Shadow Woman A Novel

Chapter Three



Information was everything. The gathering of it went on ceaselessly, every second of every day. Eyes and ears were everywhere, in one form or another. There were cameras, wiretaps—some warranted and some not—and keystroke loggers; cell phones were cloned or their calls simply captured; there was thermal imaging; there were GPS units that logged the position of both vehicles and cell phones, and even the old-fashioned method of human surveillance. Sifting through that monumental collection of information, separating the meaningful from the mundane, was a chore that never ended. With the completion of the NSA’s data center in Utah, there would be even more details about every call, every text, every e-mail for the computers to sort through, based on certain keywords that would trigger a closer look.

But even with all the high-tech stuff, there were still realtime, human eyes and ears that watched and listened, especially to sensitive cases that couldn’t be trusted to any computer program, no matter how advanced and top secret. If it was never in the data banks, then it couldn’t be mined, couldn’t be hacked.

Dereon Ashe had one of those sensitive-case jobs. He didn’t know everything about it, but what he did know was enough to make him wish he didn’t know anything, because he was damn certain this was the kind of shit that got people killed. Nevertheless, he and at least five other people endlessly monitored the woman known as Subject C—which always made him wonder exactly what had happened to subjects A and B—and examined every move she made, every call she placed or received, every detail of her life. It didn’t matter that her life was, as far as he could tell, pretty damn boring; it was minutely examined.

Damn boring, that is, until now.

First there were those weird numbers, which made him tense and quickly scribble them down, in case they meant something, then—“Oh, shit!” It was definitely an “oh shit” moment. Dereon rubbed his eyes, not because he was tired, but to give himself time to think. He was incredulous that something so simple—calling in sick—could blow up in their faces like this.

Quickly he punched the numbers to connect him with the agent in charge of this operation.

“Forge.”

The brusque identification by Al Forge made Dereon grimace with a combination of worry and alarm; he didn’t want this decision to be on him so he had to notify Forge, but at the same time, he didn’t like being in the crosshairs of Al’s attention. It gave him a goosey feeling, like ice cubes dripping down his back.

Swiftly and without any embroidering, he related what had just happened with Subject C. Though of course they knew her name, in conversation she was never identified. Subject C existed only to a very select group of people, of which he was one—damn his luck. He didn’t know what had happened with Subject C, and he never wanted to know. He watched her, he reported his findings, and he kept his nose out of business that wasn’t his. It seemed safer that way, because whatever had gone down had to have been seriously big shit.

“I’ll be right there,” said Forge, and dead air filled Dereon’s headset as the call was terminated.

He keyed back in to the surveillance audio and continued listening to Subject C, picking up where he’d left off. By the time Al Forge arrived, Dereon was able to bring him up to date on what had happened in that short interval.

Al scratched his jaw, his sharp gaze turned inward as he weighed events against possibilities. He was pushing sixty, his short hair gone mostly gray, his pale eyes a little less icy as age began to cloud them, but he was still as lean and hard as he had been when he was in the field. His face was lined by the weight of decisions he’d made, actions he’d taken. Dereon didn’t ever want to be in Al Forge’s position; nevertheless, he’d be hard put to think of anyone he respected more.

The silence wore on as Al stood there in thought, the seconds ticking past.

“C might not have noticed.” Dereon finally felt compelled to point out the obvious, just to break the silence.

The flicker of Al’s gaze sliced at him for the waste of time. Abruptly he said, “Put me through to Xavier.”

That was one of the most puzzling aspects about this job. Everything that happened with Subject C was reported to this Xavier, who, as far as Dereon could find out, was nothing more than someone who worked black ops; he wasn’t a supervisor, wasn’t in any position of power. There were, in fact, very few details readily available about the man, which in its way signaled that there was more to him than those few details revealed. Al was always the one who talked to him; even more remarkably, none of those conversations were ever recorded. But then, nothing about this situation was on the record. After every shift, all of the data on Subject C was erased.

A few strokes of the computer keys accomplished that. Al slipped on a headset. After a moment Xavier answered, his deep voice familiar and remote, as if he had never been touched by any emotion. “Yeah.” There was something in that remoteness that made Dereon glad he’d never have to meet Xavier in person, that Xavier didn’t know he even existed. His world and that of the black ops people were eons apart, and carefully kept that way.

Al said, “Subject C has possibly been alerted to a discrepancy in the timeline.” He paused. “Given that you’ve piggybacked your own surveillance system to ours, you already know this. I trust you haven’t done anything precipitous.”

Dereon swiveled around in his chair and stared at his superior in open astonishment. Of course they’d known that Xavier was in their system, but they never gave away information. Never. The smallest detail could give them an invaluable advantage—or, conversely, give one to the enemy. Exactly who the enemy was in this situation wasn’t clear, but he did know strategy, and knowledge was power. Al had just given away some power by letting Xavier know that they were aware of his activities. Now he knew that they knew that he knew—God, this sounded like some old vaudeville routine.

“You’d have been an amateur if you thought for a second that I wouldn’t.” The cool, disembodied voice registered a faint amusement.

