“Krueger?” she asked.
“Masters?” he wanted to know first.
She nodded, then he stepped closer to her. Apparently, he knew what she looked like because his shoulders seemed to relax slightly. He was a hair over six feet and had a broad build. His face was deeply lined, probably a combination of stress and age. He wore jeans, a ski jacket and sneakers. And a hat. A practical man, she decided. And a prepared one.
“We’ll talk in your car,” he suggested.
Secure enough to release her hold on the gun, she opened the door, got back inside and leaned over to unlock the passenger door. He lifted himself into the seat.
“I checked your record. You were fired from the CIA almost ten years ago,” he began.
“You’re not the most subtle fellow, are you?” Then she admitted what he already knew. “I was.”
“Willful insubordination.”
Sabrina winced at the description It was a phrase that never failed to irritate her. It was on the tip of her tongue to remind him that she had been barely out of her teens when she’d been given that label, but she held back. That’s not what this was about. Besides, the description wasn’t inaccurate. Or at least hadn’t been at the time. But that was ten years ago. People change. She was sort of hoping she was one of them.
“And here all this time I thought it had been my attendance.”
He didn’t smile. “As you know, Arnold has selected you to continue his project.”
“I do.”
“What do you know about it?”
Sabrina shook her head. “Not much. I know he was working from a secure location. Even he didn’t know where he was. I know it was important. I know that he thought I was the only one who would understand what he was doing.”
“You really believe that’s true?” Krueger asked her.
“I don’t think I’d be sitting here right now if
Reluctantly, the senior agent nodded. Sabrina could tell he was pissed, though. It was there in the clench of his jaw and the way his mouth turned down into a deep scowl, entrenching the crevices of his face.
But his anger didn’t make sense unless…A few pieces of the puzzle she’d been playing with fell into place and quickly she understood. She smiled at Arnold’s audacity even from the grave. “This isn’t about me continuing his work. You’ve lost access to it, haven’t you?”
Krueger said nothing. He didn’t need to.
“Arnold wasn’t a team player,” Sabrina remarked. It was something that the CIA should have known.
“For sixteen years he worked under contract for us,” Krueger spat in reply. “But that was the only arrangement he would agree to. He never wanted to work officially for the United States government. I guess he thought it would corrupt him.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Sabrina told him. “Arnold wouldn’t have worked for any government. He didn’t believe in sides. He didn’t believe in ideology. He believed in science. He believed in math. You guys paid him the most, and gave him the best opportunity to pursue his work. That was all that mattered to him.”
He turned to her, his scowl still in place, and she knew he was lumping her with Arnold. She twisted a little in her seat. “What do you want from me?”
“What I’m about to tell you is-”
“Classified,” Sabrina finished. “Spare me the security and national interest lecture and get to it.”
Krueger looked down at his hands, then turned to her with an extremely serious expression on his face. “Get to it? All right. Ms. Masters what if I told you some very important people in the Company believe you may be the key to bringing down one of the most dangerous men on the planet?”
She allowed a moment for the words to sink in. This is what she wanted. What she’d imagined when she first read Arnold’s e-mail. This is what she’d been waiting for, for almost ten years. This was a new beginning for her. And it wasn’t until now, until she actually was confronted with it, that she knew how precious, how important that beginning really was to her.
But Krueger didn’t need to know any of that. Instead she offered him a flippant response, one that he probably expected.
“Does this mean I’m going to get my job back? Because I’ve got to tell you, these days it’s hell finding work for a genius.”
“The project Arnold was working on was known as Deep Throat,” he explained, his tone flat. “It was an ingestible isotope. A variation on lithium-6 that targets the epidermis. When it’s digested it breaks down over time and a body’s exposure to sun’s ultraviolet rays and emits a pattern of low-level radiation that can be detected by a high-powered X-ray machine contained in a satellite. Once the target is identified, the satellite’s computer continually sends a series of Global Positioning coordinates that allow us to track the movements of those who have been tagged.”
Sabrina absorbed the information. “Radiation? How can you distinguish between the targets and every cancer patient undergoing treatment in the world?”
Krueger shook his head. “All I know is that the pattern is distinct because of the nature of the isotope. Only Arnold knew all of the logistics of how it worked. But it does work. It has been the single most significant breakthrough in the war against terrorism. You’ve read about the many failings of the intelligence communities in the past few years. Our human intel is weak. We can’t infiltrate cells because often all the members are blood related. We can’t turn them with money because of their strident belief in their cause. When they stop using modern technology, like cell phones and computers, and they go underground to live in caves, they’re all but invisible to us. This project has changed that. All we needed to do was tap their food source. Terrorist cell leaders will have their food tested for poison before eating anything, but the isotope was undetectable.”
“No symptoms?”
“Possibly some nausea or vomiting a few days after ingestion, but nothing that couldn’t be explained by an outbreak of the flu or dysentery, which is not uncommon given their typical living conditions.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“As I said it was working. We were getting daily updates from Arnold on known terrorists and their locations throughout the world. The group didn’t matter. We targeted leaders in Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA, Al Qaeda, you name it.”
“Why am I suddenly getting nervous?” Sabrina asked rhetorically.
“One of the areas of great concern to both the CIA and the FBI is the fact that there are terrorist cells operating within the United States. With the success of Deep Throat, we felt confident in allowing some terrorists on our watch lists to enter the country so we could follow them and let them lead us to these cells where we could monitor their activities. No one of any consequence. No planners, as we call them. Without leadership and direction these cells can lie dormant for years. Allowing the infiltration of low-level grunts, we would be able to locate the cells without a great risk of precipitating an event.”
That’s why she was nervous. They got greedy. “Let me see if I got this. You let some of the bad guys in the country-bad guys you hope don’t have the brains to plan anything. Only now Arnold is dead and you can’t see them anymore. And you didn’t think to have, oh, I don’t know, a backup plan in case something did happen to Arnold? Forget his heart, what if he tripped and hit his head or something?” she asked incredulously.
“The level of security he has in place goes much further than we anticipated or were led to believe. Regardless, it’s not like we had much of a choice. Deep Throat advanced us years in the war against these killers. At a moment’s notice, we could locate and destroy anyone who was tagged and anyone close to those who were tagged. You think Israel has just been guessing real good when they fire those missiles from helicopters at moving cars. It was worth the risk to have the data when all we had to do was agree to Arnold’s terms.”
Sabrina could well imagine what those terms would be. “An isolated location. No people. An endless pot of coffee and a single server?”
Krueger nodded. “The download of data from the satellite was encrypted, using an encryption code that Arnold himself wrote, and transmitted to his computer only. Data transmissions to us were always done in person. We would send an agent daily to pick up the various sets of coordinates for each terrorist that had been tagged. When the agent showed up yesterday Arnold was already dead. Naturally, the computer is password protected. And when the agent checked-”
