“Sounds good,” he told her.
She pulled her backpack onto her lap. “In the meantime, we should look through these,” she said, removing the files and envelopes that had also been in the safe.
Gloria was on the phone the minute they climbed back into their car.
“We did a complete search,” she told her boss, “but didn’t find anything useful.”
“No computer?” Boyer asked.
“No, but someone was in the house before us. They could have taken it.”
“What?”
“The door was unlocked and the alarm was off.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“Uh-uh. Don’t know how long ago they broke in.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“No clue yet.”
“Well, then, what’s your next move?”
“I have Becker’s clothes and bag. Want to get them scanned in case he hid anything in them. Thought we’d swing by the office and drop them off. After that, I thought I’d look into some of his colleagues. If it seems like one of them might know what he was up to, I’ll give them a visit.”
“I’m at the Ritz-Carlton for the next hour,” Boyer said. “You’ll save a lot of time if you can get them to me.”
McCrillis International’s office was way on the other side of the Capitol building. At this time of day with traffic, it would take more than an hour of travel time. The Ritz-Carlton, while still in DC, was much closer to her current location.
“Thank you, sir. That would be very helpful.”
“We’ll meet in the courtyard.” He gave her instructions on how to get in, then said, “Text me when you get there.”
The blip on the tracking app headed south out of Bethesda on a direct course for Washington, DC. Once they were in the city, following the car at a distance would no longer be an option. Quinn and his team needed to be in sight of the car when it stopped so they could see where its occupants went.
“Let’s move into point,” Quinn said when they were still several miles outside the district.
With a nod, Nate depressed the accelerator and began closing the gap. “There it is,” he said a minute later.
The sedan was three cars ahead in the same lane they were in. It took another mile and a half for Nate to maneuver past the car without drawing attention to their SUV. He then increased the separation to nearly a block, at which point he eased back on their speed and matched the flow of traffic. Now, thanks to the tracker, they were following the sedan from the front.
“Do we have any idea what the deal is with this Tessa?” Daeng asked from the backseat.
“I told you everything I know,” Quinn said.
“Do you think Abraham is holding something back?”
“I doubt it.”
“How well do you know him?”
“Very. He was Orlando’s mentor.”
No one said anything for a few moments.
“I’m not sure I like this,” Nate said.
Quinn took a quick glance at his friend before looking back at the screen. “What do you mean?”
“The idea of anything having to do with kids. I just…I don’t like it.”
Quinn understood where he was coming from. The world they traveled in was full of pain and death. You could get immune to seeing the body of an adult who’d been terminated, but never that of a child. A few years earlier they’d been involved in an incident that had centered around the kidnapping of a busload of kids. There were moments in the months afterward when Quinn would catch Nate staring off into nothing, the potential of what could have happened undoubtedly still playing through his apprentice’s head. Hell, the scenarios had played nonstop through his own mind for a while there.
“We’re not dealing with any kids,” Quinn said. “We’re trying to make sure whoever killed Abraham’s friend isn’t going to come after him.”
“Really? Seems to me we’re trying to help him find out about her.”
“All right, yeah. That, too. But just information. That’s all.”
Though Quinn couldn’t see Nate’s expression, he could feel the other cleaner’s sideways glance and knew Nate was thinking, Are you sure about that?
According to the tracker, they were less than half a mile from Washington.
“Slow down,” Quinn said. “Let them catch up.”
The files and envelopes from Eli’s safe turned out to contain only personal items pertaining to his bank accounts, his townhouse, and a place in Kansas he had apparently inherited from his parents. The general search of his computer was equally unrewarding, returning no hits on any of the keywords used.
The lack of easily accessible data didn’t come as a shock, though. Eli wouldn’t have been so careless as to leave in plain sight something that had spooked him enough to make him flee his home.
That, of course, didn’t mean there was nothing to be found. Given Eli’s position at the CIA, he would’ve had the resources to securely hide information from prying eyes. Most of them, anyway.
Using her digital arsenal, Orlando scanned the drive for encrypted files, sifted through operating system logs for anything out of place, and did a sector-by-sector search for ghost data. As the last of these was completed, a dialogue box popped open with text reading: XJ982323/ubr2.xuki.
“I don’t recognize the extension,” Abraham said.
Orlando frowned. “Neither do I.”
A fact that troubled her.
She opened a program she’d dubbed Surgeon and used it to extract the file from its hiding place, and then copied it to an isolated partition on her own drive. Leaving the full file closed, she opened the metadata, but all she found was useless garbage.
What kind of file was a.xuki?
Not wanting to waste the time it would take to figure it out on her own, she opened her messaging program and sent a quick note to the Mole.
You there?
His answer came back within seconds.
Where else would I be?
She typed again.
xuki — heard of it?
The Mole:
Seriously?
Orlando:
Seriously. Why?
Five seconds later, her phone rang. She donned her earpiece and answered, “Yes?”
“You’ve never heard…of it?” the Mole asked in his odd cadence, his voice electronically distorted into a metallic monotone as always.
“I wouldn’t be asking if I had.”
A pause. “You must have missed…it while you…were recovering.”
“Missed what?”
“The dot-xuki virus.” He pronounced the extension zoo-key.
Orlando frowned. While she had been out of the loop after she was shot, she had specifically worked hard to catch up on any important tech developments she might have missed.
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It was…hush-hush. Hit only…CIA data storage center outside Washington, DC….Inside source said only…three data banks…and their backups wiped.”
“That’s it? Just three data banks at one location? Didn’t show up anywhere else?”
“Nowhere.”
That was probably why she hadn’t heard of it.
“Why…are you…asking?” he said.
She looked around the coffee shop, but Abraham was the only one paying her any attention. “Found a dot-xuki file on a drive I’m looking through.”
“What drive?”
“That’s not something I’m prepared to share at the moment. Were the perpetrators caught?”
A hesitation, then, “Not…to my knowledge.”
“So it’s probably a good idea if I don’t open the file.”