Enemy Agents (11 page)

14

If it could be possible for one trait to tell you everything you need to know about a person, then Chris Quarrel knew Mr. Smith the moment he heard his voice. It was somehow simultaneously flat and cruel, emotionless yet spiteful, and always impatient. His voice was deep but not hoarse—he was certainly not a smoker—but had an unsettling hateful quality that immediately told Quarrel that there was not going to be any small talk.

Quarrel and his latest suspect, the mononymous Smith, met in the back of a taxicab in front of a reasonably priced New York City hotel. Smith was already in the cab when it pulled up for Quarrel. Milton had told Quarrel on the phone that they would meet at nine a.m., and Smith showed up exactly on time—9:00:15 on Quarrel’s watch; not bad for the morning rush in Manhattan.

“Good morning,” said Smith, in that deep, cold voice. He turned his head only briefly to look Quarrel in the eyes as he spoke, then turned forward again to speak to the driver.

“The second destination now.”

The car pulled back into traffic, which was exceedingly slow. Quarrel was there under the guise that he was a new transfer to the CIB, and Smith had to act as his handler until someone else was named as a permanent handler. Quarrel decided it would be quite a challenge to get Smith talking and opted to try a barrage of questions to see if Smith would surprise him and have a conversation.

“Nice morning, isn’t it?”

Smith turned his head a bit and gave a single nod.

“I’ve been to New York before, but I always took the subway. I figured the traffic would be miserable.”

Smith said nothing. After an awkward pause, the driver chimed in. He was a grey-haired Indian man in his forties.

“Oh people always think that, but you know what? I get no complaints. So where are you from, mister?”

“I’m from an office in Toronto. They sent me down to meet with my American friend here to close a big deal this morning.”

Considering that both Quarrel and Smith were dressed in navy blue tailored suits, the businessman story seemed appropriate. Smith seemed to tense at Quarrel’s small talk, preferring to ride in total silence. Quarrel asked him a few times if he had been to this tourist trap or that landmark or if he had a favourite restaurant in the area—small talk that wouldn’t seem suspicious to the cabbie—but Smith just ignored him, occasionally nodding. After about ten minutes, Smith pulled out a few twenty-dollar notes and held them up to the window behind the driver.

“Here is good,” he said.

The driver took the money and Smith looked at Quarrel with eyes that said, “Get out.” He did just that, and Smith followed him out the same door, waving a hand to the driver to tell him to keep the change.

Quarrel was vaguely disappointed by having to get out of the cab. He had actually never been to this city before, and he had hoped they would continue north far enough to cross into the Bronx so he could see Yankee Stadium. Instead they were in Manhattan somewhere east of Central Park, but Quarrel didn’t know the city, so he hardly knew where they were.

As the yellow cab blended back into the background, the impeccably dressed men, each with a leather briefcase, strolled down the busy sidewalk. It was just a bit chilly, the sun still low enough that the canyon of buildings blocked out the warming light. Still, the sky above was clear and the weather reports said it would be the first truly warm day of the year. Quarrel was glad for the changing seasons; Smith just marched forward, oblivious to his surroundings.

They walked for a long enough time that Quarrel started to wonder why they hadn’t just stuck with the cab. Perhaps Smith was bothered by Quarrel making small talk with the cabbie. Or maybe he just didn’t want anyone else to know their destination. After walking fifteen minutes at a comfortable pace, Smith pivoted to a set of glass doors without so much as nodding to Quarrel to say they’d arrived.

It was a coffee shop. A busy little independent operation on the ground floor of a low-rise office building.Quarrel tried to think like a spy
—
where are the exits? Are any of these people dangerous
?
—but mostly he followed Smith, who went to an empty table against the far left wall and sat down.

“Shouldn’t we order something?”

Smith reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “I’ll have water in a sealed bottle.”

Quarrel joined the line, trying not to stare at Smith, the emotionless robot in the black suit, who was sitting by himself and watching the door. Smith had black hair in a crew cut, short enough that it stood up in little spikes without any hair product. He probably buzzed his own head on a regular basis, possibly daily. Quarrel couldn’t imagine Smith sitting down with a gabby hairdresser, but Smith standing in front of a bathroom mirror and methodically running a trimmer over his head? Yeah, Quarrel could picture Smith doing that.

Quarrel returned to the small table with two coffees in to-go cups and a bottle of water. “I figured I should buy one for whoever’s going to join us,” he said. Smith nodded, his gaze still on the door.

Smith drank half the water bottle in one long chug, then capped it and set it aside.

“So who are we meeting?” asked Quarrel.

“Intelligence asset.”

“Oh. How long have you been working him? Her? Them.”

“First meeting in person was one year ago. Sporadic communications since then. I don’t meet people in person very often.”

Quarrel nodded. He was surprised that Smith met wit
h
anyone
.
Still, gathering and pushing assets was a big part of the spy game, probably the biggest part in terms of pure information gathering. New York had a lot of embassies, corporate offices, and international visitors. This was a city where literally anyone could walk in the door. With Smith being so quiet, all Quarrel could do was sit quietly and stew on the possibilities.

