She stopped.
For the third time that morning, Jamie collapsed onto the carpet. Through Molly’s legs, he could see that the door to the office had opened.
And there was another pair of legs standing in the doorway. Bare legs. Black flats.
“Busy, Molly?” a voice said.
He tried to see past Molly’s legs, but his view was obscured.
The voice sounded familiar, though.
It sounded like
“Nichole Wise, code name Workhorse.”
“That’s interesting,” Keene said. “I didn’t realize we did the whole gay nickname thing.”
“We do.”
“I was being facetious.”
“But you know who else does?”
“Well, the CIA.”
“The motherloving CIA.”
“Interesting. They send her to monitor the Philadelphia operation?”
“No. They’ve got a crush on Murphy, and they’re jealous he left them. In fact, I don’t think they’re aware we’re behind his operation. Probably better that way.”
“Does Girlfriend know about her?”
“She hasn’t said as much. If she’s figured it out, it’ll be all the more impressive.”
“Murphy’s office is full of wonders, isn’t it?”
“It’s what makes this line of work so much fun.”
Keene could see why McCoy got wrapped up in this sort of thing. The people assets. It could become as addictive as an American soap opera. Not that he watched those things. Who was screwing who. Who had a secret alliance with who else. You could work for a company—or the Company, as it were—for years and not unravel every sticky web.
“Think your girl can handle it?”
“From the looks of it, she can handle everything.”
“Care for a little wager?”
“Stop talking. I think Girlfriend is about to kill Workhorse, and I don’t want to miss it.”
ONE-ON-ONE
If you’re attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn’t, you have all the advantage
.
—JAY ABRAHAM
Nichole Wise, code name Workhorse, had been waiting for this moment for, oh, a little less than six months. One hundred and seventy-eight days, to be exact. Ever since “Molly Lewis” started working as David’s assistant. The snotty little priss. Nichole knew she wasn’t a civilian, as they’d all claimed.
That little demonstration in the conference room only confirmed what she’d suspected for months.
She was one of them.
One Murphy didn’t tell the other operatives about, for some reason.
Nichole had been recruited a year after 9/11. Those were heady times. Let’s scramble up some terrorist nest eggs, David had said, and in that moment, Nichole could be suckered into believing he was a patriot. But she knew better. She knew David Murphy was up to something else, and used this line about an “ultrasecret wing of the intelligence community” as a ploy to dupe other wise good people into doing his bidding.
Some agents may have seen this as a babysitting gig, but not Nichole. She was keeping tabs on one of the most notorious operatives the Company had ever known. One who had suddenly retired a few months after 9/11, then opened up a “financial services” corporation.
We can smell a front company a mile away, Nichole’s handler had told her. We want to know who he’s fronting.
Nichole had nodded.
We want you in there, and we want you to stay in there until you find out.
Whatever he had cooking on the side—and Nichole’s bosses were fairly sure David Murphy had something cooking on the side—she would be there to assess and act, if necessary.
So when Murphy had called them in here on a Saturday morning, she knew something big was breaking. But it frustrated her to no end that she had no idea what it might be.
And that would be a failure.
Whatever Murphy had going, she should have been on it from the beginning. This completely blindsided her.
She’d installed an undetectable key logger on Murphy’s machine a few days after she started, and changed the gear every month. She knew every e-mail he sent, every Web page he browsed.
She’d recorded every closed-door conversation Murphy ever had.
She used compressed air, a digital camera, and many long nights with Photoshop to read his sealed mail.
She’d collected every shredded bag of crosscut papers and reconstituted them in her suburban apartment, one bag at a time, one long weekend at a time. She’d used tiny paperweights to hold them in place and worked one piece at a time. Many nights she’d dream about strips of paper.
She entered into a clandestine, sex-only relationship with the mail guy—and every mail guy henceforth—even though many of them had a devil-may-care attitude toward personal hygiene.
She’d even burned through countless cheap wristwatches, placed under the back tire of Murphy’s car—oh how relentlessly old school that was—to fastidiously track his movements.
Over three years of clandestine operations, she’d earned the sobriquet “Workhorse” a dozen times over.
And nothing.
“Keep watching him,” her bosses told her.
She did as instructed, only occasionally pausing to conduct other operations now and again. She was too valuable to waste on David Murphy full time.
That was when Nichole began to grow paranoid. Perhaps she was missing something when she was conducting her other ops.
Maybe Murphy knew about her, and conducted his other business when she was otherwise engaged. Just to make it look like he was being a good corporate choirboy, heading up a successful private business.
Maybe he had a way around her key logger.
Maybe he switched out her surveillance tapes.
Maybe he purchased bags of shredded nonsense from another company, and switched out his own shredded documents for a ringer.
Maybe he was on to the watches. An old-head like him probably would be.
Maybe he was just messing around with her head.
If that was the case, one thing was for sure: For six months now, Molly Lewis was helping him.
Her surveillance of David Murphy had become increasingly frustrating during the past six months, and it was too much of a coincidence that Murphy had hired Molly right around the same time. The moment Nichole first shook Molly’s hand, the bad juju alarms went off in her head. She immediately hunted for evidence, had the Company screen Molly’s background hard, but nothing came up out of the ordinary. Born in Champaign, Illinois, to a conservative Catholic family. Attended a year of UI, agricultural college. Dropped out to marry an actuary named Paul.
But the only evidence she could find of any kind of intelligence background: the slightest hint of a Russian accent.
Which would be kind of weird coming from the lips of an Illinois farm girl with a maiden name like Molly Kaye Finnerty.
But Nichole swore it was there.
She wished she could confide in someone, ask if they heard it, too.
The only other evidence: her surveillance tapes. Pre-Molly, Nichole’s secret recordings of Murphy’s offices yielded innocuous office banter, phone conversations. But post-Molly, the tapes yielded literally nothing. Blank hiss. It was as if someone had waved a high-powered magnet over the tapes. Nichole switched to digital recording devices, but the result was the same. Even though she knew Murphy wasn’t sitting in his office all day in silence. The man loved to talk on the phone. Nichole had listened to countless hours of voice, piped through her ATH-M40fs Audio-Technica headphones.