One Last Scent of Jasmine (Boone's File Book 3) (10 page)

Both men jumped a foot as a small woman with red hair hit the door unexpectedly, coming through the fireproof entry into the cold, excessively air-conditioned environment of the server racks. She was dressed all in black, and her arms were crossed in front of her torso as she seemingly held herself, presumably against the cold of the room. “Good morning, guys.” She inquired in a friendly tone, “Whatcha’ doin’?”

Shit,
the tech thought.
It’s the monitor from the USIC. Those idiots on the outside were supposed to prevent this.
“Server maintenance, ma’am. Are you authorized to be in this area?” he bluffed.

She appeared not to be intimidated by his query. “Oh yeah. More than you. Let’s see some identification, gentlemen.”

That’s it. We’re going to have to do her.

The skinny one reached under his jacket as if to comply. Boone, by now all adrenaline, watched his hand grasp the Taser unit under his jacket as if in slow motion. The device started to swing toward another target, just as she knew it had twice already this evening.

Bullshit.
Held ready under the leather of her jacket, Little Swiss emerged. There was no need to aim at this distance, and a pair of Federal 147-grain HST hollow-point loads took her would-be assailant center chest. Worse, Boone saw as he started to fall, his colleague toward the back wall had not been content to pack less-than-lethal hardware. Bad Guy Number Two now had his hand on the backstrap of a semiautomatic pistol tucked into his waistband. The report of her little 9mm was loud as hell inside the chilly room. Before she knew it, her second target was just as dead as the first, only from a single round in the middle of his forehead rather than a pair through the sternum.

The back wall now marked where the second man's head had been before he fell.
Ballistic expressionism
.
Ew!
Boone lowered her P290 and stared for just a moment, now burdened by two more kills in a life which had contained more than enough dead men before tonight.
Son of a bitch. You never do things the easy way, do you?
What now?
Her answer was a trained reflex.
Evaluate. Clean the scene. Fade to black.

The Tahoe's driver, Wally Mikulek, woke up with a pounding headache and his ass freezing from the cold November asphalt of the DARIUS parking lot. His partner, Bart, was still unconscious thanks to the little bitch who had coldcocked him with his own shotgun.
You dumb-ass. You had a Taser round ready to go, and then you try to fuckin’ club her. You’re a putz!

Wally found he was bound hand and foot with some wicked-strong duct tape. And worse, as he saw once he managed to swivel his head, the little bitch’s Escalade was now parked at the front of the building.
Just where we were supposed to stop her from going
…
any way we had to, the man said
.

He and Bart had screwed up something royal, Wally was certain. His partner was a
putz,
all right … but a
putz
who always had a Spyderco knife clipped inside his front trouser pocket.
And it might be what saves both our sorry asses tonight, Wally-boy.

Bouncing over to his senseless partner, Mikulek's hands groped behind his back until they found his partner's leg and then his groin—
Ah! Not there! Not there!—
and finally the man's pocket. Sure enough, Wally felt the handle of a folding knife inside. He plucked it out, using the hole at the top of the blade to flip out the implement’s cutting surface.
Gotcha.
Working quickly and carefully with the razor-sharp edge, he started to slice through the tape binding his wrists.

Good. One more swipe.
His wrists freed, Mikulek took the blade through the layers of tape securing his ankles, peeling the rest of the crap off his skin and clothing.
Don’t leave it lay, Wally. Your prints and DNA are on the shit now.

As Bart came to, Wally shook his head.
That little hole gave him a good one.
Mikulek rolled his colleague over and cut the tape binding him hand and foot also, ripping it off in a none-too-gentle motion. That seemed to bring the man back a little faster. Mikulek grabbed him by the arm, helping the larger man, now groaning, back to his feet.

“Dumb-ass. Wake d’ fuck up. You got’cher spare key?” Wally encouraged his groggy partner.

“Yeah, here.”

