Dark Secret (DARC Ops Book 1) (4 page)

She smiled weakly.

“I'll give you a free fix for it.”

Okay, I am a used car salesman.

“Don't make usernames visible amongst bidders. Simple as that.”

The other face on the screen smiled in medicated fashion.

It was often difficult, especially on the first or second conversation with a prospect, to get a sense of who he or she really was. Was she legitimately interested? Was she just daydreaming until Jackson offered his price? How knowledgeable was this person? How many Ambien pills did she pop a half-hour prior? Somewhere out in San Francisco was a Quickbids developer, the doleful-eyed hipster most likely price-shopping at that exact moment, calling other firms for their bottom line. Maybe she'd listen to their pitches. Or maybe she'd just go to bed.

More than once he'd thought about writing a list of all the prospects who blatantly shopped by price alone, the prospects who could afford it but didn’t want to. And then he'd take this list over to one of Tansy's friends and tell them to do their worst. It wouldn’t cost much. And whatever it did cost, he'd recuperate when the targeted companies came crawling back. It was such a coincidence, DARC Ops being the only firm that knew how to reverse the attacks.

Jackson liked to daydream about his plan, thinking of all the insidious options he had at his disposal. Of course it never progressed past fantasy, his damn ethics getting in the way of yet another good time. Why did his black-hat hacker opponents get to have all the fun?

The daydream was interrupted by the triumphant horn blasts of a John Philip Sousa ringtone— the same ringtone he'd get dirty looks for in elevators and other decidedly anti-Sousa locations. The reason for the fanfare, another DARC employee, Matthias, who'd just had an interesting conversation with his ex-girlfriend.

“Do I really need to know?” asked Jackson.

“You do.”

“What is it? A restraining order?” Jackson checked the time—9:48—while thinking of a new fantasy, working a nine-to-five, punching in-and-out and having some semblance of personal time.

“There's someone you need to meet,” Matthias said. “She's a little rattled right now, so she might not call. But you need to talk with her. And fast.”

“Why?”

“She might have some dirt on your favorite senator.”

“Which one?”

“Langhorne. He might be...
might
be selling arms to Kenyan rebels.”

Jackson needed a minute to process that. “Why
might
be?”

“One of his staffers, a translator, found some encrypted document on his computer, that she, uh, I guess on the spot, um, decrypted.”

“Matthias, that sounds completely ridiculous.”

“I know. But she seems convinced.”

“Who? Your ex or her friend?”

“Both,” said Matthias.

“Are you convinced? Do you think it’s even possible? I'm not.”

“Well you haven’t talked to her yet.”

That was true at least. Jackson hadn't talked to some friend of Matthias' ex girlfriend.

“Her story's very convincing,” said Matthias. “And she's extremely intelligent.”

“Do you know how intelligent she'd have to be, to real-time decrypt a document? I don't even think intelligent is the word...”

“The word is savant.”

“Is that what she is?” He was wasting his time on all this when he could have been heading home to a glass of red, or something stronger.

“Jack, I'm telling you. She's... she's special.”

Jackson tried to say something but was cut off.

“Not
that
kind of special, either. Not like Rain Man.”

“Well,” said Jackson. “She'd
have
to be like Rain Man. There's no other way. Unless she's just making the whole thing up, which is a hundred percent more likely.”

“You know the Langhornes own the fifth largest weapons manufacturer in the U.S., right?”

“So what?”

Matthias took a deep breath. “Okay, fine. She's like Rain Man, but just without the, y'know, head-slapping stuff.”

“Are you sure?” Jackson waited for a response, but all he got from Matthias was a long, exasperated sigh. “Does she even really work for Senator Langhorne?”

“Why am I begging you?” Matthias finally asked.

“You're not begging me.”

“I am. It's stupid.”

“Well then stop. What's her name?”

“I only know her first name. Mira. She's pretty guarded.”

“Do you have her number or anything?”

“I can get it.”

“Wait. What? How'd you expect me to talk to this person?”

Another long sigh from Matthias.

“Alright, alright. Get her number and I'll call her.”

“Nah, fuck it.”

Classic Matthias.

“Aw come on, Matty. Don't be like that. I'll call her.”

“So how did Quickbids go?”

