Your training reports are pretty impressive, Alex.
I had a head start on the other kids.
Its more than that, and you know it. You have a gift for black ops.
This wasnt news to him, but it didnt mean he had to like being told he was a natural monster.
Why did your father call you, then?
He wants me to hand over a list of D.U. staffers and where theyre posted.
Im sure he does.
Tell me, André. Are you going to be my handler?
The man studied him intently, weighing both him and the question. Alex mentally gave the man credit for catching the nuance behind the seemingly straightforward question. Alex was laying out the ground rules for their working relationship going forward. He didnt want any fake niceties where they all pretended he was a good guy doing honorable deeds for altruistic reasons. Theyd turned him into a killer, and that was how he wanted his boss to deal with him.
Ill be handling you for the most part, André answered blandly.
Crap. So. They were going to pass him around from department to department within the agency to do their dirty work for them.
Alex supposed he ought to be grateful for the mans honesty. In return, he took a deep breath and did a difficult thing. He extended tentative trust to his boss. Peter indicated that he already has a mole inside Doctors Unlimited. Besides me.
André leaned forward hard, staring. Who?
No idea. But hell vet any information I pass him against this other moles intel.
Sonofabitch.
The two men stared at each other in grim silence. Eventually Alex asked, Have you picked up any new employees recently?
You mean besides you and Katie?
Could it be someone in the wider government umbrella? Which was a delicate way of asking if D.U.s handlers at the CIA were infiltrated. Doctors Unlimited, technically a nongovernment aid organization, covertly reported to the CIA what its staff observed overseas.
Possibly. I picked everyone for this outfit by hand. Its my operation.
Alex frowned. Has someone done deep background checks on your staff recently? He added lightly, Someone impartial?
André swore under his breath. Who do I pick for the job? What if I pick the mole?
Alex understood the mans dilemma. The hardest thing to do as a spy was to find someone, anyone, to trust. It was a world built upon lies within lies within lies.
Will you do it? André asked abruptly.
You have no way of knowing if Im a mole or not at this point. For all you know, I am working for my father.
Youre a known risk. Everyone else here is now officially an unknown.
Alex blinked, startled. André had just put him on notice not to trust anyone else at D.U. How do you want to handle the list for my father?
Give me a day to review where everyone is placed right now. Based on where our assets are at the moment, we might be able to hand over a snapshot list.
Alex nodded. Let me know when youre ready, and Ill hack into your system and pull a copy of it.
Our computer securitys pretty tight around here.
Alex just smiled gently.
Has anyone ever told you youre a scary bastard? André blurted.
Once or twice. His first week in prison at the ripe old age of twenty-four, hed all but killed three Russian-mob strongmen to make the point to the rest of the inmates that he was not to be messed with. For the remaining four years of his DUI incarcerationand more to the point, avoiding recruitment into the FSB by his fathernot another soul had laid a finger on him. His father had been a proponent of shock-and-awe since long before it was an official strategy of war. Yes, indeed. Peter had taught his son well how to instill fear in those around him.
Except for Katie. None of his tactics had ever worked on her. For some inexplicable reason, she insisted on loving him in spite of all his worst behavior. God, he hoped that never changed.
It went without saying that his investigation of Doctors Unlimited would be entirely off-book. Which meant he needed to head home to begin his work. He collected Dawn and left, already planning his approach.
When he opened the condos front door, loud, off-key singing emanated from the kitchen. He smiled indulgently. Katie had a lot of wonderful qualities, but perfect pitch was not one of them. Were home! he called out.
Katie rushed into the living room, most of her shirt dusted in flour. She planted a light kiss on Dawns cheek and a rather more carnal one on his mouth. Youre just in time to taste-test the first edible batch of cookies. Cmon. I need your opinion. More chips or not?
Ahh. So thats the slightly burned smell coming from my kitchen.
Be nice. Your oven runs hot and I had to figure out how to set the oven on the first pan of cookies.
Suppressing a burst of what he would label amusement if he allowed himself to feel such things, he trailed after her as she hurried back to the kitchen, all energy and laughter and golden hair. He took the proffered cookie, which turned out to be as warm and sweet and gooey as its creator.
