Midnight Secrets Read online

  From being a living, walking, fire-breathing king of the sons of bitches, Kowalski turned out to be a pretty cool boss. Maybe he’d mellowed with marriage. To everyone’s enormous surprise, he was a gigantic pussycat when his wife was around.

  Go figure.

  “Saw Kay Hudson the other day,” the Senior said casually and Nick looked like someone had stuck a prod up his ass.

  “Yeah?” He was trying for cool and it was a massive fail. A few beads of sweat sprouted along his dark hairline.

  This was amazing. Nick was a former SEAL, just like Joe. Now he was on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and though they weren’t the badasses SEALs were, they came pretty close. Nick’s specialty was sniping. He was cool and calm, always. He’d even been cool and calm during Hell Week. Had even joked.

  And a woman made him sweat?

  Joe would give up one poker session’s winnings to see that woman. She must be something.

  “Yeah.” The Senior had his own poker face on. Senior’s poker face wasn’t good enough to win against Joe in their sessions but for outsiders it served well enough. But Joe could easily see that Senior was hiding a huge grin. “She stopped by Portland on her way out, to say hello to Felicity and Metal.”

  Nick’s eyes were wide, the whites showing like a pony’s. “She say—she say where she was going?”

  “Nope,” Senior said cheerfully. “Not a fucking clue.”

  Nick made a strangled sound in his throat.

  Enough of this. Ordinarily, the entertainment value of seeing Nick squirm in his boots would have been enough to stretch this stuff out, but he had Isabel to think of and it was time to get down to business.

  “Nick,” Joe said, voice hard and Nick shook himself and morphed back into the cold operator Joe knew.

  “Yeah.” Nick had himself under control now and looked at all of them, plus Felicity who was sitting at the keyboard of her Magical Mystery Computer. No one was allowed to touch it, no one was allowed to even breathe on it. It was a prototype—illegally smuggled out from some secret super computer lab somewhere in the world—and it reputedly cost fifty thousand dollars.

  At that keyboard, Felicity became God.

  “Gentlemen,” Nick said. He nodded at Felicity. “Felicity.” He turned to the guys. “So. I’m here. Flew all fucking night. What the fuck is this about?”

  Joe switched on his computer and nodded at Isabel and Lauren. “The lady talking to Lauren is Isabel Lawton, who used to be Isabel Delvaux.”

  Nick’s face changed. “Delvaux? Of the Delvauxes?”

  Joe nodded. “Alex Delvaux’s daughter.”

  “So she’s one of the ones who survived the Massacre.”

  “Yeah. Barely. She has amnesia. She was badly concussed in the explosion and doesn’t remember anything beyond the day before the Massacre.”

  Nick glanced behind him, where Isabel and Lauren were engrossed in the drawing flowing from Lauren’s hand.

  “So what’s she doing here, way across the country, under another name? She on the run from someone?”

  “No. Not on the run.” Joe shook his head. “But the other day I got an anonymous message sent to my computer. We couldn’t trace it. Not even Felicity could.”

  “That’s true.” Felicity shook her head. “Not for lack of trying. But he—and we’re assuming it’s a he because he’s sneaky and manipulative—used an anonymizer and I think it was washed through three points. Totally untraceable without bringing monster crunching power to bear for a long time. Plus,” she shrugged, looking at Joe. “I get the feeling he’s—well, he’s a good guy. Could be wrong but if he doesn’t want to be identified, there’s probably a reason.”

  “I think he’s CIA,” Joe said bluntly. “Which doesn’t necessarily make him a good guy in my book. But he’s stepping outside the CIA. Asked specifically for someone good, someone incorruptible from the FBI. So we called you.”

  Nick nodded.

  “And we have a ten o’clock computer appointment.” Joe checked his watch. It’s ten now—”

  Hello, Joe

  appeared on his monitor.

  Joe sat down at his laptop. Felicity scooted over in her office chair, pulling her laptop along. They were sitting side by side.

  Hello, Joe typed.

  Let’s talk.

