by Leigh Barker
Andie sat for a moment, realised Ethan was already at the door and almost ran after him.
He closed the door behind them and smiled at her. “Orpheus directive? Where did that come from?”
She returned the smile, but her legs were still shaking a little and it faded. “Star Trek, I think. Something like that.”
“Sounds like the sort of thing Captain Kirk would say.”
“Who’s Captain Kirk?” She walked away down the wide corridor.
He sighed. “Jesus, kids don’t know anything these days.”
It took the gate guard five seconds to check Ethan’s ID; then he waved him through. And gave Andie a bright smile.
“He likes you,” Ethan said.
Andie blushed. “Why are we here exactly?” she said, changing the subject.
“There’s a computer geek here I’ve worked with. He’s outstanding, but don’t tell him I said so.”
She stared straight ahead without speaking.
Ethan got it. “Don’t worry, I’m not thinking of replacing you. You’re a way smarter geek than him.” He caught the quick look. “Not that you’re a geek. But if you were, you’d be smarter than their geek.”
That sorted that out.
The security in the NCIS reception didn’t check his ID; they didn’t need to. The sailor looked up and handed him a pass without taking his eyes off Andie.
“What is it with these city sailors?” she said as they made their way to the elevator. With the sailor’s eyes still on her.
Ethan reached for the elevator button just as the doors opened.
“Heard you were in town,” Kelsey said, and stepped out into the foyer. She glanced at Andie. “You know liking them younger is a sign you’re getting old.”
“This is Andie Shea,” Ethan said. “Andie, this is Special Agent Kelsey Lyle.”
“The one we’re not supposed to talk to?” Andie said innocently.
Kelsey took Ethan’s arm and led him across the foyer to the sofas and sat him down. She remained standing. A power thing.
“Why aren’t you supposed to talk to me? And who told you not to?”
“Because you’re a distraction,” Ethan said, with a broad smile. “And you sure are. Your boss told me to keep my head down.”
“The director told you to avoid me?”
“No, his boss.”
“SecNav. Okay, spill.”
“I do, I’ll have to walk the plank, or whatever the hell they do with marines who disobey a direct order.”
“Shoot them, but that’s nothing to what I’ll do to you if you obey it.”
Andie raised her eyebrows and wandered off to stare at the guard, just so he’d know how it felt.
Ethan told her. Even the bit about the two nukes. All his military life he’d obeyed orders. At least the ones that made sense, and not talking to the smartest woman he’d ever met made no sense at all.
She sat on the sofa next to him without speaking for a whole minute, but it felt longer. Then she shuffled around, pulled down the hem of her blue skirt over her knees to help him concentrate, and collected her thoughts for a few more seconds.
“Six months to build the orbiter is optimistic, but doable. If the buyer throws enough resources at it.”
“He will. He’ll want to get his plan done before we catch on to what he’s up to. It’s a pure fluke that Andie found the data on the drug lord’s computer.”
“And he’s got to source two nukes.” She waved him silent before he could speak. “Okay, yeah, I know. That’s the least of his problems.”
She looked past him at the wall. “The orbiter is built with exotic materials. Ablative polymers.” She frowned while she pulled it together. “Lightweight composites for the structure. Pressurized tridyne for population.”
“How do you know all that stuff?” Ethan was genuinely impressed.
“I read.”
“Gotta give that a try one of these days.”
“These materials aren’t easy to come by. They’ll need to approach specialized aerospace providers. Everything will be serialized and recorded.”
“And where there’s records…” He hoped she’d fill in the blanks on reflex and not notice he’d run out of gas at that point.
“Right. There’ll be computers.” She smiled at him. “And where there’s computers, Ed can weave his magic.”
“That’s just what I was thinking.”
She met his gaze and started to wonder how he’d manage that without reading them in, but her head was elsewhere.
“While Ed does his thing on the supply chain, we should try to find the supplier. What did you say he was calling himself? Oedipus?”
“Orpheus.”
“Right. Same country. One played in a band; the other married his mother.” She shrugged. No comment.
“Your range of knowledge is astounding,” Ethan said, without even raising his eyebrows to give it away.
Kelsey watched Andie give up on the guard, turn and stroll back.
“Who’s the kid with Asperger’s?”
“What?” Ethan twisted in his seat to look at Andie as she walked slowly around the outside of the foyer with her eyes downcast.
Kelsey tutted. “Don’t you ever look above a woman’s neck?”
“Yeah, of course. It’s embarrassing kissing her nose.”
Kelsey chuckled. “Not the first time though, right?”
“You should know.”
Andie cut across the last few feet of open space and waited by the sofa without speaking.
“So, Petty Officer Andie Shea is my computer ge—expert. And every bit as good as Ed.” He added the last part quickly before it got away.
“Thanks. I think,” Andie said. “Who’s Ed?”
“You’ll meet him right now,” Kelsey said, standing. “You two will get on like a…a…” She turned to Ethan, but he was just grinning.
“Come on,” Kelsey said, and took Andie’s arm without thinking, then let it go when she jumped.
“She has the same effect on me,” Ethan said, walking past and displaying his usual level of tact and empathy with fellow humans.
