Agent Out

by Francine Pascal

  The smell of cooking grease entered Gaia’s nostrils immediately. By comparison, the Greek diners in Manhattan, where she’d scarfed down chocolate milk shakes most of her life, smelled like four-star restaurants. Ignoring the smell, still holding the door open, Gaia waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

  Everyone was looking at her.

  Control the scene, Agent Crane had told them all in one of his training lectures. Gaia could hear his harsh voice as if he was standing right in front of her, glaring at the FBI class. Most people have never seen an FBI agent. When they do, they’ll want to trust you, want to believe in you. So don’t make it hard for them.

  Control the scene.

  The diner was about half full. There were booths against the big picture windows—they had leather benches repaired with tape and Formica tables with metal edges. All of them were occupied. An elderly couple in windbreakers with identical bowls of soup sat closest to the door. The man was twisted around in his chair so that he could get a better view of the alien blond thing that had just walked in.

  In front of her was a long, low lunch counter. The wall behind it was covered in metal sheets with stacks of miniature cereal boxes against it. A dark-haired man in a clean white T-shirt was frozen in the act of wiping the counter. The chrome stools were occupied by big men—they looked like truckers—with beards and dark caps pulled over their eyes. In the far back of the diner, next to what had to be a bathroom door, a thin, unshaven middle-aged man in a dark suit and tie sat motionless at a table, a steaming cup of coffee in front of him, watching her.

  Well? Gaia told herself angrily. You’ve got their attention. That’s step one. Now do something with it.

  A waitress was standing in the middle of the diner, the weak fluorescent overhead light reflecting in her yellow hair. She was not a young woman. Her eyes were heavily mascaraed, and her hands were wrinkled and covered in rings. She was frozen in the act of writing on an order pad. The young woman at the table in front of her had a small dog in a pink plastic bag. Even the dog was staring at Gaia.

  “Hi,” Gaia said, giving what she hoped was a disarming smile. With her left hand she’d already flipped out her badge. “Have you got a second, ma’am? FBI.”

  Everyone in the diner had a second. You could have heard a pin drop.

  That sounded weird, Gaia told herself. But this was very different from Virginia. In Quantico, even in the town proper, people were used to the presence of the FBI. When Gaia, Catherine, Will or whoever walked into a place, people looked up, mildly curious, and went back to whatever they were doing. “Just those government kids,” people would tell each other. Suddenly Gaia felt very far away from home.

  Had she sounded weird? She couldn’t tell. She was supposed to say her name, followed by “FBI,” while holding out her badge. It was routine. But somehow in this silent, dark restaurant, with the deserted, bare street out the dirty plate glass window, it was different. This was the real world—and her instincts had told her to be unforced and casual.

  And don’t worry about it, Gaia told herself angrily. She had enough to worry about without this completely unwelcome attack of self-consciousness. It didn’t matter if she sounded weird—the important thing was her investigation, how she “controlled the scene.”

  “Help you with something?” the waitress drawled. Up close, Gaia could see the deep lines in her face and smell the tobacco smoke on her breath. She didn’t sound disrespectful, exactly. She just wasn’t going to give that much deference to a twenty-year-old girl with a mess of unwashed blond hair tied up in a scraggly ponytail—FBI or no.

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” Gaia went on, reaching into her pocket to pull out Catherine’s photo. “Could you take a good look at this picture, please? Have you ever seen this woman?”

  The waitress tore her eyes away from the inside of Gaia’s jacket—she must have caught a glimpse of her gun—and turned back to the snapshot Gaia was holding out. It wasn’t that great a picture—Lyle had found it on the network and quickly printed it out for her before she left. It was a low-resolution digital snapshot of Catherine, taken during the Quantico admissions process. It couldn’t be more than six months old, but to Gaia’s eyes, Catherine looked years younger. Her hair was already trimmed in the trademark pixie cut (copied from Special Agent Jennifer Bishop), and the smile she gave the camera was innocent and engaging.

