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

Still he wouldn’t answer but pulled away from the curb and drove off, once more checking to see if anyone from the club was watching. When he got a block away and was certain that none of the Lithuanians could see them, he pulled over. “That night you and I broke into the Russian safe house in Denton, remember?”

“Guys in ski masks, large handguns, you setting off explosives, fire—something about it rings a bell.”

“Did you notice anything funny about that guy Barkus or the other one playing chess with him?”

“Other than their warmth toward FBI agents, especially the female subspecies, not really,” she said. “Oh, Barkus had dark circles under his eyes. Probably something to do with his not getting back to the coffin until after sunrise.”

“You weren’t as close to him as I was. Or the other one. They both had them, dark circles all the way around their eyes—and around their mouths, too.”

“What were they?”

“Dozens of tiny cuts scabbed over.”

“The areas left exposed by ski masks. From the shattered lightbulbs,” Kate said.

“And that night they were speaking in some foreign language that wasn’t Russian. It sounded Eastern European. It could have been Lithuanian. It all makes sense now. That guy in the tunnel in Chicago, Jonas Sakis, he made a reference to game theory and zero-sum games. And when I said something about him being Russian, he gave me this strange smirk. It was because he was Lithuanian.”

“That means—oh, my God!” Kate said. “That means these guys are tied directly to the Russians. They’re working with them, and they have ears and eyes in the NSA, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and who knows where else.”

“That’s why we’ve got to be very careful. You, me, and Luke, no one else.”

“No one else? The three of us against all of them?”

Vail ignored Kate’s plea. “The real question is, what’s the connection between the Lithuanians and Sundra—and you?”

She shook her head in disbelief at his self-control, gaining her own calm from it. “Connected how?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I got the feeling that the Lithuanian Chess Society is going to vote nay to our getting a membership list. So let’s drive around here while you write down as many tags as possible. Maybe we can identify some of them.” Vail put the car in gear, and said, “There was also something Zogas said that bothers me.”

“What?”

“You’re familiar with statement analysis?”

“A little bit. It’s been years since I used it at OPR.”

“Do you remember what he said in his announcement to the others about Sundra?”

“No.”

“I told him that she works for the FBI. He told them that we had a photograph of a missing woman who had worked for the FBI. Past tense.”

“Couldn’t that just be a translation problem for him?”

“It could be. He had an accent, but his grammar was almost flawless. Anyone who uses words like ‘commiserate’ or can explain game theory in a few words or think of something like ‘antibiography’ has a better command of English than I do.”

“Then that’s not a good omen for Sundra, is it?” Kate asked rhetorically.

When they pulled up at the off-site, they saw Bursaw’s car parked in front. “Good, Luke’s here. Maybe he can help figure this out.”

In the workroom they filled Bursaw in on everything that had happened and their conclusion that the LCS was somehow connected to both Sundra Boston’s disappearance and Kate’s being framed. Vail explained about Zogas’s possible slip in verb tense concerning the well-being of the missing analyst.

Bursaw considered it for a moment. “More often than not, that stuff is accurate. I hope it was just a translation problem. I’d like to think we haven’t been looking for a dead body.”

Vail handed him the list of license plates Kate had taken down at the chess club. “Can you get these run, but not through WFO? Have the locals run them and keep it quiet.”

“That detective from Metro Homicide we turned Jonathan Wilkins over to said if I ever needed anything. I’ve known him for a while, so it won’t be a problem to keep it quiet.”

“Until we figure it out, we don’t need to be distracted by who might know what. You, Kate, and me—that’s it. If something leaks out, we won’t have to waste time wondering if someone from the Bureau innocently mentioned it to someone that they shouldn’t have. We’ll know it’s something the opposition somehow came up with on their own and we can trace it back that way,” Vail said. “How’d you do with the missing persons?”

“I found only one. Maurice Lyle Gaston, late of Matrix-Linx International, Springfield, Virginia. We did a security clearance on him. Matrix-Linx has a defense contract. The only fly in the ointment was that he disappeared in Las Vegas. A sister who lives here reported him missing to Fairfax County when he failed to come back from a weekend getaway there.”

“Las Vegas. Interesting.” Vail wrote down the information in a small notebook. “Good. Kate and I will look into it.”

“On a more definitive note, I did find out how Longmeadow came up in her files.”

“How?”

Bursaw smiled as if he were about to unveil an important piece of the puzzle. “In a counterintelligence case. Surveillance was following a Russian by the name of Dimitri Polakov. He was later expelled from the U.S. for suspected spying activities. It was Labor Day, last year, and a surveillance team was looking for a target to follow around. They had no reason to believe he was doing anything—they just wanted to log enough hours to qualify for holiday pay. You know, before they lost him and had no choice but to break off the surveillance and go home. All of a sudden, this guy coasts up to a mailbox and then takes off. The team leader sees there’s a signal chalked on the box, so now they realize that they’ve stumbled onto something. There was going to be a drop. Polakov drives all over for the next two hours and lands at an apple orchard that’s open to the public—you know, to pick your own apples. The target gets out of his car and wanders off down one of the paths. The crew goes into the parking lot, and they start copping tags, hoping that whoever he’s meeting has a car there. They write down fourteen of them. Meanwhile two agents follow Polakov on foot, but he never makes a drop or picks any apples, so the team thinks that they may have gotten burned. But still they had the plates. Maybe one of the tags belongs to whomever Polakov was supposed to meet. They give all of them to Sundra to look into. Subsequently she was just running out the leads by the numbers when she requested tolls on the owners of the cars in the lot. One of them was Chester Alvin Longmeadow.”

“So he was there for a drop but probably made the surveillance, and the exchange never took place. That’s nice work, Luke,” Vail said. “It ties Sundra to Longmeadow, who we now know is connected to the LCS through the sergeant’s phone records. And we know that the Lithuanians are connected to the Russians because of their coming to the safe house in Denton.”

Bursaw held up the list of license plates collected at the chess club. “I’ll head over to Metro and get these run.”

After he left, Kate said, “Well, it looks like we’ve got all the players. Now we just have to figure out how they fit together.”

“That’s why I thought the three of us should sit down and brainstorm this.”

“You’re going to wait until Luke comes back?”

“Actually, I thought we’d enlist the help of Sakichi Toyoda.”

“Who’s that?”

“He was considered the king of Japanese inventors, at least in the early twentieth century. He started a little company called Toyota,” Vail said. “But more important, at least for us, he developed the concept of the Five Whys. Ever heard of it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Toyoda figured out that when a problem occurs, if you ask why five times, give or take, you’ll trace any problem back to its root cause and then can prevent it from recurring.”