“Hard to believe,” she said casually, perhaps still attempting to sound like a journalist listening to a lead.
“It makes sense. So, Project Transparrior was duped into publishing info about the Remora Shadow, and foreign intelligence believed it. But the FBI didn’t have the time or expertise to develop believable engineering. The leaked reports referred to stealth technology on fighter jets. Close, but not close enough. Radar and sonar are different, so that wouldn’t work. Given more time, they might have done a better job, but the FBI had to take down Kostas before his did any more damage, but they also wanted his spy ring.”
“Did they get them?” Jennifer asked.
I smirked, but caught myself. “Maybe. Lots of suspects. Maybe an arrest, but I don’t know. I’m just a simple lawyer, Jen. Not really my bailiwick.”
“What about your client, Marisa Dupree? Is she involved?”
“No,” I replied. “At most, she was sloppy with her passwords and security procedures. She may have accidentally allowed Kostas access to her KEL drive, which he pocketed to throw off suspicion. Yoshida limited Kostas’s access to confidential information. When the Board of Directors learned of a security breach, the jig was up. Kostas had one last play. He took Marisa Dupree’s KEL drive when she was away from her desk and downloaded the phony plans for the underwater drone, which he believed were real. So did his handlers. But Marisa wasn’t a player.”
A chilly gust off air blew off the Chesapeake Bay that seemed to slice through us.
“I can’t hear you over the wind. Come closer, Bryce,” Jennifer said innocently as she took as micro-step closer to me.
I held up both hands and backtracked. My heel bumped into the vertical roadway of the upright drawbridge behind me. “I can hear you fine. I’ll speak up. Just stay there.”
Only a minute to go before the bridge should lower again.
“So it was a trap,” Jennifer said with glum resignation.
“Yes, and you don’t have to do what you’re planning, Jen. Let me help you instead.”
“So we’re not pretending anymore, huh?”
“You’ve pinned my back against a raised drawbridge. I was foolish enough to fall for it. We’re past all that now. The FBI set a trap for you, Jennifer. And others. But they’ve got you. You just don’t realize it yet.”
“What do you mean?” she said. Her shocked, focused expression proved she had dropped any pretense of being a journalist.
“The FBI planted video cameras all around Bridgeford. They’re disguised as speed cameras, but they’re really surveillance. The sheriff doesn’t know anything about them, which was odd. I think those cameras filmed everyone coming in and out of Chester County. It’s only a matter of time before they take you down. The FBI just hasn’t connected you yet with Richard Kostas.”
Her stiletto shoes made a slight crunching sound on the gravel as she inched closer to me. The road panels of the bridge were still not moving.
Hoping to buy more time, I said, “Look, Jennifer, I suspect that you slipped something into my drink last night and searched my office for the plans. Maybe I can’t prove it …yet, but I think I know what happened. So far I’ve done all the talking. Your turn. Why’d you have to kill Richard Kostas?”
She stood in silence, just like Haven Point Drawbridge beneath us.
“Well,” I continued, “He could identify you, right? He gave you bad intel. Incomplete. Fake. He ripped you off at the dead-drop, and you got nothing for the money. Your bosses wouldn’t be happy. So you confronted him, and it didn’t go well. He had no explanation. Maybe he lied. Maybe you thought he flipped and was working with counterintelligence against you. Whichever, you saw the risk and eliminated him. That left you free to pursue Marisa Dupree and me for the Remora Shadow.”
Jennifer smiled placidly like an accomplished actress, “That’s crazy talk, Bryce. You’ve got it all wrong.”
“I don’t think so. Your partner, Yulian, used an old Russian saying. ‘In quiet lagoons, devils dwell.’ The man who mugged me at the dead-drop site said that. You repeated it today in the courthouse. He probably drives a dark van from the Russian embassy, so I figure you probably work for the SVR or whatever the old KGB calls itself these days. Yulian left the hearing early to plant the KEL drive in my office. You’d pin this all on me and skip town. But you should’ve left Chester County long ago … when Kostas’s body first hit the water.”
Her false smile evaporated. “Not possible.”
“Why?”
“The Remora Shadow,” Jennifer said with a trace of genuine despair that almost made a small part of me feel sorry for her. “I couldn’t leave without it.”
The drawbridge remained upright and unpassable. My heartrate accelerated, and my head started to throb. I wondered if I was wrong about this automated bridge lowering on its own after a few minutes.
I said, “You don’t have to do this, Jennifer. I’ll help you. You can’t get away. Look, if Kostas threatened your life, if your bosses threatened your life, we could build a defense. There’s a better way.”
She scoffed. “I’m not turning myself in. It doesn’t work like that.”
“You need my help. Killing me only makes it worse. Think it through.”
“And if the Americans take me into custody, they’ll want information about my service. Our plans. Our organization. Our networks.”
I held up my hands and explained, “They can keep you safe, if you’ll work with them.”
“Any my family back home? You are so naïve, Bryce. In other circumstances, it might even be amusing. You’ve told your theory to the FBI, no?”
Searching for an answer to her unexpected question, I paused. A rookie mistake.
Jennifer said, “I didn’t think so. Not enough time before coming here.”
Her empty right hand emerged from behind her back for the first time during this encounter. She lifting the black scarf hanging around her neck over her nose and