I see what all the fuss is about. Thats tasty, he admitted.
Have you never had a warm chocolate chip cookie fresh out of the oven before? she demanded.
Never. My father and I didnt cook.
You poor, deprived man!
She stood on tiptoe to plant a chocolate-flavored kiss on his mouth. She smelled of vanilla and joy. What must it have been like to grow up in her family? A blade of jealousy sliced into his heart for an instant. I have some work to do. If you could take the baby...
Of course. She scooped Dawn out of his arms. What kind of work?
The kind I cant talk about.
Her bright blue eyes clouded over, but to her credit, she didnt pry. Hed explained to her that he was accustomed to secrecy and that she couldnt expect him to share every aspect of his life with her all the time. But he felt bad as he retreated to his office. What the hell was she doing to him? Since when did he want to spill every detail of his existence with anyone?
Furthermore, since when did he have feelings toward any other human being? His father had taught him well that feelings were the greatest weakness any spy could fall prey to. God knew, the past year of CIA training had only reinforced that message.
Hed thought hed purged all deep feelings from his heart in that CIA training facility. But apparently not. Dammit. He had to find a way to isolate and contain these warm feelings he was having toward Katie.
Setting aside the problem of Katie McCloud, he locked himself in his office and got to work.
Mentally shaking his head, he broke into D.U.s personnel files with a few casual keystrokes. Actually, it wasnt that easy. Hed worked for months in jail developing and perfecting the decryption algorithm he used today.
He printed a hard copy of the entire employee roster of Doctors Unlimited and went to work. Financials were the easiest place to spot a turned spy. Mounting debt, illicit spending on a personal vice, an illness in the familyall the symptoms of a spy vulnerable to bribery or coercionshowed up most readily on bank statements. So, that was where he concentrated his search. He figured André would have done a thorough job vetting his peoples distant past and extended families, so he skipped looking at personal histories for now.
But after an entire afternoon of work and nearly a dozen of Katies irresistible cookies, nobody was leaping out at him as a candidate to be his fathers mole. Frowning, he went for a stroll around the terrace garden that had been his fathers pride and joy. He had to admit, Peter had a good eye for texture and color. The contrast of the stark cacti with softer, greener plant material was striking.
Contrast.
Maybe hed been looking for the wrong thing. Hed been looking for a big change in someones spending habits. Instead, maybe he ought to be looking for a long-term pattern of expenditures that, in comparison to other D.U. employees, contrasted with the other peoples in the organization.
He went back to his computer to run a position-by-position spending comparison on D.U.s staff. But that, too, turned up nothing.
Katie brought him a salad at some point and he ate it absently. Food had been optional often in the past year and was not something that held his attention anymore.
It grew dark outside, and he continued to poke and prod at the D.U. staff. But no matter how he examined them, nobody stood out as a mole. Which meant one of two things. Either there was no mole and his father was bluffing, or the mole was very, very good. He strongly suspected the latter was the case.
He leaned back frowning. If he were infiltrating Doctors Unlimited, how would he go about it? The aid organization placed physicians and nurses around the world in dangerous hot spots where regular aid organizations refused to send their people. The staff of D.U. was dedicated, passionate and a little crazy. Money wouldnt be high on their personal priority lists. Ideals would be, though.
He ran a quick search of political affiliations. And that was when he got a hit. Dmitri Churzov. D.U.s I.T. guyresponsible not only for its in-house computers, but also the all-important interface with the CIAs computershad been flagged by the FBI for attending several Communist Party rallies in college. Alex winced. God, it was so cliché. The kid even had a Russian name.
He frowned. In point of fact, the guy was a little too cliché. His father was emphatically not the type to recruit so obvious a target. Were he Peter, Dmitri would be the one guy he would not recruit to work for the FSB.
Decisively, Alex crossed Dmitri off his list of suspects. Who, then? The problem with an organization like Doctors Unlimited was that it used its legitimate work to passively collect intelligence on the side. André reported what his people observed. Nothing more. It wasnt like anyone at D.U. besides André would know about, let alone get involved with, any high-profile, active ops. Why would anybody bother to infiltrate such a low-level group? Especially with a live mole who would be expensive to recruit and compensate, and who would be high maintenance to run?
