“I follow orders even when I don’t agree. I was a combat medic in a past life. She was hurt bad, a bullet to her chest, broken bones, but Grace wanted her back in D.C. So I patched her up and put her on a CIA medevac chopper home. Did she make it? I don’t know.”
Mike gave him the fish eye. “Of course you’re lying.”
He had the gall to grin. “Nah, not about this. Far as I know, this ain’t classified. Can I have my cell now, to call Melody? No one else, I promise.”
Mike said, “No,” and she turned away and called Zachery.
“Agent Caine, is everything all right? Ben went tearing out of here, his hair on fire. And Louisa told me Nicholas has a bullet hole in his jacket sleeve.”
“We’re fine, sir,” she said, and she briefed him on the situation. “Did you agree that Nicholas and I should leave immediately for Langley to meet with a CIA agent named Carl Grace?”
“Yes. You and Agent Drummond have been asked to make an appearance at Langley to get a full debrief on COE and the Bayway bombing. I assume Dillon Savich has already called you, told you of our new interface with D.C.?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Speaking of Bayway, we’ve got the analysis of the bomb. It’s not exactly what we were expecting.”
“Tell me.”
“Problem was, there wasn’t much to find, which means it was small, Mike, very small.”
“But the load was huge.”
“Yes. We’ve got very small pieces of carbon-fiber casing, but the internal mechanism was blown to smithereens. It seems there was some sort of timer inside we haven’t seen before. Putting together what we found, I’d say the whole bomb was no bigger than a watch battery.”
This wasn’t good. But then again, after actually being in the middle of the havoc that bomb had created, she wasn’t all that surprised. “So we’re talking some sort of advanced technology?”
“Very advanced nanotechnology, and that word gives us all chills after Manfred Havelock and his micro-nukes.
“It’s a very different bomb from the others COE have used—plain old Semtex. So what’s this all about? Where did COE get this marvel? And what are their plans now? That’s what the CIA better tell us.
“Oh, yes,” Zachery continued, “we finally identified a badly burned body in the blast center—it’s your drunk barfly, Larry Reeves.”
“I guess I’m not surprised. The man made a very poor decision.”
“Ben’s been taking apart his financials. We’ll find the thread.”
“Sir, there’s something else. This meeting with the CIA—they’re going to tell us about how they had an undercover agent in the group. Her name is Vanessa Grace, she’s the redheaded woman, and her uncle is her handler. He’s the one who wants to meet with us.”
Silence, then, “Her uncle? When Carl Grace called me, needless to say, he didn’t tell me about his niece. Talk about tough—can you imagine? Well, now, this meeting with Grace at Langley, I imagine the CIA finally understands they can’t keep us in the dark any longer spouting their party line—protect state secrets, jeopardize national security, blah, blah, blah.”
“Sir, I know her, I know Vanessa Grace, or I did. We were at Yale together, in the same undergrad psych program.”
Zachery whistled. “Tell me about her.”
“I remember she was smart, very steady, capable, but it’s been eight years since I saw her last. It looks like she was the female victim from the Brooklyn fire, and also we’ll find her on the videotapes from Bayway. I saw her this morning on one of the feeds before we left for Brooklyn. I didn’t recognize her then, but I knew the woman seemed familiar. Ben was running the tapes for me.”
“No idea if she’s still alive?”
“No, sir. But you know what this means—the CIA had an agent operating undercover on American soil. Big no-no.”
“Indeed,” Zachery said, and she could practically hear him mentally sorting through everything.