its own or share bid details.” The knots in her shoulders were multiplying and though she was known for her steady, unflappable nature, she was at the end of a fraying rope. Wouldn’t it be a shock if she started screaming and railing against the circumstances they couldn’t seem to wrangle into submission? Just imagining the outburst and subsequent reactions eased her tight muscles.
Someone had gotten in and out with data that could ruin the bid as well as the company. Not one person with access had a motive to go along with it. Neither could they find connections, past or present, to indicate this sort of self-sabotage or espionage stunt.
Chloe observed the four other people on her team. Defeat and frustration were the reigning expressions on faces that usually emanated determination. “All right.” She pushed to her feet. “This isn’t a national crisis. Let’s call it for tonight.”
Her team gawked at her like a school of fish wondering how they’d been yanked from the water. “You heard me,” she said. “Tomorrow morning we’re going to present our findings to a team from Justice and look at this from a new angle.”
They groaned as one. She agreed, though she didn’t show it. None of them enjoyed asking for help or even handing off a case. It happened so rarely and the sting of failure on this one would linger. “Go,” she said. “Get some rest. Tomorrow, with fresh eyes and viewpoints, we’ll start thinking outside the box.”
As the team drifted out of their conference room, she soaked up the silence. Nothing about this leak made any sense. There were zero traces of attacks from the cyber side. Zero. That had raised suspicions as well. A developing tech company of this size could be targeted by hackers any day of the week just for an amusement. Other than a random bot crawling in search of firewall weaknesses, those inquiries had been dead ends.
The company had been both diligent and savvy about protecting their plans, their bid, and their data from any attempt at espionage. Admirable, except it left her floundering for how and who could have compromised them.
As a matter of course, they’d gathered hours and hours of surveillance footage from security systems around the company offices here and abroad. As much as it pained her to admit it, she hoped the agents they read into the case tomorrow would spot something her crew had missed.
*
Listening to the developments, or lack thereof, in the FBI conference room, Audible sent a brief text-message report up the line. He couldn’t take the chance of giving a vocal report, even if the piece in his ear had been reliable.
Special Agent Spencer wasn’t wrong, Audible thought as he resumed his role as part of the building maintenance crew. Solving this case would require a new, unprecedented angle and an open mind would help too. Not something most government agencies were known for. The alphabet-soup types liked to wrap up cases in neat and tidy boxes, linking crime and motive and justice and then tucking it all on a shelf for future reference.
Part of his job was to make sure they wouldn’t get that desired outcome this time around. He was relieved no one on the team had come up with any bright new theories during the plane ride back to New York. Taking a commercial flight wasn’t an option, not even for a case that had the boss’s full attention.
The man in charge would be pleased to hear the investigation was still stalled. Even with fresh agents coming in tomorrow, odds were excellent the FBI would never discover the real source of the leak. They were looking for an insider, a corporate spy or an activist with motive. They had no idea that a random individual with a heretofore unknown military-grade enhancement was the culprit.
Without stepping foot in the company’s offices in the U.S. or abroad, Audible had been listening in on the progress of the drone for weeks and reporting it to his boss. Admittedly, the project fascinated and intrigued him and the company’s original goals for the device were impressive. Once they started negotiating for the power source, he’d followed the new orders, leaking the bid information.<
br />
Audible didn’t pretend to understand why his boss wanted to impede production on a device that could be useful. He simply did what he was told. The first hard and fast rule of survival was obedience. He might not like his current role, it might be a futile and frustrating existence at times, but he couldn’t change anything about his circumstances if he got himself killed.
Even if the FBI tied Audible to the situation by some miracle of investigative work, there was no way to prove, or even explain, what he’d done. Not to mention he was officially dead. His name, fingerprints, and his past had all been wiped and reworked by his boss. A man known only as Messenger was in charge of the Unknown Identities developmental lab and special operations. He’d promised Audible a new life, free of any legal penalties, if he cooperated with the program and served five years of field work. In his head, he was already counting down the days until his freedom.
