Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (154 page)

CHAPTER NINE

Ian lay curled up on his side in a corner of the cell, arms wrapped around his chest, rocking and moaning. Vomit stained his shirt and something that looked like mud and vomit clumped in his hair. The floor was bare cement, with a hole the size of a man’s fist for waste, a bucket and a spigot in the corner for cleaning up, and a worn mattress in another. Smelled like urine.

It was a shocking change from the last time Julia had seen him. They’d taken over a marine training center twenty miles from Langley, where Kendall and Ian had sprinted through the obstacle course with mud pits, rope climbs and fake explosions sounding all around them while simultaneously activating and deactivating commands in the implant.

The entire training followed a grueling regimen, but they rarely showed their exhaustion. She wasn’t sure if they were trying to outdo each other, impress her, or simply were as driven as they appeared. Either way, they never complained, and were unfailingly polite and obedient. Ian and Kendall had come to her mobile lab after finishing the last of their training runs, splattered in mud. She took one look at their mischievous grins, took a step back and pointed to her white lab coat with a shake of the head. “Don’t even think about it guys.”

“Of course not,” Kendall said. “We wouldn’t dream of getting you dirty, not around so much sensitive equipment. So, is that it? Only a half day today?”

She looked at the schedule. “Looks like it. Well, I guess that’s all, you guys are ready. You’ll go off and do your thing and I’ll return to the lab. Can’t say I don’t prefer working with real people to hanging out with apes and monkeys all day.”

“Oh, you’ll still be with us,” Ian said. He tapped his forehead. “But remember, it’s not nice to peep on guys when they’re in the loo.”

“Come on, you know it doesn’t do that.”

“That’s what you keep telling me. But I’m sure you’ve put in a few upgrades, for your own viewing pleasure, you know.”

“What he means,” Kendall said, “but he’s too shy and tender-hearted to say it, is that we’ll miss you.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” Ian said. “You’ve been great.”

“That’s so sweet, guys.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, brother?” Ian grinned at Kendall.

Kendall nodded, “Let’s give her a big goodbye hug.”

She held up her hands. “No, don’t!”

But the two men wrapped their muddy arms around her and lifted her into the air, laughing. Then she felt something completely unexpected. As she was held by two pairs of strong arms, a zing ripped through her. The sense of male attention, otherwise so lacking in her life, made her feel elated, alive. When they put her down, she made a point of wiping off the mud with as much fuss as she could muster.

Seeing Ian curled in the jail cell provided a terrible contrast to her last memory of the man. There were half a dozen other cells, but they were empty. Chang had a hand-held device that looked like a PDA, which he waved around the room for a minute before nodding at Markov. “No bugs, we’re clean.”

“I hate to see our man stuck in a place like this, but I suppose it’s an improvement over certain Ethiopian prisons I have seen,” Markov said. “Hopefully we’ll get him out soon.”

“Come on, look at him,” Chang said. “This screwup wouldn’t know the difference if you put him up in the Ritz Carlton.”

Julia felt an angry retort rise to her lips, but Markov beat her to it. “This
screwup
put his life on the line for his country. What have you done? Now let’s quit messing around and get what we came for.”

________

Chang spent about twenty minutes fiddling with his probe and laptop before he gave up. “We may as well forget it. This thing can’t make a connection, so there’s no way to get the data.”

“There’s got to be some way to download,” Markov said.

Julia rolled her eyes at Chang. “It might help if Ian turned on record mode first. Did you stop to think maybe he disabled it?”

Chang and Markov exchanged glances. Markov turned to Julia and said, “There’s an emergency override so we can retrieve data in case of an operative who is incapacitated.”

“What? Are you saying it’s always on? Since when? That means the implant could be picked up by something as primitive as an EEG.”

Markov shifted his weight. “Out of my hands. This was a tactical decision made at the highest levels of this project. Protection against conventional electronic countermeasures was thought to be sufficient…”

“I thought
I
was at the highest levels of this project.”

“Medically, yes, but tactically—”

“Don’t give me that tactically crap,” she cut in. “You made a tactical decision that compromised my patient due to your ignorance of the medical facts. If you’d bothered to consult with the expert—that would be me—this wouldn’t have happened.”

Markov looked surprised and then he gave a nod that looked like grudging respect. So, you can’t make a connection. Is there any way to get the data?”

“Of course,” Chang said, “but we’ll have to remove the CPU first. That’s one of the reasons Julia is here.”

“They’re not made to be removed,” Julia said. “Didn’t you read the white paper? We take the CPU out of his chest and that leaves exposed, ungrounded leads going right into his brain. Do that and he’ll be liable to have a grand mal seizure any time he walks by a power line or someone turns on a microwave.”

“What about taking out the whole implant?”

Julia shook her head. “I said they’re not made to be removed. I put in 6 cortical arrays. Each one, when unfolded, covers 30 square centimeters of surface area, with thousands of tiny spikes embedded into the brain. What am I going to do? Tug them out one by one? You’d have microhemorrhages all over the brain, and the swelling would kill him within a few hours. Do I take off his whole skull? This implant is like a ship in a bottle. You put it in carefully, and it doesn’t
ever
come out.” She held out a hand to Markov. “You have the key?”

He handed over the key and Julia used it to open the cell. She made her way to Ian’s side. He smelled worse than he looked. She lowered his hands and pulled down the neckline of his shirt. His hands stayed where she put them; by all appearances he was catatonic. “Come and look at this,” she said.

