The Backup Asset (28 page)

“How many did you say we had, again?” Alex asked in disbelief.

“There are 142,” Jeremy replied. “The entire complement of the
Fletcher
, well, minus Simionov; he’s been dealt with already.”

“We’ll be here ’til midnight,” she complained, grabbing the mouse from Jeremy’s desk and clicking through sailor profiles.

Jeremy’s phone rang, and he picked it up immediately.

“Agent Weber. Yes,” he said, “let me put you on speaker.” He put the phone on his desk and touched the speaker icon. “It’s one of the surveillance teams deployed at Smolin’s house,” he told Alex.

“Yeah, hi,” Alex greeted the caller.

“Good morning, ma’am. Nikolai Novachenko, Smolin’s so-called son-in-law, left earlier with a suitcase and a duffel bag and is headed for Norfolk International. What do you advise?”

“Damn,” she muttered. “Stay on him, and call TSA and ask them to screen him very thoroughly. Got it?”

“Yes, got it.”

“If he carries as much as a safety pin we wanna know about it, OK? And tell TSA to call us the minute they’re done with him.”

“Yes, understood,” the agent replied dryly, a little offended to be treated as if he didn’t know how to do his job and some civilian consultant had to spell it out for him.

Alex bit her lip. She wasn’t making any friends, that was for sure.

She stood and grabbed her empty coffee cup. “Want some?” she asked Jeremy.

“Please.”

A moment later, she was back with both cups refilled to the brim.

“Did they call yet?” Alex asked.

“It’s only been a minute,” Jeremy said. “Take it easy, will ya’?”

“Yeah, OK.”

She resumed clicking through the sailor profiles, a little preoccupied. Her mind wouldn’t focus on the work in front of her, stubbornly going over every possible scenario Novachenko could use to transport classified information out of the country. When the phone finally rang, she almost jumped out of her skin.

“Good morning, Agent . . . Weber,” the caller said hesitantly, “this is Shift Supervisor Davidson with TSA at Norfolk.”

“Yeah, what did you find?”

“We had to let him go, Agent Weber. We didn’t find anything wrong with him, and we checked him thoroughly. We took him in a private screening room and went over everything in detail: clothes, his luggage, everything.”

“Anything out of the ordinary? Anything at all? Was he nervous, agitated?” Alex intervened.

“N–no, ma’am, nothing out of the ordinary. He was relatively calm, even apologetic. Most people are a little antsy when we pull them in for private screening, and his behavior was quite normal under the circumstances.”

“Why apologetic?”

“Oh, he had a sandwich with him, and he apologized for that, said he didn’t know if that was allowed or not. We let him go; they’re boarding the flight now.”

A wave of adrenaline spiked her heart rate. She hesitated a little . . . What if she was wrong? Ahh . . . the hell with it.

“Stop him,” she yelled at the TSA agent. “Grab him, and get that sandwich. We’re on our way.”

She ran to the elevator, followed closely by Jeremy.

“Care to share?” he asked, as they were heading downstairs in what seemed to be the slowest elevator invented.

“Not really,” she said sheepishly. “Just a hunch.”

Jeremy drove as fast as he could, his siren blaring, zigzagging through traffic like a maniac, and leaving behind a chorus of screeching breaks and wailing horns.

“Call your team for me, get them on the phone,” Alex asked.

“Who do you want?”

“Anyone in the surveillance lab, anyone would do.”

Jeremy told her the number and she dialed. The car’s hands-free system took over, making it difficult for them to hear over the blaring siren.

“Yeah, hi, it’s Alex Hoffmann and Agent Weber. Yeah, please go back on surveillance and look for anyone doing anything with a sandwich. What? Yeah, a sandwich. Anything . . . eating, buying, packing, giving, taking, just anything, any sandwich.”

Jeremy looked at her briefly, between avoiding a garbage truck and passing a cab.

She hung up the call.

“I’m starting to see your hunch,” Jeremy said, “but it’s a thin one, very thin. People eat, Alex. It’s just food, that’s all.”

“I need a mobile lab to meet us at the airport,” she continued, unperturbed. “How do I get that to happen? Whom do I call?”

“We have procedures for this kind of thing, you know,” he protested. “It’s not like a multimillion piece of equipment is at my beck and call.”

“Here’s how this is gonna go,” she said in a low, almost threatening voice. “Either you call your mobile lab to assist us at the airport, or
I
call a mobile lab to assist us at the airport and you foot the bill. Don’t care, really. So what’s your preference?”

He sighed, made the call, then asked wryly, “Has anyone ever said no to you and lived to tell the story?

Nikolai Novachenko sat at the small table in the improvised interrogation room, courtesy of the TSA. There was one other chair in the room, empty. Both Alex and Jeremy stood, studying Novachenko closely.

