Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (30 page)

“Travis? Travis is nothing. He was never anything. I’m most comfortable with an older man, a real grownup. Someone I can share my thoughts with and hear something back from the heart. Someone who doesn’t just think in terms of when he’s likely to get laid next.”

Nolan tried a different tack. “Millie, I’m married. My marriage isn’t perfect and that’s mostly my fault. My wife is away. When she returns, everything comes to a halt anyway. And you’re based in Rangoon . . . .”

“Damnit, Bob, I’m not asking you to marry me! I just want someone I can talk to. I’ve got a lot of issues. Thoughts flying round and round in my head. Sometimes I think I’m going to go crazy. I thought you could help me. I guess I thought wrong.” Tired of talk, she jumped to her feet.

“Millie! Millie!” He made a grab for her upper arm, but she pulled free and swiftly walked down to the street. He followed her, making certain to stay well behind in case she stopped short.

Without turning around, she said, “Thanks for nothing, Bob Nolan. Nothing at all.”

Shaking his head, he walked back through the pedestrian gate and locked it, then up to the house, where he locked the front door for good measure.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CONTAGION

TUESDAY, MARCH 11, BRITISH COLUMBIA AND FT. MEADE, MARYLAND; WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, RANGOON, SINGAPORE, BEIRUT AND TOKYO

Hecker hovered around Ryder while Doctor Yap poked, prodded and penetrated him with stethoscopes, heart monitors, ointments, antibiotics and sampling needles. Hecker had to admit the doc had his act together with what looked to be a full repertoire of tests and treatments. From Yap’s interpretations of Howard’s readings, Ryder would end up with a two- to three-week taxpayer-paid holiday. Ryder wasn’t protesting too hard, so Hecker knew he was hurting.

Before leaving, Gonzalez walked over and gave Ryder’s arm a squeeze. “Be strong, my brother. I will find the
coños
who shot Dara, busted Zeya’s ribs and poisoned you. And last and best, I will find Teller and bury a bullet in his head.
Sayonara, motherfucker
.”

Ryder broke into a broad smile and even managed an inaudible laugh. “OK, Hanny. Whatever. Just as long as you don’t take it too personally.”

Hecker brightened. Ryder would make it, provided they could get him out of the country alive.

The Wild Bunch’s three vehicles rumbled into Hogwarts. There weren’t enough mattresses to go around as it was, so Hecker figured it was the perfect excuse to go home to Sophie and sleep in his own bed, even if only for five hours. No one would be killed here tonight with those fellows standing watch.

*  *  *  *  *

“Dad’s full of shit,” Bert pronounced. He was annoyed to be summoned to the wilds of British Columbia, and his mood hadn’t improved after being drafted into running an airport shuttle service. “You’re flying off to look for Mom, but I’m stuck in our cabin in the woods where we pretend to be the Larson family visiting from Toronto. Do you really think anyone is after him or us?”

“Well, yeah. Otherwise I wouldn’t have taken leave to fetch you and drive five hours north into Canada, only to turn around and head back to Vancouver to spend thirteen hours on a plane to try to find Mom in a country jail somewhere in southern China.”

Mei Ling pulled into the passing lane to overtake an out-of-season motorhome. The Winnebago veered to the left and would have hit them had she not swerved. She accelerated to 90mph and left the mobile home disappearing in the rearview mirror, sleet blowing across Highway 5.

“Goddamnit! That was close. Do you think that was on purpose?” Bert’s question echoed Mei Ling’s thoughts.

“I have no idea, but we’re not slowing down to find to find out, Hulk.” Mei Ling kept the needle on 80mph, speed limit and icy road be damned.

*  *  *  *  *

Watermen played it out in his head half a dozen times. It would be a win-win, except for the ridicule, or possibly worse, that he’d endure from Chumakov. If his eyeglass frames really did hold the only covert micro-camera, then they were literally out of the picture, soaking in a glass of vodka. If there was a second unknown camera, he should be able to thwart it by equally primitive means. First, he’d strip to his underwear to ensure there wasn’t a camera sewn into a button on every shirt in his closet. Next, he’d soak and drape towels over his head and upper arms to form a shield to keep the ceiling cameras from reading his keyboard or screen. Third, he’d need to ensure that the laptop was more or less out of sight and use a virtual keyboard. That would stop all but the most sophisticated mouse logging software.

