Double Danger

by Trilby Plants

  The muscles in his jaw clenched, as if he would speak. He was silent a long moment. Finally, he turned toward her. “I haven’t lied, exactly. I just didn’t tell you everything. I couldn’t.”

  She held up a hand to stop his words. “This isn’t about routine information, is it?” He shook his head. She swallowed, not fully believing her own conclusion. “You really are a spy, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “I was a spook. People like me operate in the shadows, and the government denies we exist. But we’re very much alive and doing jobs that need to be done. The old joke is when friends ask us what we really do for a living, we’d say if we told them we’d have to kill them. The paper company job was legitimate. I sold paper, mostly foreign contracts. You know, three million pounds of newsprint for the London Times, a thousand cases of archival paper to a museum in Rome or the Vatican. I was a computer expert ‒ a Black Ops intelligence agent. I worked with two other people ‒ Ed and Jerry. We dealt with computer systems ‒ I told you the truth about that.”

  “What kind of computers?” Alyssa imagined rows of blinking lights in some secretive building.

  “My team ‒ Ed and Jerry and I ‒ we were white hat hackers. The good guys. We fixed big systems ‒ banks, governments, global investment companies. Sometimes we worked on server farms.”

  “Server farm?” Alyssa couldn’t even conjure a mental image of that term.

  “Places around the world that house many big computers where data are stored.”

  Alyssa rolled her eyes. “The almighty Cloud.”

  He shrugged and went on. “We also delivered encrypted information that couldn’t be trusted to electronic channels that could be hacked. We had diplomatic immunity. We carried documents that were too sensitive to be transmitted electronically. And we helped people defect. Scientists, government officials and other important people. We got them out of their lives into new ones ‒ the CIA reinvented them. We didn’t ask questions, just did what we were told, because we thought we were doing the right thing for our country. I thought nobody could get to me.”

  “This really is like some spy movie,” Alyssa whispered.

  “Not nearly so glamorous and not that dangerous.” Nick shrugged. “Our operation was code named Big Bad Wolf. We answered to someone in the NSA called Wolf ‒”

  “And I suppose you were the three little pigs,” Alyssa said.

  Nick nodded, his expression serious. “We joked about that. Dark humor. None of us ever met the man called Wolf or talked directly to him. None of us knew who he was.”

  “What else did you do?” Had he hurt people? Had he killed anyone? That was a thought too awful to voice.

  “Sometimes we delivered shipments outside the Agency to blind drops. Money. Jewels. Negotiable bonds. Things easily converted to cash. Besides fixing computer systems, I made electronic transfers between banks. Some legitimate, some not. All in the interests of national security. At first I thought it was all justifiable.” He paused.

  Rain sluiced down from the sky making the world watery. It drummed on the top of the SUV. Normally, a soothing sound, now it had an ominous undertone. Nick put his window up.

  “I believed what I was told,” he said. “It was government business. Then things changed. Ed and Jerry and I ‒ got a man out of the Middle East.” He fell silent.

  Alyssa waited.

  Nick shook his head. “It was a huge op. Navy Seals grabbed the guy and gave him to me. He posed as my assistant. I made transfers – a huge amount of money. Tens of millions from various financial institutions. I passed the guy off to Jerry, and he got him to Ed who flew him into the US.

  “We thought we helped him defect, and the money was going to our government. Later, after some huge cyberattacks, I questioned what we had done. The guy probably got immunity in exchange for information and money, but it didn’t stop anything.”

  Nick shifted in his seat. “All that blood money …. I didn’t know at the time, but I found out later he was a fundraiser for terror groups – Al Qaeda, Hamas, ISIS.

  “Do you mean people knew about attacks ahead of time and did nothing?”

  He shook his head. “No, I honestly don’t think so. But I’m convinced this man helped fund the people who carried out the attacks. After that, I had a few close calls. Things happened that nobody could have known about. One big computer operation went wrong. Someone hacked into the mainframe of a system I had fixed and made it look like I flubbed the whole thing. A bank with billions in assets. Some of those assets disappeared. I began to think I was being set up. For what, I didn’t know.”

