“The safe houses seem to have the same pattern for hiding cash boxes in the floors and tucking documents behind ductwork. How long was this house owned?”
“It was purchased over thirty years ago. You have to admire the KGB for its long-term commitment to infiltration. They were good about giving themselves places to go that would attract no attention. Money was hidden in places they might use once or twice in a decade.”
Darcy tugged open the next envelope. It was a refresher document on the meaning of the code words stamped on reports. Learning them was one of the necessary evils of working in a place that used letters to cloud even what they wanted to say. She scanned the document for new code words, feeling she should at least attempt to remember them. GAMMA was highly sensitive signal intelligence; ZARF was intelligence picked up from eavesdropping satellites; VRK—Very Restricted Knowledge. She flipped a couple more pages. “Do I need to know the latest ways to confuse us?”
“Just read what I give you. You’ll be fine.”
She pitched the report in the burn bag as the report of names and acronyms was itself red-striped and stamped classified.
Darcy slit open a pale blue envelope. She saw the first of the text on the page as she took it from the envelope and stopped, leaving the page half inside the envelope. “Well, well. What is this?” She pushed the box of mail aside and the recycling bin back under her desk. She elbowed aside the papers on her desk to clear a space.
“Something interesting?”
“What was Sergey’s authentication code during his embassy days?”
“K7942 and the date of the postmark.”
She turned over the envelope to check the cancellation stamp. “He sent us a note. It’s postmarked the day we found that sniper.” The delay caused by the irradiation process to keep the mail safe had just badly disrupted a priceless lead.
“Gloves.”
She was already tugging open the side drawer of her desk. She kept a box of latex gloves available, using them most often for the film work she did on the light board where fingerprints clouded images.
She pulled the piece of paper carefully from the envelope and gently laid it open. “The brittleness is going to be a problem.” The page crease cracked under the mere pressure of her fingers. “It’s his signature.”
Gabriel read over her shoulder.
We need to meet. I propose one month from today, June 24. The Fairmont Mall in Fairmont, Florida, at noon, the rare stamp and coins display of our mutual friend Thomas. I’ll bring something worth your time. I’ll be alone, bring all the security you like. I’d like five minutes face-to-face, just you and me. They had my granddaughter, Darcy. Send someone else, and I won’t show.
Darcy read the note twice. “It’s an interesting offer, Gabe.”
“I’m not sending you to meet with him again.”
She leaned back to look up at him. “That’s your emotion talking, not logic.”
“He broke his word last time; I don’t trust him. If he has something to share, he can do a dead drop and pass it to us. He wants to cut a deal, we can talk on the phone. He knows our number.”
She read the note again. She waffled on whether she trusted Sergey or not. She wanted to know what he had to say. And she wasn’t interested in leaving him out there. “He broke his word to us, so we’re not bound to keep ours. Let’s pick him up. All it will take is me as the bait.”
Twenty
* * *
JUNE 24
Monday, 9:40 a.m.
Fairmont, Florida
For days leading up to the meeting, FBI and CIA agents had been slipping into the hotel across from the Fairmont Mall. Darcy would make contact, and FBI officers would move in and arrest Sergey. In theory it was simple; in reality no one in the room expected today to go smoothly.
Darcy slipped on the watch the technician handed her. It told the time but it was basically all microphone. It was so sensitive the problem would be filtering out all the background noise from shoppers around her. It would pick up Sergey’s every word on tape.
Darcy leaned against Sam for balance as she worked to slip on the white sneakers that were tagged to track where she went. “You’ll be roving?” Sam hadn’t given her a choice about his involvement. After barking at her for the mere idea of meeting with Sergey, he said he was coming. The problem with having a relationship with a SEAL was his protective streak was about a mile wide. She’d protested for form, but it was kind of nice to have him here. She trusted the agents brought in, but they had other objectives as well as her safety on their plate. Sam would have only one, and Gabriel couldn’t attempt a foot race if it was required.
The cops couldn’t do much but give their agreement, for unless they detained Sergey the mall was a public place. The blueprints on the table showed not only the stores and the various dressing rooms, bathrooms, and elevators, but also the employees only areas and corridors behind the stores where merchandise was moved.
“I’ll be near you, and Wolf will be above us scanning the area from the food court.”
“You have to give Sergey credit; a craft fair with booths cluttering the mall hallways gives him optimum safeguards: dense public traffic and numerous ways to approach the meeting place.”
“Just stay in your assigned box, Dar, and let him come to you.”
“He’s not going to be easy to identify. You can guarantee he won’t look anything like that photo.” There were still two hours before the meeting, and ten agents were already throughout the area.
“I’ll spot him,” Sam replied. “You still owe me a day sailing.”
“When this is over I’m taking a week off.”
She slipped on glasses and looked at the monitor. “How are visuals, Gabe?” There was a thin wire camera in the frames of the glasses. Her partner was already in the command post van in the mall parking lot, tracking cameras that monitored every inch of the meeting area. She had audio with him through a small earpiece and a miniature microphone in her flag lapel pin.
“Tiny. I get about fifteen degrees directly where you are looking, but it’s the best that lens can do.”
