Dark of Night (54 page)

He could also understand how excruciating it would be, to be injured and forced onto the sidelines while his life partner took incredible risks.

But the words Tess said to Nash had apparently resonated. They were a team. Not just Tess and Nash, but all of them. They were in this thing together. And wasn't
that
the truth?

“I gotta call him,” Deck said.

“I'm sure he's not sleeping,” Jules again agreed.

Decker brought himself back to the issue at hand. “Theories on the knife?” he asked.

“I'm thinking our bad guys were shaking the tree, seeing what fell out. They target Dave—known to be a friend of Jim Nash, with the hope that, after being attacked, Dave would either run to Nash, or Nash would reach out to Dave. But if nothing happened within a certain time frame, even if Dave went underground, by using that extra-dirty knife, they could pretty much bank on him resurfacing for a return trip to the hospital. Which is where he needs to be, by the way. Intravenous antibiotics. As soon as possible.”

“You think they're going to contact us?” Deck asked. “Attempt a trade? Dave for Nash?”

“Nash thinks it's more likely that they'll try enhanced interrogation first. Gosh, that sounds almost lovely, doesn't it.
Enhanced.”

Decker swore. “Dave doesn't know where Nash is. Torturing him won't… Shit.”

“He wouldn't tell 'em even if he did know,” Jules said. “He's Dave. So. What do we do, Chief? Do we tell Sophia about the knife or… ?”

“We tell her,” Decker said, nodding grimly. “
I
tell her.”

Jules nodded, too. “That's not going to be much fun. If you want, I'll—”

“No.”

Jules sighed. “All right.” He stood up. Looked at the door. Looked back. “Chief, do you think of me as a friend?”

“Yes, I do,” Decker answered, no hesitation.

“I'm having a hard time with the murdered seven-year-old,” Jules confessed. “When we find the guys responsible, I'm going to kill them. I thought you should know that. I don't give a fuck if it's the head of the Agency or the Queen of England. No quarter, no mercy. They are fucking dead.”

Decker nodded. “I hear you.”

“And when it's all said and done? I'm probably going to need a new
job,” Jules told him. “If my marriage is recognized in California after November … I may be knocking on your door.”

“You're welcome here,” Decker reassured him. “Always.” “Thank you,” Jules said. “So. In the spirit of our excellent friendship? You definitely need a few tips on how to 24/7 it in your office. One, air freshener. Two, put your shit back on your desk, so that you and everyone else in the office can pretend you weren't using the surface for non-work-related activities. Three, there's no such thing as an underwear elf. Even when it goes missing, it's somewhere in the room. So make sure you find it.” He pointed to the corner.

“Oh, hell,” Jules heard Decker say as he firmly shut the door behind him.

J
immy was sitting in the panic room with the actor and the sleeping baby, listening to Robin's theories as to why Sam and Alyssa had named the kid Ash instead of after Sam's Uncle Walt—a member of the illustrious Tuskeegee Airmen and a WWII hero—who'd been the father figure and positive role model in Sam's life.

Apparently there was some spooky little boy named Walt on the TV show
Lost,
and neither Sam nor Alyssa wanted people thinking they'd named their kid after him.

So they'd gone for their second choice, which was a nod not to the punk who'd married Demi Moore, but rather to the Bruce Campbell character in the classic Evil Dead movies.

At least that was Robin's current theory.

“How are you doing?” Robin interrupted himself to ask.

“The helicopter should've gotten them there by now,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I know, I'm watching the clock, too.” Robin nodded. “But they're not going to walk in and say,
Excuse me, Elite Task Force, I must go call my significant other.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Jimmy said tersely. “It's just hard.” Especially knowing that the bastards—whoever they were—had Dave.

“I wish I could tell you that you get used to it.” Robin sighed. “But you don't.”

Their phones both rang, almost simultaneously. And yes, it was Tess calling him. Jimmy opened his phone.

“Look, I've been thinking,” he said, going point-blank as Robin, who was more mobile, took his call from Jules out in the hall. “We've gotta get Dave back and—”

“We're going to.” Tess's voice was filled with conviction. “You're going to have to do your job there, while we do ours here.”

