Smoke and Shadows (31 page)

“Doesn’t sound right,” Baran mused. “Has anyone talked to the police officer who called this in?”

Yeager shook his head. Viktor pulled out his phone and made a call.

“Stark. You on the scene? . . . I want you to talk to the police officer who reported . . . What the fuck? He’s missing? . . . shit, they’ve been set up. He’s probably the same guy who gave up the apartment number info . . . Our best bet for a lead is the surviving agents. Find out which hospital they’ve been taken to and see if you can debrief them. AGS has point on this.”

“Dead end,” Viktor said, hanging up. “This is pissing me off. We’re being stringed along like puppets. The feds put me back on this case, Yeager, I’m seeing it to the bitter end. I’m not handing it off to the FBI or DHS whenever the whim suits them.”

“Understood.”

“Uh . . . I think I got something,” Allison announced. She looked pale and unsettled as her eyes shifted between the three occupants.
 

“Well, speak up, Guthrie,” Marissa said.

“Stuart Kwon received a call from the U.S. about five minutes before the tip came into the FBI.”

Marissa grinned triumphantly. “Are you saying our man slipped up?”

“No. The call doesn’t incriminate him.”

“Well, if Reed or one of his thugs called him,” Marissa’s voice trailed off. “You couldn’t trace who was calling?”

Allison was normally straight to the point and her hedging was making Marissa nervous. “Spit it out, Allison.”
 

“The number of the originating call belongs to Trenton Cole,” Allison said. Marissa felt the floor shift beneath her feet. Her analyst added on a whisper. “Your father.”

Marissa sank into the nearest chair. Viktor put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“I know their companies do business together, but I don’t think my father—” Marissa choked. Not her father. He wouldn’t have anything to do with terrorism and blatantly harm the homeland.

“Do you have a transcript or a recording?” Viktor asked.

“Recording. The NSA was keeping tabs on Kwon after Marissa put in a request. Playing it now,” Allison announced, regret in her voice.

Marissa slowly expelled a sigh of relief when she heard her father’s part in this mess. He was a pawn. Viktor was feeling another thing altogether. He started pacing, a sure sign of his rapidly deteriorating tether on his temper.

“Son of a bitch.” The expletive ripped from Viktor’s throat with such savagery, Marissa was almost thankful Kwon was not in the same room right now. “This whole attack was to get the AGS and CIA back into the game. His manipulation of Trenton Cole wasn’t intended to break up Marissa and me, but to gauge the extent of our relationship, and he got his fucking answer.”

Viktor looked at her with a proprietary gleam. “He’s going to try and fuck with us. We have to remain vigilant.”

Marissa nodded, unable to speak, still rattled that her father was dragged into this.

“Would it be better if you two cooled it off for now?” Yeager suggested.
 

“And have her open to another attack?” Viktor snapped.

“I can also provide her protection, Baran,” Yeager shot back. Her normally cool-as-cucumber boss was beginning to lose his temper, too. She needed to make a stand now.

“I’d rather have Viktor watch my back. No offense to the CIA,” Marissa said. “It only makes sense since we’re deeply involved in the case. Even if Viktor and I pretended to cool it off, Kwon is too smart to buy that. Hopefully, his fixation on getting his revenge on Viktor will prove to be his downfall. We have to play it smarter than he does.”

“We will,” Viktor stated resolutely. “We most certainly will.”

*****

Viktor trudged up the steps to go to the mezzanine level to his office. It was already 4:00 a.m., and he had sent Tim and Nathan home after reviewing files the FBI had transferred to their database servers. Jack, Maia, and Derek conferenced into the briefing, making it known that they were on board to help in any capacity. Jack was eager to get his hands on Owen Reed after Viktor had revealed that the man was the sniper who nearly killed Maia. As for Derek, he was probably doing this for Sophie because Matsuda was a close friend. Regardless of their individual reasons for wanting in on the mission, all of them were patriots, and there was a threat to the country that must be addressed.

Marissa was in Viktor’s office working online with Allison to track the call that initiated the attack earlier. They had traced the phone to the provider and were waiting for the company to release the name of the store where the phone was purchased.
 

