Текст книги "Agent X "

Автор книги: Noah Boyd

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

10

Vail was sitting at the kitchen table with his injured hand unwrapped, trying to cut away the stitches with a small pair of scissors when Kate came in. Without a word, she took them from him and turned his hand over so she could see the sutures better. With tiny, careful snips, she cut them loose and then pulled each one out slowly. “It looks pretty good.”

He flexed his hand into a fist and then pressed the injured edge against the table. “It feels fine. What did Langston have to say last night?”

“In a very official monotone, he thanked me for the information and said he would have Kalix get to work on it. On the way over here, John called and said that after a discreet call to a contact at the Old Dominion Bank he was told that box 74 was at their Vienna, Virginia, branch. He is meeting with the prosecutor at eleven and will meet us at the bank at one o’clock unless we hear otherwise.”

Vail flexed his hand again. “Did you tell him how we connected the identities?”

“No, but he’s got to be starting to wonder.”

“Don’t forget, he’s an administrator. He’s used to figuring out what to do when answers are brought to him, not where they came from.”

“Let’s hope it stays that way.”

Vail checked his watch. “We’ve got to talk to those homicide detectives about Pollock. We should be done in time to get to the bank.”

“What are you going to tell them about why we were looking for him?”

“We’ll tell them it’s a terrorist investigation. Very hush-hush.”

“You know there are laws about lying to the police, even here in Washington.”

“With these guys’ caseloads, do you think they’re going to worry about whether it was terrorism or counterintelligence? They’re probably trying to figure out how to get fifteen minutes’ more sleep a day.”

After the homicide interviews, it was almost one o’clock by the time Vail and Kate arrived at the bank in Vienna. Bill Langston and John Kalix were already there, waiting for them in the parking lot. While she got out and went back to talk to Langston, Vail opened the trunk and loaded his briefcase with evidence gloves and envelopes. Kate came back and handed Vail the court order, which he also put in his briefcase. “Did Kalix have any trouble getting it?” he asked.

“Some. The whole thing is a little more complicated because of the secrecy angle. And you’ve got to admit that we are reading the tea leaves as far as what that message says. It could be an entirely different code. But I guess John finally wore them down.”

“It’s going to be embarrassing if we’ve come up with the wrong person,” Vail said.

“Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind. They’re going to wait in the car so it doesn’t look like the FBI is overrunning the bank,” she said.

Behind closed doors Kate and Vail explained to the manager about the need for confidentiality due to national security. He seemed to take the warning seriously. The bank computer revealed that an Alex Markov had rented safe-deposit box number 74 with a second name on the account of Yanko Petriv. The bank manager printed out all the account information and gave it to them.

For employment Markov had said that he was a correspondent for the Moscow newspaper Izvestia. For his phone number, he had given the same one Vail and Kate had called at the Russian embassy to receive the clue to Spy Number Two’s identity. Vail thought it was a nice little touch by Calculus to tell them they were on the right track. Apparently there was an Ariadne thread after all.

Vail also suspected that the name Markov was another false identity that Calculus had used to open the account. The bank box was smart, a way to transfer money and documents without the risk of being seen together. At least that’s how Calculus would have sold the idea to Petriv. But now it looked as if Calculus had done it to set him up. It was an easy way to plant and protect evidence that, because Petriv’s name was the only true name on the box, provided irrefutable proof of treason.

Now Vail needed to determine if Yanko Petriv was the mole’s real name. His employer was listed as the U.S. government. The phone number had a Virginia area code. “Can we get into the box without anyone else knowing?” Vail asked the manager.

“Sure. Just let me go tell my assistant that the boxes are closed for the next hour due to a lock malfunction. Then I’ll take you down there. We’re going to have to break into the box. If either of the box holders wants in, they won’t be able to access it after we replace the lock. By law, the next time they try to access it, we’ll have to tell them that the FBI was here and that a court order was served.”

Vail wrote down his cell-phone number and handed it to the manager. “If either of them shows up, call me immediately.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, let’s open it.”

