Enemy Agents, page 4
Scanning was unusual because it was easier to simply flip through the book and search it by hand. Scanning the book meant that they expected to receive several future communications so that the higher-ups could just input the numbers and have the message spelled out instantly. It also meant that an unimportant office drone like Chris Quarrel would get to stand next to the scanner for an hour of flipping pages.
But first, there were the letters from the P.O. box. There were three different credit card bills for Number 13, under the names Sarah Johnson, Paulina Prostelovich, and Elena James. He recorded the expenses into Number 13’s file and saved it.
Next was a letter from Number 87 detailing his three rent payments in Washington, DC. Number 87 was a surveilist, a set of eyes in DC. He never left his territory and lived in three different neighbourhoods under three identities. He had already charged the rent payments from his identities’ checking accounts, but there was always the matter of keeping track of expenses. The letter, on the face of it, was directed to Marco Ermi, a fake accountant that Number 87 consistently mentioned when sending in his expenses. This month he had used the return address of Edwin Brown, who lived at ‘Apartment 2’ on the list of rent payments.
The next two envelopes were addressed from Alan Tigh, one of the aliases used by Number 37. Thirty-Seven, like Thirteen, was an intelligence officer. While Thirteen tended to re-use the same dozen or so identities, Thirty-Seven adopted a new alias for each mission. He had been Tigh for almost a year, except for two weeks when Tigh went on a cruise and ‘Michael Steinman’ did a quick job in Monaco. Chris Quarrel opened each envelope, each containing an invoice, and noted the expenses to be paid in Number 37’s file.
Quarrel was a junior intelligence analyst. He’d started with monitoring world media and occasionally sorting through intel gathered by surveilists, and writing reports on whatever the brass deemed important. He’d been good enough to get moved from CSIS to CSIS-2. CSIS is as well known in Canada as the CIA is in the United States, but the existence of CSIS-2 had never leaked to the public. If you were to look up federal spending, you would find that no such entity exists.
Quarrel interpreted the move to CSIS-2 as a promotion, even though he was essentially doing more paperwork jobs in a slightly more expensive office. However, his three years at the Service had at least put him ahead of people like Erica, who had been hired by CSIS-2 directly, without prior work at the Service. It was nice to have a clearance level, but it meant that the secret-but-menial jobs like the ones he had today tended to pile up on his desk. And he really hated that desk.
Quarrel was training constantly to prepare for field work. He had studied languages, martial arts, and was in the Service’s training programs for surveillance and intelligence gathering. He knew that sometime soon, he’d have a shot at being assigned a personnel number and disappearing into the field just like Alan Tigh and Elena James. He just worried about whether he would be able to get the job done.
Then there was the last envelope. It was addressed to T. Takahashi, a name that Quarrel didn’t recognize. It wasn’t a previously used alias for any of the agents Quarrel did accounting for. That in itself wasn’t unusual, although Quarrel now scolded himself for not opening this letter first. The P.O. box was used only by CSIS-2 agents, either for billing or communications—and this was probably the latter. Maybe Thirty-Seven had moved into a new apartment.
Inside was a single piece of heavy paper, with rough edges and a pulpy feel. The paper might have been handmade. There was a single sentence written in an artful calligraphy, which to Quarrel’s eye looked like it had been drawn with a fine paintbrush.
Have you noticed the Letter Six yet?
This was the sort of thing you showed to Carol.
#
Elsewhere in the same office, a double-agent nervously fished for a cell phone hidden at the bottom of a desk drawer. The double agent sent a short message, just a series of numbers and letters, to the only number programmed into that phone. What the double agent had seen at Quarrel’s desk was troubling enough that it had to be reported to the double agent’s handler.
A minute later, the phone lit up silently as a response arrived. It was also coded, but the meaning was clear to the double agent.
Get out immediately.
