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Could they take that chance?
He knew her. Her biggest talent had been her ability to think on her feet, to take a fluid situation and flow with it, letting her instinct lead her. She was undoubtedly puking her guts up, but given the Winchell woman’s slip, it was too much of a coincidence, at least to him, for Lizette to “accidentally” drop and destroy her cell phone almost immediately on the heels of that revelation.
On the one hand, something like this was never supposed to happen. She was shut down, and the process was permanent.
Maybe. It had never before been tried to the extent that they’d used it on Lizette. She was supposed to have been forever altered, the way an amputee is altered; she would function, she would have a life, but would never again be the way she had been before. But because the process hadn’t been pushed to that extreme, how could anyone know for certain exactly how she’d respond?
That was where his own gut instinct kicked in. He had to factor in the fluidity of her thinking, which maybe made her more resilient. Add that to the damaged cell phone, and his gut said, “She’s back.”
So the question wasn’t whether or not they could take the chance of ignoring the alarm sounded by Winchell’s slip, but could he?
Chapter Three
Information was everything. The gathering of it went on ceaselessly, every second of every day. Eyes and ears were everywhere, in one form or another. There were cameras, wiretaps—some warranted and some not—and keystroke loggers; cell phones were cloned or their calls simply captured; there was thermal imaging; there were GPS units that logged the position of both vehicles and cell phones, and even the old-fashioned method of human surveillance. Sifting through that monumental collection of information, separating the meaningful from the mundane, was a chore that never ended. With the completion of the NSA’s data center in Utah, there would be even more details about every call, every text, every e-mail for the computers to sort through, based on certain keywords that would trigger a closer look.
But even with all the high-tech stuff, there we
re still realtime, human eyes and ears that watched and listened, especially to sensitive cases that couldn’t be trusted to any computer program, no matter how advanced and top secret. If it was never in the data banks, then it couldn’t be mined, couldn’t be hacked.
Dereon Ashe had one of those sensitive-case jobs. He didn’t know everything about it, but what he did know was enough to make him wish he didn’t know anything, because he was damn certain this was the kind of shit that got people killed. Nevertheless, he and at least five other people endlessly monitored the woman known as Subject C—which always made him wonder exactly what had happened to subjects A and B—and examined every move she made, every call she placed or received, every detail of her life. It didn’t matter that her life was, as far as he could tell, pretty damn boring; it was minutely examined.
Damn boring, that is, until now.
First there were those weird numbers, which made him tense and quickly scribble them down, in case they meant something, then—“Oh, shit!” It was definitely an “oh shit” moment. Dereon rubbed his eyes, not because he was tired, but to give himself time to think. He was incredulous that something so simple—calling in sick—could blow up in their faces like this.
Quickly he punched the numbers to connect him with the agent in charge of this operation.
“Forge.”
The brusque identification by Al Forge made Dereon grimace with a combination of worry and alarm; he didn’t want this decision to be on him so he had to notify Forge, but at the same time, he didn’t like being in the crosshairs of Al’s attention. It gave him a goosey feeling, like ice cubes dripping down his back.
Swiftly and without any embroidering, he related what had just happened with Subject C. Though of course they knew her name, in conversation she was never identified. Subject C existed only to a very select group of people, of which he was one—damn his luck. He didn’t know what had happened with Subject C, and he never wanted to know. He watched her, he reported his findings, and he kept his nose out of business that wasn’t his. It seemed safer that way, because whatever had gone down had to have been seriously big shit.
“I’ll be right there,” said Forge, and dead air filled Dereon’s headset as the call was terminated.
He keyed back in to the surveillance audio and continued listening to Subject C, picking up where he’d left off. By the time Al Forge arrived, Dereon was able to bring him up to date on what had happened in that short interval.
Al scratched his jaw, his sharp gaze turned inward as he weighed events against possibilities. He was pushing sixty, his short hair gone mostly gray, his pale eyes a little less icy as age began to cloud them, but he was still as lean and hard as he had been when he was in the field. His face was lined by the weight of decisions he’d made, actions he’d taken. Dereon didn’t ever want to be in Al Forge’s position; nevertheless, he’d be hard put to think of anyone he respected more.
The silence wore on as Al stood there in thought, the seconds ticking past.
“C might not have noticed.” Dereon finally felt compelled to point out the obvious, just to break the silence.
The flicker of Al’s gaze sliced at him for the waste of time. Abruptly he said, “Put me through to Xavier.”
That was one of the most puzzling aspects about this job. Everything that happened with Subject C was reported to this Xavier, who, as far as Dereon could find out, was nothing more than someone who worked black ops; he wasn’t a supervisor, wasn’t in any position of power. There were, in fact, very few details readily available about the man, which in its way signaled that there was more to him than those few details revealed. Al was always the one who talked to him; even more remarkably, none of those conversations were ever recorded. But then, nothing about this situation was on the record. After every shift, all of the data on Subject C was erased.
A few strokes of the computer keys accomplished that. Al slipped on a headset. After a moment Xavier answered, his deep voice familiar and remote, as if he had never been touched by any emotion. “Yeah.” There was something in that remoteness that made Dereon glad he’d never have to meet Xavier in person, that Xavier didn’t know he even existed. His world and that of the black ops people were eons apart, and carefully kept that way.
Al said, “Subject C has possibly been alerted to a discrepancy in the timeline.” He paused. “Given that you’ve piggybacked your own surveillance system to ours, you already know this. I trust you haven’t done anything precipitous.”
Dereon swiveled around in his chair and stared at his superior in open astonishment. Of course they’d known that Xavier was in their system, but they never gave away information. Never. The smallest detail could give them an invaluable advantage—or, conversely, give one to the enemy. Exactly who the enemy was in this situation wasn’t clear, but he did know strategy, and knowledge was power. Al had just given away some power by letting Xavier know that they were aware of his activities. Now he knew that they knew that he knew—God, this sounded like some old vaudeville routine.
“You’d have been an amateur if you thought for a second that I wouldn’t.” The cool, disembodied voice registered a faint amusement.
Okay, that was another wrinkle, Dereon thought. Xavier had already known that they knew about his surveillance. Vaudeville? No, this was a chess game, played by two masters who evidently knew each other well. Dereon hated chess. It made his head hurt. For someone who was in his line of work, he really preferred that things be straightforward, uncomplicated, and exactly what they seemed.
He should have gone into accounting.
