The Backup Asset (24 page)

“I didn’t know that was even possible,” Alex said. “Again, it matches what I observed in the past few days. Quentin is withdrawn, keeps to himself, he barely said a word. When he does speak, he averts his eyes and wants the interaction to be over soon. And you know what else I’m thinking?”

“What?” Jeremy asked, while Mason looked at her with curiosity.

“I think it must be awful for a man like Quentin to put up with a Bob McLeod in a position of power, especially thinking how Quentin dealt with his bullies in school. I’m thinking our Mr. Quentin Hadden is a time bomb, waiting to explode.”

“I agree,” Mason said. “After we finish this investigation I will make sure Human Resources becomes aware of what’s going on.”

“The last one is Vernon Blackburn,” Jeremy said. “Another PhD, married, no kids, and quite the playboy.”

Alex chuckled.

“What’s the matter?” Jeremy asked.

“That’s an understatement,” she replied. “The man is constantly hunting, flirting, scouting, spreading his pheromones. I feel sorry for his wife.”

“Our people found out their marriage is in trouble. His wife walked out on him recently, and he’s been trying to get her back.”

“That’s not exactly what he was doing last Friday on the ship,” Alex replied caustically, “and he wasn’t working much, either.”

“He also likes a drink or two after work. He drives a Jeep Grand Cherokee. No recent foreign travel. Did you notice anything else noteworthy?”

“No,” Alex replied. “Just philandering and jumpiness. He did seem very jumpy, but quick to recover and start flirting with just about any female who could fog a mirror.”

“I have feedback from two supervisors, his current and former. Both very happy with his performance, although both had to talk to him about office flirting. No one has complained about him though; apparently women appreciate his attention; he has a certain . . . charm,” Mason ended his briefing, a little uncomfortable.

“That it?” Alex asked. “That’s all we have so far?”

“Yes,” Jeremy replied. “As soon as the warrants come in, we’ll get financials, phone records, and data records. Oh, and forgot to say, we have all five under surveillance, round the clock, since we took over last week.”

“Any movement?” Mason asked.

“Not yet, but one of them will move soon. They always do.”

“Until then?” Alex pressed on.

“We’ll keep digging,” Jeremy said.

“I’m afraid the documents might have already been transferred. What if we’re too late by the time the warrants come in? We need to stop the info leak before it leaves the country.”

“Thanks for stating the obvious, Ms. Hoffmann, very valuable input,” Jeremy said, frustration getting the best of him.

“We know that, Ms. Hoffmann,” Mason intervened. “We’re all painfully aware of the consequences and the loss we will incur if that document leaves the country. Yet there’s only so much we can do. We have to wait for the warrants.”

“Ahh . . . the hell with it,” she snapped. “We need that info now. We need to find out who changed their behavior lately, even a tiny little bit. No one bought a new car yet, but what else changed in their lives?”

“What are you saying?” Jeremy asked.

“What would you do if you recently got into some cash, the type you can’t deposit in your bank account?”

“I . . . I’d start using it, I guess.”

“On what?” she insisted.

“On everything . . . groceries, gas, restaurants.”

“And how would we see that?”

“I’d stop using my credit cards, that’s how,” Jeremy said, a crooked smile tugging at his lips. “But we don’t have the financials yet.”

“Like I said, the hell with it,” she whispered. “Just do me a favor; pretend you’re not hearing this, OK? Both of you, please,” she added, turning toward Mason. He nodded silently, surprised and intrigued.

“And since you’re
not
hearing this, you might as well pretend you’re not hearing all the details of this call, so we save some time.” She pulled her cell and dialed a number using her cell’s encryption, and then switched it in hands-free mode.

A man quickly picked up.

“Hey, boss,”

“Hey, Lou, what’s up?”

“How’s the East Coast treating you?”

“Jury’s still out on that one, Lou,” she replied, unable to contain a smile. “Hey, I need help, pronto.”

“Shoot,” he said.

“I need financials, phone, and car GPS tracking, credit card activity, data usage for five individuals; I’ll send you their names. They’re all local here, in Norfolk. I need all that ASAP, but run them through your pattern recognition software first, and tell me what changes happened recently.”