Mikulek took the ignition key and led his partner by the arm to the passenger side of the vehicle. On the way around to the driver’s door, Wally ducked down to retrieve the shotgun and the expensive-as-hell Taser round his partner had not been smart enough to use. He handed both to his more alert colleague as he climbed back into their SUV. “Here,
putz
. Try to not shoot yourself. We gotta get the fuck outta here.”

“Fuck
you,
Wally.”

In the server room, Boone looked to her right and then down. Her trio of empty cartridge cases clustered there in the corner of the data room, one still spinning. Boone stepped toward them, plucking the pieces of nickel-plated brass off the floor and stowing them in her pocket. Crossing over to the nearest corpse, his eyes and mouth wide open, she performed a quick pat-down.
Nothing but the Taser and the case for your syringes.
There had been two doses of what was probably ketamine, one each for the two expected guards
.
Otherwise, his pockets held not even a breath mint.
Almost as if you were an operator. Go figure.

His partner in crime had been more careless, she noted from the contents of his pockets.
Extra mag for your .380 Beretta. Keys. Aha … and your wallet!
Boone flipped open the billfold, extracting Dexter Johnson’s driver’s license—Maryland—and an access card, similar to her own.
The one he must have used to enter the facility. This was an inside job.

Flipping the card over in her fingers, she spied the seal on the opposite side.
Oh … shit!
In the grip of her thin, leather driving gloves, the Presidential Seal of a White House staffer’s RFID access card stared up at her, the wings of the Eagle spread wide, an olive branch and bundle of arrows gripped in his talons.
And no one really gives a rat about a goddamned olive branch.

Boone fought down her panic and forced herself to think.
Stolen?
Looking through the rest of the wallet's contents, she found more identification matching the RFID card. The billfold was otherwise empty.
Nope.
This guy’s a staffer, all right. And he brought his get-out-of-jail-free card.
Damn. I need to zero the scene and get the hell out of here before the security guys wake up.

The relevant evidence went into a pocket of her jacket. She then moved to the extended LCD panel of a rack-mounted KVM unit, with the foldable keyboard-video-mouse controls the men had been using to access the servers of the DARIUS network.
DVR controls. They would have wanted to wipe the security footage.
She confirmed it had already been done. The camera feeds, having been rolled back more than a half hour and erased, were currently inoperative.
What about the access controls?
The pair had been there as well, preparing to delete the entries showing their use of Dexter’s card to enter the facility, the hallway and the server room.
And right here are the entries for my own card. Not for long!
Boone wiped the audit trail from the system, leaving alone the evidence registering the path of the intruders.
Cameras. Access controls … witnesses! Damn it!

She remembered the pair of heavies she left leaning against the tires of their Tahoe, awaiting her return.
What am I supposed to do with those idiots? Kill them in cold blood?
Boone knew for sure she was finished with the scene. The final outcome of the rest of her transgressions would be determined once she was back outside.
With any luck, they froze to death waiting for me.

Exiting the server room to the warmer outer office and then the hallway, Boone turned right as she remembered from Kemp’s tour, toward the fire door and the building's exterior.
Not bad for your first week on the job, Boone honey. Terry’s going to shit in his chair when we debrief.

She moved down the hallway, cautiously on the lookout for any sign she was not alone. None came. Hitting the fire door at the end of the hallway, Boone was relieved to see a concrete walk leading from the exit toward the front of the facility.
Good. No footprints either.

Stepping along at a brisk pace, she strode toward the front corner of the building, nearly rounding it before she realized something was wrong.
Didn’t I leave a Tahoe out there in the parking lot?
Little Swiss appeared from under her jacket once again, and she tactically cleared the corner low and carefully, just in case the two meatballs and their shotgun were waiting somewhere ahead. The good news was the pair seemed to be gone.
The absolutely horrid news is they’re not only gone, but know who I am.
Buttered bollocks in hell.

Chapter 6 - Give and Take

Boone was certain of one thing … she no longer felt in need of her hazelnut-accented morning brew. The drive back across early morning McLean was one punctuated by a tactical awareness verging on paranoia.
They know who I am. They knew why I was there. Did they know about Rex, too? And who
are
they?

