many questions. He settled on cleaning the mess himself.
As he made his way out from the vault, a small ring tone chirped inside his jacket. Stokes paused in confusion and pulled out Roselli’s PDA. A confirmation flashed on the display: ‘2 MESSAGES DELIVERED.’
Liberated from the vault’s thick walls, the PDA had finally caught some airwaves.
‘Great,’ Stokes huffed.
Navigating the BlackBerry’s menus, he hunted for the draft copy of Roselli’s first message. But he found nothing. Almost immediately, however, ‘undeliverable’ error messages started bouncing back from the intended recipients’ e-mail accounts. Stokes was relieved to see that the addressees were the scientists who’d partaken in the 2003 cave excavation. The message began with a warning about Stokes’s malicious intentions. Next came a rally call for each recipient to contact authorities with all information pertaining to his or her time spent in Iraq. Also included in the e-mail were hyperlinks to classified material and documents that detailed the project’s true mission. What Roselli hadn’t anticipated was that Stokes’s NSA contact had already deactivated and thoroughly emptied said e-mail accounts - stage one of the clean-sweep that would be complete only when each name in this e-mail wound up being the subject for an obituary. That task was well under way.
‘Nice try, Frank. Always a step ahead of you.’
The PDA’s grimy keyboard was making his fingers sticky; some tacky white powder that could only have come from the doughnuts that had led to Roselli’s equally doughy belly. Disgusted, Stokes paused to wipe his hands with his handkerchief before hunting for the second stealth e-mail.
But sifting through the SENT and DELETED items, he could not find a second draft. If Roselli set the message to automatically delete upon transmission, there’d likely be no way of retrieving it or determining the recipient.
After two more minutes, however, Stokes did manage to determine the e-mail address to which the second message had been sent. The domain was registered to Our Savior in Christ Cathedral - Stokes’s personal e-mail account. Rushing over to his computer, Stokes went into his e-mail client. Some spam about cheap health insurance and solar heating systems managed to sneak through, but nothing from Roselli.
What tricks did Roselli have up his sleeve? he wondered.
Cursing, Stokes tossed the PDA in his desk drawer.
From a utility closet adjacent to the elevator, he collected some cleaning supplies and made his way back into the vault. He began by thoroughly spritzing the air with odour neutralizer. Then off came his blazer and he got down on his knees to squirt the soiled mess with commercial-duty rug cleaner. He used a scrub brush to attack the stain, blotted up the resultant frothy goo with paper towels, and repeated the process. The heinous act reminded him of shitter detail back in the Corps. Though nothing could match that raunchy mix of kerosene and flaming excrement - truly the stuff of nightmares.
Satisfied, Stokes rounded up the supplies and filled a trash bag with the waste.
15
BOSTON
‘Your green tea with honey,’ Agent Flaherty said, and set a paper cup in front of Brooke Thompson, waiter- style.
‘Thanks. You’re pretty good at table service.’
‘Got me through college.’ He set down a second cup for himself - black coffee - then sat in the chair on the opposite side of the cafe table. He took a second to peer out the floor-to-ceiling window at the wind whipping the snow drifts that carpeted Calderwood Courtyard. ‘God, I hate the cold.’
‘Then you might consider moving. Because last time I checked, the Boston summer lasts about two weeks.’
He chuckled. ‘I grew up in Southie, youngest of seven. Leaving isn’t an option. How about you … leaving Florida to come here? Not exactly the picture of sanity.’
‘I prefer beaches and sun, but I had to follow the work.’
Like many pallid Bostonian Irish, Brooke thought, the guy looked like he could use some time at the beach. Though it was that same UV avoidance that probably accounted for his unblemished complexion. If he’d graduated in ‘95, she assumed him to be thirty-six, maybe thirty-seven. But with thick black hair cropped in a short, corporate cut, he easily could pass for thirty. He was wearing a navy blazer - so trademark Boston - and she could tell by the way his arms and shoulders filled it that he was an athletic guy. Brooke was a stickler for a good nose and ears, and he had both; the right mix of pretty boy and man’s man, naturally handsome, light on the manscaping. His magnetic eyes suffered an identity-crisis between blue and green. Despite the bad one-liner he’d opened with back at the auditorium, Agent Thomas Flaherty had passed her first-ten-seconds test with flying colours, she decided.
‘Mind if I take notes?’ he asked.
‘Fine by me.’
He sipped some coffee, then took out a small notepad and a Bic pen. ‘Let’s talk about Iraq, starting with when you were there and why.’
‘Hold on, Agent Flaherty …’
‘Tommy.’
‘Right. Tommy. First you need to tell me why I should be talking to you.’
‘Fair enough.’ He did his best to keep it simple. ‘There was an incident in the Iraqi mountains. Some of our guys were working under cover, patrolling the area. They got into a shooting match with some, how shall we say, hostile locals. An ID card with your name on it was found in the middle of it all.’
‘ID card?’ She considered this. ‘Oh yeah. I did lose one of those. It was more like a security badge.’
‘That’s a good start. So tell me how you lost it. That way I can explain to my boss how you weren’t associated with the other side.’
His deadpan expression showed he wasn’t joking. ‘Look … yes, I’d received an offer to assist in an excavation in the northern mountains. I accepted. I arrived there September 2003. The fourteenth, to be exact.’
This did jibe with the passport activity provided to him. To keep her honest, he jotted down the date anyway.
‘All expenses paid,’ she added. ‘It was a great resume builder, an incredible opportunity … especially since Western archaeologists hadn’t turned a shovel in that region for decades … thanks to politics, of course. Since this was only months after the US invasion, everything was very hush-hush. And I wasn’t told anything specific until I’d arrived in Baghdad.’
‘Who made you this offer … handled the arrangements?’
‘A guy named Frank took care of everything.’
‘Frank …?’
She shrugged. ‘Just Frank. He was a middleman.’
‘He funded the project?’
She gave him a confused look. ‘I was never told who funded the project. Not so unusual. Benefactors sometimes want to keep a low profile. But shouldn’t you guys know this? I mean, why are
‘Sorry?’
She held out her hands. ‘I thought it was you guys.’
He returned a blank stare.
‘You know, the military, some obscure part of Homeland Security, the CIA, or whatever it goes by nowadays. I mean, I’d been given a military escort … US soldiers wearing desert fatigues with American flag arm patches, the works. You might want to ask your boss about that. Might save you some time.’
This temporarily stumped Flaherty. If his boss knew anything about it, this visit wouldn’t be taking place. ‘And what kind of work were you asked to perform?’
‘What I do best, of course: decipher ancient languages. I was brought up north to the mountains … to a tunnel, or a cave actually, that dated back a few thousand years. The walls were covered in ancient picture carvings and cuneiform. Wasn’t easy, either. That language predated anything I’d ever seen. In some ways, more sophisticated than what came centuries after it. Really incredible stuff.’ She checked to make sure nobody was listening in then said in a low tone, ‘The kind of stuff that would challenge every established theory on the emergence of writing.’
‘And what did it say?’
