Ever Hayes - Redemption

“How do you know that?” Danny’s voice remained clear—and remarkably composed.

“I was going to tell you when I found out… I just didn’t know how. I knew you were already thinking it, so I didn’t want to say it. I knew you’d be upset—”

“Wait, you think I’m here because I found out you held out on me?”

“No.” Nicole shook her head. “Well, not exactly. I thought you were here because you knew I’d had contact with the people working with Lazzo.”

“The people in the house on Kauai?”

She shook her head again. “No.”

“There are more people involved in this?” Kate revealed her own surprise.

The hits just keep on coming.

“I…I don’t know that for sure. It could be the same people, but they were here on Oahu—they were at the Marine Corps Base Station I sent the ELF message from.”

“Okay, let’s start there. Tell me about that.” Danny leaned forward in his chair.

Nicole took a deep breath. “Okay. When I went to the base to send the message, I wasn’t the only one there. I sent the message, as you requested, but as I was leaving someone put a gun to my head and told me never to come back there. Wait…”

“What?” Danny asked.

“Can I see that patch again?”

Danny pulled it back out and set it on the table.

“I have seen this before. The guy who put the gun to my head had it tattooed on his arm—inside wrist to be exact. His hands were white, and he spoke in perfect English—though his voice was electronically altered. He told me they had your friends in Kauai and the girl on the boat—which I later realized meant Hayley. I was to keep all satellite cameras away from the specific coordinates he handed me until 5:00 a.m. and then type those exact coordinates into one screen and pretend like I’d stumbled across the compound. I was ordered not to mention a word to anyone, and any deviation from exactly that and they’d kill them all. So, what is that a symbol of?” She pointed at the patch.

“It’s the insignia for Libyan Intelligence.”

I’m no expert on lie detection but the expression on Nicole’s face couldn’t have been too different from the one on my face when I found out the same thing. She couldn’t possibly be in on this. I turned and said as much to Keena. “She’s not in on this.”

“I know,” Keena replied without taking her eyes off the screen.

Back in the interrogation room Danny was pacing. “Did they give you a way to contact them?” he asked.

Where was he going with this?

“No.”

“So they didn’t even ask you about the message you sent?”

“No.” She shook her head.

Huh. That’s weird.

Danny seemed to think so too. “So they knew what was going on without you saying anything?”

“I don’t know.” Nicole shrugged. “I guess. I definitely didn’t tell them anything.”

Suddenly I understood what Danny’s line of questioning was focused on. These guys knew Nicole was going to be at the Marine base, and they knew what she was there to do. They didn’t need to ask her about the message. They already knew. They had a contact on the boat and someone feeding them information here—they were the link between two parties. We were getting too close too fast, and they needed to slow us down. More importantly—if this was all true—Nicole was definitely not the mole.

“So you don’t know Hayley’s dead?” Danny asked suddenly.

“What?” The shock on Nicole’s face was absolutely authentic. “Dead? How…”

Danny held up his hand. “The carrier replied to your message while you were off duty. Damien decoded it and shared it with the governor. Then Barnes told me.”

“What was the message? Can I ask? No one told me anything.”

“They caught the stowaways and killed them.”

“So they’re saying Hayley and Lazzo… but that doesn’t—wait.” Nicole shook her head. “Did Damien go to the Marine base? Did he run into those people too?”

“What? No. The message came here.”

She was still shaking her head. “But it couldn’t. There’s no relay on ELF messages. Someone would have had to send it here manually from the Marine base.”

“Okay, so someone sent it here. So?”

“So otherwise you would have never gotten that message.”

“But why would they want me to get that message? I would think that would be the last thing they’d want.”

“No, Danny. Not if they’re trying to stall you.”

“So my sister and Lazzo are dead?”

“I don’t think so. If that were the case, they wouldn’t need Reagan and the girls at the compound. They wouldn’t still need you to go there tonight. They wouldn’t want you there tonight—or ever.”

“Right. I agree.”

Wait. So Hayley might not be dead? And Danny believes this? I leaned forward to make sure I didn’t miss a word.

“So…” Nicole looked at Kate then back at Danny. “Either they know the reply message was a lie, or they don’t know about the reply at all.”

“Right,” Danny answered, standing again. “And you’re leaning toward the first.”

“I am,” Nicole continued. “Someone on the carrier is communicating with the kidnappers via ELF. And the kidnappers fed Damien the reply from the Marine Corps Base Station. But Damien didn’t think anything about it because he didn’t even know about the ELF—that it couldn’t auto-relay from the carrier.”

“Okay.”

“So if Damien doesn’t know what’s going on and the governor hasn’t put any of this together, then they’re not involved, and there isn’t a mole.”

“No, there is.”

“Or…there is, and it’s—” “One of the other two Digital Task Force agents.” Kate understood where they were going with this. “Which means the mole is either Dewey or Stacy.”

“Most likely.” Danny glanced out the window then added, “And they—directly or indirectly—probably have a contact on the boat.”

I hadn’t even thought of that. It really is one giant web .

“We can’t let Dewey or Stacy know anything about the reply then, or that we even suspect them.” Nicole stated the obvious. “If one of them mentions the response from the carrier, we’ll know who the mole is.”

Danny remained silent. There was always a chance the mole wouldn’t say anything. We might never figure out who it was.

“Dewey and Stacy are out there right now—in the main room.” Nicole pointed toward the other room. “They’re going to wonder why you’re in here talking to me. Whoever’s watching us and making sure I do what they asked—they’re going to know I was talking to you.”

Danny nodded. “Yes.”

“So what do you need from me?”

Suddenly I heard Keena beside me say, “Danny, someone just hacked into this feed.”

Danny touched the earpiece in his left ear and nodded, confirming he’d heard her. “Cut on now , okay.”

Keena nodded. She knew what Danny was talking about. Suddenly Danny went ballistic. He picked up a steel chair and hurled it against the interrogation room window. The bulletproof glass didn’t so much as crack, but it sure made one incredibly loud noise. Kate jumped up and stood back against the wall, and I watched in shock as Danny flipped the table across the room. Papers and water went everywhere. The petrified look on Nicole’s face was genuine.

“What the hell are you doing, Danny?” I yelled at the screen. He obviously couldn’t hear me—and didn’t reply.

The door to the room swung open then, and Blake stuck his head in. “Get out!” Danny screamed at him. “Now!”

I watched Blake close the door and saw Danny pick up one more chair and hurtle it at the camera in the corner of the room. It didn’t appear to hit the camera, but the screen went all fuzzy, then black.