I rolled my eyes, but my mouth smiled. He really was a lovable son of a bitch. I hoped Gigi wasn’t about to break his heart, and not just because that would screw us both.
“OK, so she’s amazing.” Clearly, I need to retract my grumpy earlier criticism about contemporary word use. “So what did she find?”
He grimaced. “Well, it’s good and it’s bad.”
My entire body tensed in anticipation. Maybe our search was finally going to move out of park. “What do you mean?”
He closed the space between us. “She went in and snooped around the user records and protocol logs related to the terms I’d been using in my searches around both Corrigan and your dad and came up with nothing. Then she went in again and went deeper. Still nothing. Then a couple of days later, we tried again, only this time, the logs and the user records themselves were gone. Everything that had data links to our target folders. Gone. I mean, up until now, they’ve been changing the access codes as per standard operation procedure at Langley. But in the last week, they’ve modified the protocols and wiped dozens of files.”
He gave me that knowing look, the one loaded with portent.
I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway, “So they know we’ve been looking?”
He nodded, his eyes even wider with conspiracy.
“I’m having a hard time seeing anything ‘good’ here, Kurt.”
“Well, yeah, agreed, that part’s not great. But there’s more. Gigi, she doesn’t give up easy. And this was like a challenge for her, like they’d thrown down the gauntlet. So she goes into overdrive and starts trying all kinds of things, including this little trick of hers. She tries misspelling Corrigan in her trawl. She thinks laterally like that, you know?” He paused and nodded, more just to himself, grinning with admiration, savoring the thought. “And she got a hit. One with an ‘m’ at the end, as in, Corrigam.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m telling you. She says it was more common than you’d think before spellchecking technology closed that crack.”
He went quiet again. Kurt had this irritating habit of pausing to build portent. Maybe he’d watched too many badly written TV shows and it had affected the cadence at which he spoke.
“And…?”
“She found a reference to Reed Corrigam-with an ‘m’-in a deep archive. It was in a report from the Direccíon de Inteligencia-the DI, Cuba’s intelligence agency.”
I knew what the DI was, but I didn’t want to burst his bubble. We at the Bureau had been known to butt heads with their operatives in Miami. Instead, I just said, “Makes sense. They would have been operational in El Salvador back then.”
Kurt nodded, then looked around suspiciously, gave our surroundings a second pan-and-scan, then pulled some folded papers out from his pocket and handed them to me. “It’s all in here. It talks about a meeting a DI guy had with Corrigan. It says there was a leak from the DI, and the DI agent is only referred to by his initials, but it mentions the name ‘Octavio Camacho’ as well and I googled that. The hit that seemed most promising was this guy,” he said as he flicked through the printouts before pulling out a particular page. “He was a Portuguese journalist.”
“‘Was?’”
“Yep. Camacho died in 1981.”
I flicked back to the report about the meeting. It had also taken place that year-a couple of months before Camacho’s death.
I could feel my shoulders drop. “That’s it?”
Kurt’s face followed suit. “So far. But she’s still at it. She’s trying to hack some digitized archive backups. The encryption-compression algorithms aren’t as secure as those for live data. At least not for Gigi when she’s in the zone.” He brightened at her name. The guy was totally lovestruck. “But maybe you’ll come up with more on the Camacho front. Maybe you could check with Portuguese Intelligence, see if they’ve got something on Corrigan.”
“Or Corrigam.”
He smiled. “Exactly.”
I wasn’t thrilled. It wasn’t much-not much at all. Just another dark alley with an insurmountable brick wall at its end.
Kurt read my face. “Dude, we’ll find something. She will, anyway. I know it.”
I shrugged. “All right. Do me a favor. Check on something else for me.”
“Shoot.”
“You remember our little Casanova down in DC?”
Kurt gave me a curious look. “Our man Stan?”
“Exactly. See if you can find out what his calendar looks like for Thursday.”
He scratched the top of his ear with his thumb. “This Thursday? The day after tomorrow?”
“Yep.”
“Thursday was Stan’s booty night.”
I said, “I’m wondering if it still is.”
He nodded slowly to himself, the ear-scratching slowing down too. “No problemo. Easily done.”
“Great. Thanks.” I tapped the printouts as I stood up. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Cool,” he said as he got off the bench too. “I’ll say hi to Gigi from you.”
I gave him a chastening scowl.
He said, “Dude, lighten up. It’s Christmas.”
I took a couple of steps, then turned back toward him.
“Treat her right, Kurt. She seems like a keeper. But don’t let her push it too far. I don’t want either of you ending up in an orange jumpsuit or as permanent houseguests of the Ecuadorian embassy. Not so soon after you’ve found each other.”
Kurt beamed and patted his heart. “Thanks, man. Truly. I’m just… thanks.”
“Don’t push it, Jaegers. My Christmas spirit only extends so far.” I turned and walked away. I couldn’t resist a smile as I headed back toward the Expedition, but I felt deflated. The Kurt route-now the Kurt and Gigi route-was going nowhere. Once he got me the info I needed about Kirby, I thought I might have to set him loose. I’d miss him-but this was getting us nowhere, and it was putting him and his archmage, whatever that was, at risk.
I was getting into the Expedition when my work BlackBerry rang.
I checked the screen. There was no number appearing on it. It was a private caller.
I took the call.
“Agent Reilly?”
I froze. The voice was cavernous and artificially monotone. The caller was using an electronic voice changer.
Never a good sign.
5
In these situations, my mind immediately goes to Tess, Kim and Alex.
I don’t know why. I don’t usually deal with psychos or serial killers. The cases I normally work on rarely have the kind of personal angle that can spiral into a vendetta against my loved ones or me. But right there and then, I thought of them. And it sent a spasm of worry through me.
I just said, “I’m listening.”
“Are you interested in justice?”
I forced out a small chortle. “It’s really hard to take that question seriously from someone who sounds like he has a Darth Vader fetish.”
The man paused, then said, “I know things, Agent Reilly. Things you need to hear. Things I need you to do something about. Many innocent people have died because of this. The question is, are you ready to put your life on the line to do something about it?”
I didn’t know what to make of this. We get these whackos more frequently than you’d think, but they usually call the Bureau’s switchboard. Special Agents’ cell phone numbers aren’t easy to get hold of.
I said, “That’s kind of my job description. Who are you? How’d you get this number?”
“What I know, what I want to tell you about, goes way back. It involves a lot of people. Powerful people.”
“OK, I’m going to hang up now, cause we’ve hit our quota on scoops about Area 51 and-”
He interrupted me. “What about your father Colin? You hit your quota on that too?”
That got my attention.
I caught my breath as the savage image that had been seared into my mind ever since I was ten came bursting out of the cage I tried to keep it in, the image of my dad in his office at home, slumped at his desk with a gun by his hand and the back of his head blown off.