What Lies Behind (14 page)

TUESDAY: AFTERNOON

But evil is wrought by want of thought,

As well as want of heart.

—Thomas Hood

Chapter 26

Tuesday afternoon

BEAUTY WATCHED THE
brown-haired wren walk across the street and enter a town house with an angel out front. She moved like water, gliding gently, head up, shoulders back, a small spring in the last part of her step, like a little girl excited and bouncing on her toes.

He’d been watching her for days, months, years, it seemed. She was the ideal woman for him—just shy of being thin, pretty but not beautiful, brunette, good taste in clothes and restaurants, unmarried. He bet she’d know how to make conversation, be witty and clever, laugh at his jokes and fetch him cool drinks on hot days without asking.

He took his eyes off her long enough to look at himself in the rearview mirror. Narrowed his eyes, made himself look mean and started a vehement, virulent argument with himself.

I want her.

She doesn’t fit the parameters.

I don’t care. I want her. I want her now.

She has protections. She is not like the others.

And I’m supposed to do what, just sit back and content myself with looking? I want to feel her. That skin, so soft, so clean, so fresh.

The rules are there for your protection. You’ve spent twenty years making this work. You recognize the signs, it’s happened before. It’s simply an infatuation. Infatuation will be the end of you, of this. You won’t be able to watch anymore. Do you want her more than you want your life?

An eyebrow raised.

No.

Good. You’ve been much too impetuous lately.

I’m bored.

Then we’ll find something to make you unbored. But she isn’t it. Now, drive away like a good little boy, and find another. Besides, your blood’s still fizzing from the last one. Enjoy it. Relax. Go have a drink. You’ve taken two in the past two weeks. They are onto you. She will be onto you, as well, and soon. They are connecting the dots. Once they connect the kills, how long do you think you can stay ahead of this? Lie low for a bit, and see what happens.

I know she’s onto me. That’s what makes this so fun. I need something...more. A challenge. Yes, I think a challenge is in order. I can’t stay cooped up anymore. I need to breathe the air and feel the breeze on my face. I need to touch her. I need to know what her hair smells like.

You need a challenge like a hole in the head. Are you an idiot? Do you want to get caught? Do you want to throw twenty years of work away? Because they will put this together sooner rather than later, mark my words. And then you’ll be finished.

She will. She’s the one who will see what I’ve done, and come after me.

And he licked his lips at the thought.

They fought for an hour, waiting for her to reemerge. When she did, with the cop and a younger guy who looked both scared and excited, he took a few discreet pictures for good measure, a little something for the road, so to speak. Thought about how nice it would be to touch that shiny hair, wind his fingers through it, bring it to his nose and sniff deeply of her essence. He knew she must use something expensive on it; her clothes were high-quality. She took care of herself.

Don’t do it. Walk away. There are others, ones who fit the parameters, who are everything you’re looking for and more. Rules exist for your protection, Beauty.

You’re a fucking shit, you know that, right?

A smile in the mirror.

I’m the best friend you could ever have. Now, drive away.

And he did. Headed his car west, toward home. As much as he wanted her, Beauty knew it was better to let the anticipation build. It was too early. Too soon. There was so much more watching to be done.

He would leave the little wren alone.

For now.

Chapter 27

Capitol Hill

AS QUIETLY AS
she’d come, Robin left her sister’s town house. She’d done a thorough search, looked in all the hiding spots Amanda had created throughout the place. Someone else had also done a thorough search of the house, especially of the renter’s mail, but leaving practically no trace behind, which made the hair on the back of her neck stand up and her vision pulse with violet.

What did you get yourself into, little sister?

The dog next door was silent. Someone should ask the neighbor what time the dog had started barking yesterday. She hoped the police would be smart enough to think of it.

Back in her car, even more vigilant now. Down to Constitution, then up Indiana. Weaving around through the streets of the city, thinking furiously.

She called Lola, set her onto the email trail. If anyone could re-create a server bounce, it was her. The moment she hung up, the phone rang again. There was no caller ID. She had a special phone with its own operating system developed specifically for her team of miscreants, so they could operate in the shadows, unseen, unheard, untraceable.

When she hit Talk, there was a low tone. A signal.

She waited patiently, and a moment later, Atlantic came on the line.

“What’s the matter?” he asked without preamble. Atlantic was a very busy man, the head of a number of secret task forces across all the agencies. Robin only knew the names and auspices of two—her own group, and Operation Angelmaker, Atlantic’s attempt to keep a tight rein and eye on the world’s government assassins. When one stepped out of line, he—or she—was brought back in or eliminated.

Robin had always been Atlantic’s go-to girl in times of need.

“My sister was murdered last night.”