Pushing the door to his office open, he found Marissa stretched out on his couch with the laptop sitting on her thighs. She was fast asleep, snoring lightly, her back leaning against the arm of the couch. He massaged his chest, feeling a spasm jolt the muscles underneath. He was pretty sure that muscle was his heart.
 

He sat down quietly beside her, his woman mumbling in protest when he lifted the laptop away.

“Shh . . . sleep, kitten,” Viktor murmured. Setting the laptop aside, he toed off his shoes and pulled off his jeans, and proceeded to unbutton his dress shirt. He left his undershirt on and stretched out beside Marissa. Thankfully, his couch was long and wide and he was able to shift her lower, so her whole body was on the couch. He tucked a throw pillow underneath his head and pulled Marissa half on top of him, resting her face on his chest. Hugging her tightly, he closed his eyes, knowing that they would need all the respite to face what was ahead.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Marissa had worked with Allison for hours waiting for their query to come back from NSA’s Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) database, feeding it different parameters like first dates and last dates of calls, numbers called, and so on. They refined their search to signals within a ten-mile radius of the attack. Their patience paid off when several telephone identifiers were returned. It took a while for the provider to give them a list of locations where the phones were purchased. Surveillance footage from these locations were picked up this afternoon. The hope was to identify either Reed or Logan and maybe the vehicle they were using.

Tim tried to track the telephone identifiers this morning, but they were offline and probably had been dumped for a new device. The first call made on the phone they were tracking occurred the day after the chemical weapon attack at the Cinemaplex. The last call was made right before the tip-off to the FBI from the supposed Loudoun County police officer. The cruiser was found this morning, no sign of the officer who was assigned the cruiser.
 

Allison came in to the AGS datacenter this afternoon to pour over the surveillance videos with Maia who was assigned datacenter duty until she regained her strength.
 

By 7:00 p.m., tempers started to flare as Tim and Allison bickered over their methods of cutting through the surveillance recordings. Maia was sitting back, letting the two analysts duke it out, but she was beginning to look impatient as well.

“I can feed the discs through my facial recognition software,” Tim argued. “It would certainly cut back on the time.”

“That’s a half-ass way of doing it,” Allison fired back.

“To you maybe, but it’s worked for us—”

“I wonder how many leads you’ve lost because of this—”

“Our success rate speaks for itself—”

“And what success rate is this?”

Marissa wanted to intervene. She knew that AGS owned very sophisticated software that even the CIA had not yet purchased. Allison herself knew this, but there was a reason for the short tempers. And thankfully, Jack McCord walked in with the solution.

“Dinner!” Jack declared as he strode in with two huge bags of what appeared to be Chinese takeout.

“Oh, thank God!” Maia chirped. She hopped out of her chair to greet her husband.

“No heavy lifting, babe,” Jack told his wife when Maia tried to grab one of the bags from him.

“Stop treating me like crystal,” Maia groused.

Jack only smiled affectionately, and Marissa was heartened to see the fierce love in the way McCord regarded his wife.

He lowered the food on the round conference table and cupped Maia’s face with his hands, planting a very wet kiss on her lips. “Good evening to you too, sweetheart.”

“Hate to bust y’all’s bubble, but eating in the datacenter is not allowed,” Tim said even as he eyed the bags of food hungrily.

“Since when?” Jack’s head pulled back like a cobra’s.

“I hope you’re not countermanding my rules, McCord.” A voice spoke from behind them.

Viktor had just walked in with Nathan and Derek.

Jack grinned as he lifted the food bags. “Not at all.”

“Did you get my Kung Pao chicken?” Derek asked expectantly.

After their bellies started to fill with sodium-laden Chinese food, Allison apologized to Tim and let him load the first discs into the AGS software.
 

They were all hanging out in the break room when Tim came back with the laptop, a look of excitement on his face.

“Got something,” he said, laying his laptop in front of Viktor. The others gathered around them.
 

“They were careful to avoid the surveillance cameras—” Tim began

“They?” Marissa clarified.