  “Arf! Arf!” The little dog in the seated woman’s pink plastic bag suddenly exploded into a barking fit, its marble black eyes fixed on Gaia. The sound was deafening.

  “Waffles, hush,” the woman told her dog. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  “That’s okay,” Gaia said, smiling at her. The ma’am reassured her—she had control of the room. She hadn’t flinched—people might have noticed that. Gaia held the photograph out again.

  As the waitress peered skeptically at the snapshot, Gaia tried to stay focused. But it was hard. She couldn’t shake the thoughts of Catherine from her head. She had to know where Catherine was now—whether she was still smiling or whether she was trembling and pale, locked in a cold basement room somewhere.

  Or dead, Gaia told herself. Don’t forget Malloy’s theory.

  “Sorry.” The waitress shook her head.

  “Are you sure?” Gaia raised her eyebrows. “Ever? Anywhere? Take your time—look at the picture as long as you want.”

  “I could look at it all day—it won’t change the fact that I never seen this girl,” the waitress blandly insisted.

  The thin man in the black suit was watching her. His eyes seemed to light up in the darkness from the back of the diner. His narrow tie was clipped to his shirt, and his collar was freshly starched. The salt-and-pepper hair reminded Gaia suddenly of her father, for reasons she didn’t quite understand—the man looked nothing like her father. But his calm stare was different from the looks of the other patrons—he was coolly appraising her, as if he saw this kind of thing every day and was ready to tell her what she was doing wrong.

  “This is a federal investigation,” Gaia said loudly, looking around the room. Fourteen pairs of eyes stared back. Her voice echoed against the walls, sounding high-pitched and young. “I’m looking for a missing person—a young woman my age, with short black hair and glasses. Her name is Catherine Sanders.”

  Who are you kidding? Gaia told herself. They can see right through you. Because this isn’t a “federal investigation”; it’s a private wild-goose chase.

  “Waffles,” the woman with the pink bag scolded her dog again. The dog had erupted into another frenzied spasm of barking.

  “Let me see that photo.” the man behind the counter said meekly. Gaia walked over, her heels clicking on the linoleum, and held out the snapshot. The counterman leaned over, squinting critically as he stared at the picture.

  “She could look different,” Gaia told him. “She could have different hair, or she could have lost her glasses.”

  Or she could be dead, that same voice repeated maddeningly in her head. The blood-streaked duffel bag snapped into focus in her imagination.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” the counterman said finally, standing back upright. “Can’t help you.”

  “Do you know who lives across the street?”

  One of the men at the counter looked over at her. Gaia caught his eye, and the burly man held her steady gaze. Behind him, out the window, the sagging facade of the house faced the street like an empty mask.

  “You, sir?” Gaia stepped forward. “Do you know whose house that is?’

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I told you,” Gaia said, stepping closer to the man. “I’m a federal agent. If you know who lives over there, I want you to—”

  “Little girl like you? I don’t believe it,” the man said. From up close, his breath smelled of pepper and coffee. He was staring at Gaia, his teeth shining, his unshaven face twisted into a smirk. “Why don’t you run home to your mama and leave us alone?”

  Gaia reached out and grabbed the man’s
wrist. Slowly she started bending it downward. The man tried to pull away—looking very surprised when he wasn’t able to.

  “You interrupted me,” Gaia said, leaning closer. “Please don’t do that again.”

  “Let go—”

  Gaia held up the photograph. “I want to know if you’ve seen this woman,” she said calmly. “Why don’t you take a nice long look and tell me if you recognize her?”

  “Let go of my arm!” the man yelled. He was squirming in his seat, but Gaia was holding him at a particular angle so that he couldn’t move. “Let me go, damn it!”

  “You’re not looking,” Gaia said, moving the picture closer to his face. “Tell me if the woman in this pic—”

  “No! No! I’ve never seen her!” the man yelled. Everyone in the diner was watching. “I don’t know who she is!”

