Double Danger

by Trilby Plants

  She told him about going to class, and crashing into Nick’s car and Nick taking her home. She stumbled over him spending the night on her chair. Will raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch, but said nothing. She told him about the bullet in her tire, the trashing of her house, and how she had run from the two men in the dark car. Her voice breaking, she told him about Carl’s shooting ‒ as much as she remembered ‒ and their panicked flight north and her fear she was a kidnap victim. She repeated the conversation she’d had with Carl’s girlfriend. She said nothing of her feelings for Nick. It wouldn’t help Will to know that. It was none of his business, and she wasn’t sure how she felt, anyway.

  She ended with the newspaper account of the shooting. “At the campground I saw the newspaper ‒”

  “That’s how I recognized you,” Will interrupted. “I saw it in the paper this morning before I left for work. And then a BOLO came into the office.”

  Alyssa opened her mouth to ask what that meant.

  “Be on the lookout,” Will said.

  Alyssa nodded.

  Will refreshed her coffee. “Go on.”

  Alyssa took a sip of the hot liquid, savoring the normalcy of a cup of coffee, the turbulence of her life held briefly at bay.

  “So,” she said, “there was my picture in the paper for something I didn’t do. For something that didn’t even happen. I guess when I saw that, I finally believed at least some of what Nick had told me, and that we couldn’t go to the police. We need to find out who is after us and why. So we came to you hoping you could help.” Alyssa breathed carefully. She had been tested. Had she passed?

  Will let out his breath. “Jesus.” He looked from her to Nick. “They put you in the Program.” Nick nodded. “And somebody knows who you are.”

  “Who?” Nick said. “At first I thought it was someone from my past. Or maybe the Agency is cleaning up loose ends. But none of that makes sense. I have no idea who’s at the bottom of this. I think I know where to get some answers.”

  “Did you talk to the Marshals?” Will said.

  “I called my handler,” Nick said. “He was killed in Detroit last week. Probably not a random shooting. It could be coming from them.”

  “How?” Will set his coffee cup down.

  Nick shrugged. “Maybe the Marshal Service got hacked. Maybe there’s a mole. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “What can I do?” Will’s voice held quiet assurance.

  Alyssa guessed she had passed the test.

  “We need the things from my desk at work,” Nick said. “I think there’s a flash drive that may have what these guys are looking for. You said you took them instead of sending them to evidence.”

  Will rose, opened a cupboard door and pulled out a large, opaque plastic canister. He took off the top, pushed down into what sounded like rice and pulled out a plastic bag. He crossed the room and dropped the bag in front of Nick.

  “Your flash drives,” he said. “They were in a box on your desk. Six of them, all labeled personal. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to keep them. I knew how paranoid you’d become in the weeks before you ... before you died.” He shrugged. “I thought they might be important. Everything else went to evidence lockup.”

  Nick was already unzipping the bag. He spread out the six drives in front of him. They were all black, and each had been labeled with a white paint pen Personal.

  “This one,” he said, plucking one from the pile.

  “How do you know?” Alyssa said.

  “I spelled personal in all caps. Now I need a computer.” He turned to Will.

  “Follow me. Cathy took our laptop with her.” Will led them upstairs to a mauve and white bedroom. Stuffed animals perched on bookshelves along with neat lines of books, and the bed was covered with dolls. A pair of scuffed tennis shoes sat under a white ladder back chair draped with a mint green warm-up jacket. On a desk in front of the chair sat a laptop computer, its top closed.

  Will gestured. “Help yourself. It’s Sara’s, but she won’t mind.”

  “Sara has a computer?” Nick said.

  Will nodded. “She’s not so little anymore. She’s eleven. Besides, my sister insisted we get her one. Remember the sister we saved from Kevin Wilkerson? Maggie sells real estate in Green Bay. She says young women today need be tech savvy, and Sara shouldn’t have to use the family computer. Maggie basically bullied us into buying Sara her own. And she has her own cell phone. She sends me e-mail and Twitters and Facebooks.”