André had allowed that the mole could be someone who merely interacted with D.U. at CIA headquarters. Maybe that was where his fathers mole was placed.
The agencys computers would be significantly more difficult for Alex to hack than the D.U. system, particularly if he didnt want to cause all sorts of alarms to go off and a black ops team to show up at his door. But it was by no means impossible.
Rather than make a direct attack, he instead went after Andrés home computer. It took him nearly an hour, but eventually he lifted most of his bosss passwords from his other accounts. Armed with those, Alex attempted a straight-up log-in to the CIAs system as if he were André himself.
Tsk. Tsk. The same password that logged the guy into his daughters school grades got Alex into the CIA mainframe.
He unashamedly browsed his bosss correspondence with his CIA superiors. If hed once had any sense of ethics and morals about privacy, theyd been stripped out of him this past year.
It was mostly desultory reports and the occasional debrief on a concluded overseas mission by one of the D.U. medical teams. Even the intelligence reports were predictable, though. Troop emplacements, supply routes, casualty numbers, the usual stuff. But then a phrase jumped out at him.
Cold Intent. Major intelligence and military operations were given two-word names, a random adjective/noun combination. Some of them became well-known: Rolling Thunder. Desert Storm.
What major op could an unassuming, passive intel collection outfit like Doctors Unlimited be involved in?
The whole message read, Cold Intent is on track. The asset is in place and unaware. It was dated right about the time he and Katie were sent overseas last year.
He stared at the words on his screen with foreboding. The asset is in place and unaware. Unaware of what? What asset? Why did he get a sick feeling in his gut that the message had something to do with him?
Cold Intent. He typed the phrase into the CIA search engine. Immediately, a screen popped up announcing that André did not have access to that information. If it was above Andrés pay grade, then why was the man aware of it and referring to it in a message?
Frowning, Alex turned his attention to the recipient of the message. There was no name, merely a series of random numbers and letters belonging to an IP addressa location designated somewhere on the internet to receive messages without being attached to any one email account or identity.
He initiated a deep system trace on the location of the IP address. He might not be able to find out who the recipient was, but he could find out where the recipient was.
The message had bounced off seven of the thirteen nodes that all internet traffic passed through and his system was painstakingly searching back to an eighth node when everything went crazy. Attack warnings flashed on his screen. Automated notifications that his antihacking software had been activated flashed up. Lines of code scrolled too fast to read, and then his computer screen went blank. A silent, blue screen of doom glowed at him.
What the hell?
Are you coming to bed soon? Katie asked from the doorway.
He looked up, startled. To bed with her? So she could smash through his emotional defenses with the shocking ease she always did? A frisson of dismay whispered through him. No. Go on without me.
Social norms dictated that he should probably kiss her good-night or in some other way act affectionate and social. He really owed it to her to at least pretend normalcy, but he just couldnt bring himself to do it. He felt bad about not being able to show her simple affection, but he just couldnt. He really ought to be riveted on how his computer had just been shut down. And why.
Katie retreated silently, disappointment darkening her blue eyes, and he turned his attention back to his dead computer.
Whatwhowas Cold Intent? Why did the mere act of tracing an IP address send an attack at him that had triggered a tactical nuclear meltdown of his computer?
He was shocked at the amount of damage the attack had done to his normally intensely secure computer. He ended up more or less wiping out every file on the hard drive, restoring it to the factory defaults and starting over from scratch reloading and rebooting the entire system from his backup files.
He was still working hours later when he heard Dawn stirring in her room over the intercom and went in to rock her back to sleep. He sat down with her in the rocking chair in her room and let the deep peace of the night and her sweet baby smell pass over him. How could something so innocent exist in the evil world he knew it to be? How was he ever going to manage to keep her safe from it all? The weight of the responsibility pressed down on him until he struggled to breathe. He laid the sleeping baby in her crib and went back to work grimly.