  Nick’s expression darkened. Anger filled his eyes.

  “I wanted out. A field operative can’t live forever on tradecraft and luck. I was afraid my luck was running out. You’re always on duty, every second of every day. You can’t trust anybody. You look at a man in a restaurant and wonder if he’s just a customer or someone who’s after you with some untraceable poison.

  “How much would somebody pay him to kill you? You hope you’re worth a fortune. A woman on the street pushing a stroller is a concern. What if there’s a bomb in it instead of a baby? You get on a plane and imagine that the young couple in the seat in front of you are terrorists willing to blow up an entire planeload of people just to get to you.

  “You’re afraid you’re terribly important, and worried you’re completely expendable. I asked to be relieved of duty. A few months, they told me. A few months to clear up my record, debrief me, make certain there would never be anything to connect me with the Agency.” He hesitated.

  “What happened?” Fat drops of rain splattered the windshield. Another streak of lightning lit the sky, and thunder whumped against the Suburban.

  “Three and a half years ago Jerry was killed in a car crash near London. He ran off a country road and ended up in a haystack. The gas tank exploded, and the hay burned. The police said he was drunk. Way over the legal limit.”

  “How awful,” Alyssa said.

  Nick chuckled, a mirthless sound. “Jerry didn’t drink. At all. He was my friend. I knew him. He had a thing about putting anything into his body that would affect his judgment. He’d get a glass of club soda at a party and fake it. People thought he held his liquor well. His death wasn’t an accident.”

  “Straw.” Alyssa said. This was getting cheesy.

  Nick nodded. “My friend Ed was a corporate pilot. An excellent one. Graduate of the University of Iraq. He was one of those flyboys who piloted the planes that delivered the smart bombs. When he got out of the Air Force, he flew a Lear jet that took the CEO of an enormous financial conglomerate around the world, and they don’t let just any fool do that. So it shouldn’t have happened. The NTSB ruled it a freak accident. Catastrophic engine failure on takeoff. An engine came apart and shredded the plane’s hydraulics. An engine that had been properly checked and serviced. Ed tried to bring the plane back in, but he crashed into the forest in upstate New York.” He shifted in his seat. “The second pig.”

  “Sticks,” Alyssa said. He looked at her quizzically. “I remember seeing it on the TV news. The announcer said the plane plowed through the trees like they were sticks.”

  “Exactly. Both were staged by experts.”

  “This is too much like a bad movie.”

  Nick’s eyes focused on something in his past. “This is real, and apparently someone has a perverse sense of humor.”

  Alyssa wanted to touch him, but she could not move. This was a man who knew guns – and death.

  “I was the third pig,” he said. “I lived in an old brick house on a quiet street in Escanaba. Not exactly a breeding ground for spies and international intrigue.” He looked through the rain-washed windshield. The trees swayed and sighed in the wind. Lightning forked across the sky. Thunder cracked, farther away this time.

  “I was supposed to leave that night on the last flight out – there were only two a day – for Shanghai to negotiate a contract with a big Chinese printing company. It was a
cover for helping some high ranking North Korean official defect. A series of bad storms rolled through the area. There was a tornado – did some damage. My flight was cancelled. I was rescheduled for the first plane in the morning.”

  His eyes weren’t quite focused. “I went home. There were two men waiting in the house. One had a knife. Silent and efficient.” He swallowed, inhaled. “They left me to bleed out on the kitchen floor. You saw the scar on my chest.”

  Alyssa nodded. He’d said it was an accident. Not exactly a lie.

  “They must have figured I was too far gone to save myself. They laughed and joked as they splashed gas around the basement so the floor joists would burn.” His eyes clouded, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “They set it up so the fire would start after they left. A candle burning on the kitchen floor. A propane tank with a broken valve. Propane sinks and pools. When it reached the flame, boom. It was supposed to look like a tragic accident.”

