Just as I was attempting to make my getaway, a team of agents and bigwigs came marching in, including the MIB aka Agent Frostbite . . . er . . . Frost, CIA director Tanner, Dr. Sherrod, FBI director Gaston, the air force team of Walrus and Penguin, and my weapons-training BFF, Agent Rosco.
“Did you need something?” Director Tanner asked me, obviously noticing my hedge toward the door. “No,” I said quickly, and plastered a smile on my face. “Just thought I’d get a drink of water.”
Tanner punched a button on the intercom in the center of the table. “Dawn, could you please bring in some refreshments before we get started?”
I smiled even brighter and took my seat. Of course, I didn’t take the actual seat I’d been sitting in earlier. This time I moved a little farther away from Richard Des Sexpot.
When we were all seated and refreshments had been served, Director Tanner got down to business. “Welcome to your last briefing,” she began.
I looked nervously at the door and raised my hand.
“Yes?” she asked me.
“Uh . . . ,” I said, feeling a bit foolish, but I had to ask, “aren’t we going to wait for Dutch—I mean Agent Rivers?”
Director Tanner’s forehead creased. “Excuse me?”
Okay, so now I was
really
feeling foolish. “I thought he would want to be included in the final briefing.”
“He is,” she said to me.
I looked around at all the other faces save Sexpot’s, but I could feel his eyes on me. I knew I was turning a big ol’ shade of red, but there was nothing I could do about that. “Is he on the other end of the intercom?” I asked, looking at the small star-shaped object in the center of the table.
“Abigail,” said Sexpot.
“Hold on,” I told him, still trying to figure out where my fiancé was.
“Edgar,” Sexpot said next, and just like that, I realized who Richard Des Vries actually was.
“Holy freakballs!” I squealed, whipping my head around to really look at him now.
“You didn’t know it was me?” he asked, his voice losing any hint of the former accent.
“No!” I said, my eyes all big and goggly. “I mean, I thought your voice sounded familiar, honey, but I was trying to avoid really looking at you, and the whole accent and dark hair really threw me off.” I squinted at him and studied the person that Dutch’s voice was coming out of. He did indeed look totally different; the olive tone to his skin was much darker with the tan, his cobalt blues had been turned to dark brown, and his eyebrows were either thicker or just darker so they looked thicker. All that with the goatee had totally transformed him. “Did you bleach your teeth?” I asked him, squinting some more.
It was Dutch’s turn to blush and I suddenly remembered who else was in the room. I coughed and quickly scooted my chair closer to the table. “Sorry ’bout that,” I said. “I wasn’t aware you guys had done such a good job turning Agent Rivers into someone else.”
To my relief, Director Tanner appeared immensely pleased by my reaction, and she and Gaston exchanged a knowing look. “Yes,” she said. “He does resemble Mr. Des Vries to a remarkable degree.”
“You mean there’s a
real
Richard Des Vries?” I asked. There was that name again. . . . Where had I heard it before? And I looked at Dutch again. . . . I swore I’d seen someone who looked exactly like him, but where and when?
In answer, Director Tanner clicked her remote control and on the screen behind me flashed a picture that brought it all back to me. “That’s the guy in the lineup of photos I sorted through last week,” I said aloud.
Tanner nodded. “It is.”
“So, is the real Des Vries locked up?” I asked. I was already getting hits off his energy, which told me the man was currently behind bars.
Director Gaston smiled. “He is, although he’s not being held by us. He’s currently in an Israeli prison awaiting trial for illegal weapons dealing. We’re trying to get him extradited to the U.S. for a round of interrogation with us, but that’s highly unlikely. The Israelis have wanted him for years and they’re not about to let him go.”
“How’d they get him?” I asked.
Gaston said, “Des Vries was on a flight from Jordan to Bucharest when he began suffering an acute case of food poisoning. His commercial plane had to make an emergency medical landing in Israel. The minute the Mossad heard about who’d just landed at their Tel Aviv airport, they were all over him.”
“Why did the Israelis want him so bad?” I asked him next.