Earlier that day he’d heated the oven to 450°F for over an hour before shutting it down. Now the oven was back to room temperature and presumably free of functioning cameras. He’d insert the laptop and type from his knees with his elbows resting on the open door.

He knew this ludicrous scene would not last long. Under Scenario A, he’d be doing something right and Chumakov’s flunkies would disconnect his internet access. Under Scenario B, the internet stayed on. This would indicate that the FSB still had a camera and a mouse logger, and was reading both ends of the correspondence. In that case, he’d better jump offline pronto. The more he typed, the more he gave away. Either way, it would be a short chat.

He stripped to his briefs, fetched the damp towels out of the bathtub where they had been percolating, grabbed his laptop and knelt in front of the open oven. Pulling open the door, he removed the racks and was pleased that the Mac fit inside and he still had a Wi-Fi signal. He logged in even as his eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom. He could hear the water dribbling onto the open oven door and running onto the kitchen floor.

*  *  *  *  *

Officially, Nolan’s security clearance was down to
Secret.
Unofficially, he was pursuing Teller through Agency back channels and across distant decades, calling in favors and hacking his way back to his previous clearance levels.

The silence sent a message every bit as loud as cannon shot. Constantine was shutting him down. Nolan knew he wasn’t the flavor of the month even before his latest escapade, but there was a new inbound missile in his inbox. Constantine wanted him on the carpet tomorrow morning to explain what he’d been doing in Ms. Mukherjee’s hotel room on Sunday night before entertaining her in his own home last evening. Nolan thought the COS would have more pressing matters than unraveling the nighttime activities of his staff, but apparently not. That was 7:30 to 8 Wednesday shot in the ass. He might not sleep any, and for a non-Millie reason at that.

The rest of his inbox held no Christmas presents either. Matthews replied to his Airstrip One report, copying everyone, declaring that Nolan’s assertions that MH370 had landed in the Delta and later took off were unsubstantiated speculation. While the Agency’s own team was now supervising the Airstrip One investigation, progress had been slow. The Burma Army had cordoned off the entire area as a crime scene with no access permitted to the runway. The site of the camouflaged building had been bulldozed clean, with nothing left but a scrubbed concrete foundation. None of the workers had worn hazmat suits. Nolan wondered whether Matthews’s boys and girls had bothered to take radiation readings from beyond the fence. There was still no word on the public or encrypted email accounts from anyone in the family, although Bert should be dropping off Mei Ling at the Vancouver airport, and he hoped Joanie was asleep.

Tor held cheerier news. His two Sri Lanka hackers were eager to take up the challenge of Thursday and Friday’s cat-and-mouse games. He prepaid them both in Bitcoin, hoping they’d return his trust in kind. He forwarded IPPL emails from contractors to his inattentive successor’s account and autoreplied to all with a one-line message that he’d retired as of today. If only that were true.

It was almost one o’clock—just enough time to scan the online news portals while he waited for his Tor check-in with Watermen. “Australia firm finds plane in Bay of Bengal,” rang out the new CNN headline. A Perth-based mining company called EchoGold licensed declassified Soviet military satellite technology. In the old days, the KGB sought subsurface nuclear, biological or chemical weaponry by using satellites to scan for the nuclei of the targeted elements. EchoGold conducted geophysical surveys to locate oil and gas, metals and even diamond deposits. The technique was the same. The satellite captured the super-weak electromagnetic fields emanating from elements. The company calibrated the sensors to match the elements sought, and the satellite did the rest.

EchoGold had reprogrammed their transponders to look for a plane rather than a gold seam. Within a few days, the search mix of aluminum (seventy percent of a typical airliner), titanium, steel, nickel, gold and copper turned up the outline of a sunken plane less than one hundred fifty miles off the coast of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal. EchoGold’s owners offered their findings to the US and Australia, but after forty-eight hours with no reply, EchoGold issued a press release, which CNN picked up. The Malaysia government was now quite interested to meet EchoGold, so at least one party found the Aussie miners credible.