  “How cruel.” Horror constricted Alyssa’s throat, making it difficult to breathe.

  Nick turned toward her and rested one arm on the back of the seat. “They left. Just walked out and left me to burn. I crawled into the mudroom. That’s what saved my life. The explosion didn’t blow the house apart. It blew me out the back door. Somehow, I crawled away from the house.” He blinked. Alyssa wanted to smooth away his frown. “In seconds, the whole house was in flames. I made it to the yard. I’d lost a lot of blood, but all I could think of was that someday I’d get even with them.

  “I had a friend, Will Stevens, who was a sheriff’s deputy. He’d been recruited by the Agency in college. He’d quit the Agency a couple of years before I did. He was an analyst, not a field agent. But he knew my secrets. I knew he’d help me. I wouldn’t let the paramedics take me until Will promised he’d contact the Agency. When I got to the hospital, I died.”

  “You died?”

  “Even Will thought I had. They told me he came to my funeral.” Nick took a deep breath and continued, “It was the best way to keep me safe from whoever was after me. The doctors didn’t know for a while if I’d make it, and I guess I didn’t care. The knife did a lot of damage. I should have died. But I needed protection. So the Agency declared me dead and got me into another hospital under an assumed name and tried to save my life. I was there a couple of months and another six months in rehab. At some point, I decided to live. I thought that outliving the enemy would be good revenge.”

  He paused, took a deep breath. “I had a little plastic surgery. And the beard and mustache helped. They gave me a new identity. I came out of that hospital a new person. A different person. I have a birth certificate, social security number, school records, work records – everything to prove I’m Nicholas Trammel. Even copies of my college yearbooks – undergrad and grad school – with my new picture in them and signed by fictitious friends. Colleges I never went to. I was assured that if anyone checked, my records were on file there. And people would vouch for me. Even my imaginary friends.”

  Alyssa reached out and touched his arm. She ran her fingers across his skin, aware of how tense his muscles were. He did not pull away, neither did he relax at her touch. Suddenly self-conscious, she clenched her hands together in her lap.

  His expression softened. “I had plenty of time in the hospital to think. I felt betrayed that somebody would attack me in my own home, and the all-powerful Agency couldn’t – or wouldn’t – do a damn thing to prevent it – or find out who was responsible. Hurting and hating got me nowhere. I couldn’t go back. So I tried to put it behind me.

  “When I was well enough to be on my own, Witness Security stepped in. US Marshals took over, and I was assigned someone to help me settle into a new life: new town, new job. The old me didn’t exist. The records of who I was were sealed or destroyed. My digital footprint was reinvented.” He scoffed, a faint sardonic smile. “Government geeks are almost as good at hacking as I am. My handler never knew who I was. He only knew the new me.”

  “So what does this have to do with our problem?” Alyssa said.

  “Background. Background is always important. I keep going over it, thinking I missed something. Two days before the fire, I got an envelope at work from Ed. He’d been dead a couple of months. He must have had someone keep it and mail it for him. It was a flash drive with a note telling me not to give it to anybody. He said that if I had the package, he must be dead, and I should hang onto it.

  “I figured since Ed thought it was important, I’d keep it safe until I had time to deal with it. I was headed out of the country. You know that old trick about hiding something in plain sight? I put it in a pen holder on my desk at work. I never got to look at it. That night they burned my house.

  “So,” he said, his voice soft, “after almost a year of rehab and several surgeries I just lived my quiet, made-up life for the last two years. Until the night before last when I met you, and all hell broke loose.” He gripped the steering wheel and stared out at the rain running in rivulets down the windshield.

  Alyssa put thoughts in order. “Then your life is in danger because you have information that threatens someone.”

  He turned and looked at her. “Both of our lives, Alyssa. We’re in this together. I’m really sorry.”