After the manager oversaw the drilling of the lock on box 74, he led Kate and Vail to a small room and left them, closing the door behind him. Kate said, “Think Markov is Calculus?”

“You recognized the phone number, too. If he is, that should mean that whatever is in this box has a lead to the next name.” He lifted the lid, and they both put on evidence gloves. Inside were banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills. A quick count revealed almost forty thousand dollars. There were also a number of documents, most of which had CLASSIFIED stamped on them. Other pages included some handwritten lists, which were mostly names and phone numbers. Underneath them were two passports, one Czechoslovakian in the name of Lev Tesar and a Hungarian one with the name Oszkar Kalman. Kate opened them both and saw that although the hair color and length were different in the photos, it was the same individual. She said, “Looks like part of Mr. Petriv’s compensation package included escape plans.”

“Notice anything else about this?”

“What?”

“If they were using this box as a dead drop, there should be only money in here, or documents, not both.”

“Which means what?”

Vail studied the account printout the manager had given him. “Two weeks ago there was activity four days in a row. Petriv came the first day to put documents in the box. Markov—or Calculus, if you prefer—came the next day to remove them and leave money. The third day Petriv comes back and verifies the payment and moves almost ten thousand to his checking. On the fourth day, Markov makes sure some of the money is still there and puts back the documents, or probably copies of them, for us to recover. He knew that Petriv wouldn’t go back into the box until another exchange was set up. That left everything there for us to find.”

“Which we hope means that Calculus hid a clue to the next name in this pile of documents,” Kate said. She examined the papers more closely. “According to some of the stampings on the pages, I think these might be NSA reports. I’ve seen similar ones. If they are, maybe this is the intelligence agent that Calculus was referring to. Maybe there were only two spies he was going to give us.”

“Maybe,” Vail said. “Let’s pack everything up. Keep your fingers crossed that Langston won’t want to see any of it.”

“I’ll make sure he doesn’t,” Kate said.

“How are you going to do that?”

She said, “We’ll give him Petriv’s name and phone number and tell him we need him to find out who Petriv really is and where he works. A little distraction.”

“It’s obvious that somewhere in your life someone taught you some bad habits.”

Vail pushed the code into the off-site’s alarm. As he and Kate climbed the stairs, he asked, “Did Langston seem satisfied with the division of labor on Mr. Petriv?”

“He seemed suspicious. I know he can be a little pompous, but don’t take him for a fool.”

“Define ‘suspicious.’ ”

“He asked me how we came up with the bank-box information. I told him we stumbled across it. He pressed me, and when I wouldn’t be more specific, I think he assumed we had done something illegal. Of course he didn’t want any of that to get on his shoes. But when I told him we’d look over everything from the box and let him know if there’s anything of interest, I got the feeling this is the last time we’re going to get away with disguising light lifting as heavy lifting.”

“Let’s worry about next time next time.”

After putting on a fresh pair of gloves, Kate handed a set to Vail. He spread the documents out on the table, and she asked, “How do you want to do this?”

“Let’s split them into two piles. You read one while I go through the other. If we don’t find anything, we’ll switch.”

After a few minutes, he said, “I think this document is talking about a wiretap. It refers to a target phone. Can you call and see what the number is?”

She dialed headquarters and after a short conversation hung up. “It’s an importer that specializes in items from Eastern Europe.”

“What government agencies specialize in wiretaps of East Europeans?”

“Which ones don’t?” She smiled. “I’d better call Personnel and make sure that Petriv isn’t a Bureau employee.”

Vail continued looking through the papers while she made the call. After hanging up, she said, “He’s not one of ours, at least not under the name Yanko Petriv. That leaves the likely suspects CIA and NSA.”

“Then your initial guess of NSA is probably a good one. Just make sure you act surprised when Langston calls.”

They both went back to reading the documents. After twenty more minutes, Vail pushed his last item across the table and leaned back in his chair and waited for Kate to finish.

