Pieces of the Puzzle Read online

  Scott cut in, “Tell me right now if Wellmen is on the List. You and I both know the only way we’ll ever get him is to kill him. I’m not one of your assassins.”

  Glen pursed his lips, his nostrils flared. He said calmly, “That’s why you’re perfect for this job. Let’s not forget about the one you did take.”

  Scott whispered, “I should have put a bullet in you while I had the chance.”

  “This is business, purely business. Even if you had killed me, you never would have gotten away. Use that brain of yours on occasion. At this point, I’m the only one between them and you.” Glen broke off momentarily, regained his composure. “We have the dates narrowed to a seven-day window. Wellmen booked hotel reservations solid for weeks throughout the islands. Fortunately he could only get helicopter and airline reservations booked solid for that week.”

  “Doesn’t want any unexpected visitors dropping in?”

  “Relax,” Glen said. “We want you inside his security. We want his data. Everything’s in that digital wallet and he carries it on his person at all times. He even sleeps with the damn thing. He hates television cameras, outsiders, the public’s prying eye. He’s always careful, always. Even at the ranch you can’t get within fifty yards of him without a strip search and his guards carry signal sniffers—top-of-the-line stuff stolen straight from us.”

  “And the wedding. Why at the end of January when Valentine’s Day is only two weeks away?”

  “You’d have to ask the bride that one.”

  “More like the bride’s father. Do you think it’s a cover for something else?”

  “Doubtful. His one weakness is that he loves Jessica deeply, despite herself. He wouldn’t do anything to spoil her big day.”

  “And the reservations?”

  “Getting the reservations wasn’t that difficult. I’m not just talking about money.”

  “Yeah, yeah. He owns a healthy number of hotels and has substantial influence in the U.S. tourist industry as a whole.”

  “In the dossier, wasn’t it?” Glen glanced into the briefcase, then closed and locked it. “What you won’t find in the dossier is the work some associates did on the Apollo reservation system to ensure that seven-day window.”

  “Why at the wedding?”

  “Didn’t read too close, or did you—no, you didn’t forget, did you? All right, I’ll say it. It’s the only opportunity we’ll have to find him in the company of more than two or three other people. The only time you’ll be able to get close enough to him.”

  “I thought you wanted me in his data, not in his face.”

  Glen grinned, the wolf showing his pearly whites. “Come with me to Meade tomorrow. If things work out, you’ll be on a plane Wednesday.”

  “I’ll drive myself. If I see one of your suits within fifty yards, I’m gone.”

  “One o’clock sharp.” Glen stood. It was a dismissal. Glen was sure Scott knew it, but Scott didn’t move.

  “There’s one thing I have to know,” Scott said. “Did your people have anything to do with the accident in California?”

  Glen stood and walked Scott to the door. “Of course not. No family under the old rules.”

  Scott raised an eyebrow. “An accident?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time.” Glen opened the door and ushered Scott into the hall. “See you at one. Go home. I told Cynthia you’d be home for dinner.”

  “Stay out of my life!”

  Glen shot back, “I am your life.”

  The slide projector was still on. Scott stared up at the picture of the funeral projected on the canvas behind Glen and couldn’t help but wonder how far off his was. He turned away quickly, knowing he’d go to the meeting but not home.

  Three months of separation couldn’t fall away in an instant. If he cared, Glen or someone else would find a way to use that against him. Cynthia and the baby were safe as long as he kept his distance. For now they were the daughter and grandchild of the Chairman, and not the wife and baby of Scott Madison Evers.

  Chapter 2

  Ft. Meade, Maryland Tuesday, 28

  December

  The Cold War had been over for more than twenty years and the Agency’s centerpiece was proof positive that the spoils of war do not always go to the victors. The building was still monolithic. You couldn’t shrink buildings, only budgets. The security that had always been omnipresent hadn’t changed and the reason was the growing interest in domestic affairs.

