Enemy Agents (9 page)

11

“So what did you get from Shark?” asked Milton. Chris Quarrel was driving a rental car into Connecticut. Milton’s voice emanated, tinny and distant, from the car’s speakers. Quarrel spoke loudly to make sure Milton could hear him through the shoddy hands-free system.

“He’s reckless, unreliable, and he steals drug money.”

“Yeah, but that was in his file. What’s your gut tell you?”

“Honestly,” said Quarrel, trying to listen to instincts that had never been tested in the field, “I still can’t figure it out. Shark could be bitter and loyal, or he could be bitter and dangerous. No way to tell just yet. Honestly, I don’t know if I have the instincts for this. I’ve trained to interrogate a suspect, but in a proper interrogation room, and I wasn’t training against top-level agents. It was role-playing with other trainees.”

There was a sound that might have been static from the speaker, or Milton grumbling on the other end of the line. “Kid, in this game you need two things: evidence and guts. If you only have a hunch you’ll never prove it, and if you only have evidence you’re walking into a trap. No elite agent is going to leave you a trail of breadcrumbs unless they’re trying to play you. And if you only go on your gut you’ll miss some key detail and blow an entire operation. The evidence is strongest against Shark, so now I need your gut. Give me an answer.”

“Right now, I can’t do that. Shark could be anything and I wouldn’t be able to tell.”

Milton grunted. “Disappointing, kid. Maybe you’ll have better luck with Boswell.” The line went quiet, and the little speaker spat static until Quarrel changed radio stations.

Samantha Boswell was a legend. For ten years, she had been the CIA’s best (or, Chris Quarrel knew now, the CIB’s best) operative. She could get into any location, kill any target, and escape unseen. For ten years, “Cipher” was a rumour, and her actual existence doubted by top members of the CIA, MI-6, and even her enemies weren’t sure she was real. Her targets died, and somehow, eventually, those kills were all attributed to “Cipher.”

There had been conjecture that “Cipher” was a team of assassins, not just one person. At one point, a Chinese official wrote a report guessing that a famous American spy who had been dead since 1985 was actually alive, and training as many as a dozen agents who were, collectively, Cipher. Her first mistake, in her eighth year of service, was to let a guard live. She hadn’t seen him, because the guard had been cowering in a closet instead of protecting his asset. After that, word got out that Cipher was just one woman.

It was in her eleventh year of service that Cipher made her second mistake, and finally revealed herself to the small, secretive world of spies. This mistake involved bringing the wrong equipment. She had scanned for signals coming out of a target’s home, but hadn’t detected the tiny camera hidden inside a book on the shelf. That camera had filmed her shooting the target as he lay sleeping.

The woman on the video was the same one the guard had described. Suddenly, Cipher had a face. After that happened, Harry Milton had been forced to reveal that, yes, Cipher worked for him, and she was in fact a single person. Word of her exploits spread through the world of Western intelligence, and even though only a handful of people had ever seen her picture, and even fewer had met her, Samantha Boswell became a legend.

She was seen by many as the American equivalent of William Thorpe, the invincible British agent who had been so great during the Cold War. If you believed everything you heard, Thorpe might have single-handedly saved the free world on a daily basis from 1970 through to 1990. And now, according to the whisperers, Samantha Boswell had done much the same in the new millennium.

Quarrel knew it was mostly exaggerated, but after he had taken a good look at her file in Harry Milton’s office, he realized that the scant details he had heard were nothing compared to the real files. Boswell had over 200 assassinations to her name, and never once botched a job. In fact, the rumour that she had never once fired a shot that missed its target seemed to be confirmed by the case reports.

Two hundred missions, thousands of rounds fired, and every single bullet struck where it was supposed to—whether that target was the tire on a moving car, or a person shot while jumping off a roof. That was the legend of Sam Boswell, and now Chris Quarrel, whose own legend began and ended at paintball, was on his way to investigate her. And then he’d have to decide whether or not to accuse the planet’s deadliest woman of treason.

But first, a bake sale.

