Enemy Agents (26 page)

Quarrel studied the blueprints. “So where is this thing?”

“Ask your government,” Hinkston said, dialing. “It’s in the Yukon.”

Before Hinkston could even get someone on the line, Quarrel interrupted him. It was something he had meant to ask, and he wanted to get it out there before Hinkston ran off chasing teacups. “I need the rest of Maggie Reville’s files.”

“You said you wanted to see the array. You have.”

“She didn’t start out with this. She turned whistleblower when she saw some unusual billing practices. I want to see what got her so spooked.”

“A very big company overcharged us. They all do it. Not exactly enough to charge the CEO of said company with high treason.”

“It is when that CEO is Martin Mercier.”

Hinkston’s fingers stopped tapping the phone. “What?”

“After Digamma gave him a fresh identity, Mercier became Hugo Zoeli.”

“You can prove that?”

“I watched him kill Matt Crowe this afternoon. And now I want to know what he’s up to.”

Quarrel had nothing left to say. He just held out his hand and waited for Hinkston. Hinkston hung up the call and tilted the screen and looked like he was waiting for something. After the cell phone gave him some kind of a message, Hinkston sighed, opened his briefcase and pulled out a small stack of photocopies.

“Keep them. Just invoices, really. A reporter with a freedom of information request could get those. But if you find something, I want to know.”

Hinkston was about to dial his phone when it surprised him by ringing. “Hinkston,” he said in lieu of a greeting. As he listened, his face turned red. “Jesus jumping Christ . . . you tell them to bring him to me, goddammit! Not to Milton. Bring him to Langley. To me!”

Hinkston was jerking the door open, waving at Navy Blue.

“What’s happening?” Quarrel called.

Hinkston didn’t really answer, he just shouted, “Jack goddamn Hall is a goddamn traitor.”

As Hinkston and his muscular accomplice ran away, Quarrel muttered to himself. “I guess Thorpe really did have some interesting photos.”

#

When Quarrel exited the historic building, William Thorpe was waiting. Thorpe was dressed in his typical dinner jacket, although this one didn’t fit him quite as perfectly as his others. It must have been off-the-rack rather than custom tailored. As they descended the large grey staircase to street level, Thorpe handed Quarrel a large envelope.

“Photos. What of?”

“Your old pal Jack trying to steal nuclear components.”

Considering that only a few minutes earlier, Quarrel and Hinkston had deduced that there wasn’t a nuclear threat, it was a bit of a surprise. Combined with Thorpe miraculously returning from his trip with Fatale, Quarrel realized that he couldn’t trust the old agent anymore.

“Really?” is all he could muster.

“Coffee. This way.” Thorpe pointed and Quarrel followed. It was a warm spring night and Washington looked good for once. After the grey, slushy winter, it was nice to walk around outside again.

They ended up at a nearby café, sipping overpriced coffees. Quarrel took his time with each photo, soaking each one in. They looked unaltered, but Quarrel was no real expert. They clearly showed Jack Hall in some sort of a deal with a number of people Quarrel didn’t recognize.

“So who are they?”

“Don’t know. I took Fatale to see if she’d lead me to Mercier, but the bastard cancelled the meeting. Fatale guessed that Mercier must have been waiting for Hall, so we went to him instead. This is where she took me. I got the photos, called in CIB, and Hall was arrested. After that, I decided to head back to CIB and hand over my photos and give Milton a heads-up. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there.”

Quarrel wasn’t sure where this was going, so he waited for Thorpe to continue.

“The team that arrested Jack put him in an armoured truck for transport back to a black site. The truck was hit before it could bring him back. Jack was rescued by a team of very efficient operators. They killed the whole CIB crew. I suppose I might have stopped him escaping, if I had been there, but I could just as likely have died in the crash, or been killed in the firefight.”

Thorpe raised his coffee to his mouth, and Quarrel thought he saw a quiver in the British agent’s hand. Thorpe saw Quarrel seeing it. “Bloody shakes. Been cutting back on the martinis.”

“Oh.” Quarrel found himself re-evaluating his trust in Thorpe. He was acting differently, suspiciously. “And Fatale?”

“She did right by me. It’s not Mercier but it’s close. I’m keeping her in a secure location of my own. Don’t worry, I won’t let her out. I know what she did to your office.”

Quarrel was doing his best to keep his poker face, but nothing Thorpe said rang true. There was no way Fatale had ever set up a meeting with Mercier, when Hugo Zoeli was in that parking garage around the same time. Nor was it likely that Thorpe would leave a threat like Fatale alone in an unguarded room somewhere, considering her talent for disappearing.

