The Discarded (16 page)

He grabbed his phone again and sent a quick text to Orlando.

Tracker in place

Her reply came moments later.

Active and working

CHAPTER
17

T
HE FIRST SURPRISE
came when Gloria and her team discovered the alarm to Becker’s home was off. The analyst had left town in a hurry, but Gloria found it hard to believe he’d have gone without properly securing his place.

Unsure what they would find, she and two of her men proceeded inside with extreme caution. They did a thorough check of the main floor first and found that the front door was unlocked.

She was willing to admit there was a slight possibility Becker had fled without setting his alarm, but there was no way he would leave a door unlocked. Someone else had been here. Why and how long ago were the questions.

She tapped Nolan on the shoulder and motioned to the stairs. He headed over with King right behind him and Gloria bringing up the rear. Halfway up he paused, pointed at the floor above and then at his ear. Next he held his thumb and forefinger about a quarter inch apart, indicating he’d heard something but it had not been very loud.

“Go, go,” she mouthed.

Once they reached the next floor, she silently asked which room the noise had come from, but he shook his head, unsure. The first door led into a master bedroom, while the second and third opened onto rooms crammed with shelves and boxes full of items she didn’t take the time to ID. All three rooms were unoccupied.

“We’re clear,” Nolan said, no longer muting his voice.

“So what the hell did you hear, then?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It was a short…whoosh, I guess. Like two things rubbing against each other. I guess it must have come from a neighbor’s place.”

“You’re sure?”

“No, but there’s nothing here.”

She walked over to the window and looked out. They were on the side of the house facing the road. Nothing out there but cold air and a dead lawn.

“All right,” she said, turning back to her men. “Let’s tear this place apart.”

__________

“A
NOTHER BLOCK AND
a half down,” Orlando
said, checking the map on her phone. “It’ll be on the right.”

“Got it,” Nate said.

She looked into the back where Quinn was sitting with Abraham and Daeng and held out her hand. “I need to set you up.”

Quinn gave her his cell.

Quickly, she went through his apps until she found the one she wanted, and then input the information that would allow him to track the beacon he’d left on the sedan.

Half a minute later, Nate pulled the SUV into an open spot at the curb next to a Starbucks coffee shop.

“Let’s go,” Orlando said to Abraham.

Quinn climbed out of the car so Abraham could exit, and then switched to the front passenger seat where Orlando had been. “We’ll come back for you in a while,” he said.

“Try to make it back before they close,” she told him. She swung her bag over her shoulder and looked at Abraham. “Come on. Let’s see if we can find a table.”

Quinn directed Nate to a street three blocks away from Eli’s place, where they found a parking spot at the curb and settled in to wait. It was another twenty-two minutes before the tracking dot on the map began to move, bringing the total time the others had spent inside the townhome to around forty minutes.

As Nate started the SUV, Quinn watched the dot move down to Old Georgetown Road and then head southeast. The sedan’s route would take it within a half block of their position in less than thirty seconds.

He watched the intersection, and as soon as he caught sight of the intruder’s vehicle, he said, “Let’s move, but slow. Give them a few blocks’ lead.”

Nate shifted into
DRIVE
and pulled into the road.

__________

A
LL THE TABLES
were occupied when Orlando and Abraham entered the coffee shop.

“I’ve got this,” Abraham said. “You get us something to drink. You know what I like.”

While Orlando was in line, Abraham walked slowly toward the area where the majority of the tables were located, taking on a small but noticeable limp, and donning a friendly smile that turned into a cringe every time he put weight on his “bad” leg. When he got to the tables, he slowed as if confused and looked around. Several of the tables’ occupants glanced at him then quickly looked away.

He shuffled forward a few feet, and stopped in front of a table where a young guy of about twenty sat in front of a pile of chemistry and math books.

“Excuse me,” Abraham said in a tired old voice. The kid looked up. “You wouldn’t happen to be leaving soon, would you?”

“Uh, oh, um, no,” the guy said. “Sorry. I’m…I’m studying. Big test coming up.”

“Of course. I understand.” Abraham took a step back. “I hope you do well.”

“T-thank you.”

He gave the kid a smile, and then turned and looked around again. As he knew would happen, he caught several of the other customers looking at him again. While most immediately glanced away again, another guy about twenty years old didn’t break his gaze soon enough and had no choice but to acknowledge Abraham’s hopeful smile. The guy had a book bag at his feet that hinted at his own need to study, but there were no books on the table, only his hand holding the phone he’d been smirking at and typing on since Abraham had walked up.

“Are you leaving?” Abraham asked.

“Um…” The guy looked like he was trying to come up with any response that would allow him to stay, but finally his shoulders sagged. “Sure. Just…two seconds, huh?”

“Oh, wonderful. Take your time. And thank you.”

As the kid returned his attention to his phone, Abraham moved to within a foot of the table and stared down. When the kid realized he was being scrutinized, he stuffed the phone in his pocket and stood up.

“All yours,” he said.

“Thank you again,” Abraham told him.

Orlando walked over a few minutes later with a couple cups of coffee. “Nice table.”

“Just good timing,” he said.

“Is that what you call it?”

She arranged her computer so that the screen faced the wall and only she and Abraham could see it. She then did the same with Eli’s machine.

When his old friend’s computer came to life, it asked for a password. Orlando reached over to pull the laptop in front of her but Abraham said, “I can get this.”

She looked at him. “Are you sure? There’ve been a lot of advances in the decade you’ve been gone.”

“First of all,” he said, centering the computer in front of him, “it hasn’t been a decade, and second, do you think I’ve just been sitting around doing nothing?”