  Joe looked around. Felicity was calm. The guys all leaned in.

  Okay, he answered.

  “Hello, Joe.” A metallic affectless synthesized voice came from his speakers. Joe was familiar with the software. It washed out all identifying traits, including gender.

  “Hi.” He kept his voice neutral.

  “So, introduce me to your friends.”

  Joe could feel his eyebrows climbing up. Felicity leaned forward. “If you’ve got eyes on us, we should have eyes on you. Switch on your camera.”

  A metallic laugh. “Nice try. Maybe later. Not quite yet.”

  “You have us at a disadvantage,” Joe said evenly. “But I’ll introduce everyone anyway. Felicity Ward is our computer expert. The guy to your left is Douglas Kowalski, then Sean O’Brien and Morton Jackman.”

  Jacko grimaced at hearing his real name.

  “And the man on the right is Special Agent Nick Mancino, FBI. HRT. You asked to have him here and here he is.”

  “Special Agent Mancino. Nice to meet you. You any good with a computer?”

  “I’m okay,” Nick said evenly. He pointed to Felicity. “But we’ve got a genius here.”

  Felicity’s face didn’t change. She was a genius with a computer and she knew it.

  “Mind letting us know what this is about?” Joe was getting impatient. “This is about the Massacre, isn’t it?”

  “What do you know about the Massacre?”

  “I was in a coma when it happened. Battle injury, got on the wrong side of an IED. So I’ll let Nick answer that. FBI were among the first responders.”

  “So, Special Agent. What do you know about the Massacre?”

  Nick wasn’t fazed. “Alex Delvaux was expected to announce his run for the presidency at around 7:30 p.m. at the Burrard Hotel. They were running a little late. There were about seven hundred people in the room and behind the scenes. The Delvaux family itself, the extended family. Friends of the Delvauxes. A lot of the party higher-ups because Delvaux was the party’s leading light. And party activists. There were about a hundred and fifty members of the press who had received accreditation, but estimates are that there were also about fifty unaccredited bloggers who were allowed in. And then general supporters of the Delvaux campaign.

  “The room was fifteen thousand square feet and it was packed. There was going to be a buffet reception later and there were a hundred and seventy people who were either part of the kitchen staff or waitstaff. A deejay who was on a podium at the end of the room. And ten armed guards. There were no Secret Service special agents since Delvaux hadn’t actually declared his run yet. As of the next day, Secret Service protection would have begun.”

  “So if something were to happen it had to happen that night.”

  Nick met Joe’s eyes then turned to the monitor as if it was a face. “Yeah. I guess you could say that. I mean the security that night was good but not Secret Service level.”

  “No. What next?”

  “At 7:20 the lights went. At 7:21 cell phone coverage stopped. All cell phone coverage died. Everyone taking pictures, everyone Instagramming, uploading videos to YouTube—it all stopped at 7:27. All internet coverage stopped too.”

  Felicity stirred. “It was a powerful jammer.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said.

  “Not just the cells,” the metallic voice said from the monitor. “Power, the power backups, elevators, security vidcams, all switched off. All over the city, too.”

  “Yeah, the power going out all over DC was crazy,” said Nick. “It was all crazy. We were part of the rescue team that night after it was clear that it was a terrorist attack. We thought there would be hostages but there weren’t. It
was just wholesale slaughter.” Nick clenched his fists. He’d been there that night, seen the carnage. For Joe it was all secondhand information, acquired after he’d woken up. No one had actually given him an overall recounting of the event and the first month after he’d woken up he’d been in pain and weak. The outside world had retreated to a far-off signal for him. And Isabel had no memory of it at all.

  “So what’s the official version of what happened that night in the ballroom of the Burrard?”

  They all looked at each other uneasily at the mention of the term official. As if there were several versions.

