Hidden Agendas nf-2 Page 6

  "I'm serious here, Alex. Somebody just posted to the net a list of all our sub-rosa ops in the Euro-Asian theaters."

  "Jesus!"

  "Yeah. Every American spy in Europe, Russia. China, Japan, Korea—all of them have just been outed. State is crapping big octagonal bricks. A lot of the ops are in supposedly friendly countries, our allies. That's going to cost us some favors and a lot of mea culpas, but we've also got agents in places where they'll get shot first and questioned later. We've put out a total recall, but some of them aren't going to get out before they get picked up."

  "Damn," Michaels said.

  "Yeah. Damn. And think about it — if he got Europe and Asia, who's to say he didn't get the Middle East, Africa, or South America?"

  Michaels couldn't even speak. "Damn" wouldn't begin to cover it.

  "We got to find this guy, Alex."

  "Yeah."

  Chapter Seven

  Monday, December 20th, 10:25 a.m. Quantico, Virginia

  Joanna Winthrop washed her hands, reached for the paper-towel dispenser, and looked at her reflection in the large mirror over the sink in the women's restroom.

  She shook her head at her doppelgänger. All of her life people had told her how beautiful she was, men — both young and old — and more than a few women, but she still didn't see it. She had learned how to pretend to ignore the stares, but people still stopped her on the street, strangers, to tell her how attractive she was. It was flattering. It was interesting.

  It got in her way.

  And it was a mystery to Winthrop. She had a sister, Diane, who truly was beautiful, and next to whom she had always felt dowdy. Her mother at fifty was a knockout, and her smile wrinkles and gray hair only served to accent her perfect bone structure and muscle tone. True, Joanna wasn't ugly, but of the Winthrop women, she was a distant third insofar as looks were concerned. In her opinion.

  Of course, that wasn't what most other people seemed to think. It had been a mixed blessing all of her life. Sure, it had been fun to be invited to all the parties when she'd been a kid, to always be at the top of everybody's lists, to be popular and sought-after. She had accepted it as the norm, never questioned it — until she looked up one day and realized that most people considered her nothing more than a… decoration. All she had to do was stand there, smile, and be pretty, be an ornament, and that was enough for them. It wasn't enough for her, it wasn't anything she had done — nothing she had earned, she'd been born that way. Who could take credit for that?

  Boys were tongue-tied in her presence, but they lined up for the chance to be rumble-mouthed, and eventually she realized that to most of them, she wasn't a real person, but a trophy — to be pursued, captured, then displayed. Looky here, guys, look what's hanging onto my arm. Don't you wish she was yours?

  She was smart, she did well in school, stacked up well against objective academic standards, but nobody seemed to care about that. Being pretty was more important than being smart to everybody. Everybody except Joanna Winthrop.

  Being pretty got old. Too many people couldn't see past it — or didn't want to see past it.

  She tossed the damp paper towel into the trash can and glanced back at the mirror again. The first boy she'd slept with, at seventeen, had been the president of the science club, not any of the dozens of jocks who had chased her. He was intelligent, soft-spoken, and handsome, in a consumptive dying-poet kind of way. A sensitive, caring, bright young man who respected her for her mind. That was what she had thought.

  He'd bragged about sleeping with her to his friends the next day. So much for his sensitivity, his caring, his respect for her mind. It had broken her heart.

  Most of the girls she knew were jealous of her looks, especially the pretty ones, and they were resentful and catty. Her only real friend in school had been Maudie Van Buren, who had been plain, fifty pounds overweight, and addicted to black sweatsuits and running shoes. Maudie didn't care about looks — hers, Joanna's, anybody's — and she didn't understand why Joanna was so upset about being popular. She'd love to be on anybody's list for anything, she always said.

  They'd gone off to different universities, Winthrop to MIT, Van Buren to UCLA. But they kept in touch. And each year, they got together for a week at Maudie's uncle's mountain cabin outside Boulder, Colorado. During the break between their junior and senior terms, they had managed one of their best ever conversations. Maudie had gone on a diet, started working out, and in six months had dropped her excess weight, tightened up, and emerged from her sweatsuit-fat-chrysalis stage as a slender — and beautiful — butterfly.

