CHAPTER 1
“HOW MANY OTHERS know?”
Jonathan Quinn made no response, his eyes focused across the room as if he were the only one there.
“Answer me! How many?”
Not a blink. Not a flinch.
“Your silence won’t save anyone. I’ll find them like I found you.”
The corner of Quinn’s mouth drifted up as he finally looked back at the man.
“What makes you think you found me?”
The man’s stare turned into a sneer, and his mouth opened to reply.
“Now,” Quinn whispered.
In an instant, darkness filled the room.
CHAPTER 2
EIGHT DAYS EARLIER
AUGUST 26th
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
THE E-MAIL SAT unopened in Helen Cho’s inbox for nearly thirty minutes.
It wasn’t that she was in a meeting or otherwise occupied and hadn’t seen it. She had been sitting at her desk when her computer softly dinged, announcing the
e-mail’s arrival.
There were times when she would ignore incoming messages for hours or even days. But this wasn’t one of those. This one she’d been expecting, had even called to make sure she would receive it as scheduled.
She knew much of what was written in the attached report, and had already seen most of the accompanying photos. So why was it so hard to open?
There was only one answer, of course. Acceptance, for reading the report meant she would finally have to acknowledge Peter was dead.
Ironic, she knew. It wasn’t like death was something she never had to deal with. In her line of work, it was a common occurrence. As head of a growing network of government security and intelligence agencies, she had long ago hardened herself to the reality that people in the business died. Information gathering, targeted terminations, asset acquisitions—these were some of the elements that made up her day. So another death should have been just that.
No emotional attachment. Accept and move on.
And yet here she was, her personal feelings affecting her job.
When the e-mail first arrived, she told herself she had more important things to attend to. Which was true, but they were dealt with in a matter of minutes. Everything after that was just busywork.
Except the unopened e-mail.
She stared at her monitor, the cursor positioned over the message. “Damn you, Peter,” she said, and clicked.
The e-mail itself was brief. The subject line: REPORT: LKR-2867c91. The message: SEE ATTACHED.
She downloaded the report, ran it through her decryption software, and opened the resulting file. The report concerned events that had taken place on Duran Island in the Caribbean Sea, forty-eight hours earlier. Most of the information had come from sources within the Isla de Cervantes government. Their security forces had responded to the call that something had happened on the smaller island. When they arrived, they had found over a dozen bodies laid out side by side in the old fort that dominated the strip of land. The only people found alive were locked together in a different room upstairs, all of them uninjured.
Among the dead was Duran Island’s owner, the former Isla de Cervantes presidential candidate Javier Romero. According to preliminary interviews with the survivors—all of whom appeared to have been in service positions for Romero, such as nurses, maids, and cooks—Romero had built up a small army, and then forcibly brought in several men, all hooded and bound, and locked them in cells inside the fort. There was some discrepancy about how many men had been held captive—some said five, others said as many as ten—but all agreed that the detainees had been tortured multiple times.
Apparently these same men had somehow escaped, and turned the tables on Romero and his forces, killing most of them before leaving the island. Isla de Cervantes officials also believed that it was someone connected to the escapees who had called in the tip about Duran, and provided information about a boatload of Romero’s men who’d fled the fight and were sailing for Isla de Cervantes.
In addition to the dead at the fort, the security forces had discovered two more bodies along an empty runway on the other side of the island. Though officials had no idea who they were, Helen’s people had been able to identify them after running photographs of the dead men through a facial recognition system.
The big man was named Janus. According to the file in the archives, he worked mainly as hired muscle for whoever was willing to pay.
The older man, though, was Peter, former head of a defunct agency known as the Office.
The Office was the organization Helen’s own core agency had been created to replace. She had been apprehensive about taking the job at the time. Peter had always been a friend, and, in many ways, a mentor. Though she knew it was an excellent opportunity, without Peter’s blessing she would have declined the assignment. He had given it without hesitation.
The two of them hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but Peter had never refused to take her calls, and had often been the only person she could turn to for advice.
The few additional details contained within the report that weren’t part of her original briefing were minor at best, and unimportant. She ignored the photos of the dead, and clicked through to the back of the report to read a short analysis prepared by her people.