She heard the soft intake of breath, was surprised. She’d only met him once in person, six years ago, when he recruited her. The rest of their communications had been by phone. But Atlantic was hard as nails, shrewd and unflappable. He was descended from the Ainu, the indigenous Japanese, and possessed one striking feature from this heritage—eyes that were an unholy, unnatural shade of pale ice blue, so light as to be nearly transparent.

“You’ll never forget him if you meet him. He has a gaze colder than the depths of the Atlantic,” she’d once been told by a colleague. It was true. Atlantic was an unnaturally gifted man, able to create great loyalty among his people, great respect among his peers and engender great fear among his enemies.

Compassion wasn’t part of his lexicon.

“I heard,” he said. “I am very sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes. Amanda got into something. I need to find out what. Since I can’t exactly ask her employers...”

“You’d like me to do it in your stead. Fine.”

And he was gone. Atlantic was never one to waste time.

She tapped her finger on the steering wheel. Wondered if she should make a call, ask for a welfare check on the men who rented her sister’s house. No. If the D.C. cops were worth their salt, they’d eventually find the town house in Amanda’s records and make their own gruesome discovery.

She wound down to Lafayette Square, found a spot on the street, paralleled expertly and walked into the park, staring across the way at the White House. She could never see the white marble without thinking of her swearing in, standing in the quiet Indian Treaty room, the flags whispering over the air-conditioning vents, the roughness of the pebbled leather of the Bible’s cover beneath her palm.

I, Robin Souleyret, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

She had spoken the words of the oath with a deep sense of satisfaction, then took it to its most extreme meaning. She’d defended, all right. Fought and killed to protect the ideals and freedoms of her government. She’d done things no one should have to do, and had done them willingly, knowing she was serving the greater good. The sight of the building made her swell with pride. Regardless of occupant, regardless of political winds, she had played her role, and played it well.

Amanda had taken the same oath. She did her job well, too.

Amanda didn’t know exactly what her older sister did, and Robin tried to keep it that way. The isolation from her only family was hard, but she wasn’t sure Mandy would understand her vocation. Killing people under orders wasn’t exactly meant for dinner conversation. As far as Amanda knew, Robin was a CIA field agent who went to multiple postings around the world. Her background was in physics, so it stood to reason she’d be keeping an eye out on the nation states with nuclear capabilities.

When, in actuality, Robin was a gun. That was all. A conscienceless gun. And Robin went to great lengths to make sure her little sister didn’t know that.

Walking along the promenade in front of the White House, she took in the wandering black-clad spec ops detail on top of the building, the surface-to-air missile batteries, the cameras every few feet and other covert security measures. Had a moment of smugness—little did they know their greatest weapon was walking by at this very moment.

If they had known, if they had looked down and seen death walking past, they might not go so blithely about their day. Robin had a bit of a reputation in certain circles.

The smugness fled. Now Mandy would never know. Robin had fulfilled her greatest duty, to keep her sister ignorant of her sins.

Mandy had a law-and-order streak in her. Recruited into the FBI out of college, she wanted all the glamour and excitement that came with being a cop. She went through the academy, took all the tests, shot all the guns. And when her superiors started to see she had a knack for undercover work and was conversant in three languages, they’d seized the opportunity and started her onto a different tract.

Robin knew Mandy specialized in corporate espionage. Her normal MO was to falsify a résumé, get hired on by a company, find their weak spots, steal their secrets and get them back to whomever was paying. Or she was brought in to do the exact opposite—figure out who was stealing secrets, and where they were being sold. It all depended on where the company stood in line with the best interests of the US government.

Amanda answered to several different masters—whoever was directly affected, whoever had hired her, and her handlers, plus her FBI hierarchy. Robin had always admired her little sister’s ability to juggle the sometimes vehemently opposing orders from several quarters. But like Robin, once on a case, she operated with autonomy, only reaching out when absolutely necessary.

A tidal wave of aquamarine the exact color of her sister’s eyes clouded her vision, and Robin stifled a sob. Amanda had reached out. And Robin had been too busy to help.

She batted the cloud away.
Stop that. You’re no use to her like this.

Her phone rang, and she took a seat on an empty park bench and answered it.

Lola Jergens was on the line. “We have a trace. The email came from inside the State Department.”

“Do we have a specific area, or a name?”

“The external address was fake, the whole thing was scrambled. No name, only the server section. It came from the Africa desk.”

“Africa? She was supposed to be working out of France, or had been a month ago.”

“There’s no mistake.”

Robin stood, started back toward her car. “Lola, I want you to pull every name in the section, figure out who would have been working with Amanda. I’m mobile. Call me when you have a target.”