“Milton already knew Jack was a bad egg.” Thorpe said, “That Pentagon break-in proved it, and all those agents getting gunned down in the street proved it again. My photos only added fuel to the fire. He’s about ready to go to war against Jack, and he practically screamed when I said I was bringing this to you. I guess you’re not in Harry’s good books anymore?”

“A team tried to kill me this afternoon. Not sure who sent them, but someone at CIB tipped them off. So Milton’s not exactly in my good books, either.”

Thorpe nodded. His eyes dipped to the floor and for a second, Quarrel saw a mask of sorrow settle on the older man’s visage. Then Thorpe shook it off and had another sip of his latte.

“So what’s new in the Library of Congress?”

Quarrel stuttered, tried to say something, and came up blank. It was the biggest rookie mistake you could make. He didn’t want to tell Thorpe what he had been up to, since all this talk about nuclear components and Thorpe’s skittish behaviour had Quarrel spooked. He knew he couldn’t trust Thorpe with the information on TCPE, and rather than think of a believable lie, he had blown it completely with a rambling stutter and an awkward silence. Finally, he managed “Just meeting a contact. From Canada. I’ve never been inside the library before, so I thought it was a good place to have our meeting.”

Thorpe’s eyes narrowed and he nodded. “I see.”

Thorpe leaned in, crossing his arms and resting both of his elbows on the table. This pose seemed somehow unnatural. It took Quarrel a moment to realize that there was something in Thorpe’s right hand. A pen.

He was staring straight at Quarrel, but tucked under his left armpit, his right hand was writing on the empty envelope the photos had been in. “Listen, Chris. I know you really want to trust Jack, but in this game there is no trust. There’s betrayal and there’s photographic evidence. You need to muster whatever resources you have and track down Jack. You hear me, kid? Find Jack Hall. Stop wasting time with progress reports and sightseeing tours, understand? Track the fugitive.”

His hand quietly flipped the envelope over, and he leaned back, uncrossing his arms. Quarrel realized that this was a show. Someone was listening. He didn’t look at the message on the envelope. Instead he picked up one of the photos of Hall.

“I lost a lot of friends in the bombing,” he said, looking Thorpe in the eyes. “And I know first hand that Jack Hall was in Canada less than twenty-four hours before that bomb went off. My priorities are straight.”

“Good. I’ll be in touch.” Thorpe picked up his coffee and left. After a few seconds alone, Quarrel exhaled hard, his stomach churning like a cement mixer. Unsure if he was still being watched, Quarrel picked up the photos on the table, tapped them against the tabletop to line them up, then reached for the envelope to tuck them away. He tried to look nonchalant as he tucked the pictures into the paper sleeve, reading the message scribbled in rough, almost illegible cursive.

ALL LIES. FATALE HAS MY WIFE.

Quarrel froze as the information sunk in. Thorpe was being controlled. Hall was posing for staged photos, which meant they had him, too. Fatale—Erica—was back on the street, likely waiting to finish the job on Quarrel. He felt his stomach tighten, his throat seemed to want to close up and choke him. He chugged his coffee and realized that he was so tense his hands shook. His long-time goal was finally happening: he was an agent in the field, alone, with no older agents to guide him. It was his dream come true. He was terrified.

#

Quarrel returned to Edwin Brown’s apartment with the Maggie’s file on GX and Thorpe’s envelope of photos tucked under his arm. He walked in, tossed the file on the table and went to the cabinet. The apartment was empty and quiet. Finding a bottle of Crown Royal, he pulled the cork and took a long swig, not even bothering to get a glass. He corked it as the whisky-burn filled his throat, and tucked it back into the cupboard. When he shut the cupboard door, revealing the other half of the room again, Swift had materialized at the table, having slipped in silently when he wasn’t looking.

“Good meeting?” she asked, poking at the file but not opening it.

Quarrel shrugged. “You get the new IDs?”

Swift nodded. “Passports, driver’s licences, and I dug up an old bank account I had five grand in. I just need to know if you want to fly on the four a.m. or wait ‘til tomorrow afternoon.”

Quarrel nodded, a little relieved. “Take the four. I want you to get out-of-country as soon as possible.”

“What do you mean?” she stepped closer. “You’re not coming with me?”

“Everything here’s screwed right now. It all went to hell.” He could still taste the booze and for a moment he wanted to go back for another swig, but he knew that he still had much to do. “I blew it.”

“What happened?” She got up from the table and came to Chris, standing close enough he could smell her shampoo, which was actually Mr. Brown’s but was still nice.

