off the seat with a vicious choke hold. With her left hand she grabbed his ear and, twisting it hard, forced his head to stay locked in a position that severely restricted his breathing.
She murmured conversationally in his ear, “This is a basic Krav Maga choke. You know, those Israelis are mean bastards. They don’t care much if they kill the occasional punk in the name of doing their job. If I crank down this hold and shift it a bit, like this-” she tightened the hold across his throat and windpipe fractionally “-I can cut off your breathing altogether.”
He gurgled beneath her arm and tried to struggle, but when she yanked hard on his ear, the shooting pain of it forced him to subside as it had been designed to do. She left the killer hold in place a few seconds more for good measure, then eased up with her arm enough for the guy to draw a partial breath.
“Now where were we?” she murmured. “Ah, yes. You were about to tell me who gave you the order to mess with me this morning.”
He drew in another rattling breath but said nothing. She started to tighten her grip around his throat again.
“All right, all right!” he gasped.
“Talk,” she commanded in his right ear.
“Janelle Parsons.”
“Who’s she?” Diana demanded.
“Works in the office of the Director.”
Crud! What was this with high-level orders to yank her chain? “What did she say to you, exactly?”
“She said there was a loose cannon bombing around town causing problems. I was to detain you and question you, and arrest you if you gave me the slightest reason to do so.”
Diana let go of him and stood up. He leaped off the swing and dropped into a defensive position before her. Didn’t want her to get an arm around his throat again, did he? “So why didn’t you arrest me?” she asked.
“You saved that guard’s life,” he answered simply. “And I didn’t have due cause to arrest you other than some order from on high to harass you.”
Dang. Under other circumstances, she could’ve liked this guy. Been honored to work with someone decent like him. Aloud, she said, “Thanks, Agent Flaherty. I appreciate the information. I’m sorry I had to rough you up to get it. But it truly is a matter of national security, and time is of the essence. When this is all over, I’ll be happy to sit down with you and tell you all the gory details.”
He stared at her in open disbelief as she politely excused herself and moved off the front porch. Of course, she wasn’t dumb enough to turn her back to him at any point, and she kept her hand in her pocket and on her pistol. She slid into the front seat of her car and backed out of his driveway fast, peeling away into the darkness while he still stood on the porch, staring at her. Whether or not he’d call the police and get an APB put out on her was anybody’s guess.
She pointed her car toward home and her computer. She had a bunch of names to run through the Oracle database, assuming it wasn’t completely corrupted. The tampering she’d found had all been in analysis subroutines. Hopefully, the fact-correlation routines were still functional, and she couldn’t wait to see what they said.
She parked in the alley behind her house, backing into the neighbor’s driveway in case Flaherty had, in fact, called the police. She could bolt out of her house and drive away fast if someone came knocking on her door. She made her way through her yard cautiously, keeping an eye out for any company. After scanning every dark corner of the yard and finding nothing, she slipped into her kitchen. Without turning the lights on, she moved into the living room. She closed the front blinds and then moved over to her computer and turned it on.
She had a couple of incoming e-mails and she glanced through the addresses. Mostly from her family. They could wait. Nothing from the office or Oracle. She accessed the Internet and booted up the Oracle database quickly.
She entered the names she had-Alex Porter at the Secret Service, Colonel Al Smith at the office of the Army Chief of Staff and Janelle Parsons at the FBI. The computer searched for several minutes, looking for significant connections between the three people.
A response popped up on her screen. “Please enter more data to narrow the search parameters.”
Damn. On a hunch, she typed in, “Find name of Richard Dunst’s last supervisor at the CIA.”
A cursor blinked for a few seconds and then came back with, “Collin Scott.”
She typed back, “Find Collin Scott’s supervisor when Dunst worked for him.”
That name came back up almost instantly. She stared at it in dismay. Joseph Lockworth. Holy cow.
She went back to her list of names in the original search and added the names, Collin Scott and Joseph Lockworth. On a hunch, she threw in the names of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well. Flunkies at JCS didn’t do much on their own. She’d bet someone higher up had told Colonel Smith to make the call to Captain Hammersmith and friends.
Oracle took longer to think about her list of names this time. And that meant it was probably on to something. While it analyzed whatever it had come up with, she went into her bedroom and threw on a pair of warm, lined wool slacks and a turtleneck-sweater combination. No sense freezing to death tonight. And even with her coat on, that stint on Flaherty’s porch had chilled her.
The computer beeped in the living room and she hastened out to see what it had come up with.
A detailed analysis scrolled down the screen. Most of the individuals on her list could be placed at various conferences, retreats, or meetings together steadily for the last three years. Oracle wasn’t talking two or three meetings. It listed fourteen dates where at least four of the people on her list were in the same place at the same time. Now what were the odds of that? She read further. Oracle placed the chances of these meetings being random coincidence at less than ten percent. Maybe not enough to convict someone on, but it was enough for her.
She typed in, “Who else was at most of these meetings?”
The screen blinked while Oracle compared the various lists of attendees. And then a list of a dozen names appeared. She scanned down through it. Quickly. Nine of the names were high-ranking members of the federal government. Good Lord. Even the Army Chief of Staff himself made the list, General Eric Pace. The last three people on the list were prominent businessmen-according to Oracle two were CEOs of major corporations, and the third was a finance banker. Whoa. If this was the group behind Q-group and Dunst, no wonder they’d nearly succeeded in killing Gabe. Frankly, the real shocker was that they’d failed. So far, she reminded herself grimly.
She glanced further into the analysis and stared in dismay as another name caught her attention. One of the speakers at nearly half the conferences was another name she knew all too well. Thomas Wolfe. Gabe’s own Vice President? Could it be? Was he involved in a conspiracy to kill Gabe and take the Presidency for himself? The very thought sent a chill racing down her spine.
She read on. Most of the conferences this gang had been at together had to do with national security issues, and three of the conferences were sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Free Economies. Bingo. S.A.F.E… She’d found the connection. Triumph surged through her. DiscoDuck’s encrypted e-mail files had contained multiple references to the word safe in the mail titles. Now she had a positive link between the Q-group, Richard Dunst and this S.A.F.E. bunch.
Quickly she typed in the society’s full name and asked for information on it. Founded a dozen years ago. Established its own small-press publishing house a few years back. Followed the teachings of…there he was again…Thomas Wolfe. Believed that terror would choke the global economy if left unchecked. Argued that terrorism was the greatest threat to the future of mankind since the beginning of history. Okay then. So this was a conservative group. Probably in favor of use of force against terrorism, given their strong opinions about it. Then why in the world would they propagate terror of their own and try to kill Gabe Monihan? It didn’t make any sense. She was missing something.
She stared at her computer screen, seeing nothing but a blur before her eyes. Now what was she supposed to do? She forced her numb brain back into gear.
Four of the names on her list worked at the CIA. Maybe that was the center of this group’s operations. It was worth a try. She picked up the phone on the desk beside her computer and called Delphi one more time.
Yet again, her employer picked up the phone immediately and asked without preamble, “What have you got?”
“I’ve got a list of names. I tracked down everyone who passed down warnings about me to the various underlings who harassed me today, and I ran those names through part of the Oracle program that’s still working.