  “None of us know,” the elderly man in the window booth called out. “Now leave Jimmy alone and let us eat our lunch.”

  Gaia looked over at the man who’d spoken. He was ladling a spoonful of soup toward his craggy mouth, unconcerned. It was almost like a signal—the clinking of silverware resumed. It was as if the old man had given everyone permission to ignore Gaia.

  At the back of the restaurant the thin man in the black suit watched her curiously. It was almost as if he was waiting to see what she’d do next—how good her training or her instincts were. She quickly moved her eyes away from his and gazed around again at the diner customers.

  They dont know anything.

  Gaia was suddenly sure of it. They hadn’t seen Catherine and they didn’t know who lived across the street—if anyone did. They weren’t hiding anything; they just didn’t know the answers to her questions. Nodding once, although nobody was watching anymore, Gaia moved toward the door. The bell rang again weakly as she walked back out into the still Baltimore air.

  a perfect target

  THE SHADOWS BEHIND THE HOUSE

  Gaia could feel eyes on the back of her neck as she came back out to the sidewalk. She didn’t turn around, but she was pretty sure the waitress and the other diner patrons were still watching her.

  And the man in the suit.

  Gaia wasn’t sure what it was about that man that had caught her attention. And she wasn’t about to go back for another look. She’d had just about enough of Moscone’s Diner and its singularly unhelpful patrons. And all that man had done was sit in the shadows and watch her. Nothing so unusual in that.

  Except that she knew better. One thing Gaia had learned from even the rudimentary amount of FBI training she’d had was that you had to pay attention to your instincts. Not trust them necessarily (in fact, that could be a terrible mistake) but at least be aware of them. And something about the tall, gaunt man in the diner was sticking with her. Blue eyes, she told herself. Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Not a military cut—a little longer. Needed a shave. Clothes have seen better days—suit a bit wrinkled, white shirt yellowing a bit.

  Anything else?

  Like Dad, Gaia realized. The thought gave her a strange pang. She hadn’t seen her father since her Stanford graduation—since that unforgettable afternoon when this whole crazy thing had started, the day she’d taken a high dive off a campus roof and saved three hundred people from ten pounds of exploding C-4 plastique. The guy in the diner reminds me of my father, that’s all. Dad, if things had never gone his way—if he’d fallen down on his luck and never quite bounced back.

  That was all.

  Standing beneath the bleak white sky, Gaia gazed back at the house across the street. It was her next stop, obviously. Her only choice was to go back and give the place a much more thorough search.

  Unfortunately, nothing had changed in the few minutes she’d been across the street. The door was still shut tight, and the house was still silent and unmoving.

  So is Catherine in there or not?

  Craning her neck, Gaia looked straight overhead. Squinting into the sky, she could see the rusted-out wires running from a nearby phone pole and over to an ancient-looking metal box attached right beneath the house’s cracked eaves. The telephone line.

  That’s got to be it, she told herself. That’s got to be the line that leads to the mystery modem. She still couldn’t quite believe it, but Lyle had sounded so sure.

  Facing the creaky porch steps again, Gaia was very conscious of wasting time. She kept fighting off images of Catherine bound and gagged somewhere in the darkness behind that door, waiting for her to stop playing games and come get her. Looking at the front door’s rusty doorknob, she knew she could break the door down with one good shove, but there was a little problem of federal law—the law that said she couldn’t enter this house without an invitation or a search warrant. And a search warrant was flat-out impossible—it meant a judge, and a hearing, and actual FBI authorization, none of which she had. And it meant time—at least a day’s delay. It was out of the question.

  She glanced back over her shoulder. The reflections in the diner window made it impossible to see whether she was being watched—and at this point the last thing she needed was someone calling the bureau and checking up on her. A young blond woman was just here, Gaia imagined the waitress saying into the phone. Claimed to be FBI—waved a badge but didn’t seem to know what she was doing. Then she went across the street and broke into that house.

