Enemy Agents, page 17
She popped a thumb drive into a USB port and copied the file to her own drive.
She had it.
“On your knees, bitch.”The voice was like ice on the back of her neck. Samantha Boswell was standing behind her, holding a Glock, aiming for Swift’s head. She felt Boswell jerk the dart gun out of her belt and toss it back through the closing server room door, before stepping back to a safer distance. “I mean ‘on your knees,right now.’ ”
Boswell had somehow resisted a powerful tranquilizer. This was not good.
The file finished copying. She didn’t move to reach for it, but she was about to. Boswell spoke again. “I just put this gun back together and trust me, itwill fire.”
Swift let out a ragged breath and her stomach dropped. Boswell had her. She slowly got down on her knees.
“How the hell did you break in?” Boswell demanded.
“It’s a secret.” Swift put her hands atop her head without being asked.
Boswell kept her distance. “What the hell are you doing in here? Stealing more information to give to your terrorist buddies?”
“I really need this information.”
“You’re helping Saleb. You broke him free. Because I sure as hell didn’t.”
“Listen to me, Boswell. You’re a good agent so just trust me on this. I need that file.”
Boswell’s gun was still aimed at Swift’s head. “Tell me where Saleb is and you get to leave this room alive.”
“Saleb isn’t a traitor. He was set up and that file can prove it.”
“If we had that kind of info on file, don’t you think someone would have noticed?”
“I’m asking you to help me—”
“Did you know I’ve never missed when I pulled the trigger? At this range you’d have a closed casket.”
Swift realized that this tactic wasn’t working. There was no reasoning with Samantha Boswell. There was no give. Boswell was too jaded, too untrusting, or potentially even worse: Boswell could be the Jupiter who had sent her to destroy Saleb’s file. Either way, Swift was out of options. She needed to escape this room and get back to Saleb. Back to Europe. Back to her own mission to find the mole. She needed a way past Sam Boswell. And the file she’d read at the briefing made it sound like nobody in history had ever gotten past Boswell.
But Jessica Swift was no slouch, either. She hadn’t planned a perfect infiltration of America’s sixth-best-defended structure without a Plan C. Placing her hands on her head had been the first step. A tiny RFID tag in one of her hairpins had sent a signal once it was within two inches of her watch. As long as that signal was on, the watch was counting down. And that had been not-quite-exactly one minute ago. She shifted her weight, a whole-body movement that masked the imperceptible shift of her wrist to angle the watch face at Boswell.
“You have three seconds,” said Boswell, “before I—”
Swift’s watch fired two hundred small beams of light into Boswell’s eyes. The instant she saw the “blinder” strike Boswell’s face, Swift dove to the left, rolling around the server tower. Boswell screamed, her eyes temporarily blinded. She squeezed the trigger at the spot where she expected Swift to be, and the bullets passed within inches of the rolling intruder.
Now Swift had the advantage. Boswell might have had some kind of freakish ability to make any shot, but nobody could take a close-range blast from that watch without at least ten minutes of complete visual impairment. Boswell wouldn’t completely see right again until she’s had a long sleep. Swift knew that Boswell would be relying on her other senses now, and that played to Swift’s advantage. She was used to moving in total silence. The cold of the server room would throw Boswell’s sense of air movement way off. Swift eased the painter’s mask from her belt, slipped it on, and drew the knockout gas capsules.
She slinked around the room, one capsule in each hand, and threw them. One exploded off the server tower near Boswell’s head, the other on the wall behind her. Boswell would not be able to tell where they had been thrown from. Swift eased a pair of goggles over her eyes as Boswell tried not to breathe, felt for the door, and finally collapsed, her gun clicking against the concrete.
