Michaels smiled. “Oh, yeah.”
Howard said, “You and she heading off soon?”
“We’ll stick around until they let Jay go home. Doctor said a couple days.”
“It was good of you to stay.”
Michaels shrugged.
Howard said, “I talked to Thorn while you were in visiting. He’s on his way over. He’s also got a theory about why Jay got hit. He thinks it was the file the Turks gave us.”
“The Soviet spy list?”
“Yes. The revelations were moving toward the U.S. He thinks maybe one of the moles might have gotten wind of it somehow.”
“That would be a trick in itself.”
It was Howard’s turn to shrug. “Turkish security might not be as good as Net Force’s, and the Russians are still selling everything that isn’t nailed down — and some stuff that is. Maybe that information was valuable to somebody here.”
“A Soviet mole who didn’t want to be outed?”
Howard nodded. “Makes as much sense as anything else. We ran checks on the violent bad guys we’ve put away in the last couple of years. Anybody Jay took down who would likely be ticked off enough to want to shoot him is still in prison, as near as I can tell.”
“We didn’t get them all,” Alex said. “Remember CyberNation?”
Howard frowned. “I remember. The scar still itches when it gets hot and sunny. But they would probably try to hit you or me; we were a lot higher on that list.”
“Yeah. So what is Thorn doing about it?”
Howard shook his head. “Computer things. Digging in Jay’s files, looking for clues. He’ll probably be happy to have Gridley back in harness to help out — Jay will know more about his own stuff.”
“You’ll be keeping him guarded?”
“Of course. In addition to these guys, we’ve already got sub rosa people on Jay’s place. He won’t go anywhere without an armed Net Force shadow until we get this cleared. That goes for his wife, too.”
“Interesting that Saji is pregnant.”
Howard smiled. “That it is.”
“From what Toni said, those were the first words out of Jay’s mouth when he woke up.”
“Good for him. Hard to think of Jay Gridley as a father, though.”
“It ought to settle him down some. Teach him some patience.”
Howard and Michaels both grinned. Kids did that, no question.
23
Still in his office, Thorn read the FBI report again. He had heard that Jay was out of his coma, and had, in fact, been on the way out the door to go and see him, when his computer priority-one notice had chimed. He went back to check it.
It seemed that a man the Bureau strongly suspected was a Russian spy — a control — had been found dead in his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, only a few minutes before. The locals were working the incident, but the Russian connection had the Bureau involved. It looked like an accident, according to the very sketchy on-line preliminary report by the Special Agent in Charge of the case, but he was suspicious. There was nothing specific, but the AIC was not convinced that the man, a doctor, had slipped in the bathtub and cracked his skull.
Even if the Agent in Charge was correct and this was more than a simple accident, there was nothing to connect it to the attack on Jay. Still, considering Thorn’s theories about Jay’s shooter, the report bothered him.
Jay had been working on a coded file that exposed hidden Russian spies around the world, and would likely have revealed more, right here in the U.S.
A man known to the FBI as a Russian agent, and more, one suspected of being a control — one who ran other spies — had died in a freak accident? Or maybe been killed in such a way as to make it look like an accident? That was… odd, to say the least. Enough to stick in Thorn’s mind.
The common term was “Russian spies,” which is what Thorn had set his tripbot to note when new law enforcement reports came in.
This was Thorn’s gift — that he could sometimes take two things that did not seem directly related and he could see a correlation. It had helped him come up with new ideas about software, it had even helped in his fencing bouts, and he had learned to trust it over the years.
These two events were connected. He knew it — in his gut, if not his mind.
But how?
The obvious thing was, somebody had killed one man, made it look like an accident, and tried to kill the other. How many assassins or would-be assassins could there be in this area?
Who could say for sure? Maybe there were dozens of them running around looking for victims. But he didn’t believe that, and—
What if there was just the one?
Forget for a minute the why of it. Just run with the idea that the guy who shot Jay also killed the Russian. What would
Thorn shook his head. What
Well, it would mean that if you found one, you found the other.
And if you got him, you could maybe find out why he had done it, and maybe who had put him up to it…
A hint of something touched him, as might his opal ring catching a ray of sunlight at just the right angle to gleam with a sudden bright flash of color:
Maybe there was a way to figure out who the assassin was — by the process of deduction.
Thorn knew he had to think large, to encompass all the possibilities. First, assume it was just one guy. He was obviously dealing with a professional who wouldn’t leave anything obvious with which to track him. The bug on Jay’s car had been a mistake, maybe, and they had done what they could with that — the records from every traffic cam, bank ATM machine, and Homeland Security invisible in the area of the spy electronic store had been accessed for the day the transmitter had been sold, but all that had given them were thousands of faces. They had run those against the ones in the law-enforcement archives, and the FFR — the Facial Feature Recognition software — had come up with a few bad guys who happened to be passing by, but none they could tie to the assassination attempt on Jay.
Of course, it could be that the shooter didn’t have a criminal record, any kind of security clearance, a passport, or even a driver’s license, so maybe his picture wasn’t accessible.
Can’t match what isn’t there.
What they needed was a cross-reference. If a camera anywhere near the dead Russian agent held an image of somebody who matched one of the faces in the electronics store?
Gridley was awake and Thorn really needed to get by there to see him, but he could get this rolling before he headed for the hospital.
Thorn put in a call to the Intel Section of Homeland Security and got the woman in charge of the surveillance cams to provide Net Force with the Connecticut records on the day the Russian was killed.
Then he called the State Police, the Department of Transportation, and the local Sheriff’s office. Finally, he got a street directory of businesses around the location, and sent a blanket e-mail, asking them for their visual records on that date. He didn’t have a court order, but in these days, people felt that helping the government find somebody who was a killer and who might be a terrorist or a spy was worth doing.
The records would start to come in pretty quick, and the Super-Cray would run the matching software,
