The Pursuit (Alias)

by Elizabeth Skurnick

  “So what do you mean?” Vaughn asked. “Are you saying that you were a test for us?”

  Steve took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket, looked at them longingly, then put them away with a sigh. “Let’s just say that Betty likes to get the most out of John Q. Public’s tax dollars,” he said. “Officially, I was there to investigate the mole. Extra-officially, I was there to see how you all would react to a world-class jerk in your midst.”

  “You were our psychological obstacle course,” Vaughn said, relief beginning to creep back into his bones. Was it possible he hadn’t screwed up royally after all?

  “And how did we do?” Akiko asked, leaning back against the back of the couch with a glance toward Vaughn.

  Steve took the pack out again, considering, then suddenly threw it across the room, where it landed behind a bookcase. He immediately removed another pack from his jeans pocket and stroked it wishfully. “You did well. You know, physical bombs aren’t the only kind you ever have to defuse,” he said, looking at Vaughn and Akiko meaningfully. “A lot of the bombs you’ll meet up with in the field are of the human variety.”

  “And did we defuse you?” Vaughn asked, unsure. It had seemed like they were getting to Nick at the time, but he’d left the Farm so quickly after their plan was put into action, it wasn’t clear.

  “Like I said, you did well,” Steve said, standing up and yawning. “You stuck together well as a team, and, on your own, you were basically pretty unaffected by my maneuvers, whatever you were made to think about your performance.” He leaned down and yawned again, then smiled. “Betty was especially impressed with how you two reacted to pressure,” he said. “Not that you ever heard it from me.”

  Vaughn couldn’t believe it. “So those assessments were doctored?”

  Steve grinned. “Just enough to piss you off,” he said. “But you guys didn’t let it get you down—you came out swinging, which is what Betty was looking for.”

  Akiko frowned. “That seems like a pretty messed-up way to deal with your employees,” she said. “Making them jump through psychological hoops just to see if they have what it takes to stand up in the field.”

  Steve nodded. “It’s a little controversial at the Agency, too,” he said. “Again, you didn’t hear it from me. But Betty’s had a lot of experience with hotshots who flame out once they get into the real deal. I can’t go into detail, but let’s just say there were some pretty spectacular breakdowns.”

  “So Betty makes all the best CTs go through total hell before she lets them get to work?” Akiko asked. “That’s unbelievable.”

  Steve spread his hands in a What, me worry? gesture. “Let’s just put it this way,” he said. “You only had to be her assistants. She practically had me working in the Langley cafeteria.”

  By the time they’d assembled outside the embassy that night, Vaughn had been filled in on their time at the Farm enough that his ego had expanded back to what he considered its original, healthy balloon. Hopefully not into the dangerous region that leads to those breakdowns, he’d thought, checking one last time that the UAV and camera/film cases were firmly strapped into what looked like his paparazzi gear.

  “So the physical stuff was just to get on our nerves too?” he’d asked in one of the last of a series of pointed questions to Steve about that difficult period.

  Steve had grinned again. “Well, actually, I was kind of just feeling you out,” he said, smiling more widely at the look of shock on Vaughn’s face. “Not literally, of course. But we couldn’t find anything in any of your rooms or files that pointed to who the mole was. I was trying to get a grip on who might be wearing some kind of extra equipment.”

  “Literally,” Akiko mused.

  “But our fight was totally staged. Betty thought a blowup might be the best way for me to publicly leave the group without you missing me,” Steve smiled. “Not that you were going to miss me much, whatever I did.”

  “So I didn’t go crazy and beat you up!” Vaughn said, his heart pounding. He hadn’t done anything wrong!

  “Tomato juice, my man,” Steve said, pulling open his collar dismissively to point to where he’d presumably planted the blood packet. “I’m sure you must have wondered how you’d KO’d me when I was the one landing all the punches.”

  “Yes!” Vaughn said, laughing with relief. “I thought I’d really lost it.”

  “Well, I was trying to make you lose it,” Steve said. “But you were just so doggoned patient and correct in disarming all of my provocations.”

