Enemy agents, p.10
Enemy Agents, page 10
Through the eyepiece, she saw the guards pull out a card table, and she took a deep breath. She was about to commit to a course of action that could be called treason. She set the telescope down and started walking toward the house.
She knew the exact spot where she would become visible on the cameras. Dressed all in black, she crouched beside a large saguaro cactus and crawled toward the house, keeping herself hidden in the cactus’s shadow. Once she ran out of shadow, she would be visible on the camera.
Jessica pulled out a small air-powered handgun and took aim at the one camera that could see her. She fired a small dart that stuck into the panelling an inch below the camera. The dart would give off magnetic pulses for eight seconds, causing interference with the camera signal, so there would be waves of static on the screen.
The moment she heard the dart hit and stick, she was sprinting for the house. It was a bungalow, so she was able to run up the wall, jump, and pull herself onto the roof without any tools to help. Once she was on the roof, it was easy. First, she waited to hear if the guard would come investigate the staticky camera. After a couple minutes, she decided she was in the clear and moved to Saleb’s window. After tying off a rope on a pipe sticking out of the roof, she lowered herself down to the window and pressed her piece of paper against the glass. It took Saleb a moment to notice, but then he walked over.
The paper said: YOU WERE SET UP.
She turned the page over: I WILL GET YOU FREE.
After Saleb nodded a baffled ‘OK,’ she raised what looked like a large laser pointer or a small flashlight. It didn’t make a sound, just clicked on and started shining a red light on the glass. As the light cut through the glass, she slowly and methodically shifted the beam in a two-foot-wide circle. With her other hand, she attached a heavy duty suction cup to the inside of the circle. Once the beam had gone all the way around, she flicked off the light, removed the large circle of glass, and gently dropped it to the ground. Then she set in on the second window, which was already scored by light that had gotten through the first pane. Half-way through cutting the second pane, she saw that the laser was leaving a brown circle on the opposite wall, and if she continued cutting, the beam would slice Saleb. She waved him to the side. He was confused until he saw the line on the wall, then got out of the way. Once she finished the second cut and removed the glass circle, Saleb’s escape hatch was complete. Saleb moved to climb through, but she held up a hand to block him and waited a few seconds. After a while, she gently tapped the edge of the glass to see how hot it was, and then waved him through. It was awkward for him to climb through a hole that far off the floor, but he managed to pass through using the armchair as a step. For the first time in months, Saleb was outside.
Jessica held a finger to her lips. Amnesia erases personal memories, but not basics of communication. Even Saleb would understand she wanted him to be quiet.
Jessica held his hand and walked him along the wall toward the back corner of the house. She stopped there. She leaned in and whispered into Saleb’s ear.
“We have to sprint. Hard and fast and don’t stop until I do.”
He nodded.
They both took a few deep breaths, and then she started to run.
They were fifty feet out before the male guard saw them on his screen and hit the panic button.
A quarter-mile away, at the spot where her telescope still lay on the ground, Jessica pointed to the blanket on the ground. She picked up her backpack and stuffed the telescope into it before swinging it onto her shoulders. Meanwhile, Saleb had pulled back the blanket to discover the pair of bicycles. Swift looked over her shoulder—there were flashlights outside the house. The Marshals were coming.
“Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Just follow me as fast as you can.”
The guards would eventually find the tire tracks, but it would be too late to follow them. Five miles away, Jessica’s rented Jeep was waiting.
#
In a small apartment that Swift had rented in Tucson, Swift handed Saleb a bottle of water before sitting down at the table. The furnishing was thrift-store: A table, two chairs, and two sleeping bags. But it wasn’t a hotel because Swift was worried the authorities would be watching every hotel in the state.
“Who are you?” asked Saleb.
“My name’s Jessica Swift. We’re in the same line of work.”
“Are we friends?”
“We’ve never met. Don’t worry. You’re not forgetting me.”
“Then why would you come for me?”