“Our big plan,” he said, “me and Thorpe, thinking we’re geniuses. The plan worked. We thought we were pulling everyone in to help us. But we were just drawing them into a trap.”

She came closer, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Chris,” she said, leaning in, “what happened?”

“Fatale got free somehow. She’s controlling both Hall and Thorpe. Seems like they’re working for her now. Crowe’s dead. Shark disappeared, probably scared of actually having to stick his neck out for something. Then there’s Milton and Boswell, one of whom must have ordered the hit on Smith’s apartment, which means we can’t trust either. There’s nobody left to trust. I doomed us.”

She wrapped her arms around him, leaning in to talk into his ear. “We can get out. Find the evidence Jupiter’s still hiding in Zurich. Saleb’s ready and waiting. It can be our leverage. Protection. We can disappear.”

“No we can’t. We can’t just run away from this.”

“I can disappear.” She was whispering in an almost silent voice, but it didn’t waver. She meant it, believed it. “And I can show you how to disappear with me.”

Quarrel closed his eyes, longing. He leaned his head down to rest his forehead on hers. “They have a weapon. Something called a ‘teacup.’ It’s a microwave beam—basically a death ray. They have the plans, and they have the computer that’s the key to turn the whole thing on. If this thing really works, they could kill so many . . . ” he wasn’t even sure he could finish it. After he trailed off they just stood like that, leaning on each other. Quarrel felt his heart thumping and knew she could feel it. She slid her hand from his shoulder to his chest, nodding gently as she thought of what to say.

“You know I can’t let them kill anyone. I won’t. If they haven’t fired it yet then they still need something. And whatever that thing is, we’ll find it first.” Swift still sounded confident. He wasn’t sure how she vacillated so quickly and easily between confidence and despair, but he was glad she was back to believing in herself again. He leaned into her embrace, relieved to have someone to lean on. “We’ll find it first,” she repeated.

They stumbled to the bedroom, still wrapped around each other. It was only after they fell into the bed that they finally looked each other in the eyes, and when their lips met and their eyes closed, their despair didn’t matter for a little while.

#

When Quarrel left her, he tucked his phone, the one that only Thorpe knew about, in her hand while she slept. He set the alarm clock for only a few hours later, when she would have to go to the airport.

The spring night had cooled to almost freezing. Quarrel pulled his hood up as he walked out onto the empty sidewalk. He thought about Swift, hoped that her search would find something that would break the case open. He sighed, and in the cold he saw a faint cloud of his own breath which faded into the night air until it disappeared, and he walked alone into the night.

31

Quarrel spent the night tucked into a study carrel in the quiet study area on the second floor of Lauinger Library at Georgetown University. It was open all night as students prepared for the coming exam season and Quarrel only needed to pickpocket a swipe card from a sleeping student in a cafeteria in order to get into the library at such a late hour. It was also quiet and seemed like a good place to hide out until he figured out some kind of a plan to stop Digamma, Fatale, and whatever else he would have to face. He wondered how far William Thorpe would go to protect his wife, and shuddered at the thought of having to fight against deadly agents like Thorpe and Jack Hall.

He spread Maggie’s GX files around the desk, staring into page after page of seemingly pointless lists and numbers. Globection was good about their bookkeeping, and the files here detailed a lot of expenses from GX’s military projects. Some of it seemed totally pointless: lists of expenses from technicians in the field, such as hotels and dinners; lists of components going into a new wi-fi router designed for use in Afghanistan’s mobile bases; a note that four researchers were due for their annual $1000 pay increase that had to be approved by some supervisor. Quarrel stared at the data for hours trying to understand why Maggie had bothered printing it. Sure, some of the invoices to the Army or to the DOD seemed to be a little costly, but there was no sign of a proverbial $10,000 toilet seat.

The sun was rising when Quarrel wondered why Maggie had printed the same sheet twice. There was a list of costs associated with a new communications satellite. Something to do with the Army communicating with their troops in the Middle East. It all seemed pretty straightforward, as least as far as Quarrel knew. Students were starting to file into the library in greater numbers now, getting in some cramming before tests or finishing homework that was due that morning. And with the movement of students came the attention of a security guard. One library employee, an African American woman dressed casually, but obviously there to serve as more of a guard than a librarian, spotted Quarrel and started toward him. Quarrel sighed and thought to himsel
f
guess you look too old to be here
,
which was a little disappointing since Quarrel was still well shy of thirty.

The woman was approaching, so Quarrel pulled out his stolen swipe card, but also decided to get ready to leave if he had to. He pulled all the leaves of paper into a stack, with the identical satellite invoices on top. As they slid in place, one aligned to the other, and that’s when he saw it.