“Shitty.” Jackson, caught off-guard, couldn’t help but share his true feelings about his conversation with the Bay Area's sleepiest developer.

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, it does,” Jackson lied. He suddenly enjoyed the fact that he'd have one less project to worry about. And a little more free time. It might be nice. It was an odd realization, but as the night wore on, Jackson began to relish the idea of sitting in his backyard chair. Just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing. Maybe he'd drink a beer. But that was it. Aside from maybe calling that savant girl. That might be interesting.

T
he city had changed overnight
, as did the roads which lead to it, Mira crossing a different bridge on a different and distinctly Joan Didion-less commute that morning. The street names were foreign, the skyline unrecognizable. The green lawns of the National Mall and the red stripes of its ubiquitous flags were dulled beyond distinction. Joyless, muted colors lurked everywhere. Even the District's noise, the busy ambiance, sounded distorted and tinny through the open windows of Mira's car.

She no longer found any pleasure in the Capitol's illustrious architecture, nor its iconic landmarks, nor the swampy history of L'Enfant's grand avenues. But she was especially apathetic about a certain starkly modernist-designed Hart Senate building, which now seemed to take on an air of institutionalization. It was a stale, suffocating air. And she had the brain fog to prove it, a lack of oxygen which stifled translations of even the most everyday Siamese. That made for another change, her work rate, which was becoming increasingly slow and arduous throughout the morning. She'd been pulling teeth, yanking out any semblance of meaning from the squiggly lines of Thai abugida, and then Romanizing it to
gam-rai
, which means 'to gain'.

Baht
... THB... one of those being 0.030 of a U.S. dollar... 625.60 Dong when converted to Vietnamese...

Mira sat hunched over her laptop in a cubicle that felt increasingly small and jail-like. She'd been mired in the same sentence for ten minutes.

...chứng...từ xuất......khẩu.........nhờ...

The translator cogs in Mira's head had been turning slower since her discovery on Langhorne’s computer. But this time she could feel them come to a dead halt, as if the cement they'd been turning through had finally hardened. And then there were no more words.

Her head certainly
felt
as though it was full of cement. Heavy, slouched forward, almost grazing against the laptop screen. She could probably chalk it up to a lack of sleep, if she didn’t know better. Her haggard appearance, too. Harboring a moral dilemma could sprout any number of wrinkles and broken capillaries. Even after one day, Mira already saw the ravages of stress and fatigue. She assessed the damage through an over-caffeinated amount of bathroom breaks, staring at a mirror full of acne breakouts and yellow-green tinted eye bags. A face only Chuck could love. But it wasn’t the worry lines on her face that mattered so much as the ones she'd read on the Senator's computer, the worrisome lines of coded text keeping her up all night. And when she'd finally fallen asleep, Mira dreamed she was crouched in the tall grass of a blistering-hot savanna, listening to the soft footsteps of Kenyan children armed with machine guns.

By morning’s light, she had already convinced herself of the worst. Not only had she been working for a rogue, double agent arms dealer, but she herself might have been involved by unknowingly translating coded messages to overseas warlords. How many of her seemingly normal trade agreements had actually been encrypted instructions for some underground agent? And what kind of clandestine activities did Senator Langhorne have planned for Mr. Voong Xuan, the intended recipient of her current translation?

After her latest bathroom break, Mira returned to her laptop and maximized the window of the document she was currently procrastinating over. It was a humdrum summary of U.S. soybean export statistics. No odd-looking symbols. No Vietnamese slang. No need for an emergency visit to a Vietnamese restaurant. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to translate another word of it. Maybe it was time for a "sick day."

It wasn't a lie, after all. She really
did
feel sick. And after one of the managers had finally nodded toward the exit as he walked by her cubicle, she got up and left like she'd just quit.

A
few hours later
, the face looking back at Mira in her rear-view mirror looked even worse. Apparently, it
was
possible for her eyes to sink deeper and darker. It was only a matter of time before they'd start pushing into her frontal lobes.

