by D. L. Line
“Not going to cut it, buster. You owe me for the bike, and I should just tell you you’re not paying me enough—”
She stopped, interrupted by a warning from the other end of the call.
“Yeah, but I’ll get the drive back from my hacker. She may be spooked, but I know how to work her. It just might take a couple more days. I still need you to find out who those cops are and who tipped them off.”
She stopped pacing long enough to light another cigarette from the burning end of the one she was currently smoking, stubbing the butt out in the overflowing ashtray. “Then what the fuck good are you? This whole thing just got lots more complicated, and I’m not going to sit here with my thumb up my butt while you hang me out to dry. For all I know, you’re getting ready to pack up your dolls and dishes and head back to Whatthefuckistan—”
The voice interrupted her again, which only served to fuel her rage.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Kazakhstan, whatever. Who gives a shit? Could be Bumfuck, Egypt, for all I care, but that doesn’t solve the current problem. There are cops involved now, my transportation is gone, and you’re a useless waste of space. Help me out here.”
Faith stubbed out the current cigarette she was smoking, fished in her pocket for another one, and pulled out nothing but an empty pack, which she immediately crumpled into a ball and hurled angrily across the room.
“Yeah, ten grand would cover the bike. You going to wire it into my account?”
The voice answered her as she picked through the ashtray looking for a long butt to smoke.
“Well, thanks. That helps. And yeah, I’ll get you your information, hopefully by tomorrow night. I’ll call you when I’m on the way over to her place.”
Faith snapped her phone closed, stopping just short of hurling it across the room too. “Asshole,” she muttered again to the closed phone. At least he was going to cover the bike. That helped. She contemplated going out to blow off some steam, but hesitated as she came to the decision to try Denny one more time. She flipped the phone open and scrolled down through her list of contacts, stopping at “Skater Boi,” and pushed the call button. Fuck. Voice mail again.
“Denny, Dude, I know it’s late, but I still need to talk to you. Call me tomorrow. I’ll be out most of the day, but you know the number. Later.”
Faith let out a long, frustrated huff of breath. Shit. No hacker, no bike, and no fucking cigarettes. “This sucks,” she muttered to herself, as she dug through her pockets for some cash for a taxi. She couldn’t do anything about the bike until tomorrow morning, but she could go out, buy some smokes, and deal with the monster-sized case of hungry and horny that all this shit had given her. Too bad about Denny. That would have solved the second part of her little problem quite nicely, but it didn’t really matter now, did it?
*
Skip stared at the phone in his hand, muttering softly, “Bitch,” as the call was terminated on the other end. Faith really was good at what she did, but she was proving to be as big of a pain in his ass as Bulldog had been. Well, he could fix that problem, too, and most likely the same way.
Much of his problem was already solved. He had removed the USB drive with the files from the hands of the FBI. That part was easy. What wasn’t easy was the fact that the drive was only part of the problem. There was still a hacker out there, with his research on her hard drive, and he needed to plug that leak too. It was really too bad that he had lost the free government-sponsored surveillance that he had procured to keep watch on Faith, but she would call him tomorrow. Faith had given him the name of the hacker, and the weird programmer guy that worked in Skip’s own Information Systems Department had broken into the American University student database and provided the rest. Maybe he’d just head out that way tomorrow, when Faith was on her way there, and see what he could do about killing two birds with one stone.
“Two birds with one stone.” Skip typed the necessary information into his computer to transfer ten thousand dollars into the account that he had set up for Faith. The nice thing about the account was that it was still actually his account, so he could just pull whatever money was left out of the account once Faith was dealt with. Besides, he’d always wanted a motorcycle.
Skip poured himself a glass of twelve-year-old scotch and headed into the media room to find something to watch on television. As the first slug of dark amber liquid warmed his insides, Skip languished in the glow of total control.
Tomorrow. It would all be fixed tomorrow.
