All That Mattered, Ch. 17

“Miss Desmond,” the young woman said. “You must believe me. Jonathan and I were not —” she broke off, clearly struggling for a word. “Amanți.”

Francine’s Romanian was basic at best, but she recognized the word. “You made it look that way, though.”

“It was…how do you say it…” She paused, grimacing. “O acoperire. A cover. Something meant to create the illusion for those who watched. So yes, we did make it appear as though something might be improper. But you must understand. In private, all Jonathan did was speak of you. He loved you. Why is he not here with you now?”

“He —” Without warning, Francine’s voice caught. She had to take a breath to recover her aplomb. “That’s why I’m trying to retrace his steps.”

“I don’t understand. Did he not return to this country?”

She looked away, pretending to study the pigeons on the sidewalk in front of them. Adriana Varga, until recently a low-level clerk in the Romanian Ministry for Foreign Trade, had stumbled into something she hadn’t meant to find — a cache of information too large, and too significant, to ignore. The U.S. consul in Bucharest hadn’t hesitated to arrange a way to get her to Paris on an “errand,” where she met Jonathan Stone.

A hand settled gently over hers. “He did not return. Did he?”

Francine took another deep breath. “No. Which is why anything you can tell me will be useful.”

“There is not much to tell. After we met in Paris, I returned to Bucharest for a time. But made it clear I was seeking something, a way to get out, to —” she cut herself off again. “Distracție. So that it would not look strange if I was out of doors at night. I went out and came back several times. Enough for the Miliția to grow…careless. To stop watching so close. Just a young girl dazzled by a man, wishing for what she could not have.” She paused. “Who took an unauthorized trip near the Yugoslav border and foolishly fell from a railway bridge. The Miliția called it an accident.”

Adriana had hidden for nearly a week before riding beneath train carriages and inside boxcars until she reached Belgrade. From there, she’d traveled under an assumed name until her “reunion” with Jonathan in Paris, knowing the DGSE would have someone watching along the route in case something went wrong. She’d still been plainly nervous by the time she stepped out onto the crowded platform at Gare de Lyon, where Jonathan had met her with a kiss, a hug, and a slip of paper that he’d pressed into her hand. It had contained directions to the U.S. embassy, along with a date and time.

“Did you…” Francine trailed off. “Was there any further contact with Jonathan?”

“No. I had hoped to find him here in Washington, but those who debriefed me — they said I should wait at least six months. A year would be better. I wanted to thank him, and to thank you.”

“Who debriefed you, Adriana?”

“I…am not certain. There was more than one agent. Toți vorbeau engleză, dar sunau diferit. Accentul.” She stopped herself. “The…the accent.”

“American?”

“Yes. Not British. But not the same as each other.”

“There are several American accents,” said Francine.

Adriana nodded and continued. “One of them asked whether Jonathan mentioned anyone watching him. I told them, Jonathan said something about the station when he had come back from Zurich. That someone had been behind him. But he also said it was probably nothing.”

“Which station?”

“Gare de Lyon. Where he met me a few days later.”

---

“How many days?” asked Lee into the telephone handset. He was cradling it on his shoulder, scribbling notes while they talked.

“Adriana didn’t remember exactly. Two or three days.”

It was safe enough to roll his eyes, since she wasn’t there to see it. “Closer to two or closer to three? And what was in Zurich?”

“Trade attaché,” said Francine. “I can’t confirm, but sounds like a banking cover.”

“Same entry point?”

“Gare de Lyon.”

“Oh, of course.” He let the sarcasm color his tone. “How many other runs through Lyon that week?”

“I’m not sure,” she answered. “I’ll see if I can track that down.”

“Good. Call me back when you have more.”

“Lee.” Now she sounded hesitant. “What’s the temperature like?”

“Typical March. Breezy. Warm one day and cold the next.”

“Lee. That’s not what I meant.”

He exhaled, rubbing the bridge of his nose. That, of course, knocked his glasses askew, and he had to take a minute to reset them.

