What Lies Behind Page 17

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, but Dr. Bromley isn’t in the country. Can I take a message? He’s been checking in, but I haven’t heard from him today.”

  “I know he’s not. Where is he exactly?”

  “Let me see...” There was tapping; she was looking it up on the computer. “Cape Town, South Africa. He’s doing something for the Infectious Diseases Research Training Program. I don’t know when he’s expected back, but I do see he has office hours next week. Should I put you down for an appointment?”

  “Do you know a student of his named Thomas Cattafi?”

  “Sorry, ma’am, no, I don’t.”

  “All right. This is an extremely urgent matter. Can you reach Dr. Bromley for me?”

  “It’s hit or miss with the time changes, but I can try.”

  “If you could reach out to him, that would be a huge help. Please ask him to return my call immediately. Thank you.” She rattled off her name and information and hung up. Shook her head at Fletcher.

  “We’re out of luck, for the time being, anyway. They’re going to try and track him down.”

  Fletcher ran a hand along his chin. “Should we try on our own? Send someone to him?”

  “Let’s give her an hour, see if she can get through.”

  “We just can’t win, can we?” She saw him thinking, deciding what they should do. After a minute he said, “We’re going to have to share the information about the vaccines soon enough. They want us to investigate these murders—that’s what we’re going to do. Let’s go to Souleyret’s house, see if there’s anything to be seen, then I’d like to check in on Cattafi. And where the hell is this mythical sister, huh?”

  “We need to let Baldwin know what we’ve found. Him, I trust. He can help us decide what to do with this information, and maybe help us get a contact at the CDC to do an independent assessment of the vials from Cattafi’s place. And he’ll have an idea of whether Girabaldi is on our side, or her own.”

  “Call him, then, but from the road.” He stood, put out a hand to Daniels. “Marcos, you can head back to Quantico now. Keep your mouth shut, you hear me? We’ll take it from here. Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.”

  Sam saw the kid was disappointed to be dismissed. He was having fun, despite the horror of the information they’d just discovered. “Yes, sir. But I’m happy to hang around in case you need anything else.”

  “Fletcher, maybe Agent Daniels could start looking for Souleyret’s sister for us. Save us some time? Since he’s already here.”

  Daniels gave her a small smile. “I can find her.”

  Fletcher ran a hand through his dark hair. Sam saw the gray at his temples had spread, and felt a small shock. He’d aged in the time she’d known him, which wasn’t very long, all things considered. A few months, really, cherry blossoms to autumn leaves.

  And in that time, she’d never seen him as rattled as he was right now.

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay. That’s a good idea. Since you’re already in this, Marcos, let’s get you in all the way. You can work from here—you’ll have everything you need, especially privacy. Do you need to call your boss? Tell her we need you?”

  “She’s already given me the day, sir. I’m yours. Do you have any information on the sister?”

  Sam slid him the thin file State had given them, and the one from the FBI. “Here’s everything we have on her. The sister’s name is Robin. Robin Souleyret. Find her, and I’ll buy you a drink.”

  He gave her a smile. He had a nice smile. It made him look even younger than he was.

  “How old are you, Agent Daniels?”

  “Twenty-eight yesterday, ma’am. Today’s my first day working for NCAVC.”

  Chapter 30

  Georgetown

  XANDER SLAMMED THE phone down and unplugged it from the wall. How the media had found him so quickly was astonishing. No one was parked outside yet, and he hoped that wouldn’t happen, but he wasn’t at all convinced he could avoid it. Sam would be upset with their life being played out on the news again. And so would he.

  He joined Chalk at the kitchen table, where they’d been sipping water and booting up their respective computers. Xander had eschewed the idea of them having an office, much preferring to work out of the town house in Georgetown, but now, he was rethinking that decision.

  “I don’t know if we’re secure here. That was CNN. This isn’t good.”

  “I’ll fight them off for you, cupcake. Just point me at the nearest news van with my grenades and they won’t bother you anymore.”

  Xander clutched his hands to his chest and batted his eyelashes. “Chalk, you’re my hero.”

  Chalk flipped him the bird and started typing.

  The smile left Xander’s face. He wasn’t kidding; he didn’t feel secure here. Not with a professional contract hitter down by his hand, a client/target taking a nap on his living room couch and three possible suspects having Diet Cokes in the backyard under Thor’s watchful eye.

  Xander had come across a professional assassin once, been assigned to cover his ingress into a hot zone outside of Kandahar to take out a brutal Taliban leader, an executive order kept so quiet the press had no idea it was happening, back when the greater good was actually a point of sale in the war. The ride had been a long one—at night, overland in dangerous territory, scooting around known IED hotbeds, making sure they weren’t seen. They talked. It was the natural thing to do to pass the time.

  The assassin had his own code. He wasn’t a believer, wasn’t attached to any sort of dogma. If the job paid, he went, simple as that. But he’d felt it was his duty. There were too many lives being lost fighting unjust wars unnecessarily. He felt the best way to end a conflict was to take out the leadership, do it quickly and brutally, and watch the rebellion fall apart.