#

Chris walked into a fairly new elementary school in a subdivision outside Hartford, Connecticut. The doors were open, and he passed straight through the small lobby into the gymnasium, which was full of a mix of adults and kids as the school held its Spring Bake Sale to pay for the end-of-year field trip for the graduating class.

There were thirty-something moms everywhere, but Quarrel had seen a photo of Boswell, and hoped to spot her easily. He was wrong about that, since she flanked him before he could spot her. He was pretending to study some butter tarts on a red tray when someone tapped on his shoulder.

“Hi, Chris, glad you could make it.”

He turned around and there she was. The hard-edged woman from the photo, the one who looked like she wanted to kill the camera for looking at her, was not the person he saw now. This woman was tanned, dressed in relaxed jeans and a pale green cardigan. She smiled, and it seemed genuine.

“Mrs. Boswell, how nice to see you again.”

She hugged him lightly, and stepped back.

“How was the drive?”

“Lovely. How are you?”

She smiled again. “Busy, busy. You know how it is with kids. Always something.” She led him through the crowd, to a corner of the gym where the tables were selling old toys and homemade art. They were less popular than the baked goods, so there was room to talk without anyone overhearing.

She continued. “You know, you think you’ve got your day all planned and then some kid comes along and messes everything up.”

“Sorry about that,” he said, his own smile a little sheepish.

“How’s Harry?”

“He needs to hire someone to dust his office.”

She laughed. It was fake, as was the entire conversation, but she played the part well. Another mom, behind a table of snowman sculptures that were surely leftovers from a Christmas bake sale four months ago, smiled at them and waved to Boswell.

“Old Harry never did know when to leave the office. Hi Bonnie!” She made no move to introduce her young friend, instead motioned Quarrel toward a set of metal doors that were on the gym’s back wall, which were still closed. She pushed on one and Quarrel found that they were outside, behind the gym, and alone. The metal door squeaked as it swung shut.

Once it clicked into place, Boswell elbowed Chris in the solar plexus so hard he lost all the air in his lungs and collapsed to his knees. The fringes of his vision flashed black and the ground in front of him was dotted with white stars. Once when Chris was ten, he had fallen off a jungle gym and landed flat on his back. Nothing since then had knocked the wind out of him quite so hard, until he met Sam Boswell.

“Oh boy, Chris,” she said, still playing the neighbourly mom, as she pulled him to his feet. He was still doubled over, hands on his knees, trying to make his lungs work, when she whispered in his ear.

“I know you’re just following orders. I know you don’t know any better. But if you ever bring business within ten miles of my kids again I’ll shoot you in the face.”

Unable to speak, Quarrel nodded.

“So what the hell does Milton want with me? He knows my deal. I go on the road six times a year. I don’t do interviews with junior Canadians.”

Wheezing, Quarrel managed to spit out “How did—”

“You have an accent. You might not hear it, but I do.”

“I hafff . . . have to. Ask you—”

“Catch your breath, sport. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The pain had spread through his torso, making his body feel like a massive bruise, but he didn’t argue with her. “Have you ever heard of Digamma? Or the letter six?”

“Is digamma the triangle? No, that’s delta. I was never a sorority girl.”

“It’s like an F but with a thingy on the bottom horizontal line.” He drew one in the sand with his finger:

ϝ

She shook her head. “Try a cryptologist. Can I get back to my cupcakes?”

“One more thing. When did you cut down from full time to six trips a year?”

“Few years back. After I had my girls.”

“That’s an eighth grade fundraiser. You had kids for years before you retired. So why?”

“The fact that you know my name is answer enough. I love my country, but not enough to bring its shit down on my kids. Once they got me on video, that was it for me. Can I go, or is Harry gonna send you back to bother me again?”

“One more question.”

“The last one was one more.” Now he saw the hateful woman from the photograph. In the school she was a helpful mom. Back here out of sight, she was like a cornered snake. Quarrel imagined that this was who she was when she was “on the road.”

“Can you think of a single reason for terrorists to blow up an office building in Ottawa?”

Her eyes narrowed a bit, studying him. For the first time, he saw wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “I would assume it wasn’t just an office building, otherwise Harry wouldn’t give a damn. But before that bomb went off, no. Honestly, I’m surprised your country still pretends to have spies. It’s adorable.”

