All the Wrong Moves (9 page)

The fact that CID Agent Andrew Hurst, aka Comb-Over, accompanied the team didn’t exactly improve my mood. I knew military arson investigations crossed functional lines. Specially trained firefighters provide the thermal expertise. Criminal Investigation Division agents add their input on the criminal end. I also knew the Fort Bliss CID detachment was as strapped for manpower as every other unit in the U.S. Armed Forces, with more than half their personnel deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. That didn’t mean I appreciated being treated like a suspect by Comb-Over.

“You weren’t here at the time of the fire, Lieutenant Spade?”

He had his pen poised and his notebook open. Angled away so I couldn’t see his scribbled notes, of course.

“I was in El Paso. I arrived back on-site the same time as the pumper from Dry Springs.”

“Mind telling me what you were doing in El Paso?”

“I met Agent Mitchell for lunch, worked some paperwork at my office, hit the PX and Commissary, then stopped by my apartment to check my mail.”

I’m not sure why I didn’t mention the meeting with Captain Dan Jordan. Must have been the way Comb-Over crabbed his shoulders to block my view while he jotted my response in his notebook.

“What time did you arrive at your apartment, Lieutenant?”

“I’m not sure. Six P.M. Maybe six-thirty.”

“And you left when?”

“Around eleven.”

“You needed four hours to check your mail?”

“I also took a shower and washed my uniforms. Why? What difference does it make
when
I left El Paso?”

“I’m just trying to establish a timeline.”

Like hell. There was something going on here. Something I didn’t understand but was starting to feel goosey about. I got a clue what it was when the CID agent treated me to a very unfriendly look.

“I spoke to the lieutenant colonel who commands the USMC detachment on post yesterday afternoon. He informed me you and Agent Mitchell have decided to conduct your own investigation into the death of Patrick Hooker.”

Ooops.

“Not so,” I countered without much hope of convincing my interrogator. “Mitch simply wanted to talk to a friend of mine.”

“Talk, or request sensitive information outside official CID channels?”

I wasn’t letting him draw me into that quagmire. “You have problems with Agent Mitchell’s actions, you take them up with him. In the meantime, how about you find out what made my lab light up the sky?”

THAT was my last exchange with Agent Hurst until he approached me several hours later with the lead arson investigator in tow.

My team was with me. We’d been standing around outside the lab, ignoring the early morning heat and wondering what, if anything, the investigators might uncover.

We found out when the lead investigator displayed a plastic evidence bag containing two intertwined scraps of wire. Their red plastic coating was almost entirely burnt away but enough remained for our resident test engineer to frown at the twisted strands.

“Where did these come from?” Rock asked. “We don’t use wire with that type jacketing in any of our test instrumentation.”

“Are you sure?”

Rocky drew himself up as much as five foot, seven inches of skinny PhD can.

“Yes, I’m sure. This coating is polychloroprene. It’s used primarily on wire exposed to rough usage, oils, chemicals or other harsh solvents. None of which we expose our sensitive instrumentation to.”

The lead investigator hefted the evidence bag in the palm of his hand. He was a young Robert De Niro type, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a mouth that looked like it wanted to smile but couldn’t quite get there.

“We found these strands attached to the circuitry controlling the lab’s H-K system. Appears someone disabled the feed from the sensors.”

“Sunnuvabitch!” That spewed out of me, not Rock. “So that’s why the system didn’t activate!”

Hurst gave me a look that said my outburst didn’t eliminate me from his list of suspicious characters. Young De Niro merely nodded.

“Arsonists tend to have favorite methodologies,” he said slowly. “I read a case study a few months back about one whose signature includes using polychloroprene-coated wire to short circuit electrical fire suppression systems.”

Whew! That let my team off the hook. I was almost certain none of them were serial arsonists. Now all we had to consider was a whole list of disgruntled inventors . . . until the investigator’s next remark knocked them off the radar screen, too.

“We suspect this guy is some kind of a rogue agent, as he seems to have insider knowledge and hits mostly high-profile government targets.”