“He’s earned a reputation for selling arms to the Palestinians and Iranians to use against the Israelis. He’s also been known to work a deal or two with Hamas and the Taliban. He’s unscrupulous and notorious, not to mention a murderer, smuggler, and thief, but in the world of weapons dealing, he’s still fairly small-time. Word is that he’s been looking for a big weapons deal to put himself on the map, and the Israelis have taken him out of the game before he had a chance to do that.”
“Ah,” I said, noting again the uncanny resemblance between the real Des Vries and Dutch, which was probably why Gaston had smiled like a crocodile when I’d told him to look at Des Vries for the missing drone. That reminded me of the mission and I asked, “Did you ask the Israelis if Des Vries stole the drone?”
Gaston nodded to Tanner, who answered me. “Yes, and as a favor to us during their interrogation of him, they got him to admit that he knew the drone existed, but he claims he had nothing to do with its disappearance. He pulled something similar with the British several years ago, when he managed to hack into a drone carrying facial recognition software and steal it away from them to resell it to the North Koreans, so you showed great skill in pulling his photo out of the pile. Still, we don’t think he’s responsible for the theft of our drone because Des Vries was captured a full five days before the drone went missing and the Israelis can be
particularly
persuasive during their interrogations, I’m inclined to believe him.”
“But what if he was working with someone else who went ahead with the plan after his capture?” I pressed.
Tanner shook her head. “Every piece of intelligence we’ve obtained from both our sources and the Israelis suggests that Des Vries works alone, and nothing in his recent history points to him orchestrating the theft. Still, his capture by the Mossad, his uncanny facial resemblance to Agent Rivers, and his ties to Toronto have provided us with the perfect cover to go after the real thief.”
Tanner then put up another slide, and I recognized the unattractive heavyset man as the second suspect I’d pulled out of their file. “We agree with you that Viktor Kozahkov is a very likely suspect. He lives in Toronto, does a fair amount of weapons dealing, and he’s got some close ties and connections to the biggest guns in the Chechen mob.”
I eyed the director. Her convincing argument didn’t match the wave of doubtful energy coming off her. “What’s bugging you, then, about making Viktor for the drone thief?” I asked.
She shrugged. “This heist seems way above his sophistication level,” she said. “Viktor’s smart, but we didn’t think he was this smart, and he’s never been more than a midlevel player in the weapons-dealing trade, buying caches of weapons in bulk and selling them in smaller bundles for more money. Stealing the drone just feels like it’d be out of his league.”
“Maybe he had help,” Dutch said.
Tanner nodded. “Maybe,” she agreed, but her tone suggested she was still unconvinced.
She then clicked to another slide and up came the photo of one seriously mean-looking dude. A large, rotund man with beady little eyes that were cruel and cunning came onto the screen. I sat back in my chair and shuddered.
“This is Vasilii Boklovich,” Tanner said. “If you’re right, Ms. Cooper, and Viktor Kozahkov has either stolen the drone or come by it from another source, then he will no doubt attempt to auction it off through this man.”
Gaston took over the conversation again. “Boklovich is
the
man to know if you have a weapon of either great quantity or great value to sell. He’s tied in to all the major terrorist organizations around the globe and has been known to host special auctions where these things eventually go to the highest bidder. We’ve wanted him for years, but he’s proved especially elusive.
“Several intelligence reports suggest that he’s hiding somewhere in Ontario province at this time. The first two agents we sent into Toronto were tasked with discovering if Boklovich had the drone in his possession yet, because one way or another we’re certain it will end up with him at auction.”
I shuddered again when I remembered what had happened to those agents. One look at Boklovich’s photo told me that if he’d discovered they were agents, he’d dealt with them swiftly and cruelly.
“In the final report they sent back before their deaths,” Gaston continued, “they made it clear that Boklovich did not yet have the drone, and there’s been no chatter yet about an auction or something as valuable as the drone and Intuit up for sale. So, either Viktor Kozahkov is dragging his feet, or whoever has the drone hasn’t made contact with Boklovich yet.”
I frowned, wondering how Dutch’s cover was going to help get back the drone. Gaston answered that question next. “Two years ago, Richard Des Vries purchased an old vacant warehouse near the water in downtown Toronto. Since then he’s been renovating the building, turning it into a high-end condo complex with eight luxury units, which we knew he was getting ready to sell, keeping the largest unit for himself of course.