In bad enough shape to perform a discreet tactical reload while she waited at a traffic light, Boone exchanged the partially expended magazine still in Little Swiss for the fully charged spare hanging under her opposite arm. Her mind tallied the load-out of the team she had just encountered.
Ketamine: two hundred bucks a dose. Taser loads: five for eight hundred bucks. Short shotgun: fifteen hundred once you pony up for the federal tax stamp. Saving your patron untold billions of rubles in development costs on an invulnerable missile defense system—assuming he could have ever accomplished it in the first place—bloody priceless.

Regardless of her caution, no opposing force made itself known between DARIUS and her hotel parking lot. Boone, nevertheless, parked in front of the main entrance and directly under a light pole.
This way, at least my assassination will look great on the security cameras.
But again, no one was waiting. Her entry—this one a hurried walk into the building with her hands once more seeming to clutch herself to stay warm rather than ready—occurred without incident.

The halls and the elevator were likewise clear. She had been prepared as only a trained combatant could be, should it have proved otherwise. Instead, she arrived at her hotel room door alive and unmolested.

Once more inside her dimly lit room, ODNI's Senior Case Officer saw with annoyance neither the beep of her room card nor the sound of the door opening and closing again had been enough to rouse her slumbering guest. She strode over to his side of the king-sized mattress. “Terry. Wake up.” Boone found she actually needed to shake him.

“Hmmph. You coming back to bed?”

“Early morning, Mister Bradley. Up and at ‘em.”

Her boss opened one eye. “It’s still dark.”

“That’s because it’s zero-five-hundred hours. Get your ass out of bed, Mister Bradley,
sir
. We have business.”

It seemed his other eye opened unwillingly. “You’re back. Find anything?”

“Not here, Terry. Get
up.
”

“Okay ... okay,” he acceded.

She dragged his naked—
and still rather luscious
—body out from between the sheets.
I will have to leave a note and a bigger tip letting the housekeepers know I want the linen changed today.

“God ... I feel like a truck ran over me.”

She did not recall Bradley's transition to morning being so difficult in the past. “
That’s
because you were Boone’d to within an inch of your life.”
It leaves you two inches short of the dead meat in the DARIUS server room.
Boone pulled him toward the front of the bed. She noticed a distinctively male look appear in his eyes.
Oh, no.
“Don’t even think about it, Terrence Bain Bradley. Into the shower with you. Make it a cold one if you have to,” Boone said, pushing him toward the bathroom. “I’ll do what I can to make your clothes presentable in the meantime.”

“
Fickle
woman,” he groused in a groggy voice. More importantly, he did what she told him.

Sighing as he enclosed himself in her bathroom, Boone looked around. His clothes—and hers as well—were strewn on the floor around the single king as neither of them had been in a mood to fold the items last night. She picked his business wear out of the jumble, laying out and accounting for what he would need this morning.
Maybe Edna will buy the idea he pulled an all-nighter in the office instead of my bed.

Boone swung down the padded board from inside the closet, picking the hotel’s iron out of its nearby holder.
Great … this is just great. Now I’m ironing his shirts, too.

Just under an hour later, after an awkward time of it in her room and a nearly silent drive in, the two of them were the ones opening shop in ODNI. It was two hours ahead of schedule. Boone went to her office to secure the documents from her inside jacket pocket into an evidence bag while her boss started his coffee machine.

ODNI’s Senior Case Officer sat in her chair just for a minute, careful to keep her gloves on while she handled the access and identification cards.
Why, oh why did I ever remove these from the scene?
The answer was self-supplied and immediate.
It happened because even you can sometimes be susceptible to panic, Agent Hildebrandt.

Once the cards were sealed inside the plastic, with no hair or even a skin cell along for the ride, she could relax at least a little.
Enjoy the feeling while you can
. She looked through her doorway at the hall—one leading past his office too—and knew her brief respite would not last.