Kelsey stopped and looked Andie over. “Plain clothes. Nothing sticking out. Nothing showing that shouldn’t be. Okay, you’re ready to meet Ed Simon.”
Ed leaned to his left and looked past his monitor, saw Kelsey and looked away quickly. There lay only pain. He looked back when he realised there was another woman, but next to Kelsey she wasn’t worth checking out. Little, plain, and shy. Little and plain he could live with, but—
Kelsey stepped in front of him and broke the moment. He looked up, tore his eyes off her breasts before it was too late and tried to give her his best smile. But a leer looks like a leer no matter what you want it to be.
“This is Petty Officer Andie Shea,” Kelsey said, not noticing the boy’s discomfort. “She works for the marines as a torturer, specializing in the removal of genitalia. Specifically male.”
Ed knocked his pile of computer mags off his desk in his hurry to get back into his seat.
“You gonna pick that up?” Ethan said, and turned his monitor so he could see what he’d been up to. “And this stuff’ll make you blind.” He put the monitor back. “The director know what you’re using his technology for?”
“Research. Err. For a case.” Ed bent down and retrieved his magazines whilst trying not to look at the remover of genitals. He’d intended taking the day off sick. Why had he let his conscience talk him into coming in? He could’ve been at the cybercafé, researching, trading, gaming. But no, he’d come in. And met—he glanced up at the petite woman. The remover of—oh God, he needed to pee.
“Got a job for you,” Kelsey said as he stood up and tipped the magazines onto the rest of the junk on his desk.
“I’ve got a job.”
“Doing what?” Kelsey said.
“Tracking stuff.”
“Good to hear. That’s what you’ll be doing for me. Tracking stuff.”
/> “Okay, I can do that.” He threw Andie a quick look. “And, err, what will, err—”
“The castrator?” Kelsey said, and almost put her hand on Andie’s shoulder.
“What is she here for?”
“I can hear you,” Andie said.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to upset you. Or make you mad.” Ed’s face was getting redder by the second.
Ethan decided he needed him alive. “We want you to find out if anybody is buying exotic…” He glanced at Kelsey for confirmation. “Exotic aerospace materials.”
“What for?”
“For aerospace things,” Ethan explained, exhausting his technical expertise.
Kelsey glanced around the empty office. Empty for a very good reason. They were talking to him.
“We need to know who is building an X-37.”
Ed’s jaw lowered slowly and he blinked while his brain whirred. He shook his head to reset it. “You mean other than the Department of Defense?”
“Well, yeah,” Ethan said. “We already know they’re building them, so it wouldn’t add much to our knowledge base, would it?”
Ed decided to talk to the big marine master sergeant. He was way less scary than Kelsey and the—
“What do you know about the X-37B?” Ethan said, hoping it was enough he wouldn’t have to try to explain and embarrass himself. Like that had ever happened.
“Airforce Rapid Capabilities Department is driving through the development. There’s been three test flights. OTV one…” He saw Ethan’s blank look. “OTV, orbital test vehicle? They’re out to build a reusable platform to replace the shuttle. A low Earth orbiter that can fly at twenty thousand miles an hour. To carry experiments into space.” He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, right.”
“We think somebody else is building one,” Kelsey said. “It’s a secret between us.” She moved her hand to encompass the four of them. “And if you tell anybody else, Andie will visit you in the dead of night.”
Ed stared at her with eyes wide open while his flushed face paled like sand running out of a timer. He shook his head. Then shook it again.
“Good,” Kelsey said. “Now can you get the records from the material suppliers and see if anybody other than the DOD is buying?”
“Do you want me to ask for them?”
Nobody spoke.
“Didn’t think so. Okay. Take me a while.”
“How long?” Ethan said.
“As long as it takes to hack into every aerospace supplier with the ability to manufacture the materials for a project like this.”
“An hour?” Ethan said.
“A week,” Ed said.
“Fine,” Kelsey said, and turned to go. “We’ll be back this afternoon.”
“But—”
They were heading for the door.
The castrator had a really shapely butt. He looked away the moment he realized what he was doing. But she’d seen him.
“What do you want me to do?” Andie said, turning from the strange computer tech and trying not to smile.
“What I don’t want you to do,” Ethan said, “is spend your time trawling through invoices and delivery notes.” He saw her shoulders straighten and he put a tick in that box. “I want you to find the son of a bitch who sold the plans.” He stopped walking and unconsciously bent his knees so he was nearer Andie’s height. “I realize it’s a hell of a task, but you’re the best. That’s why you’re here.”
She looked him in the eye fleetingly, then away again. “Is there somewhere I can work? I’ll need good comms.”
Kelsey pointed at the row of office doors along the corridor. “Pick one.”
“Won’t the people using it be put out?”
“Literally,” Kelsey said, with a smile. “When I tell them to leave.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, for sure,” Ethan said. “If she was a guy, she’d need an extra large sports box.”
“Eww!” Kelsey and Andie said together.
Three minutes later, Andie had the use of two desks and they left her to do computer stuff.
“Now Andie’s settled, what are we doing?” Kelsey said, watching the two admins hurrying down the corridor with arms full of files and a slightly irritated look about them.