Chapter Eighteen
Despite the long break that a restless night’s sleep had provided, Terri was reticent. Reluctant to share her feelings, she sat back at the kitchen table, ignored her breakfast, and watched while Bobby and Jen tried to cook up solutions to the problem at hand. It was strange, watching the two of them interact like that; making plans over coffee and the doughnuts that Bobby had picked up on his way over. Most of what made it strange was the way Terri felt about the whole situation. None of their ideas sat right with her, because every experience she’d had for the last six months had served to teach her that riding off after babes on motorcycles, or anyone else for that matter, with no support or backup, was a stupid idea at best. And Bobby knew better. Didn’t he? Or was he just so completely pissed off about losing Faith and the resultant ass chewing that he had received from McNally, that he was ready to try the cowboy thing himself? Definitely not a good idea, not this time.
And what about Jen? Well, that one was easier to explain. She had a problem to solve and that was what she did best. There were constants and variables at work, and Jen had a better handle on things like that than anyone Terri had ever known before. She loved watching Bobby and Jen together. Jen talked and plotted, waving her hands in the air, and Bobby grabbed Jen’s sleeve to keep her hand out of the large coffee cup where she kept a small collection of her beloved colored pens.
She was just about the cutest thing Terri had ever seen. And that made it worse. Business like this, with guns and lies and car chases, wasn’t what Terri wanted for Jen. Bobby was a professional. He knew what the job meant, and it was probably why he was still single. Jen wasn’t a fed. She deserved her innocence and her USB drives and to watch South Park if she wanted (even though Terri, for the life of her, could not understand why), but not this. Terri mused a little more, wondering about Jen’s innocence. Yes, there were all the girls when she was younger, and the computer hacking, but the innocence, or lack thereof, that Terri was thinking of was more related to the fact that Jen was the only one amongst them who actually knew what it felt like to have a loaded weapon inches away from her brain with a crazy man at the trigger. Terri shuddered at the thought, a small movement that failed to go unnoticed, as Jen stopped talking to Bobby and asked her a question.
“Terri, baby, are you all right? You’re not saying a lot.”
Bobby chimed in. “Actually, Jen, she’s not saying anything. Terri, are you still with us?”
“Yeah, I’m just thinking too hard, as usual.” Terri sloughed off their concern with a wave of her hand.
It didn’t appear as though Bobby was buying her excuse. “Terri, you know that if you have a problem with this, you need to tell me.” They were both looking at her now.
“Okay, you’re right. This whole idea just doesn’t work for me. Yes, I want to spare Denny any more problems, but the idea of handling it ourselves strikes me as absurd. Especially considering everything that’s ever gone wrong when we’ve done that in the past.”
Terri stopped talking, and looked toward Jen for support. Getting only a small shrug as a response, Terri turned her head and directed her full attention toward Bobby, since he seemed to be the only person with a strong opinion at the moment.
“Terri, think about our options. First, we do have surveillance tapes of Faith, that is if McNally hasn’t made those disappear too, but it’s all one-sided cryptic conversations. Not a lot to go on, and you know as well as I do that the Federal prosecutor won’t touch it. It’s to
o sketchy. Right?”
Reluctantly, Terri had to agree.
“Second, Denny is still crashed out upstairs, so that means we have her computer with the hacked files, but all we have, officially, is her word that Faith hired her, since the video is probably inadmissible. So then we take the info to McNally, or whoever we decide that we can trust, and anyone at the Bureau is going to take one look at the all that bioterrorism shit and call Homeland Security, pretty effectively removing us from the loop, again most likely landing Denny in the women’s prison at Alderson, and the place just hasn’t been the same since Martha Stewart got out.”
“Yeah, but Alderson has a softball team, and...” Jen hesitated as Terri and Bobby stared at her. “What? I know these things.”
“Of course you do. Hey, maybe they’ll let Denny have a weekend pass to go to the Women’s Final Four.” Turning her attention toward Bobby, Terri added, “Jen likes the Final Four,” turned back toward Jen and added, “don’t you, sweetie?”
“Hey, it was just once, well, twice, but...yeah.”