  Scott touched his badge to the elevator’s reader. The doors opened and he stepped into the hall. He paused for a moment to look at the H-level directory and then hurried off in the direction of Conference Suite 18. He traversed the half mile of corridors in less than five minutes. The halls were empty, as were most of the offices.

  He touched his badge to the room’s reader, ignoring the thumb scanner, and watched for the reader’s light to turn from red to green. He paused for a moment to catch his breath, tucked in his cotton shirt, put on the tan jacket, fixed his tie and then stepped into the room.

  Glen was waiting for him. He escorted Scott into 18-C, pausing outside the closed door. “You’re more than an hour late. The Chairman had another meeting, so we went ahead without you. It’s just you and me now.” Glen added softly, “You let me down.”

  “There was a mix-up upstairs.”

  Glen gripped Scott’s shoulder from behind. He didn’t say that he had arranged the mix-up; instead he indicated that Scott should open the door. Scott flashed his badge at the card reader.

  The light turned from red to green. Scott opened the door.

  From behind him, Glen said, “As you can see, I got left with this entire mess.”

  Scott didn’t say a word as he turned on the light. He just stared at the empty room.

  Glen acted as if he remembered something and then said, “We’re supposed to be in 18-A.” He then led Scott down a side corridor to a different conference room. Inside, they found a conference table littered with digital recording discs. “I want you to go through the surveillance recordings of the Colorado ranch. Video first. Audio last. I’m going to sort out the paperwork and get rid of the duplicates. Let me know if the sanitizer bothers you.”

  Scott composed himself and left thoughts of Cynthia and the baby behind. “Is there anything in particular I’m supposed to be looking for?”

  Glen smiled, apparently pleased. “You’ll know if you find anything. I trust your instinct more than anyone else’s analysis.”

  Glen turned on the sanitizer and started pulling discs out of their cases. He would sanitize most of the records to erase their contents permanently.

  Scott turned to the surveillance recordings. He grabbed a stack of recordings and headed to the opposite side of the room, where racks of electronic equipment were set up for playback. The standard-issue surveillance equipment wasn’t new to Scott. He powered up the computer, inserted one of the discs and waited for the system to finish initializing.

  Sixty seconds later, he pressed Play and Search Forward. Everything on the recording for the first few hours was night vision green. Just before dawn flashed by, he saw something. He reversed the video and went through a frame at a time. He saw the front door open as three individuals emerged from the house. They shook hands with someone he couldn’t see, then got into a truck and drove away. He noted the date and time, then pressed Play and Search Forward. He watched a mail truck come and go, a delivery truck, then the recording ended. He took the disc out and stuck in another.

  It was nearly 9 p.m. when Scott removed the last disc and turned bleary eyes about the room to find Glen was gone. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then eased out of the chair. A note on the table next to the stack of recordings read: Be back in afew hours.

  I’ll bring chow.

  Scott shook his head, stretched and then started on the audio-only recordings. He glanced at the disc label as he put on a headset. After making sure the foot controls were within reach, he began to search.


  His thoughts wandered. Occasionally, he saw Cynthia’s brown eyes in the back of his mind, but adrenaline kept sleep away. Glen wouldn’t try to kill him here. Scott was sure of this. Somehow there was a place for Scott in Glen’s twisted plan—at least for now.

  Around 3 a.m. Glen returned. They ate, didn’t say much. Afterward Glen went back to the data files and Scott went back to the recordings.

  By 7 a.m., Scott was poring over the audio recordings again, putting the pieces together. A pad of paper beside him was marked up with a myriad of notes, things scratched out, circled, written over. Scott pushed pause, noted the time of the recording as 03:58:00.

  Glen was still reviewing data files. “Useless, all useless,” he was muttering to himself.

  Shortly after 9 a.m., Scott called Glen over and pointed to the monitor. “Every Friday night coming. Every Monday morning leaving. I’ve seen their faces before in the Wall Street Journal, but their names weren’t in the caption and the article didn’t catch my eye. Senior partners in some big law firm in New York City. I’ve also got four interesting phone calls to a 212 area code. Not much content, but when you put the time of the calls together with their departure and then patch in the sixth line. Well, listen for yourself.”