Swift circled back around and silently removed the USB drive. She’d have to read the file later. Right now she had to get back out, which meant climbing over Boswell, getting back into the vent, and getting out through the restaurant before they could capture her. As she stepped over Boswell, Swift realized that Boswell wasn’t immune to just one form of tranquilizer. Sam Boswell wasn’t knocked out at all, but rather she’d been playing possum in order to lure Swift close enough to hear her, and as soon as Swift stepped into a vulnerable position, Boswell grabbed her leg, took her hard to the ground, and picked up the gun.
“Neat trick with the watch, bitch. But I won’t miss when I’m holding you in front of the gun, now will I?” Boswell coughed. “Y-B gas. I worked up an immunity years ago.”
With her one free leg, Swift kicked the gun, surprising the still-blind Boswell and knocking the gun to the floor. Boswell raised an arm to protect her face, so Swift kicked her in the side of the head, her heel hitting Boswell’s ear.
Boswell shrieked and her grip lessened. Swift pulled free and jumped to her feet. Boswell felt along the floor for the gun, which gave Swift enough time to hit the red button on the console beside the door. Boswell wasn’t going to let Swift get out of this, so she was left with only one other option—get arrested with the Jupiter data and prove Saleb’s innocence from a holding cell. The alarm went off. Swift jumped silently behind the central console, keeping it between herself and Boswell.
Swift heard a whirr of rubbing fabric as Boswell rolled over and drew down on her. Even blind, Boswell’s gun was perfectly aimed at Swift. Swift pulled away, leaving no part of herself showing behind the cover of the server tower.
Seconds later, a team of military security arrived, opening the door behind Boswell.
Jessica Swift stood up to surrender, and before she could speak, a man’s elbow was in her sternum. They strapped her wrists in cable ties behind her back and searched her. They took everything in her pockets, including the USB stick. They removed her watch, her belt, her hair pins, and her shoes. And then they locked her in an interrogation cell down the hall from Fatale.
It was over. The only goal in this whole thing was to quietly identify the Jupiter who had set up Saleb, and instead she was trapped, cuffed, and since she hadn’t had a chance to read the file, she still knew nothing. If Jupiter was here, they’d know what she was after. They would cover their tracks, and if that wasn’t possible, they would disappear. Jessica Swift had tried a very risky gambit in breaking into CIB. And now the mole was going to get away.
And it was all her fault. She had fooled herself into thinking she could handle herself among these violent, dangerous people. But she was no match for someone like Boswell, not even when Boswell was blind. Jessica Swift was a weak, pathetic criminal and now she’d pay for it.
She’d blown it, and now she was alone, shivering and terrified. A million fears swirled in her head. The mole was out there, covering his tracks. And there would be more dead people. More murder. More bombing. More blood she was responsible for because if she’d only been stronger, she could have stopped it. Why the hell hadn’t she been straight with Quarrel? She could have told him what information she needed, gone about it his way instead of this insane risk. Why had she tried this foolish plan alone? Who would be the next to die because Jessica couldn’t do what needed to be done?
All her fault.
All her fault.
At first it was only tears, but after a few minutes alone with herself and the cycle of self-hatred, she was sobbing uncontrollably. With her hands cuffed behind her back, Swift couldn’t wipe her eyes, so she lay her face on the steel table and let the tears form a puddle beneath her cheek.
22
“We had to expect that one of those women would arrest the other.”
Chris Quarrel stood while Harry Milton sat, and both of them waited.
The elevator from the bogus bank and into the heart of CIB moved slower each time Quarrel had to ride it down. Or maybe things were just more urgent each time. Maybe his sense of time ticking away was synching up with that of Jack Hall, the man without patience. Anyway, he was standing on that ugly carpet, watching the gouges and scrapes in the wall scroll past his feet to above his head at a snail’s pace, waiting for that first crack of light at the floor that would mean they had finally reached the bottom.
He had little to go on so far, and was impatient at the thought that the information was waiting for him at the bottom of this ridiculously long elevator shaft. Swift broke into CIB. Tried to steal information. Boswell was there. The alarm sounded. All hands on deck. And now here he was, stranded alongside Milton for the ride back into the pit.