After leaving the office, she’d given in and called Lashay’s friend. What other option did she have, short of going to the cops and accusing a U.S. Senator with powerful connections of treason? Alone in her car, Mira had to refrain from rolling her eyes. It was this or nothing, she had no other plan. She was slightly early for her DARC Ops appointment and Mira considered brushing on some makeup for damage control. But hey, fuck it. She was a mess. And there wasn’t enough makeup in the world to cover it up. Even if there was, the fact still remained that her contact at DARC, a guy named Jackson, would inevitably be some asthmatic computer nerd who rarely saw the light of day. No need to add any flames to
that
fire. Chuck’s attentions were enough to deal with.

DARC's command center took up the top three floors of a downtown D.C. office tower. And so far, it looked the part completely. Perched along the length of the roof's cell tower was a massive array of communications antennas, then far below at street level was an array of domed security cameras. And in the lobby, a tuxedo-clad security guard who needed to see some ID. And another who had to call upstairs on his headset, who then had to ask, and confirm, and then ask for more ID before saying, “Thank you, Ms. Swanson. You may proceed to the elevators. Someone will be waiting for you on the eighteenth floor.”

Waiting for Mira on the eighteenth floor was the receptionist, a saccharine-voiced girl who looked no older than twenty-two, who abruptly showed her to their “statement room."

Why '"statement?" Were they expecting her to make some sort of official statement?

The statement room turned out to be a harshly fluorescent closet which slightly resembled a police interrogation cell. Its decor was minimal, a table surrounded by three well-worn chairs to facilitate her confession. She sat there, alone, wondering if she was about to be charged already for her part in Langhorne's conspiracy. She imagined two plainclothes federal agents slipping through the door and handcuffing her to the table. While they searched her pockets, someone would offer a Coke and a smoke and then it would begin. “There's more, Mira,” they'd say. “There's more. We know you're not telling us everything.”

Just as Mira was planning her confession, the statement room door creaked open. But the man smiling from the doorway looked too handsome to be a federal agent. He wore a sharply tailored black suit with the faintest of thin gray pinstripes. Unbuttoned over a close-fitting dress shirt, the ensemble offered tasty little hints of the muscular body that lay underneath.

Was this supposed to be her computer nerd?

“Hello, Mira. I'm Jackson.” He pressed one hand against his solid blue tie as the other shook her hand. To Mira's surprise, the computer nerd had the rough and calloused palm of a well-seasoned landscaper. “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon. But it's a nice surprise.”

She fumbled out some words like, “Yeah, me too,” as Jackson filled the other chair with his large frame, his long legs navigating past the table legs.

“I’m really curious about it,” he said. “Your story. It's incredible.”

“Yeah, I know.” Mira struggled to think of anything better to say. “Maybe it's
too
incredible?” There she went. Typical self-deprecation. Self-sabotage.

“Uh, well...” He laughed uncomfortably.

“Don't worry, it sounds crazy to me too.”

“But that's okay, though,” Jackson said. “If I ignored everything that initially sounded crazy, I would've missed out on a lot important discoveries.”

Mira smiled and nodded. “Yeah, totally.”

Totally? Last Mira checked, she’d graduated high school. What the hell was it about this man that made her lose her words? Usually she had plenty at her disposal, in multiple languages.

“But then again, there's been a lot of crazy stuff that I've had to skip over. Pure crazy. You know, like a guy in the subway just shouting things or what-have-you... Not that I'm saying that's you.”

She tried to smile.

“Matthias vetted you, and I trust Matthias.” He cleared his throat. “So, Mira, let's get started.”

Weren’t they getting started already? Mira straightened up against the chair-back, awaiting whatever he meant by "get started."

Jackson began with a quick flip of the name badge that hung around his neck, so that his gleaming white smile faced Mira. And then a question: “Can you tell me how much you already know about DARC Ops?”

“Not very much,” Mira said as she looked around the sparsely lit room. “Which, I'm sure is intentional?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I understand you deal with covert, black ops, uh... stuff. So I'm guessing you'd prefer to stay under the radar.”

He smiled. “To a certain extent, yes. But we also have to advertise somehow.”

“Well, Matthias used to date a good friend of mine. So there's your viral marketing.”

“That's right,” he chuckled. “Matthias can certainly be clingy like a virus.”

Mira couldn’t help but giggle a little bit. But why? It wasn’t even that funny. She quieted herself and then got back on topic: “But, yeah, I guess I'm here because you can handle tech
and
foreign policy.”

