Noah Boyd - Last Chance to Die

ALMOST TO THE MINUTE, four hours after leaving him, Kate pulled up in front of the old Bureau observation post. It was midafternoon, but the temperature was still near freezing. She took his suitcase out of the trunk and carried it upstairs. He was in the room where the meeting with the director had taken place. He had shaved and showered and was reading one of the files that had been provided.

“It didn’t take you long to get back at it. Anything in there?” she asked.

“There is one interesting thing. The cell phone they gave Calculus, it tracked him twenty-four hours a day. We have detailed coordinate charts telling us where he went and when.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not yet, but I’m already getting the feeling I’m missing something.” He stood up and went over to a computer that was on. “Take a look at this. You’ve probably seen it before.”

She peered over his shoulder. “Sure, that’s a spy satellite we have access to. How’d you know about it?”

“I kept reading in the file about transverse tracking. When I turned on the computer, I saw the icon on the desktop.” She sat down in a chair next to him. “I looked through those cell-phone GPS logs. I think they’re important.”

“Important how?”

“Take a look at his message again.” He handed her the file. “How do the last three words differ from the first three?”

To Moscow unexpectedly. Find CDP now!

“The exclamation point?”

“And …?”

She looked for a few seconds and then shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know, what?”

“Look at my hand,” he said, holding it with the fingers spread as wide as possible. “Now look at the message again.”

She did and then said, “It looks like there’s an extra space between the ‘CPD’ and the word ‘now.’” She thought about it a little longer. “I still don’t get it.”

“I made some coffee. Would you mind getting me a cup?” His voice was more instructional than demanding.

Her face shortened into a knot of confusion. “Oooo-kay.” She went into the kitchen and started pouring coffee into a mug. “Black?” she called out to him. Before he could answer, she yelled, “The last sentence contains a message within a message!” Forgetting the coffee, she hurried back into the room. “If he didn’t mean anything by it, the exclamation point would been after ‘To Moscow unexpectedly,’ to emphasize the danger he was in. But using it with ‘now’ and isolating it with an extra space indicates that there are two messages within those last three words: Find CDP and an instruction to do it now, at that exact moment.” She grinned, realizing that Vail had sent her to get coffee so she would stop staring at the forest and be able to isolate one of the trees.

“And what are we in possession of that can quantify ‘now’?” he asked.

This time Kate let her mind go blank before trying to figure out the answer. “The exact time he sent the message.”

Vail said, “And since we have his exact longitude and latitude when he sent it, he might have been giving us a clue to who CDP is.”

“But he would have to know that the phone we gave him was capable of tracking his movements.”

“First of all, he’s an engineer, an engineer in the spy business—don’t you think he would assume that? Why would we give him just an ordinary satellite phone? Plus, the phone was turned on. He’d have to know we could track him then.” Vail handed her the file; it was opened to the GPS charts. He turned back to the computer and the satellite imaging. “The call was made on December twenty-ninth at 4:18 p.m. Give me the coordinates listed for that time.”

As she read them, Vail maneuvered the mouse over a map of the United States until the digits in the small display windows were the same as those she had given him. He locked them in and then used the on-screen control to zoom down to the location, which could be seen with incredible detail, close enough to capture the address from an adjoining map on the screen. “It’s some sort of business. There are dozens of cars in that front parking lot alone.”

“Here, let me,” Kate said.

Vail got up, and Kate sat down at the computer. She went to a different search engine and typed in the address. A corporate profile popped up on the screen. “Alliant Industries in Calverton, Virginia.” She clicked on another icon and was shifted into Bureau indices and searched the name. “There it is, Alliant Industries. They’re in our files because we’ve done quite a few background investigations on their employees for security clearances. Evidently they have some defense contracts.”

“Can you pull up the list of names that we’ve investigated?”

“Hold on.” She typed some more, waited until the results came up on the screen, and then started scrolling through the alphabetical list. “Believe it or not, there are two with the first initial C and last initial P: Claudia Prinzon and Charles Pollock. Let me see if I can find middle initials.”

She started to open the background report on the woman when Vail said, “Don’t bother. It’s Pollock.”

“How do you know?”

“Pollock is a North Atlantic food fish. Our little fish.”

She shook her head and laughed. “This isn’t going to make the Counterintelligence Division very happy.”

“Why not?”

“How do you think they’re going to take it when I tell them that you found the first mole in less than four hours, not counting sleeping, showering, and shaving time? I know you’re not trying to make them look like idiots, but …”

Vail laughed. “Maybe that’s why I keep getting fired.”

“Maybe?”

“Then let’s not tell them.”

“You know that’s not possible. Now that we know who Pollock is, we’ll have to start twenty-four-hour surveillance and get up on his phones and computer ASAP. And eventually search warrants. Are you going to do all that by yourself?”

“Okay, we’ll wait a couple of days before we tell anyone. That way it’ll look like it was a lot more difficult.”

“Hi, I’m Kate Bannon. We met last year. Apparently you don’t remember me because you’re trying to run the same scam on me as you did then. You’re still trying to end-run everyone. And in case you’re counting, ‘everyone’ includes me.”

“It doesn’t include you. Wherever this takes me, it takes us. It’s just that the more they get involved, the farther away the answer always seems to get. They’re like moths.”

“Moths?”

“They keep flying into the light simply because it’s the brightest thing in front of them, even though they’re slowly beating themselves—and any chance to solve this case—to death.”

“Give it up, Vail. At some point even you are going to need Bureau help.”

“As clever as Calculus has been with this, maybe he’s hidden evidence somewhere out there, and if we’re equally smart, we can find it without wasting all that time and manpower.”

“You’re not worried about wasting Bureau resources. If anything, you like burning them. You’re just dreaming up excuses to cover up whatever you really have in mind.”

“Come on, Kate, we’re ahead of schedule. Let’s poke around a little and see what we can find. It’s New Year’s Day. There are hangovers to nurse, there’s football to watch, resolutions to fake. Nobody wants to hear from us.”

“Define ‘poke around,’” she said, with even more caution than usual.

“It’s a holiday. We have a car, a credit card, and all of Calculus’s locations for the last two weeks he was here. Let’s take a ride and see if he left anything else to find.”

She shook her head with mild self-contempt. “You make it sound so simple, so right, and even though I know it’s neither, I’m going to go along with it.”