Finally she set down her last page. “Any anomalies?”

“None. You?” he asked.

“Other than two blank sheets of paper stapled together with a couple of dates written at the bottom of one, nothing.”

“Let me see them?”

She searched through the stack of pages and pulled them out.

Vail held the two papers gently between his fingers. The bottom one was a common size, about eight and a half by eleven, but the one stapled on top of it was an eight-inch square. At the base of the full-size page were the dates 12/27 and 1/6. They were written with the same careful penmanship and medium-blue ink that had been used to inscribe “Ariadne” on the water-soluble envelope. “This is what we’re looking for. And these sheets have one additional anomalous quality: They’re glossy.”

“Which means?”

He turned them over a few times, finally holding each page up to the light at different angles. He took them over to the window and raised the shade. Tilting the larger page up to the bright sunlight, he shifted it around for a few more seconds. He held up the smaller one. “This is the same size as what else?”

“I don’t know, what?”

He went over to the desk, set down the pages, and put the fingerprint magnifier on top of the square sheet.

“A fingerprint card,” she said. “That’s why he cut it to that size. So we’d recognize it.”

Vail went back to the window and used the natural light to examine the smaller page with the loupe. Then he flipped it behind the full sheet and examined its surface. “I know that engineers have a reputation for not being creative, but I think Calculus is an exception. It’s so simple. And so ingenious.”

“What is it?”

Vail held up both his hands and spread the fingers apart. “What am I holding up?”

“Two hands,” she said. “Ten fingers.”

“Another name for fingers.”

“I don’t know . . . ‘digits.’ What?” Vail didn’t answer but watched her face. All of a sudden, it dawned on her. She took the loupe from Vail’s hand and locked her eye against it, running it over both sheets. When she straightened up, she smiled. “You’re right, it is ingenious. He’s using fingerprints as a code.”

“Each finger has a number on the fingerprint card we use. The right thumb is number one, all the way to the left pinkie being number ten—or, for code purposes, zero.”

After a few seconds, she again scanned the larger sheet. “The message is on this page, but we wouldn’t be able to assign a number to each one without a control set of prints. The fingerprint card, so to speak”—she bent over the smaller page and ran the magnifier across it to confirm what she was about to say—“has a set of ten in the same order in which they’d be rolled during an arrest. From them we know what number to assign to the latents on the big page, which is the code to lead us to the next mole,” Kate said. “But then what do the dates mean?”

“I don’t know. First we’ve got to get both of these pages fumed so we can see exactly what Calculus is telling us.”

Vail’s cell phone rang. It was Luke Bursaw. “Steve, remember we talked about seeing if the police department had any similar patterns of missing females? Well, they do. I got copies of their reports and was wondering if you could give me a hand for a couple of hours.”

“Hold on a second.” Vail covered the phone. “It’s Luke. He needs some help. An hour or two. It’ll take that long to get those pages processed, won’t it?”

“With the fuming process, yes. Go ahead, I’ll get this done.”

“Luke, why don’t you come over here. . . . Okay, I’ll see you then.”

After he hung up, Kate asked, “You’re going to let him see all this?” She waved a hand at all the documents and photos covering the wall.

“First of all, he is an agent. Second of all, he’s Luke. I’ll ask him to pretend that it isn’t there, and he will.”

“You’re right.” As though they were as fragile as archival material, Kate cautiously packed up the two sheets of paper, threading them into a clear plastic envelope before putting them into her briefcase. “I’ll call you when I’m done. You and Luke aren’t going to get lost, I hope. Remember, we’re in a race here.”

“He said a couple of hours. If it takes longer, you’re going to have to yell at him.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last six months it’s who to yell at.”

11

Luke, do yourself a favor and ignore the stuff on the wall,” Vail said.

Bursaw let his eyes briefly scan the documents and said, “You always did thrive on chaos.” He took out a sheaf of papers. “These are homicide reports on three women who were killed in the last six months.”