As Spencer’s team grumbled and muttered on their way out of the conference room and down the hall, he sympathized with their frustration. Though it had only been four years, it seemed like a lifetime ago that he too had trained, planned, and occasionally failed to execute a mission to satisfaction with his Navy SEAL team.
Currently disguised as a janitor, Audible swiped a damp mop back and forth over the floor, keeping up the pretense at the opposite end of the hallway. Being this close was a huge risk, but the only way to keep tabs on the progress they were or weren’t making. Using the enhancement implemented by the UI doctors that effectively turned him into a highly tuned communications receiver, he continued to eavesdrop on Spencer.
He heard Spencer call for a pizza and a moment later she walked out of the conference room, turning out the lights and locking the door behind her. It was a conscientious effort, though it made no real difference. He sent an alert that he could get hands on the raw data and waited for instructions.
Move to rendezvous point one. Messenger’s order didn’t surprise him. Danny’s job here was merely to gather and transfer intel and he’d become too valuable for Messenger to risk exposing his efforts right under FBI noses.
Danny pushed his maintenance cart to the service closet at the end of the hallway and made his way down the stairs and out of the building.
Rendezvous point one was over in Prospect Park and Danny hurried to get there by the previously designated time. Messenger didn’t tolerate excuses as lame as traffic, not even in New York City.
The codename seemed innocuous enough, but Audible had figured out he did more than relay orders or reports. He called all the shots. The man always wore an impeccably tailored gray suit, was utterly unreadable and maintained high expectations of everyone, from the people in the labs to those who worked in the field. Disappointments and failures weren’t tolerated after an operative passed the testing phases.
From his perspective, the off-the-books agency had gotten better about their naming conventions. He was Audible because he’d been worked on, altered, and enhanced until he could find communication signals and listen in and report on all sorts of crap he shouldn’t know about.
He hadn’t been given a vote or a chance to express his preference for the codename. He supposed Audible was as good as anything. The nickname he was raised with, Danny, or even the name his SEAL team had used, Danny Boy, sure as hell weren’t options. According to all official records, Danny Connolly had been shot, his body swallowed by a cold, unforgiving sea during a top-secret operation four years ago.
Shot by a sniper in the service of the man in the gray suit who controlled him now, actually. He wondered if Messenger knew he’d learned that information about the situation that brought him into the UI group. It had been the first time he’d used his enhancement for his own purposes, listening in on radio chatter during his first field test. And that revelation had been the singular point when he determined to retain his humanity, his sense of self. No one else might call him Danny anymore, but that didn’t mean he had to be a puppet named Audible.
It had taken the better part of a year recovering from the gunshot wound only to be subjected to testing, alterations, and more testing until UI labeled him operational. Now, they frequently delivered him to various locations around the world to work alone, eavesdropping on or interfering with the signals per Messenger’s orders. Danny found it far more agreeable when they used him as a spy overseas, gathering intel on people and deals that might impact or harm American interests. Admittedly, he had an easier time when the task was interfering only with communications in any location. During those missions he could pretend he wasn’t doing anything too amoral or illegal. Comms dropped all the time, for any number of innocuous reasons.
But eavesdropping missions like this one against the FBI, drove home the inarguable point that he was working outside the law. In the earliest days, he’d tried a variety of ways to drop out of Messenger’s group and failed so spectacularly that he’d given up, deciding to bide his time.
As Danny approached the previously selected area of Prospect Park, he saw Messenger was already waiting on a bench. Vaguely he wondered what sort of circumstance would force the man to choose different clothing. Hell, they’d been in Majorca once with the sun beating down and Messenger never broke a sweat. Maybe unflappable composure was Messenger’s super power.
“You’ve done well on this case,” Messenger said when Danny sat down.