“Oh, so they teach advanced hacking at the old folks’ home nowadays, do they?”

“My fellow active seniors and I are insulted by your terminology. Now quit wasting time talking to me.”

With a smirk, she turned her attention to her own screen.

Abraham couldn’t help but smile himself. It felt good to be working with Orlando again. He’d had three different apprentices over the years, but she had been, by far, his favorite and best.

Whip smart. Funny. Perceptive.

And above all else, caring.

He had missed that. So much.

Focusing on the computer screen reminded him why she was sitting next to him, and it wiped the smile from his face.

Eli.

Dammit.

He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to set his feelings aside so he could work.

“Need a little help already?” Orlando asked.

He opened his eyes again. “Absolutely not.”

Perhaps Orlando could have broken through the security screen faster, but Abraham was satisfied with getting past it in only a couple of minutes. “Done,” he said, turning the screen so she could see.

“Nice. May I?”

“Have at it.”

She leaned over and accessed the operating system. After a few moments of clicking and typing, she returned to her own laptop.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got it slaved and am cloning the drive to my cloud. Should be done in a few minutes, then we start with some global searches.”

“Sounds good,” he told her.

She pulled her backpack onto her lap. “In the meantime, we should look through these,” she said, removing the files and envelopes that had also been in the safe.

__________

G
LORIA WAS ON
the phone the minute they climbed back into their car.

“We did a complete search,” she told her boss, “but didn’t find anything useful.”

“No computer?” Boyer asked.

“No, but someone was in the house before us. They could have taken it.”

“What?”

“The door was unlocked and the alarm was off.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“Uh-uh. Don’t know how long ago they broke in.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“No clue yet.”

“Well, then, what’s your next move?”

“I have Becker’s clothes and bag. Want to get them scanned in case he hid anything in them. Thought we’d swing by the office and drop them off. After that, I thought I’d look into some of his colleagues. If it seems like one of them might know what he was up to, I’ll give them a visit.”

“I’m at the Ritz-Carlton for the next hour,” Boyer said. “You’ll save a lot of time if you can get them to me.”

McCrillis International’s office was way on the other side of the Capitol building. At this time of day with traffic, it would take more than an hour of travel time. The Ritz-Carlton, while still in DC, was much closer to her current location.

“Thank you, sir. That would be very helpful.”

“We’ll meet in the courtyard.” He gave her instructions on how to get in, then said, “Text me when you get there.”

__________

T
HE BLIP ON
the tracking app headed south out of Bethesda on a direct course for Washington, DC. Once they were in the city, following the car at a distance would no longer be an option. Quinn and his team needed to be in sight of the car when it stopped so they could see where its occupants went.

“Let’s move into point,” Quinn said when they were still several miles outside the district.

With a nod, Nate depressed the accelerator and began closing the gap. “There it is,” he said a minute later.

The sedan was three cars ahead in the same lane they were in. It took another mile and a half for Nate to maneuver past the car without drawing attention to their SUV. He then increased the separation to nearly a block, at which point he eased back on their speed and matched the flow of traffic. Now, thanks to the tracker, they were following the sedan from the front.

“Do we have any idea what the deal is with this Tessa?” Daeng asked from the backseat.

“I told you everything I know,” Quinn said.

“Do you think Abraham is holding something back?”

“I doubt it.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Very. He was Orlando’s mentor.”

No one said anything for a few moments.

“I’m not sure I like this,” Nate said.

Quinn took a quick glance at his friend before looking back at the screen. “What do you mean?”

“The idea of anything having to do with kids. I just…I don’t like it.”

Quinn understood where he was coming from. The world they traveled in was full of pain and death. You could get immune to seeing the body of an adult who’d been terminated, but never that of a child. A few years earlier they’d been involved in an incident that had centered around the kidnapping of a busload of kids. There were moments in the months afterward when Quinn would catch Nate staring off into nothing, the potential of what could have happened undoubtedly still playing through his apprentice’s head. Hell, the scenarios had played nonstop through his own mind for a while there.

“We’re not dealing with any kids,” Quinn said. “We’re trying to make sure whoever killed Abraham’s friend isn’t going to come after him.”

“Really? Seems to me we’re trying to help him find out about her.”

“All right, yeah. That, too. But just information. That’s all.”

Though Quinn couldn’t see Nate’s expression, he could feel the other cleaner’s sideways glance and knew Nate was thinking,
Are you sure about that?

According to the tracker, they were less than half a mile from Washington.

“Slow down,” Quinn said. “Let them catch up.”

__________

T
HE FILES AND
envelopes from Eli’s safe turned out to contain only personal items pertaining to his bank accounts, his townhouse, and a place in Kansas he had apparently inherited from his parents. The general search of his computer was equally unrewarding, returning no hits on any of the keywords used.

The lack of easily accessible data didn’t come as a shock, though. Eli wouldn’t have been so careless as to leave in plain sight something that had spooked him enough to make him flee his home.

That, of course, didn’t mean there was nothing to be found. Given Eli’s position at the CIA, he would’ve had the resources to securely hide information from prying eyes. Most of them, anyway.

Using her digital arsenal, Orlando scanned the drive for encrypted files, sifted through operating system logs for anything out of place, and did a sector-by-sector search for ghost data. As the last of these was completed, a dialogue box popped open with text reading: XJ982323/ubr2.xuki.

“I don’t recognize the extension,” Abraham said.

Orlando frowned. “Neither do I.”

A fact that troubled her.

She opened a program she’d dubbed Surgeon and used it to extract the file from its hiding place, and then copied it to an isolated partition on her own drive. Leaving the full file closed, she opened the metadata, but all she found was useless garbage.

What kind of file was a .xuki?