Her condescension was insulting, but to Quarrel’s not-very-proven bullshit detector, it seemed truthful enough. Boswell had no idea that CSIS-2 existed.

“I’m done,” she said, pointing along the brick wall of the gymnasium. “You can walk around that way to get back out front. Don’t come through the gym.” She opened the door, and the sounds of the bake sale poured out; voices blending into a din, kids laughing and screaming. “It was so nice to see you again, Chris. Shame you can’t visit again.” She pulled the door shut behind herself, leaving him alone, out of breath, and even less sure of his investigative skills.

Driving back toward the District of Columbia, Quarrel called Milton again. “She damn near broke my ribs, but she seemed clueless about the big stuff.”

“Just how much did you tell her?” Milton asked, his voice agitated.

“Enough that if she’s your mole, she’ll probably try to kill me.”

“Well,” Milton said, sounding pleased, “I guess that’s progress. You might want to come in and sign out a gun.”

12

Chris Quarrel and Harry Milton were in the underground bunker that was the CIB. This time, they were on the floor beneath Milton’s office in an expansive concrete room where the walls were covered by two things: hooks for lab coats and racks of guns. Scattered throughout the lab were ten of CIB’s scientists, working on assorted projects and experiments. The first counter they passed was flanked by two young men setting up a chemistry experiment. One of them was checking the temperature in a beaker that sat over a Bunsen burner flame, while the second was attaching a Kevlar vest to a gel torso. Once the vest was attached, they nodded to each other. The first chemist poured the blue liquid from the hot beaker into a larger beaker that was already half-full of clear liquid. The blue colour faded until it disappeared, and the resulting compound looked like water. Then the chemist picked up the beaker and threw the liquid at the vest, splashing it everywhere. Within a second, the Kevlar started melting into a thick, black slime. Milton made a questioning grunt to get their attention.

The second chemist looked at Milton. “We’re looking for a way to remove body armour without killing the man underneath. If you can take away his sense of safety, he’s more likely to surrender. It could prevent situations from escalating.”

Milton nodded politely, said nothing to the eager young scientist, and kept walking. A few steps later, he leaned conspiratorially toward Quarrel. “Very bright minds here, but they don’t realize that the people we employ would always make the headshot anyway.”

At the next station, a woman stood facing a narrow hallway that extended out sideways from the main room. She shouted, “Fire in the hole!”

Quarrel realized it wasn’t a hallway at all, but a long rifle range. The woman facing down the range was not holding a gun, but an umbrella. After shrugging her shoulders to loosen up, she held the umbrella straight out horizontally, holding it with both hands. With a click of her thumb on the handle, a two-inch long rocket-propelled grenade fired from the tip and down the range, exploding with a huge noise but very little vibration.

“There’s an accelerometer inside of it. It only fires if you hold it steady and within three degrees of horizontal for three seconds first,” the woman said, turning and removing her earplugs. “That way you don’t accidentally blow up when you twirl it.”

Milton offered the woman a handshake. “Chris Quarrel, this is Meg. Meg’s our fabrication specialist. Anything we can’t buy, she builds.”

Quarrel shook her hand as well. “What do you take in school to get that job?”

“Electrical engineering. But we’ve got everyone from nuclear physicists to auto mechanics. If you can build gadgets and gizmos, you can work here.” Meg was surprisingly young, probably close to thirty but looked like a college student. She had short, spiky brown hair and a round, slightly pudgy face. She was skinny despite the baby fat on her face, so she was practically swimming in her big white lab coat.

Milton guided them toward the middlemost counter, which was covered in a variety of guns and knives. “Agent Quarrel has decided he needs a weapon. A good sidearm he can keep for a while, nothing
‘
specia
l
’.”

“Gig!” Shouted Meg. A lanky young man in a Ninja Turtles t-shirt emerged from an open door behind the counter.

“What ya want?” He said before he saw Milton. “Oh, hi, sir.”

“New guy wants a gun,” explained Meg.

“OK. I’m Gig. I’m the procurement specialist. I buy the stuff Meg can’t build.” She gave him an angry look.

“I can build anything, it’s just faster to buy certain things.”

