The Backup Asset (25 page)

“There he is,” Jeremy said, pointing at Hadden’s Acura, following the gentle curves of Norview Avenue, headed for the highway. “Let’s pull him over.”

She grunted, still angry that Jeremy insisted on picking up Hadden himself, and he let the two surveillance teams follow Smolin. Smolin is who she cared about; Smolin could potentially hold information about her mystery man, while Hadden was yesterday’s news.

Jeremy flipped a switch on the console of his Dodge Charger and the blue lights embedded in his radiator mask turned on, accompanied by the siren. Alex couldn’t stifle a smile.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” she said.

The Acura slowed down and came to a stop.

“Stay here,” Jeremy said and got out of the car. Alex obeyed him for about ten seconds, then jumped out of the car and followed him.

Quentin had handed Jeremy his driver’s license.

“Step out of your vehicle, sir, we need to perform a sobriety test,” Jeremy said, acting just like an off-duty highway patrolman.

The moment Hadden got out of his car that changed. Jeremy grabbed him and turned him around, forcing him face down against his car’s hood, and cuffing his hands behind his back.

“Quentin Hadden, you are under arrest for espionage and treason. You have the right to remain silent—”

“Hey, I know you,” Hadden said, looking at Alex.

“Yes, you know me,” Alex replied dryly. “That doesn’t change a thing.”

Jeremy helped Hadden get in the back seat of the Charger.

“I will need an attorney,” Hadden said.

Jeremy burst into laughter. “What? You think we caught you robbing a convenience store and you still have rights? Where you’re going there are no lawyers, and you have no rights and no privileges. The sooner you get that into your head, the better off you’ll be.”

Hadden remained quiet for the duration of the short trip to FBI headquarters. Upon arrival, Jeremy booked him and had someone put him in an interrogation room.

Alex trotted behind him and followed quietly everything he did.

“Jeremy, I want to sit in on the interrogation. I wanna ask him some questions, my way.”

“No, absolutely not.”

“Please,” she insisted, “it’s really important to me. I think I can get to him. I read in his file he has a lot of frustrations with his employer. I can use that, I’ve experienced it myself and I can create rapport with him. Please, let me try.”

“No, Alex, I’m sorry, I can’t. We can’t allow contractors to sit in interrogations; it’s against the procedure.”

“And since when do you give a damn about procedure?” Alex asked in a raised voice, letting frustration get to her.

“Since I have a son to think of,” he blurted out before thinking.

“Oh,” she said quietly, backing down. “I understand.”

Jeremy rubbed the back of his neck, exasperated. “Look, you can sit in the observation room and watch.”

“OK,” she replied. “But, Jeremy?” Alex called as he was walking toward the interrogation room.

“Yeah?”

“He’s too calm, and that’s a bad sign. Be careful.”

He stood there for a second, unsure what to say, then went into the room and closed the door behind him. Alex entered the adjacent room.

She saw Jeremy take a seat across the table from a calm, composed, and somewhat sad Hadden.

“One question for you, Quentin. Why?”

Hadden looked Jeremy in the eye with a faint smile on his lips and stayed silent.

“Why betray your country? Why sell state secrets, our latest technology? Why?”

Jeremy leaned forward in his chair, reducing the distance between the two. Hadden wasn’t fazed by it. Minutes of silence went by, uninterrupted.

“They deserved it,” Hadden finally spoke. “And more.”

“Who?”

“The swine at Walcott. The corporate fat cats who can’t find it in their hearts to give us a fucking lunch break without squeezing more work out of us. The assholes who treat us like disposable objects, like doormats.”

Hadden’s voice escalated with every phrase, as emotion took over his rational brain.

“I have to put up with an arrogant idiot like McLeod every day, and what options do I have? I couldn’t transfer, they didn’t approve it. I can’t stop working, ’cause, you see, everything is a perfect slave game. The system lets you have just enough to become vulnerable, enough to have something to lose, but never enough to be free. You just can’t get ahead in this life. Everything is pointless, not worth it.”

“Why not leave Walcott, get another job?” Jeremy probed gently when he caught a second.

“And exchange swine for swine but lose my tenure benefits too? Have you worked a single minute in a for-profit organization? Or have you just indulged in the relaxed pace and job security of government employ?”

“I’m not important right now, Quentin; let’s focus on you.”

Alex cringed and bit her lip. Hadden will see that as rejection and withdraw. But she definitely didn’t expect what followed next.

“Who am I kidding?” Hadden was saying, wearing a bitter, crooked smile and letting more sadness seep into his eyes, his voice. “No one ever gives a fuck. Well, neither do I, not anymore. I’m done.”

He looked Jeremy in the eyes as he cracked something in his teeth, then started convulsing almost immediately.

Alex rushed in the room, just in time to catch Hadden taking his last breath, loaded with the distinctive smell of cyanide. There was nothing she could do.

“Fuck . . .” she said quietly, looking at Hadden’s distorted features.

“I–I didn’t see that one coming,” Jeremy said, looking a little lost.

“He was too calm, Jeremy,” she replied. “He had reached his decision; it was just a matter of time before he was gonna do it.”

“We got nothing out of him we didn’t already know, goddamn it,” Jeremy said angrily, his face reddened with anger and the suffocating feeling of powerlessness he must have felt.

“Yeah, but we still have Smolin out there,” Alex said encouragingly, touching Jeremy’s hunched shoulder. “There’s still something to go on with, so let’s get to work.”

Alex was still uncomfortable entering the FBI headquarters as one of their own. Every time she swiped her badge, she expected to hear the beep and see the red light turn on, yet it turned green and let her proceed through the gate just as it was supposed to.

She took the elevator and headed to Jeremy’s office.

“Good morning,” she said cheerfully, tapping on the open door.