“Because last week I was sent on a mission to destroy some files. Specifically your file. This file.” She pushed the stack of pages across the table. “You were ordered to go to Lyon the night your partner was killed. They wanted you apart so you’d both be easier to kill.”
Saleb stared at the documents, confused. “Who ordered . . . ?”
“I don’t know. Someone above you. Above us. Probably the same person who ordered me to destroy the evidence. But someone in the CIB wanted her dead. They might have wanted you dead too, or maybe this frame was planned. But the point is: you did not murder Jessica Jordan.”
“What’s it to you?”
Swift sighed. “Let’s just say I don’t like having my strings pulled, either. If I did my job and burned this file, you would have been executed for murder and treason. I just can’t be a part of that. I have a conscience, even if nobody else does.”
“So what now?” Saleb was still so overwhelmed, he couldn’t think.
“Now,” she said, “you disappear. Go off and build a new life. Escape from this. And someday I’m going to find the assholes pulling our strings and I’m gonna get myself free, too.”
“You just want me to walk away? You tell me that someone else killed Jessica, and framed me for it, and you expect me to just let it go?”
“Why not? You have amnesia, right? You probably don’t even remember your Jessica. So why bother looking for revenge?” She reached across the table to put her small hand on Saleb’s larger one. “I don’t want all this effort I put into setting you free to go to waste. Just get out of here, Khalid. Live a happier life than me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t know? About Jessica?”
“What about her?”
“Jessica Jordan wasn’t just my partner. She was my wife.”
Swift’s shoulders dropped as her eyebrows spiked upwards. “She was your wife?”
“They’ve been telling me I killed her, but . . . ”
“But you didn’t.”
“I know this is crazy. I don’t remember her at all. But something always felt wrong about their version of events. Like a gut feeling I couldn’t express. Like I could never . . . like I’m not even capable of . . . ”
“Killing someone.”
“Killingher. They tell me I killed other people and I believe them. But not my own wife. How could I possibly do that? It always felt wrong. I might not remember who I was, but I know myself, you know?”
“You were right.”
“Someone did this to her, to us, and they got away with it. If I really loved this woman, if we were happy . . . ” Saleb was struggling to say whatever he was feeling. Swift couldn’t imagine what the man was going through. It must be like having your entire love life on the tip of your tongue; like searching for loved ones in the dark and never finding them. “I owe her. I know that’s stupid, and she’s like a stranger to me now, but I can’t walk away. I have to find out who did this.”
Swift rubbed her face, momentarily hiding behind her hands. “My life is very . . . supervised. I’m kept on a leash. They won’t let me disappear. If you hang around, they’ll know I’m with you and then we’re both on death row.”
Saleb nodded. “I’m not asking you to—”
“I’m in,” said Swift. “Your wife deserves justice. Let’s bring the bastards down.”
14
If it could be possible for one trait to tell you everything you need to know about a person, then Chris Quarrel knew Mr. Smith the moment he heard his voice. It was somehow simultaneously flat and cruel, emotionless yet spiteful, and always impatient. His voice was deep but not hoarse—he was certainly not a smoker—but had an unsettling hateful quality that immediately told Quarrel that there was not going to be any small talk.
Quarrel and his latest suspect, the mononymous Smith, met in the back of a taxicab in front of a reasonably priced New York City hotel. Smith was already in the cab when it pulled up for Quarrel. Milton had told Quarrel on the phone that they would meet at nine a.m., and Smith showed up exactly on time—9:00:15 on Quarrel’s watch; not bad for the morning rush in Manhattan.
“Good morning,” said Smith, in that deep, cold voice. He turned his head only briefly to look Quarrel in the eyes as he spoke, then turned forward again to speak to the driver.
“The second destination now.”