“Do I even want to know what the fuck you two are talking about?”
“No,” they answered firmly, in unison.
“Well, okey dokey then.” Bobby turned his attention back to Terri. “So, can we agree that we really don’t want the Homeland guys in on this?
“Yes,” Terri answered, and urged Bobby to continue. “Go on.”
“Third, we take the George McNally approach, erase Denny’s hard drive and pretend like none of this ever happened. Then sometime next week or next month, Faith shows up at Denny’s house, demands the information or her money back, Denny has neither, and winds up floating face down in the Potomac. We don’t know for sure that that’s what will happen, but my guess is that it’s at least a possibility, and I, for one, couldn’t live with that option.”
Terri was, again, forced to reluctantly agree. “No, I couldn’t live with that either. So, what does that leave us with?”
Jen motioned to Bobby, indicating that he should explain the plan. “Okay, Terri, we can’t get the receiver from supply because of McNally and all his sneaking around. But what we can do is this.” Terri followed his glance as he turned toward Jen. “I think Jen can explain this part better than I can.”
Jen visibly brightened, eager to explain her part of the plan. “Right. I looked at the tracer and with what Bobby told me, it sounded like a standard GPS transmitter. Of course it’s much smaller than the one that I have, but...”
Terri was confused, so she asked, “You have a GPS tracer? Why do you have that?”
“Well, you know. If we ever want to go camping or something like that, and we need to navigate through the woods...” Jen hesitated as Terri began to laugh again. “What?”
“Camping? Yeah, right. You hate camping.” Terri turned her attention toward Bobby. “Jen told me once that her idea of roughing it was a Holiday Inn with no hot tub. Right, sweetie?”
“Well, yeah, but...whatever.” Turning her attention toward Bobby, she answered, “Yes, she’s right. A mini-bar is nice too, but that’s not important now. So, to answer your first question, they had this really cool GPS tracer slash software package at Staples once, so I bought it. It is fun to play with on car trips, not that I’ve taken a whole lot of car trips, well, except for last spring when I was driving back and forth from Harrisonburg to here every weekend, but that—”
“Jen,” Terri stopped her. “Focus, sweetie.”
“Oh, yes, GPS, right. Anyway, so all I need to do is tweak the software and reset the respondent frequency, and we can use my computer to follow the tracer. It’s really no big deal.”
“Can you set this up on your laptop so Bobby and I can take it with us?”
“Hmm, I suppose I could do that, but the laptop might not have enough juice to keep up, so the data would be slow, possibly unreliable to the point that you could lose her. The processor on the mainframe upstairs is lots faster, so you’ll get actual real-time data that way. You can’t take it with you, but I could monitor it and stay on the phone with you.”
Terri shook her head emphatically. “No, Jen, I don’t want you...”
“Baby, I’ll be right here in the house. We lock all the doors, turn off the lights, and I’ll keep Snickers close by. I’ll be on the phone with you the whole time. You can even take my extra headset so we can just leave the line open. So you’ll be on the wire with Bobby, on the phone with me, and we’ll have Denny put the tracer in her pocket, or tape it in her bra, or something like that.”
Terri still wasn’t convinced. She turned her attention toward Bobby. “What do you think? Can we even do this?”
“I don’t see why not. I know we’re hoping that Denny delivers the goods, Faith takes off, Denny goes home, and that’s the end of it. The only part that concerns me is that we lose the tracer on Faith once Denny goes home, but we can always follow her the old-fashioned way and hope that she still thinks she lost us in the Metro.”
“But, Bobby, she spotted me coming out of McKinley Hall, and she knew that’s where Denny was, so wouldn’t she assume that we were there looking for Denny too? I know I would, so we need to be prepared for the worst.”
“Oh, oh... I got it.” Jen waved her hand as she bounced eagerly in her seat. “That tracer is small enough that I could open up the USB drive and tuck it in there. That way, my computer follows the drive regardless of who has it. Problem solved.”
“I’m still not sure.” Terri said. “There are way too many variables at work here, and it’s a lot to expect from Denny.