“I’ll be damned,” Nolan said aloud. The plane’s location was well within range of MH370, and less than an hour’s flying time from Airstrip One. That meant the 777 would have crash-landed in the dark, minimizing the likelihood of either visual or radar detection. Putting the plane down intact rather than ramming it nose-first into the sea ensured that life jackets, hand luggage and airplane pieces didn’t end up in a ten-square-mile debris field, too. Nolan wondered what Matthews, Melissa and the other naysayers would do tomorrow when he brought this up. It was 1:03 a.m. Time to shift gears.

*  *  *  *  *

Watermen typed on a virtual keyboard the message he’d committed to memory:
Security uncertain. All prior comms likely known to FSB incl Sri Lanka details. Chum will kill ur kids if you don’t give full 4P files. Please advise.
”

Not only did the Wi-Fi signal die, but the lights went out as well. He didn’t know if the message had gone through before they pulled the plug. He figured it had and the FSB was already reading it. The only puzzle was how Godpa would communicate ahead of Friday’s meeting.

Five thousand two hundred miles away, Nolan sat at his desk and reread the two-line message. The FSB had disconnected Watermen. No real surprises except the threat against his children. That wasn’t the mark of an intelligence professional. Either Chumakov was an amateur or he was desperate. Desperate people were doubly dangerous, but also prone to errors. Watermen needed to stay cool and remain true to form. Big-Shot Bob was going to shepherd them through this, though just how wasn’t entirely clear.

Nolan stayed in Tor and reached out to a good hacker of his acquaintance originally from Vladivostok. Sergei had moved back to Moscow, where he ostensibly tended to an ailing mother. Sergei was enough of a wild card to be interested in undertaking two dangerous assignments, one involving his brain and one shoe leather. The Siberian was adept at both network penetration and chutzpah. For the right price, Sergei would scale the White House fence armed with a garden rake.

Nolan’s message was short and sweet. “I need you to deliver a message in Strastanaya Square tomorrow between 12:30-13:00 at the Alexander Pushkin statue. I will deposit ten Bitcoin upon acceptance. Upon completion and debriefing, I’ll pay another ten Bitcoin. Interested?”

Nolan had barely pressed and he had a reply: “For $12,000? Hell yes!”

*  *  *  *  *

Tim Weill hit the intercom button on his desk. “Buster? Can you come in here?”

Brian Gregory walked into the corner office and heeded the silent gesture to shut the door. “Any other feedback from the Perkins briefing?”

“Ah, no, that’s all good. I mean, we still have our jobs, right?” Driving up to the gate this morning, Weill didn’t know if the NSA guard was going to let him in. Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Billy Perkins, was none too pleased with the Stuxnet 3.0 briefing on Monday. It wasn’t clear if the messengers were within the blast radius when he’d gone off about the NSA’s unilateral run at their primary adversary. Perkins was so pissed off, at one point Weill wanted to ask the director if he’d prefer it if the NSA had never launched Project Acapulco so the NSA
wasn’t
actually reading all the PLA Navy’s radar and acoustical submarine feeds along China’s coastline.

Weill continued, “Maybe it’s not all bad, because I have in front of me two very peculiar gifts from the DCI.”

“Looks like a laptop and a cell phone,” said Gregory.

“Quite perceptive, Watson. But what if I told you they were Bob Nolan’s, and that Perkins had them hand-delivered to me five minutes ago with the message”— he read from a sticky note—“‘See if you can access his hard drives, especially all Tor-based communications, plus anything of interest on the phone’?”

“I’d say this would raise several thorny issues, not least of which is why Bob Nolan no longer has his Agency laptop or cell phone, why the CIA isn’t looking into it themselves, and finally, if Nolan has been a bad boy? Have they already tried and failed to crack the encryption?”

“I’m guessing the latter. Maybe Bob’s gone off the reservation and they don’t want any of his friends in Langley knowing about it.”

Weill scooped up the laptop and handed it to Gregory. “This is our way off Perkins’s hatchet list. Assign our best people and see if we can break in. We know Nolan’s clever with plenty of old-school moves. Think outside the box in addition to throwing brute force at it. Time seems short, so make the PC your focal point.”

“Gotcha. Right. Should I drop everything else?”

“For now, yes. Grab the whole team if you have to. And don’t mention to anyone outside our group that these are Nolan’s. Once we crack them, it will be our cue to hand the PC and phone over to Langley. Of course, if a folder or three happened to be copied onto a backup drive, I’m sure that would be fine for the sake of maintaining data integrity.”