Rule 53

by Elaine Nolan

  “Good to know,” she answered. “They’re only prepared to give us copies, which I find suspicious, so I need someone I can trust to be there and find out why.”

  “And someone they trust to hand it over to,” he added, and she nodded. He was being used again, by both sides, and he didn’t like it.

  “Think you can rein in your urges while you’re there?” It came out with a sharp edge.

  “Which urge are we talking about?” he continued defying her. “The one to be an Intelligence Officer or investigator?”

  Her features told him it wasn’t the one she referred to, but he dared her to venture down that path.

  She didn’t, seeing how ready he was for that particular fight and decided not to pursue it for the moment. Better to catch him off-guard for that one.

  “I’m adding you to the team going to the embassy, and with the other agents there you can’t be accused of collusion or being duped by your compromising… liaison with her,” she said instead, and again he held back on a snarky retort.

  “When?” he asked instead.

  “As soon as the rest are ready. I don’t want to give them too long to review our personnel files,” she told him, and he wondered why, wondered what she was up to, but she didn’t explain any further.

  “And I’ve asked for the opportunity to question Rainey,” she added, but that didn’t surprise him.

  “Questioned by whom?”

  “Not you. The other members of the Hearing panel will do their job there.” She dismissed him, told him to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

  He was out of practice on the spur-of-the-moment jump-to-action part, and he missed it. The jealousy monster reared its ugly head again at the thoughts of Leigh getting to play action hero while he was grounded and shackled to a desk.

  CHAPTER 65

  The introductions were polite and congenial, with offers of tea or coffee accepted. Even Tom, dressed in his official blue and navy, the Garda insignia on his tie pin and belt buckle, seemed approachable, and shook Jake’s hand, although Jake could’ve done without the bone-crushing grip, but he gave back as good as he got. Two people were missing from this but Tom opened the meeting regardless of their absence.

  “Thank you for coming,” he started, interrupted by Adam’s entrance and escorting Nathan Rainey. Only one missing, Jake thought, but watched Rainey as he sat on the Irish side of the table. The man Jake had been watching and surveilling for months seemed haunted, tired, and he wondered just what the hell the Irish had put him through. “You asked to question Mr Rainey, so here he is.”

  “Alone,” one of the federal agents said and Tom shook his head.

  “Absolutely not, and that was made clear to your Senator,” he answered, interrupted again, by Leigh this time, and Jake held back a smirk at seeing her back in her dress uniform for this. Adam, too, was formally dressed, as were the two other Gardaí in the room, a mix of navy blue and moss-green, and a show of just how seriously these people were taking this. “And you know our Communications Specialist,” Tom said by way of introduction. Jake couldn’t help himself, and raised an eyebrow at the title, then wondered how she could keep her hard expression and not react. She ignored the pro-offered hand to shake by a member of the Hearing as she sat on their side, where the hardware was located. She got straight to work connecting what looked like an external hard drive and accessing it, displaying the properties of the drive.

  “And what is this?” Swayne’s appointed spokesperson asked the Irish.

  “Mr Rainey surrendered this hard drive to us,” Tom answered.

  “Then you need to hand it over to us.”

  “We don’t need to do anything of the sort. The reason we’ve asked you here is to show you the proof of the source of the information we’re prepared to give you. You don’t need to know, or have access to, anything else,” Tom said.

  “What else is on it?” Jake asked, earning himself scowls from both sides, but Leigh still refused to look at him. It hurt, but he understood why, she was trying to keep them both out of harm’s way.

  “Nothing that concerns the United States,” Tom answered. “What Commandant Harte is showing is the date the drive was created and then the date we accessed it. As you’ll see, these are the only two dates on the drive. All the documents we’re prepared to hand over to you have similar certifications of who accessed it and when, with the Commandant being the only person to access it. I have a copy of Mr Rainey’s statement as to how he came to have the hard drive, which I’ve included in the submission to you.”

  “How convenient that the two people involved with that source are directly connected to each other,” the spokesperson said, and the accusation wasn’t lost on anyone.

  “An unfortunate happenstance, but neither party have had contact with the other since retrieving the drive. Commandant Harte has also agreed to answer your questions on any details you’re stuck on,” Tom confirmed.

  “And what was to stop them working together and creating the information on the drive?”

  “Again, I draw your attention to the date of creation, which I assure you predates the Commandant’s posting to this Embassy by almost two months.”

  “That could easily be falsified,” the spokesperson accused, but Tom just nodded to Leigh, awaiting her cue.

  “Yeah, we figured you’d say that. As investigators I’m sure you’re familiar with the open-source code Dynacoder?” she asked, finally engaging with the table. Some of the US delegation nodded. “Good, then you know it’s a reliable and trustworthy piece of code for just these kinds of occasions. For those of you who aren’t up to date on your tech, it’s a verification programme, and it will verify…” she activated it, and watched them as they watched the progress on the screen. Only Jake looked away and watched her. She turned away, for fear of betraying herself and looked back to the screen as the results came back, unarguable proof of the dates. Both she and Tom exchanged smirks at one hurdle down.

