Last Chance to Die

10



Vail was sitting at the kitchen table with his injured hand unwrapped, trying to cut away the stitches with a small pair of scissors when Kate came in. Without a word, she took them from him and turned his hand over so she could see the sutures better. With tiny, careful snips, she cut them loose and then pulled each one out slowly. “It looks pretty good.”

He flexed his hand into a fist and then pressed the injured edge against the table. “It feels fine. What did Langston have to say last night?”

“In a very official monotone, he thanked me for the information and said he would have Kalix get to work on it. On the way over here, John called and said that after a discreet call to a contact at the Old Dominion Bank he was told that box 74 was at their Vienna, Virginia, branch. He is meeting with the prosecutor at eleven and will meet us at the bank at one o’clock unless we hear otherwise.”

Vail flexed his hand again. “Did you tell him how we connected the identities?”

“No, but he’s got to be starting to wonder.”

“Don’t forget, he’s an administrator. He’s used to figuring out what to do when answers are brought to him, not where they came from.”

“Let’s hope it stays that way.”

Vail checked his watch. “We’ve got to talk to those homicide detectives about Pollock. We should be done in time to get to the bank.”

“What are you going to tell them about why we were looking for him?”

“We’ll tell them it’s a terrorist investigation. Very hush-hush.”

“You know there are laws about lying to the police, even here in Washington.”

“With these guys’ caseloads, do you think they’re going to worry about whether it was terrorism or counterintelligence? They’re probably trying to figure out how to get fifteen minutes’ more sleep a day.”

After the homicide interviews, it was almost one o’clock by the time Vail and Kate arrived at the bank in Vienna. Bill Langston and John Kalix were already there, waiting for them in the parking lot. While she got out and went back to talk to Langston, Vail opened the trunk and loaded his briefcase with evidence gloves and envelopes. Kate came back and handed Vail the court order, which he also put in his briefcase. “Did Kalix have any trouble getting it?” he asked.

“Some. The whole thing is a little more complicated because of the secrecy angle. And you’ve got to admit that we are reading the tea leaves as far as what that message says. It could be an entirely different code. But I guess John finally wore them down.”

“It’s going to be embarrassing if we’ve come up with the wrong person,” Vail said.

“Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind. They’re going to wait in the car so it doesn’t look like the FBI is overrunning the bank,” she said.

Behind closed doors Kate and Vail explained to the manager about the need for confidentiality due to national security. He seemed to take the warning seriously. The bank computer revealed that an Alex Markov had rented safe-deposit box number 74 with a second name on the account of Yanko Petriv. The bank manager printed out all the account information and gave it to them.

For employment Markov had said that he was a correspondent for the Moscow newspaper Izvestia. For his phone number, he had given the same one Vail and Kate had called at the Russian embassy to receive the clue to Spy Number Two’s identity. Vail thought it was a nice little touch by Calculus to tell them they were on the right track. Apparently there was an Ariadne thread after all.

Vail also suspected that the name Markov was another false identity that Calculus had used to open the account. The bank box was smart, a way to transfer money and documents without the risk of being seen together. At least that’s how Calculus would have sold the idea to Petriv. But now it looked as if Calculus had done it to set him up. It was an easy way to plant and protect evidence that, because Petriv’s name was the only true name on the box, provided irrefutable proof of treason.

Now Vail needed to determine if Yanko Petriv was the mole’s real name. His employer was listed as the U.S. government. The phone number had a Virginia area code. “Can we get into the box without anyone else knowing?” Vail asked the manager.

“Sure. Just let me go tell my assistant that the boxes are closed for the next hour due to a lock malfunction. Then I’ll take you down there. We’re going to have to break into the box. If either of the box holders wants in, they won’t be able to access it after we replace the lock. By law, the next time they try to access it, we’ll have to tell them that the FBI was here and that a court order was served.”

Vail wrote down his cell-phone number and handed it to the manager. “If either of them shows up, call me immediately.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, let’s open it.”

After the manager oversaw the drilling of the lock on box 74, he led Kate and Vail to a small room and left them, closing the door behind him. Kate said, “Think Markov is Calculus?”

“You recognized the phone number, too. If he is, that should mean that whatever is in this box has a lead to the next name.” He lifted the lid, and they both put on evidence gloves. Inside were banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills. A quick count revealed almost forty thousand dollars. There were also a number of documents, most of which had CLASSIFIED stamped on them. Other pages included some handwritten lists, which were mostly names and phone numbers. Underneath them were two passports, one Czechoslovakian in the name of Lev Tesar and a Hungarian one with the name Oszkar Kalman. Kate opened them both and saw that although the hair color and length were different in the photos, it was the same individual. She said, “Looks like part of Mr. Petriv’s compensation package included escape plans.”

“Notice anything else about this?”

“What?”

“If they were using this box as a dead drop, there should be only money in here, or documents, not both.”

“Which means what?”

Vail studied the account printout the manager had given him. “Two weeks ago there was activity four days in a row. Petriv came the first day to put documents in the box. Markov—or Calculus, if you prefer—came the next day to remove them and leave money. The third day Petriv comes back and verifies the payment and moves almost ten thousand to his checking. On the fourth day, Markov makes sure some of the money is still there and puts back the documents, or probably copies of them, for us to recover. He knew that Petriv wouldn’t go back into the box until another exchange was set up. That left everything there for us to find.”

“Which we hope means that Calculus hid a clue to the next name in this pile of documents,” Kate said. She examined the papers more closely. “According to some of the stampings on the pages, I think these might be NSA reports. I’ve seen similar ones. If they are, maybe this is the intelligence agent that Calculus was referring to. Maybe there were only two spies he was going to give us.”

