“Someone killed him,” Quinn said.
“Yes, but we didn’t know that yet. At that point, there were two of us with Terri…with Tessa. The guy with me went out to try to make contact, but he never came back. It was obvious something was up. Since Carter’s group usually did sub work for the CIA, I used a contact I had there to see if she could find anything out. That’s when I learned about Carter, and the fact that nearly everyone else associated with Operation Overtake had been killed. Not exactly a good feeling knowing you’re probably the last link in the chain.” She looked at Abraham. “For a while, I assumed you were dead, too.”
“What about the person you were supposed to be taking Tessa to?” Orlando asked.
“Carter was the only one who knew who that was. Kept it in his head. Took it with him when he died.”
“So you decided to keep her?” Quinn asked.
“I was asked to help,” she said. “You have to understand, this was a mess. While the Agency wasn’t directly involved, and would have liked to wash their hands of the whole thing, they knew there was a slim but real possibility that if Operation Overtake was exposed, it could be linked back to them. The abandonment of a little girl? Or God forbid, her death? Think of the careers that would have ruined.” She paused. “The offer was a well-paid early retirement, and access to additional funds for whatever other extras I might need. The trade-off was that once I accepted the job, Tessa would be my responsibility alone. If something happened to her, all the blame would fall on me.”
“And you said yes to this,” Quinn said.
“I wasn’t a bad agent, but I wasn’t jumping at the chance to get shot at every day, either,” she said. “It was an out.”
Abraham scoffed. “It was more than an out, wasn’t it? How long were you with her when they made you the offer?”
Desirae said nothing for several seconds. “By then, a few weeks.”
Abraham nodded. “If I had been watching her that long, I would have said yes, too. Hell, I probably would have said yes if you’d asked me in Amsterdam.”
Desirae said nothing, but by the look on her face, Quinn knew Abraham had hit close to home.
“So you moved her into your mom’s basement?” Quinn asked.
A reluctant nod. “The Agency arranged the construction.”
“And then?”
“When I felt enough time had passed, we moved here.”
“So until now there haven’t been any problems?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said hesitantly. “Though I wasn’t to have any direct contact with anyone at the Agency anymore, my friend there did set me up with access to their system so I could watch my back. She contacted me a few times after that, telling me someone seemed to be trying to find out if Tessa had really died in Osaka or not. I kept tabs on things to make sure no one was getting close. The searches seemed to be coming from two different sources. One I tracked back to Eli Becker right there in the CIA. At first I thought he was a mole working for those who had killed the rest of the Overtake team, but after a while I figured out he was working for you.” She looked at Abraham. “That’s when I realized you were still alive.
“The real problem, though, was this other group. It took me a few years, but I was able to ID them as McCrillis International. Familiar with them?”
“You might say that,” Quinn replied. “They’re the ones who killed Eli.”
“I guessed as much. In the first few years, they would probe several times a week for info about Tessa. After that, it dropped off some, occasionally there were months with nothing. This last time was over six months, and I thought maybe they’d finally given up.” She hung her head for a moment, then looked at Abraham. “It’s my fault they’re on me again, not yours. I’m sorry I said it was.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I thought I was being so smart. See, the one thing McCrillis hadn’t been able to get their hands on yet was a full copy of the Agency’s file on Overtake. About a year ago they got close. Scared the crap out of me when I found out. I’d been told the report had been sanitized to reflect that Tessa had been killed along with Jennifer Kagawa, her…mother, but I hadn’t seen the files myself and couldn’t be sure there wasn’t something in them that would lead back to us. So I knew I had to do something.
“The dot-xuki virus was yours,” Orlando said, leaning forward.
Desirae shook her head. “I can’t take credit for creating it — that was done by a tech I still trusted — but I did execute it. Good thing, too. It wiped out the files at the Agency and delivered a copy to me. The stupid son of a bitch who had asked me to take care of Tessa had created a special subfolder detailing the decision and had subsequently been adding updates of her status. If McCrillis had found that, we’d both be dead right now.”
“What about the recent picture of Tessa?” Quinn said.
“The one Eli was sent? That came from me.” Once more Desirae looked at Abraham. “I thought maybe it would be enough to satisfy you. See that she was alive and well. I should have never sent it. Within twenty-four hours, not only had Eli somehow been able to dig up more information, but I was also receiving notifications that McCrillis’s activities seemed to have kicked into high gear and I realized they were on his trail. I couldn’t have that. Eli had the picture of Tessa. McCrillis would know she was definitely alive if they got ahold of it.” She took a breath. “I called, told him that someone was after him and he had to leave town. Then I set up some quick and dirty false trails I hoped would keep McCrillis busy for a while. Apparently, it wasn’t enough.”
“Who took the picture?” Orlando asked.
“I don’t know. I used one that was in the file, so someone from the Agency, I assumed.”
“I have news for you, then. Your virus left a few things behind. Eli had a second copy of the picture on his computer, only he’d found it in the CIA system and it had a dot-xuki extension.”
“What? Oh, my God. How many files were left?”
“I don’t know. The message Eli left made it sound like only a few. The good news is they’ve been isolated, so it’s doubtful McCrillis has gotten to them.”
Desirae didn’t look convinced, and Quinn was willing to bet she would attempt a second purge in the future.
“Have you ever been able to figure out why these McCrillis people would want to kill Tessa in the first place?” Abraham asked.
Desirae stared at him for several seconds, as if caught off guard. “I live with this every day. I guess I forgot that information was kept from us during the operation. It’s her father. He’s Frank Rostov.”
Silence.
“The Frank Rostov?” Orlando asked. “Rostov Dynamics Frank Rostov?”
“Yes.”
Frank Rostov had turned his father’s small San Francisco electronics company into one of the largest tech firms in the world, rivaling Apple and Google and Microsoft. Aside from making much of the equipment and software that served as the backbone of the Internet, his company had also become one of the largest tech-related defense contractors in the country, easily making him worth more than thirty billion dollars.
“Didn’t he get sick or something?” Nate asked.
Desirae nodded. “A severe stroke. Hung on for a little while before he finally passed away.”
“That was what? Five or six years ago?” Nate said.
“The stroke was just a little over seven,” Desirae corrected him. “More precisely, two months before Jennifer was killed in Osaka.”
Tessa’s mother, Desirae told them, had been Rostov’s mistress. When she became pregnant with Tessa, he had sent her away to appease his wife, promising his mistress he’d take care of her and Tessa, and acknowledge the child as his own at some point in the future. The money had come, but the public acknowledgment had yet to materialize when the stroke cut him down. In his diminished capacity, Rostov was no longer able to run the company, so his wife, Jacqueline Rostov, took on the role of CEO. She had been the one who had used the company’s defense connections at the CIA to find someone who could handle a delicate matter for her. This turned out to be 525, Gavin Carter’s group, and the job was to terminate Tessa and Jennifer.