Agent X - Boyd Noah - Страница 59
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Kalix’s face was expressionless. Apparently the director had told him of the promotion previously. Kate recalled Kalix’s comment that Langston had ordered an end to the investigation into whom the Russian handler Gulin had met with at the antique mall. If it had been pursued more thoroughly, Rellick probably would not have been able to do so much intelligence damage, and there would have been no need to frame Kate. She smiled. “Congratulations, John.” But she couldn’t help wondering if Kalix had been the one to tell the director about Langston’s misstep. She decided it didn’t really matter. He had helped her escape custody, cleared her through his contacts, and actually saved Vail’s life in the process. Even if he had dimed out his boss, she had to give him a pass.
“Okay,” the director said, “everybody get out of here and go back to work.”
Kate opened the door to her office. The piles of mail and reports completely covered her desk. She stepped around behind it and started prioritizing the stacks. After an hour she could see that it was going to take at least a week of twelve- to fourteen-hour days to catch up. But suddenly there seemed to be a greater priority—to find out what Vail was doing. She locked the door and headed for the garage.
She let herself into the Sixteenth Street off-site and found Vail lying on the couch staring up at the wall. There seemed to be even more paper covering it than she remembered. Vail looked over at her absentmindedly and then back at the wall without saying anything. He hadn’t shaved and appeared to not have slept. “I thought you might be sleeping,” she said.
“I found a spy we missed.”
“What?”
Vail got up. “I’m starving. Do you want something?” He went into the kitchen and took some cold cuts out of the refrigerator for a sandwich.
“No.” She followed him. “Who did we miss?”
Without answering her, he started to make the sandwich, and although he wouldn’t look at her, she could see a small smirk on his face. She slapped his arm. “Come on, Vail.”
He put the sandwich on a paper plate and walked into the workroom. On the table was a digital recorder. He pushed the Play button and took a bite of his sandwich.
“Hello, it’s me—you know, Preston. I’ve got those infrared facial-recognition schematics you wanted, but the price has gone up. This time I want a hundred thousand dollars in cash, just for me. I’ve been getting the short end while taking all the chances. So this will keep it, you know, level and true. You’ve got my number.”
“Notice anything about that?” Vail asked. There was a knock downstairs. Kate didn’t answer, so he pressed Play again. “I’ll get the door.”
It was Bursaw. “Next time you’re going to skip a meeting, how about letting me know? I don’t enjoy being that close to the director.”
“He’s an honorable man.”
“He’s still the boss. My personnel file has many unanswered questions in it that I don’t need someone at that level looking at.”
“Come on, Kate’s upstairs.”
When they walked into the workroom, Kate was a little animated and said, “I think I know what you’re talking about, Steve. Hi, Luke.”
Vail said to her, “Okay, fire away.”
Vail looked at Bursaw to see if he was curious. “Do I need to know?” he asked.
“It’s part of the Russian business. It’s something I’m going to have to take care of before we get back to Sundra.”
“I thought everyone was dead.”
“Apparently we missed one,” Vail said.
“And I assume, because I’m going to be given the SS blood oath again, that no one else is to know about whatever the new plot calls for.”
Kate said, “Don’t you think we owe it to John Kalix to cut him in on this? He’s an AD now.” Kate told Vail about the promotion that morning.
“Then we owe it to him to keep him out of it. He’s back to the rules. Let’s allow him to enjoy his promotion for a day or two before we make him sorry he accepted it. Luke, can you give us a hand?”
Bursaw shook his head. “Okay, but this time I want first shot at the insanity plea.”
Although Vail had given Bursaw the broad strokes of the Calculus investigation when he’d agreed to help with Kate, he hadn’t told him the specifics about how the double agents had been uncovered through the Ariadne thread left by the Russians. “The first clue was a series of dots and dashes etched into the side of the DVD that Calculus left for us. That led us to a phone in the Russian embassy and an access code. Here’s the message.” He played it again for Bursaw.
Then Vail said, “And now, since the deputy assistant director has apparently figured out where we went wrong, she’ll explain.”
She said, “Let me give you a brief rundown on how we found these moles. The first one, Charles Pollock, we were given his initials and, to simplify it, where he worked. From that we recovered a DVD that recorded him trading classified documents for cash. In each case that’s what we were supplied with, a way to identify the mole and physical evidence of his spying. And in each case there was a hidden or coded clue about how to find the next one. These are what we followed that led to recovering the phony evidence against me. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes.”
“So on the Pollock DVD, besides the payoff, the edge had, in Morse code, a telephone number. When we called the number, we got that message you just heard played. And, as you heard at the end of it, there was a touch-tone number being dialed. We assumed that it was another code to identify the caller named Preston who was talking about the infrared technology at the beginning of the recording. We broke down that code, and it led up to a bank box that belonged to Yanko Petriv, the NSA translator. Things were moving pretty fast right then, so we went after Petriv, thinking he was the one selling the facial-recognition schematics. But what we didn’t take the time to consider was that Petriv was born in Bulgaria and would probably have an accent, since he spoke Eastern European languages well enough to be a translator. The voice on the recording is definitely American, maybe upper Wisconsin or Minnesota. And he’s talking about some very classified technology. Not something a translator would have access to.”
Bursaw said, “Let me see if I got this right. The Preston recording is not this guy Petriv, but someone working in technology, selling it to the Russians.”
“Right.”
“That means that the recording is the evidence?”
“It’s not as prominent as the others, but that’s what it looks like. That’s part of the reason we skimmed over it and missed him.”
“So how are you supposed to identify him?”
“I don’t know. The whole thing was a sham so I’d wind up in prison and out of Rellick’s way. It didn’t have to be flawless. It just had to move us along the chain of spies until it got to me.”
Vail said, “For it to be convincing, there had to be enough information contained in the phone message for us to identify him. That’s the only possibility.”
“Play it again, Steve,” Bursaw said.
Vail started the recorder and set it down on the table between them. When it finished, Bursaw smiled. “Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Vail asked.
“ ‘Level and true.’ Did you notice how it’s emphasized slightly? Just like ‘Preston.’ ”
Vail played it again, and he and Kate listened more closely. “You’re right,” he said.
Bursaw went over to the desktop computer and queried “level and true.”
“ ‘The Air Force Song,’ ” he said. “Fourth verse, second line: ‘Keep the wings level and true.’ ”
“Our guy is in the air force,” Vail said. “That makes a lot more sense with the ‘infrared facial-recognition schematics.’ And who knows what else he has access to and is selling to the Russians right now? Someone with this kind of access could do a ton of damage.”
Kate said, “There’s a lot of air force personnel within a hundred miles.”
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