“What are you going to do?” Lola asked, wary. “You can’t exactly walk in there. You’re still persona non grata.”

Robin smiled, and a homeless man on the edge of the park who was about to ask for money started and turned away, pretending he hadn’t seen her.

“I just want to have a chat with whoever asked my sister to bring something into the country. Because whoever it is probably got her killed. Find out who it was, Lola, and let me know right away.”

“And in the meantime?”

“I think it’s time I go see Tommy Cattafi.”

Chapter 28

Capitol
Hill
Fletcher’s house

IT DIDN’T TAKE
as long as Fletcher expected to upload the data from the SD card. The files were encrypted, not a huge surprise there. He opened the small package that came with the laptop, dumped out a thumb drive with a decryption software program on it, and a couple of other, more esoteric code-breaking tools should the thumb drive’s program fail. Thankful for the forensic accounting seminar they’d been given last month, which covered how to run these programs in exactly this kind of scenario, he inserted the thumb drive and launched the program.

The more sophisticated the criminals became, the quicker the cops had to paddle to keep up. Jordan had introduced him to a number of fun toys the feds used to access information from both web accounts and hard drives, and he’d successfully lobbied for Metro to bring several of them on board.

The proletariat in him had qualms about the level of access the government now had, especially warrantless spying, which was happening more and more, but the cop in him appreciated the tools. They made his life easier, made an investigation of this nature go much, much faster than it normally would have.

The program finished running. The screen of the laptop went blank, then suddenly began filling with numbers.
Damn. Code. It was all in code. Son of a bitch.
Yes, he’d managed to crack the SD card, but he’d need a sophisticated cryptography program to decipher any of it.

Or a little help from his friends.

And he knew exactly who to call.

So much of the crime they saw now had links to the online world. When he’d become the homicide lieutenant, in addition to his appeal for more sophisticated technologies, he’d pushed for an outreach program into the technology community. They needed more confidential informants—CIs—who were on the hacker end of the spectrum. More deals done with boys and girls who were doing less-than-legal online work in exchange for information on their employers. His investigators agreed, and had done well rounding up some people they could use when the need arose.

One of the people who’d been fingered right away was a girl named Rosalind Lowe. In the hacker world, she went by the call sign Freedom Mouse.

Mousy she was not. A white hat hacker, she’d gotten herself involved with a small-time Mafia don in northeast D.C. who’d turned on her, and she’d come to them looking for help in extricating herself from the man’s grip. She had information that was enough to take him down, but if he had any idea it had come from her, she’d be dead.

Fletcher liked Rosalind. She was smart and sassy, tattooed and pierced, and had a bullshit detector a mile wide. She could find work as a human lie detector, should the current technology ever fail. She’d also been specializing in cryptography at MIT before she’d gotten bored and dropped out.

She’d helped them take down the don, and in exchange they’d forgiven her a small banking scam. Nothing that would hurt anyone. She was incredibly good at breaking into company’s servers and then letting them know their firewalls were a joke, and had done just that.

He grabbed his phone, called Hart.

“Fletcher, where the hell are you?” he asked, sounding terribly annoyed.

“Home. With a wad of info I can’t decipher. Can you get Mouse for me? I have a job for her.”

Hart was quiet. “Armstrong is on the warpath looking for you.”

“Which is why I called you. I need Mouse, Lonnie. Yesterday. And I can’t call her, there’s too much heat on this case as it is.”

“Man,” Hart said, dragging it out.

“Thou doth protest too much. Trust me, okay?”

“Okay. I’ll make the call. I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep this thing quiet for much longer. Cattafi took a turn for the worse. His family won’t be here for a few hours. They called from Chicago, asked if there was anything we could do. Which, of course, there isn’t. And we’re hitting a brick wall with Souleyret. I can’t find out anything worthwhile. We’re going through her financials right now. She owned a house on Capitol Hill for the past ten years, not too far from you. It’s leased out. There’s a BMW 3-series sitting in a long-term parking garage at Union Station registered to her name. That’s it. She has no debt, no loans, no sketchy income, just a regular direct deposit from Uncle Sam. Girl was squeaky clean, with sugar on top.”

“Why not park the car at the house?”

“Guess that’s part of the lease agreement. Renters get the garage space.”

“Credit cards?”

“Just one. An American Express she pays off automatically every month. We’re going through the most recent charges now, but she must work on a cash basis, because it’s barely being used. There’s nothing exciting here. Bank statements show ATM withdrawals, some with foreign activity fees, so we can build an idea of where she’s been. But that’s all we’ve got. There’s nothing in her financials that screams,
Here’s why someone wanted to off me.
We’ve got requests in for her phone and text records, but I gotta say, I’m getting the sense this chick is a bit careful. Contained. Or we’re missing something huge. Now, when you gonna get here and start helping?”

