Last Chance to Die Noah Boyd (best novels to read txt) 📖

isn’t exactly a surrendering bunch. If you had yelled, I’d be dead.” Vail rolled over the body of the man he’d shot and started going through his pockets.

“They were here to ambush us?” Kalix said.

“They were probably here to ambush me. But now that you’ve killed one of them, maybe they’ll give you equal consideration next time. With Kate in custody, they probably figured I’d be alone.”

“Why you?”

“Apparently they’re finding me to be a bit of a nuisance. Sakis had a photo of me in Chicago.”

Kalix studied Vail’s face, looking for fear. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“A gift horse?”

“I must be moving in the right direction, otherwise why try to kill me? I just have to figure out exactly what I’ve been doing to upset them.”

Kalix chuckled. “Better you than me.”

“You’re about to have your own problems.”

“I am?”

“Somebody needs to call your boss and bring him up to date.”

The smile disappeared from Kalix’s face. “Who would have thought that keeping you from getting killed would be a bad thing?”

Vail laughed. “Is that a rhetorical question, or do you want an alphabetical list?”

Kalix squatted down next to the second man and started searching him. He pulled a cell phone out of the man’s pocket and turned it on. Staring at the screen, Kalix said, “Whoa.”

“What?”

Kalix turned the phone so Vail could see it. On the screen was the same photo of Vail that had been found in Sakis’s pocket. Vail took it from him and scrolled through the phone’s options. “It was sent last night around eleven thirty.”

“They must have figured that this would be your next stop. And where one man failed yesterday, they felt two would succeed today.”

Vail pushed a couple more of the phone’s buttons and handed it back to Kalix. “There’s the number the photo was sent from. Think you can get someone to break it down?”

Kalix started dialing his own phone. “What do you think it is?”

“I’m hoping it’s a link to whoever is behind all this. But I’m not betting anything over a dollar. Someone’s trying awfully hard to make sure Kate stays in prison.”

21

After more than three hours of interrogation by the Annandale police and Bureau agents, Vail and Kalix headed back to Washington and the off-site. “Come on in. I’ll buy you a beer,” Vail said.

They walked into the workroom, and Kalix motioned toward the wall. “You and Kate sure covered a lot of ground on this.”

Vail came back from the kitchen and handed him a beer, cracking open his own. “A lot of it is the tracking information from the phone you guys gave Calculus.”

“It looks like a lot more than that.” Kalix opened his beer and took a small sip as his phone rang. “John Kalix.”

He went over to the desk and got ready to write. Then he dropped the pen and straightened up. “There’s no way to trace it at all. . . . You’re sure? . . . Okay, then your best guess. . . . Okay, thanks.” He disconnected the line. “That was one of the techs. The phone company has no record for that number.”

“How can that be?”

“After being told it didn’t exist, he called the number and got a busy signal. So, since the number was active, he called a contact who handles covert government ‘contingencies,’ as he calls it. Best guess is that it’s CIA. It’s a clearing number. If a source needs to leave a message, he leaves his code name so it’ll get routed to his handler. But it’s mostly used for dry-cleaning traces, a dead end in the trail. Say you wanted to make a pretext call, like you did today before we went into that house, but you didn’t want anyone to be able to trace it. You dial the covert number plus a code and then the number you want to call. It’s then put through like a regular call. You can send photos, or text, or anything else you can do with a regular line. And if anyone tries to track it, you get the answer we just did. It doesn’t exist. If you call it, it rings busy unless you enter the code.”

“How do Russians get access to a CIA tool like that?” Vail asked.

“Maybe one of their moles sold it to them. Once you pay a source for something, you generally feel it belongs to you. But the problem is, we can’t even determine if it was the CIA who gave it up. Other agencies know about things like this. We figured it out. Even if we did find out it was CIA, there are hundreds of employees who probably have access, authorized or unauthorized, to that number.”

Vail said, “Instead of this getting clearer, it seems like we’re getting further and further from any answers.”

Kalix didn’t answer. He was back at the wall, studying the charts. Vail could see that something had caught his attention, so he sat down on the couch and sipped his beer, waiting.

Finally Kalix turned around. “I haven’t told anyone this, but ever since I was up here with Langston and saw these charts and realized that’s how you found the three spies, I had a duplicate set made for me from the file. I’ve been spending a lot of time studying them, especially while you were in Chicago. I really wasn’t making too many connections until we came up with this CIA number. See if this makes sense: We know that someone has framed Kate. Most likely the Russians. But why Kate? She’s not in counterintelligence, at least not now. And she was only exposed to that work twice. Once in Detroit when you were there and she was supervising a squad covering the Middle East, right?”

“Right.”

“And her only other CI assignment was when she had liaison here at headquarters with the CIA. So now with this phone number probably being the agency’s, that’s twice we’ve had the CIA come up. The big question is, how do the Russians and the