  Nick cleared his throat. “Tweets,” he said. “Hope you have safeguards.”

  Will nodded. “Plenty.”

  Nick turned to them. “Look, I don’t know what we’ll find here, and I don’t know what we’ll do with it when we find it. This is supposed to be government business, and we may be breaking a couple of federal laws by just looking at it. National security and such.”

  Will’s forehead wrinkled. “So what are you saying? We should just mail it to the Agency with an apology, and that’ll take care of it? And hope the people who are after you just vanish?”

  Alyssa’s mind turned in on itself. So many questions, so few answers. Now she had met Will and had seen the friendship the two men shared, she abandoned any doubts she had harbored about Nick. Or whatever his name was.

  “No.” Alyssa kept her gaze on Nick. “No, he’s saying maybe we should wait outside while he looks. And the answer is, no. Emphatically, definitely, positively no.”

  Nick started to speak, but Alyssa gave him no chance.

  “I got stitches from crashing into your car. My house was trashed. I’ve been shot at. My friend was shot. I’m wanted by the police, dammit ‒ unjustly, might I add. I’ve been pushed and dropped and pulled over seats and jolted around on crappy roads and generally scared to death, and I am not going to sit back while you, through some misguided sense of chivalry or patriotic loyalty, leave me out of the answer.” Her fists were clenched, and anger warmed her cheeks.

  Nick put his hands on her shoulders. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I just thought maybe you’d be better off if you” ‒ he glanced at Will ‒ “both of you, didn’t know what was going on here.”

  “I already don’t know what’s going on,” Alyssa said. “Now it’s time I did.”

  Will leaned against the door, crossed his arms and nodded. “What she said.”

  “Okay.” Nick said. “Let’s find out.”

  He seated himself and opened the laptop. Alyssa perched on the edge of the bed. When the computer was up and running, he inserted the flash drive into one of the USB ports.

  “Now,” he said, “we’ll see what’s caused all this uproar.”

  A menu displayed on the screen, unlike anything Alyssa had ever seen. Nick clicked on an icon, and the screen filled with a list of images. He opened one. A poorly rendered panorama of a forest scene appeared. He closed that image and clicked on several more in succession. They were not photos. Looked more like bad paintings.

  A cottage made of hay bales at the edge of a forest. The next image showed the cottage demolished, hay scattered everywhere. A house made of logs, then destroyed as if by a mighty wind. He closed the folder and opened another. Music files. The first one a poorly executed piano theme. Several clicks brought variations of the theme. Then a recognizable tune.

  Alyssa hummed along with the music.

  “You know this?” Nick glanced sideways at her.

  “Sure. They’re playing your song.”

  Nick shook his head. “I don’t follow you.”

  “It’s ‘Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ From Disney’s animated version of the Three Little Pigs.”

  Nick stared at her. “How ‒”

  “I teach little kids, remember?” Alyssa said. “We play games, we watch movies. I know the song.”

  “Sing it for me.”

  Alyssa took a deep breath and sang the opening line.

  Will repeated the Tra-la-la, his deep voice sonorous. “She’s right, buddy. I have kids of my own, you k
now.”

  Nick’s stony countenance broke into a half smile. “Okay.” He turned back to the computer.

  He clicked on more image files. There were pigs, a wolf, landscapes, house interiors.

  He leaned back in his chair. “Nothing,” he said. “It looks like concept art for a game. Some of it looks professional, but most of it’s pretty amateurish. And there’s no game, at least not on this drive.”

  He typed a command, and the screen went black.

  “What happened?” Alyssa said.

  “Just looking into the files, see if anything is hidden.” Numbers and symbols appeared. Nick switched to another screen. Same thing. Alyssa didn’t see any point to it. Must be what programmers called code.

  Again Nick typed a command. He furrowed his brow and crossed his arms while lines of numbers and symbols filled the screen. “Nothing in the subdirectories. Where the hell could it be?” He stared at the screen.

  “This doesn’t look like the work of a real coder,” Will said. “There’s no game. It’s just some art and some crappy music. A high school geek could do more than this.”