Quarrel didn’t like Smith. Out of all the possible suspects on the list, Smith was the most likely in Quarrel’s mind. He had no personality and no history, and that was suspicious. In Quarrel’s few years of training for a life in the service, he had encountered a wide range of people, but between them all there were only a handful of reasons to get into the game. Some did it for patriotism, like Jack Hall. Others for thrills, or because their previous career in law enforcement or the military had prepared them for this line of work. But mostly, people became spies because it was a little exciting and because a government paycheck is always nice. None of those reasons seemed to fit Smith. Quarrel had studied the one-page file on Smith only once, which was enough to have it memorized. Codename: Smith. No real name given. No place of birth. No psych exams beyond the vague phrase “as expected”. Not even a physical. The guy was just a codename and a passport photo, in which Smith looked and dressed exactly as he was now. The man might very well have been some sort of robot, or clone, or alien in disguise, but this wasn’t a fantasy world of genetically engineered spies. It was the real world, where offices are blown up by fertilizer bombs and where even an enigma like Smith was still just a man with the right kind of training. Quarrel made up his mind to think of Smith’s stoic lack of personality as a facade, something he did to try and cover up his real motives. Smith could damn well be the man who blew up the Ottawa office, or murdered Matthew Crowe, and if acting like a Spartan asshole was his form of cover, Quarrel wasn’t going to buy it.

The idea of sipping a cuppa joe across from a man who might very well have blown up the CSIS-2 office in Ottawa made Quarrel’s stomach turn. He thought of Carol, dead at her desk after surviving decades of field work, and of poor Erica, who hadn’t even earned a clearance level before the job killed her. Even Hershey, smug bastard that he had been, was at his core a patriot and a hard worker, and his reward had been to die before he turned thirty. Quarrel didn’t even know if any of his coworkers’ bodies had been found in the remains of the building, but it had been two weeks since the bombing and they would have had funerals already. Quarrel was sure that if they did find bodies, they’d never find Hershey’s. Hershey had been standing out front, having a smoke when the bomb went off in the parking lot in front of him, only feet away. He would have been vaporized.

Quarrel hadn’t bothered to look up the memorial services. He had never planned on attending any of the funerals. He was too busy trying to catch the asshole that caused them. And the more Smith acted like an angry jerk, the more Quarrel hoped for a reason to vent some of his simmering rage in Smith’s direction.

Quarrel was spinning these dark thoughts through his mind when Smith stood up. The younger agent also stood, and turned, somewhat flustered, toward the doorway. The woman coming toward them was young, about twenty-five, and was dressed in casual business clothes with a messenger bag over one shoulder.

“Hello again,” she said, shaking Smith’s hand.

“Hello again and again,” said Smith. It must have been some kind of practiced greeting they had worked out to say the coast is clear, because Quarrel didn’t expect Smith would try to be cutesy.

“And you are?” she asked.

Quarrel looked toward Smith for some guidance on how to proceed but got nothing from Smith’s poker face.

“Chris. I’m a new transfer.” They shook hands.

“Maggie Reville.”

They sat back down, Smith on one side of the table, Chris and Maggie on the other. For a moment, they didn’t speak.

“Don’t get offended or anything,” she said to Quarrel, “but can I see some ID?”

Quarrel nodded and fished into his inside pocket. He had been given a couple of government-issue IDs, since the existence of CIB was still a secret. He pulled out a CIA badge and passed it to Maggie. She studied it carefully for about five seconds before handing it back.

“OK. Just being careful.” She was shy, uncomfortable. Her shoulders slumped and her voice was very quiet. She sheepishly looked to Smith. “Careful like you taught me.”

Smith actually smiled for her, even if it was blatantly fake, more of a condescending pat on the head than a sign of real emotion. “So let’s get down to it: why did you want to get together?”

Maggie was visibly uncomfortable, but Quarrel didn’t know his role here. He wanted to put his hand on her shoulder and tell her to relax, instead he leaned on the wall and said nothing. She pulled the messenger bag into her lap and opened it, to pull out a thin manila folder.

“I used that program you sent me to get into the secure servers. I did it from a floor I almost never go to so it would be harder to trace. I found these.”

She opened the folder to show several pages of blueprints, obviously printed by an office laser printer. They were almost too small to make out. “I have them on the thumb drive, too.”

“What are we looking at?” asked Quarrel.

“The files only had numbers for names, but I looked at the electrical info and this thing needs more juice than most small towns. It’s some kind of a high-energy science-y thing. But I thought it was weird enough to make a note of.”

“You could have sent this without meeting in person,” said Smith.

“I know—” Maggie was obviously very torn about all of this. After all, she was spying on someone—probably a corporation she worked for—and all so she could report to this emotionless jerk. Quarrel leaned in and put a hand on her knee.

“It’s alright. Drink your coffee. If you wanted to talk in person, we’re here for you. Your comfort is our job.”

She took a sip and rolled her shoulders. Quarrel took his hand off her leg, thinking it might be inappropriate to leave it there.

“There are two other things. First . . . ” she pointed to the corner of one page. “ . . . these aren’t Globection designs. They’re scans of something that has a stamp on it . . . ”

The name Globection jumped out immediately. Guess that’s where she works. Guess that’s who she spies on.

Quarrel read the image. “CIA? Globection has access to CIA schematics?”

“Exactly,” she said. “We don’t have any CIA contracts. This shouldn’t exist on our servers. Someone’s using Globection to host stolen information.”

“You find any more like these?”

“No schematics like that, but,” she was talking to Chris now, Smith just observing, “I did find something else that jumped out at me.”

She pulled the last page from the file. It was a list. At the top wa
s
‘lastname_firstname:password
’
under this was a list of over twenty names and passwords, organized alphabetically.

“I looked up the names. They don’t work for GX. So I started googling them. Recognize anyone?”

Quarrel scanned the list but came up blank. He kept his own poker face this time, trying to look like he belongs on this case, then passed the list to Smith, hoping he’d see something Quarrel missed.

Smith gave his usual barely-perceptible nod. “Helen Prince, Daniel Chang . . . these people work for the CIA.”