For the next few minutes, boats of all shapes and sizes went by. Mostly fishing boats, it seemed, but she saw two houseboats and, across the lake, a group of kayakers. Watauga Lake was a popular place. She checked her watch; 35 minutes had elapsed since Christa slipped out of sight beneath the boat. She knew from the safety drills she had gotten from her friend that she couldn't stay down too long. She leaned over to check for bubbles just as Christa's head broke the surface.
"Found it." Christa pointed toward shore.
Regan looked up and saw an inflatable marker buoy bobbing in the wake of a passing boat. "How long's that been there?"
"Six or seven minutes, maybe. I made a five minutes safety stop on the way up. I'll need to off-gas for at least an hour before I go back down." She threw her mask and fins on the swim platform. "This is going to be a lot of work. Metal plate bolted down. Looks real heavy." She was taking short choppy breaths. "Glad I brought those tools. Looks like we're going to need them."
"We got company." Regan pointed with a nod of the head. "Been here about thirty minutes."
"Fishing the whole time?"
"Yeah. He's already caught three or four that I've seen. Threw 'em all back in though."
"We'll raise the dive flag before we go down. That way he won't hook one of us."
Regan laughed. "That'd make for one hell of a fish story, wouldn't it?"
Jake admired Regan's choice of boats, a Bayliner 192 cuddy cabin inboard/outboard with canvas Bimini top and full swim platform. A much more suitable boat for scuba diving than his metal-hull bass boat that didn't have a swim ladder. The name written in bold green script across the transom was Miss Debi. He checked his watch when he pulled into the cove where the grave of Norman Reese was located, 7:00 a.m. He hadn't anticipated the women would arrive this early. There was only one woman on board the boat now, Ashley Regan, so he assumed her friend was already underwater trying to locate the grave.
He anchored 150 feet away near a tree that had fallen into the water. He cast two lines, one on each side of the tree, letting one sink to the bottom while he used a top-water plug with the other. He'd noticed Regan was watchful until he caught his first fish. Then her interest in him seemed to wane.
Jake smiled; he'd used the same ruse off the northern coast of Spain last year in the Cantabrian Sea while he was chasing a terrorist. The terrorist was lulled into the same false sense of security when Jake and two CIA agents caught their first fish.
A slight breeze worked in his favor and weathervaned his boat so he had clear vantage point of the Bayliner without having to turn his head.
The second and third fish strike came in rapid succession. By the time he had reeled in his top-water plug which had a large mouth bass, his bottom fishing rod had doubled over. All the excitement caused him to divert his attention away from the Bayliner. When he looked back up, an inflatable marker had surfaced. Shortly after that a diver climbed onto the swim platform. He knew by the location of the marker they'd found Reese's grave.
A few hours prior he hadn't even surfaced when he ran out of air. Fifteen feet below the surface with less than a minute left on his safety stop, he exhaled and when he tried to take a breath, there was nothing left in the tank. He had expected it and surfaced anyway. He knew he'd have plenty of time to rid any excess nitrogen from his blood before he was forced to dive again and knew he was well within Navy safety margins.
When he had returned to the cabin after the dive, none of his safety traps had been sprung. He checked his email. He found a photo of Abigail Love from Fontaine and a terse message from Wiley about waiting for backup.
He knew he couldn't wait on Wiley to send reinforcements. There wasn't time. This might be his only chance to find out what Regan was doing and what she possessed that had morphed her from accountant to grave robber.
At 8:30, both women put on their dry suits. He knew it was time. He noticed a deck boat driven by a woman pull into the open cove. She was alone. Jake used his miniature spyglass to get a better look. He recognized her immediately and lowered his head blocking his face with the rim of his hat.
He knew she could jeopardize the entire mission.
He also knew that Abigail Love could recognize him.
34
George Fontaine sat down at his desk when the alerts flashed across two of his four big screen wall-mounted monitors.
The tracker program Evan Makley had installed on his computer courtesy of Abigail Love did more than she'd advertised. In a sense it was a Trojan virus with specific non-malicious tracking capability. Every email he sent had the virus attached, even the ones to himself allowing him to work from his home computer. And each recipient's computer was now accessible by Love's servers.
That meant Love's servers could have had access to every bit of data stored on over fifty national security computers, most in the D.C. area.
Could have had being key if Fontaine hadn't hacked the virus code and rerouted the pathway to the Commonwealth Consultants servers. Now, Love's servers saw nothing. Taking her out of the loop was his number one national security priority. Fontaine developed algorithms that not only allowed him to reroute the pathway from Love's virus but also installed a similar track back virus of his own construct, revealing her IP routing.
The first alert on his screen pinpointed the exact physical location of Love's servers. Within the hour, Wiley's team would take down the servers, remove the hard drives, and destroy the complex.
The second alert listed every IP address Makley sent emails to. Computers that now had Fontaine's tracking virus attached. The virus enabled him to see and download everything on each of those computers. He scrolled through the list until he located the server he needed. Now the back trace began.
After hacking through the firewalls of 27 anonymous servers around the globe, Fontaine located the server that sent the blackmail message to Makley. To his good fortune, the computer was still online and within a few seconds he had captured the physical address of the computer, a Starbucks. Moments later he commenced a download of the contents of its hard drive.
Only minutes into the transfer, the download stopped. Fontaine smiled. He already knew two important things about the blackmailer, she or he was using a portable device and it wouldn't be long before the computer came back online.
Half an hour later he was alerted the computer was back online. The physical trace revealed the computer accessed the Internet from a Cadillac dealership less than a mile from the Starbucks. Wiley's assets were a minimum of two hours away. He needed the computer online in a single location when they arrived. He knew this wasn't going to be it.
Thirty minutes later, the download stopped again. Fontaine partitioned what he had obtained on his computer and started sorting through the bytes of information. He was amazed at the lack of precaution this person had taken to protect the information on the computer. No encryption. No hidden files. It seemed the only precaution was the use of several anonymous servers and email clients.
Almost everything on the computer was standard and straightforward. The person's identity revealed, Fontaine started a background check while he combed the remainder of the data.
Midway through the data, he found something that shocked him. Jake's guess had been correct. After a background search, another name popped up.