Gig shrugged. “Mostly I’m the gun guy. You want a gun, I’m the guy.”

Quarrel was amused by the pair of excitable young nerds in the heart of the secret underground bunker. He shook Gig’s hand. “Gig and Meg?”

“Codenames, obviously. The network guy’s called Kilo.”

“I see.”

Milton wasn’t as amused. “Just a sidearm. Nothing special.”

“Anyway,” Gig said, “we have a lot of
nothing special
in stock, and even more
standard issue
. It’s the special orders that keep me up at night.” Gig gestured to the table of guns like a spokesmodel on the ‘Price is Right.’ “Take your pick and we’ll sign it out.”

Quarrel studied the guns. He had used about a dozen of these before but had never really thought about his own preference. And he was very intrigued by the variety of weapons he’d never even tried before.

Suddenly, the elevator at the end of the room dinged open, and a short blonde man with thick legs and large biceps sprinted out of it. Quarrel knew him; he was Jack Hall from the training program. Hall didn’t break stride until he reached Gig, but by then he was already barking out orders.

“Gig! M-two-forty-nine with a grenade launcher. H-E rounds and flashbangs!”

Gig disappeared back into the door beside the counter as the big man turned to Milton. “Harry, we have a big problem. A guarded CIA convoy just got hit about a half-hour outside of Langley.”

“What the hell were they moving?”

“Control computers for American nuclear weapons.”

“Control computers?”

“They tracked the missile’s location and only armed the bomb when it was near the target so that you didn’t have any nuclear accidents if the missile was shot down before it got to the target. There was a team dismantling old nukes at a site on the northeast coast. The actual bombs and fissionable materials are already secured and harmless. These computers were the last components to be dealt with. And there were six of them on the truck. Supposed to just go to a recycling plant and get ground into bits.”

“What use is an old computer without the bomb it’s attached to?”

“Don’t know. I guess in theory if you happened to have a thirty-year-old nuke lying around, this thing could set it off but you’d think anyone with decent electrical skills could just hack it.”

“So why steal them?”

“No idea. These things have a short-range tracker but they predate modern GPS. If they get away, we lose ‘em for good.”

“Jesus Christ. Take a chopper. You bring the computers back or destroy them, but don’t let the hijackers keep the damned things!”

“That’s why I need a nice big bang.”

As if on cue, Gig emerged from the door with a machine gun and a black messenger bag. The blonde man took the bag first, and then the gun.

“I just attached that grenade launcher—I’m hoping it fires straight.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

The big man sprinted for the elevator. Staring at the table of weapons, Quarrel asked Gig a question: “These things loaded?”

“Yeah, why?”

Quarrel grabbed a handgun and a light machine gun and ran after Hall. “I’m going with him!”

The big man turned back, looking past Quarrel to Milton. “Who the hell is this guy?”

“Foreign exchange student. He’s field trained.”

Stepping into the elevator beside the big, intense American, Quarrel offered a handshake. “Chris Quarrel. You trained me.”

The doors closed. “I remember now.” He ignored Chris’s hand. “You failed.”

#

After twenty minutes, they were flying low over a highway in central Virginia. It was still just mid-morning, and the traffic was light. Jack sat next to the pilot, navigating from a small tablet computer that was tracking the signal from the control computers. Quarrel was in the back, trying not to look terrified.

Between talks with the pilot, Jack would speak to Chris through the headsets they wore to communicate over the drone of the engines. He had filled
Chris
in with the pertinent details. There had been a five-vehicle convoy. The front and back vehicles were armoured SUVs, and the three middle vehicles had been armoured trucks. The computers were in the last truck, a detail the thieves must have known in advance. As the convoy went through an intersection, a semi-trailer truck rammed the target truck at fifty miles an hour, rolling it over. A team of at least twelve men then emerged from the surrounding area with machine guns and hand grenades, to hold off the rest of the convoy. A team then cut into the rear of the armoured truck, killed the men inside, and took the computers. Then all of the attackers got into five high-end sports cars and took off at well over a hundred miles an hour. They made it far enough that all authorities on the ground had lost them—meaning they could have switched vehicles and might be driving anything.