  “That proves nothing,” the spokesperson said.

  “It proves everything,” Leigh answered. “You already agreed it was a trusted piece of code, and I can do this on every single file we plan to give you.” Jake held back a smirk at the reaction of his team, knowing everything he did and said would be reported back to Swayne. With no further argument, Tom pressed on in his demonstration, and Jake noted the other folders on the drive that she ignored, opening only one. Tom cued up one of the other Gardaí, who handed the head of the US team a large folder. They’d stamped each document within it in red ink with the Irish government harp, and the words Official Duplicate and a code that Jake assumed was connected to the Embassy. From the quick scan through the packet, each document was initialled by hand, presumably by an Embassy staff member. It was as official as it would get and enough for the evidence to stand up in any court in the land, or anywhere around the world.

  “Your Senator suspected corruption, and she’s right, she’s just looking in the wrong place,” Tom started. “As you’ll see from the documentation, she was deliberately misled.”

  “And what’s stopping this from being another misdirection, another creative story,” the lead agent challenged.

  “We’re trying to cooperate here in the interests of international security. We’re giving you valuable, credible and verifiable intelligence. You can poke this gift horse all you want, but the results will still be the same. Now, if you’re not happy with it, you can always return to your Senator empty handed, and we’ll contact someone else, someone who’ll take what we offer with the seriousness it’s due. Or maybe your Senator is one of those codenames on the list of bribed government officials. Perhaps that’s why you’re blustering and stonewalling,” he accused them.

  With no counter argument, Tom processed the rest of the evidence, and Leigh stayed true to her word of verifying every file. After they examined the paperwork, Tom let the US people talk to Nathan, who gave his answers as clear and succinct as he could, again prepared for this
, and Jake suspected Tom helped him. The questions to Leigh were confined to the tech stuff, and she caught the sly attempts by the Americans to find out what else was on the drive, but she deflected every one of them.

  “Do any of you have a thumb drive?” she asked, surprising them.

  “For what?” the head of the team asked her.

  “I’m not emailing every single one of these documents to you,” she answered. “I presume you’d like an electronic copy as well?” He nodded and retrieved a small drive from his inside jacket pocket, and handed it to her, hovered over her as she inserted it into the hardware.

  “It’s encrypted,” he explained, as he stood over her, and to his annoyance she ignored him, but held her hand up, stopping him from speaking any further.

  “I assumed it would be,” she said, running a security programme against it, her eyes narrowing as she found something else.

  “What else is on it?” Tom asked, interpreting her annoyance, but she called up another programme, and read the lines of code the second one produced. She removed the thumb drive and slammed it on the desk, but looked across to Tom.

  “Crude and amateur attempts to hide an infiltration programme,” she told him. “Not just one, there’s a second, subtler one, embedded behind it thinking I’d only find the first one, and scrub it. That would probably activate the second one. And I’m guessing there’s at least one more, deeper again, but I’m not wasting any more time on it. I’m not using that.” She continued to ignore the US agent standing next to her and concentrated on Tom instead, who glared at the agent.

  “I’ve a clean one,” Jake said, and sent it sliding up the conference table to her.

  “You trust it?” Tom asked.

  “We’ll see,” she answered, and Jake nodded, taking no offence to her checking it. She nodded to Tom. “We’re good.”

  “Although I don’t see why we should be of any more help than we’ve already been,” Tom added.

  “We are the land of Cead Milé Failté’s,” she answered. “And when we’re done, and they have everything, then they can politely fuck off.” Her seemingly polite answer threw the Americans, but all except Nathan on the Irish maintained their composures. She’d get an earful from Adam later about her choice of language while in uniform, but fuck it. “Password?” she asked without looking at Jake.

  “Polkadot, one word, capital P, but with two zeros instead,” he answered and she stalled, looked down the table at him. Tom caught the growing smirk on her face that she tried to rein in as she returned to keyboard. A quick glance at lover boy told Tom it was a personal inside joke between them, and wondered if, by the mirth in her eyes, it had anything to do with the kinky shit between them. Tempted as he was to ask, now was not the time, and in moments she had the files copied to Jake’s drive and slid it back to him.

  “How do we know she hasn’t copied something sneaky onto that drive?” the US agent still standing over her asked.

  “Then you’d better hope your people are as good as she is,” Tom answered, and she shook her head.

  “We’ve better integrity, and nothing to hide,” she said. “But feel free to check. Your people should have the same government issued software checker we use.”

  “That concludes this meeting, and I refer you to what she said earlier,” Tom replied.

  Jake held back, knowing they would report it to Swayne, but with his thumb drive handed over and added to the briefcase with the other documentation, he felt sure he was free of an allegation of collusion.

  “That was some demonstration, and some conspiracy theory,” he said as he approached her, ignoring Tom’s glare, but she gave the Garda a nod, letting him know all was fine, and to give her privacy. She continued shutting down the PC and screen.

  “It’s more than a theory.”

  “And related to the rest of the stuff on the drive you wouldn’t show us?” he pressed.