“Lee?”

“I’m fine, Francine. But…well, I put a feeler out. It got stomped. Hard.”

“Too hard?” Now there was a note of concern in her voice.

“No. Not for me, anyway.” If Billy was already openly acknowledging his disagreement, then he could be uncomfortably close to the fire — and if Francine got wind of that, she might very well do something that would make it worse. “And I think it’ll be fine in the end. It just needs some more time to die down. Let it breathe a bit.”

“It’s already been three weeks.” But he could hear it in her voice: she wasn’t going to push.

Lee breathed a quiet sigh of relief and ended the phone call. As he hung up the phone, he looked up and saw Amanda’s skeptical look.

“I had to say something,” he began.

“I didn’t ask.”

Shaking his head, he pushed up and went to the shelves to retrieve the next set of computer access traces. “But you wanted to.”

“Lee.” Her tone had changed again.

“What?”

“Where are you?”

“What? I’m right here, with you. In the Q-Bureau. Stuck in a room full of paperwork.”

“You’re standing at the shelves.”

“Yes, and?”

“You’re standing at the shelves,” she repeated. “And your crutches are over by your desk.”

He looked down at his feet, which currently sported a dress shoe on the left and a surgical shoe on the right. Then he looked at his desk. His crutches were propped against the wall behind it. There was no way to deny what she had pointed out: he had just stood up and walked five feet.

“Monica said it was all right if I didn’t push it,” he said quietly.

“I know. And you weren’t. Were you.” It wasn’t a question.

“No,” he admitted as he picked up a sheaf of papers and returned to his desk. This time, he felt the odd pulling on his right calf. “Maybe…maybe I am getting better.”

“Maybe the new crutches are helping.”

He gave her an exasperated look. Why couldn’t it be simple improvement? “I’ll ask her about it at tomorrow’s appointment. We should get back to the printouts.”

Amanda held his gaze just long enough to let him know she hadn’t missed the change of subject. “Francine won’t thank you for not giving her the true situation.”

“She doesn’t need to know. If we all play our cards right, things will settle before she’s reinstated.”

“How many times have you gotten mad at her for keeping things to herself? Or for that matter, how many times have you already done this to her and had it blow up in your face?” Amanda shook her head. “If I talk to her again, I’m not going to lie to her.”

“I never asked you to.” He clenched and released his hands. “Look, I’ll go talk to Billy and tell him what she called in. See what else I can find out while I’m doing that. Sooner or later someone will have to acknowledge she’s been working this case right alongside us.”

“Which would give you the leverage you needed to ask for her reinstatement. Again.”

“She never should have been relieved of duty,” he said. “Maybe suspended for a day or two, but that would have been it. Smyth is blowing the whole thing out of proportion.”

She opened her mouth, but then took a breath and shut it again without saying anything.

Lee hissed softly. “Go on and say it.”

“Say what?”

“Amanda. I saw through that game of yours two years ago.”

She lowered her gaze to the work in front of her. “Fine. I was going to tell you that if you go down there angry or with an agenda, things could get worse than they already are. Do you really want to risk that? Especially if she does eventually find out how bad things got?”

“She won’t.”

“You don’t know that.” But she kept her tone mild.

“Damn it,” he started, but then he was the one who shut his mouth before any more words came out. “All right. I’ll give it half an hour. Things should be a little more under control then. I’ll just present it as an update, some updates he should know about. Fair?”

Her answering smile was small. But it was sincere.

---

Scotty’s smile was broad and unrestrained. “You were right! It is the same van!”

In the driver’s seat of the car they’d parked, Nancy was already scribbling notes. “Same plate? Same dent in the rear quarter panel?”

“Yup. That’s why I said you were right. That’s the third time in two hours they’ve gone past.” He paused. “Does this mean they have a hideout nearby? A secret lair or something?”

She chuckled ruefully. Ever since she’d explained what IFF actually did — complete with a trip to the bull pen, which was no longer off-limits to him — he’d been imagining spy-fiction scenarios.