“Give me a few minutes to read them.” The ability to ignore agency boilerplate was a necessary skill for anyone in law enforcement, and Vail had regained his in the few days of being back to reading Bureau reports. “I think there’s some coffee.”

“I could use a couple of cups.” Bursaw got up and started toward the kitchen. “What is this place?”

“Across the street is the old Russian embassy. You know, before they built the new one up on Tunlaw Road.”

“Then this was an observation post?”

“Tough duty, huh?”

“You want some coffee?” Bursaw called over his shoulder as he entered the kitchen.

“No!” Vail yelled after him. “All three of these women were prostitutes.”

Bursaw came back in with a cup in his hand. “I know that Sundra doesn’t exactly fit into the victimology pattern of these women, but she disappeared during the same six-month period as they did,” Bursaw said. “Does that mean you don’t think they’re related to her disappearance?”

“Not necessarily. If it is the same guy, she could have known him or unwittingly presented him with an opportunity. His MO is to take women in very low-risk situations. Prostitutes have to go with him. It’s unlikely that he would try something risky like grabbing Sundra anywhere she would have a chance to resist.”

“If you’re suggesting it might be someone who knew her, I’ve already interviewed everyone I could find, from names in her address book to people my cousin knew, including casual acquaintances like the UPS guy or anyone else she might know without really knowing. So far nothing.”

“Then I’d say this is your best bet right now.”

Bursaw took a sip of his coffee. “Come on, Steve.” He waved at the wall. “I can see you’ve got a lot going on, but I need you to fire up that twisted brain of yours in Sundra’s direction.”

“Give me a few minutes to think about it.” Vail walked into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. When he came back, he said, “You told me that Sundra had a new computer. Was it taken into evidence?”

“Yes. I’ve already gone through it. There really wasn’t much on it.”

“Take it to the lab and have them go through it. I read about a new forensics technique called Volume Shadow Copy. It allows them to reconstruct a computer’s hard drive on any given day. Start with the day she disappeared and then each day before that to see if anything was purged. If it was, get a copy of it, and we’ll take a look at it.”

Bursaw made a note. “Volume Shadow Copy. Okay.”

“What about her work computer?” Vail asked.

“I know they’ve downloaded everything off it from the server and then dry-cleaned it so no one else could get access to it. As far as I know, nothing was found.”

“Again, get a printout, and we can take a look at it. Maybe the two of them together will tell us something that each alone wouldn’t.”

“Actually, that’s not a bad lead. Although it was strictly against Bureau policy, she was known to copy files onto her personal computer and work on cases at home. I’ll get on it.”

“In the meantime we should look into the three dead prostitutes. I assume you’re checking to see if there are any women out there who’ve gotten away from this guy.”

“As we learned in Detroit, a surviving victim is still the best way to find out who’s killing hookers. I’m having them put together a list of serious assaults on ladies of the evening in that general area right now.”

“All you need is one.”

Bursaw drained his cup. “Thanks, Steve. So, you staying here? I saw the cots in the room off the kitchen.”

“Free room and board. Life is good.”

“I thought maybe you were staying at Kate’s.”

“At the moment it’s all business.”

“Moments pass.”

“Evidently you don’t know Kate as well as you think you do.”

Vail was just dozing off on the couch when Kate called. “I’ve got the pages fumed. Are we going to need someone to figure out which finger is which?”

“How clear are they?”

“As clean as if they’d been inked,” Kate said.

“Then I can do it.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Hi,” Kate said as soon as she came through the door. “How’d it go with Luke?”

“More tilting at windmills than finding lost women, I’m afraid.”

“So you’re done with it now?”

He looked at her, and she knew his answer before he said anything. “Probably not. Sorry.” He pulled on a fresh pair of gloves. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Amused, Kate said, “So you came here to go to a cocktail party, and now you’re working a third case. Sounds like somebody needs to learn how to say no.”

He gave her a sarcastic grin. “Should I decide to get some instruction, I know an expert who delivers the word with extreme malice.”

