“Boss, I think you better think this through again. Remember what happened when he took Sarah? You walked right into the deadliest trap he ever set to get her back. I don't think he understands that you wouldn't do that for everyone.”
Noah caught Sarah grinning at him, and she quickly turned away. He picked up his phone and dialed the main office again. A moment later he was talking with Doc Parker once more.
“Sir, we’ve come up with a theory. Can you tell me if anyone got into our personnel files during the attack?”
“Interesting. We weren’t compromised during the attack, no,” Parker said. “However, the computer guys say we've been hacked. It probably happened in the last forty-eight hours, and personnel files seemed to be the biggest target.”
“Interesting,” Noah said. “If the same people were behind the hack, then they already had the information that we thought they might've been after. Well, it was just a theory anyway.”
“What was the theory, Camelot?” Doc Parker asked.
“My team was speculating that if Nicolaich was involved, he might have been trying to learn about people from my past that I was close to. Someone he might use for bait, to draw me into a trap. I killed his son on my last mission, and then managed to expose him so that the Russian government was willing to declare him a rogue. We think it's a pretty safe bet that I'm high on his hit list.”
“Wait a minute, let's think this through,” Parker said. “We know that we were hacked, and our personnel records were gone through, but that was before the attack. The thing is, we didn't find out about the hack until after the attack occurred. It was while they were going through the computers to make sure we were still secure that they found some evidence that someone had been into the system. If we think about just how Machiavellian Andropov seems to think himself to be, then the attack may have been simply a shot fired across the bow. He wanted us to know that he'd already come in through the back door, but we wouldn't find any evidence of it unless he kicked in the front door, first.”
“Sir, did anyone actually see Andropov during the attack?”
“We've got two security camera images of a man that could conceivably be him. Facial recognition says it's about an eighty-eight percent match, and the build is right.”
“Too bad nobody got a bullet into him,” Neil muttered. “Might have ended this whole problem right off the bat.”
Noah chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment. “What about casualties on the other side, sir? Did our people manage to take out any of theirs?”
“Oh, yes, we did, we took out seven of them. We even captured three alive, but so far they aren't talking. I'm sure they will, though; we've got a girl down there in interrogation who can be extremely persuasive. If she manages to break him, I'll let you know what we learn.”
Noah thanked him, and ended the call. He turned to Moose and Neil.
“Okay, let's assume you're right. Neil, I want you to track down a couple of my old friends. Maybe Nicolaich wants to use them as bait for me, but let's see if we can turn the tables and use them as bait for him.”
“No problem, just give me names and somewhere to start.”
“Start with Molly Hanson. The last I knew, about a year and a half ago, she was working for Dexter Reedy, the big think tank in DC. She's a super genius and was my best friend when I was a kid. The other one is Jerry Whitehead. He won't be hard to find, he's the lead singer in a big rock group called Reign of Fire. They're the only two I was ever really close to, before you guys. If anybody was going to try to use someone against me, it would be one of them.”
“Are you shitting me?” Neil asked. “You actually know Jerry Whitehead from Reign of Fire?”
Noah shrugged. “I can’t actually say that I know him now, but I did up until I supposedly killed myself. He and Molly were the two who helped me the most when I was a kid, while I was trying to figure out how to cope with being a Pinocchio in a human world.”
Neil rolled his eyes and shook his head, then turned around to the computer and began punching keys. It wasn't long before he was calling off facts and details about both Molly and Jerry, but neither of them seemed to be having any problems at the moment.
“Well, that may shoot that theory down,” Noah said. “Of course, either one of them would be pretty hard to get to. Molly is protected by the government, and Jerry would have his own security, I'm sure.”
“That wouldn't stop Nicolaich,” Sarah said. “And I'll tell you right now, you can forget about Jerry. Nicolaich won't go after him, he'll go after Molly.”
Noah cocked his head and looked at her. “Why do you think so?”
Sarah smiled at him. “Because she's a girl. You came after me, didn't you?”
Noah sat there and looked at her for a moment, then turned to Neil. “Is Molly still living in Alexandria?”