Eggleston shivered.
"This is what you'll be working with."
"Whoa," he said. "Not a laptop."
"No."
"I'll need the password."
"I thought you might. I talked to Stephanie earlier. Look on the bottom of the mug."
Eggleston walked to the console and picked up the cup. He turned it over. Taped to the bottom was a small piece of white paper with a long string of characters and numbers.
"There are some files you can't access that are eyes only for myself and Stephanie. What I need you to do is begin searching for pieces of information and people I want to know more about."
"I can be up and running pretty quick," Eggleston said.
"Take your time. Stephanie has got this set up exactly the way she wants it, so please don't change anything. I think you'll find you don't need to. She's very thorough."
"If she set this up and programmed it, I want to meet this lady," Eggleston said.
He ran his fingers along the edge of the console and looked at the computers.
Elizabeth saw that he was hooked. It was the kind of look she'd seen Stephanie get from time to time, as if she was in the presence of an all-knowing entity that could tell her anything she wanted to know.
"Take a day to get familiar with everything. Do you think you can run the communications gear?"
Eggleston looked at the array. "No problem. I've had a radio license since I was eleven. This is nice stuff. It will be easy to work with."
"Excellent."
Eggleston gestured at the console. "What would you like me to do first?"
"There was a recent theft and murder at the British Museum. I want you to access the CCTV recordings at the museum and cross-reference them with our database of known undesirables. It's possible someone we recognize will turn up. Can you handle that?"
"Hack into the British Museum?"
"Yes."
"What about legal issues?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know, accessing confidential information in another country."
"Are you sure you work at Langley?" Elizabeth said.
"Just asking," Eggleston said.
"There's a coffee maker over there. The bathroom is in the ops center."
"Ops center?"
"The big room we passed near the pool. If you run into any of the others on the team, introduce yourself. Any other questions?"
"I don't think so. If I come up with something, I'll ask."
"Then I'll leave you to it."
Back upstairs, Elizabeth poured a cup of coffee and sat down at her desk. She missed Stephanie. Eggleston would have to do until Steph came back. At least he seemed to know what he was doing.
By late afternoon, he'd proved it.
CHAPTER 28
Eggleston sat apart from the others at the morning briefing. He'd been a little intimidated at first. They all had guns, even the women.
Who are these people? The security here is as good as Langley's, except the place looks like somebody's house in the country. The kind of place where the owner is probably out on a golf course somewhere, hitting a few balls.
They'd been polite, keeping their distance. It didn't bother him. He was used to being an outsider. The truth was that he preferred his cubicle at Langley and his computers to interacting with his peers and the rest of the world. For Joe Eggleston, heaven was a comfortable chair and a console hooked into the biggest computer he could find. This temporary assignment to Harker's group was the closest thing to heaven he'd found in a long time.
"You've all met Joe," Elizabeth said. "I asked him to look at surveillance tapes from the British Museum on the day of the murder. Joe, show them what you found."
Eggleston tapped a key on his laptop. A black and white picture of the front of the British Museum appeared on the wall monitor. It showed Selena and Nick starting to leave the museum.
"You guys look like tourists," Diego said.
"That's kind of the point," Nick said. "How do you think we should look?"
"I don't know. James Bond never looks like a tourist."
"James Bond is a character in a movie."
"Yeah, but you gotta set a standard somewhere."
Elizabeth rapped her pen on the desk. "That's enough. Let's focus."
"Sorry," Diego said.
Eggleston was shocked. Comments like that at a high level briefing at Langley would have gotten somebody in real trouble.
The picture changed and began rolling in real time. Nick and Selena started down the steps. A tall, lanky man walked past them going the other way. As he passed, he turned and looked at Selena. Eggleston froze the video. The man's face was fully visible.
"This man's name is Addison Rhoades," Elizabeth said. "He's the one who interrogated O'Malley at the prison. He used to work for MI6. Now he works for Nazar Al-Bayati."
"You think he's the one who killed Sir Peter?" Selena asked.
"I do."
"What about tapes inside the building? Do they show anything?"
"The coverage in the museum is minimal. The only extensive coverage is in sections where valuables like gold and jewelry are displayed. Rhoades avoided the cameras. There was no camera in the storage room where the scroll was kept and where Sir Peter was killed. You don't see Rhoades again until he comes out. There's no sign of the scroll but that doesn't mean anything. It would be easy enough to hide it under his coat."
Nick said, "Rhoades knew O'Malley and works for Al-Bayati?"
"That's right."
"And you think Abidi sold Semtex to Al-Bayati, who used it to cover his tracks after stealing the scroll in France."
"Right."
"Tell me if I've got this figured out." Nick ticked off points on his fingers. "We go looking for Abidi to ask him about the Semtex. He dies. Al-Bayati gets nervous about what he might have told us and tells Rhoades to find out who went after him. Rhoades uses his connections to ID Selena and Al-Bayati tells Rhoades to get us out of the way. He sends a hit team that includes O'Malley. They're after us. Steph and Lucas get caught in the crossfire. That about it, Director?"
"That's what I think."
"Son of a bitch," Nick said. "What are we going to do about it?"
"I want you to go back to Lebanon and have a heart-to-heart talk with Al-Bayati. Recover the scrolls if you can. That's not a priority."
"I don't think we can take Bayati at his house, Director," Ronnie said. "You asked us to check it out. Diego and I looked at the satellite shots for a long time and thought it through, how we'd do it. We both think it's a high failure mission."
Diego nodded his head in agreement.
Nick scratched his head. "We've taken walled compounds before."
"Not like this one," Ronnie said. "This one has all the bells and whistles. There are rolls of razor wire on top of the wall. It's electrified and I'll bet it's alarmed. There are cameras and guards everywhere and the whole place is lit up like Yankee Stadium at night. We'd have to go up the cliff on the water side to avoid being seen and there's more wire at the top. Once we're in the compound there are a couple of dozen men to go through before we make it to the house. Every one of them carries an AK. The gate would take a tank to break through it."
"Okay. Then we'll get him when he's not in the villa."
"That's a problem," Elizabeth said. "He almost never leaves his villa."
"We could wait."
"You might wait a long time."
"Everyone can be gotten to, sooner or later. There has to be a way."
Selena had been quiet. Now she said, "We're mad about what happened to Stephanie. It won't do her or us any good to go after Al-Bayati if it gets us killed. Suppose we did get into the compound? What then? What would we gain by that?"
"What are you getting at?" Elizabeth asked.
"It's not as though we have to retrieve the scrolls. We know what's on them and we can assume Al-Bayati does too. He's gone to a lot of trouble to get his hands on them. He's after the treasure, if it can be found. The second scroll tells everybody where it is. What would you do if you were him?"