Field Agent Read online

  He stared across the table, first at me, then Fife, then back to me. He said nothing.

  “Professor Parks,” I said. “I’m Agent Crown. This is Agent Fife. I appreciate you meeting with us.”

  He blinked, but still said nothing.

  “I’d like to talk with you about an organization you were a part of. The Arcetri.”

  Still not a word. The man didn’t even blink. I hoped I hadn’t come all the way across the country for nothing.

  Nothing to do but keep plowing away.

  “Of course, we can have you taken back to your cell if you’d prefer to keep to your one-hour time limit outside.” After letting that sink in a moment, I added: “Specifically, Professor, I’m hoping you can shed a bit of light on one of your fellow scientists. Dr. Jaclyn Stone.”

  This finally delivered a reaction. Not much of one, but at least I’d earned a raised eyebrow.

  “What can you tell me about her?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond, but I didn’t either. I could play the stare-down game as well as he. The quiet treatment was a tired old game often played by inmates. They felt it was a display of power. Which, if you think about it, was ridiculous. It never came across as anything but childish. But they still did it.

  When the silence grew uncomfortably long, he shifted in his seat, cleared his throat, and asked, “Has Dr. Stone found herself in hot water?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s why I’m here, talking to you. Is the good doctor prone to getting into hot water?”

  Now he chuckled. “Jaclyn is prone to expensive suits, sloppy research, and fudging figures.”

  “Does that disgust you? Not the outfits, but the sloppiness?”

  “I never worked with her. If I had, it would’ve pissed me off.” He shot a glance at Fife, who seemed content to sit back and listen. Then, looking back at me, he said, “And since our paths never crossed in the laboratory, there’s not much else I can help you with.”

  I tapped a finger on the table. “You can help me with the Arcetri.”

  He smiled. “Which is what? A type of cheese?”

  I returned the smile. “I feel like we should let you go back to your cell and feel important. Sit and bask in the glory of wasting our time. That’ll give you a big warm feeling that’ll last about as long as it takes us to get to a decent restaurant, order a steak dinner and a couple of drinks. Then catch a ballgame, and finally drift off to sleep in a comfy, 4-star room with Egyptian cotton sheets and a view of the mountains. Pretty nice. Of course, you’ll have won because you wasted our time and can feel all superior about it as your curl up in your six-by-eleven-foot cage. Congratulations. You’re a powerful man.”

  I leaned on the table. “Now stop being a dick. We’re the last two people on the planet you’ll ever be able to impress with your self-importance. I’ve spoken to you respectfully, and asked simple, easy questions.”

  He stared at me for a while.

  “Seven by twelve,” he finally said. “My cage is seven by twelve.”

  I sat back in my chair. “Oh. What do you do with all the extra space?”

  After another spell of silence he shrugged. “You can’t possibly expect to come here and have me spill everything I know. There are two problems with that.

  “One, there’s not much anyone knows. This organization you reference, the Arcetri; it’s not even a real organization. It’s an informal club, and a name tossed around by a few people who thought of it as a foundation for fighting back.”

  “Against what, exactly?” I asked. “Disrespect?”

  He paused, and then grunted a laugh. “And that sounds preposterous to you? Probably because you’ve never known what it’s like to watch your entire life’s work thrown out like garbage. All of your dreams and passions dismissed as nonsense, while people whose work was actually built on the back of your ideas are rewarded. And can you speak up about that? No, you cannot. You’ll be labeled a sniveling, jealous warthog, and relegated to getting a job in some backwater laboratory, creating new flavor combinations for corn chips. If you’re lucky.”

  “All right,” I said. “That’s a well-articulated reason number one.”

  He took a deep breath. “Honestly, Agent Crown, reason number two is because there is absolutely nothing in it for me.” Looking around, he spread his hands as far as the restraints allowed. “You can’t really punish me much more than this.”

  I felt more than saw Fife’s eyes on me. This had been a last-minute trip. We’d been given nothing to negotiate with. I wasn’t even sure who had the power to offer anything in exchange for Steffan’s help. If ever in my career I’d spoken entirely out of my ass, it was right now.

  “Not everyone spends their entire sentence here,” I said. “After a few years it’s possible to get shipped to a more, uh, comfortable facility.”

  Parks leaned forward. “I’m listening.”

  “Well, cooperate fully, and we’ll look into shortening your stay here until you’re transferred.”

  This caused him to bark a short laugh. “Vague answers for two hundred, Alex.”