#
In the office of CSIS-2 Director of Intelligence Carol Kimura, Quarrel sat nervously while the DI inspected the note. Carol was in her early fifties, and recently she’d realized that her years inside the service outnumbered her years as a civilian. She was still in shape, but wasn’t about to sprint a four-minute mile anymore. Her hair had streaks of grey and she ran the office with both the carrot and the stick—she used whatever means she had to in order to make her team produce results. Those who took the right kinds of risk received a reward, those whose risks turned into mistakes were made to see their errors. She had always been firm but kind toward Quarrel, although now she knew that she would have to show this young agent what the stick looks like.
“Have you shown this to anyone?” she asked.
“No. Came straight to you.”
“Leave me everything. The letter, the envelope. I’ll take it to the lab personally. And don’t tell anyone a word about this.”
“OK. Should I look up T. Takahashi?”
Carol shook her head, “No. It’s not important.”
“But—”
“I’m not going to dance around here, Chris. If you so much as type that name into a search window things will be very bad for you. Bad like you’d be grateful if all you got was fired. Ignore Takahashi. That’s an order.”
“Understood.”
“And scan my goddamn book. Now.”
Quarrel left the envelope and the letter and headed out, closing the door behind himself. Carol picked up the phone and dialled. While she waited to connect, she lit a match and held it to the address written on the envelope. Once the name and address had burned away, she blew out the small flame and fed the remains of the envelope into her shredder. The speakerphone made a familiar electronic tone, and then a man answered the phone.
“Harry Milton.”
“Carol Kimura calling.”
“Oh, Carol. What can the United States do for you today?”
“Having flashbacks, Harry. Someone just sent a letter to Theresa Takahashi care of a CSIS-2 post box.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” said Harry, “you haven’t been Theresa for a very long time.”
#
Chris Quarrel stood by a scanner in the office’s copy room. Every ten seconds, he turned a page and placed the book back down. This was going to take hours. Staring absent-mindedly toward the door, Chris saw Erica pass by. He called out to her.
“You think you could get me a coffee? I’m stuck here for like a hundred and fifty more pages.”
“Sorry, Chris. I have a meeting with Jean. Enjoy your reading, though.” She smirked and disappeared from the doorway, down the hallway toward a few offices devoted to the Middle East.
The scanner didn’t just copy the pages, it also read each word and saved it as a text document that could be easily searched. Whenever Carol decided to read a communication from the book cipher, she’d only have to enter the number chain into the database and it would generate the coded sentences automatically. Basically, the system made Carol’s life very easy in the future,and Chris’s life very boring in theright-now. But that was life at CSIS-2; everyone else saved the world, Quarrel did the filing.
Half an hour later, the book was in the system. Bored and stiff, Chris decided to head out to the nearest coffee shop to get some caffeine. There was a Tim Horton’s around the corner, and a large black coffee would work wonders. Quarrel grabbed his coat and told the coat room guard he’d be back in a few minutes, then headed for the stairs. It was still cold outside, and Chris dug into his pocket to find his gloves.
As he stepped out of the stairwell into the lobby, he ran into Pete Hershey, who was stepping out of the elevator.
“Quarrel, you got back from a break like an hour ago and you’re taking another break already?”
“Before I was running out to get the correspondence. Thisis my break,” said Quarrel, fighting back the urge to end with the wordasshole.
“You just spent a week at a training mission. You need to play catch-up. Get back to the office.”
“I’ll stop taking coffee breaks when you cut out smoking, OK?” said Quarrel, pulling on his gloves. As he pulled the front door open, he felt Hershey slap his shoulder.
“And did you receive a Level Seven folder today?”
“On my desk.”
“Next time tell me when you get something like that, alright?”
“Sure, Pete.”