Danny knew Messenger didn’t expect or need a reply. If the man could successfully render his operatives mute, he probably would. Better all-around if no one had to listen to the complainers or whiners before they pulled it together and fell into line or died during the adjustment or training phases.
“Are you having any trouble managing your assignment?”
“No, sir.” Where was this coming from? “The gear’s working.” Danny knew Messenger had been dialed in closely to this operation. He also knew better than to guess at Messenger’s thought process.
Early on, he’d learned to separate himself from the intel he gathered and the conversations he impeded. It was that or give up and find a way to die for real. But survival had been drilled into him, from growing up a foster kid in a rough Chicago neighborhood, joining the Navy right out of high school and sticking against all the odds through the grueling training to become the best of the best.
More than once, he’d marveled that becoming a mentally and physically undefeatable SEAL was exactly what landed him here, in impossible and unbelievable circumstances. He didn’t stay out of any loyalty to Messenger or belief in UI. He was simply too stubborn to quit when there was a chance to have a life again.
“Help me with one more thing here in town,” Messenger continued, “and then we’ll get you back to the lab for recovery and assessment.”
Messenger’s preferred way of describing a debriefing session. Covertly, Danny glanced around. If he was that close to going back to the lab, there would be a team of at least two men hovering to grab him when it was time.
“The parameters on this job have shifted.”
Danny waited for the details, afraid he knew exactly what Messenger would say next.
Messenger leaned back, crossing his legs as casually as if they were talking about sports or the weather. “Special Agent Chloe Spencer needs removed from this investigation.”
Removed. Because she’d figured out the leak hadn’t been of an electronic or cyber variety. Because she would bump the case back to another division within the FBI. A UI operative shouldn’t care about the reasons. “And the timeframe?”
This kind of thing usually required thorough planning to prevent any evidence trail.
“The task should be completed by eight a.m. tomorrow,” Messenger said in that cool, totally reasonable tone.
Before her team shifted gears. Crap. “A temporary removal?” Danny asked. Messenger had to know Spencer’s disappearance wouldn’t stop the FBI from shifting the investigation on the drone company to another team. It would give them one hell of a diversion, though.
“Pe
rmanent.”
Danny resisted the urge to gawk or argue. Messenger was manipulating a federal investigation with the icy detachment of a chess player sacrificing pawns. “I’m comms overwatch for this removal?” He’d killed for both the military and for Messenger. This time he hoped he wouldn’t be the one snuffing out a bright life.
For some reason, he felt an affinity with Spencer. Maybe it was listening in on the team dynamics for the past two weeks after so many solitary missions. She had a way of urging on her team, of picking them up no matter how many dead ends they bumped into. She was smart and thorough. And sexy as hell in those power suits she preferred with her golden-blonde hair wrapped in a prim bun.
“You’ll take care of it personally,” Messenger was saying. “You’re here, you know her patterns best after observing her for several days. It would take too long to get anyone else up to speed.”
There was only one answer that would keep him alive. “Yes, sir.”
Messenger stood and buttoned his suit coat. “Your next rendezvous will be for extraction.” Without another word he walked away, toward the car that was certainly waiting for him on Parkside Avenue.
Dismissed, Danny stood and walked deeper into the park, needing time to think. Already the images were dripping into his mind. Her body falling limp, the light going out of those intelligent brown eyes as he took her life. He didn’t consider murder a casual task. Was there an alternative path that didn’t end with both of them dead?
Arguing was futile after Messenger delivered an order. The man worked solely from his own self-serving brand of cold, calculating logic. Danny had never seen the man take counsel from anyone other than a doctor at the lab when a patient enhancement wasn’t working. He assessed information and made swift choices according to his private agenda.
Killing Chloe Spencer was the last thing he wanted to do. Messenger was right that he’d gotten to know her during the case. She was an American citizen, a devoted and effective public servant. He’d taken an oath to protect his country, to protect its people. Special Agent Spencer had taken a similar oath when she’d joined the bureau.