“Not just handle...”

“Exactly. You're the best, apparently.” She waited for his reaction, which turned out to be a casual little shrug. It seemed like an oft-used show of modesty, an instinctual reaction to his company receiving yet another superlative. But Mira could feel how certain he was. It was evident just by the way he sat in a chair. “And you wouldn’t be scared to take on people in high places,” she continued. “Maybe even people in government?”

“Hmm...” Jackson leaned back and crossed his legs. “That's where it gets complicated. If the person is just
in
the government, then it's not really a problem. But on the other hand, if they're acting on the government's behalf...”

She thought for a moment. “I can't see that being the case.”

“I can. And I have.”

Mira felt his eyes studying her face, reading her frown and worry lines like decrypted messages. She fought the urge to look away, to shift her body from his strong, discerning gaze.

“So Matthias tells me you're a translator for Senator Langhorne...”

She gave in to the urge, shifting uncomfortably in her seat at the mere mention of that name, the Senator who'd gone from boss to bogeyman overnight.

“And you came across this... document?” Jackson made a little apologetic frown. “I'm sorry. I should let you take it from here.”

Mira had been staring past his broad shoulders to the doorway, the room's only exit. It was closed. She took a deep breath, and then remained silent.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked in a softer, more comforting voice. “Water? A soda?”

Her gaze finally found its way to Jackson's lightly stubbled face. “Could we talk somewhere else? I don't want to be bugged.”

He laughed. “No one's bugging you. Unless you mean,
annoying
. In which case you might be right. Am I annoying you?”

“No, I mean bugging. Recording.”

“No one's recording you.” His face was relaxed and honest-looking. He was either telling the truth, or hiding his sociopathy. “Mira, this conversation is private. Trust me.”

Trust him? She'd already done enough of that in her life. Mira had enough experiences in her past to know the value of skepticism when dealing with good-looking men. No more free passes. Right?

“And if you don't trust
me
, then you can certainly trust U.S. code section 2511 of title eighteen.”

Her laughter started up before he could finish. “Really? DARC Ops is scared of a little wiretapping law?”

With a growing smile, Jackson leaned his head back so that he could talk to the ceiling. “That is correct, Mira,” he said loudly and clearly. “Our company has done and will do everything in its power to rigorously observe the constitutional rights of our past, current, and potential clients, as well as comply with all local and federal laws and statutes, including U.S. code section 2511 of title eighteen.” He lowered his gaze back to Mira. He seemed proud of himself.

“That's all well and good,” Mira said calmly. “But D.C. has a one-party consent law, which means that you can record even if I'm unaware of it.”

“I'll put it this way,” Jackson said, playing again with his name badge. “If we're recording you in here, then we're recording you in every other room in the building too. Does that make you feel better?”

“Sort of?”

“Do you still want to change rooms?”

Mira looked around the statement room again. “Well, what is this, the office bomb shelter? Slide in a Culligan water treatment system and some canned food and you're good to go.”

Jackson smirked politely.

“I mean, look at it.”

He kept his eyes on her. “I'm pretty familiar with how it looks. I actually come in here to do my crosswords. It's nice and quiet.” He paused a moment, shifting in his chair. “Also, we don’t usually take in people off the street like this. No offense. But when we do, we like to have our first meeting in here. I forgot why we ever called it the statement room. But it is what it is.”

“You like crosswords?”

Jackson nodded. He seemed reluctant to discuss his hobby, like it had been some office secret. Maybe that was why he needed a secret hideaway.

“Really?” Mira pressed on. He looked about ready to crack. “Crosswords?”

“I've got one cooking in my office right now,” Jackson finally said.

“The Sunday crossword or
New York Times
?”

“Sunday.” He was referring to the Washington Post's weekly puzzle, which was also Mira's favorite.

“Do you have thirty-six across?” she asked.

Jackson suddenly had a sheepish grin on his face.“I don't know... What is it?” For a micro-second he almost looked... vulnerable?

“I don't know it, either,” Mira said. “That's why I asked.”

“I meant the clue. What's the clue?”

“Enigma vanquisher. Six letters.”

“Turing,” he said promptly.