  Over bottles of silty, home-brewed beer that Maudie's uncle had stocked the fridge with before he left, the two young women had talked.

  "I think I finally get it," Maudie said. "About the pretty thing."

  Winthrop sipped at the cloudy brew. "Uh-huh."

  "I mean, when I was a big tub, anybody who bothered to spend time with me did it because of my personality, such that it was, and it wasn't as if I had to carry a stick to clear myself a path through my admirers when I went out. Now, I get calls from guys who thought I was invisible when I was a whole helluva lot bigger than I am now. It's like I suddenly got rich and everybody wants to be my friend." She took a big slug of the beer. "I mean, the depth of a guy who is only interested in you because of your looks is about that of a postage stamp, isn't it? Kind of hard to feel a lot of trust for somebody like that. ‘Oh, baby, I love you for your mind!' sounds a little hollow when he's fumbling to unsnap your bra strap."

  Joanna grinned around another swig of beer. "Tell me about it, sister."

  Maudie looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

  "You've had to deal with this your whole life. How did you finally get past it?"

  "Who got past it? I bump into every day I go out. You learn to live with it."

  "I may start eating again," Maudie said. "Who needs the stress? Maybe it's better to be fat and sure of my friends than skinny and suspicious."

  "No, I think the best thing is to find somebody who can get past your face and boobs, who doesn't care too much about either. It's okay if they think you look good, that's fine, as long as they realize that isn't all there is to you."

  "You got somebody like that?"

  "I got you, babe."

  "I mean somebody male."

  "Well, no. Not yet. But I'm ever hopeful. He must be out there somewhere."

  "Better be careful. I might find him first."

  Both women laughed, and drank more of the malty home brew—

  Winthrop's virgil cheeped, and she pulled it from where it was clipped onto her belt. Incoming call. The caller ID showed it was Commander Michaels. It must be important if he was calling her from just down the hall.

  "Yes, sir?"

  "We have a situation here, Joanna. If you could come to my office, I'd appreciate it."

  "Be right there," she said.

  She discommed, stuck the virgil back on her belt, gave herself a final glance in the mirror, and started for the door.

  Monday, December 20th, 10:45 a.m.

  Michaels looked at the three leaders of his computer team, as good a group of people as he'd ever worked with. They all looked back at him with anticipation as he finished laying out the scenario.

  "All right, folks, there it is. CIA is justifiably upset and they'd like us to do something about it. Forty years of work is going down the tubes, and more might follow that any second. Let's have some risk assessment and scenario building here. Jay, what do we have so far?"

  "I wish I could say it was good news, Boss, but so far, zip city. I don't think we're dealing with some kid hacker. What little I've found is a little rougher than the Russian we just dealt with. The guy snuck in and out, but he didn't track a lot of mud — I haven't found his footprints yet."

  "Toni? How is he getting this stuff?"

  "Three possibilities," she said. "One, he's cracking his way into secret files and stealing it; two, somebody who knows
it is feeding him — or three, he knows it himself."

  "So he could be almost anybody," Joanna said. "Somebody outside the walls, or inside them."

  "How do we find him?" Michaels asked.

  They all looked morose, and Michaels knew why. If the guy hadn't left an obvious trail, and if he didn't come back and blunder into a hole and break his leg or something, finding him would be iffy at best.

  "All right, skip that. How do we stop him?"

  Again, Michaels already knew the answer, but he wanted to get his team cranked up to full alert.

  Jay said, "We've already put out the word to all federal agencies to harden systems, change passwords, reschedule downtimes from periodic to random, all like that."

  "Which will help if he is by himself outside and looking in," Toni said, "but not if he's a cleared employee."

  "Or being fed by somebody who is," Joanna added.

  "We set some rattle cans up on real obvious targets," Jay said. "Squeals, squeakers, telltales, like that, but if he was dumb enough to blunder into those, he probably wouldn't have gotten in in the first place."

