Authors: Alan Jacobson
Hačko lifted her head and looked toward the open doorway.
“It’s not a tough decision,” Vail said. “If you care about Emir, tell us what we want to know. You don’t give a shit about him, fine. He dies. But either way, we’re gonna get the information out of you. Might as well save his life.”
After a long moment, DeSantos grabbed her by the hair and forced her to look at him. “Where’s Rudenko!”
Hačko’s face displayed none of the confidence and arrogance it had a moment ago. “He—He was in a flat in Camden, near the markets, above a Vietnamese restaurant. That’s all I know. I was only there once, I didn’t pay attention to the address.”
“Where’s the rest of the ricin?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right, forget it. Let’s go,” DeSantos said, grabbing her shirt collar and pulling her away from the warehouse. “Say good-bye to Emir.”
“No, wait. All I know—All I know is that it’s going to be an aerosolized release.”
“Bullshit,” Vail said. “You’re the chemical engineer. You designed it, you know everything about how it’s going to be deployed. And where.”
“Let me see Emir. If he lives, I will tell you.”
DeSantos and Vail shared a look. And that’s when Vail knew that her suspicions were correct. Fiqar was dead.
“Take her to the car,” DeSantos said. “I’ll call an ambulance and get him taken care of.”
“No!” Hačko said, yanking her arm away from Vail. “I want to see him.”
“Can you handle this?”
Vail shoved her SIG into Hačko’s neck. “I’m good.” She led Hačko away, her prisoner twisting and looking back, checking to make sure DeSantos was doing as he had promised.
What she did not know is that it was a hollow promise, one DeSantos had no intention of keeping.
54
F
ive minutes passed before DeSantos joined them at the car. “I called Carter. Ambulance is en route, ETA two minutes.”
Vail understood the code: Carter, and whatever hazardous materials crew he had assembled, would arrive in short order—which meant they had to be gone before then.
“We’re taking their car,” Vail said. “I think we wore out our welcome in that one.”
“Good.” DeSantos shoved the SIG into his waistband and turned to Hačko. “I kept up my end of the bargain. Where’s the ricin going to be released?”
“I want to go to the hospital, I want to be with Emir.”
“Not gonna happen. You give us the info, we’ll take you there. But right now, our job is to find that toxin.” He gave her a long look, but she tensed her lips.
“Fine.” Vail popped open the trunk. “Climb in.”
“I’m not getting—”
“Now.”
She didn’t move, so DeSantos picked her up and threw her inside. He removed the belt from her jeans and bound her arms securely while Vail pulled off the woman’s socks and stuffed them in her mouth.
After closing the lid, Vail parked the vehicle they had been using at the far end of the complex. She joined DeSantos a moment later near the exit.
He drove Hačko’s Peugot out of the lot just as the whirring lights and sirens of Carter’s hazmat contingent were heading toward them, a block away.
“That’ll come in handy,” DeSantos said, pointing to an external GPS mounted on the dash. “Don’t have to risk turning on my phone. Program in Camden.”
Vail cranked the radio and set the balance to the rear to mask their conversation. Van Halen’s “Panama” blasted from the speakers.
As she poked at the GPS screen, she said, “If they’re releasing an aerosol, what are the options?”
“Too numerous to figure out without time, intel, and a detailed knowledge of the country.”
“Is it time to bring in MI5?”
“Reid and Carter have been in contact with Buck. But there’s still the problem of the mole. If they go agency-wide with this, their inside man will find out and tip them off. They’ll change their deployment and Rudenko will hit the wind. We’ll get nothing.”
“We’d buy time. I’m not sure Reid and Carter are enough.”
“They aren’t, but we don’t have a choice. Not until we can figure out who’s working with Rudenko. So—it’s time to work off assumptions and roll the dice.”
Vail sighed. “Maybe we can increase our odds with some good old-fashioned reason, logic, and intelligence.”
“Where we gonna find any of that?”
Vail allowed herself to smile. “If you were Rudenko and his crew, how would you pull this off? How would you release the ricin?”
DeSantos stole a look at a street sign. After a moment, he said, “I’d use a crop dusting plane.”’
“At night?”
“Absolutely. Fly under the radar—literally. Drop your load over a large swath of land, or a city, a park, the choices are endless. And no one knows what happened until they wake up sick. Or don’t wake up at all.”
“So an airfield. Something small.”
“They’re not taking off out of Heathrow or Gatwick, that’s for sure.” DeSantos consulted his watch. “Call Uzi, see what he can tell us.”
Vail assembled her phone and put it on speaker.
“Boychick,” DeSantos said, “talk to me.”