“It could also just mean they’re nervous and keeping an eye on something. They could very well be staking us out.”

At that, Scotty sobered. “Yeah, it is kind of strange that we’ve just been sitting here in this alley for all that time.”

“Which is why I asked for an old junker out of the motor pool. With any luck, it’ll be dismissed as abandoned and nobody will look long enough to see we’re here.” She flipped a page. “How long was it between the last two times they passed?”

“Twenty-two minutes.”

She turned to look at him. “Were you timing or something?”

“No. But — well, it’s kind of a filmmaker thing. Especially if you run cameras or do editing. You get used to knowing exactly how long something takes. Twenty-two minutes? That’s the length of a half-hour documentary since you gotta account for commercials. So I’m sensitive to that.”

“Huh.” That was both interesting and useful. Internal clocks that accurate were rare.

“Before that it was forty-four minutes between drive-bys.”

“They changed their pattern.” She made another note.

“Yeah, but isn’t it interesting they cut it exactly in half?”

“It is,” she said slowly, turning things over in her mind. “That’s too specific to be random. I’ll bet they’re driving in some sort of pattern. Maybe we missed a pass.” Traffic had been waxing and waning this afternoon, and the bus routes were running. If the van had been on the other side of a bus or a tractor-trailer, they might have missed it. “Let’s give it one more cycle and see if they come by again.”

“If they do, are we going to follow them?”

He sounded almost excited, which made her smile. “No. But we’ll definitely move ourselves. It’s like a science experiment. Change one variable, see if something else changes in response to it.”

“Well, there’s also the light. It’s going on the golden hour now.”

“The what?”

He blushed. “The golden hour. About an hour after sunrise, and an hour before sunset. It’s when the light is absolutely gorgeous and you can get great mood shots. Lots of contrasty shadows and warm tones.” He paused. “It would also make it harder to see into a vehicle.”

“Or easier to hide behind glare,” she murmured.

“Yeah. That too.”

They waited in silence until Scotty spoke up again. “That’s it. Twenty-two minutes.”

There were no cars nearby.

Nancy cranked the engine of the old sedan they were using. It coughed and complained, but didn’t backfire. Dragging the gear selector down, she inched out of their alleyway. It wasn’t easy to judge the exact location of the front and rear bumpers. This thing’s as old as I am. How on earth would they have ever called it a coupe?

Beside her, Scotty took his camera out.

“No,” she said quickly. “That’s too obvious.”

“We could —”

She pointed at her field kit. “There’s a 110 in there with a zoom on it. Use that.”

“A 110? Oh, right. A spy cam.”

“Among other things.” She eased around a corner. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

“I’ll do that. But these things are terrible for getting angles.”

“We don’t need an artistic angle. We just need to be able to see what’s important.”

He gave her a sideways look. “That’s why we need a good angle.”

She tried to coast the car as much as possible, since it made a strange whooshing sound every time she put her foot on the accelerator. Doing so took more of her attention than was probably safe, though. “I’m going to make a two-block loop so we can look at both sides of the street.”

“You’re not worried about someone seeing us pass twice? This is a pretty unusual car.”

Unusual wasn’t quite the word Nancy would have used, but it would do. “I think we can take the chance if we only do it once.” She brought them through one stop sign, down the next block, and then signaled for a left turn on the light.

Scotty suddenly sat straight up. “Turn right.”

“What?”

“Turn right!”

“I’m in the wrong lane —”

“There aren’t any cars over there. I think I see the van!”

Biting her lip, she dragged on the steering wheel to turn the car to the right, scanning the block ahead once they were through the intersection. There were several vehicles parked on the street, but none of them were a white van.

“There!” Scotty already had the camera clicking.

“Where?” Nancy hit the brakes without thinking about it, only realizing what she’d done when the tires squealed briefly.

“Go,” Scotty told her. “I got it.”

“Got what?”