He closed his eyes, because he didn't want to be a helicopter flight away from her. And it was driving him crazy to think about where Dave surely was, right now. “Yeah,
I'm
working hard.”

“Well, it's good I came back here.” She ignored his sarcasm. “The security cameras’ signals have been pirated.”

Pirated
meant the signal was going out to another receiver. And yes, dealing with that kind of problem
was
right up Tess's extremely talented alley.

“One of the SEALs—Lopez—noticed a glitch in the system, and when we checked it out, sure enough,” she continued, with that note of thrill in her voice that happened when she was in techno-nerd mode. It was another reason to curse the fact that he wasn't there, because he loved watching her when her eyes lit up and she glowed with the excitement of a challenge. “It's creepy, I have no idea how long they've been watching us, because it wasn't something that would've been noticed on a standard system check. But there's been some kind of short, which makes the digital signal from the camera freeze—which is what brought it to Lopez's attention. After I get off this call, I'm going to pirate the pirate and give ourselves the ability to send our watching friends only those images we want them to see. It's tricky: I can't just create a simple loop, because the sun's going to come up. I have to get creative.”

“Damn that pesky dawn,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah.” She laughed. Paused. “You sound almost okay.”

“I'm not,” he admitted. “I know what they're doing to Dave, and it's making me—”

“We're one step closer to finding him,” Tess said. “Remember Russ Stafford? On the flight over, I figured out why that name sounded so familiar.”

Jimmy sat up. “You think Russ is our man?”

“I do,” Tess said. “His name sounded familiar because it was. It came up during an assignment in 2003.”

Which was back when she'd worked, like him, for the Agency. Only she'd worked a desk down in Support.

“But there's something I need to ask you first,” she said. “Have you ever skimmed funds from money that you seized while working an Agency op?”

“Define
skimmed,
” Jimmy said. “Because when you're out in the field, and you need to make a quick escape, you take what you need to survive.” Which sometimes included the contents of someone else's wallet. “A trip to the ATM isn't always prudent, so—”

“No,” she said. “I'm talking about
significant
amounts of money. Like, enough to slow you down while you figure out a way to transfer it into some offshore account.”

“Slow me down?” he said. “Not a chance. Most of my assignments were in places where if I was found—by anyone—I'd be killed. Arranging to transfer money takes time and contacts who don't want to kill you. Although if I saw a situation where large sums of money were going to fall into, say, al Qaeda's hands? I'd intervene. Maybe push it in another direction. An anonymous donation to the local orphanage.”

“Okay,” she said. “Maybe that's what happened, which is too bad because it means I'm probably wrong about Stafford.”

“How much money went missing?” he asked, knowing that this was where this conversation was going.

“Fifteen million dollars,” Tess told him.

“Shit,” he exhaled on a laugh. “No. That would require a truck to move. That's not a slip-an-envelope-through-an-orphanage-mail-slot deal. Can you give me details?”

“Abida Talpur,” she said. “September 1999. His deletion was on your list.” She managed to say it without the pause that most people added before the word
deletion,
but then she added, “For his terrorist activities—”

“I know what he did,” Jimmy interrupted her. Abida Talpur was responsible, in 1998, for taking out an Air Kazbekistan jet carrying the K-stani minister of defense—and two hundred and twenty other men, women, and children, all of whom had died. Talpur had planned it, paid for it, and celebrated it. And so, in 1999, Jimmy was assigned to erase him from the surface of the earth. Which he'd done, gladly and, as it turned out, rather easily.

He'd gone in, done the job, and gotten out.

“I didn't get close to Talpur,” he told Tess now. “I took a sniper shot
from a mountainside. I didn't even go into the city. I hiked out, across the border.”

“Okay,” she said. “Good. Then Russ Stafford's back on our list. Because when Talpur died, he had assets of close to forty million dollars. I don't know if you paid attention to the political and financial ramifications of Talpur's death—”

“I did,” Jimmy said. “But it's been a while.”

“Talpur didn't have a son, didn't have any surviving male relatives,” Tess told him, “except for this one brother who'd been exiled. So Hersek Khosa, the friendly warlord next door, moved in and absorbed Talpur's property and holdings. His empire, so to speak. But in the spring of 2003, Talpur's brother manages to get back into the country, and he cries foul— claiming that Abida was killed by a squadron of U.S. soldiers, who were in league with Khosa.”