“We locked it down. More guards, nobody allowed to leave. Cut off all our computers from the outside world. Nobody in here is getting information out.”
Quarrel didn’t care about Milton’s security measures. He cared about the fact that the same woman who’d saved his life was also arrested for treason.
“Relax, kid,” said the old man. “This place has dozen of the country’s best soldiers on duty. There’s no way those ladies are going to kill each other before we get in there.”
“I.” Said Quarrel.
“What’s that?”
“BeforeI get in there. This is my case, and I’ll be asking the questions. Alone.”
Milton snorted out a sigh.
Finally, there was a line of light at the floor.
Quarrel speedwalkedthrough the gathered guards, his CIB identification card held out with a straight arm, staring ahead.Avoid eye contact, and they won’t ask questions. In the viewing room outside the interrogation room, a red-eyed, pissed-off Boswell jumped to her feet when he came in.
“Finally! Can we—”
“Wait outside,” he said, casting his eyes to the one-way glass and the sight of Swift, who sat slumped over, looking pathetically broken.
“Excuse me?” Boswell stepped uncomfortably close and Quarrel felt compelled to meet her eyes. They were bloodshot from whatever she’d been exposed to, which only added the fire behind them, and Quarrel was reminded that despite her usually professional demeanour, Boswell was the most lethal woman in the country. She got so close he could feel her breath. Close enough that it would only take her a second to kill him if she so chose.
He almost caved to Boswell’s imposing posture. If not for Swift saving him the previous night, he probably would have. He even managed not to stutter when he finally spoke.
“I need to interrogate her. And I need you outside so you don’t hear her side of the story. Then when I’m done, I’ll get to you.”
“Oh you’ll get to me?” Those vicious eyes narrowed and Boswell took a half-step back. “I’m the one who caught her stealing intelligence while you were twiddling your thumbs. You took away my house, my family, you force me to spend my nights in this underground hell and ‘you’ll get to me?’ Between me and you, I’m the only one actually doing anything about the leak. And you come in and tell me to take a time-out? Do you know who the fu—”
Quarrel flicked his eyes to the nearest guard. “Get her out of here and don’t let her back in until I say so.”
Boswell started to yell, but the soldier placed his hand on her arm. The second soldier moved to her other side. She calmed down. Still looking Quarrel in the eye, she spoke slowly and calmly. “I don’t want to hear your second-hand report of what she says. I want to hear it directly. I want to solve this goddamn thing before someone nukes my kids.”
“Good,” said Quarrel. “Then you’ll respect my need for some privacy and wait your turn.” He nodded to the first soldier again, and they escorted Boswell out of the room. Before another guard could come inside to replace the others, Quarrel put his thumb on the flat screen next to the door. The scanner registered his identity, and he flicked the door lock.
When he entered the interview room, Swift lifted her head off the table. Her hair fell in limp strands across her face, matted down on her cheeks by streaks of tears.
Quarrel turned his back to Swift and faced the wall. Above the mirror/window there was a small black security camera. He punched it with the side of his fist, knocking it to face the nearest corner. Then he picked up the microphone from the center of the table, ripped the cord out its back, and threw it into the other corner. He pulled the only other chair in the room out from its spot at the opposite end from where Swift was sitting, and pulled it up beside her. Sitting down, he was practically touching her knee with his own.
“So . . . ”
She sniffed. “So, what?”
“You broke in. You might want to give me a reason why.”
“Doesn’t matter now.”
“Can I ask you something?”
She didn’t answer, just stared at the floor.
“You don’t look like the same girl I saw yesterday.”
Again, she did nothing. Swift was bordering on catatonic.
“Yesterday I saw someone who was willing to break into my room and take on an assassin, just based on a hunch that I was in trouble. Yesterday I saw someone who was willing to take on a very dangerous woman to save me, even though I made it damn clear that I think you’re lying to me about pretty much everything.” Quarrel waited, but she didn’t move. Her intermittent blinking was all she had to offer. “And today I hear you orchestrated a plan to break into what I have to assume is one of the most secure rooms in one of America’s most secure buildings, and that you actually got inside, and well . . . here you are. Crying and sobbing.”
