Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) (21 page)

“Tell me.”

“Y’know you can do calls on computers using the internet? I have a trick system I put together to use that. Only drawback is, it’ll only work in city limits or near unsecured connections. It can’t be backtracked. It’ll even disguise your voice. I’ll send you the files and a list of stuff to get. Of course, they could be monitoring whoever you’re calling, and you still need to be careful what you say, but I guess you’ll have plenty of code words and stuff.”

“I wish, Matt. I’ll keep that problem in mind. The cell is just so damn useful, it really throws me that it’s about as secure as shouting across the street. Okay, enough. Did you find any stuff on Matlal and Hoben?”

“Nothing special. Not quite as phantom as some people…” I grinned at that. Matt had looked for any traces of me on the internet, and there weren’t any the whole time I was in Ops 4-10. “But anyway, it’s in your inbox, in an encrypted file. Tullah’s got the password.”

“Thanks. You did keep your head down while you pulled this cyber-ninja stuff?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Okay, last thing. May not be your scene. I’ve picked up a tracker on my car. I checked and couldn’t find it. Do you have anything on the latest tech for trackers? Like how I’d find one?”

“I know a guy has this info. I’ll get it on an email in, say, fifteen.”

“That’s ace, Matt. I’ll call later on your spook phone.”

“Cool.”

We signed off.

“He’s so smart,” I said to Tullah, looking dreamy, “as well as good-looking. Do you think he’s too young for me?”

“Enough of that,” she said, grinning, and twisting her computer screen around. “Is this Alex the wolf?”

She’d pulled up an image on her search engine. I guessed it was three or four years old. Alex was at a black tie event. On his arm was his late girlfriend. I reached across Tullah and checked the details. Her name was Hope Gilliam.

“Yeah. That’s him.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“Old girlfriend. She died. He still has a photo of her in his living room.”

“Hmm. She’s pretty, but he is like so freaking wolfy hot.”

I grinned. “Even better in the flesh.”

That made her snigger. “I’ll bet!” She scribbled a meaningless password down on a piece of paper and passed it to me. “That’s for Matt’s emails.”

I picked up my laptop and keys and started for the door.

“Amber?”

I turned.

“This…” she waved at the screen, the house, everything. “Alex and Jen. This is Athanate behavior, isn’t it? You’re really there?”

I huffed. “I can’t say that becoming Athanate caused all this. I’d have found both of them attractive before, I guess, but I’d never have thought…I don’t know. Either I’m Athanate already or I’m something else. Whatever. They’re what I want. I think I’m at wherever it is I was going, Tullah.” I was making little sense to myself, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if I was making no sense to Tullah.

She just nodded. “Ma will know,” she said.

“Yeah. That’s one of the things I’m worried about.” I smiled and headed out.

Instead of walking straight back to where I’d left the car, I diverted to Alameda Avenue. There was an Asian restaurant there with three things going for it—good food, early opening and free internet. I ordered a sweet and spicy chicken with rice and a hot shrimp dish; apart from Jen’s breakfast yesterday, I’d only snacked on the run and I was hungry.

I downloaded Matt’s files and briefed myself as I waited. I hoped the food was easier to stomach than the Matlal report. There was little hard evidence, but his profile was eerily close to many I’d read. How had this man not come to the attention of whoever allocated tasks to Ops 4-10? If half of what it said was true, he should have had a swift, fatal visit from the team years ago.

Last, the kicker, was the department reference on the police report about animal attacks. Matt had found that department 55734 was an FBI project team called Anthracite. Thursday’s meeting with the Weres just clicked up a few notches in importance and I had one more reason to stay away from Ingram.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Back at the car, parked on a quiet road a couple of blocks from the park, I began a thorough search for the tracker. I was working on the theory that I’d been bugged when I visited the CBI building. Given my car was in plain sight in the parking lot, and I was in there only an hour, that should mean it wouldn’t be too deeply hidden. That was a comforting thought. I didn’t need the disruption of taking it into a garage and having it taken apart.

There was nothing in plain sight. Matt’s scanner that I’d borrowed for Jaworski chirped once as I walked around the car with it, but it gave no indication of where the tracker might be.