“Not a soldier in sight,” Jimmy confirmed.

“By 2003, we'd pulled our embassy and all troops out of the region, and the borders were locked down, pretty tightly. We were looking for a reason to get operatives in, so we sent an ‘official’ team to investigate. I was on support for that assignment. And here's where it gets really interesting.

“I was digging through intel,” Tess continued, “just doing my job, collecting all the information I could find for the agents in the field, and I come upon a discrepancy in Talpur's bank records. We'd been watching his assets pretty closely before his removal, because of his terrorist ties, and we had what seemed to be a very accurate accounting of his funds— which, like I said, totaled about forty million, give or take a few hundred thousand.

“But we're also watching the assets of Hersek Khosa, because we're keeping track of everyone in the region who has money, and I notice, huh. Khosa absorbed Talpur's assets, but the numbers are off by fifteen million dollars. It's just gone. And I check and I recheck and I pull all sorts of files and it's just not there. And I'm getting worried, because a terrorist can do a lot of damage with that much money. So I write up a complete report, including all kinds of information like the name of Khosa's Agency handler—and okay, the fact that Khosa even had an Agency handler alone is something of a surprise—”

“Not to me,” Jimmy said.

“Well, it was—and it still is—to little ol’ naive me,” Tess said. “And yes, Khosa's handler was Matt Hallfield—the former head of Agency support. Although Russell Stafford's name also came up because he'd had plenty of in-person dealings with Khosa, too. You said he was Hallfield's assistant?”

“That's right. Although why
he
would have gone to Kazbekistan is beyond me. Hallfield, yeah, he was a field agent himself in his day, but Stafford? That's flat-out weird.”

Tess agreed. “Stafford's wasn't a name I recognized, so I flagged it. And I gave the entire report to—wait for it—Doug Brendon, who was my immediate supervisor, and he goes
Good eye, Bailey, but it's being handled. ”

Yeah, that sounded like Dougie Brendon, the current head of the Agency and prick extraordinaire.

“A week later,” Tess continued, “the missing fifteen million shows up on the reports about Talpur's assets, with an asterisk. Someone's added a note, saying that the money is missing and the subject of an ongoing investigation. As far as Khosa's files? They were gone. They didn't just lock me out—”

“Which wouldn't have worked.” There was no such thing as hack-proof as far as Tess was concerned.

“They were completely erased,” she told him. “ Good-bye. I tried to figure out where they'd moved them, but I never did find them.” She paused. “Except for the copy I had made, to include with my report.”

“Please tell me you still have that.”

“I do,” she said. “It's on a flashdrive, with all of the other reports I wrote when I worked for the Agency. It's… somewhere safe. Deck actually recommended I do that—keep a record of everything—back when I first left the Agency.” She paused. “And, in fact, I'm pretty sure now that
that's
what they were looking for when our apartment was ransacked in July.”

Their apartment had been completely trashed, their sofa slashed, every dish they'd owned broken. The place had been searched, but it was a search with an attitude—and a threatening message.

“But okay,” Tess continued, “back in 2003, I see that asterisk on the report, and I go back to talk to Brendon, who tells me, off the record, that the ghost group operative who took out Abida Talpur was being questioned,
but that these things happened—that operatives of this sort often took their own bonuses. It was a part of doing business with the men and women who had those kinds of special skills. Wink. Wink.”

“No one ever asked me anything about any missing money,” Jimmy said.

“Well, all right then,” Tess said. “There's where we start. With Russell Stafford and Doug Brendon.”

“So this is about money,” Jimmy said. “Jesus Christ, fifteen million isn't even that much by today's standards.”

“It's not just about money,” Tess said. “It's about accountability and, well, treason. On the chopper flight out here, I dug to see if there was any additional information—recent info—on either Talpur or Khosa in the Agency files, and turns out Hersek Khosa not only had al Qaeda ties, but his name came up in connection to perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. He was an al Qaeda leader, and he went on to help fund the Bali bombing as well as set up terrorist training camps in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Algeria, and Kazbekistan. The real kicker is that there were reports—that had been conveniently buried or best case negligently overlooked—that confirmed this information as far back as 1997.”