On the wall at his left, there was a cheap clock, one of those $9.99 electronic wall clocks one can get from Walmart. Somehow that seemed to be the focal point of interest with Novachenko, who looked at it every minute or so.

“Got someplace to be, Nikolai?” Alex asked.

“Yeah, got a plane to catch,” he replied morosely.

“That flight is boarding now, and you’re not going to be on it,” she said. “So you can relax. The sooner you answer our questions, the sooner you’ll be on your way.”

His jaws clenched the moment he heard he wasn’t going to make his flight.

“You can’t hold me here,” he protested, starting to get up from his chair. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said in an escalating voice.

“Sit down,” Jeremy said, pushing him back into his chair with a firm hand on his left shoulder.

“Who is Evgheni Smolin?” Alex asked.

“Who?” Novachenko replied.

“Cut the bullshit, will you? Or else we’ll be here ’til midnight,” Alex said, feigning anger, and slammed her hand on the small table. “I’d rather be elsewhere, you know. Smolin, who is he? He lives in your house, so you better know who that is.”

“He’s my father-in-law,” Novachenko replied, stealing another quick look at the clock, and wringing his hands.

“Wrong answer, Novachenko, think again. This time why don’t you try the truth for a change? Don’t dig yourself into a bigger hole than you can manage.”

“No, I swear, he’s my father-in-law,” Novachenko replied, turning a little pale and biting his lip.

“That’s not gonna fly,” Alex replied, opening a file and reading from it. “Smolin is from Moscow and has never had any kids. Your wife is from Kiev.”

Another quick look to check the time.

“No, no, damn it, your information is wrong. I’m telling you the truth.”

“Let’s check the facts, one by one,” Jeremy intervened. Novachenko checked the time yet again and slouched a little in his chair, more relaxed.

Alex frowned slightly, then looked at the flight schedule. The flight was still boarding. Why was he relaxing now? Made no sense. She had a strong feeling that they were missing something, something of crucial importance.

“Is your wife from Kiev?” Jeremy asked, pushing in front of Novachenko a couple of pictures, one showing Olga’s graduation from a Kiev school, the other showing the frontage of a house.

“Y–yes,” he stuttered, then glanced quickly at the clock. “Yes, she is.”

He had stopped wringing his hands, and his pallor was almost gone. Either the man was an expert in dealing with stress, or something was very wrong.

“Oh, no . . .” she whispered, feeling her blood drain. “What else did he have on him?” she asked Jeremy with an unspoken urgency in her eyes.

“That,” Jeremy pointed at a duffel bag left on the floor, in the corner. “And some pocket change.”

She grabbed the duffel bag from the corner and made a quick hand gesture to Jeremy to follow her. As she exited the room, she caught a glimpse of Novachenko’s pallor returning, together with his upper body tension and hand-wringing habit.

“What’s up?” Jeremy asked as soon as they closed the door.

“He was getting calmer with time,” she said, going nervously through the contents of Novachenko’s duffel bag. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

“What do you want to do?”

“You keep on drilling him. I wanna run to the mobile lab; they must have some result on that sandwich by now. And I want to give them this,” she said, holding a travel-size can of hair spray, “maybe it’s got something to do with that sandwich, or maybe it has something to do with time.”

“Huh? Do you know you’re not making much sense?”

“Yeah, I do,” she replied and turned to leave. “But neither does a short-haired man carrying aloe vera hair spray on a flight.”

The tractor-trailer took seven parking spaces along the white curb marked drop-off zone only. Black and windowless, the trailer bore the inscription “Federal Bureau of Investigation—Mobile Forensics” in gold lettering.

Alex didn’t waste time knocking; she hopped up the two steps and opened the door.

“Ah, Agent Hoffmann,” the female lab technician said, “I was just about to call you.”

She started to say she wasn’t an agent, but curiosity took precedence.

“What did you find?”

“You were right, there was something in that sandwich: E. coli SPAM.”

“Eww . . . gross. It looked like ham and cheese to me. How is this helpful?”

“No . . .” she chuckled. “SPAM as in steganography by printed arrays of microbes,” the technician clarified, smiling briefly and turning toward an LCD showing luminescent microorganisms, resembling little hot dogs piled on top of one another. “SPAM is an information encryption and transport technique, using fluorescent strains of Escherichia coli treated and arranged a certain way to represent the letters of the alphabet. In these microbe arrays, there are enough colors for anything you’d want to write.”

“How would someone grow these microbes and transfer them to a sandwich?”

“You arrange the microbes to represent the message, then grow them in a Petri dish.”

“Ahh . . . Petri dishes, now it makes sense. I’ve seen those at our suspect’s home,” Alex added, seeing how confused the tech seemed. “Please continue.”

“Then you transfer the cultured microbes to film, and ta-da! Your biofilm is ready for transport.”