“I’ll look around a lot,” she promised. Sam handed her the shopping bag she would be carrying. It contained her special gift from the Chief of Disguise to be used if needed. “Gabriel, I’m coming to join you at the van. Shut off the video for a minute.”
“Why?”
“I plan to kiss Sam good-bye.”
Her partner chuckled and she heard a click.
“It’s been kind of crowded around here lately,” Darcy said, smiling at Sam.
“It has indeed.” Sam rested his hands on her shoulders. “You enjoy this fieldwork.”
“More than I do sitting behind a desk.”
“You’ll play today by the book?” Sam asked.
“I’ll get the job done.”
“I note the change. I’ll be close by. If anything goes wrong, you look for me.”
Darcy rested her hands against his. “That’s a promise.” Sam and Tom would both have audio, hearing everything that was going on.
“Come here, gorgeous.” Sam drew her to him and claimed her lips in a quick kiss. “You probably won’t see me very often, but you’ll never be out of my sight.”
She squeezed his hands and stepped back. “Gabriel, I’m on the way.”
It was time to go to work.
* * *
The rare stamp and coin booth was set up in corridor E of the mall. On the left side of it was a booth selling customized painted mailboxes, on the right a booth selling sculptured candles. The stores in corridor E included two small clothes boutiques, a Hallmark card shop, a candy store, a music store, and was anchored by a department store.
Darcy entered the area ten minutes before the prearranged meeting time, carrying with her the shopping bag with her gift from the Chief of Disguise and three packages bought from stores as she walked through the mall. A backup microphone was built into the handle of the shopping bag. The pack
ages purchased during her walk through the mall let her control space around by simply where she set them down.
The rare stamp and coin display was owned and managed by Thomas Youst, a mutual friend of both agencies. He was a Canadian, used by both sides over the years as a trusted courier for documents. His business gave him a reason to travel wherever he was needed. The CIA hadn’t told Thomas they were coming, and she doubted Sergey had either. But if for some reason Sergey was not going to show, Darcy figured Thomas would be holding the message.
She stopped at the east table of the three tables that made up his booth and looked at one of the stamp books. Twenty bucks for a stamp, all the way to several stamps priced in the hundreds. If she’d been a collector, Thomas’s booth would be a fascinating stop.
“Have a favorite era?”
“I collect by topic. I love butterflies,” she mentioned, “and dogs.”
Thomas didn’t even blink at the message, he just reached for the other photo album and turned it back four pages. “Have you seen Scotty, President Truman’s dog?”
Maybe she would start a collection. The stamp was gorgeous.
She set down her packages. “May I?”
“Sure.”
She tagged the sheet with one of the Post-it notes provided and turned pages in the display book, looking at what else he had.
Thomas stepped over to the cash register to serve a customer buying a silver eagle.
Now these were pretty. She studied a set of four puppies that were on a Danish stamp.
“It’s overpriced.” Gabe’s warning came softly in her ear.
She smiled but didn’t answer him. She turned back to the Scotty. Christmas was five months and a day away. And they wanted Thomas to stay in business. She reached for her purse. Her company credit card came out. “Would you wrap these two please?” she asked Thomas, selecting both the terrier and the puppies.
“Darcy. Quit shopping. You’re on the job.”
She brushed back her hair and smiled again, knowing a camera was perched in the decorative ferns beside the staircase that had her face in view.
She had picked out four of the agents in the area, but Sam still escaped her. Most of the agents would be shopping within the stores in the area, awaiting word to move on Sergey. She didn’t bother to look at her watch. Sergey would not be late this time, knowing she’d leave rather than linger.
“Report in,” Gabe said, as he had done regularly since before she entered the area considered her box. One after the other agents reported in that they had seen no sign of Sergey.
Darcy signed her name on the credit card receipt and accepted the sack. “Thanks.”
She picked up her bags. She paused by the table of coins on the west side of the booth, admiring the gold maple leaf coins, and then walked toward the department store.
“Darcy, stay in your box.”
“I see him,” she murmured.
Two men heading toward her immediately found reasons to slow, pause, and window-shop so they could see what she did, then head back the way they had come.
Her heartbeat quickened as she contemplated what she was about to do. Where was Sam? She needed to know his location if she was going to pull this off. A man rose from the bench to her left and she realized somewhat startled that it was Sam. He’d changed clothes and was in a suit and tie talking with a woman. At first glance she had placed him as a businessman on his lunch break. Okay. She picked up her pace ever so slightly and angled to her right to skirt between two teenagers and a woman pushing a double stroller.
* * *
“Where’s she going?”
Sam heard the intensity of Gabriel’s words and felt the same concern as Darcy left her assigned security box and crossed the hallway into the department store. The agents were arrayed around the coin and stamp booth. By entering the store she was cutting down to a quarter the number of agents around her.
“Darcy, stop. Don’t follow him.”
Sam caught a look at the side of Darcy’s face as she entered the department store and turned toward the women’s dress department. The determination in her face meant she wouldn’t be stopping. She was heading somewhere intentionally. What had she seen? Sam hadn’t seen anyone he thought fit the basic profile of Sergey.
