One Murphy didn’t tell the
Nichole had been recruited a year after 9/11. Those were heady times.
Some agents may have seen this as a babysitting gig, but not Nichole. She was keeping tabs on one of the most notorious operatives the Company had ever known. One who had suddenly retired a few months after 9/11, then opened up a “financial services” corporation.
Nichole had nodded.
Whatever he had cooking on the side—and Nichole’s bosses were fairly sure David Murphy had
So when Murphy had called them in here on a Saturday morning, she
And that would be a failure.
Whatever Murphy had going, she should have been on it from the beginning. This completely blindsided her.
She’d installed an undetectable key logger on Murphy’s machine a few days after she started, and changed the gear every month. She knew every e-mail he sent, every Web page he browsed.
She’d recorded every closed-door conversation Murphy ever had.
She used compressed air, a digital camera, and many long nights with Photoshop to read his sealed mail.
She’d collected every shredded bag of crosscut papers and reconstituted them in her suburban apartment, one bag at a time, one long weekend at a time. She’d used tiny paperweights to hold them in place and worked one piece at a time. Many nights she’d dream about strips of paper.
She entered into a clandestine, sex-only relationship with the mail guy—and every mail guy henceforth—even though many of them had a devil-may-care attitude toward personal hygiene.
She’d even burned through countless cheap wristwatches, placed under the back tire of Murphy’s car—oh how relentlessly old school
Over three years of clandestine operations, she’d earned the sobriquet “Workhorse” a dozen times over.
And nothing.
“Keep watching him,” her bosses told her.
She did as instructed, only occasionally pausing to conduct other operations now and again. She was too valuable to waste on David Murphy full time.
That was when Nichole began to grow paranoid. Perhaps she was missing something when she was conducting her other ops.
Maybe Murphy knew about her, and conducted his other business when she was otherwise engaged. Just to make it look like he was being a good corporate choirboy, heading up a successful private business.
Maybe he had a way around her key logger.
Maybe he switched out her surveillance tapes.
Maybe he purchased bags of shredded nonsense from another company, and switched out his own shredded documents for a ringer.
Maybe he was on to the watches. An old-head like him probably would be.
Maybe he was just messing around with her head.
If that was the case, one thing was for sure: For six months now, Molly Lewis was helping him.
Her surveillance of David Murphy had become increasingly frustrating during the past six months, and it was too much of a coincidence that Murphy had hired Molly right around the same time. The moment Nichole first shook Molly’s hand, the bad juju alarms went off in her head. She immediately hunted for evidence, had the Company screen Molly’s background hard, but nothing came up out of the ordinary. Born in Champaign, Illinois, to a conservative Catholic family. Attended a year of UI, agricultural college. Dropped out to marry an actuary named Paul.
But the only evidence she could find of any kind of intelligence background: the slightest hint of a Russian accent.
Which would be kind of weird coming from the lips of an Illinois farm girl with a maiden name like Molly Kaye Finnerty.
But Nichole swore it was there.
She wished she could confide in someone, ask if they heard it, too.
The only other evidence: her surveillance tapes. Pre-Molly, Nichole’s secret recordings of Murphy’s offices yielded innocuous office banter, phone conversations. But post-Molly, the tapes yielded literally nothing. Blank hiss. It was as if someone had waved a high-powered magnet over the tapes. Nichole switched to digital recording devices, but the result was the same. Even though she knew Murphy wasn’t sitting in his office all day in silence. The man loved to talk on the phone. Nichole had listened to countless hours of voice, piped through her ATH-M40fs Audio-Technica headphones.
So why dead air?
Molly listened to the blank tapes in search of an audio clue. An electronic pop or spike. Something to indicate the device that had wiped them clean.
And then she heard it.
Or she swore she heard it:
Impossibly faint, at the edge of human hearing.
Formal Russian for “Hello.”
The more she listened, pumping up her playback equipment to maximum volume, the more she swore she heard two more syllables after the greeting.
Nee-cole.
It was all beginning to prick at Nichole Wise’s mind … until the day David Murphy made his next civilian hire: intern Roxanne Kurtwood. In Roxanne, Nichole saw a clear path to sanity.
Murphy’s organization was strange in that it blended operatives and civilians. Operatives ran the joint; civilians supported them.
Roxanne deserved more than “support” status. She was smart, versatile. Ivy League. From a family of Pakistani doctors. She had a flexible moral code. All that good stuff that makes for a good op. And not a trace of Russian in her speech.
Nichole decided: Roxanne would be
Nichole decided to recruit her slowly, bring her into the ocean one inch of water at a time. She hadn’t given Roxanne a hint of this, but quietly laid the groundwork. She hadn’t proposed this to her CIA handler yet, either. But he knew they were always looking out for new talent. She suspected they’d approve. Then they’d have two sets of eyes on Murphy. It would be hard for that snake to wiggle around two sets of daggers plunging into the grass, trying to pin him down.
Roxanne: her partner-in-training. Her savior.
And something even more important—something Nichole hadn’t known for years.
A friend.
Of course, it figured that she was dead.
