To what extent would he go to find other alternatives… such as focusing Bureau resources on taking Scarponi down to render the threat inconsequential? Knox would definitely go to great lengths to try. If nothing else, to give the appearance of a convincing effort. But even if he really pushed, how successful would he be against one of the most prolific and successful contract assassins in history — one who had escaped capture for years, even with the vast resources of the international law enforcement community trained on him?
And what did Payne know about Knox? Had his life been devoted to government service? Was he the kind of man who wouldn’t compromise his morals and duties to protect his family? Payne kept coming back to that question. Even if Knox did not plan on having Payne killed — or the equivalent, arranging for him to be unknowingly placed into Scarponi’s sights — there were other ways for Knox to meet the gist of the hit man’s demands.
He could discredit me. Leak the amnesia story to the press, deny it publicly, and put me on the witness stand to fend for myself. By withholding key information about the undercover operation, he’d make me look bad under cross-examination. It would just about guarantee a not-guilty verdict for Scarponi — who could never be tried again for the same charges. Case closed. Harper Payne, a discredited and useless former agent left to fend for himself. That’s why Knox pushed for an expedited trial date: to lessen the chance I’d get my memory back in time to testify.
I’m a pawn.
How deeply are Waller and Haviland involved?
Payne was massaging his temples again, fighting to contain his anger, when the elevator doors slid open. He walked past Chuck Seamen without seeing or acknowledging him.
“I thought you had a meeting with the Director.”
The voice came from behind him. He turned, his mind still a blizzard of thoughts. It was Waller, standing with Haviland near the bank of elevators.
“What are you doing here?” Payne asked, his brow arched downward and his hands clenched at his side.
“We were going to ask you the same thing,” Haviland said.
“I had a meeting with—”
“Yeah, we heard,” Waller said, a penetrating stare locked on Payne’s eyes. “Director’s in a meeting. He asked us to bring you to his home. He’ll be along in a little while.” Waller motioned toward the elevators. “Car’s in the garage.”
“I’ve got my own,” Payne said, turning toward the door.
“No, you’ve got Agent Ginsberg’s,” Waller said, forcing a smile. “You were obviously paying attention during the class on vehicular theft.”
“We have to talk, Harper,” Haviland said.
He sensed the firmness in Haviland’s voice. Payne stepped forward and joined them as they strode into the elevator. Not until the doors clamped shut did he realize he was losing the control over his life he had fought so hard to regain. With uneasiness beginning to well up inside his chest, he took a few deep breaths to try to make it go away. But as hard as he fought the emotion, a recurring thought was flooding his mind.
Bad things were about to happen.
45
Hector DeSantos entered the situation room, his Coach leather attaché in hand. Brian Archer was sitting at the conference table, papers scattered beside his laptop. His hair was a disheveled mess and he was huddled over a document, tracing a portion of it with a pencil and an index finger.
“Brian,” DeSantos said, “I’m sorry—”
“You’re sorry you’re late again,” Archer said without lifting his eyes from the page. “I know, Maggie kept pulling you back into bed for another go-round and you couldn’t break away.” He looked up at DeSantos. “Or is it that you slept late because the alarm didn’t go off? Or did you drop your keys down the sewer—”
“All right, all right. Point taken.”
“At least you’re not bullshitting me by saying it won’t happen again.”
DeSantos took a seat next to Archer and handed him a piece of Juicy Fruit.
“What is this, a peace offering?” Archer took the gum, folded it into his mouth, and nodded at the paper-strewn table. “The computer finished decrypting the first NSA document.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.” Archer selected a paper from amongst the maelstrom of pages on the table and handed it to DeSantos. He took the document and read from it: “CARD Report. Memogen Project confirmed with SCP. Subject Scarponi is an ideal blank blank. Blank blank blank excellent proposal. Cooperation with blank blank blank blank is required. Approval blank assistance blank blank blank. Blank blank secret.’” DeSantos looked up from the document, his brow knitted with consternation. “Three days of word crunching and that’s all it came up with?”
“It’s a little incomplete.”
DeSantos tossed the page onto the table. “A little incomplete?”
“Our decryption software isn’t that swift.”
“You mean it sucks.”
“It needs work,” Archer corrected. “But that’s why we have the NSA.”
“Yeah, but in this case we can’t give it to NSA because that’s where we got it from in the first place. They’ll know their own code.”
Archer leaned back in his chair. “I know a guy there, we’ve hacked together before.”
“You live in a weird world, you know that? Normal people like me, we hang out together, throw back a beer or catch a movie. You hang out and hack.”
Archer ignored his partner. “He’ll take a look at it without a problem, Hector. And, he’ll keep quiet about it if I ask him to. He owes me.”
DeSantos was shaking his head. “I don’t care how much shit you’ve done for this geek. You’re not seeing the big picture, Brian. What if he’s the one who developed this code for this — this Memogen Project — whatever that is? We’ll have breached his system. I don’t think he’ll take that lightly. Faster than you can say ‘we’re cooked,’ we’ll be filleted, fried, and served up in federal court. That’s after they start asking questions — like, ‘Why were you hacking into our secure network? Where did you get the pass codes? Why did you do it?’ The fact we’re government employees won’t count for shit. Heat will come from all over the fucking place.”
“Knox will clear it up—”
“Knox won’t do shit. He’ll put a fucking football field between us and himself. And if you don’t think he’ll do that, you’ve had your head buried in computer code too long.”
“Knox is the one who gave us the entry codes to begin with. His handwriting is all over this. Who else would have access to what he gave us?”
“Knox doesn’t know what we did.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
DeSantos laughed. “He sure as hell didn’t intend for us to use some earthworm program to hunt around the NSA and DOD databases.”
Archer held his hands out, palms up, professing his innocence. “He didn’t say not to. Maybe he wanted us to find this stuff.”
“Yeah, and maybe he didn’t.”
“Why wouldn’t he? What’s in here that we’re not supposed to know about?”
DeSantos was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know. But none of that matters, Brian. We don’t know what we stumbled onto here. We could’ve just stuck our noses into some fucked-up shit that we have no business being in. Without knowing what we’re up against, we can’t be making calls to anyone even remotely connected to NSA, especially a techie analyst who works there. For now, we keep this between us. We don’t even tell Knox. No one. No exceptions.”