  Glen put on a headset.

  “Two separately dialed phone calls. The first is from New York to the ranch. I’m running the playback simultaneously. Channel one is in your right ear. Channel two, in your left ear. I’ll start the video and audio at 03:52:30.”

  Glen bunched up his eyebrows but didn’t say anything. Scott let the recordings run until the timer turned over to 03:58:00.

  Glen looked puzzled. Scott ran the recordings back and played them again. “Close your eyes. Just listen this time. Wait till you hear the door opening, then look at the video.”

  Scott watched for Glen’s eyes to widen and revelation to follow, but that didn’t happen. Scott ran the video forward three frames, paused it. “There, do you see what he’s putting into his pocket?”

  Glen squinted. “A portable phone. So what?”

  “Now what if I told you the disguised voice on the phone was John Wellmen?”

  “You said the call was from New York.”

  “It is.”

  “John Wellmen was in New York?” Glen jumped to his feet.

  “You can’t be serious. He hasn’t left the ranch in months.”

  “No,” Scott said tersely, “You’re not following me.” Scott adjusted the rate and pitch of the incoming New York call to reduce the effects of descrambling and then played the calls again.

  “Outgoing line three patched together with outgoing line six in New York. Maybe relayed somewhere. Maybe not.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Both calls are outgoing calls. Neither is incoming. That’s what raised my suspicions. We’re supposed to think that one line is incoming and the other is outgoing, but these are just decoys. The real conversation is happening on a different frequency and there’s a link to a third party on a conference call that we’re missing altogether.”

  “Are you saying the signals are multiplexed?” Glen understood the concept of stacking frequencies and transmitting them together. The Soviets had long used this tactic in the field to divide up the frequency spectrum and make signals more difficult to collect.

  Scott started tapping at the keys on the computer’s keyboard. “In a way. There’s a subcarrier mixed in with the signal. It’s carrying the actual conversation but is also using time division multiplexing. We don’t have the equipment here to unravel it, but there is good news.”

  Glen nodded. Scott handed Glen a headset.

  Scott said, “Listen in the silence. You can hear a warble in the background that sounds deceptively like a descramble echo, but it’s not.”

  Scott stopped. Glen waited. “Damn it, Scott. I don’t have the patience.”

  “Well, screw you!” Scott threw down the headset. “If I’m going to play your game, you can at least—”“Whatever you might think, Scott, this isn’t a game. I told you the rules have changed. We’re playing for keeps. Winner takes all.”

  Scott took a swipe at Glen. Glen bobbed away. “You bastard. Put a bullet in my head now and save yourself the trouble later.”

  Glen bobbed away again, a little too slow. Scott’s jab caught him in the mouth. “Now that’s the Scott Evers I know. Quick of tongue, hand and eye. Almost makes me think of the early days.”

  Scott backed away, put his hands down. “I was eighteen. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into then.”

  “You could’ve been the best. I saw it then.”

  “I am the best.”

  “Prove it.”

  Scott picked up the headset, nodded to the recorder, pressed Play. “It’s the missing link in the conference call, scrambled using different encoding sets from the outgoing lines. It doesn’t use TDM.”

  Scott played the recording again, descrambling the background voice. Glen listened. The voice said, “What about the engineer?”

  There was an inaudible reply.

  “I don’t trust her. What about the Florida office? Has it been searched?”

  A warble.

  “The change affects nothing. I want it. Is that simple enough for you?”

  A warble.

  The line went dead. Glen asked, “Are there more conversations like this?”

  Scott tore off a sheet of paper from the notepad, handed it to Glen. “The times and dates. Can we send this stuff to Analysis?”

  Glen put his hand on Scott’s shoulder. “I’ll handle it. Go home to Cynthia. Get some rest. I already booked you on tonight’s red-eye to Denver.”

  Scott wasn’t going home but he didn’t say this. Instead, he asked, “Tonight?”