  Akiko leaned over and slapped Vaughn on the shoulder. “I told you something weird was going on,” she crowed triumphantly.

  “Believe me, I’ll never doubt your mother’s intuition again,” Vaughn replied, chuckling.

  Steve’s face darkened. “I still never figured out who tampered with the tanks that day,” he said. “I got called down here too quickly to get to the bottom of it, and since Triple Threat was pulling up stakes in Azerbaijan, we had to get here pronto and figure out just what was going on.”

  Vaughn slapped his knee in amazement. “So that’s why you attacked Don for his tank,” he said. “You were just trying to get some air?”

  “That’s right,” Steve said. “But since I’d investigated the mole thing and couldn’t find anything, it seemed like a good excuse to get a dishonorable dismissal at the same time.” He flicked away the ashes from the cigarette he’d finally allowed himself. “I must have given old Don a pretty good scare, though,” he said.

  “So you didn’t find the mole,” Akiko said.

  “No,” Steve said. “We now think that Triple Threat was just blowing some smoke around to pull us off the trail.” He waved at his own cloud of smoke to illustrate and smile. “They’ve gotten a ton of disinformation out there since they’ve realized we might be on to them. It seems like a lot of the intercepts we’ve made might be completely false.”

  “And we’re here to investigate whether this one has any truth,” Vaughn observed.

  “That’s right,” Steve said, grinding out his cigarette. “And if the world is lucky today, the most dangerous thing at Raul Suarez’s compound is the pool in his backyard.”

  The Suarez compound was only a ten-minute ride from the embassy, and Akiko and Vaughn were prepared to tell any authorities that questioned them that they had simply gotten lost on their way to the LeRoc gala. They entered the compound without incident, though, simply flipping over a small stone wall about a mile behind the house Steve had assessed days earlier and declared alarm-free.

  “Cher, we’re in,” Akiko informed Steve through the wireless, invisible mikes Barry and Elena had fastened like crowns over their back molars. Vaughn began to assemble the UAV and set up the laptop and foldable satellite dish to transmit the images to Langley.

  With his Associated Press credentials, Steve was one of the few reporters allowed into the festivities. “Copy that,” he replied, the sounds of hubbub and laughter clearly audible in the background. “Hold your position. Repeat: Whitney and Mariah, hold position until I get a visual on our three musketeers.”

  “Do you think he’ll bring us back a magnum of champagne?” Vaughn asked Akiko, clicking on the laptop to bring up the transmittal bar. The blue bar quickly filled from 1% to 99%, then finally 100%.

  “If you get what you came for,” Steve replied, laughing—Vaughn had neglected to turn off his mike’s Send feature.

  “Link established,” Vaughn said, knowing he must be blushing even in the dark. “Repeat: Cher, we’ve got a link.”

  “All right, I’ve got a visual,” Steve said. “And boy, does she look good enough to eat!”

  “Hey, married man?” Akiko replied, setting up the UAV. “Do you think we could put Nick away for the evening and concentrate on our jobs?”

  “Sorry,” Steve’s voice crackled through. “LeRoc’s a little distracting. Okay, I’ve got our boys at nine o’clock, and we definitely have nothing to worry about. They look like they’re polishin
g off all the champagne in the place, though, Vaughn—sorry.”

  “All right, let’s move,” Vaughn said. Clicking off transmission momentarily, Vaughn ran the laptop’s control test of the UAV and nodded at Akiko. Wordlessly, she flipped open her camera, and the foot-long plane rose up in the air like a helium balloon.

  “Watch the wind,” Vaughn cautioned, noticing the leaves rustling angrily in the trees. “I don’t want this thing slamming into Nicole LeRoc’s face when she’s out smoking on the embassy’s balcony.”

  “Got it,” Akiko said. She had already guided the glider toward the region over the house, and the laptop had begun to spit out a stream of digits, sending them directly over to Langley, where they’d be converted into 3-D images and sent back via satellite.

  “Whitney and Mariah?” Steve’s voice came through the headset, sounding far more animated and tense than before. “We’ve got movement from our three musketeers.”

