It'll automatically flag anything it finds and upload it to a saved file."
"Good." Anna's hand snapped out and she yanked the data rod from the interface socket. D-Bar called out in surprise as he lost his remote feed, but she ignored him, dropping the rod to the floor and breaking it in two with the heel of her shoe.
"Was that you?" D-Bar demanded. "What did you just do?"
Anna's hands twitched, making it difficult to gather up the broken pieces in one go. "Cut you off," she confirmed, dropping the fragments into a cup of cold coffee some errant technician had left on a nearby desk. "This is not my first rodeo, kid. I let you drop the seeker, but I'm not letting you keep an open conduit into a federal law enforcement agency's mainframe, not for one second more than I have to."
"And how exactly are you going to get the data out?" he retorted.
"Way ahead of you." Anna rooted through a storage locker and found a case of blank media units, flash drives of the same model she'd used to store her own information. Working as swiftly as she could, she connected a drive in place of the data rod and let the unit fill with the seeker program's digital harvest.
D-Bar was too interested to stay silent for long. "What are you seeing?"
"A lot," Anna admitted. Data flashed past her eyes, much of it in formats unfamiliar to her, some immediately recognizable as U.S. Secret
Service and Department of Justice files. There were operational schedules, transport routes, profiles of agents on duty and principals to protect; but there were other documents as well, evaluations and surveillance records, the kind of materials that Kelso's agency didn't use. Then she saw information that bore digital watermarks from Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Diplomatic Corps; other pages were not even in English, and it took her a second to realize that she was seeing memos and documentation from security agencies outside the
United States. Whoever the leak was inside the service, they had been tunneling through the agency's link to the DOJ, and from there out to the shadowy nexus of information shared by the global law enforcement community.
As abruptly as it had begun, the search ended and the data parsed itself into the flash drive. Anna felt a cold impulse down her spine and she reached for the keyboard in front of the monitor, inputting the name "Skyler" and a date string as the parameters for a sweep of the stolen data. Instantly, the complete scope of all the supposedly secure transit information about Senator Skyler's detail on that fateful day was there in front of her. Every last bit of it, from details of what pool vehicles would be used and their maintenance records, through the receipts showing how many bullets the agents on the detail had logged out from the agency armory. Everything an assassin would need to prepare a flawless attack.
The file bore a validation code, a digital fingerprint tying the requested data to the terminal and agent identity of the person who had copied them. Anna knew the code; she'd seen it a hundred times appended to her own after-operations debriefs and memos. But still she clicked on the text string, hoping that she had read it wrongly. Hoping she had made a mistake.
The display opened a panel and showed her Ron Temple's authentication.
"You son of a bitch." The words slipped out of her in a shallow breath, drained of all anger and fury. Anna felt nothing, just a chill numbness at the core of her gut.
A man she had trusted, a man she had served with, and before her lay proof that he was a traitor, proof that he had sold out whatever integrity he had to the faceless figures who had their hands on the leash of the Tyrants.
Then the emotion came, breaking the icy dam of the dead feeling in her chest, engulfing her. Anna's eyes prickled and her vision misted. She staggered a little and reached out a hand to steady herself. Temple had sold them out-Kelso and Ryan, Byrne, Laker, and Connor, everyone on the Skyler detail, along with all those other men and women he had given up. Her hands drew into hard, tight fists. She wanted to know why.
More than the fury, more than the rush of potent despair, Anna wanted to know the answer. How a man could betray his oath and his colleagues.
For money? Out of fear? No answer she could imagine seemed good enough.
A repeating tone dragged her back from her reverie, and she blinked owlishly. D-Bar was yelling in her ear, and Kelso glanced back at the server monitor; a warning panel was blinking there, a string of text in livid red letters telling her to stand by and wait for security.
"Are you listening to me?" D-Bar shouted. "Kelso, can't you hear that?"
She pulled out the connector leading to the flash drive, then shoved the data device in her pocket, moving swiftly across the room to the door.
Outside she could hear voices.
Fighting down the tremors in her fingers, she stepped out calmly into the dim corridor and walked at a steady, unhurried pace toward the elevator bank. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to run, but she knew that the agency's internal security monitors possessed subroutines that looked for abnormal body kinetics-if she ran, they would see it. She smothered the urge with a grimace and metered her pace. Just a few more steps.
Behind her, she heard a voice call out. Drake. She knew it was him without having to turn around. Anna ignored him, kept moving. In a few more seconds, she'd turn the corner and be at the elevators.
"Hey, stop!" called the other agent. "I'm talking to you! Stop right now!" Anna heard the rustle of a holster being snapped open, the click of a safety catch flicking off. "I won't tell you again!"
She fled. It wasn't a conscious choice on her part, not something she was aware of doing on anything but the most base, animal-brain level; but suddenly she was sprinting the rest of the distance down the corridor, her thoughts clattering inside her mind, the rush of new adrenaline warring with the tidal drag of the stim crash. She couldn't think straight, she couldn't process. All she could do was run, run, run Anna raced around the corner and came face-to-face with Agent Tyler, wandering out of the break room past the elevators, stirring a cup of dark coffee. "Kelso?" His face registered a moment of confusion.
"Stop her!" shouted Drake. That was enough to galvanize Tyler into action, and he let the cup drop, going for his service weapon.
Anna ignored him and dove for the open doors of the elevator, hand reaching for the controls. Her feet were just across the threshold when
Tyler snatched at the collar of her jacket and pulled hard. Some of her hair caught in his grip and sent a shock of pain through her head. A kick landed in the back of her right knee and her leg buckled. She went down, catching a glimpse of herself falling and Tyler right on her in the mirrored back of the elevator car.
Then she was on the floor, half in and half out of the lift, with a federal agent's handgun pressed into the small of her back. "You're under arrest," said Drake.
Romeo Airport-Michigan-United States of America
The aircraft put down on the runway just as the sunset bled away across the landscape. No visible-spectrum landing lights were in operation, and the pilot brought them in using a virtual headset rig that made it seem to him as if he were touching down in the middle of the day.
Romeo had gone back and forth between active and inactive over the last four decades, until it had quietly slipped into the hands of a minor corporate consortium that, via a labyrinth of blinds and shell companies, was one cog in a far larger machine. The surrounding area was remote enough that the local populace were sparse, but it was close enough to Detroit for the glow of the city's skyscrapers to be visible on the horizon, the colors reflecting off the bottom of the low cloud base.
Inside the hangar, a staging area had already been set up alongside a fuel bowser for the jet and a line of utility trailers. Robot forklifts swarmed around the rear of the plane, peeling back the vast curved blades of the cargo doors to gather up the helo nestled in its storage cradle.