  Michaels nodded. It wasn't their fault, but they had to catch this guy before more people started dying. He had to be hard here. "Folks, this guy, whoever he is, has caused at least one death we know of, and maybe more, and is likely to cause more. He's compromised our national security, pissed off our friends and enemies alike, and way down at the bottom of the list, he's also making Net Force look bad. There are people who will use this against us, and that's a problem, but that's the least of our worries. I want to see some contingency plans, some operational scenarios that will nail this bastard and get him off the net. Use whatever Cray time you need, spend what you need to spend, call in favors, whatever. This is critical, priority one. We have other business, sure, but this sits on top of the pile, understood?"

  They nodded, murmuring assent at him.

  "All right. Go."

  After they had left, Michaels stood staring into infinity. It never rained but it poured. And it was his job to stop the rain.

  Monday, December 20th, 12:05 p.m.

  Toni stretched her legs, dropping into the left sempok position by sliding her right foot behind and past her left, sinking until her buttocks touched the floor, then bouncing up and across to the opposite side. A good silat player could defend or attack from a seated pose, could leap to her feet, kick, sweep, punch, or move quickly to one side. It didn't always look pretty but it worked, and that was the point. In silat, the object was to get the job done, not strike attractive poses for anybody watching.

  She looked up and saw Alex walk into the gym carrying his bag. She raised her eyebrows in surprise. She hadn't expected him to come in for class today, not given all the crap going on with the spy thing.

  "I didn't think I'd see you here," she said.

  "Me neither," he said. "But there's not much else I can do about things at lunch. Everybody I'd want to talk to will be out and I hate to interrupt somebody trying to grab a quick bite. Besides, exercise tends to clear out the cobwebs. I'll get dressed, see you in a minute."

  He headed into the locker room, and Toni went back to limbering up. Poor Alex. He took all this so personally, as if everything that happened was all his fault. She fielded as much of it as she could, tried to take care of him, but she couldn't shortstop all of the crap that landed on his desk.

  Of course, given her choice, she would be able to make his life a lot more relaxed away from work. He needed somebody to take care of him, to rub his back, to fix him a drink before dinner, to—

  — screw his brains out?

  Toni smiled. Well, yes. That too. That wasn't likely to happen. He was still faithful to his ex-wife, at least as far as Toni knew. It was both an admirable and a frustrating trait in him. Although she had certainly seen how he looked at Joanna Winthrop, with her drop-dead good looks and bedroom eyes, and that had made Toni's belly knot in cold fear. How could you compete with a woman who had a face that would launch a thousand ships, a body to match, and who was as bright as a thousand-watt bulb to boot? Hardly fair, her being beautiful and smart.

  Toni blew out a sigh. She could hardly blame him if he wanted to chase the beautiful lieutenant, could she? Alex didn't feel for Toni the way Toni felt for him. She loved him, and even so, even so, she had stumbled. Of course, that one-night stand with Rusty had been a big mistake. She'd repaired it as best she could immediately after it had happened, and he was dead now, so nobody knew about it and nobody ever would. Except her. She knew. She was in love with her boss, but she had slept with another man. How could she get around that? It felt awful.

  Toni threw an elbow at an imaginary opponent. Too bad she couldn't control her love life as easily as she could a physical attack. Life would be much easier. Get into a fight with a would-be partner and throw him, then he'd be yours forever.

  Too bad it wasn't that easy.

  Monday, December 20th, 2:05 p.m. Bladensburg, Maryland

  Alone, Hughes drove to one of his safe houses for the meeting with Platt.

  There was always business that couldn't be handled longdistance, just as in Guinea-Bissau, and one needed places to conduct such business away from curious eyes.

  This hideaway was a basic third-floor single-bedroom apartment deep in the bowels of one of the new monster apartment complexes just over the District line, in Maryland. The complex was part of the extended bedroom community that had come to surround the nation's capital, accreting slowly over the years at first, then suddenly metastasizing like some architectural cancer, expanding in huge pressed-wood, ticky-tacky lumps and clots in all directions. Such places were the modern equivalent of tar-paper shacks — although probably not as sturdy.