“We believe his venture into real estate was a calculated one. Europe and the Middle East have been heating up for Des Vries—he’s made some serious enemies in the recent past—and we know he badly wanted in with the Chechen crowd in Toronto. The Chechen Mafia dominates the weapons-trading market worldwide to a large degree.
“Des Vries, however, is an outsider. He was born in Holland and making alliances with the Chechens would prove difficult. The drone’s disappearance actually gives us an angle to work.”
Tanner took over again. “What we’re proposing is to have Agent Rivers assume Des Vries’s identity, move into the condo in Toronto, and make contact with Kozahkov. If Kozahkov reveals that he has the drone, then we’ll set up surveillance on him until he attempts to move it. If Kozahkov doesn’t have the drone, then we’ll use him to get you two into the auction.”
Dutch shifted in his chair. “I’ve been poring over the file on Des Vries, and his assets don’t make him wealthy enough to bid on the drone.”
“Oh, he won’t be bidding on the drone,” Tanner said. “He’ll be providing something else even more valuable.”
My interest was piqued when Tanner motioned to Gaston again to explain the plan. “We’ve set up a very carefully timed leak through very specific channels we know are being monitored by Boklovich,” he began. “We’re going to acknowledge that one of our drones has been stolen, and that it was carrying a prototype of a very sophisticated weapon, and while that is a cause for concern, we’re not overly upset because the prototype had a fail-safe.”
“A fail-safe?” I repeated.
Gaston nodded. “We’re going to suggest that Intuit was designed to work only a handful of times before self-destructing, and as it typically takes hundreds of demonstrations for a competent computer programmer to reverse engineer a highly sophisticated device like Intuit, it would be useless to anyone who might want to buy it for mass production, or to use it beyond one or two missions.”
“Is that true?” I asked, thinking that if it was, I’d be pretty ticked off that we’d been suckered into such a dangerous mission when all they had to do was wait for the stupid thing to mechanically fail on its own.
“No,” said Tanner. “The rumor is not true. Intuit’s software will continue to work normally and could most definitely be successfully reverse engineered, but we’re counting on the rumor being taken seriously by Kozahkov, Boklovich, and the drone thief. If any of them buy into it, they’ll all be anxious to get rid of the drone quickly before the rumor can spread to every potential buyer willing to pay big money for the technology.”
“Ah,” I said, understanding the ruse.
“Agent Rivers will pose as Des Vries,” Tanner continued. “Once the two of you move into the condo, he’ll set up a meeting with Kozahkov to determine if Viktor has the drone. If he does have it, then Agent Rivers will tell the Chechen that he’s heard a rumor that Intuit will be useless past one or two demonstrations. If Kozahkov hasn’t yet heard about it, he’ll check, and after he verifies the rumor, he’ll be highly motivated to set up an auction with Boklovich. The minute Kozahkov attempts to move the drone, we’ll go in and nab it.”
“And if Kozahkov didn’t steal the drone and he doesn’t have Intuit?” Dutch asked.
“Then you are to offer him yet another story,” Tanner said. “You’ll tell Viktor that you’ve been able to acquire a copy of the actual software for Intuit straight from Professor Steckworth’s computer. Tell him that you’ve managed to get a clean copy on a disk that doesn’t contain the fail-safe mechanism and can be duplicated without all the difficulties that come with reverse engineering. The software will be like the goose to the drone’s golden egg, and Kozahkov will jump at the chance to help you sell it by promising an introduction to Boklovich in exchange for a percentage of the eventual sale. With Viktor’s help, you’re a shoo-in to get an invite to the auction where we
know
that Boklovich won’t hesitate to offer both the drone and the software for sale. Knowing him, he’ll offer them separately to help drive up the price for each.”
“Will you actually provide me with a copy of Intuit’s software?” Dutch wanted to know.
“Yes,” said Tanner, a bit stiffly. “We will give you an encrypted copy of it. We’ll also give you a password to allow you to get past the encryption should you be required to demonstrate that you do in fact possess the real software. But be forewarned, Agent Rivers: We’re certain that Boklovich will require proof that you possess what you claim to have, but by no means should you give him your password or an unencrypted copy. He’ll kill you the moment he thinks he doesn’t need you anymore.”