She caught Jeremy’s jaw dropping, and she made an effort to refrain from smiling. Mason listened just as impassible as usual, only a flicker in his eyes showing his keen interest in her approach.

“How far back?” Louie asked.

“Go six months.”

“You got it.”

“How long, Lou?”

“It’s probably gonna take me a couple of hours, maybe more.”

“ASAP, Lou, please. It’s burning, this one.”

“You got it.”

The call disconnected, leaving the room engulfed in silence.

Jeremy spoke first, perplexed.

“Two questions for you, Ms. Hoffmann. Do the laws of these United States mean absolutely nothing to you? Do you often break the law blatantly in front of law enforcement, just to see what you can get away with? Do you expect me to break every rule in the book and look the other way? Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“Yes, saved us time, precious time that we can’t afford to waste. And you said two questions, but you asked four.”

Mason looked at her approvingly, although she struggled to figure out how that was expressed. His face looked just the same as usual, and so did his eyes, yet there was that flicker in them.

“That was only my first question,” he growled.

“Then what’s the second?”

“Who are you people?”

Smolin wiped his mouth with a napkin and put it down on the table, next to his empty plate.

“Thank you, it was good,” he said.

“
Spasiba
,” Olga thanked him and started to clean the table. She put all the dishes and empty glasses away, then cleaned the tablecloth of breadcrumbs using a small brush and a miniature dustpan. When she finished her work, she nodded briefly and disappeared, leaving the two men alone.

“Good, now let’s talk some business.” Smolin poured himself a cup of coffee from the machine. “Nikolai, I need you to travel to Moscow in a few days,” he said. “I need you to take something there.”

“How big?”

“Not big at all, but very important. I have important information in my possession that needs to be taken to Moscow and personally delivered to the Division Seven leader. You’ve heard of Division Seven, yes? You’ll have the opportunity to meet him face to face.”

Nikolai turned a little pale and clasped his hands tightly, visibly uncomfortable.

“Will I stay long?”

“No. A couple of days at the most.”

“What if . . . what if I get caught?” Nikolai muttered, staring at his clasped, white-knuckled hands.

“You won’t get caught, Nikolai,” Smolin said. “We’ve been working on an intel transport system that is 100 percent guaranteed to work. It’s never been used before; they’ll never see it coming.”

“Yes, sir,” Nikolai answered faintly. “I hope so. What kind of system is it? What will we use?”

“We’ll use the latest in biotechnology.”

“OK, let’s deal with the elephant in this car, Jeremy,” Alex said, “what have I done to piss you off?”

He hesitated before answering. His face read like an open book for Alex. Frustration, uneasiness, and a little sadness.

“It’s not you,” he eventually answered. “I–I’ve had a rough patch lately. I’ve changed partners quite a bit lately, and it’s impacting my work.”

“Let me see if I can translate what you said in plain English . . . no one wants to work with you, and you’re in trouble with your boss because of that?”

“Whoa . . . you are direct,” he said.

She looked straight at him, inquisitively.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Something like that.”

“I was wondering why you were on your own, you know. Feds normally roam in pairs,” she said, smiling. “What happened?”

“I’m impatient, I guess, and don’t care much for procedure, if it’s in the way of catching the bad guy sooner,” he said, relaxing a little.

“We have that in common, you know,” she chuckled.

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“He’s on the move,” Alex said in a brisk tone. “He’s going into the picnic area.”

They had been stuck on a stakeout, watching Quentin Hadden’s every move. Just hours earlier, Louie had brought the results of an in-depth pattern analysis for the five suspects on their list. His analysis included credit card charges, bank account transactions, phone and data records, the whole shebang.

He’d spent significant time digging into Sylvia Copperwaite’s background. Typically, a gambler carrying a significant amount of debt fit the profile, but she was clean. She’d been living on the edge for more than a year, and she never did anything wrong, not even a speeding ticket. She was clean as a whistle. The only unusual phone call she’d made in the past months had been in the past week, and it was a call to an addiction help center. She was getting help.