It was her team’s belief that the deaths had been a result of an act of revenge gone wrong, its roots stretching back several years to when Javier Romero had made his run for president of Isla de Cervantes.
At the time, it was the opinion of nearly every nation in the western hemisphere that a Romero presidency would have been a catastrophe that could have created a ripple effect, not just through the Caribbean, but also through Latin America.
A plan was put in place, and a termination team was dispatched to remove any chance of Romero winning the election. While the mission failed in its surface goal of eliminating Romero, the long-term goal of keeping him out of office was achieved, due to the severe injuries he incurred during the attempt on his life.
The Office supervised the project. Given the presence of that organization’s former director, and the obvious abilities of the men who had been held with him and subsequently escaped, it is believed that Romero had rounded up the team sent to kill him years before so he could avenge what they had done.
We have not at this time been able to locate records of the operatives assigned to that mission, nor did Romero have any record of whom he’d locked up. It is possible the information was on the memory card that had been in a plastic bag attached to Romero’s shirt when he was found, but it was destroyed by one of the bullets he’d taken to the chest. Some of Romero’s surviving staff did claim to have heard several names used when those abducted were being led around. Because of the discrepancies between what each recalled, the accuracy of the list that follows is not guaranteed, nor is it known if it’s complete.
Layer
Berkeley
Cousin
Cohen
Helen sat back. As much as she would have liked to deny it, revenge was an emotion that helped drive her industry, taking so many unnecessary lives over the years.
You do this to me. I’ll do this to you.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Now the cycle had taken Peter.
At least Romero was dead, too. If he weren’t, it would’ve been Helen’s turn to jump in, as she would not have hesitated to order him killed immediately.
She’d arranged through back channels for his body to be brought to the US, where it would be cremated, and she could then scatter his ashes somewhere serene. But that bit of info was not in the document in front of her.
What was left on the report was a place for her digital signature. She stared at the empty box for a moment before finally hitting the keys that would affix her name, and not only approve the report but officially confirm Peter’s death.
That’s it, she thought as she closed the document. Finished.
She ran the now signed report through the encryption program, scrambling what she had earlier unscrambled, attached it to a new e-mail, and sent it off for final distribution.
She then stared at her computer screen, feeling like she should say something, anything, to mark the event and honor her dead friend. But when no words came, she did the only thing she could, and focused on the next item that needed her attention.
* * *
THE REPORT’S DISTRIBUTION was not handled by a person. The address Director Cho had sent it to was an automated system that forwarded the report to three locations. The first was to the active archives where the report could be quickly accessed by those with clearance; the second was to Antarctica, the name for the remote backup system used by Helen’s burgeoning network of agencies; while the third was another automated distribution system, the one that handled human recipients. There, the report number would be run through a database looking for requests to receive the information. If there were no matches, the e-mail would be irretrievably erased.
In the case of report number LKR-2867c91, there was one request.
The automated software created a new e-mail, attached the report, and forwarded it. It didn’t matter that the receiver was someone on the outside, and not a member of Helen’s team. The software was following its programming.
Just before the original was about to be securely removed from the system, a subroutine kicked in, staying the command. The bit of code was not part of the official program. It had been added in the last two months, and was unknown to anyone within the organization. It had been created for a single purpose. As reports passed through the secondary distribution node, it would perform a rapid keyword search, something it was able to do whether the document was encrypted or not. In the sixty-odd days since it had been attached to the software, the sought-after keywords had not shown up.
This time, however, all relevant terms appeared in the appropriate order. Per design, the subroutine sent a message to a privately owned P.O. box store in Raleigh, North Carolina, telling the manager that a letter the store had been holding should now be mailed. Once this was accomplished, the original e-mail was erased, as had been the main program’s intent.
The subroutine’s final act was to destroy itself and any evidence of its existence. This, like its other task, was executed perfectly.
WASHINGTON, DC
“YOU’RE SURE?”
Kyle Morten grabbed the side of his laptop as if he were going to turn it around. “I could show you the photo.”