“The van. It’s backed up against a loading dock on the next block over. Go on up and make another right.”

“Scotty,” she said quietly. “That puts us right in front of the Agency. On the right side.”

His eyes were wide. “Yeah. It does. And it’s in the right place along the block, too.”

She guided the car past without stopping, turning left after two more blocks and pulling into a parking lot. “What did you get?”

“The van. That logo — it’s definitely Al-Safa Media Group.”

Nancy felt something twist in her stomach. “Could they be making a delivery to your department?”

“No.” His skin had gone pale. “They wouldn’t be. I told Mr. Karalis what was going on. Not everything,” he added quickly. “But enough to explain why it might not be a good idea to use them for a little while. He agreed.”

“So they’d have no other reason to be at or near the Agency?”

“No.” His expression had gone grim. “None at all.”

---

There was no reason for this latest log-in. None at all.

It didn’t fit the pattern Amanda Stetson had identified. The user hadn’t gone through the usual steps of looking at a dozen directories inside the Army database before settling down in one. Instead, they had gone straight to a directory marked OPS, uploaded a new version of one of the executable files, and logged off.

Douglas wasn’t entirely sure what the file was, but executables generally had a limited scope of function. As he noted the file name, he hoped the Army had a clean backup copy available. Another expert could analyze the files for differences if there was time to find one. Douglas couldn’t read the machine code himself. What he could do, however, was raise the alarm.

Standing up, he noted the breach on his diagram and then turned to walk toward Melrose’s office. Two steps later, he stopped, frowned, and turned back toward the diagram. Had he seen —?

Yes. He had.

“Trent?” It was Melrose. “Everything okay?”

“No, sir.”

That got Melrose’s attention.

“There’s been another breach. A different one. Outside the older pattern.”

“The older pattern?”

“The prior incursions followed Fibonacci intervals. That was how Mrs. Stetson was able to come up with the predictive algorithm I’ve been using.”

Melrose shot him a look.

“My apologies. They’re using a mathematical sequence. Mrs. Stetson found it and was able to use it to predict the next few incursions. Except this one —” he shook his head. “This one skipped ahead. It wasn’t due to occur until 2100. Um, nine o’clock this evening.”

“I know military time. Keep going.”

“Yes, sir. It wasn’t due to occur until 2100, but instead they signed in at 0800. Thirteen hours early.”

“Are we sure it’s the same operator?”

“Same login credentials,” Douglas replied. “Same access point. Same signature. And thirteen is a number in the sequence they use.”

“Just not in the right place. Instead, it was early.”

He nodded. “They also did something different this time. Replaced an executable — a file that actually runs an operation when called upon. Before, they only seemed to be looking around. It seems they may be moving from reconnaissance into action.”

Melrose frowned. “When would the next interval be due?”

From out of the corner of his eye, Douglas saw Lee Stetson get off the elevator and head in their direction. “Either at 1600 or 2100. And it’s 1620.”

“What’s at 1600 or 2100?” asked Stetson.

“The incursions,” explained Douglas. “No time to go back over everything. The operator accelerated the breach sequence. They’ve also altered something.”

Stetson peered at the diagram. “What’s in that OPS directory?”

“I don’t know exactly. But the name itself suggests —”

“Operational scheduling,” said Melrose. “Trigger files. You said the file they swapped was something that runs automatically?”

“Potentially.”

“You know what else would be in that sort of directory?” asked Stetson. “Surveillance actions. Activation sequences. Deployment routines.” He paused. “Aegis launches missiles.”

“If something happened at 1600…” began Melrose.

“We’d have seen it,” said Stetson. “There’s nothing. It’s 2100.”

“Set up a command room,” said Melrose. “Now. Pull in anyone you need.” He paused. “I’ll explain it to Smyth.”

Douglas turned to Stetson. “I’ll get you a list of the protocols —”

“No, Trent,” said Melrose. “You built this. You’re in the room.”

“Even though I might not be cleared?”

“You are now.”