  “You used one of your safe words” she said, deflecting the conversation. The conference room door opened a notch again, and she knew Tom continued to earwig.

  “Not one of the important ones,” he defended himself, but she laughed.

  “Just the one for when you’re out of your depth, how apt.”

  “You think I’m out of my depth? Sweetheart, you’re swimming in my pond now.”

  “Really? It didn’t seem like yours. It didn’t even seem like theirs. Just what is going on?”

  He tapped his fingers on the table top, his tell-tale sign for when he felt uncomfortable, and she looked up at him, tried to soften her features.

  “Why are you so hell bent on helping him clear his name?” he asked. She hesitated, and he saw that hard mask she tried to hide behind slip away.

  “Because…,” she started and took a breath. “Every time I look at him I see my father, and it hurts, and I realise how much I still miss them, even after all this time. And I want to believe Nate’s telling the truth. I want to believe he’s on the same side, that he really is family.” He stepped closer to her, understanding how she felt, and knowing this was the most vulnerable she’d been with him, possibly with anyone.

  “I’ve never seen this side of you before,” he admitted, “seeing you in full-on official techie action.”

  “Yes you have, when we first met, in Shannon.”

  “Not like this. This is… different, deeper, more dominant than I’ve even seen you.”

  “And?” she challenged him.

  “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

  “I’m not on your side, remember?”

  “You’re fucking good at this,” though it pained him to admit it.

  “I know,” she confessed. “Is that why you really left? Because you were afraid something like this might happen, that we’d be on opposing sides? That one day we might not be allies?” He hesitated and took a breath before nodding.

  “And while I know all your weak points…” he said.

  “I also know all of yours,” she answered. “You know I’d never use them against you.”

  “I know, but I would,” he admitted. She surprised him by nodding and gave him a smirk.

  “I know.”

  He leaned in, making sure it was the right thing to do, and found her waiting for him, daring him to come closer.

  “That uniform suits you,” he whispered. “Not suit, it makes you, completes you.”

  “Does that scare you too?” she whispered back.

  “No,” he answered, his lips meeting hers, but the bang and furore beyond the door broke them apart.

  Jake wasn’t sure when or even how a revolver appeared in her hand as she got to the conference door and opened it, finding the scuffle in the corridor. By the time he got around the conference table she’d thrown herself into the fight, taking the other US agents by surprise. She barged into the closest US agent, making him release his grip on Rainey and now stood between them, her weapon up and defending her half-brother. Tom moved Rainey back another step. They heard running footsteps coming up behind the Americans, more weapons trained on the agents.

  Jake read the scene before him, coming to several rapid conclusions, none of which boded well for continuing good relations with Ireland. The glare Leigh gave him told him she’d reached similar conclusions, but her deductions included him, assumed he was part of this. He tried to let her know, shook his head, a silent communication he hoped she understood that he had nothing to do with this. With more Irish soldiers arriving from their rear, Rainey was now out of the Americans’ reach as the Irish formed a barrier around him. Tom faced the Americans.

  “We have been more than cooperative,” he started in a tone Leigh recognised from her father. It was the measured calm tone all Gardaí seemed to have when dealing with dangerous situations, or in her experience, whenever she was in trouble. “We have given you more than enough evidence to prove Rainey’s innocence and help you solve your own investigation. Get out of this Embassy now, and trust me, your State Department will receive a detailed c
omplaint.”

  “We’re under orders to bring him in, and the State Department won’t entertain your wild accusations with you harbouring a wanted suspect,” the spokesperson said.

  “You’re not getting him without an extradition warrant, which you need proof to get, and yes your State Department will believe us when they see footage from our internal security cameras. Get out, before we throw you out,” Tom threatened, even more menacing in that low, even tone. The spokesperson nodded, and they started to back up, leaving room for Jake to step out.

  “Leigh… I had nothing…” he started, but stalled as Tom stepped in the way.

  “How does it feel Jake?” she asked, pushing Tom aside, and lowering her weapon.

  “How does what feel?” he asked.

  “How does it feel to put your faith so much in one person and let them use you like this?” she asked.

  “Like what?” Jake challenged.

  “As a distraction, a decoy. This is Swayne’s work, and you know it. The snipers trained on us last time may not have been her directly…”

  “But?” he asked, annoyed as she just raised an eyebrow briefly. He knew what that meant, that she had intel to back up her insinuation, intel not handed over.

  “The US Marshalls, or any other federal agency, are not engaged in any act against this Embassy,” one said.

  “So you’re denying any knowledge of any ongoing surveillance?” Tom demanded.

  “There is no surveillance.”

  “Wanna bet?” Tom challenged. He asked for the laser-sight from one rifle, and led them to the front door. He pointed to a building in the distance, then pointed the laser, catching the glass of a camera lens.

  “Roughly the same direction where the laser-sights would’ve come from the day we arrived here,” Jake confirmed. Tom pushed him hard, and he stumbled down the steps, followed by the rest of the US team.

  “We have given you more than enough,” Tom told them, and shut the door once more in their faces. He found Leigh a few steps behind him.