Agent X - Boyd Noah (серии книг читать бесплатно .TXT) 📗

Bursaw turned off Rock Creek Parkway onto Pennsylvania Avenue and then turned up Twenty-eighth Street. Three blocks later he pulled up to a small apartment building. “This is it,” he said, getting out and opening the trunk.

Inside his sister’s residence, Bursaw put the box containing the files on a desk in the living room and handed Vail the keys. “You’re now officially in charge of them.” He pointed at a large fish tank with a couple dozen disinterested tropical fish swimming around. “The car is a powder blue VW Bug. It’s parked in the garage. The key card to get in and out is over the visor.”

“Are you going somewhere?” Vail asked.

“I’ve got to go home, change, and go to the office. I hope you’re right and they won’t be looking for me. As soon as I put in an appearance and see if there’s any general alarm for you two, I’ll be back to give you a hand.”

“Thanks, Luke,” Kate said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Vail walked him out. “Is there an access code for your sister’s answering machine?”

“Good idea. We can leave each other messages on it if you go out. It’s 777.”

“I’ll call Kalix and let him know what Kate said about the photos. It looks like Myles Rellick is our best bet, but I have no idea where to start. We can’t do surveillance, or a wiretap, or even search his financial background. This fugitive stuff isn’t as easy as it looks.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out. Especially since it’s for Kate, her being such a good friend and all.”

“I told you, it’s complicated.”

“The best things always are.”

When Vail came back in, he found Kate looking through the bedroom closet. “Sorry we didn’t have time to get some of your clothes.”

“I’d rather wear three-day-old clothes than a nice crisp prison uniform.”

“Anything there?”

“I’ll find something,” she said. “I’m sorry I got emotional in the car.”

“Any CIA epiphanies yet?”

“Not yet, but I’m too tired to summon up any real memory. I’m going to take a shower and get some sleep. You could probably use a couple of hours yourself. You look beat.”

He smiled at her mischievously. “I could use a shower, too. This place looks like it would have a limited supply of hot water.”

“That’s good,” she said in a playful tone, “because it sounds like you could use a cold shower.”

After a couple of seconds, Vail said, “Kate, I’m sorry. This is all my fault. The whole thing was a setup, and you’re paying the price. I was so smug figuring out those puzzles. ‘Ariadne’s thread.’ I should have picked up on something.”

“Like what? Everything was falling into place.”

“Like their killing the moles, and just as we got to them. They knew just when to kill them—because they were sending us to them. That should have registered with me.”

Gently she took his hand in hers. “I should be terrified right now, but— No, that’s not right. I am terrified. But with you here I know this is going to end well. So please, don’t stop being you.”

“Probably the smartest thing you could do right now is be worried.”

“Well, bricklayer, I’m so worried that I’m going to sleep. You probably should, too.”

Vail picked up one of the pillows from the bed. “Maybe you’re right. I’ll stretch out on the couch and see if I can’t nod off as soon as I call John.”

A few hours later, Kate walked into the living room, her face still full of sleep. “Tell me it’s New Year’s morning and I just had a bad dream.”

Vail sat up on the couch. “I don’t suppose you dreamed about who would do this to you.”

“Nothing. As far as the CIA people at Langley, I was kind of a ghost. Float in, do a little paperwork, say hello to a few people, and float out.”

“You’ve got the Russians on you. You’re a threat to somebody. I know you supervised security work in Detroit, but that was the Middle East, right?”

“Right.”

“When was the last time you worked the Russians?”

“Never. When I rotated out of Detroit, I went to OPR for a year, and then I was a unit chief in the Counterintelligence Division, but it was an administrative position, the liaison with the CIA. I had a desk at Langley, but it wasn’t like I was there sixty hours a week.”

“Where else were you assigned?”

“After my CIA stint, which was about a year and a half, I got tapped to go to New York as an ASAC. But just before I was to leave, the director called me in and told me he wanted me to be the deputy AD in the general criminal division. So I haven’t been in counterintelligence for almost two years. And then it had nothing to do with the Russians.”

Vail was silent, staring back at her without seeing her. He was quiet longer than usual. “Did you handle any assets when you were there?”

“No, I haven’t seen an informant since I was a street agent,” she said.

Vail just shook his head.

There was a knock at the door, and then they heard a key in the lock. Bursaw walked in, carrying a large pizza box.

“How’s the manhunt going?” Vail asked.

“Not a word about it at WFO and nothing on the news. I went by the off-site, and there are a couple of guys sitting on it. They look like marshals.”

Vail said to Kate, “Then they’re on your apartment, too.”

Bursaw opened the box and pulled off a piece of pizza. “So what’s the plan?”

Vail pulled off a slice and handed it with a napkin to Kate. “I wish I knew.”

A few minutes later, there was another knock at the door, which caused everyone to stop talking. Vail peered out the peephole. It was John Kalix. He came in carrying an oversize briefcase. “I think I found something,” he said.

Kate stood up and hugged him. “Thanks for everything, John, except for maybe keeping the big galoot here alive.”

“I’m kind of new at all this, but I’ll bear that in mind next time.”

“What’s going on at headquarters?” Vail asked.

“I wish you could have seen that AUSA when he came storming into my office. He was making all kinds of threats until I asked him, with as incredulous a tone as possible, why his boss would accept a lawyer’s identity over the telephone. He said the entire hoax was perpetrated by FBI agents in the FBI building and that he was going to get to the bottom of it. Needless to say, he didn’t ask for any Bureau manpower to hunt down the wily Katherine Bannon. My sources tell me he has two two-man teams of marshals looking for you, and that’s all.”

“As long as Luke isn’t identified as part of this, we should be safe here,” Vail said. “You said you found something.”

Kalix took a portable DVD player out of his case. “While I was sitting around trying to look nonchalant after you and Kate disappeared, I got an idea. I started thinking about the spy dust that’s part of the evidence against Kate. Since we know she’s innocent, it means that the Russians must have collected it when we used it on that SVR intelligence officer, Nikolai Gulin. And maybe it isn’t a coincidence that he’s also the one in the photo with Kate. So I ran him through everything we have. Remember I told you that he was very elusive, but that we did have photos and videos of him taken during surveillances a couple of years ago? When I reviewed everything, I found this. It was taken at the Fredricksburg Antique Mall, which is far away enough from Washington that it was a good spot for a meeting or a drop. Anyone ever been there?”

Kate said, “I was there once . . . I don’t know . . . a couple of years ago, visiting a girlfriend of mine who had just moved to Fredricksburg from Colorado. It’s kind of a fun place. They had some interesting stuff.”

“Then you know people don’t go there without some interest in antiques, even if it’s casual. According to the surveillance log, Gulin never went into one shop or even looked in a window. It is, however, a place where it’s not easy to follow someone, which is probably why he chose it. As I said before, we had information that he was working an FBI agent. In this video it looks like he could be meeting with someone, but we couldn’t be sure because we lost him within minutes of this being shot. There was never any real effort to identify the second individual.”