“I’m willing to bet you know several.” Carefully, she pulled out the sheets of paper, which now had a purple cast to them.

He took the fingerprint loupe and said, “On the code page, there are three prints on each line and three lines, nine impressions. So we’re going to get nine numbers out of this. With any luck they won’t represent something else. Start thinking about what has nine numbers and can identify a person.”

“Actually, I was thinking about it on the way here. There’s only one that comes to mind—a Social Security number.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Vail examined the top row of prints. He compared it to the prints from the “fingerprint card.” “The first one is the left ring finger, so number nine.” Kate wrote it down. He examined the second latent. “The left index finger—seven.” He continued, line by line, until all nine latents had been decoded. “Okay, what have we got?”

She handed Vail the pad of paper with the nine numbers written on it. She had placed dashes after the third and fifth, making it read like a Social Security number. He handed it back. “How can we find out who it belongs to?”

She went over and sat down at the computer. “Let me see if they have an Accurint program on here.” After logging on to the Internet and clicking the mouse a couple of times, she said, “Yes.” She signed in to the program with her password and then typed in the nine digits. After a few seconds, a secondary screen popped up. “James Dellasanti. Currently residing just outside Wheaton, Maryland.”

“Can it tell us where he works?”

“Sometimes, but it’s a different query.” She punched a few more keys, and the screen changed. “No, not this time. Let me check and see if we did a background investigation for his clearance.” She switched into a Bureau program and queried the name. “Well, the good news is, he doesn’t work for the FBI or any agency we do the backgrounds for.” When Vail didn’t say anything, she said, “We could give this to Langston, too. Let him do the cut-and-paste stuff.”

“We can’t. We don’t have any evidence against this Dellasanti. With the others we have a DVD and then stolen documents with money in a bank box. Here we have nothing but a set of numbers that we’re not even sure is a Social Security number. And where’s the link to the next mole, if there is one? There’s got to be more to this.”

“Then it has to be the dates.” She looked at the page. “December twenty-seventh and January sixth.”

“Maybe, but what do they mean?”

“One date has passed, and the other’s coming up in two days.”

Thinking about what she’d said, Vail walked over to the wall covered with the maps and reports documenting Calculus’s travels. “Can you get into the spy satellite again?”

Kate started tapping the keys and after a minute said, “We’re up.”

“Okay, let me read you his coordinates from December twenty-seven. Just the places he stopped for more than five minutes.”

After she wrote the numbers down, he moved behind her and watched as she manipulated the mouse until the coordinates were in the small windows on the screen. She zoomed in. “The first one is the Russian embassy compound.”

“That’s to be expected. Try the next one.”

She entered it and then zoomed down to ground level. “That’s a fairly busy intersection with a McDonald’s right there.”

Vail went back to the wall. “He was there about twenty minutes and it was approximately eleven thirty. So it was probably a Big Mac lunch. Next one.”

After locating the third coordinate and zooming down to it, she said, “It’s a public park in Maryland.”

“That’s it!”

“That’s what?”

“That’s what January six is. A dead-drop date.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s well documented that the Russians love parks for exchanging money and information. And it’s also well known that they hate changing a procedure when they find one that works.” Vail went back up to the wall and rechecked the entry. “He was there eighteen minutes. Calculus was picking up the information from Dellasanti, who evidently is supposed to go back there on the sixth and retrieve his payment.”

“Don’t you think that’s a lot of supposition based on a couple of written dates?”

“You’re right.” He turned back to the wall and searched Calculus’s movements again. “Here,” he said, pointing at a document, “the following day he was at the same coordinates for twelve minutes.”

“He was putting the documents back.”

“Probably copies. He would have to turn in the originals because his bosses would have to see them to okay the payment.”

Kate said, “So the day after, he put the copies there with the payment? For us to catch Dellasanti with?”

Vail was tracking Calculus’s movements again. “He never went back there after that, so it has to be. And by writing down the second date, he’s telling us exactly when he’ll pick up the package.”

