R Patterson - The Shadow Hunter

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Orlovsky said, wagging his index finger. “They shouldn’t have brought you here, but I’m glad they did because I’m in need of someone with your skill set.”

Hawk’s familiarity with Orlovsky centered around his dealings with Middle Eastern terrorists in search of weapons and retrieving information about the clients. However, Hawk’s interest in Orlovsky hadn’t extended much beyond that. But Orlovsky seemed deeply interested in the man he’d been swapped for in a prisoner exchange five years ago.

“What if I told you that you being here wasn’t just fate?” Orlovsky asked.

“I wouldn’t believe you because I’m here on my own.”

Orlovsky arched his eyebrows. “All on your own? You sure about that?”

Hawk nodded.

“So you just got up one morning and thought that you’d come visit Siberia. I hardly believe that’s true.”

Hawk grew impatient with Orlovsky’s attempt at mind games. “Just tell me what you want or I’m going to walk out of here.”

Orlovksy laughed. “I love a man with a great sense of confidence, even if it’s misplaced. Because you’d be dead before you made it to the door.”

Hawk sighed and drummed his fingers on the table.

“Perhaps this wasn’t what you expected when you came here, but I have an opening—and you need a way out of here,” Orlovsky said. “It’s a perfect situation for both of us. I mean, we were once traded as prisoners, why can’t we help each other out again?”

“And how are you going to help me out if I help you?” Hawk asked.

“Aside from letting you live?” Orlovsky asked with a smirk. “According to my men, you claimed to be needing a ride. I’m willing to give you one of my cars if you make one delivery for me.”

“Whenever something is too good to be true, it probably is,” Hawk said. “I have no reason to believe you.”

“We must trust each other,” Orlovsky said as he placed his weapon on the table in front of Hawk. “Surely you must know that Russians don’t share their vodka with their enemies.”

Hawk eyed the gun. Even if bullets remained inside it, escaping a sprawling estate with as much firepower as Orlovsky had would be a fool’s errand. The trust was as phony as the idea that if he wanted to pick up the gun and go, he could make it out alive. Hawk had no other option but to go along with Orlovsky’s plan.

“Okay,” Hawk said. “I’ll do it.”

“Excellent,” Orlovsky said as he stepped over one of the bodies near the door. “I believe this might be the beginning of an unlikely partnership.”

Hawk seethed as the Russian left the room.

Bridger, Montana

ALEX PEEKED THROUGH the cracked door of John Daniel’s room. He was lying on his back, clutching the corner of his blanket in one hand and a Star Wars x-wing fighter he’d built with Hawk out of Legos in the other. John Daniel had crashed just after lunch, blissfully unaware that his father was missing halfway around the world. Alex was certain she detected a slight smile on her son’s face.

During the peace that fell over the house when John Daniel was napping, Alex wanted to join him. She resisted the urge to curl up on the couch and sleep by a roaring fire. But without Hawk around, she didn’t have time to waste. Dusty and Tucker needed to be fed, and Alex had work to do. Besides, she knew if she laid down, she’d probably never fall asleep despite her exhaustion. Not knowing where Hawk was created an underlying level of angst that wouldn’t dissipate until she’d heard from him.

She put on her boots and traipsed out to the barn. Pulling a hay bale into a wheelbarrow, she delivered the afternoon feeding to the horses. Dusty and Tucker galloped over the snow and went after their food as if they hadn’t been fed in a week. Alex had noticed that the colder it was, the more ravenous the horses acted.

“Good boy,” she said, stroking Dusty’s mane. The horse gave a quick snort as he snatched the hay with his teeth. She gave Tucker some attention before retreating into the house.

With Mallory Kauffman’s assignment waiting, Alex turned on her computer and began analyzing the material. While working with Firestorm and the Phoenix Foundation, she had come across moles buried deep within the government’s labyrinth of bureaucracy several times. As clever as they always thought they were, they couldn’t hide from the fine tooth comb of a skilled analyst. Everyone left a trail. Whether it be a paper trail or a digital one, even the most careful spies would take a risk at some point. The more challenging cases weren’t solved by someone acting carelessly, but by someone acting too carefully. Even a government employee who was above board on everything would make a mistake at some point, sending an email to the wrong person or purchasing an item using the wrong budget code. Those were natural mistakes, errors that didn’t suggest anything further was wrong. But those who were worried about someone digging through their every move would move with such caution and precision that the perfect picture they painted would cast them as a larger suspect.

As Alex perused the files, she cross-referenced them with the intel that was supposedly leaked. Her search focused on who knew what information and when they knew it. Once she established that, she was able to sift through the emails to determine who was sharing the information. The problem the NSA analysts ran into was that the intel stolen never seemed to be passed along using digital means. Someone had been very careful to ensure that whatever they learned wouldn’t be disseminated in an easy manner. Alex concluded the mole had to be sharing whatever they had gleaned through old fashioned spy craft. Perhaps it was through a brush contact or a handwritten note planted at a drop site. Due to the limitation of her research in Montana, she couldn’t determine the how. All Mallory wanted was the who—and Alex was certain that she’d figured it out after a few hours.

The NSA team had pinpointed what information was being stolen, which made it easy for Alex to narrow down who the mole was. However, she still couldn’t say definitively, but she’d done this long enough to know that there were rarely coincidences. And the person who appeared to fit the profile with access to the information was a U.S. State Department employee named Victor Edgefield.

At 37 years old, Edgefield had plateaued in his career at the State Department. Working in public affairs as an information officer, he was involved in policy meetings and worked on a team responsible for crafting the messaging the Secretary of State desired. Edgefield had been hired after an injury cut short his CIA career. But he’d been passed over for promotions several times over the past few years.

Around that same time, Edgefield inexplicably started gambling. Based on the sums of cash Alex noticed he started pulling out of his account, the gambling had started a little over six years ago. However, he was detained during a raid on an illegal gambling ring where he’d been playing poker. While he avoided charges, he didn’t avoid his name getting put into a report. Alex also noted on Edgefield’s phone records that he’d contacted a local prosecutor at this time, who promptly dropped the charges against a man named Manuel Diaz, the alleged owner of the operation.

Apparently, Edgefield’s debts were large enough that his favor didn’t result in forgiveness of the money he owed. Alex found more large sums of cash withdrawn until they suddenly stopped. Within a week after he stopped withdrawing cash from his bank account, the NSA team identified the first instance of sensitive information being leaked. Even more puzzling was who Edgefield was giving the intel too.