“Logan and some other guy,” the analyst replied. “But I managed to catch an angle as they were leaving the store. They came in two vehicles, Logan in a white panel van, the other man in a Ford F-150,” Tim continued. “I’ve run the plates. The white panel van was rented with falsified identification and was dumped this morning. The pickup truck is registered to Eloisa Logan, Logan's cousin.”

A pop-up notification scrolled through the screen. Tim clicked on it. It showed a split screen of two faces. Marissa recognized Henry Logan, at a ninety-five percent facial match with his service picture. The other guy was not found in the database and was simply featured with the screen shot from the surveillance video. He had a shaved head, a full beard, and bushy brows.
 

“The other man may have come in with Owen Reed on the
Cassiopeia
.”

“Looks like a Merc to me,” Derek piped in.

Viktor, who had been quiet until then, said, “Release an inter-agency bulletin on the pickup truck. The directive is ‘not to engage but call it in immediately to our hotline’.”

*****

Marissa stared at the blinking number on her personal phone.
 

“You gonna get that?” Agent Olsen asked beside her. They were heading to the U.S. Capitol complex in DC to brief Senator Robinson on the search for the chemical weapons. Viktor hadn’t wanted her to go by herself and sent Olsen with her. Viktor and Nathan were off on a lead about the pick-up truck. It had been flagged near an apartment complex, and the two had been staking out the area since early this morning.

She contemplated ignoring her father’s fifth call, but her gut told her to answer this time.

“Dad.”

“Finally.” Her father’s annoyed voice greeted her. “What would it take for you to return my calls?”
 

“I’ve been working nearly round the clock, Dad.”

Silence for a beat and then, “Did something happen? Are you okay?”

Marissa noted a genuine concern in his voice.

“We’re dealing with a situation right now, but I’m fine,” Marissa replied. Not wanting to avoid the subject, she added, “Viktor told me what you did. Though in some twisted way, I understand your reasons. I think you also know that I can’t be manipulated with your money. Otherwise, I would’ve taken an interest in Cole Nauticals.”

Trenton Cole sighed heavily. “I wished you didn’t leave like you did the other night.”

“What did you expect, Dad? You tried to bribe my boyfriend,” Marissa lowered her voice, embarrassed that Agent Olsen would overhear such a conversation.

“He didn’t take it, so no damage done.”

“No. Damage. Done?” Marissa said incredulously. “Are you so arrogant to think that when you fail to manipulate people’s lives, you can just brush it off like some failed business deal? You insulted Viktor. You need to apologize.”

“I will not!”

“Then we have nothing more to say to each other,” Marissa said.

“Wait. Let’s meet for lunch. I’m in DC.”

“Why are you in DC?”

“I’m meeting Senator Goodman’s aide on port security concerns.”

“You’re at the U.S. Capitol complex?” Marissa frowned. Unease slithered up her spine.
 

“Yes.”

“When was this meeting set up?”

“For someone uninterested in the business—”

“Dad, answer the question!”

“Yesterday. I received my summons yesterday.”

“And did you verify the request?”

“My assistant told me . . . what’s wrong?”

“It’s probably nothing,” Marissa tried to reassure her father. “Do you have a direct line to Senator Goodman’s office?”

“I think so.”

“Do me a favor and verify your meeting.”

“But—”

“Just do it, Dad. Call me back immediately, okay?”

After getting reassurance from her father he’d call back, she pondered whether to reschedule the meeting with Senator Robinson. She didn’t have much to report yet, and besides it would be best if they waited for the results from Viktor’s end.

*****

“Positive ID on the guy. He’s in apartment 5A,” Nathan told Viktor and Edmunds as he got into the parked car in front of the PeachTree apartments. “Heat signature indicates one person inside. Surrounding apartments are empty.”

The streets in and around the complex were empty because it was mid-morning on a work day. This was advantageous for their op and there would be less chance of casualties in case SK nerve gas was released.

“Chatter is indicating an imminent attack,” Viktor said. “We need to move in now and seize whatever is in there. The last canister had a GPS device. If the tracker is in there we could locate the weapons sooner.”

Viktor called the datacenter.

“Tim. We’re going in. Keep visuals on the complex and let us know if you spot any hostiles.”