Finally, Quarrel was able to escape the office, leaving Hershey, who was just taking a smoke break, to loiter in front of the building. As he walked toward the coffee shop, Quarrel was thinking to himself: ‘The last three Level 7s that came along, he told me to buzz off. So when I finally don’t tell him about one he uses it as a reason to dump on me.’ And also:‘God I wish I was a field agent and I didn’t have to put up with this passive-aggressive office politics shit.’ And of course there was the constant refrain of Quarrel’s inner monologue:
‘I wish I worked alone.’
As he rounded the corner from the side street onto the main road, Quarrel scooped up a handful of half-melted snow from the roof of a parked car, balled it up in his hand, and threw it at a young maple tree in the boulevard. It was a perfect throw, nailing dead center on the two-inch-wide trunk. For just a moment, Quarrel felt a hint of pride at his hand-eye coordination.
Just as the snowball impacted, Quarrel’s office exploded.
5
The breeze blowing through the air vent was cold. It wasn’t strong enough to carry the dust to the filters, so the vents were covered in a thick layer of dry filth. Jessica Swift was covered in it. The dirt stuck to her clothes, to the sweat on her bare skin, and collected at the end of her ponytail whenever she turned a corner. She crawled along a route she had memorized from the blueprints before she entered the building. Tonight was a dress rehearsal. She needed to know that she could get in and out of the vents where she needed to. She scouted possible B- and C-exits in case her original escape was blocked somehow. Wherever it wouldn’t be noticed, she replaced vent cover screws with wing screws that she could pull off quickly and without tools. She studied the views from each vent and where it would lead.
This was mostly an office building. It belonged to a major bank, and only the first two floors were open to the public. The rest of the building was just offices, desks, computers, and cubicles. She was disappointed by that. Given the reputation of Swiss banks, she had hoped to find a secret hidden room, or at least soundproof offices. Where did they do all the scheming with South American despots?
WBS was the fourth-largest bank in Switzerland, headquartered in Zurich. This building was decades old, and the exterior matched its neighbours to create a charming street view. A 2000s renovation had modernized the inside; knocked down some walls and opened it up a bit, but the bones were still very boring to crawl around in. The building was square, and from the third floor up, every floor was virtually identical except for the occasional oversized executive office. They had installed some new vents, bigger than they would have been originally (which she was grateful for since she had a few inches to spare between her slim shoulders and the sides of the vent) but they hadn’t upgraded the ventilation enough to keep the air moving, hence the dirt.
Jessica had never been to Zurich before, and she had hoped the assignment would be in something more interesting than this. The assignments she got from Jupiter, her handler, always gave her the basics—an address, a target, a timeline—but never a sense of what the place was actually like. A centuries-old castle would be fun to sneak into, or some postmodern twisting absurdity of steel and glass might be interesting. Instead she was in an ordinary six-storey building that was probably identical to half the other buildings on the street, trapped in the dusty air vent. It was exactly like her training, and she had trained in a filthy abandoned warehouse.
Her target was on the ground floor, but she was currently on the third. She wanted to make sure that if she needed to, she could get out this way after she had robbed the bank.
It was after hours, but not very late. She had entered through the front door just before the bank closed at five, made her way into a vent without a single person or camera noticing, and began her work. It was past six when she crawled past an office and felt the air duct sag under her weight.
It creaked, loudly, the steel twisting away from the ceiling just a little.
She wasn’t near a vent cover, so she couldn’t see where she was exactly, but since she had just passed an office, she assumed that she was currently sitting above a hallway. And underneath her, someone said, “Was war das für ein Lärm?”
‘What was that noise?’
There was someone in the hallway. She tentatively shifted backward, pushing with hands as she walked her knees back. The pressure of her hands made the vent groan again, louder.
The person spoke again. “Die decke.”The ceiling.
Suddenly, there was a dull sound of movement, and she knew someone was moving the ceiling tiles. She crawled backward faster, and just as she moved away someone poked at the vent. The steel panel where she had just been kneeling rose up an inch as somebody tested it.
The Swiss person, who she now assumed was one of at least two security guards in the hallway, said something else in German, but she didn’t know enough of the language to understand it. A second person asked a question, and the guard answered.