“Excuse me, son,” said the library woman, standing right next to Chris, “swipe your GO-card here, please.”

“Uh huh,” he said absent-mindedly, pulling the two pages away and holding them side-by-side.

“You realize that before eight in the morning this is a student-only building?”

“Uh huh,” he said again, his eyes tracing a line between one page and the other. There was just one line that was different from the original GX internal invoice and the one that was sent to the CIA.

“You are required to swipe your GO-card when asked by library staff,” she said, thrusting a handheld card reader at his face. Finally, Quarrel stood up, speaking softly in an exaggerated Quiet Library Voice.

“I gotta go. You’re great at your job. I’m going to leave now.” He picked up the papers and stuffed them back into the folder. The woman looked at him in a disbelieving, condescending way and jerked her thumb toward the door. “And by the way,” he asked, “how old do I look? I’m really so old that you single me out?”

#

After he was escorted out into the magic-hour light of a predawn spring morning, Quarrel took another look at the pages, folding them over at the line that they changed. In the internal GX invoice, the company listed a large, extremely expensive reflector as one of the satellite components. In the invoice they sent to the CIA, the reflector was replaced with “transmission dish” and cost much less than what the GX invoice said it was worth.

Maggie had become a whistleblower thinking that GX was over-billing the government, but the reverse was true. They were doing the opposite: hiding expensive components on a cheap satellite. The satellite was built with features the government didn’t know were there. The CIA wouldn’t have their own engineers combing over the satellite, so they wouldn’t know what GX was up to. And the guys that actually loaded the satellite onto a rocket and launched it would have no idea what was or was not supposed to be attached to the CIA’s new toy. So GX could essentially launch whatever they wanted into orbit and hide the launch under cover of the CIA. As long as the Afghan bases still got their high-speed internet, nobody would know the difference.

Quarrel had left his cell phone with Swift, so he walked to a gas station and bought a cheap disposable. He was still realizing the implications as he called.

“Hinkston,” answered Hinkston, sounding distant. He was on a speakerphone.

“It’s Quarrel.”

“I’m busy, kid.”

“You said if I found anything in Maggie’s files—”

Hinkston suddenly picked up the phone, the background noise vanishing. “What did you find?”

“Globection hid a huge reflector on one of the CIA’s satellites and changed the books to hide it.”

“Reflector?”

Quarrel waved for a taxi. “You said yourself, HAARP could only hit the area above it, not around the world. But if you have a targeted emitter . . . ”

Hinkston picked up the thought. “You can bounce your big death ray off a satellite and hit any target within two-thirds of the Earth’s surface.”

“This proves everything. That GX is in league with the crew who stole the control computer, that they’ve been planning to hijack the TCPE. You need to lock that thing down and arrest Hugo Zoeli.”

“Whoa, slow down, kid. You don’t arrest the President’s golf buddy based on some unverified stolen invoices. As for the Teacup, I have a CIA Ops team assembled at an airfield in Washington State. Once we clear the red tape about crossing the border, I’ll have that thing locked down tight.”

“You can’t just let Zoeli off the hook! For god’s sake he’s a mass murderer with his own private army!”

“I know that, kid!” Hinkston bellowed. “Unlike you, this is not my first week on the job. I’ll call you later at the phone you’re calling from. We’ll meet up, you’ll show me the evidence, we’ll talk to some Canadian officials about getting my team into your country. But right now, the CIA is dealing with the mess you left in Tyson’s Corner, a pile of dead agents that Jack Hall killed, and figuring out what the hell Thorpe did with that Fatale woman. So you’ll excuse me if dealing with jurisdictional red tape takes a back seat to cleaning up Harry Milton’s mess!”

Hinkston hung up. It was hours before he called Quarrel to set up a meeting at a CIA safe house in the area.

#

Quarrel knocked on the door of a small, plain-looking house in the suburbs. It was early evening and the weak orange sunlight made the beige paneling look dark, striped with shadows where each panel overlapped. Within three seconds of Quarrel knocking, a fit young woman answered, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that showed off her very muscular arms. The casual clothes made her look like a normal suburbanite relaxing after work, but her intense fitness level revealed the truth. She was the house agent who lived here full-time and was most likely former military. She ran the safe house, which meant guarding captives, protecting assets who were hiding out, or in this case, hosting a secret meeting. She didn’t offer her name.

“Come on in, Chris,” she said like they were old friends.