“Got some more info on Buck and that secure text he sent you. Someone piggybacked on the encryption algorithm—”
“Uzi. We’re in England. Speak to me in English, okay?”
“Fine. I’ll dumb it down. Wait—Where the hell are you? Is that Van Halen?”
“We’ve got a visitor in the trunk. Music’s cover. Go on.”
“Right. So in simple terms, they stole the key of Buck’s handset and used it to send you a message.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“It came from inside the home secretary’s office.”
“Are you sure? The home secretary is behind all this?”
“Not necessarily. Give me a little more time. I’m tracking something down and I’m almost into their system. How about you?”
“We have reason to believe that there really are three ricin stores,” Vail said. “We’ve secured two of them, but the third is the largest, and it’s going to be aerosolized. We’re guessing it’s going to be spread by crop duster.”
“Hot Rod’ll do some research, see what he can find out.”
“We don’t have time for thirty minute check-in schedules,” Vail said. “I’m gonna use the iPhone from now on and leave it powered up.”
“Hopefully my modifications will keep them from tracking you.”
DeSantos chuckled. “From your mouth to God’s ears.”
55
A
s DeSantos drove toward Camden, Vail dialed Reid. He answered, confused about the unknown number and struggling to hear her over the commotion at the warehouse.
“Another dead body,” Reid said. “You people are getting quite the reputation.”
“I think that train’s already left the station,” Vail said, craning her neck to get a look at the surroundings, making sure they weren’t being followed. “Are you with Carter?”
“Bit of a risk, but I can’t skulk around town worried about getting arrested. We’ve got important matters to settle.”
“Is it confirmed?” Vail asked. “Ricin?”
“It’s a scene here, lots of people in spacesuits. But from what they’re saying, yes. Both sites check out. The preliminary mobile lab shows we’ve got the liquid form containing the cytotoxic proteins ricin and RCA.”
“RCA? I assume you’re not talking about the electronics company.”
“Ricinus communis agglutinin. I think that’s what he called it. Now you know why I said, ‘RCA.’ It’s a chemical in the toxin that blows out your blood cells. I suggest you avoid exposure.”
“Good thing you told me. I was thinking of snorting the powder, assuming we find it.”
DeSantos turned and gave her a look.
“Got something else for you and Carter to chase down,” Vail said. “Someone sent us a bogus secure text on the CLAIR. It was supposedly from Buck but it came from the home secretary, possibly his office.”
“He’s a she, and how did you get this information?”
“Let’s just say it’s not something you can use in court. So you’re going to need to poke around and find whatever evidence you need to get a search warrant. When you do, you’ll want the right to examine hard drives and their government server, smartphones—you get the picture.”
“Who are we going after? Surely you’re not telling me it’s the home secretary.”
“Don’t know yet. We’re working on it. As soon as we’ve got something, you’ll know. Meantime, start poking around. You wanted to know about Walpole’s murder. That secure text Buck sent us—He told us he’d located one of the triggers.”
“Ah,” Reid said, understanding. “But it wasn’t one of the triggers, it was Walpole.”
“Right. Uzi—the guy you spoke with earlier—he did whatever geeks do and traced the message we got from Buck. It was bogus. It was sent from inside the home secretary’s office—by her, or her assistant, or someone else. Find whoever sent that bogus message and chances are good you’ll have the guy who betrayed all your colleagues.”
“Bloody good.”
“Is Buck back on the job?”
“You could say that. Chap’s got a screaming headache and I believe he would like to shove his boot up both your arses. But yeah, he’s in the office.”
“One other thing you should know: Walpole was sitting on a secret commission that’s investigating a bank that’s been laundering money for Rudenko.”
“He was also the major architect of legislation for the UK to have a unified fiscal and foreign policy,” DeSantos said. “That put him in the crosshairs of a number of interested parties.”
Vail glanced out the window, taking in her surroundings. “Not sure how all that fits in with the Home Office, but what doesn’t make sense to us may make sense to you. Like, what does the Home Office do?”
“It’s run by the home secretary, whose official position is Secretary of State for the Home Department. She’s got an executive who works alongside her, the Permanent Secretary, which is a senior civil service position. The Home Office oversees immigration, security, and law and order—meaning MI5, police, border control, passports and ID cards, and counterterrorism.”
“So it looks like we’re hiking in the right forest.”
“Let’s hope so. I’ll get to work on this. Ring me up if you hear anything else.”
As soon as she hung up, her phone rang.
It was Uzi. She put him on speaker. “What’ve you got?”
“How about malware,” Uzi said, “on the home secretary’s PC. A Trojan.”