  I spread my hands. “Hey, I’m not the attorney general. I’m not even a lawyer. But I do have connections with very powerful people. They get what they want most of the time.”

  “Uh-huh. And what does cooperate fully look like to you?”

  “For starters, everything you do know about the Arcetri. No bullshit, no cherry-picking. Then I want you to tell me everything you know about Jaclyn Stone. And, if it comes to it, I’d want you to testify against her.”

  He shook his head. “Seems an awful lot to pay for what you’re offering.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m the one who has to convince a bunch of hard-asses to move you. Seeing as how you tried to murder the family of a congresswoman—and, by the way, about ten thousand other people—I’d say I have my work cut out for me. All you have to do is sit back and tell me what you know. Now who has the harder job?”

  Nothing was said for a long time.

  In a softer, gentler voice I prodded him one more time. “Look, Steffan, it’s not as if you’re ratting out someone in the mob. Then you’d have to watch your back for the rest of your life, even in here. You said yourself the Arcetri’s not even an official organization, so there can’t be some code of honor you’re protecting. What’s the worst they could do? Cancel your subscription to Scientific American?”

  A smile turned up on the corners of his mouth. “It’s comments like that, you know, that inspired the formation of the club in the first place.”

  I chuckled and held up my hands in a sign of surrender. “You’re right.” Then I leaned forward again. “So what’s it gonna be? Are we sending you back to your cell?”

  He threw another glance at Fife, then nervously rubbed his hands together. “What kind of assurance do I have that you’ll keep your word?”

  “Assurance? Just my word that I’ll do everything I can. You don’t know me, but I’m asking you to trust me, Steffan.”

  He sat still for the longest time. Then: “I want out of this place within the year.”

  I took a long breath, and nodded. “All right. Now tell me about Jaclyn Stone. Is she part of the Arcetri?”

  Parks sighed. “All Jaclyn ever lacked was the right bio-formula to make the kind of impact she wanted. If she now has that formula . . .” He paused. “Then you’re in big trouble.”

  20

  The ride back to Denver flew by, but that could’ve been my adrenaline. After initially wasting our time with bullshit posturing, Steffan had filled the rest of the hour with heady talk. Some of it I’d expected. Much of it I had not.

  “All right,” Fife said, deftly maneuvering the sports car through traffic. “Let’s assume he’s telling the truth about everything. And, for the record, that’s a bold assumption, because these cats live to screw with federal agents. It’s often the only thing they can live for. But let’s assume it’s all gospel.”

  “Then it fills in a few gaps,�
� I said.

  “Enumerate, please.”

  I humored him and held up my hand, ticking the fingers up with each point.

  “One, it explains how a tech-nerd like Jason Deele comes up with a ground-breaking new agricultural formula and product seemingly overnight. Because it wasn’t overnight. He didn’t walk away from phone apps and gadget-gear and suddenly develop a new strain of soybeans. Jaclyn Stone had a head start, probably by several years.

  “Two, it explains their unlikely partnership.”

  Fife raised a hand, putting me on pause. “You mean the partnership of Deele and Stone.”

  “Yeah. Talk about two people who could never have met organically, pun intended. They couldn’t possibly have run in the same circles. For my money, Stone sought him out, made him a proposition, and closed the deal.”

  “And three,” Fife said, getting in on the act. “They were actually perfect for each other. A scientist with a product that only works if used in conjunction with a deadly fungus—that’s not something you can just shop around—and a loose-cannon tech boy wonder who’s always on the lookout for another big score.”

  “Huge score, underlined,” I said. “Who knows how many hundreds of billions of dollars it could eventually be worth?”

  “Is there a fourth point?” Fife asked.

  “Yeah. The fourth point is that Jason Deele is a crazy son of a bitch who won’t let a little thing like corruption and death on a large scale stop him from this gold mine. He couldn’t be a more perfect partner for Jaclyn Stone: He’s a psychopath with billions to invest.” I shook my head. “She probably couldn’t believe her luck.”

  We drove in silence for several miles. I replayed some of Steffan’s comments. I couldn’t tell him what we suspected of Stone, but just our presence at the prison told him she was up to no good. The feds don’t come sniffing around for misdemeanors.

  When he begrudgingly revealed information about the Arcetri, he did so only in regard to Stone specifically. I wanted more on the group, but for now would have to be satisfied with what he was willing to share.