  “Okay,” Nick said. “Maybe this was done by an amateur. Where would a neophyte coder hide something?”

  He clicked a few times and a cascade of images filled the screen, layer on layer. He hovered the cursor over one, a crudely drawn pig, then closed the image. He did the same for the dozen or so character images.

  “Where is it?” Nick muttered. A click of the mouse and the images vanished, replaced by a grid of labels. He hovered the cursor over each one in turn. For each one, a small window popped up giving the information for the image. Alyssa recognized the technique. A quick way to see the data on a file.

  “Gotcha,” Nick said.

  “What?” Alyssa leaned over his shoulder.

  “See this file?” Nick pointed to one of the image icons. He double-clicked and a panoramic scene appeared. “No way should it be this big. Something is hidden in the picture.”

  “How?” Alyssa said.

  Nick leaned over the keyboard tapping keys.

  “You can hide information in an image,” Will said. “It’s quite easy. If you’re not looking for it, you’d miss it.”

  A few more keystrokes brought up another window.

  “A password,” Alyssa said. “More spy stuff?”

  “Not tradecraft. Common sense, since this appears to be what’s important.” He furrowed his brow in concentration. “What password would someone use?” His fingers were poised over the keys. “Usually a programmer uses something like his mother’s maiden name, but we don’t know who did this. And mother’s maiden names can be found. Jerry had the drive first. But the person he got it from, whoever did the programming, must have been the one who encrypted the file and the password.”

  “Wolf?” suggested Alyssa. “Big Bad? BBW? BBWolf?”

  Nick tried each in turn. Nothing.

  “Who’s afraid?” she said. Me, she thought.

  Nick shook his head. “No. It’d be more complicated. A pet’s name, maybe. Or, better ‒ and harder to crack ‒ an alphanumeric.”

  “What?” Alyssa said.

  “A random combination of letters and numbers. Even a beginning coder would have enough sense to do that. But if the information is meant for someone else, it has to be fairly easy to remember, or else there’s a decryption key included, and I haven’t seen any.”

  “Where would Jerry have gotten this information?” Will said.

  Nick shook his head. “If we knew that ….” He trailed off, leaning close to the screen, deep in concentration.

  “What now?” Alyssa said.

  “I’m copying the flash drive to the hard drive,” he said. “I have an idea.”

  He removed the flash drive and replaced it with another of his Personal drives. When the window came up, he scrolled down the display of files. Apparently not finding what he sought, he ejected the drive and checked another, then another. On the fourth try, he found what he was looking for and clicked on a program.

  “Whoa,” Will said. “Hacker’s companion.”

  “What?” Alyssa turned a questioning look at him.

  “It’s a program that’ll unlock a password,” Will said. “I’m not about to ask him where he got it. It’s probably Dark Web or some government secret.”

  “It is,” Nick said, not elaborating.

  “I know nothing,” Alyssa said. She wanted to turn away, protect herself from forbidden knowledge, but she could not. She was in too deep.

  Within seconds the computer screen contained a window running columns of letters and numbers. Nick leaned back in the chair. “This could take a while.”

  Will raised his mug. “More coffee, anyone?”

  Both Nick and Alyssa nodded. Will left and came back with the pot. He refilled the three mugs and returned the pot to the kitchen. Just as he was walking back into the bedroom the characters on the screen stopped scrolling and showed a series of numbers interspersed with letters, like a frozen combination lock.

  “Got it,” Nick said. “Good thing it wasn’t a pro who did this.”

  A couple of clicks later the screen was filled with a long column of alphabetized names, last name first. Each name was followed by a city and a number-letter combination. Partway through the list Alyssa spotted the name Travis Nickels and further down William Stevens.

  “Nick, what does it mean?” she said.

  “I don’t know all the names,” Will said, “but I know some, and I know what this means. I’ve seen lists like this before. They’re operatives, the cities are their base of operations.”