“Hey, why don’t I just go ask her about it? I can tweak the tracer, show her what’s up, and see what she thinks. Can’t hurt to ask, right?”
No matter how hard she tried, Terri couldn’t figure out a problem with that. “I guess not. It’s just that this all feels, I don’t know, wrong, stupid, inevitable. I hate it.”
“I know, baby, but no matter how many times we go over this, there just isn’t a good solution. If Denny goes for it, it may be the only way everyone comes out of this okay. I’ll go talk to her.”
Terri watched Jen leave the kitchen and then turned to stare out the window at the brightening sky. She could hear Bobby breathing and realized he had stopped inhaling doughnuts and was probably watching her.
“Terri.”
She swallowed hard but didn’t turn around. “Bobby, do you know what I have always loved about being an agent?”
“What’s that, kiddo?”
Terri could hear the sadness and pity in his voice and struggled to talk around the knot in her throat. “The feeling that what I did mattered, that every decision I made helped. I have always been in control. Right and wrong were so clear-cut, and all of that is gone now.”
“Terri, look at me.”
She did and felt her heart warm. There sat Bobby, all six foot five of him, wearing his heart on his sleeve and powdered sugar on his nose. Terri reached out and brushed the sugar away.
“Thanks, I’m sure you’ll take me more seriously now. Damn, I always screw up the big emotional moments. What I wanted to say was—shit!” Bobby reached into his pants pocket for his phone. “It’s work. Hang on.”
“Terri, baby, come here!” Jen had that “I need you now” tone to her voice.
Terri pushed up from the table and deposited her coffee cup in the sink. As she climbed the stairs, she could hear Jen pacing around above her. That was not a good sign.
“Jen, what’s wrong?” Terri asked as she came through the door.
Jen stood in the middle of the media room, holding a single sheet of paper.
“It’s Denny...she’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone? Where did she go? How?”
The message was short and to the point:
Dr. R,
I’m sorry for this mess and all the trouble I’ve caused you and Agent McKinnon. I should have listened to you in the first place, but I didn’t. So I’m gonna make it right. I heard you all talking
, and I know I can do this. I’ll give Faith what she wants and the FBI can follow me and catch her. I have to try to clean up the mess I made. I’ll call you.
Denny
Terri crumpled the note in her hand. “Well, isn’t this just great? What the hell is she thinking? Going out without backup. She could get herself killed.”
Terri rounded on Jen, prepared to continue her tirade, but stopped when she saw the terrified look on Jen’s face.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, Jen. Come here.” She folded Jen into her arms and stroked her back gently. “Sweetie, we’ll find her. It’ll be okay. We’ll call her and go get her before she can get very far. Nothing’s going to happen to her. We’ll get to the bottom of this and then Faith, her boss, and McNally will all have to answer to whatever it is they are up to.”
“Not McNally, Terri.”
Between the note and the fact that Jen seemed dangerously close to melting down, Terri hadn’t heard him come up the stairs. He stood in the doorway with his cell phone still in his hand and an expression Terri had seen far too many times during her career. In that moment, she knew exactly what Bobby was about to say and closed her eyes in a futile attempt to push it away.
“He’s dead. Security guard found his body in a parking structure over in Arlington. Single gunshot wound to the head.”
*
“You can do this, Robertson. It’s the right thing to do.”
Denny spoke quietly to herself as she walked quickly, ignoring her own reflection in the front windows of the shops she passed. Sneaking out the front door had been easier than she had imagined it would be. Apparently, Snickers had been more interested in Agent Kraft and his bright pink box of doughnuts than a half-cocked graduate assistant tiptoeing barefoot down the steps and out the front door. After running around the corner and stopping long enough to slip into her blue suede Vans—fucking new shoes that I just had to have—she made her way out toward Connecticut Avenue with the plan of heading toward the Dupont Circle Metro Station and back to her own apartment. She’d call Faith when she got there, and then she’d call Dr. Rosenberg and tell her the plan.