Steve Martini: The Enemy Inside

“She wasn’t married, had no lovers that we know of. Lived alone, right?”

Fischer nodded. “As far as I know.”

“She didn’t or I would have known about it,” said Proffit.

Fischer didn’t ask how. Clete always had his sources.

“If there is anything we should worry about, it’s not going to be in her files here at the firm. It’s going to be in one of two places,” said Proffit. “She may have stashed documents at her house. That includes her home computer, any thumb drives or other portable storage devices, and paper records. Perhaps a safe-deposit box. Did she have one?”

“I don’t know.”

“The weight of what you don’t know could sink us,” said Proffit.

“What is it exactly that you’re worried about?” asked Fischer. “If you could give me some specifics it might help.”

“I’m worried about whatever it is that I don’t know,” said Proffit. If Serna had been one of their corporate lawyers, even one of their stables of criminal trial lawyers, Proffit wouldn’t have been so concerned. It was the nature of her work that scared him, and her ambition. She was in a position to do real damage both to himself and the firm. They were one and the same as far as Proffit was concerned. From what he could see, she was already in the process of doing that damage when she died.

“Who is her next of kin?” he asked.

Fischer shook his head, shrugged a shoulder.

“Well, goddamn it, find out! See if she had a company life insurance policy. If so, there should be a named beneficiary. That may be it. Did she have any other property besides the place in Georgetown? A vacation hideaway where she may have stored documents?”

Again Fischer didn’t know. But by now he was taking notes on Post-it slips from the little square holder on Proffit’s desk.

“Did she own or rent the place in Georgetown?”

“Owned. I think.”

“Well, find out!” said Proffit. “We don’t want some nosy landlord traipsing through the place looking at things until we’ve had a chance to do it ourselves. Did she have anybody else in the firm she trusted, any associates?”

“She wanted to hire an assistant. You said no.”

“I know what I said. Was there anybody in the office she confided in?”

“I didn’t follow her into the ladies’ room, if that’s what you mean. Vicki Preebles was her secretary. I assume if she trusted anybody it would have been her.”

“Was Preebles upset by the news? Serna’s death, I mean?”

“Sure. Wouldn’t you be? She wanted to stay and help out, but I told her to take a couple days off. I felt it was the thing to do,” said Fischer. “We can wait a respectful period and then debrief her. See what Serna may have told her. If anybody knows anything, I suspect it’s her.”

“Hmmm.”

“And I changed the locks on Serna’s office just like you said.”

“Good.” Proffit thought to himself that if Cyril Fischer ever got disbarred, perhaps he could make a living as a locksmith.

Her principal value rested not in her ability to kill her victims, though she was proficient in this. Her usefulness flowed from her knowledge of forensic science and, in particular, trace evidence, hair and fibers, minute particles of dirt, pollen, and other microscopic bits of information that could compromise a job. Sometimes she worked alone and sometimes with others to make sure they made no mistakes and left no telltale signs behind.

You could call her a hired mercenary, but of a special kind. She seldom, if ever, worked in a war zone; almost always in developed countries, Western Europe, the first world nations of Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Governments and large corporations hired her because they knew her skills and could afford the price of her services. She spoke several languages, Spanish, Portuguese, French, a smattering of German along with some Russian. Her English, though fluent, if you listened closely, carried a hint of what sounded like a Spanish trill, so that you might mistake her background as Latin American if you didn’t know better.

Ana Agirre was Basque, born in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Her great-grandfather died in the bombing of Guernica by the Germans in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, a travesty made famous by Picasso’s painting of the same name. Both her father and her mother worked in the Basque underground before the end of the Franco regime and then afterward, part of the ETA, the Basque separatist movement. Her mother died smuggling explosives during an ETA mission in Barcelona. Her father was taken prisoner. She never saw him again. At the time Ana was eight.

Raised by her maternal grandmother, she excelled in school, particularly in science. She graduated from secondary school a year ahead of her classmates. Given her family background and the fear of retaliation by the Spanish government, Ana was sent to college in Paris. She could have taken courses preparing her for medical school or any of the research fields. Instead, she chose criminalistics and later took a job in the crime lab of the Police Nationale, successor to the fabled Sûreté. The French didn’t seem to care about her family’s background. In fact, some voiced sympathy for the Basque people and their repression under Franco. There she learned and refined her forensic skills.

One would have thought she was on a mission to rehabilitate her family so earnestly did she study, absorbing everything she saw and learned with the zeal of a monk. What she masked was anger, anger at the world for having taken from her the one person in her life who she loved more than life itself, her mother. It was a painful loss, one she could never get over. It came to her in her nightmares, the brilliant flash of fire, the sensation of heat and the shattering sound of the explosion that ripped her mother to pieces. Though she had not witnessed it, she had now seen enough to know what it would have been like, the aftermath of a blast from nearly two kilos, four pounds, of RDX, what the American military called C-4 and the British termed PE-4.

Since she was ten, when she had overheard the whispered conversations of her aunts and uncles in the parlor of her grandmother’s house, Ana had known that her mother’s coffin, buried in the graveyard of the small church in their village, was empty. There was no body inside. After the blast, police and firefighters had found nothing except bits of charred fabric from her mother’s clothing, none of them larger than a few centimeters in size. They determined the source of the explosion from chemical tests at the site.

C-4 was stable. It smelled like motor oil and had the pliable texture of children’s clay. But when subjected to heat or the shock produced by a detonator, it would explode with a fiery ear-shattering blast that could level half a city block.

Ana concluded that the bomb must have already been armed with a detonator when whoever made it handed it to her mother. It went off on a quiet street in a Barcelona suburb. The only victims were her mother and Ana, who was left to fend for herself.

She remained with the Paris crime lab for six years before moving on to a private laboratory that contracted its services to the French military. There she came in contact with representatives for corporate mercenaries who ultimately hired her as an independent contractor. Ana set up her own business. For large fees, sometimes seven figures, she asked no questions and did whatever was asked of her.

Want to burn down a building? Ana would provide you with an incendiary device that would completely consume itself in the flames. Investigators might find the precise location where the fire originated, and if they had sufficient equipment they might sniff out the chemical accelerants. But as to any other evidence, there would be none.