“But I saw Smolin take a bite from one of these sandwiches,” Alex pushed back. “Why isn’t he sick, or dead?”

“These E. coli are genetically modified to be entirely safe. In case of trouble, a spy could eat all the evidence and be fine.”

“Great,” she grumbled. “Tell me please, how does one generate a message, exactly?” Alex asked.

“Seven different strains of E. coli were engineered to glow a different color under the right chemical and light conditions, by triggering fluorescence in a certain protein. The microbes are grown in rows of paired spots, each combination of two colors representing a letter or a number. For example, a yellow and an amber spot could represent the letter A. Here’s a sample decoded microbe array I found on the Internet, to give you an idea,” the technician said, pointing to a different screen, where chains of little colored circles lined up row after row in a matrix distribution.

“How does one do this? I’m guessing they’d need access to a sophisticated lab, right?”

“Maybe, maybe not. If you want to take the grassroots approach to generating SPAM biofilm, you wouldn’t need much; just some Petri dishes, a carefully modified antibiotic solution, culture medium, some LEDs, and . . . that’s about it,” the technician clarified, counting on her fingers.

“So how can we decode the message?”

“We can’t, not without the original growth environment. We’d need to regrow the bacteria in the same environment, or we would not obtain the right colors and the message would be completely indecipherable.”

“What?” Alex said, almost growling. “There must be something we can do to nail this bastard.”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. Again, if we use the wrong growth medium, the array will light up in the wrong sequences, and that won’t mean anything.”

“Could this type of message self-destruct?” Alex asked, suddenly remembering the small can of hair spray she had brought with her from Novachenko’s bag.

“Yes, it’s time sensitive; the microbe luminescence fades with time if not preserved, or fixated.”

“Could this be the fixating agent?” Alex asked, handing the technician the hair spray.

“Let me check,” the young woman said, cocking her head to the side and spraying a small amount of substance into a test tube, then inserting it into a gas chromatograph. A minute later, the machine chimed and displayed a chart filled with numbers.

“Yes,” the technician confirmed, “this is the fixating agent, that’s for sure. I’ll treat the biofilm with it and hope it will last enough for us to figure out how to decrypt it. We need to find its culture medium.”

“How would that look?” Alex pressed on.

“It could be anything. I’m guessing some kind of liquid or emulsion,” the tech added, “although he might not have it on him, that’s why SPAM is so secure.”

“What are you saying?” Alex asked in disbelief.

“You could have the encoded bacteria here, and have matching controlled growth medium on the other side of the border. No one would be able to grab it and decode it.”

“Still, we have to try,” Alex replied.

She pulled out her cell and called Jeremy.

“Hey, I need you to bring me everything this guy had on him, and I mean every—”

The trailer door opened and Jeremy walked in, carrying the rest of Novachenko’s luggage.

“That what you’re looking for?

The technician made room on the table for the luggage, and they all started going through the stuff, piece by piece. Alex almost disregarded a commercially wrapped gift set of cosmetics, containing makeup, lipstick, nail polish and clear coating, all with brand labels. Then she changed her mind and looked at that package in detail.

Alex picked the clear nail protector bottle, opened it and sniffed it. It stunk of acetone . . . no, that wasn’t it. No microbes could live or glow in acetone. She then smelled the nail polish. This one was almost odorless, except a faint, nearly imperceptible fruity smell. She handed it over to the tech.

“Is this it? Could this be it?” she asked impatiently.

The young technician tested it quickly and confirmed it had the chemical makeup of a bacterial growth medium.

“Yes!” Alex said. “Please tell me we can read the message now,” she said, clasping her hands in a pleading gesture.

“Yes, we can, if this is the right growth medium, and it is logical to assume it is. Now we can overlay the biofilm on the growth medium and the bacteria will light up, allowing us to read the message.”

“But isn’t the message encrypted?” Jeremy asked.

“Yeah, it is, but now it’s easy, it’s a simple alphabet encryption. Any deciphering software will be able to read it. We have CrypTool installed right here,” the tech said, turning toward another computer. “It will take an hour or so, Agent Hoffmann.”

“It’s Alex,” she said. “I’m not really an agent, you know.”

The technician smiled, a little confused.

“OK, then, let’s pick up a Russian spy,” Alex said, smiling widely for the first time in days.

“Hey, wait a second,” Jeremy said, “weren’t you opposed to picking up Smolin until we identify the backup asset, and his entire uplink network?”

“Yeah, I was. But today we almost missed that sandwich. We got lucky, and that’s the only reason the stolen intel is still contained. Leaving Smolin out there, regardless of how much surveillance we plant around him, is too much of a risk. We have no choice, they’re too damn good,” she ended her argument with frustration in her voice.

Jeremy looked at her intently, then nodded and replied, “OK, let’s pick him up.”