  “You’ll be traveling as Randall Benton. You’re a real estate attorney, looking to buy acreage for a resort. Everything else you may need is in the cover detail.” Glen took an envelope out of an inside jacket pocket and stuck it into Scott’s hand. “I want you to poke around and see what you can come up with out there. Nick from the Denver office will meet you at the airport. He’s authorized to get you anything you need. This is need-to-know only and he’s outside the loop. Don’t tell him where you’re going or what you are doing. Don’t let him tag along. If he asks you anything, anything at all, direct him to me. While you’re there, the only authorities higher than you are me and God. Do we understand each other?”

  Scott didn’t want to, but he did.

  Glen looked at his watch. It was 12:45 p.m. “I have a 1 p.m. briefing that I can’t miss. … During this mission, there is no problem one phone call to me won’t fix. When the results come back from Analysis, I’ll call you. I want daily updates. Ops Out, Feet Wet procedures. Otherwise, I’ll see you in a week or so.”

  It was a dismissal. Scott didn’t move.

  Glen seemed pleased and turned to an image frozen on the computer’s second monitor. “If I had told you right from the start that those three gentlemen were, from left to right, Whuthers, Wolcott, and Williams, attorneys at law, would you have kept digging all night long through the recordings trying to find out their identity and in the process made a connection no one else made? Scott, I know you better than you know yourself.

  You work best functioning near zero. I want you in Denver hungry. If there’s something to find, you’ll find it. I’m counting on it. I’m your friend, Scott. You can count on that as well.”

  As Scott left the room, Glen looked at his watch. At 12:55 p.m., he closed the door, locked it from the inside, and then sat down at the table. Quickly he unbuckled his belt, slid it out of the loops of his pants, and then carefully detached the buckle. He untied his shoes, unstrung the laces partway, and then removed the shoes. He pried the gun barrel from the inside of the left shoe, the silencer from the right. A moment later he fit the barrel onto the top of the buckle, then attached the silencer. Afterward, he relaced his shoes.

  He stood, relooped his belt. He co
ncealed the gun, stepping out of the room. He looked around the side corridor. It was empty. He made his way to the rear door of Conference Room 18-C. The door was still slightly ajar, just as he left it. He opened it, removing the wad of putty as he went in.

  An oaken table dominated the plain rectangular room. Glen crossed to it, noting that the Chairman was seated at the head position and the team code-named the Wellmen Four had already arrived. The Chairman set his glass of water down, cleared his throat, and then stood to shake Glen’s hand. “We’ve already started, but that’s all right. I’ll introduce you and go on.”

  “No need for introductions,” Glen said, “I know almost everyone here. John, Tom and Sarah were part of a Humint team I headed up in the Middle East. We spent three years together.” Glen nodded to John and Tom. Sarah, who looked as radiant as ever, wouldn’t look at him. “And I’ve seen the newbie around a few times.”

  The Chairman smiled. “Well, you won’t need me anymore then.” He motioned to Sarah at the far end of the table. “Sarah,” he said, “the show’s yours again.”

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid I must. Glen’s the one who needs to know the facts. He’s my proxy. Fill him in on everything.”

  Glen shook the Chairman’s hand. “Thank you. I’ll do my best, sir.”

  “I’m counting on it,” the Chairman said as he departed.

  Sarah handed Glen a folder without looking him in the eye, then turned back to the rest of the team. “As I was about to say, although our investigation showed there is inconclusive evidence against John Wellmen at this time, it did reveal some items of interest.” Sarah touched a remote pad in front of her. The lights dimmed and a slide projector turned on. “This photo was taken a little over a week ago at the Colorado ranch.”

  Sarah clicked the remote again. “In fact, every Monday morning since March 2nd, you’ll find these three individuals leaving the Wellmen’s ranch at 4 a.m.” She paused, tapped the projection screen with a pointer. “Here I’ve enlarged the frame to show the faces. From left to right, they are Whuthers, Wolcott and Williams. Now here’s the billion-dollar question: Why are the three highest-paid lawyers in the free world spending every weekend at the ranch?”