Okay, that was another wrinkle, Dereon thought. Xavier had already known that they knew about his surveillance. Vaudeville? No, this was a chess game, played by two masters who evidently knew each other well. Dereon hated chess. It made his head hurt. For someone who was in his line of work, he really preferred that things be straightforward, uncomplicated, and exactly what they seemed.

He should have gone into accounting.

Al made an impatient gesture, then swiftly brought himself back to stillness, as if impatience was a luxury he couldn’t allow himself. “The point is, I’m not going to pretend to give you update reports that I know you already have. You want to know if I’ve been straight with you. I have, all the way. You also need to know that I’m not working with a hair trigger here. There’s no indication that the situation with Subject C has changed, and every reason to think it won’t.”

“So you called me because, what, you want reassurance that I won’t make a preemptive move? You know better than that. If I said so I’d be lying, and you wouldn’t believe me anyway because if you were in my position you’d be lying your ass off.”

That went without saying, so Al didn’t bother trying to deny it. In his job, in their jobs, they did whatever was necessary. Sometimes the necessary was ugly; that didn’t make it any less necessary.

“I don’t want to do anything that will cause harm to Subject C,” Al said, choosing his words carefully. “The situation is balanced.”

Xavier gave a short, humorless bark of laughter. “I’ve known from day one—hell, before that—that the situation is only as balanced as I make it. Your dilemma is that you don’t know what safeguards I put in place, or how many trip wires. Otherwise I’d have been dead years ago. You know it and I know it.”

“My job isn’t to kill patriots,” Al said, a quiet note entering his voice. He was a man who’d fought for his country on multiple levels for most of his adult life, and his creed was the same as Truman’s: the buck stopped with him. He wouldn’t throw any of the black ops people under the bus; if it became necessary, he’d sacrifice his own career and freedom first. The people who worked under him knew it; Dereon knew it. That inspired a very deep level of loyalty—except, it seemed, in Xavier.

“No, your job is to protect the country, whatever that means on any given day.” Cynicism laced Xavier’s words. “And I’m with you on that, normally.”

“Except in this situation.”

“Let’s just say I trust you as much as you trust me.”

“If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t still be on the job.”

“Unless your motive was to keep me busy and maybe out of the country.”

“I’d assume your trip wires would cover that contingency.”

“You’d assume right.”

“So we’re at a stalemate.”

“Remember the Cold War term? Mutual assured destruction? That works for me.”

“You’re making enemies,” Al said. “Powerful enemies, people who wonder why they should trust you when you obviously don’t trust them. You’re forcing them to see you as a threat.”

“I am a threat, unless they behave themselves. Yeah, I know, we can all hang together or we can hang separately, but I know these people. At some point, some son of a bitch is going to figure he can outsmart me and put this thing away forever. He’ll be wrong, but the shit will have hit the fan before he figures that out. So, yeah, regardless of what reassurances you give me, I’ll make my own decisions.”

Al was silent for a moment, deep in his stillness mode. Then he said, “Don’t assume that I’m the enemy. Just remember that. If I can help you, I will.”

Dereon worked that over in his head. With Al Forge, you never knew; he could either be on the level or he could be playing Xavier. Only time would tell.

That same curt laugh sounded in their headsets. “There’s another Cold War saying: Trust, but verify. Talk to you later, Forge.” There was a brief pause. “You too, Ashe. It is Dereon’s shift today, isn’t it? Or have I lost track?” The connection ended.

Dereon’s blood ran cold. He jerked his headset off and stared at Al, his expression frozen with horror. “H-how did he know that?” he stammered. “How the f*ck did he know my name?” Or what shift he worked, or anything at all about him? This was like attracting the attention of a velociraptor: nothing good could come of it.

Al closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because he’s Xavier, that’s how. Shit. This means he has a mole in here, or somehow he’s got eyes and ears on us that our sweepers didn’t pick up, or he got this location and followed us all to our homes. He’s a patient bastard; he’d spend weeks figuring everything out.”

Followed him home? Panicked nausea rose in Dereon’s throat. “He knows where I live? Where my wife and kids are?”

“Don’t worry. He won’t kill you unless he needs to.”

“That’s reassuring!” Dereon said sarcastically, too alarmed to care how he was talking to his superior.

“It is, actually.” Al heaved a weary sigh. “If he wanted you dead, you already would be. You have to understand how Xavier thinks. He didn’t let us in on that little secret to scare you shitless—though evidently he succeeded in doing that anyway.”

Being Forge, he couldn’t let Dereon’s panic pass by unremarked. He expected his people to be in control—of their jobs, of the situation, and most of all, of themselves. “He let us know that he’s on top of us, and he also knows that we now have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to find out exactly how he found out. We have to run security checks, we have to put fresh eyeballs on everyone who works here, and we have to turn our vehicles and homes inside out, looking for bugs.”

Dereon took a deep breath, forcing himself to look at this strategically, the way Forge was doing. “Will we have to move locations?”

“Possibly, but there’s no guarantee that he doesn’t have physical eyes on us and will simply have us followed to the new location, in which case we’ve gained nothing and wasted resources. There’s also the possibility that by reacting the way we now have to react, he’ll be able to learn even more about us by watching what we do.”

In other words, Xavier had them by the short hairs, and had his own reasons for letting them in on the secret.