“Not soon. I’m trying to find out what got Souleyret killed. She brought something else into the country—not the vaccines—which is why I need Mouse.”

“Oh. I see.” His tone changed, from annoyance to interest. “And you think there may be some answers she can find?”

“I do. What about the sister? Have you found her yet?”

“Not yet. I was hoping Sam could dig into the official FBI files, see if she can’t find her.”

“I’ll ask. Stay in touch. Text me the address on the Hill. When I finish here, I might as well go talk to the people who rented from her, find out if they know anything.”

“You do that, boss. I’ll just keep plugging away on nothing good.”

* * *

Sam sat back in the chair. Fletcher was just hanging up his cell phone. “Anything?” she asked him.

“No. Hart’s hitting a dead end with Souleyret. Nothing hinky in her financials, nothing unusual anywhere around her.” He pointed at the computer. “My decryption program worked, but the files are all in code. I have a call in to a kid who might be able to crack it for me.”

Sam’s phone rang. “It’s Baldwin. Finally. He might have a shortcut for us.” She put the phone to her ear. “Where have you been?”

His deep voice always made her calm, but she heard a buzz of excitement in it. “Confirming we definitely have another victim of the Hometown Killer.”

“Why do you sound happy about this?”

“Because there’s DNA at this crime scene. We have something to match him to now. He’s starting to speed up, and he’s starting to get sloppy. We’re going to catch him, and soon. I hope.”

“That is good news. I need to talk about our girl. Are you secure?”

“No. I won’t be for an hour at least.”

“All right. Let me say this, then. Are you aware of her code?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I was worried about that. Check the back pocket of the file. You’ll find your help there. Listen, I’m sorry for being so cagey. I’ll explain everything when I can get on a secure sat phone, or home.”

“Okay. Be careful, Baldwin.”

“You, too, Sam. See you.”

She hung up and flipped to the back of the file Shultz had sent. Taped to the back of the last page was a small thumb drive.

She peeled it off and handed it to Fletcher, just as Daniels came back with a platter piled high with sandwiches.

“What’s this?” Fletcher asked.

“I think it’s a code breaker. Daniels, did Agent Shultz tell you this was in here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Fletcher shrugged and slid it into the USB drive on the laptop. Nothing happened.

He disengaged the drive and handed it back to Sam. “Looks like it’s a dud. Let’s eat, I’m starved.” Fletcher went to the kitchen and brought back some sodas, and they dug into the sandwiches.

Fletcher closed his eyes in bliss. “You weren’t kidding, Marcos. Can I call you Marcos?”

“Yes, sir. Or Marc. Or Daniels. I get Agent a lot. I even answer to
Hey, you!
”

“Funny guy. I’m Fletcher. Or Fletch. Stick around, be my full-time chef? I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Not sure how Quantico could function without me, sir, but I’ll ask.”

Sam finished the first half of the sandwich, musing as she chewed. “We’re missing something.”

Fletcher tapped the top edge of the laptop, which had gone to sleep while they were eating. “Yeah, someone who can crack codes. Wish Lonnie would get back to me with Mouse already.”

Daniels stopped eating. “I’m not bad at it, Fletcher. Code-breaking, I mean.”

Sam eyed him, and he flushed a bit under her gaze, tucked his chin down and took a big bite of grilled cheese.

“Daniels, does Agent Shultz know that, too?”

He nodded. “I did a semester of cryptography at Yale.”

Sam smiled. “I think I know why she asked you to stick around. Finish your sandwich, then you can have a go at the laptop.”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Daniels said, “I’m in. This program is a little hard to get started—it doesn’t launch by itself. You need to look at the codex and give it parameters before it can begin the process of identifying the initial code and rearranging the numbers into the codex.” He turned the screen to face Sam.

Fletcher came to read over her shoulder.

At first, the words made no sense. Then Sam realized what she was seeing.

“Oh my God.”

“What is it?” Fletcher asked. “This is all gibberish to me.”

She pointed to the screen. “These are vaccination schedules, dated from last week all the way back to 2005. Throughout the pan-Africa region, but concentrating in Sierra Leone and Guinea. But that’s not what’s so interesting.” She scrolled down. “Look at the findings. Wow. This isn’t good.”

“Are the vaccines killing people?”

She nodded. “Yes.” She pointed at the screen. “See these two columns? These are inoculation dates and death dates. The death dates increase dramatically starting last March.” She looked at Fletcher, troubled. “This wasn’t a one-time test run. They’ve been at it for a year, injecting people with this new bug. God, Fletcher. Amanda’s instincts were right. They’ve been perfecting it.”