Jack Coughlin - An Act of Treason

“Son of a bitch went gambling. So he was in Monaco as of yesterday.”

“And evidently won a substantial amount, too, sir. I can now backtrack and find the name he is using and where he is staying. He has already opened up for us, and I anticipate a lot of new information very soon as I become able to establish more specific criteria. Should I inform the CIA?”

“Oh, hell no. Keep this information within Trident for the time being. We’re only a day behind him. Good job, Liz. Now get out of my office and go back to work.”

A T THE AGE OFfour, in his home in Groton, Connecticut, Freedman stuck his right index finger into an empty light socket, and the electrical jolt threw him across the room. His nanny was listening to rock music on tape and never heard his cries. It stung! It burned! Eventually the pain eased, and the fright was replaced by curiosity. Benton Freedman had discovered electricity, and his world would never be the same.

At dinner that night, proudly wearing a Band-Aid on his injured finger, the little boy discussed the incident with his father, who took apart the offending lamp to show the boy how it worked. For months afterward, Benton roamed the two-story house with a screwdriver and needle-nosed pliers, disassembling toys, light switches on the walls, plugs at the ends of cords, and anything that remotely looked as if it ran on electricity. Within two years, he was devising simple programs on a basic Apple computer.

Freedman’s father was an engineer who helped build submarines for the U.S. Navy, and he took Benton aboard one of the huge boats for a seventh birthday present. The Electric Boat yards on the Thames River was a howling seventeen acres of pure construction bedlam, where some twenty-five thousand workers worked with heavy machines performing some of the most intricate construction work in the world. Benton had often watched submarines gliding soundlessly up the smooth river with only part of the long black hull and the conning tower showing above the water. His dad took him across a rickety gangway in a huge dry dock, down a hatch, and into a new world. Lighted dials, pipes and valves, television screens and bundles of rubber-coated wires and sprawls of schematic diagrams. He was given a blue baseball cap with the sub’s name woven in gold thread, and a birthday doughnut in the galley.

His father then showed him the most special part of the boat, the space where a nuclear reactor was being installed to power this war beast. Benton quickly grasped the techniques, and the experience spurred his academic interest in science. He graduated from high school at fifteen, and took an associate’s degree in mathematics at a state college while waiting to grow into the age limit for admittance to the U.S. Naval Academy. He was known among his classmates there as “the Wizard,” graduated with honors, and went into the boats. Two undersea tours won him the coveted gold dolphins badge of a submarine officer. Then Freedman took a PhD in computer technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was swept up into the dark world of military special operations.

Despite his normal frazzled looks, Freedman never forgot the harrowing combat drills aboard the nukes, where he had honed his skills of working quickly and with total concentration in tight quarters, while under immense stress. Tons of ocean were just on the other side of the hull, waiting to crush you for a mistake. When General Middleton hand-picked the young genius for Task Force Trident, the lieutenant commander thought that it was the best thing that had happened to him since he stuck his finger in that light socket. Although the Trident Marines changed his nickname to “the Lizard,” he tolerated the teasing because the organization’s ultra clearances were the keys to the toy box, allowing him to draw from resources throughout the government to build a complex computer network that was secure, fast, and efficient.

For the present, his work was narrowed to supporting Kyle Swanson and Agent Lauren Carson and trying to track the renegade Jim Hall. With the financial sniffing programs in place on the secret accounts, the Lizard could spend more time patrolling the internal communications network of the CIA with his computer sweeps. The FBI was the prime agency hunting Kyle Swanson. The Lizard had plenty of access there, too.

There was also quite a bit on the Carson hunt, and much of the traffic seemed to be coming from the desk of a man named Jack Pathurst in the CIA Security Office. It was clear from the messages that her current whereabouts were unknown. That was as it should be, thought the Lizard, since he had worked with Major Summers to spirit the beautiful agent out of the country undetected and rendezvous with Sir Geoffrey Cornwell. Canadian passport, a wig of long, dark hair, a clean history, and presto, she was gone. Kyle was vectored in from another direction through Sir Geoffrey’s extensive arrangements.

Now Freedman would build a protective information fence around the two fugitives. If anyone approached them, he would have plenty of tripwires in place.

TODI

ITALY

R IDGES OF CLOUDS WITHdark bottoms, pregnant with rain, had been gathering above the mountain towns of Umbria throughout the day, and the downpour broke about four o’clock, chasing Kyle and Lauren into the Tempio di S. Maria della Consolazione. It drummed ferociously on the weathered central dome and the four smaller hemispheric rooftops at each of the four corners, then slid harmlessly down the slabs of ancient stone.

“The only day in the past week that we decide to risk some time outside and it rains.” Lauren shook her hair with her open fingers. It had been cut much shorter and colored a deep brown.

Kyle folded the umbrella and left it at the doorway. He had grown a mustache but not a beard. “I don’t care. Being confined to the villa was reminding me of my old cell in Islamabad.”

Lauren gave him a playful slap. “Being alone with me in a romantic Italian villa is like being in prison with those rats you told me about? Is that what you’re saying?”

Swanson pulled her close and kissed her on the lips. She smelled good, tasted even better. “No. But that place is just two big shoe boxes stacked atop one another, with hardly any ventilation and a bathroom the size of a postcard.” Turning her loose, he looked up at the intricate stonework, then wandered into one of the apses and back to the main entrance, his footsteps echoing. They were alone.

As he stared into the curtain of rain pelting the parking lot and grassy slope, she came up behind him, put her arms around his waist, and laid her cheek on his broad back. “We’re leaving soon, aren’t we?”

“Afraid so. Since I contacted the Lizard this morning to pass along your comment that Hall would have just gone to Monaco to play, we have to change positions again. Unfriendly intel people may track the cell phone towers and come up with the right country code.” He had already destroyed the temporary cell phone and bought another. “We can move a little faster now.”

“But why stay around here at all? This area has too many bad memories for me, Kyle. Jim Hall used to take me to his villa up in Tuscany for a weekend. I was so dumb.”

Kyle paused to watch the gusting winds lash the paving stones on the approach road. He would not pass judgment on her. “Defense, Lauren. It is standard evasion and escape technique to think defensively in these situations.” He took her hand, and they walked back deeper into the ornate church. “This place was perfect for a while. I did some training a few years ago with the Gruppo Operativo Incursori, part of the Italian special forces, and one of the guys came from around here. He brought me down to the family farm for a weekend.”