“Hi,” he replied. He had dark circles under his eyes and looked very tired.

“Sleepless night?” Alex asked.

“I lost a suspect in my custody, what did you expect?”

She sat on a chair in front on his desk and said, “Let’s focus on the next suspect, the one who’s still alive and can still cause this country a ton of damage. Don’t you agree?”

“Yeah . . . We need to find out how the hell they’re moving the intel, and if they’ve sent it yet.” He scratched his head for a little while, then his hand moved lower, scratching the stubs growing anarchically on his unshaven face. “What’s that gut of yours telling you, can we still contain this leak?”

“In all fairness we don’t even know the size of the leak, what was leaked, and since when. Apparently, judging by Hadden’s credit card usage history, this leak is fairly new, and we have to assume they didn’t have much time to work through a ton of documents. However,” she continued, letting a deep frown cloud her forehead, “it doesn’t help to be dealing with someone so extremely motivated and extremely smart at the same time. That man could have
invented
a new copier, just to get this job done. What a shame . . . “

“Yeah. Let’s see,” Jeremy said, consulting his notes. “We know for sure one document was leaked, but we have zero information about anything else. Did Mason say anything today?”

“Nope, nothing. Speaking of Mason and Walcott, you know what I find very strange?” Alex asked.

“What?”

“The fact that they were overprotective with McLeod to keep the invention faucet open, but they didn’t feel the same about Hadden, who also had critical patents with them. I wonder why. It was almost like Hadden was right when he said he felt he was disposable.”

“We’ll ask Mason to look into it. Not sure it’s relevant though.”

“Maybe not, but I’m still curious.”

“Yeah . . . Hey, how come you knew Hadden was gonna kill himself? I didn’t,” Jeremy asked.

“I didn’t know it, Jeremy, or I would have told you. I sensed that something was wrong on a deep level with that guy, that’s why I wanted to interrogate him myself.”

“Ahh . . . fuck,” Jeremy said, swiveling his chair and looking out the window, as to avoid the mistake he’d made.

“But there’s no guarantee this wouldn’t have happened to me too, all right? Then you would have been in a world of trouble, with a suspect death during an unapproved interrogation. I don’t blame you, so why do you blame you?”

Jeremy crossed his arms and frowned, keeping his eyes averted. “Yeah . . .” he said.

“Tell me about your son,” Alex asked, reading a lot in the single word he had spoken.

“He’s . . . he’s in rehab right now,” he replied.

“Drugs?”

“Yeah . . .”

“He’ll be all right,” Alex encouraged him. “I’m sure about that. Let’s focus on our Russian now.”

“You didn’t really answer my question, how did you know something was off with Hadden?”

“I read a lot,” she said, then remembered something and added, “oh, and I used to date one hell of a corporate psychologist,” she laughed, just a hint of sadness in her eyes.

“OK, let’s go,” he invited her, leading the way. “We’ve set up a centralized surveillance lab for Smolin and the rest of the players. We’ve pulled surveillance out for the remaining four.”

“Do you think that’s smart?” Alex asked.

“Why? What are you saying?”

“Nah . . . nothing. Just my gut, that’s all.”

“I’m listening this time, spill,” Jeremy said, stopping his trek toward the surveillance lab and looking at her intently.

“I’m just saying we don’t really have it yet. We don’t have the envelope Hadden gave Smolin. We don’t have any information, we only have the fact that Hadden didn’t dispute the treason charge, that’s all.”

“And that’s not enough because?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right, pull them. I’m just . . . overly sensitive when it comes to Russian spies, that’s all.”

“Because of your other case?”

“Yup,” she confirmed.

“Will you ever tell me what happened on that one?”

“Maybe,” she smiled. “Maybe after we close this one.”

They entered the surveillance lab. Several analysts were working on workstations placed closely together.

“Alex, please meet NCIS Special Agent Moore,” he said, as a man approached them. The man smiled widely and had an open, welcoming demeanor, and an almost elastic gait, typical for sailors.

“Alex Hoffmann,” she said, shaking Agent Moore’s hand. “A pleasure. But . . . NCIS?”

“Whenever the Navy is involved, we come in. Your spy was on our ship, Ms. Hoffmann,” Moore said, continuing to smile. “We’re Navy’s counterintel.”

“Alex, please,” she said.

“Gabriel,” Agent Moore replied.

“We’re pleased to have Moore with us,” Jeremy said. “Our agencies pooled resources to work faster to get more done.”

“Walk me through what you have here,” Alex said.

“We’ve deployed surveillance on Smolin from almost all angles. Here,” Gabriel said, pointing at one of the desks loaded with several computer monitors, “we have all feeds from street cameras around his residence. We’ve pulled in traffic cams, ATMs, security cams. Over there we have the feeds coming in from his phone’s GPS and the GPS tracker we placed on his car last night.”

“All warrants are in?” Jeremy asked.

“Yes, they moved really fast this time,” Gabriel confirmed. “We have phone records, insignificant. Bank records for Smolin and the Novachenkos, also nothing remarkable. We bugged the house early this morning, when everyone left. We have video and audio in every room. And there,” he showed them another desk, this one with four monitors. “we have cloned phone-activity trackers. Smolin was using a burn phone.”

“And you cloned that?” Alex asked. “How the hell did you pull that off?”

Gabriel’s smile widened. “We have a technology now that allows our agent to clone a target’s phone just by walking next to them or past them for a second. That’s all it takes. When our agent walked past Smolin at the park exit last night, the system picked up two signatures, so now we have two cloned phones for Smolin, and one for each Novachenko.”

“Impressive. Data too? Or just voice?”

“Everything. Text, apps, voice, email, Internet. And we’re tracking all data and Internet usage inside the Novachenko residence. They can’t make any move without us knowing about it.”