She did such a good job playing the welcoming hostess that when Quarrel got inside he had the urge to take his shoes off, and had to consciously remind himself that this wasn’t really her home. He shook off the feeling of visiting someone’s home and looked to the agent for direction. The house looked ordinary in every way. They were in the main hallway, with a living room to the right and a kitchen straight ahead. On the left there was a closet, a bathroom, and a closed door that must have went to the basement. This is the door the woman pointed to. “Basement. Hinkston and his guest are already here,” she said in a welcoming tone.

Quarrel went to the doorway, and the agent flipped open the plastic cover around a light switch, revealing a small keypad. After typing a quick code into this secret security measure, there was a clicking sound from the basement door and the door opened automatically. Quarrel stepped through to the landing at the top of the stairs, and the house agent closed and locked the door behind him. There was no back door in the stairwell, and there were no windows at all. The stairway was drywalled and painted beige, looking quite ordinary, but Quarrel knew the drywall would contain soundproofing, fireproofing, and maybe a few hidden compartments of guns or gadgets.

The stairway led to a typical suburban rec. room, with a couch, chairs, a TV mounted to a wall, and a large table covered in extremely high-tech equipment and various screens. Other than this table, it would look to any observer like a completely normal house. It took Quarrel a moment to realize that the high-tech touchscreen table was actually a pool table, with the surface flipped to reveal the gadgets inside. There were only two men waiting for Quarrel. One was Hinkston, and the other was a pudgy man with red hair that was more grey than red, who looked like a child next to Hinkston’s bulk. Quarrel recognized the Canadian official immediately.

“Thompson! I didn’t expect I’d see you here.”

Mr. Thompson smiled. “Nor did I, Mr. Quarrel.”

“I didn’t know they sent level-fours on international trips. You must have been higher up than just a four.”

Thompson’s lip twitched and he reddened a bit. Quarrel realized that Thompson had been in the intelligence business much longer than himself, but was now reduced to answering Quarrel’s summons. Thompson was obviously irritated, and Quarrel regretted his comment immediately. “
I
a
m
a level-four. They sent me because you know me. And I didn’t really like having to fly down here on a half-hour’s notice, so let’s just get on with it, OK?”

Hinkston chuckled and intervened. “Well, anyway it’s nice that we all know each other. If you’ll come here and let us run a scan, Mr. Quarrel.” Quarrel nodded and stepped closer to the table, holding his arms out like he was passing through airport security.

Hinkston picked up a device from the table and waved it around Quarrel. After a while he decided he had done enough of that and sat the device down again. “Well, you’re not broadcasting anything right now, but if you’ve been bugged they could turn it on again in a few minutes.”

“I haven’t been bugged.”

Thompson patted Quarrel on the shoulder, almost reassuringly. “Very likely you’ve lost whoever it was that tried to kill you, but we want to be safe. Are you carrying anything
,
anything at al
l
, that anyone has given you since you arrived in the USA? Or even something you took without permission? Equipment, clothing, pens, weapons, even notepads could have a tracker in the cover.”

Quarrel was wearing all new clothing and he had ditched both of his old cell phones. There was only one thing he had that could be traced back to anyone else.

“I have a gun. Signed it out of CI—” he stuttered, not wanting to reveal the existence of CIB to Thompson, who probably didn’t know it existed “—CIA.” He pulled the weapon from the pocket of his hoodie and handed it to Hinkston. Hinkston ran a couple of small handheld scanners over it, shrugged, and set it on the table.

“Well it’s not singing either,” he said. “Let’s get to it.” He leaned over the table, the middle of which was a big touchscreen monitor. He tapped the screen and it brought up a topographical map.

“This side’s Alaska. This side’s the Yukon,” he pointed. “There’s Whitehorse.” He moved his finger northwest, toward the border. “And right in here, is the TCPE. Targeted Charged Particle Emitter. Now, as far as I or the CIA know, this thing doesn’t do jack. If it had ever worked, I think I would know. But nonetheless, it seems that someone stole the plans for this thing, and the one device that can turn it on was recently stolen.”

“You’ve confirmed that?” Quarrel asked. “The control computer works on this thing?”

Hinkston nodded. “The exact same model that was stolen.” He zoomed in on a spot on the map. “We need to make sure this thing doesn’t work, and never will.”

His finger touched the map in what seemed to be an empty section of the Yukon Plateau, an area with very little population. It seemed unlikely that anything that big could stay secret, but almost nobody lived up there. And if they had provided a decent cover story in the eighties, maybe the locals would just accept it.

“So you want to send in a team to destroy this thing? Or you want to sit on it and arrest whoever shows up?” Thompson asked.

“Destroy it,” said Quarrel.

“Sit on it,” said Hinkston at the same time. They looked to each other and both men smiled.