  Akiko’s voice was equally tense. “Delay them, Cher,” she said. “I’ve got about five minutes of flyover time left before we’ll have what we need.”

  “We’ve got definite movement,” Steve’s voice came back. “Repeat: definite movement from our boys. Finish your stuff and get out of there—I’m going to try to hold them up.”

  Vaughn could picture Steve running after them in the crowd, holding up his reporter’s pad and asking them a few questions about ProTem. Would it be enough to hold them off? And how could they possibly know about the UAV so soon—was their alarm system so sophisticated it could detect it? Even though Vaughn was no expert, he was pretty sure that was impossible.

  There had to still be a mole in the CIA— someone with enough access to information to let Triple Threat know what was going on almost as it happened. But the only people Vaughn knew with access to that information were the three of them, Betty, and the director of opera-tions.

  Who’s telling Triple Threat what’s going on here? Vaughn silently wondered.

  Ticking down the seconds frantically, Vaughn and Akiko finished the flyover and retrieved the UAV. Packing it up as quickly as they could, they leaped over the fence and returned to the road just as a black Mercedes with tinted windows roared up the drive. Slamming themselves into a small dip by the side of the road, Akiko and Vaughn just missed getting caught in the glare of the vehicle’s headlights.

  “Back to the safe house,” Vaughn whispered to Akiko. “Double-time.”

  When the vehicle had made its way to a safe distance up the drive, they leaped out of the gully and back onto the road, where they hailed another cab—thankfully, this one not as decrepit as the first—and made their way past the crush of vehicles around the embassy.

  “Lots of big party tonight,” the driver commented, trying out some clearly rudimentary English as they inched their way by. “Lots of pretty people.”

  “Yes, lots,” Akiko agreed. Vaughn kept trying to get Steve back on the line, but he was getting nothing but air.

  “Cher?” he whispered, keeping his lips almost clamped together so the driver wouldn’t observe anything out of the ordinary. “Cher, do you copy?”

  There was nothing.

  Back at the safe house, Vaughn and Akiko dropped their gear and immediately set up the satellite station again. The phone rang. “Thank God,” Vaughn said, striding over to pick it up. Perhaps Steve had gotten caught in a crush of reporters whose network of global transmissions might well be blocking his own. Whatever it was, Vaughn would be glad to know that the man was all right—he’d started to like Steve as much as he’d disliked Nick.

  But when he picked up the phone, the voice on the other end of the line was Betty’s. “We’ve lost satellite contact with Cher,” she said immediately. “Mariah? Whitney? Do you copy?”

  Grimly, Vaughn answered in the affirmative. “Wait for further instructions,” Betty said, then hung up the phone. Vaughn didn’t need it spelled out to him. It was clear what had happened. Even though they’d gotten the photos, the mission was a complete failure.

  Triple Threat had gotten Steve Rice.

  10

  VAUGHN HIT THE DESK in frustration. “We can’t just leave him there!” he yelled at the circle of faces.

  Betty had immediately called them back to Langley after it was clear what had happened, and Vaughn had spent almost three hours trying to convince her and the director that they needed to send in an extraction team after Steve. Although they’d lost audio feed with him back at the embassy the night before, Barry and Elena had finally been able to pick up a very, very faint GPS signal still being emitted by the mike embedded in his tooth. The only problem was that the signal they were picking up was coming from Azerbaijan.

  “So they took him back to the original location of their operations,” Vaughn said. “We know Suarez has a private jet Triple Threat uses all the time—it makes perfect sense.”

  “Or they just flew the whole tooth to Azerbaijan,” another tech suggested, looking innocently at the horrified faces around him. “What?” he asked, putting up his hands. “You know it’s a possibility. They’ve been trying to throw us off their tails the entire time we’ve been looking into them. It would make perfect sense.”