  Here was one of these cheap constructions, the River View Province. Three stories high, a thousand units strong, less than six months old, it was a perfect place to hold clandestine meetings. Nobody knew their neighbors, and it was so large nobody noticed who came and went. It was between Colmar Manor and Bladensburg, just off SR 450, and if you were on the third floor in the unit Platt had rented, and if you stood in the kitchen sink and leaned out the window, you could indeed see the north fork of the Anacostia River — for what that was worth.

  Hughes drove a rental car, a small, plain gray Dodge something or the other that looked just like a million other cars on the road. He might as well have been wearing a cloak of invisibility for all he was likely to be noticed. He wasn't likely to run into anybody he knew out here, and he wasn't going to be recognized by anybody except a political junkie, none of whom would see him and Platt together in any event.

  He wended his way through the vast parking lot, got lost when he took a wrong turn at one of the stupidly named and numbered lanes — Catbird 17—then finally arrived at the assigned parking slot for his apartment. He pulled the car into the space and shut the motor off. He looked around. Cold, clear, nobody around except some big guy walking a pair of brown and black German Shepherds on long wind-up leashes. The dogs snuffled the air, looking back and forth, keenly alert and searching for wolves to bark at. How could you live with two dogs that big in one of these little places? The poor guy must spend half his day walking those monsters; otherwise they'd eat all his furniture and wear holes in the carpet. Hughes liked dogs, and though he didn't have time for one now, maybe he'd get a whole pack when he got set up. He'd have the room, and the time to fool with them.

  He took the elevator to the third level, headed down the hall to the unit, opened the door with a plastic keycard, and stepped quickly inside.

  Platt was already there. He stood in the kitchenette, and he had what looked like a plastic bag full of ice cubes pressed against the right side of his head. The big man had scratches and a brush burn on one cheek, and the knuckles on both hands were torn and crusted with flecks of dried blood.

  "What the hell happened to you?"

  Platt grinned, and moved the bag of ice away from his head. "I had me a little ar-gu-ment with o
ne of our underprivileged black brothers. He clipped me a good one on the side of the head. You want to ice something like that down pretty quick, otherwise you wind up with a cauliflower ear. I'm too pretty to let myself get to lookin' like some punch-drunk ole boxer."

  Hughes stared. "You were supposed to keep a low profile. You weren't supposed to draw attention to yourself."

  "Didn't get no notice to speak of. Boy lost a couple teeth, maybe got a broke rib or two, he'll be just fine in a week or three. Probably didn't even go to the hospital. Shoot, any wog dentist could put them teeth back in. I left before the po-lice showed up, if they ever did. It was just a little ole dance, nothin' much. He moved pretty good, we had us a fun time."

  A man who got into fights for fun. Platt was surely crazy.

  "You got somethin' for me?" Platt said.

  Hughes removed a thick manila envelope from his briefcase and tossed it at Platt, who caught it one-handed.

  "There's twenty thousand in there, all in used hundreds."

  "That ought to keep pork chops on the table for a couple weeks," Platt said.

  "Just be sure and get that list from the NSA satellite clerk."

  "Yeah, I'm looking forward to those codes. I'mon be able to get HBO for free."

  Hughes shook his head.

  "You see ‘em runnin' around like chickens with their heads cut off over at Langley? Bet we get ourselves a new CIA Director real damn quick." Platt laughed.

  "The spy list did create quite a stir," Hughes allowed. "But we've got to keep the pressure up."

  "No problem. Japanese Stock Exchange codes go out in the mornin', and the flight information for the Hijos del Sol cartel's cocaine shipments gets fed to their main rivals, Hermanos Morte, tomorrow afternoon. It'll be knee-deep in blood and snowing the Devil's Dandruff all over Colombia before it gets good and dark. DEA is gonna be having kittens down there trying to figure out what's what."

  "What about the banks?"

  "I got some stuff coming out on Wednesday. Nothin' big, just a couple of thousand East Coast ATMs going wonky, givin' out beaucoup cash to anybody who uses a smartcard. Be real interesting to see how much of it gets turned back in."