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

“You’re absolutely right,” she said. “Lunch is not going to be ready for a while. You guys want something to drink?” she asked with surprising nonchalance.

“No thanks,” Bursaw said.

“I’m all set,” Vail said. “You’re taking this well.”

In a faked whisper, she said, “Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve got a couple of really good guys looking out for me.”

Bursaw said, “You went and got somebody else?”

After lunch Vail picked up one of the Calculus folders and started rereading it. Ten minutes later he tossed it onto the table in front of him. “That’s it, I can’t read anymore. I’ve been over this stuff so much that I wouldn’t recognize the answer if it were highlighted.”

Bursaw’s phone rang; it was Kalix again. He put it on speaker. “I’m with the group going to Rellick’s house with a search warrant. They pinged his cell phone, and it shows he’s home. I’ll call you—we’re just about to make entry.”

Everyone tried to appear unexcited, as though too much optimism might jinx the outcome. Kate went back to the kitchen, and Bursaw turned on the news. For the next half hour, he listened to the local broadcast. Vail became lost in his thoughts, reexamining everything, looking for another way to prove Kate’s innocence in case Rellick proved to be uncooperative. When nothing came to him, he got up and went into the kitchen. He stepped up behind her and slowly pulled on one of the apron strings. “I think I know what we need.”

She let him get it completely untied before she turned around. Reaching behind her, she retied it. “Yes, Steve, that’s exactly what we don’t need right now.”

“I never even got a real New Year’s kiss.” He put an arm around her waist.

“I kissed you. Which, by the way, triggered my one New Year’s resolution—to only kiss men in tuxedos.”

“I’ve been thinking about canceling my diving trip and going to maitre d’ school.”

“You greeting people for tips. That sounds like a shorter career than you had with the FBI.”

Bursaw’s phone rang again. He called in to Vail that it was Kalix. Vail put Kate at arm’s length—“It’s so easy to mock someone else’s dreams”—then walked into the living room and took the phone. “Yes, John.”

“Is everyone there?” Kalix asked.

Vail called Kate in from the kitchen and pushed the Speaker button. “We’re all here.”

“Rellick’s gone. He left his phone here and turned it on as a decoy. That’s the bad news. But up in his attic, there have to be fifty of those banker’s boxes—you know, for storing records. Not only his own, but all kinds of family stuff his parents must have accumulated for decades. Everything—his divorce records, stocks sold twenty years ago. So far they’ve found five or six of them with classified documents in them, all copies he evidently made. So now the CIA will be able to reconstruct exactly what information he turned over to the Russians. They’re most appreciative.”

“Will that be enough to clear Kate?”

“It will be with what they found in one of them. Remember on that thumb drive, the typed list of eight FBI-CIA joint investigations along with their named targets? The one that Kate’s latent was supposed to have been on?”

Vail looked at Kate. “It was in there?”

“They’re going to examine it for prints to see if Rellick’s are on it. It hasn’t been processed before, so the Russians must have copied it and fumed the copy for the flash-drive setup.”

“You’d think Rellick would have destroyed everything, especially that.”

“He probably panicked, and maybe he intends to defect. If so, why bother? Considering where this box was, under all the rest, he may have just forgotten it, and even if he didn’t, it would have taken him some time to find it in all that mess. From the other documents in the box, it looks like it’s a couple of years old, so if he did think about getting rid of it, he probably knew that it would take too long to find.”

Vail said, “That sounds like all good news to me.”

“For us, yes, but for them there’s a new problem. As soon as they discovered he was gone, they unleashed the techs on his work computer. They found a deleted file that he’d cobbled together from a bunch of different files that he shouldn’t have been able to gain access to. They’re thinking maybe the Russians helped him ‘jailbreak’ some of the CIA security measures.”

“What was on it?” Vail asked.

“Dozens of the agency’s European sources. If he’s taking it to the Russians, the likelihood of their being killed is quite high. It would set the Agency back ten years.”

“You said ‘if he’s taking it to the Russians.’ ”

“The last entry in the file was just two days ago. And it was deleted last night after the polygrapher told him about the impending test. So they don’t think he had completed the list yet. But somehow they were able to tell that it was downloaded before it was deleted.”

“Did they check his e-mail?” Vail asked.

“Both at the office and here. He didn’t send it through either of them. I don’t know, maybe he put it onto another thumb drive. As you can imagine, there’s a fairly large amount of panic around here. Right now they’re trying all their super-secret spy stuff to find him. The problem is that he knows how to avoid it,” Kalix said. “Steve, they found one more thing on his computer here. That photo that was sent to the two guys at the house who tried to kill you, through that untraceable CIA phone line—it was on there. The Russians must have had him send it so it wouldn’t come back to anyone.”

“Well, that answers who,” Vail said.

“Anyway, before Kate’s innocence gets lost in all the impending catastrophe, I’m going to go see the United States Attorney. He says he’ll see me as soon as I get there. In the meantime, maybe we can find something else here that will eliminate any doubt that Kate wasn’t part of this.”

“I don’t know how to thank you, John,” she said.

“You’re not clear yet, Kate. As long as Rellick’s on the loose, they are going to need somebody to blame. They’ve got evidence against you, and even though it’s all manufactured, the United States Attorney probably isn’t going to be a fan of yours the way you made a fool out of him when you escaped. But I’ll let you know once I talk to him.”

After Kalix hung up, Vail said, more to himself than the others, “He’s right.”

“Think so?” Bursaw said.

Realizing he’d said it out loud, Vail looked at Kate. “Sorry. It would be better for you if they found Rellick. Much better.”

She thought for a second and then said, “See if this sounds right: Rellick left his cell phone behind at his house, mostly as a decoy. Would he have another one? You know, just for spy business?”

“That makes a lot of sense,” Vail said.

“You have that CIA dead-end number, right?”

“Yes.”

“Since you were last in the Bureau, we’ve developed fairly sophisticated reverse-toll record traces, especially for cell phones, because every call is noted for billing. So we can take a call if we know the date and time and, with a fairly simple computer run, determine the phone it was made from.”

Vail said, “So if Rellick does have another cell and we can identify it through the reverse records, if he’s got it on, we can ping it.”

“And find out where he is,” Bursaw added.

Vail had his pocket notebook out, turning pages. “Here it is.” He started to write it down, then stopped. “But how do we get it done? Technically, you’re still wanted.”

“If you think about it, there aren’t many people at headquarters who know my situation. The worst thing that could happen is that someone could find out I’m here. We really have no choice.” Both men nodded. “Why don’t you guys get out of here, and I’ll make the call. That way if something happens to me, you’ll still be able to look for Rellick.”

“Just remember, if you get locked up again, you’re on your own.”

“Talk about your one-night stands.”