Everyone else’s financial transactions and phone usage had stayed unchanged, following the usual patterns seen in the past six months, except one.

Quentin Hadden had stopped using his credit card almost completely, and no cash withdrawals were made out of his bank accounts. There wasn’t any other discrepancy in Hadden’s patterns of behavior, which was strange. He wasn’t making or receiving any different calls than the usual. Of course, he might have purchased a burn phone, for which they had no records whatsoever. However, he hadn’t been traveling, eating out, or buying any large ticket items since surveillance had started. That was it, the only shred of discrepancy they had was the fact that the man had stopped using his credit cards for anything other than gas and online shopping. He either had an influx of cash to burn, or he somehow stopped needing food and toilet paper.

They had no better lead to go with, so Alex and Jeremy had decided to stake him out, one of the first points they had agreed on since they had met. Hadden had taken the day off, raising another red flag, and for some reason had been sitting for a few hours in his car, reading, right there in the Botanical Gardens parking lot.

Spending countless hours locked in the car with a grumpy fed had been a bit of a pain in the backside for Alex, that was for sure. But Hadden was finally on the move, leaving his parked car behind and heading toward the picnic area.

Alex hopped out of the car and put on shades and a baseball cap. Jeremy followed suit, then they locked arms and walked slowly and casually down the alley, just a few yards behind their target.

Hadden approached the picnic tables, where several people sat. There was a family with three children at one of the tables, packing their cooler and food containers and getting ready to leave. They were noisy and gregarious, but he didn’t pay any attention to them and didn’t stop there; he continued walking down the alley.

Several tables farther, two older men were playing backgammon, completely absorbed in their game and letting out sounds of frustration or exhilaration to go with the rolls of their dice. Hadden slowed down, as if captivated by the game, and stopped, watching the players.

“Who’s winning?” Hadden asked.

“I am,” one of the men replied.

“The hell you are,” the other one said. “Not as long as I have breath in me.”

Hadden smiled and patted the first man on his shoulder, leaning into him and discreetly sliding a small envelope in the man’s jacket pocket.

Alex and Jeremy almost missed that.

“That’s it, that was the drop, we got it,” Jeremy said.

“No, we don’t,” Alex replied, grabbing him in a side hug and taking what appeared to be a selfie, but in fact snapping a quick and somewhat distant image of the man at the backgammon table.

“Let’s go,” Jeremy said impatiently, “Hadden’s leaving.”

“So let him,” Alex said calmly, “we know where to find him. We have a bigger problem, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Yeah, and I’m arresting the bigger problem now,” Jeremy said, reaching in his pocket for his cell to call the backup unit stationed at the park entrance.

“No, you’re not,” she said, forcing his hand away from his pocket.

“Jesus, woman, what the hell is wrong with you?” Jeremy snapped.

“Don’t you wanna know where this lead takes us? If you book him now, I’m sure he’ll clam up and you got nothing else.”

“There isn’t a single case in the FBI’s procedure manual where we let spies go free when we catch them red-handed. What if we lose him? Then what?”

“Give me a minute, will you please?” Alex replied unperturbed, and sent the picture via encrypted text message, with just two letters typed under it, “ID.”

Hadden had disappeared around the corner, headed most likely for his car, and the two of them took a bench under an old oak tree, with a direct line of sight to the backgammon game that still continued. She sensed the frustration in Jeremy, who could have easily closed the case as a win and make amends for his lack of partner retention, but she didn’t care. She still fostered some hope that this case might somehow be related to her mystery man, the Russian ghost with the initial V.

A chime coming from Alex’s mobile got their attention a few minutes later. A new text message read, “Major Evgheni Smolin, Russian Foreign Intelligence (SVR), entered via Toronto Pearson as Rudnitsky inbound from Zurich. Then crossed as Duncan, Canadian passport, at Niagara Falls on April 9. Current address, Smithfield Virginia, Novachenko residence.”

“There, see?” Alex said, exhilarated to see the suspect was, indeed, Russian. “Now let’s set up surveillance to find out who else is invited to this party.”