  “First of all, the chances that someone would remove a tooth and take it to Azerbaijan is ridiculous,” Elena said, vibrating with so much anger that Vaughn thought she was going to crumple her Styrofoam cup while it was still filled to the brim with hot coffee. “Not to mention highly unlikely, since the entire apparatus is lodged in a filling and virtually undetectable. Second, Barry and I designed the GPS to feed off of body heat, so unlike the mike, it’s entirely thermal. That’s why we can still hear it. For your theory to work, you’d have to have a person removing a filling they could never see or sense in the first place, then holding it close enough to their own bodies that it was as hot as the inside of a mouth—which is a lot hotter than the surface of your skin—and therefore still working. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t fly.”

  “So you’re saying that the chances are very good that Steve is still alive,” Vaughn said.

  Elena looked around at the room, then back at Vaughn. “They only pay me about one-third of what I’m really worth at this dump, but I’d stake my entire yearly salary on it, personally,” she said, downing her coffee in one large gulp.

  “For whatever it’s worth, I would too,” Barry said, raising his hand tentatively, then, when no one responded, putting it back in his lap.

  “What worries me,” said Betty, “is the possibility that they know we know where Steve is, and they’re just waiting for us to come get him. I don’t fancy sending a group of my agents into a trap.”

  “But that’s why we’ve got to get him,” Akiko said, sounding as if she was growing more frustrated by the minute. “The fact that they bothered to take Steve with them at all points to the strong possibility that they already know he’s CIA. Once they get whatever intel out of him they’re looking for, his life isn’t even worth what we could bargain for on it, if we move fast enough.”

  “I agree,” the director said, ending the nearly three-hour debate with the first words he’d uttered yet. “I think we need to get an extraction team in, and let’s get it in now. We’ve lost valuable time already.”

  Betty turned to look at Vaughn and Akiko. “Are you up for going? You’ll be coordinating with the people we’ve already got in Azerbaijan. They’re working on some intel we’ve picked up from wiretaps in the area.”

  Vaughn didn’t hesitate. “Get me on a plane,” he said.

  Akiko nodded vigorously. “Me too,” she said. “We’ve worked with Steve before, and we know how to use our strengths to complement his.”

  When I first met this guy, I wanted to kill him, Vaughn thought. Now I’m about to get on a plane and risk my life to save him.

  This time, there was no rickety cab providing transportation from the airport to the safe house. They were met at the field by Don, who had grown ruddier and a little thinner since the last time th
ey’d met.

  “Long time no see!” Don yelled, waving them over. He reached over to give Akiko an awkward hug, then slapped Vaughn on the back, grinning. “You guys have a good trip?” he asked, leaning over to spit a stream of tobacco. Akiko jumped back, startled. “Oh, sorry,” Don said. “Everybody chews here, you know.”

  “I’m starting to think all that stuff about tobacco being addictive might be true,” she said sarcastically, shaking her head at Don as he walked them to the car.

  They passed through the hot, dusty streets, avoiding the occasional loose chicken or other car racing past in the other direction. “So, you guys get anything off of your photos on that mission?” Don said. “Boy, we’d sure love to get something so we could move on that crew—they left here just as I came over, I heard.”

  “No,” Vaughn said distractedly. Something seemed strange about Don, but he couldn’t put his finger on it—the tan or the weight loss, maybe? “The photos got back to Langley okay, but there was only evidence to show that they were setting up a manufacturing space—nothing to point to there being anything down there for sure.”

  “The mission got interrupted,” Akiko said briefly. “Where are we headed, Don?” she asked.

  Don turned around to grin at both of them, and Vaughn realized what was different—he was wearing glasses. He hadn’t worn glasses at the Farm—no one did. There were too many paramilitary maneuvers to make it practical. “The safe house, I toldja,” he said. “Why, do you have to go to the bathroom?”

  Something was tickling at the edges of Vaughn’s brain. Something about the glasses. Don and his glasses.

  In their first meeting, Don had claimed to be a former air force pilot and aeronautical engineer. But he couldn’t have been an air force pilot with glasses. The air force only allowed people with 20/20 vision to become pilots.

  It was possible, Vaughn surmised, his thoughts racing, that Don had only recently gotten the glasses and that nothing funny was going on. But Vaughn’s funny bone was feeling pretty funny to him, and as he looked over at Akiko, he saw that hers was, too.