Hall seemed to be unfazed by that. “As long as we have the tracking beacons within ten miles they can ride a goddamn rocket ship and I’ll still find them.”

Now they were within a mile of all six computers, which were still together in one moving vehicle. There were three vehicles in a pack ahead of the helicopter. “Bring me over top of that cube van,” said Hall to the pilot.

They pulled over top of the van, and Hall nodded. “That’s the one. They’re right under us. Pull away a bit so I can see them.”

Quarrel looked out the window to see the van, which was bunched closely between two other vehicles in the slow lane. In front was a luxury convertible with the top up, and behind was a minivan. “Are the other cars with ‘em or civilian?”

“I don’t know. Either way we want to isolate the van.”

Suddenly, Jack threw open his door and leaned out of the moving helicopter. “Lower!” He raised the M249 and slid the safety off. Then he unleashed a barrage of bullets at the van, hitting the street first and then punching the driver’s door with several shots. After the burst, he waited. The minivan behind the van slammed on its brakes, while the convertible and the van both sped up.

“Closer!”

Realizing that he could help, Quarrel climbed over next to Hall, trusting his restraint straps to hold him inside the chopper. He raised his own weapon and lined up the sights. Before he could fire, Chris realized that the convertible’s top was opening. He readjusted to aim for the roof of the car. As soon as he saw a person, he fired. He missed. The man in the back of the car was holding something. There was a bright flash, and then a contrail of smoke shot past the chopper’s tail rotor.

“Rockets!” shouted Hall to the pilot, who sped up to pull them ahead of the terrorist vehicles.

Hall loaded a flashbang grenade into the under-mounted launcher on his gun. He took aim again, this time at the car, and fired. The round hit the hood of the car and exploded in a bright flash. The driver stomped on the gas and launched the car well ahead of the cube van. A second later, Chris realized the driver was blind when the convertible kept going straight where the road curved, and it slammed into the guardrail. The rocket-man standing in the backseat was thrown fully across the two lanes on the other side of the guardrail, while the driver was smashed into his steering wheel so hard that even if he survived, he wouldn’t be a threat. A second after that, the cube van passed the wreck without slowing.

“Aim for the tires?” asked Chris.

“Save your ammo. I got it.”

Hall reloaded the launcher, this time with a high explosive round. He took his time aiming as the chopper swung around to keep up with the bending road. They pulled up alongside the van, about fifty feet from the ground. “Hold that speed!” shouted Hall. Instants later, he fired.

The grenade hit the road a few feet in front of the speeding van. The van was almost on top of it as it exploded, and the force was enough to throw the front end of the van into the air so it was only driving on the rear wheels for a second. When it slammed back onto the ground, both front tires exploded and the van started to slow, gradually rolling to a stop. Either the engine was dead, or the driver was.

“Bring us down in front!” shouted Hall when he saw that the van was stopping.

A hundred feet in front of the stopped van, the helicopter lowered to the ground. Hall was diving out about eight feet from the ground, while Chris waited for touchdown before he ran out into the road, ducking his head out of
f
ear of the rotors.

Hall waved his hands in signals that Quarrel knew meant “Take the right, and take cover.” Quarrel jumped the guardrail to the other side of the road. It wasn’t busy, but he still felt uneasy about standing in the fast lane with his back to the traffic; however, the guardrail was the only cover available to advance on the van. Meanwhile, Hall was charging down the paved shoulder, his weapon ready in case anyone in the van moved.

They got within thirty feet before the van’s windshield exploded with handgun fire. Hall dove to his left, seeking shelter in a ditch. The bullets missed him by inches. Quarrel had never fired on a person before, but if he didn’t provide some cover, Jack Hall would be killed. As the terrorist fired on Hall, Chris took aim from a kneeling position behind the guardrail and fired at the shooter. His shots rattled the driver’s side door, where the window exploded. The terrorist stopped firing, and Quarrel indulged the thought—the fear?—that he’d killed the man, until he heard the bullets ricocheting off the guardrail. The driver was alive, and firing a machine gun back at Chris. Quarrel turtled behind the steel ribbons of the guardrail as bullets honed in on his position.