Matt’s notes on tracker technology suggested it might be much smaller than I was originally expecting. The size of a wristwatch rather than the size of a smartphone. It still had to be big enough for a battery, a GPS receiver and a signal transmitter, and it needed to be fixed securely. It couldn’t be completely flat or tiny.

I gave up looking by eye and started to go around the car again by feel.

I found the bastards had glued it behind the license plate on the front grill.

It was about the size of the battery in my cell. Having levered it off the back of the plate with a knife, I prized it apart and found a super-slim battery, which I took out. I tossed it all into the Faraday cage which was still in the trunk.

I left Matt’s scanner on just to check that there were no further chirps to indicate something transmitting, and drove off toward the nearest computer store on Virginia Avenue. I bought the equipment Matt listed to turn my laptop into an internet cell phone and the adaptor to run it off the car’s cigarette lighter. All for cash.

Then I connected it all together, put the antenna on the dash and clicked on Matt’s install file.

An animated octopus tap-danced onto the screen. I rolled my eyes. Geeks. One of the octopus’s legs went out at an angle and stilled. Then another, and another till all eight were still. The octopus shrank and became an icon at the bottom of the screen. A message popped up. “I have eight unsecured internet connections in the vicinity. I will warn you if there are less than four at any time. VOIP communications and internet access will be multiplexed through all connections and remote sites.” The message faded and another popped up. “Call Matt now?” I clicked on it and Matt’s voice came through.

“Hi, Amber.” He sounded like he was speaking in a cubicle.

“Matt, this is freaking A. Is it for-sure untraceable?”

“Yeah. The remote sites spoof the addresses. Once they know it’s being done, and given federal budgets and resources, it can be reconstructed, theoretically. But I’ll know if they start backtracking. And those remote sites are real remote. Yeah, it’s untraceable until I tell you otherwise.”

“Absolutely awesome. I owe you.”

“No problem. I’ve really wanted to give it a run for ages.”

“Hold on, I’m testing it?”

“No, no. I tested it, you’re giving it its first run. Uh… gotta go now. Call me later about those two industrial units you were asking about.”

I shuddered and signed off. I’d had a lot of experience with cutting edge equipment, not all of it good.

To test it in a different mode, I sent him an email using the system and asking him to do some more digging on the topic of the police reports about animal attacks. It’d be interesting what he could come up with.

I drove away west, doubling back to see if I had a tail and checking the octopus icon from time to time. No tail and some unsecured connections.

I headed towards Monroe Street for a while, then stopped halfway and checked my cell. If they were tracking it, they had a location for me at that moment, but I wasn’t going to hang around. Most of the calls listed on it I could ignore. I would talk to Niall and Jen today anyway.

There was a brief message from Agent Griffith. “Ms. Farrell,” he said carefully, “I have some notes here mentioning you in connection with a Project Snakebite in the Denver PD. I can’t seem to find any other references to this project. Please give me a call.”

No, I wouldn’t call the FBI this week and talk to them about the Snakebite codename that Captain Morales and Colonel Laine had thought up to cover anything to do with vampires in Denver. I groaned; now I’d have to warn José as well—he had a police team assigned to this, and they’d need to disappear. But at least Agent Griffith was being polite now.

I was nearly at the end of the messages. I got sales calls and wrong numbers like anyone else. My finger touched the button to delete a voicemail that was a woman I didn’t know who had obviously accidentally dialed my number.

“…it’s not the same river, and you’re not the same woman.”

I froze. I didn’t know the voice. The woman was clearly in the middle of a conversation. That’s reasonably unusual, just enough to make me pause. But the words were a rework of the second part of a quotation from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. The part everyone knows is the first half—‘you can’t step into the same river twice.’ And the only time I could ever recall discussing it with anyone was with Colonel Laine, the week before.

Another voice I didn’t know cut in. “But what does the book say about who will help you up?”

I’d skipped school to join the army. I don’t read philosophers and Bibles for fun.

I started reading stuff about Heraclitus because of what he said about change. It seemed very relevant for me as I became Athanate.

