took her in the same side of the building the airliner had hit on 9/11 and downstairs to an anonymous-looking office. Several men at desks glanced up at her and did double takes as she walked past. She wasn’t exactly standard Army issue at the moment. The pair who’d arrested her sat her down at a table in the middle of a one-each interrogating room and pointedly locked the door. She looked around. It came complete with the big, two-way mirror, a surveillance camera and a tape recorder.
She sat impatiently through a reading of her rights. She duly waived the right to counsel and leaned back in her chair. “Okay, gentlemen. What’s this all about?”
“You reported a break-in at your house earlier this morning.”
She frowned. And they were arresting her because of it? “That’s correct,” she answered aloud.
“Was anything stolen?”
“No.” She hadn’t been a rebel most of her life for nothing. She knew full well to volunteer absolutely no information whatsoever under questioning. The headmistress at the Athena Academy had often been unable to pin pranks on her because of her gift for silence during interrogation.
“Were you injured?”
“No.”
“You reported that the intruder was attempting to use your computer. Did you have any classified information on your computer?”
Taking classified information home from work was a felony. She answered that one firmly. “No.”
“Was any data stolen?”
“No.”
“Why did you report the break-in?”
She stared at the officer pointedly, making it clear that she didn’t deign to answer patently stupid questions. The guy reddened slightly.
The second officer dived in. “The Bethesda police reported finding a disturbing collection of pictures of Gabe Monihan in your bedroom.”
She stared back at him as he left the statement hanging between them.
“Care to comment on that?” he asked.
“No.”
“Are you obsessed with Gabe Monihan?”
Wouldn’t these guys have a field day if they knew she’d spent a piece of this morning plastered all over the man in question? She answered the query. “No.”
“Are you stalking him?”
“No.”
“Fixated on him?”
“No.”
As much as she wanted to shout at these guys that they were wasting her valuable time, that would give them power over her. If they knew she was in a hurry, they’d slowball this little interview until it was too late for her to do a damn thing to save Gabe.
She waited for the next inane question.
“Then why have you been illegally accessing information via the Internet pertaining to President-elect Monihan’s personal life?”
She blinked. Huh? Now how in the world had they figured that out? She would readily admit that she’d broken into all kinds of private information about Gabe’s life, college transcripts, medical records and the like, but she’d been searching purely for a reason that the Q-group wanted to kill him. Besides, the guy’s life was as squeaky clean as they came. She hadn’t found a speck of dirt on the man, except that he’d flunked French 101 three times in college.
The real question, though, was how did these guys know about it? Had a wiretap been authorized on her home computer? Except the Oracle database had protection protocols built into it that would detect something like that on any system it was using. Just within the last few hours, she’d had Oracle open and running on both her home and work computers and no alarms had gone off. They couldn’t possibly be tapped!
She leaned forward in her chair. “Do you have any evidence to back up your ludicrous accusation that I’m accessing information illegally, or do I need to call my lawyer and document this interview for a harassment and libel lawsuit?”
“Do you deny the charge, then?” one of the men asked.
“I damn well insist on seeing the evidence upon which you’d make such an accusation,” she retorted. It wasn’t exactly an outright denial, but hopefully the indignation of her tone made up for that minor omission.
“We’re not at liberty to divulge our sources, ma’am,” one of the guys replied.
Sources? Now there was an interesting word choice. In the intelligence community that both she and these men came from, that particular word almost invariably meant a human source. More times than not, an informant. Had they gotten a tip that she’d been poking into Gabe’s personal affairs?
If the Secret Service or the FBI had actually traced hack-ins of Gabe’s records to her, they’d have already come to her home with a search warrant, seized her computer, filed charges against her immediately and arrested her outright. She knew enough hackers to whom that very sequence of events had happened for her to be dead certain of how it went down.
But these guys, despite their initial statement of arrest, had yet to charge her with anything and apparently had not been to her home themselves. And that meant her computer probably had not been seized. Which meant these guys had nothing but a tip of some kind to go on. They were on a fishing expedition.
“Why did you aggressively evade a surveillance detail upon you earlier today, Captain Lockworth?” one of the men fired at her.
So. It had been the Army tailing her toward the Oracle office in Alexandria earlier. “I had no way of knowing if it was the Army or the forces of evil following me. It’s my job to lose enemy surveillance if I become aware of it, is it not?”
No answer to that one.
“You expended extensive military resources on a wild-goose chase.”
She was tempted to tell them they should have sent someone competent to do the job, then. But she bit back the comment. No sense being more antagonistic toward these guys than she had to be. Not if she wanted to get out of here any time soon.
She asked casually, “So how did you guys catch up with me if I lost you?” Might as well let them toot their own horns for a moment to appease their bruised egos.
“There’s been a police APB out on your car all morning.”
Wow. She’d rated an APB? “And why did you think it was that urgent to talk to me, again?”
“We believe you may pose a threat to the safety of the President-elect of the United States.”
She’d laugh if that weren’t so absurd. “Me? A low-level intelligence analyst from DIA? What the heck kind of threat do I pose to anyone? I go to work every day, sit in my office, read a lot of paperwork, write reports and go home. Where in the world did you get the notion that I’m a threat to Gabe Monihan?”
“Again, I’m not at liberty to divulge our sources.”
An informant pegged her as a threat to Gabe, too? The timing of it all was mighty damned suspicious. It certainly lent credence to the idea that she’d been shaking the right tree by investigating the Q-group. Look at the garbage that was falling out of it. Somebody’d sicced these guys on her to back her off of the investigation.
“May we have a look at the papers you put in your purse as you were coming out of the Internet cafe?”
She retorted coolly, “May I see a copy of your search warrant?”
The men scowled. After a pregnant silence, the two officers exchanged glances, got up and left the room. Great. How long was she supposed to cool her jets while they came up with Plan B? She glanced at her watch. Time was a’wasting, here. Vividly aware of the camera and the two-way mirror, she forced herself not to fidget. She painted an expression of saintlike patience on her face and sat quietly in her chair, even though her insides were fairly bursting to get out of here.
One of the men stepped back into the room a few minutes later. “Things will go better for you if you tell us what you’re up to, Captain Lockworth,” he said kindly.
“You can lose the good cop-bad cop routine, buddy. And furthermore, I’m not up to anything.”