“Here I am.” She croaked the words out, her voice hoarse.
“And you’re putting on the crybaby facewhy? Either I gave you way too much credit yesterday, or you’re not giving me enough today. Because I don’t buy this.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You said that before.”
She shrugged. “Because it doesn’t.”
“Boswell’s chomping at the bit to come in here and beat the information out of you. You want me to let that happen or do you want to talk to me?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Quarrel remembered Thorpe slapping Fatale when she taunted him during questioning. That might have been Thorpe’s way, but it wasn’t Quarrel’s. He’d have to talk her out of this funk.
“What did you want? What information was so valuable to you?”
Swift spoke in a loopy, spaced-out voice that made him think she was having a psychotic break. “Well I’d tell you go check, Christopher, but it ain’t gonna matter anyway by now, ‘cause by now they’ve got it all sewn up. So charge me with treason and let Boswell beat me and let Hall torture me and lock me in a cabin in the desert until the firing squad’s ready because it ain’t gonna matter after the nukes kill us all and it’s all my fault so I might as well be dead by then . . .”
Quarrel couldn’t take her rambling any more. Throwing himself forward he wrapped his hand over her mouth and leaned in until he was eye-to-eye with her, practically daring her to look at him. She shut up, and her watery grey eyes finally looked up from the floor, partially hidden behind the limp brown hair draped over her face. He lifted his hand from her mouth, and used it to tuck her hair behind her ear.
“Whatis your fault?”
“Everything, it’s all—”
“Be specific here. I’m the new one here. I’m the outsider. If you want to confess to someone you can trust, confess to me. I’ll cover it with Boswell and everyone else. But you have to tell me the truth.”
“People are going to die.”
“Why? Who do you work for?”
She almost laughed, and in closing her eyes to suppress the laugh, she squeezed out fresh tears. “I work for Jupiter. I’m not CIB or CIA or C-I-Anything. I just follow orders.”
“And Jupiter gave you orders that are going to hurt people? What did you do?” Quarrel wiped the tears from her cheeks and she started to seem almost lucid again.
“It’s not what I did. It’s what I failed to do. I could have ended this if I had that list.”
“OK, what list?”
“You know I got a bunch of people killed a few years back? Was that in my file? Perfectly innocent people.”
“Jessica.” She was starting to look to the floor again. “Jessica.” He touched her chin and made her look him in the eye. “Is that your real name?”
“Yeah. My codename’s Io. You know who Io is? Zeus screws her and then turns her into a cow so he won’t get caught cheating on Hera. That’s me.”
“My real name’s Chris Quarrel. So we’re just two people investigating a case right now. And I owe you a lot so I really want to help you, but you have to tell me what you broke in here for.”
“It’s not really treason. I have clearance to access that server. I just didn’t want to ask.”
“What do you mean?”
“I could have requested access. But then they’d know. They’d change the file. Like they have by now. They’d erase what I need before I got a look at it. So I had to break in. I had to. Nobody could know what I was looking for until after I had it.”
“What did you want?”
She smiled at him. “I was gonna bring Jupiter down. Prove that one of those Jupiters ordered me to help him destroy evidence of his crime. I just needed to know who accessed the Jupiter program on a specific date and time. But now’s too late. If Jupiter is really Boswell or Milton or whoever else is here now then they’ve changed the file already. Hell, they might have changed it when they first used the program. Might have changed it when I asked questions at your big meeting. But now it’s gone for sure.”
“What did Jupiter order you to do?”
She leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “They made me steal the proof that the so-called traitor, Khalid Saleb, wasn’t even in the same city the night his wife was murdered. They wanted me to burn the file. So now I know. Saleb’s the good guy. Jupiter’s the bad guy.”
“And there’s a record every time Jupiter calls you?”