  Xander had seen enough rebellions pop up after a leader’s death to think this wasn’t exactly accurate. He told the man—his code name had been Atlas—that he felt like they were fighting a hydra. The insurgents were true believers, and cutting off the head in this neck of the woods simply created five hundred more heads, all desperate for power, and the desire to crush the West.

  Atlas had laughed and told him it didn’t matter. There would always be another leader to eliminate. That was what made the world go around. One rebellion quashed, another rising from its ashes. More money for him. He was just the trigger. And in keeping with his pragmatic philosophy, he pointed out there were plenty more where he came from, too.

  Xander supposed he was the same as the assassin, albeit with a slightly different code. He only killed under orders, too. He dragged himself back to the present, to his current crisis.

  Beloved by many, Denon was still despised by a few, and they were clearly the ones behind the assassination attempt. The old axiom was true: powerful men and women drew powerful enemies. Xander had no illusions on that point. It was the thesis that would keep him and Chalk in business, long into their careers in close protection.

  More importantly, if Xander could find who was funding the hit on Denon, they’d be able to stop the contract.

  And he had no illusions on what that meant, either.

  He was about to go hunting.

  He knew he’d done the right thing protecting his principal. But now he’d brought down a world of hurt on himself and everyone around him. He couldn’t stand the idea of putting Sam in danger. She managed to get herself in enough trouble without him adding to the mix.

  Xander pulled up a file on his laptop. Maybe someone from Denon’s past had a beef they’d missed, and was using his private staff to get close.

  In the manner of all great—and rich—men, Denon had his fingers in a number of lucrative pies. The biggest entity by far was his interests in Britain’s oil and gas. Twenty years earlier, as a young driller on an ocean platform, h
e’d seen a way to make their jobs more efficient, and his work resulted in a new method for getting the oil from the ocean’s floor, one that had been adopted by every oil company in the world. Which made him a multibillionaire.

  It was complicated stuff, and since he couldn’t find any links from the past to support the current issues, it had no bearing to Xander’s thoughts. He closed the backgrounder and moved into more recent information.

  The specialized software Chalk had developed for their use was taking forever to run. Xander’s internet connection was overloaded by the five laptops connected to the router. It was taking quite a bit of effort not to rip the house apart in frustration.

  “Anything yet?”

  Chalk shook his head. “Patience, grasshopper.”

  Chalk was more tolerant than Xander, always had been, which was what made them a good team. He was quiet, tapping industriously into the program he’d designed, waiting for it to work. The software could search the netherworlds of contract hits, looking for any moves by the known hitters. Assassination was primarily a word-of-mouth business, but there were still people who used their computers and email to ask for “help,” and Chalk was a genius when it came to programming. He’d written a software program that looked for the lingo special to the field. When it found a match to the usual buzzwords, it made a note, downloaded a piece of ingenious tracking software.

  Some would call that hacking, but he didn’t use the information he collected for his own personal gain, he simply fed it into his program to identify the threat. So white-hat hacking, definitely. The program followed everything from the computer of the person who’d initiated the contact, especially funds transfers. It was a handy tool to gauge where in the process certain plans were. Talk was one thing. When money started changing hands, it was clear matters had gotten more serious.

  It was only one tool, and helpful or not, now they knew it was fallible. The program had picked up nothing of interest relating to James Denon before their detail began.

  Chalk cracked his knuckles, drawing Xander’s attention. “We’re going to have to invest in a better wireless connection for you, my friend. I think I’ve got it finally.” He clicked his mouse a few times. “Yeah, we’re up.” He read for a few seconds, shaking his head. “I see nothing here—no warnings, no threats. No contracts on Denon. No mutterings at all, in fact. I’ve been scoping conversations from the past two weeks—I did this before, too, and saw nothing, figured we must have missed something—but I’m coming up blank.”

  “So the program doesn’t work perfectly. You can keep working on it, refine it.”

  “No, it works. Unlike some, I believe in my abilities.” He grinned at Xander. “Seriously, maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe Denon wasn’t the target.”

  Xander came around to the back of Chalk’s chair. “Let me have a go.”

  Chalk got up, fetched himself a Coke from the refrigerator. Xander took his spot, running through the program, searching for anything that might stand out. After ten minutes, he had to admit Chalk was right. There was nothing out of place, nothing that looked even remotely suspicious.

  Xander leaned back in the chair and stretched. He needed fuel—caffeine, food, sleep. He grabbed himself a Coke and started making sandwiches for the crew. Chalk watched quietly, letting him think. After years together as Rangers, living in all corners of the world, there was no unnecessary chatter.

  Finally, Xander turned, set a plate of sandwiches on the table, motioning for Chalk to dig in. He delivered a plate to the pool, left another on the table by Denon. Then he grabbed one for himself and in between bites ran through things with Chalk. “So if Denon wasn’t the target of the hit, who was? Or did we just stop a madman from going all bell tower on that tarmac?”