  Being sorry would solve nothing, Alyssa thought. “And that information is on a flash drive.”

  “So I would guess.”

  “Did you talk to the person you mentioned – your handler?”

  “That was the call I made at my place. He was killed a few days ago. I think someone is tying up loose ends.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Alyssa said. “Someone thinks you might have given me some information. But you don’t have it. And you don’t know what it is, but you might know where it is. So if you turn that information over to the authorities – not the police, the Agency – then you’ll be safe. We’ll be safe.”

  Nick’s gaze faltered. “It’s not that simple, Alyssa. Two problems. First of all, I’m not sure what happened to the drive. It might have been thrown away. It might have gone into storage somewhere. It could be anywhere. Or nowhere. And what could be so damned important that someone’s willing to kill for it?”

  Half thoughts flitted through Alyssa’s mind. “I can’t imagine. Wouldn’t the place you worked give your personal things to your family?” Family, thought Alyssa: mother, father, wife. What if there was a wife waiting somewhere who thought he was dead?

  “No.” Nick shook his head emphatically. “No family. My parents died young, and my Grandmother raised me. She passed away when I was in college.” Alyssa breathed easier. No family. She glanced again at his right hand. The ring was gone. She didn’t know when he had removed it.

  “Okay,” she said. “So we don’t know where the drive is. What’s the second problem?”

  He looked directly at her. “How would anybody know to come after me unless my identity were blown?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It had to come from within the Agency or WITSEC.” She flashed him a puzzled expression. “Witness protection. There must be a mole.”

  “What?” She was playing a part in a spy movie.

  “A double agent,” he said. “If he’s selling identities, a lot of people could get hurt. Families. I dealt with important people, Alyssa. Scientists, economists, bankers. Movers and shakers. People who understand the importance of peace and democracy. And some unsavory ones, too.”

  “Do you have any idea who the mole might be?”

  “Not a clue. But I think that flash drive might be the key. There must be something on it that’s valuable to someone.” His eyes became more animated, not as dark.

  “You don’t know what it is or where it is.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They think I do.”

  “So they know who you really are, and they’re trying to get you. And me by association. What are we going to do?” She laced her fingers together, resisting a sudden urge to put her arms around him and draw comfort f
rom him. A hug would not fix this dilemma.

  “We could run,” he said.

  “Oh, right. I’ve got a hundred dollars in my pocket, and my MasterCard would get us to New York – maybe – and then what?”

  “You can’t use your credit card. They can –”

  “Track us. That’s why you got rid of my cell phone.” She stared at him. How could they possibly run? Where would they go?

  “I have money,” he said with quiet intensity. “Enough to go to Rio. Or Costa Rica. Get lost forever.”

  “Come on, Nick. We’d need a lot of money.”

  He leaned toward her. “A few hundred thousand dollars would go a long way in Costa Rica. Even for two people.”

  “A few hundred thou –”

  “I have some cash in the bag I took from the apartment. From the day I started working for the Agency I made contingency plans. I run an obscenely lucrative computer security consulting company, and I invested well. I have a passport under an assumed name and the money belongs to that identity. I have legitimate credit cards in that name with prepaid amounts. And I have more stashed in a bank in the Caymans. Close to half a million. You could come with me. I owe you that. We can split the money and go our separate ways. I can get you a fake passport. You could just disappear.”

  “Leave my life?” she said. Even with what was happening, how could she consider it?

  “I haven’t left you much of a life, have I?”

  “Oh, Nick. I read books. I watch movies. Those men can follow us. We’d always be looking over our shoulders. With the resources they probably have, they’d find us eventually. Right?”

  He shrugged.

  Alyssa put a hand on his arm. “There has to be someone we can ask for help.”

  His hand dropped from the steering wheel to his lap. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on. There has to be something we can do.”

  His eyes became cold as steel. “You don’t get it, Alyssa. There’s no way out. My handler is dead. The person I was died three years ago. Who does a dead man go to for help?”