“Talk to me, Darcy,” Gabriel demanded. “Did anyone see what she saw or what she was passed?”
Darcy paused to allow a mom stepping off the store escalators with a toddler to pass by.
“Stop her. She just dumped the glasses and the watch,” Gabe demanded.
Sam was still thirty yards behind her, and the only two agents closer were on the wrong side of the traffic flow. Darcy disappeared from his sight as she turned into the congested area near the cosmetic counter leading into the women’s clothing department.
He never saw her again.
* * *
“This better be worth the official reprimand I’m going to get, Sergey.” Darcy set her tray down on the food court table.
“You haven’t left the mall,” he pointed out reasonably, sampling one of her nachos. Today he was a three-hundred-pound short man in a custom-made suit with a bold blue tie. Sitting on the table beside him was a salesman’s display case of fine writing pens. “You have to admit, the cheese makes the nachos. We don’t have as good a cheese sauce in Russia.”
His tray showed he’d already had two cheeseburgers and a plate of cheese fries. “I have to keep up appearances, you know,” he said, eyeing the tacos she bought. “The man you had in the bird’s-eye seat, watching the stamp and coin booth from here at the food court? He’s good. It took me almost an hour to realize he was also one of yours.”
“A friend of a friend.”
“Yes, I saw the others pick up your tail when you unexpectedly left. Sit down, my dear. Resting against that walker has to be tiring.”
She lowered herself to the seat, moving with the speed of a seventy-year-old. She’d dumped the glasses and watch in another woman’s shopping bag. Her tennis shoes with their tracking tags had been abandoned in the women’s dressing room along with the flag pin. The key Sergey had slipped her worked perfectly to the storage room door behind the rack of dresses being returned to the showroom floor. The walker was waiting for her beside a baby stroller as Sergey helped her to go either young or old. Darcy’s own shopping at the mall gave her the change of clothes. The Chief of Disguise at the Agency had given her the critical last item. The female FBI agent sent in to search the changing rooms had been too late to catch the metamorphosis.
Darcy had walked right by the agents canvassing the department store to find her. It was embarrassing to realize she could fool Sam as well. She had honestly thought he would recognize at least her eyes, but he’d not only stepped aside to give her the right of way in the aisle, he’d held the elevator door for her and asked if she was going up or down.
Darcy looked at Sergey and took a sip of her diet soda. “You’re as good as you used to be, but you are begging to be caught.” He had slipped the directions and the key into her pocket as she paused by the display of hand painted plates.
“Eat. If you want to take me in when we’re done with lunch, I promise to go with you quietly. But you and I need to talk.”
* * *
“Where did she go?” The latest officer to enter the van and ask that question got several nasty looks in reply. The van was crowded with men. Sam stood behind Gabriel, watching the tapes he was replaying. They had to find her before Sam let his anger boil. Even knowing the danger, she’d still ducked out on them. On him.
“There was the pass. Look at that. Slick as a professional pickpocket.” Gabe stopped the video and replayed frames one by one. The man was twenty years too young to be Sergey—bald, wearing a U.S. hockey team shirt and jeans with high-tops unlaced and shoelaces trailing. It couldn’t be Sergey, but it was, and something had clearly been given to Darcy.
“Come on, Darcy, when did you read it?” Gabriel asked, hitting the Play button.
/> She continued window-shopping as she made her way through the mall, wandering, shopping, so she would end up at the coin and stamp booth at the agreed upon time. “Your patience is killing me, Dar,” Gabe muttered, hitting the Fast-forward button.
“Whoa.” Sam’s hand tightened on Gabe’s shoulder. “There.”
Gabe stopped the playback. Darcy’s hand came out of her pocket. The view from the camera in the frame of her glasses remained on a pair of shoes in the display window while the security camera tracking her captured her hand coming up and resting against the glass briefly, then going back into her pocket. “She used the glass. Darcy, we are going to have words. Peripheral vision. She put the message on one pane of glass and read it in the other. Exactly like that sales poster reflects into both panes.”
“So we have no idea what he told her.”
“Only that she had a good forty minutes to think about what she was going to do,” Gabe said grimly. “Whatever was in that message, it was enough to have her breaking decades of trust between us. Would someone please tell me we’ve got Darcy’s sister on the phone and that she’s fine?” The possibility that the note said “I’ve got your sister” was a reality Gabriel had immediately jumped to as he saw his partner breaking with the plan.
“Her office says Amy’s out somewhere chasing a stolen truck, but they swear she’s fine.”
“I want her voice telling me that.”
“We’re working on it.”
Gabe rolled back his chair and tossed his earphones on the table.
Sam recognized extreme stress when he saw it. The man was at his limit. “You know her best, Gabe. What’s she likely to do?”
Gabriel punched a button to print the image of the man who had passed Darcy the note. “Not leave the mall. Sergey wants to talk with her and not get arrested, that’s one thing. But she’s not stupid enough to be alone with him again. Even if the worst case has happened, she wouldn’t leave the mall with him.”
Gabe picked up the image. “The odds Sergey still looks like this are nil, but get it out to the guys and let’s start combing that place end to end, starting with the second floor.”