She pointed to his neck and chest and motioned Chang over. “His entire neck and chest has taken shrapnel. This one here is right over the CPU. Maybe it got damaged in an impact? In a controlled environment, I could probably replace the CPU with another unit safely. Then we could download the data directly from the old unit. At least that’s my best guess.” She turned and walked back to Markov, out of earshot of Ian, Chang following. “He looks awful. I can’t believe that…”

Without warning, Ian sprang to his feet with a cry and whipped his head from side to side, his expression wild. Markov hastily pulled the cell door shut behind them. “Ian,” Julia said from the safety of the other side of the bars. “Can you hear me?”

He came to the edge of the cell in a swift motion, reached through and grabbed for Julia’s jacket. “It’s not over,” he said. His eyes bugged, his voice sounded strained, desperate. “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to finish what I started.”

Julia stayed out of reach, but leaned in to look at his eyes. They looked dilated. His face was pale and blood trickled from one nostril. His hands were shaking.

“Ian, what’s going on?” she asked. “What do you mean, finish? What happened?”

“Don’t question him,” Markov snapped.

But Ian didn’t answer anyway. Instead, he collapsed to the ground, curled back into a fetal position and moaned.

“Jesus,” Chang said. “This guy is messed up.”

The door opened behind them and a tall, thin black man with a suit came striding in. He looked over the three of them with an openly hostile expression. “I was half expecting tanks and airplanes. Isn’t that the way you guys usually operate when you want to violate someone’s sovereignty?”

“You must be Charles Ikanbo,” Markov said in a calm voice. He held out a hand, which the man refused to take.

“That’s right, Namibian Central Intelligence Service Director. Who the hell are you?” Ikanbo held a lit cigar in one hand. He slowly brought it to his mouth and puffed smoke in Markov’s face.

“Anton Markov, U.S. State Department.” He had told Julia to tell people she was a diplomat and had apparently taken his own advice. Under no circumstances was ‘CIA’ to come out of her mouth. That had a way of freaking people out.

“So you’ve seen the prisoner, now what?”

“We’re here to secure his release,” Markov said.

“You must be kidding.”

“We know there have been certain inconveniences, for which we are prepared to offer compensation and as much in the way of explanation as possible. Anything, in fact, up to but not including an official diplomatic recognition or apology of the incident.”

“What a surprise.” Ikanbo took a drag on his cigar. “American diplomats unwilling to take responsibility for their actions.”

“Officially, no. Unofficially, let me express my deepest regrets. Other State Department officials will pass along their own unofficial regrets to your president.”

“Let me explain something to you, sir,” Ikanbo said. He towered over the shorter Markov, but seemed neither intimidating to nor intimidated by the CIA officer, which Julia found impressive. “This foreign spy killed several dozen employees of an international corporation operating on Namibian soil under government sanction. And reliable witnesses claim that he had an associate—missing, I might add—plus some sort of aerial confederates. Rockets, helicopter, airplane—there is conflicting testimony. In short, you’ve violated Namibian sovereignty and created an international incident.” He replaced the cigar in his mouth.

“The incident is indeed regrettable,” Markov said, “although I do not believe that there were others involved. You shouldn’t trust hearsay.”

“What’s more,” Ikanbo continued, ignoring Markov’s hollow protests, “when I arrived on the site, your agent was holed up beneath the wreckage of a tank. He killed two of my men and critically wounded a third before we took him prisoner.”

“I can’t believe he’d do that,” Julia said. “If you knew him like I do—”

“What my assistant means,” Markov cut in, giving Julia a hard look, “is that this man has suffered a complete mental breakdown. Nobody can say for sure what he did or did not do, or what did or did not happen in the desert, including alleged damage and casualties…”

“Don’t patronize me,” Ikanbo snapped. “I have pictures, eyewitnesses, dead bodies, for God’s sake. There is no
alleged
damage.”

“Accepting your premise that damage did occur, it is only the actions of one man, acting alone, without U.S. sanction, knowledge, or complicity of any kind.”

“Impossible.”

“Nevertheless,” Markov said, “that is our official position.”

Ikanbo’s eyes narrowed. “What’s more, he was perfectly lucid when we captured him. It’s only been in the last twenty-four hours that he has turned into a raving lunatic. Either it’s a clever act or more spies have infiltrated this facility and fed him something to keep him quiet.”

“Oh, please.
That
is paranoia.” Markov sounded legitimately disgusted. “We would never do that. And look at him. He’s clearly insane. How else would you explain his unprovoked attack—
alleged
attack, I mean—on legitimate security forces of the Namibian government? No, you don’t need to answer that. It doesn’t matter, because we promise to get to the bottom of this, just as soon as we’ve had a chance to remove the prisoner to a secure location and interrogate him.”

“What? Not so long as I am Central Intelligence Service Director. This man will never leave our custody. Never.”

“A transfer of responsibilities can be arranged,” said a woman’s voice from the doorway.

Julia looked up in surprise to see Sarah Redd, the American Director of National Intelligence. She strode into the room wearing a smart pantsuit and heels that clacked on the concrete floor. Her makeup was fresh, her appearance rested, confident. A tall, slender Namibian man followed behind her right shoulder.

Sarah Redd managed thousands of employees and a budget in the tens of billions of dollars. Technically, she was the advisor to the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council, but in reality, she answered to nobody except for the president. It was during the shakeup after 9/11 that U.S. intelligence had been reorganized to provide a single officer responsible for all of the separate organizations involved in intelligence gathering and analysis. She had come to the position via military intelligence, rather than the CIA, where her career had followed a rocket path to brigadier general by the age of forty-two.

Markov looked as dumbfounded to see Sarah as Julia felt. Chang merely watched with his typical slacker gaze, either unsurprised or skillfully cultivating an air of disinterest. The Namibian who had followed her into the room gave Ikanbo a glum shake of the head. “I’m afraid we must release the prisoner.”

Ikanbo sputtered. “Do you know what happened out there? Do you have any idea?”