  “I think the letters mean current status,” Nick said, his voice thick. “The first three on the list are marked D for deceased, followed by the date, followed by H, meaning they were terminated by someone with the code H. The next is Ed Parker ‒ my friend ‒ marked with a T for terminate ‒ and the code H. Then Jerry Welch, also marked with a T and the letter H.” He took a ragged breath and continued, “And there’s my name with the same code.”

  Alyssa gasped. “They did mean to kill you.”

  Nick pointed to the screen. “Will, you’re on the list with no letter. The rest of the names all have D or T.” He whistled. “I think they’ve listed almost the entire network in Europe, active and retired. Whoever this H is did a lot of damage. There are at least a dozen names marked D.”

  Alyssa felt sick to her stomach. “What would someone do with this list?”

  Nick looked at Will before he answered. “I think more people would have been killed. Someone might have wanted to sell this list.”

  A chill raced through Alyssa’s body. “Who are they, the people who set this up?”

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “In recent years, spies have come in from the cold ‒ they’ve unmasked themselves, and most of the people on this list are either out of the business or out in the open.” He scrolled down to another list ‒ no names, just long numbers. “And I’m not sure what this means.”

  Will leaned over and peered at the screen. “Could be anything. Computer codes ‒”

  “It’s money.” Nick’s voice was breathy.

  “What do you mean?” Will asked.

  “Money,” Nick repeated. “That’s what the dollar signs are. It’s not computer code.” He pointed. “These are account numbers. I used to make money transfers to accounts like this. Sometimes a dozen deposits totaling a million or more. I made the deposits, and as soon as they were done, I erased my tracks and hid the origin of the money so it couldn’t be traced. I never knew whose money it was or the purpose. Didn’t have that kind of authorization. Someone must have copied these account numbers from the mainframe ‒” He stopped and scanned the list. “There’s a lot of money here.”

  “How much?” Alyssa said.

  “Millions,” Nick said. “Tens of millions. If someone copied the information to this drive and deleted it all from the backup tapes of the system, it would never be missed. Whoever i
t is has access to a huge sum of money. It has to be someone inside. And I have the only copy of the account numbers.”

  “That’s why those men are after us,” Alyssa said. “They must have thought we were working together, and maybe I had the drive. That’s why they trashed my house.”

  Nick nodded. “Whoever’s responsible for all this, he’s dangerous. It could be anybody. It has to be someone high up in some agency: maybe NSA, CIA, FBI, or the Federal Marshals. If not the Marshals, he would know how to find someone like me in the Program. Maybe the list of agents was an unexpected bonus. Damned if I know. But this much money could fund an entire country’s military. Or a nuclear weapons program. Or a terrorist organization.”

  Will let out a deep sigh. “I’m beginning to see your problem. I’m not sure I can help, buddy. This may be beyond help.”

  Alyssa’s heart sank into a morass of self-pity – and longing for her normal, orderly life that seemed so long ago.

  Chapter 15

  Hunter drove the dark Ford Taurus slowly down the residential street. Mist and shadows from maple trees pressed the streetlights to pools of pale light. Beside him Charlie took a last drag from his cigarette, then flipped it out the open window. It made a momentary bright trail as it arced out and sparked when it hit the pavement.

  Hunter hated the smell of cigarettes. Hated how Charlie smelled after he smoked.

  “Christ,” Hunter said. “It’s bad enough you got to smoke. You don’t throw out your butts.” Charlie was an idiot.

  Charlie lit another cigarette, muffling the flare of his lighter with his hands. He exhaled smoke out the open window, leaned back in the seat. “Who gives a shit?”

  “DNA,” Hunter said.

  Charlie rolled his eyes. “Who the hell’s going to go along a street and pick up random shit like that?”

  Hunter said nothing. The time for talking to Charlie was past. Charlie’s tenure in the street gangs of New York City had brought him to his role as assistant to an assassin. Wolf had foisted him on Hunter so he could learn the trade from an expert. If Charlie thought he would someday be as good as Hunter, able to branch out, get his own jobs, make his own money, he was mistaken.