The car pulled back into traffic, which was exceedingly slow. Quarrel was there under the guise that he was a new transfer to the CIB, and Smith had to act as his handler until someone else was named as a permanent handler. Quarrel decided it would be quite a challenge to get Smith talking and opted to try a barrage of questions to see if Smith would surprise him and have a conversation.
“Nice morning, isn’t it?”
Smith turned his head a bit and gave a single nod.
“I’ve been to New York before, but I always took the subway. I figured the traffic would be miserable.”
Smith said nothing. After an awkward pause, the driver chimed in. He was a grey-haired Indian man in his forties.
“Oh people always think that, but you know what? I get no complaints. So where are you from, mister?”
“I’m from an office in Toronto. They sent me down to meet with my American friend here to close a big deal this morning.”
Considering that both Quarrel and Smith were dressed in navy blue tailored suits, the businessman story seemed appropriate. Smith seemed to tense at Quarrel’s small talk, preferring to ride in total silence. Quarrel asked him a few times if he had been to this tourist trap or that landmark or if he had a favourite restaurant in the area—small talk that wouldn’t seem suspicious to the cabbie—but Smith just ignored him, occasionally nodding. After about ten minutes, Smith pulled out a few twenty-dollar notes and held them up to the window behind the driver.
“Here is good,” he said.
The driver took the money and Smith looked at Quarrel with eyes that said, “Get out.” He did just that, and Smith followed him out the same door, waving a hand to the driver to tell him to keep the change.
Quarrel was vaguely disappointed by having to get out of the cab. He had actually never been to this city before, and he had hoped they would continue north far enough to cross into the Bronx so he could see Yankee Stadium. Instead they were in Manhattan somewhere east of Central Park, but Quarrel didn’t know the city, so he hardly knew where they were.
As the yellow cab blended back into the background, the impeccably dressed men, each with a leather briefcase, strolled down the busy sidewalk. It was just a bit chilly, the sun still low enough that the canyon of buildings blocked out the warming light. Still, the sky above was clear and the weather reports said it would be the first truly warm day of the year. Quarrel was glad for the changing seasons; Smith just marched forward, oblivious to his surroundings.
They walked for a long enough time that Quarrel started to wonder why they hadn’t just stuck with the cab. Perhaps Smith was bothered by Quarrel making small talk with the cabbie. Or maybe he just didn’t want anyone else to know their destination. After walking fifteen minutes at a comfortable pace, Smith pivoted to a set of glass doors without so much as nodding to Quarrel to say they’d arrived.
It was a coffee shop. A busy little independent operation on the ground floor of a low-rise office building.Quarrel tried to think like a spy—where are the exits? Are any of these people dangerous?—but mostly he followed Smith, who went to an empty table against the far left wall and sat down.
“Shouldn’t we order something?”
Smith reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “I’ll have water in a sealed bottle.”
Quarrel joined the line, trying not to stare at Smith, the emotionless robot in the black suit, who was sitting by himself and watching the door. Smith had black hair in a crew cut, short enough that it stood up in little spikes without any hair product. He probably buzzed his own head on a regular basis, possibly daily. Quarrel couldn’t imagine Smith sitting down with a gabby hairdresser, but Smith standing in front of a bathroom mirror and methodically running a trimmer over his head? Yeah, Quarrel could picture Smith doing that.
Quarrel returned to the small table with two coffees in to-go cups and a bottle of water. “I figured I should buy one for whoever’s going to join us,” he said. Smith nodded, his gaze still on the door.
Smith drank half the water bottle in one long chug, then capped it and set it aside.
“So who are we meeting?” asked Quarrel.
“Intelligence asset.”
“Oh. How long have you been working him? Her? Them.”
“First meeting in person was one year ago. Sporadic communications since then. I don’t meet people in person very often.”
Quarrel nodded. He was surprised that Smith met withanyone. Still, gathering and pushing assets was a big part of the spy game, probably the biggest part in terms of pure information gathering. New York had a lot of embassies, corporate offices, and international visitors. This was a city where literally anyone could walk in the door. With Smith being so quiet, all Quarrel could do was sit quietly and stew on the possibilities.