  “The few eyewitnesses who survived said that a group of men dressed in black, with black ski masks and goggles, stormed into the room shouting ‘Allahu Akhbar.’ God is great. They were heavily armed and they opened fire immediately with automatic weapons. AK-47s. Police and the FBI were notified only at 7:32 that there was an attack at the Burrard, via landline. Since the hotel is so close to the White House, the Secret Service was notified and they hustled the president into the war room. By the time we scrambled and were on the scene, the explosives blew and half the building came down. Most of the few people who survived the massacre died in the rubble. There were very few survivors.”

  “And the terrorists. They all escaped.”

  “Correct.”

  “And the lights went out all over Washington.”

  “Correct.”

  From what Joe had read, it was the lights going out all over the nation’s capital that had brought the situation briefly to DEFCON 3. Even the White House and the Pentagon and Congress had lost power. There had been talk of an invasion of the United States. Martial law had been declared and there was a nighttime curfew. Police officers shot three hundred and forty people who didn’t obey the curfew.

  “Flights were grounded. The president was subsequently taken to an undisclosed location where he addressed the nation. Wall Street closed for two days.”

  “That’s all correct,” Nick said steadily.

  “The country lost three trillion dollars, almost overnight.”

  “I heard that.” Nick leaned forward, as did the others.

  “Your genius friend, Felicity. Ask her. She’ll have details.”

  Felicity looked serious, sad. “That’s right. It’s not a figure that has been officially published. The country was just coming out of the tail end of a recession. But three trillion dollars were siphoned out of our economy. As much as we lost in the decade of war with Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s all over the darknet but the mainstream media hasn’t talked about it at all.”

  “Nor will it ever. But that three trillion dollars went somewhere. What does the darknet say, Felicity?”

  Felicity looked uneasy. Metal said that Felicity, being Russian, thrived on conspiracy theories but this seemed to spook even her. “Darknet says a lot of things.”

  “But the thing it says most?” the metallic voice inquired.

  “Well...” Felicity shifted in her chair and looked unhappy. “A lot of money was sucked out of the economy due to the Massacre and that money had to go somewhere, as you said.”

  “Yes. Does the darknet say where?”

  “A handful of offshores.”

  “A handful of offshores suddenly gains three trillion dollars. And no one notices?”

  Felicity’s mouth set as her fingers blurred over the keyboard. “Here’s who noticed. I’m sending you a list of websites naming the companies. But no one in the mainstream media even touched this.” She huffed out a breath. “Like after 9/11. Like the collapse in 2008. No one talks about it except the conspiracy crazies.”

  “Not so crazy after all.”

  “No. So you seem to know a lot about this, too.” Felicity glanced at Nick. “And if you want someone squeaky-clean from the FBI that means you don’t trust the CIA, even if international terrorism is their thing.”

  There was a long silence.

  Joe leaned forward. “Are you CIA?”

  Another long silence. Then: “Not anymore.”

  The hairs on the back of Joe’s neck rose. “You contacted me. About Isabel. What does Isabel have to do with this? Are you contacting the survivors?”

  “Not all of them.”

  Goddamn. Isabel was in the middle of something really fucking serious. “Is there, is there a chance that someone from the CIA could be involved in this?”

  Of course not. The CIA was full of liars and cheats—that was their bread and butter. But traitors? No.

  “Yes,” the voice answered and Joe looked at Senior, Metal and Jacko in turn. They all looked grim.

  Joe’s hands were balled into fists. “Who?” Who in the CIA could turn traitor like this? “Not the entire agency, obviously. How many people do you think are involved? And can’t they be reported?”

  “I don’t know how many people are involved. Probably not many, four or five I think. But they are strategically placed. And those who ask questions of the wrong guys end up dead.”

  A shudder went through Joe. He glanced at the corner where Isabel and Lauren were working hard on the image she saw in her nightmares. “No one is touching Isabel.”

  “No. Keep her alive.”

  Fuck yeah, he was keeping Isabel alive.

  Nick shouldered Joe aside. “If any American citizens were involved in the Massacre, they’re going down. Whoever is involved is guilty of high treason.”

  “And mass murder.”