“Before every mission I feel it’s important to take stock, to weigh the options and evaluate the risks.”
“Coffee it is, then.”
“You read my mind.”
“Short, smutty read with lots of pictures.”
They left NCIS and took a short walk in the cold November air and silently assimilated the enormity of what they’d learned.
“Are you dating?” Ethan said as he sat at the window table in the overpriced diner.
“Straight to the point as ever.” Kelsey sat opposite and picked up the menu. She was going to have coffee and nothing on a plate. “You asking?”
He chuckled. “We’ve traveled that road. Do it again, we just hit all the bumps.”
“Copy that.” Kelsey put the menu back against the sauce bottles. “Who do you suspect has got the…OTV?”
The waitress arrived and poised her pen over her pad and waited.
Ethan ordered breakfast and coffee, with extra breakfast. The waitress liked that and gave him the day’s smile. Everybody else would have to wait until tomorrow.
“Make a list,” Ethan said. “But narrow it to somebody who can top a one-point-five-billion-dollar bid.”
She whistled. “Russians. Chinese.”
“Al-Qaeda.” He inclined his head in response to the questioning look. “They could afford it. They had the revenue from most of the Middle Eastern oil for years. And—”
He smiled at the waitress as she poured coffee into his thick mug, then splashed a drop into Kelsey’s.
So that was how it was.
“And?” Kelsey said, watching the stick-thin girl walk slowly back to the counter. Actress resting.
“And? Oh yeah. They get their hands on the nukes, they only need to do this once. Their holy war will be pretty much won.”
“We’d better stop them, then.”
“That’s the plan. Breakfast first.” He lifted his mug for a refill.
Andie found it almost at once. She entered the web address from the file Milaris had saved and read the section Questions to Seller. She could barely believe there’d be such a thing on a dark web page; it went against everything held holy out there. That there was a section was bad enough, but that the seller had answered the question beggared belief. The potential buyer wanted to see proof, a photo of some of the plans. And Orpheus had posted a high-res image of a single page.
Andie didn’t do anything for several seconds; she just looked at the photo and tried not to set herself up for a fall. Then she opened the image in Photoshop and looked at the info data.
It took her a moment to accept that the poster had left the EXIF data intact, and she wondered if it really had been posted by Orpheus. For the first time she suspected Orpheus wasn’t one person, maybe a hacker group. It had to be. Somebody didn’t know what he was doing. Posting the photo was truly stupid.
The exchangeable image data should have been removed. Would’ve been removed by anyone who knew how to stay anonymous. Unless it was in a moment of carelessness or haste.
It didn’t matter. The camera taking the shot of the plans was GPS enabled, and there were the geo-coordinates pointing right at the spot it was taken.
Her heart thumped in her chest and she had to force herself to breathe deeply and slowly. She opened Google Maps and typed in the coordinates, and held her finger over the enter key, took another slow breath and pressed it.
She stared at the map. The location was an Internet café in Annandale. Right there in Washington. She sat back in her borrowed chair and thought about it.
It had been easy, but sometimes you got a break. Not everybody knew about the GPS coordinates being stored in a photo, ask the software guru John MacAfee, busted from a photo in a newspaper interview. Stu
pid. And the Internet café made sense. Even if the authorities could backtrack his IP, it wouldn’t do them, us, any good.
So was the information worthless?
She stood up. Not necessarily. If the café owner didn’t care too much about security. And why would he? Spotty kids surfing porn. Who gives a damn?
Ethan would need to know. She started to pack up her laptop, stopped and sat down again. It took less than five minutes for the shredder she’d written to wipe every trace of her activity from the NCIS servers. The data security team would know somebody wiped their footprint, that was their job, but they’d never recover it or know who it was. That was her job.
She finished packing up her gear, checked the desk for anything that might have escaped, and dug out her cell to call Ethan. She found his number and pressed speed dial.
He’d be pleased, and for a moment she wondered what that would feel like.
The borrowed Suburban came to a stop in front of the NCIS office and Andie got in the back without speaking.
“You did an amazing job,” Kelsey said, half turning in the driver’s seat.
Andie looked up quickly and saw Ethan apparently asleep up front. “It’s barely lunchtime. Does he need a nap every few hours? My grandpa was like that.”
“I hear they’re looking for a tech on the Polar Star,” Ethan said without opening his eyes.
“That’s interesting to hear,” Andie said. “The Polar Star is in the breakers’ yard, and icebreakers belong to the US Coast Guard. So I guess I’m not going anywhere cold.”
“Don’t count on it,” Ethan said, and sat up. “Okay, we’re going to an Internet café in Annandale, but I’m guessing our hacker won’t be sitting there in dark glasses and a trench coat.”
“Unlikely, unless he’s been there for a week. It’s possible it’s his local, but I’d say that’s unlikely,” Andie said.
“I agree,” Kelsey said. “I’m no computer tech, but I think the owners of these places wipe the system every time a user logs off.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Andie said. “They don’t. It’s up to the user to erase their tracks.”
“Orpheus would do that,” Ethan said. “It sounds basic.”