Quarrel didn’t like Smith. Out of all the possible suspects on the list, Smith was the most likely in Quarrel’s mind. He had no personality and no history, and that was suspicious. In Quarrel’s few years of training for a life in the service, he had encountered a wide range of people, but between them all there were only a handful of reasons to get into the game. Some did it for patriotism, like Jack Hall. Others for thrills, or because their previous career in law enforcement or the military had prepared them for this line of work. But mostly, people became spies because it was a little exciting and because a government paycheck is always nice. None of those reasons seemed to fit Smith. Quarrel had studied the one-page file on Smith only once, which was enough to have it memorized. Codename: Smith. No real name given. No place of birth. No psych exams beyond the vague phrase “as expected”. Not even a physical. The guy was just a codename and a passport photo, in which Smith looked and dressed exactly as he was now. The man might very well have been some sort of robot, or clone, or alien in disguise, but this wasn’t a fantasy world of genetically engineered spies. It was the real world, where offices are blown up by fertilizer bombs and where even an enigma like Smith was still just a man with the right kind of training. Quarrel made up his mind to think of Smith’s stoic lack of personality as a facade, something he did to try and cover up his real motives. Smith could damn well be the man who blew up the Ottawa office, or murdered Matthew Crowe, and if acting like a Spartan asshole was his form of cover, Quarrel wasn’t going to buy it.
The idea of sipping a cuppa joe across from a man who might very well have blown up the CSIS-2 office in Ottawa made Quarrel’s stomach turn. He thought of Carol, dead at her desk after surviving decades of field work, and of poor Erica, who hadn’t even earned a clearance level before the job killed her. Even Hershey, smug bastard that he had been, was at his core a patriot and a hard worker, and his reward had been to die before he turned thirty. Quarrel didn’t even know if any of his coworkers’ bodies had been found in the remains of the building, but it had been two weeks since the bombing and they would have had funerals already. Quarrel was sure that if they did find bodies, they’d never find Hershey’s. Hershey had been standing out front, having a smoke when the bomb went off in the parking lot in front of him, only feet away. He would have been vaporized.
Quarrel hadn’t bothered to look up the memorial services. He had never planned on attending any of the funerals. He was too busy trying to catch the asshole that caused them. And the more Smith acted like an angry jerk, the more Quarrel hoped for a reason to vent some of his simmering rage in Smith’s direction.
Quarrel was spinning these dark thoughts through his mind when Smith stood up. The younger agent also stood, and turned, somewhat flustered, toward the doorway. The woman coming toward them was young, about twenty-five, and was dressed in casual business clothes with a messenger bag over one shoulder.
“Hello again,” she said, shaking Smith’s hand.
“Hello again and again,” said Smith. It must have been some kind of practiced greeting they had worked out to say the coast is clear, because Quarrel didn’t expect Smith would try to be cutesy.
“And you are?” she asked.
Quarrel looked toward Smith for some guidance on how to proceed but got nothing from Smith’s poker face.
“Chris. I’m a new transfer.” They shook hands.
“Maggie Reville.”
They sat back down, Smith on one side of the table, Chris and Maggie on the other. For a moment, they didn’t speak.
“Don’t get offended or anything,” she said to Quarrel, “but can I see some ID?”
Quarrel nodded and fished into his inside pocket. He had been given a couple of government-issue IDs, since the existence of CIB was still a secret. He pulled out a CIA badge and passed it to Maggie. She studied it carefully for about five seconds before handing it back.
“OK. Just being careful.” She was shy, uncomfortable. Her shoulders slumped and her voice was very quiet. She sheepishly looked to Smith. “Careful like you taught me.”
Smith actually smiled for her, even if it was blatantly fake, more of a condescending pat on the head than a sign of real emotion. “So let’s get down to it: why did you want to get together?”