FST-3? High profile?

My team emitted sounds that ranged from Pen’s neigh to a collection of disbelieving grunts.

“Whoever hit your lab,” the investigator concluded, “his primary objective appears to be your data retrieval systems and synthesizer. It sustained the most direct damage.”

I finally grasped the implications of the investigator’s comment. It hadn’t occurred to me until this very moment that the arson might be linked to the data EEEK gathered the night of Patrick Hooker’s murder.

Data I’d promised to provide to an assortment of government agencies.
Much
higher profile government agencies than FST-3.

THE arson investigation unit continued sifting through the mess in the lab, so my team and I retreated to the air-conditioned comfort of the D-fac to assess our losses as best we could.

Dennis used his laptop to pull up our equipment inventory while Pen and Rock worked up a status report on the tests we’d completed prior to the fire and those that had been pending.

There was only one, thank God. Small stuff compared to EEEK. Who, I should add, was still nestled in his coffin in our storage shed.

The initial estimate of our losses made me swallow. Several times. List in hand, I put in a call to my boss and got his voice mail.

“Dr. J, this is Lieutenant Spade. I’m with my team on-site. We, uh, have a problem. Please give me a call.”

I was still waiting for him to return my call in mid-afternoon. The delay gave me time to refine my list. Unfortunately, it also gave me time to reflect on my role in this latest disaster.

I kept thinking about Special Agent Hurst’s timeline questions. Could a four- or five-hour detour to my apartment to clean up and wash a few uniforms be construed as AWOL or desertion? I didn’t see how, as I’d made the stop after normal duty hours. Except the lines between on- and off-duty tend to blur when we’re out here in Dry Springs.

I seemed to recall reading something about abandoning your post under fire being punishable by death. I was confident that meant enemy fire, not the kind you toast marsh-mallows by. Just in case, I was about to power up my laptop and peruse—you guessed it!—the Uniform Code of Military Justice when my cell phone pinged.

I took a deep breath and glanced at the number displayed on Caller ID. The air whooshed out of my lungs again. The area code was El Paso, not the hallowed “571” of DARPA’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

“Lieutenant Spade.”

“It’s Mitch, Samantha.”

Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!

No use. The sound of his deep-timbered voice sent a shiver down my spine.

“Heard you had a problem out there last night.”

“Yeah, we did. Who told you about it?”

“Sheriff Alexander. He says there’s talk of arson.”

“We’re past the talking stage. I have a team of investigators on-site right now. They’ve found evidence that someone deliberately short-circuited the lab’s fire suppression system.”

Mitch chewed that over in silence for a second or two.

“No one was hurt, were they?”

“Not in the fire, but we’re all kinda shaken. Rocky—Dr. Balboa—especially. He’s in deep mourning for his sigma-delta quantized whatevers.”

“Come again?”

“His data synthesizer took a direct hit. Everything we downloaded from EEEK was vaporized.”

“Not everything,” Mitch reminded me. “You produced the boot print. There’s something breaking on that print, by the way.”

“What?”

“The FBI’s running that show. I don’t have the details.”

“Give me a call when you do.”

“You got it.”

He signed off, and I went back to Googling up the UCMJ.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHEN my boss finally returned my call, I was fairly confident I wouldn’t face a firing squad for deserting my troops under fire. It was almost five o’clock our time, six P.M. in Virginia. It was also, I remembered belatedly, Friday evening.

Normally my team would have shut down operations and been driving back to El Paso about this time. Or, if we hadn’t completed our on-site evaluation, been heading to Pancho’s for a little R&R before tackling the remainder of our tests on Saturday morning.

No R&R tonight. Sergeant Cassidy had already declared his intention of patrolling the perimeter again while Rock, Pen and Dennis searched for salvageable items in the lab and I refined the initial damage estimate.

I had some preliminary figures ready when my boss called. Dragging in a deep breath, I hit the talk button on my cell phone.

“Lieutenant Spade.”

“Hi, Lieutenant.”

That light, mellifluous voice didn’t belong to my supervisor, but rather his executive assistant.

