The End Game

“And who might your boss be?”

“Let me use my phone and I’ll call him. He can debrief you from here. Please, don’t arrest Melody.”

“Not a chance in Hell, mate. You give me names, I run a background to make sure you aren’t lying, then you can talk to him.”

Swanson pulled the cloth away from his nose, saw no new blood, and managed a sneer. “And here I thought all you FBI types were nerds and wing tips. But not you, you’re a real tough guy.” He touched his fingers to his nose. “I gotta say, you have a mean right hook.”

“The contact, now, or you’ll see my left jab, and trust me, you won’t like it.”

Swanson spit blood onto the garage floor. “All right, all right. Lighten up. My boss is going to rip you a new one, not me.” He read off a number.

Ben typed it in on his tablet. “It’s legit. Goes to Langley.”

Mike said, “Call it, Ben.”

Ben dialed the number from his own phone. It co

A male voice said, “Craig? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, there’s—”

Nicholas spoke over him. “This is Special Agent Nicholas Drummond, FBI. Please identify yourself.”

There was a brief pause. “Carlton Grace. CIA.”

Ben started tapping away, looking for the name. A few moments later, an eyebrow raised, he nodded.

“Agent Grace, we have your subordinate Craig Swanson in custody. He was—”

“Drummond?” They heard a whistle. “Well, how’s that for luck. I already spoke to your boss, Milo Zachery. You and Mike Caine need to come down to Langley to meet with me right away.”

“You never know, do you?” Craig Swanson said, gri

Nicholas managed to resist smacking him again. His spook boss had already cleared it with Zachery? What was going on?

Nicholas said, “We’re not going anywhere unless you tell us right this minute what this is all about.”

•   •   •

Carlton Grace laughed low and quick. “What’s wrong with you? You know I can’t tell you a thing, not on this open line. Agents Savich and Sherlock will be here as well. It’s time. Oh, and Drummond? Bring Swanson with you. He needs a few lessons in subterfuge, apparently.”

The line went dead. Swanson was still gri

“Ain’t that a kick?” Ben said.

Nicholas looked at Mike. “What in the bloody hell is going on here?”

She was playing with her ponytail, staring off at nothing in particular.

“Mike?”

“Nicholas. Remember I told you the redhead was familiar to me? Well, I remember who she is.”

“How do you know? Facial recognition hasn’t come through; we don’t even have Mrs. Antonio’s sketch of her.”

“Everything clicked into place. Her name is Vanessa Grace, the same name as Craig’s boss. Is she related, Craig?”

“Yes, he’s her uncle.”

“I went to Yale with her. Nicholas, she’s got to be CIA, too.”

Nicholas’s eyebrows went up a good inch. “You’re telling me COE has a CIA agent inside?”

“Had,” Swanson called out. “Not any longer.”

Nicholas turned on him. “Bugger off, Swanson. You people, you’re as bad as the Foreign Office. You had someone inside and you didn’t bother to let us know? Particularly after Bayway—why weren’t we informed?”

“Hey, man, that decision is way above my pay grade.”

All Nicholas could think of was how many lives could have been saved if the CIA had only told them about their undercover agent. He wasn’t surprised, this sort of interagency secrecy was one of the reasons he’d left MI6.

“Mike, please call Zachery and verify this. I’m calling Savich.”

45

KING TO G1

Before Nicholas had a chance to call Savich, his cell phone blasted out one of Sousa’s marches. Nigel, he thought, and when had he programmed that bouncy hit in?

No, not Nigel. Adam Pearce. At last.

He nodded at Mike and stepped away.

“Adam, what do you have for me?”

“Enough news I hope you’ve got a computer in front of you to type it all.”

“I’m in a basement garage in Chelsea with FBI agents and a moronic CIA undercover, so please keep it simple. I’ll call back for the rest.”

“Understood. You know that body you’re ru

“I have not. And I must ask, how do you know before I’ve been notified?”

“You asked me to do all I could to find a way into COE. Since I work for you, it’s not like I hacked into any databases, not technically. And I do have a way in, if you’re interested.”

Nicholas said, “Adam. Let me say I’m very glad you’re working for the FBI and not against them. And you’re entirely correct: technically, you can do what’s needed to help solve this case. Tell me, who is the dead guy?”

“Ian McGuire. He’s an IRA bomber—well, he was until he got shot, then burned. He was the head of the Londonderry branch. We’re talking a guy who has a sheet the length of my arm.”

“Do you know when he came to the U.S.?”

“Good news and bad news. McGuire’s been here for several months, with his whole crew of fanatic nutcases, maybe eight of them, all long-timers. They came through different airports on different days, under known aliases.”

“How did we miss this? They’re on the watch list, aren’t they?”

“A lot of people are on the watch list, Nicholas. I believe I was on it for a while myself. It doesn’t take any great brainpower; people cross the borders all the time.”

“I trust you know where they’ve been, what they’ve been doing?”

“As much as I can reconstruct. I don’t know where his team is, but I think it’s safe to assume they allied themselves with COE. Speaking of which, let me skip ahead. I found the communications between COE and Gunther Ansell, the whiz in Germany. They paid old Gunther ten million for his proxy servers, then manipulated the code to insert the worm into the oil companies. All it took was a single click on an e-mail and the whole network got infected. Easy.”

“And then someone killed Gunther. So where are they, Adam?”

Adam sighed. “That’s the bad news, Nicholas. Until twelve hours ago, they were in Brooklyn. But now? I don’t know. They’re offline. There hasn’t been a peep on any of their IPs, not since the cyber-attack began. I’ve been sending feelers everywhere I know, but so are half the hackers in the U.S., looking to party along. COE went dark after the attack, and there’s nothing else I can do until they come back online, so I can’t get in if they’re not answering the door.

“But I do have something you’ll like. I found an e-mail generated out of one of their known IP addresses to a guy at a brokerage firm on Wall Street by the name of Porter Wallace. Wallace runs a couple of major hedge funds and is young, really young, to have so much power. He’s even been written up in The Wall Street Journal a few times. I can’t get into his system without an epic hack, and I’m juggling five searches as it is. I’ve sent you all the information I’ve found. You have a lot of manpower there. If your onsite team can start taking apart the data—”

“I will set them to it immediately.”

“Good, because there’s a possibility we can find a trace from earlier to tell us where they were headed next. Right now I can find no rhyme or reason to their targets.”

“What about the targets themselves? There must be a reason COE attacked the places they did. It takes too much time and effort and coordination to set the bombs, like getting plant plans to know where to set the bombs, like at Bayway, with this guy Larry Reeves. There has to be a tie-in. Find it for me, Adam.”

“I’m working as fast as I can. I’ll keep you updated.” And he was gone.