“You mean, like a virus?”
“A virus infects other files and self-replicates. A Trojan looks like a legitimate program or service, but it hides malicious code. The one I found on the home secretary’s PC was designed to record her keystrokes and transmit them back to its origin.”
“How can that be, Uzi? I mean, we’re talking about a secure facility. Wouldn’t it be like our Department of Homeland Security? I’d think they’d take security seriously.”
Uzi laughed.
Vail looked at her phone. “That wasn’t funny.”
“More funny than you know. Things are not as locked down as you think. Here’s how it’s sometimes done: the home secretary has meetings every day, right? So one day she gets back to her office, and she’s just had lunch with Joe. She gets an email from Joe—only it’s not really Joe. It’s someone who either knows that she’s recently had a meeting with Joe, saw her in a restaurant with Joe—or at least knows that she knows a Joe.”
“An insider,” DeSantos said.
“Doesn’t have to be, but it increases his chance of success. So fake Joe sends an email to Elizabeth with the subject line, ‘As we discussed.’ She opens the email, thinking it’s from her colleague, and there’s a note that says, ‘Elizabeth, thought you’d be interested in this article, which goes to what we were discussing.’ She clicks on the link in the email, which takes her to a webpage that’s spoofed to look just like the BBC. When the page loads, it doesn’t really pertain to anything she and Joe discussed. Still, it’s an interesting article on immigration legislation. Elizabeth closes the webpage and moves on to a call she needs to make.
“What she doesn’t know is that by clicking that link and going to that fake BBC webpage, she’s downloaded an executable file onto her PC. It starts logging all her keystrokes. Passwords, emails, documents, anything she types gets transmitted to the fake Joe, who also now has a backdoor that gives him total access to her PC.”
“And she’s clueless.”
“Clueless. It’s happened to more Fortune 500 companies than you’d believe. And high-ranking government leaders. You can have great security protocols, but people are always going to be the weakest link.”
Vail sat forward in her seat and did another scan in all directions for tails. “I’ve got Reid and Carter working with us on this. Is there any way to tell where that malware is sending the data?”
“Sending the keystroke data would likely be when the PC is in an environment where a firewall would not prevent the transmission,” Uzi said. “The keystrokes would likely be packaged up and sent to an anonymous IP address on the Internet, like StuxNet does. Let me see what I can find out, but it takes time. And time’s not on our side. Santa, you listening?”
“I’m here.”
“We need to discuss our exit strategy.”
“Exit strategy?” DeSantos stole a glance at Vail. “We don’t have all the ricin yet. And Rudenko’s still at large. This is our best ch—”
“Look,” Uzi said. “There’s only so much we can do here. Working against the clock, against law enforcement, against the Security Service—if we can’t secure the toxin soon—and I mean, soon—we need to get our asses out of Dodge. We’ll turn over all our intel to Buck on the way out of the country.”
“But—”
“You know I’m right, Santa. It’s gotten too messy, and if we stick around, we may not get any further than we’ve gotten. We’ve been lucky—and we’ve been good. But the longer we hang around, the more likely our luck’s gonna turn bad. And if we’re arrested, you and Karen are toast. As it is, I don’t see a way out of this for you guys without some serious diplomatic maneuvers. And we both know that just doesn’t happen when you’re black. Especially when there’s a body count that can’t be easily explained away.”
DeSantos again looked at Vail. She tried not to let her face betray her feelings, but she agreed with Uzi. Jonathan was on her mind—and she had already expressed her feelings over getting duped into this mission.
DeSantos sighed. “Since when did you become the parent in this relationship?”
“Are you with me on this?”
“Yeah” DeSantos said. “Fine. You’re right.”
Vail sat back, relieved—yet still hoping they would get to finish what they had started.
“Of course I’m right,” Uzi said. “That’s why I’ve already worked out a solution.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“’Cause I’m freakin’ awesome. You think I’d come over here without a plan to get us out? Hot Rod and I worked it out on the flight over and cleared it with Knox. We’re gonna head over to Mildenhall.”
“The Royal Air Force Base?”
“In Suffolk, yeah. The US has a big air force base there that happens to be well stocked with a fleet of Ospreys.”
“There aren’t any Ospreys there.”
“Apparently, my man, there are now. They’re retiring all the CH-46 birds and replacing them with Ospreys. And Hot Rod and I are going to borrow one and pick you up.”
“You’re going to steal an Osprey?”
“Borrow, Santa. Borrow.”
“And go where?”
“First things first. We’re heading out to Suffolk. Hot Rod’s going to drive, and I’m gonna keep working the keyboard. I’ll let you know where it leads.”