And the colonel had quoted the Bible to me just once. He’d said it was a happy coincidence that the buddy principle we used in Ops 4-10 was endorsed by the Bible, Ecclesiastes 4:10.

I’d taken those words to heart, and I whispered them now. “
For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.”

I shivered. With this, along with ‘Captain Baker’ on the Colonel’s contact number, I now knew that something had gone very wrong at Ops 4-10, and that was a seriously scary thought. A battalion of Ops 4-10’s capabilities in the wrong hands? I didn’t want to think about the chaos that could cause. And even if there were nothing to worry about on that level, why was I suddenly being denied? What had happened to the colonel? Was the whole paranormal investigation side under new management and being ‘cleaned up?’

The voicemail ended abruptly. Just as it would if someone had found they’d accidentally dialed a number.

I turned the cell off and drove on a few blocks before parking on a side street.

Was that last part simply the colonel saying he was out of it and warning me that my cell was being monitored? Or was it a more sinister warning—who could I rely on to pick me up if I fell? Who was my buddy now? I couldn’t just put it all aside. Important as my visit to Haven was, I needed to find out what this meant.

The octopus had made some more friends; I used the laptop to call Jen and left a voicemail saying there was a problem with my cell, but I’d be back this evening. I wanted to call José as well. He needed to know that Ingram was asking about Project Snakebite. But if they were tapping my cell and they knew something about Snakebite, what were the odds they were tapping his? It wouldn’t help if they couldn’t trace my call but recognized my voice. Even if I used Matt’s software to disguise my voice, I didn’t have an agreed code to warn José and I couldn’t just come out and say Snakebite. I guessed a personal visit had to go on my to-do list.

I risked another look at my cell to see if there was any follow up from the Colonel. There was one more message—a sales spiel suggesting I might find the meaning of life if I logged on to a fortunetelling website. That raised a twisted smile. I turned the cell off again, drove a couple more blocks and logged on using the octopus.

If this was the colonel, then he had hidden depths, or he’d found at least one buddy. It was a real fortunetelling site, and when I logged on as a guest and put my birth date in, I got a short screen of fortune cookie style quotes. Standard stuff, except one—‘in change we find purpose.’ That was another Heraclitus, and aimed at me, I guessed. I clicked on it, and for a second, a number flashed on the screen and the website closed, as if there’d been a fault. I dialed the number on my internet phone.

The call went through to silence.

“Colonel, it’s Farrell. I’m on a secure line.”

There was a moment more of silence, and then his voice came on, sounding tired. “Hi. Thanks for following the breadcrumbs.”

I took a deep breath. “What the hell happened?”

“I wish I knew. I’m still trying to figure it out, but the unit is now a hot zone for both of us. I will find out what happened, but I’ve got to get Vera out of this.”

“They’d involve her? What about the rest of your family?” He was seriously rattled to have used her name in a phone call. Instructor Ben-Haim would have been having apoplexy.

“I always discussed things with her, never with other family. And I found a listening device at home.” I could hear the anxiety in his voice.

“Okay. Colonel, bring her to Denver. I can make you two disappear until we straighten it out.”

“I appreciate it, Sergeant. Obviously, I hoped you could. I’m sorry to add to your concerns.”

“Forget that, just get here.”

“How do I contact you?”

“Text my cell something random from the unit and I’ll call this number again.”

“Done. I’ll be there in the next couple of days.”

“Make it after the weekend.”

“Got a party?” he tried to joke.

“As if. This stuff at the unit…it isn’t the people we know, is it?”

“No. The unit is on lockdown while personnel are being merged into another one run by Petersen. It’s that other unit that’s the problem.”

The name Petersen gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. I’d found out his main interest in me was to see me dissected. For the greater good, of course.

“I was told he’d been promoted,” I said.

“Yeah.” The colonel’s voice betrayed what he thought of that.

Good tradecraft should have meant we cut the call off as soon as we’d covered the important things, and we were way past that already. But I knew how isolated and exposed he would be feeling, and we were safe enough. I’d been there. No matter how tough you are, out in a situation like the colonel was, the sound of a friendly voice would be welcome to him.