“And then Calculus told him the money wouldn’t be there until January sixth. This time the evidence is actually catching him in the act,” she said. “What better proof?”

“Exactly,” Vail said. “Can you walk the camera around a little?”

“Sure. What are you looking for?”

“Someplace for the drop. Someplace you could hide a package of documents or money and not have it bothered by people or weather. That’s why parks are so popular for this kind of thing. Especially in the winter.”

Kate’s eyes were locked on the screen as she virtually strolled through the park. “Here’s something close by, maybe twenty yards away—a footbridge.”

Vail came around the computer and stared at the monitor. “Perfect,” he said, then pointed. “See underneath the end there? You could easily hide a good-size package.” Vail went back to the wall to check the coordinates of the bridge. “Okay, he was there for about three minutes, and then he walked around a little, stopping here and there for a minute or two. Probably to look less conspicuous.”

“But the bridge, that’s where you figure he left the package.”

“That’d be my guess.”

“Can I call Langston now?”

“Okay, but tell him not to send anyone to the dead drop. We have to assume if Calculus told the Russians everything, they could be watching it. If they spot our people, there’s probably a good chance that Dellasanti will be killed.”

Kate asked, “If the Russians do have the Calculus list, why aren’t they just taking all of them out instead of waiting to see if we’re going to arrest them?”

“They’re probably still productive sources, and good ones are not easy to come by. Also, should it ever surface in the future that the Russians are killing their moles, recruiting new ones would be impossible.”

“I’d better quit putting off calling Langston. Even though this should be good news, that we’ve found another one, I’ve got a feeling he isn’t going to like it. We’re figuring out who these people are faster than we can arrest them.”

“Actually, it only seems a little complicated at this point. Spy Number One, Charles Pollock, is dead. Spy Number Two, Yanko Petriv, with a little luck is in the process of being fully identified for arrest, and Number Three, James Dellasanti, will be caught in the act in two days in Maryland. As you reminded me earlier today, speed is what’s important here. It doesn’t matter if everyone’s happy about it, or if it’s legal enough to put in their memoirs. The Russians already have the list and apparently are willing to kill these people to keep them out of our hands. And don’t forget the ‘big fish.’ That’s the real prize we’re trying to beat them to.”

“That all sounds nice, but in case you haven’t noticed, very little of this has gone as planned. What if something happens, like Dellasanti deciding to pick up whatever’s at the drop before the sixth?”

“He’s probably been told that the money won’t be there until January sixth. And spies hate going to the dead drop—it’s when they’re most exposed. If Calculus put the documents back like he did in the bank box—and according to that tracking phone, it looks as if he did—we’ll have him along with the evidence and money all in one nice neat little package. We just have to make sure that you and I get our hands on whatever documents might be there before anyone else does. Especially if Dellasanti isn’t the ‘big fish.’ I don’t want to lose control until we figure out who that is. If Langston gets the idea in his head that he can take over, he’ll have to play by the rules, and I think if this case has proved anything, it’s that this isn’t going to get solved that way.”

“As uncomfortable as I am with deceiving him, I guess you’re right.” Kate looked at her watch. “I desperately need to catch up on my other job’s paperwork. And I’d better let Langston know about this upcoming drop by no later than tomorrow morning. We’ll need to get surveillance on it ahead of time.”

“Just make sure he’s going to let us handle that package.”

“I’ll do my best. In the meantime, if Langston has Petriv identified, we should be able to round him up tomorrow. And then, with a little luck, Dellasanti the next day,” Kate said. “This whole thing wouldn’t seem nearly as daunting if we knew how many names were left.”

“I told you before, spies love mind games. Answers are better protected if they’re surrounded by confusion.”

Kate slipped her coat on. “What are you going to do with the night off?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Maybe have dinner with Luke.”

“By ‘dinner’ you mean work on his missing analyst.”

Vail smiled. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it came up.”