  Casually, as if she was taking a scenic walk, Gaia strolled to the left, heading across the dirt yard and around the side of the house. Her footsteps sank into the soft ground as she walked. Brushing a stray strand of hair away from her face, she sneaked a glance back at the diner and the sidewalk. Nothing. Nobody around. She kept going and, once she was out of view of the street, she reached under her jacket and pulled out her gun.

  The weeds got higher as she moved into the shadows behind the house. She could smell the stink of garbage getting stronger. Without looking down, she could tell she was walking on old beer cans and God knows what else in those tall weeds. The garbage smell grew stronger still, and Gaia could see why. Black plastic trash bags were strewn everywhere.

  She tried not to think about what could be hidden in this disgusting backyard. It would take a team of five agents most of an afternoon to go through a place like this, carefully bagging and tagging everything and collecting chemical and forensic evidence. Gaia remembered a story Agent Crane had told them about an innocent-looking Idaho housewife who’d had two bodies buried in the icy ground behind her trailer home.

  She finally sidled up to the back door, holding her gun straight out. She tried to stick to procedure, looking around for all her “danger spots”—the spots where she was vulnerable to an attack. There was a laundry line strung with bedsheets over a fence behind her—no sniper spots, no danger areas. Good. The other direction, she saw dark overhanging trees and more garbage bags—fine. No danger areas. Raising the gun, she reached with her left hand and rapped on the door.

  “Hello?” she called out. “Anybody home?”

  Nothing. Her own reflection looked back at her from the cracked glass of the door. She rapped again more loudly

  Her shadow on the door suddenly deepened—a cloud bank had shifted and the sky had darkened. Somewhere in that brief gust of wind, as Gaia held her breath, she swore she’d heard the faintest voice coming from inside the house. Catherine? No—it was a male voice. Very indistinct, and very far away. Probably the television.

  Now she was using every ounce of her will to fight off the impulse to break in.

  Late at night, in their dorm room, Gaia and Catherine had gone through all the books, memorizing the guidelines for criminal investigation and the rules of evidence. Catherine’s memory was impeccable—nearly as good as Gaia’s—so they’d made fast work of it. A federal agent may not enter upon private property, Gaia recited to herself now, unless sufficient evidence exists that a criminal act or acts or the reckless endangerment of civilians is in process within said property, such that the agent’s intervention is necessary to prevent such crime from o
ccurring or concluding.

  The blurred, faint male voice kept talking inside the house. She could hear it for sure now. It sounded very much like a television—the rapid-fire delivery of a commercial announcer. Now she could hear a female voice, too, and background music. Definitely a television.

  But it could be a crime in progress, she convinced herself. It could be.

  “Here goes,” she muttered, sighing heavily. With the complete knowledge that she was crossing a line that she couldn’t uncross, Gaia pulled back and slammed her shoulder into the door.

  With a tremendous crack, the door lock fell to the ground and the door swung inward. It gave so quickly that Gaia nearly lost her balance, stumbling forward into the darkness. She kept her grip on the gun, immediately whipping her body to one side, out of the bright doorway where she knew she presented a perfect target.

  THE GUN YOU COULDN’T SEE

  The smell hit her first—a rank kitchen aroma of stale air, dirty dishes, rotting pizza boxes, and accumulated garbage. As her eyes adjusted, Gaia began to see dimly through the blackness. Dust motes danced in the light from the doorway. Glancing at the door itself, Gaia saw that there would be no way to hide the obvious fact that she’d broken in. The entire edge of the wooden door frame was splintered apart, with shards of splintered wood sticking out in all directions.

  I heard a sound, Gaia imagined herself telling a judge and jury. I heard voices—I heard a threatening male voice. I thought I could hear my friend. I knew my friend was in danger.