“Maybe,” Vail said. “Let’s pack everything up. Keep your fingers crossed that Langston won’t want to see any of it.”

“I’ll make sure he doesn’t,” Kate said.

“How are you going to do that?”

She said, “We’ll give him Petriv’s name and phone number and tell him we need him to find out who Petriv really is and where he works. A little distraction.”

“It’s obvious that somewhere in your life someone taught you some bad habits.”

Vail pushed the code into the off-site’s alarm. As he and Kate climbed the stairs, he asked, “Did Langston seem satisfied with the division of labor on Mr. Petriv?”

“He seemed suspicious. I know he can be a little pompous, but don’t take him for a fool.”

“Define ‘suspicious.’ ”

“He asked me how we came up with the bank-box information. I told him we stumbled across it. He pressed me, and when I wouldn’t be more specific, I think he assumed we had done something illegal. Of course he didn’t want any of that to get on his shoes. But when I told him we’d look over everything from the box and let him know if there’s anything of interest, I got the feeling this is the last time we’re going to get away with disguising light lifting as heavy lifting.”

“Let’s worry about next time next time.”

After putting on a fresh pair of gloves, Kate handed a set to Vail. He spread the documents out on the table, and she asked, “How do you want to do this?”

“Let’s split them into two piles. You read one while I go through the other. If we don’t find anything, we’ll switch.”

After a few minutes, he said, “I think this document is talking about a wiretap. It refers to a target phone. Can you call and see what the number is?”

She dialed headquarters and after a short conversation hung up. “It’s an importer that specializes in items from Eastern Europe.”

“What government agencies specialize in wiretaps of East Europeans?”

“Which ones don’t?” She smiled. “I’d better call Personnel and make sure that Petriv isn’t a Bureau employee.”

Vail continued looking through the papers while she made the call. After hanging up, she said, “He’s not one of ours, at least not under the name Yanko Petriv. That leaves the likely suspects CIA and NSA.”

“Then your initial guess of NSA is probably a good one. Just make sure you act surprised when Langston calls.”

They both went back to reading the documents. After twenty more minutes, Vail pushed his last item across the table and leaned back in his chair and waited for Kate to finish.

Finally she set down her last page. “Any anomalies?”

“None. You?” he asked.

“Other than two blank sheets of paper stapled together with a couple of dates written at the bottom of one, nothing.”

“Let me see them?”

She searched through the stack of pages and pulled them out.

Vail held the two papers gently between his fingers. The bottom one was a common size, about eight and a half by eleven, but the one stapled on top of it was an eight-inch square. At the base of the full-size page were the dates 12/27 and 1/6. They were written with the same careful penmanship and medium-blue ink that had been used to inscribe “Ariadne” on the water-soluble envelope. “This is what we’re looking for. And these sheets have one additional anomalous quality: They’re glossy.”

“Which means?”

He turned them over a few times, finally holding each page up to the light at different angles. He took them over to the window and raised the shade. Tilting the larger page up to the bright sunlight, he shifted it around for a few more seconds. He held up the smaller one. “This is the same size as what else?”

“I don’t know, what?”

He went over to the desk, set down the pages, and put the fingerprint magnifier on top of the square sheet.

“A fingerprint card,” she said. “That’s why he cut it to that size. So we’d recognize it.”

Vail went back to the window and used the natural light to examine the smaller page with the loupe. Then he flipped it behind the full sheet and examined its surface. “I know that engineers have a reputation for not being creative, but I think Calculus is an exception. It’s so simple. And so ingenious.”

“What is it?”

Vail held up both his hands and spread the fingers apart. “What am I holding up?”

“Two hands,” she said. “Ten fingers.”

“Another name for fingers.”

“I don’t know . . . ‘digits.’ What?” Vail didn’t answer but watched her face. All of a sudden, it dawned on her. She took the loupe from Vail’s hand and locked her eye against it, running it over both sheets. When she straightened up, she smiled. “You’re right, it is ingenious. He’s using fingerprints as a code.”

“Each finger has a number on the fingerprint card we use. The right thumb is number one, all the way to the left pinkie being number ten—or, for code purposes, zero.”

After a few seconds, she again scanned the larger sheet. “The message is on this page, but we wouldn’t be able to assign a number to each one without a control set of prints. The fingerprint card, so to speak”—she bent over the smaller page and ran the magnifier across it to confirm what she was about to say—“has a set of ten in the same order in which they’d be rolled during an arrest. From them we know what number to assign to the latents on the big page, which is the code to lead us to the next mole,” Kate said. “But then what do the dates mean?”

“I don’t know. First we’ve got to get both of these pages fumed so we can see exactly what Calculus is telling us.”

Vail’s cell phone rang. It was Luke Bursaw. “Steve, remember we talked about seeing if the police department had any similar patterns of missing females? Well, they do. I got copies of their reports and was wondering if you could give me a hand for a couple of hours.”

“Hold on a second.” Vail covered the phone. “It’s Luke. He needs some help. An hour or two. It’ll take that long to get those pages processed, won’t it?”

“With the fuming process, yes. Go ahead, I’ll get this done.”

“Luke, why don’t you come over here. . . . Okay, I’ll see you then.”

After he hung up, Kate asked, “You’re going to let him see all this?” She waved a hand at all the documents and photos covering the wall.

“First of all, he is an agent. Second of all, he’s Luke. I’ll ask him to pretend that it isn’t there, and he will.”

“You’re right.” As though they were as fragile as archival material, Kate cautiously packed up the two sheets of paper, threading them into a clear plastic envelope before putting them into her briefcase. “I’ll call you when I’m done. You and Luke aren’t going to get lost, I hope. Remember, we’re in a race here.”

“He said a couple of hours. If it takes longer, you’re going to have to yell at him.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last six months it’s who to yell at.”