“This is Audra. Dr. Jessup would like you to switch to video conference mode. Let me know when you’re set and I’ll put him on.”

I swallowed a groan. My hair had long ago escaped its clip and straggled down my nape. I’d draped my ABU blouse over the back of my chair and was wearing only my sweat-stained brown T-shirt and dog tags. Worse, I hadn’t even
thought
about lip gloss since the arson investigation team had arrived at the crack of dawn.

“Hang on a sec, Audra.”

I scrambled into my blouse and twisted my hair off my neck. No time for gloss, though. As ready as I could be, I hit the video net switch on my cell phone.

I think I mentioned that DARPA is all about gee-whiz technologies. My DARPA-special cell phone is a prime example. It combines the latest in encryption technology with satellite communications and really cool graphics. The thing could probably receive signals from the Hub-bell Space Telescope if I figured out the right commands.

Unfortunately, it also displays my boss’s face with star tlingly vivid, three-dimensional clarity. One glimpse of his pained expression told me he’d already heard about our lab meltdown.

Deciding to brazen it out, I gave him a smile and a chirpy, “Afternoon, sir.”

“Good afternoon, Samantha. I heard you had a fire at the site last night. Not from you, I might mention.”

I didn’t bother to ask how he knew. Obviously the incident had warped across the government ionosphere with the speed of Hans Solo in his younger years.

“Yes, sir, we did.”

“Why don’t you give me your version of the events?”

I wasn’t surprised he would assume my version might differ from whatever he’d heard. It usually did. At least he was willing to listen to my side of things. That’s more than could be said for my previous bosses.

When it comes right down to it, I like Dr. David Jessup. I also respect him tremendously. He’s one of those brilliant, freewheeling thinkers DARPA brings in for a five- or six-year stint to shake things up and go after the really far-out technologies. His mind-boggling list of credentials includes more degrees than you can count, a fellowship in Harvard’s prestigious Science, Technology and Public Policy Program and two terms as president of the National Institutes of Health’s Black Scientists Association.

All this at the ripe old age of forty-two. Although I have to say his fuddy-duddy bow tie and houndstooth check sport coat make him look years older. Maybe that was the point.

The problem is, Dr. Jessup’s exposure to the military is as minimal as mine. We arrived at DAPRA the same week, which was probably why he got stuck with being my boss. Poor guy didn’t know enough to run for cover.

After all our months together, Dr. J still isn’t quite sure where a lowly lieutenant holding only a bachelor’s degree fits into an organization composed almost exclusively of PhDs. I’m still not sure, either, but I don’t let it keep me awake at night.

I did, however, need to give him the details of what
had
kept me awake last night.

“I wasn’t here when the fire started, sir. I had a meeting with the Border Patrol regarding the bodies I discovered out on the range. Then I went to my office to do a little work. Did you get the email I sent you yesterday regarding the issue of proprietary rights?”

I inserted that bit about going to the office deliberately. I know I said I was almost certain I couldn’t be accused of desertion but it never hurts to build your case.

Thus reminded that I was on post and diligently at work yesterday, Dr. J nodded. “I read it.”

“I spotted the flames when I drove back out to the site later that evening. They pretty much consumed the CHU containing our test instrumentation.”

Dr. J winced. I understood why with his next comment.

“You’ll have to fill out a report.”

The military loves reports almost as much as acronyms. Even DARPA, long considered a maverick among Department of Defense agencies, is not immune. You could paper Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium with our required reports. Kind of ironic when you consider the billions we pour into research for non-written, non-verbal forms of communications.

“My team and I are already working it,” I assured the good doc. “I’ll get it to you Monday morning.”

He looked relieved until I added a kicker.

“You may want to check DOD Directive 7200.11 concerning damage to government property. Once you receive my report, you or someone above you in the DARPA chain of command has three days to appoint an investigating officer.”

That had to be a first!

Me
, citing a government regulation!

My palms got clammy and I experienced a momentary faintness at the thought I might have gone over to the dark side. I gulped and recovered enough to continue.