  Joe was a warrior. He’d been in battle. He’d killed. But he had never encountered anything like this before. From his own countrymen. It was hard to wrap his head around this. Afghani warlords behaved like this, not members of the US government.

  “Why?” His voice came out hoarse but no one seemed to notice. He felt rattled like never before. He knew the crazies out there. He’d fought them far away from the homeland never thinking that pure random evil on that scale could happen here.

  “Money, for one,” the metallic voice answered.

  So—not pure random evil. This was worse.

  “As Felicity said, those three trillion dollars went somewhere. Check what I’m sending.”

  On Joe’s laptop files started appearing, data streams flowing vertically like something out of The Matrix.

  “Stop,” Felicity said, typing furiously. She picked up her laptop and showed her monitor to Joe’s monitor. For a second it was like SkyNet had taken over the world and the monitors were talking to each other. “Send the info here. I’m showing you the IP. Joe’s computer can’t handle the data, mine can.”

  The men in the room looked at Joe to see if he’d taken offense. He hadn’t. It wasn’t like Felicity was challenging his manhood or his dick size. And anyway, hers was bigger than his.

  The data stopped immediately on Joe’s monitor and after a few seconds began flowing into Felicity’s computer. It flowed like a curtain and as Felicity did her thing, the data started morphing into different patterns, sliding, forming shapes then flowing apart.

  After ten minutes. Felicity froze her screen and lifted her fingers from the keyboard.

  “Okay,” she said. “Ex-CIA guy, are you still with us?”

  “Oh yeah,” the metallic voice answered.

  Felicity shot them all a glance. “You guys ready for this?”

  Isabel and Lauren were lost in their world in the corner but Joe’s guys were all ready and waiting.

  Felicity drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “So those three trillion dollars fled the country. And as you all would have noticed if this weren’t such an incredibly well-run company—” she shot a quick glance at the Senior, “—youd know how impoverished this country is now. Or perhaps you know it already. We had just begun climbing out of the post-2008 hole when the Massacre struck. Since the Massacre weve lost over two million jobs, unemployment is at its highest level since the Depression and the stock market has lost two thousand points. Its like the Massacre sucked out the economic backbone of the country, besides scaring the shit out of ev
erybody. The darknet hasn’t managed to actually trace the money that was lost, but this information is new.

  “These tables—” she gestured to her monitor, “—courtesy of a former hedge fund manager via ex-CIA guy, show sudden spikes in income and asset creation of a number of offshore funds and tax haven banks. Ordinarily it would be impossible to figure out who the people behind those funds and banks are but we have a treasure trove of info in these charts. I had to data-dive and do some massive number crunching to start to understand who profited from the Massacre but we have some preliminary results.

  Everyone leaned forward. Joe was sure that Metal Voice was leaning forward, too.

  Felicity gave a dramatic pause.

  “Well?” Joe nudged her shoulder. Ordinarily Metal wouldn’t let him get away with that, nor would any of the other ASI guys because Felicity was untouchable, but they were burning to know, too.

  “This doesn’t make me happy,” Felicity said. “Usually when I crack a difficult database the sheer challenge is enough to make me smile, but this doesn’t make me smile at all. Not when you think how many people died in the Massacre. Not when you think how many people have lost their homes, their businesses, their jobs. How many people’s lives have been ruined.”

  Metal put his hand on her shoulder and she reached up to put her pretty hand over his, never taking her eyes from the monitor.

  “The best way to tell you is to show you.” At each step, Felicity clicked a key, and a different screenshot came up. “That initial flow of data was several terabytes of bank account data and stock exchange movements and hedge fund quotations. The stock exchange now is run by quants running algorithms that operate with split-second timing and there are several million exchanges done every second of the day. It is almost unquantifiable. Almost.”

  The screen started slowing. Was less a flow and more a series of data sheets. The data sheets had elements highlighted and the highlighted elements were then put on another set of pages.

  “I can go over this step-by-step if anyone wants, but my system analyzed the funds and bank accounts and they were all shell companies. But digging down there were a few names that jumped out. First of all, the top earner was the PRC.”