  “We need to run Denon’s people through the system. None of them pulled a contract. Ergo, maybe one of them was the real target.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  Chalk smiled. “Already am. Program’s been running since you sat down. Should be about ready now. Of course, now that our target pool has expanded exponentially, we may find this has nothing to do with Denon at all.”

  Xander thought of the bloodstain spreading down the concrete wall. “Don’t say that.”

  Chalk had green eyes with yellow centers that made him look like a raptor. He trained those hawklike eyes on Xander now. “Xander, man, you did right. Don’t worry. You saved a life today, no matter what. Even if it wasn’t our principal, you saved a life.”

  “We’ll see about that. Where’s this Senza guy from? Is there anything on him?”

  Chalk sat back at the computer, pulled up a fresh screen. “He is Spanish, actually. Was. Worked under several names, so I don’t know which one is real, but his history says he was a product of their spec ops. GOE—Grupos de Operaciones Especiales. Mean motherfuckers. Remember that guy, Pablo somebody, who came through Herat with those LAG 40 grenade launchers? He was GOE.”

  “I remember. He was posing as a translator. He was nuts. I didn’t know if he was transporting those weapons or was setting up to shoot them at us.” Another chunk of the sandwich disappeared. “So Senza had all the same training as we do.”

  “Yeah. His mandatory was up, they cut him loose in early 2000 and he went private.”

  “That’s a nice long career for a private hitter. Any paper on who he’d been working for? Did he discriminate?”

  “Not really. He’d taken ten jobs in four countries in the past two years. That’s steady work, at a decent clip, too. You know how some of these guys are—they’ll disappear for years, only come out if the target is huge, meaningful. And some of them will take the smaller jobs to keep in practice. Senza fell into that category.”

  “Someone like Denon is pretty meaningful.”

  “He is. But let’s see who else might be of interest to the forces of evil.”

  He tapped on the keyboard, and a list popped up—the names of Denon’s small group that traveled with him to the US on his secret trip. “I’ve put in all the names of everyone in Denon’s top echelons, from the staffers who traveled with him to the company’s C-suite, and I’ve got nothing. Bebbington, Everson and Heedles are clean.”

  “Show me the files.”

  Xander ran through them. “Well, there’s a ton more people in his company who could be a target.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense, Mutant. We have to limit the target list to the people who knew about the trip. He kept it off the radar entirely. We should look at all the people he met with here in the States, too.”

  Xander agreed. “Get the itinerary, let’s start marking off names, and see where we stand. I’m going to start at the beginning of the job and run through every contact made, from the pilots to the hotels, service and limos, everything external where there were strangers. You start running backgrounds on the people he was slated to see while he was here. Let’s run them down, and see who Denon’s doing business with who might be doing naughty things.”

  “Roger that. On it.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Xander found what he was looking for. Or rather, an anomaly, which was enough to set his instincts on fire.

  He was running the surveillance tapes from Teterboro, the first hour of the job, looking for anyone who might have been paying special attention to their principal’s landing. Denon had specifically requested to meet them as he exited the terminal, not a moment before.

  They’d been running the perimeter. He distinctly remembered casing the warehouse, looking for unseen threats, just as he’d done when Denon was leaving. Xander hadn’t been looking at the plane. He’d had his back to it. Chalk had been inside the terminal scanning for problems there.

  They’d missed it. Son of a bitch, they’d missed it.

  On the tape, two females came down the steps of the private Gulf
stream at Teterboro Friday night. Maureen Heedles, and a blonde he didn’t recognize. She looked neither right, nor left, but marched directly into the terminal, and out of sight of the camera Xander had on his shoulder.

  She wasn’t listed on the manifest for the flight to London today. And she hadn’t been on the flight that left this morning. That he was one hundred percent sure about.

  Denon had brought a woman into the country, and left her behind.

  Chapter 31

  FLETCHER CALLED HART back and got the name of the renters of Souleyret’s house on Capitol Hill—Michael Oread and Jared Lanter.

  “They’re both Congressional staffers,” Hart said. “I called to talk to them, but neither man was at work today. I haven’t had a chance to follow up. Also, Robertson is under sail to find and isolate the vaccines.”

  “Good. Good work, man. Where are we with the cameras around Cattafi’s house?”

  “Nothing yet. We still haven’t been able to touch base with the neighbors. They must be out of town.”

  “The cameras will have a brand name on them. Get someone up on a ladder, find out who makes them, call the company and give them the address. They’ll have an emergency contact for the owners.”

  “That’s next on my extremely long list. Let me know if you find anything at Souleyret’s house.”

  Fletch hung up with a bad feeling. Just something in his gut that told him things were all wrong, all off. How a simple case of domestic dispute had turned into an international intrigue and a possible bioterror attack in less than twelve hours was mind-boggling. There was no keeping this quiet; there were too many moving parts. He didn’t feel the need to inform Girabaldi, though. He was going to handle this his way.

  They got in his car and headed toward Souleyret’s place. Sam was silent on the ride over, making notes in her round handwriting.

  “Anything good coming?”

  She shook her head “No. Nothing good. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the data we just saw. I keep hoping I’m wrong.”