She made it back to the vent over the office, and looked out in time to see a security guard in a blue and white uniform enter the office. She continued easing backward, silent as a mouse now that she was held up by better-supported vents. She thought she could get out of this. But then all of a sudden the guard jumped on the desk and shoved the air vent upward.
Jessica was wearing goggles to protect her eyes from the dust. She also had a black headband on her forehead. It was sweaty and dusty, but she ignored the filth and pulled it down to cover her mouth. That would have to do as her disguise. It was another ten metres of backward crawling to the corner, and the guard would poke his head up and see her before then. Instead of retreat, she crawled forward, toward the grate the guard was fighting to shove upward.
“Hello,” she called, quietly, in French, a language she spoke better than German.
“Who is that?” the guard asked, his French was flawless. Like so many Swiss, he was multilingual.
“I was trying to get to my boss’s computer. You caught me. I’ll come out now.”
The guard lifted the grate and she moved it aside, then lowered herself down to the desk, feet first, trying to look as awkward as possible. She didn’t want to look like a pro. She wanted to look like an idiot.
“What were you doing in there, girl?” he asked as she came down off the desk.
“I messed up very bad on this week. All my reports are shit. I wanted to change it in my boss’s computer. It’s stupid.”
“Who is your boss? What floor do you work on?” He reached out to pull the headband off her face.
She sighed. There goes that plan.
She grabbed at the key ring on the guard’s belt, snapping it away before he realized what was happening. Then she was headed for the door, but the guard was quick. He ran at her and shouted for his partner, and before Jessica could reach the hallway the guard tackled her hard into the wall. Her shoulder immediately started to throb from the impact.
“You think I’m stupid, bitch?” he spat the words in German now.
Everything flashed in front of Jessica. All the trauma that had brought her to this point in her life. The fire. The beatings. The warehouse. Everything that had scarred and shaped her piled up around her. This guy was nothing compared to them. That was why she wouldn’t hurt him. Couldn’t hurt him.
The guard grabbed a handful of her hair with his left hand while his right went to grab h er wrist. She ducked and spun, grabbing at his left forearm with the keys still in her hand. The teeth keys bit into his skin just enough to make him let go of the ponytail, and by then she had spun all the way around his body, stole the flashlight from his belt, and was out the door. She pulled it shut just as the guard tried to grab the knob. Before he could overpower her and pull the door open, she jammed a key into the lock and broke it off with the butt end of the heavy flashlight, locking the guard in the office.
The second guard was only a couple metres away. She ran at him, full-speed. He was a smallish man, and didn’t fill up much of the wide hallway. Clicking on the flashlight, she shined it into his eyes and threw it at his face. He reflexively caught the light, only to realize that the girl had slipped right past him. Before Guard Number Two even knew what was happening, the filthy girl from the vents was in the stairwell.
She didn’t run the stairs, she leapt over them to each landing. It was four big leaps to reach the ground floor, and then she just slipped out the fire exit and into the street. She had a backpack tucked under a bush on the corner. One minute after a girl in black tights passed a guard on the third floor, a completely different girl in a red sweater and blue jeans walked down the Bahnhofstrasse listening to her iPod.
The Bahnhofstrasse is the expensive street in Europe. Immaculate and lined with young trees, it was home to every prestigious retail store in Europe. Jessica didn’t notice the beauty of Zurich’s buildings or expensive shops on the way back to her hotel. She was too busy thinking back on her own mistakes, and wondering what would happen if anyone ever really had her cornered. Scratching a dumbass guard’s arm was one thing, but in her business things would only get worse. Someday, somehow, someone would get the drop on her and she’d have to fight for her life, and Jessica’s hands shook as she wondered if she’d even be capable of defending herself. She silently swore that she’d be better than she had been today, that she’d never be caught; always slip in and out without confrontation. She had to be the best, or she’d be dead.