Like he knew would happen, his client quickly turned her head away. “Absolutely not! I just want to know that you’re sure.”
Morten glanced at the picture of the body splayed across a patch of bloodstained ground. “Peter will no longer be a problem.”
“Finally,” she said, allowing herself the slightest of smiles.
Morten held back his displeasure at her implication. This had not been a protracted operation. As soon as he’d found out the problem existed, he’d moved into action, identified a creative solution, and—with Griffin’s assistance—implemented a plan to keep the truth from ever getting out. So in light of the careful steps needed to ensure the termination of the Office’s former leader, the operation had been quick and efficient.
The client rose from her chair and straightened her jacket. “And we’re positive no one else knows what he was looking into?”
“Positive.”
“His personal files? I assume those have been taken care of.”
“Do you want the details? Or…” Apparently the woman needed to be reminded that creating a wall of plausible deniability was part of the services Morten’s company, Darvot Consulting, provided.
She gave him a look he’d seen on clients’ faces a thousand times before, a blend of arrogance, annoyance, and reluctant admittance he was right.
“You’ll update me if there is anything else I need to know,” she said.
“There won’t be.”
“I’m counting on that.”
She picked up the leather portfolio she’d walked in with and headed for the exit. Griffin, who had been standing quietly at the back of the office, stepped over to the door and opened it. As she had when she entered, the client left without even acknowledging the man’s presence.
When they were alone, Morten said, “Are the teams in place?”
“Ready and waiting.”
“Give them the go.”
Griffin pulled out his phone and fired off a text that would activate the two teams of housebreakers, one positioned at the Georgetown apartment building where Peter had lived, and the other outside the nearby townhouse Peter had sometimes used as a satellite office. Both locations would be searched for anything that might pertain to the private investigation Peter had been conducting. So, the real answer to the client’s question would have been, No, the files hadn’t been secured yet, but they soon would be.
“When is O & O scheduled to begin?” Morten asked.
“This evening,” Griffin said. “Needed to give our people enough time to look around first.”
O & O was a for-hire, quasi-government security agency that had proved extremely useful to Darvot over the years. Because it had a poorly defined management structure, Morten had been able to use O & O to obtain sensitive, top-secret information without the organization even realizing what they’d handed over.
O & O was also useful when it came to assignments Morten and Griffin would rather not use their own men for. In this case, Griffin had engaged the agency to watch the apartment and townhouse once the search was complete, and deal with anyone who might show up in the next few weeks. To support the latter point, a thick file of false documentation had been provided to O & O, indicating anyone who entered either place during that specified time frame was likely connected to a particularly violent Islamic terrorist organization, and should be considered an imminent threat to the country.
The reason for the stakeout was that, contrary to what Morten had told his client, he was far from positive no one else knew what Peter had learned. While he felt confident that prior to being kidnapped, Peter had kept his investigation to himself—especially given the personal nature of what he was looking into—the concern was about after the old intelligence officer had been taken to Duran Island. Morten thought there was at least an even chance Peter had guessed how Romero had come to possess his and the other men’s names, and had shared his suspicions with his fellow prisoners. This wouldn’t have been a problem if that jackass Romero had pulled off his plan to kill them all. Unfortunately, it appeared that everyone but Peter had escaped. Which meant there were four men out there somewhere who might be a problem.
That’s why the apartment and townhouse needed to be watched. It was also why Griffin had hired some freelance trackers to hunt down the four men. To this point, none of the fugitives had resurfaced.
As Morten mentally went through everything again to make sure he hadn’t missed any angles, the desk phone rang. Griffin walked over and picked it up.
“Yes?” He listened for a moment. “Okay, thank you.” He hung up and looked over at Morten. “Your car’s here.”
Morten pulled himself from his thoughts, satisfied they’d covered their bases, and walked over to where his shoulder bag was waiting. The rest of his luggage for his flight to Europe was with the doorman downstairs, and undoubtedly being loaded into the car at that very moment. “Anything comes up, anything,” he said, “contact me immediately.”
“Of course,” Griffin said, opening the door.
“I’ll be back the evening of the third. Let’s have it wrapped up by then, shall we?”
“Yes, sir.”
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