  “For most of us,” he’d said, “there was egregious damage done to our careers. I don’t expect you to understand why I did what I did, but you at least can acknowledge I got a raw deal from a lot of people. So I lashed out. To me there was justification.”

  “And Stone?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth to answer, stopped, and then gave a shrug. “How do I say this? What she went through . . . wasn’t that bad. I mean, sure, she got screwed by some people, and I think her former partner went way too far in her lawsuit.”

  I finished his thought. “But not enough to explain criminal activity.”

  He leaned forward in order to scratch an itch on his cheek, a challenging move with your hands shackled to a table. “I’ve met Jaclyn a couple of times. And each time she struck me as a scientist with a different agenda, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, look, I may have strayed from my original work—”

  I raised my eyebrows as if to say No shit.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But if she’s finally developed something dangerous, I’m not sure it was entirely an act of revenge.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’m no psychiatrist, but Jaclyn is the type who’d do it for no reason other than to see how it worked. On people.”

  Now, racing down the highway in the passenger seat of the Mustang, I considered the fact that we might have gotten a deal on psychopaths this time: Buy one, get one free. And the idea reminded me of a conversation I’d had with our Q2 shrink, Miller. When I’d asked him once why there weren’t more partnerships between dangerously sick people, his answer intrigued me.

  “Contrary to what you might think, two psychotic personalities don’t double the potency of the psychotic acts; they’re more likely to cancel each other out. Two unstable elements will often destroy one another.”

  If Miller was right, then this evil marriage between Jason Deele and Jaclyn Stone was rife with danger for one or both of them. It would be a dream come true if their partnership blew up; at the very least it would save me a lot of time and potential danger. The problem was I couldn’t count on them to implode before they’d fully implemented their plan.

  “I’ve got to get back to Washington,” Fife said as we neared the rental car return at the Denver airport. “What’s your next move?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. With Deele flying back to South America, it might be a good time for me to snoop around that lab of his. The one he didn’t want me to see without him.”

  “You know it’ll be guarded, right?”

  “Thank God I’m a stealthy bastard.”

  I managed a ninety minute nap on the return flight to Houston. Thank you, window seats.

  Back in my hotel room by ten, the first order of business was an upload. No way I wanted to lose my conversation with Steffan Parks.

  At midnight I set my alarm for 2 a.m., grabbed another quick nap, and was back in my car, dressed in all black, before 2:30.

  Poole had come through again. I plugged in the address she’d uncovered for the lab and set off. Deele’s claim that it was “not far” turned out to be the truth. My software predicted I’d be there in 45 minutes. Houston’s traffic would at least settle down overnight, right?

  Normally this first trip would be all about pure reconnaissance. Rushing in could be a recipe for disaster. As Fife had so astutely observed, it’s not like the place would be dark and quiet. There were bound to be security people crawling around.

  But truth be told, I was a spy in desperate need of some spying. Sometimes in my profession I get lots of it, but then I’ll have long stretches where nothing gets my heart racing. Christina doesn’t ask much about my experiences, but one time she got a big laugh out of me. We were on the couch, watching a James Bond movie—the one with Pierece Brosnan where he’s shot at about a thousand times by guys with machine guns and never gets hit with even a single round—and she asked how real-life spies handle all the non-stop action. I think beer came out my nose.

  If only she knew how often we had our thumbs securely planted up our asses. It ain’t glamorous, and our hair never looks as spectacular as Brosnan’s after our fight scenes.

  At the moment I was itching for something dangerous. I’d endured a lot of travel lately and plenty of talking. For Christ’s sake, I even sat through a Powerpoint display. I needed action, no matter how risky.

  A small backpack filled with a nice collection of special tools occupied the seat beside me. My trusty Glock 18, delivered to my room by a Q2 courier along with the backpack, lay on the seat as well. I hoped it wouldn’t sing tonight.

  At ten past three I pulled to the side of the road two blocks from the lab. It was an industrial area where most of the buildings had bright security lights circling their perimeters. I studied a satellite photo, then pulled back onto the street. A slow drive-by was in order.

  Deele’s property occupied its own block, which meant it shared no space—not even a parking lot—with any other business. The building itself was set back from the road and fortified against an assault. The fence surrounding it was not only tall, but capped with razor wire. Signs every thirty feet spelled out the dire consequences of trespassing, but it would take quite an effort to get to that point. A guard shack defended an entrance from the road, with a solitary figure perched inside. Powerful floodlights bathed the parking area and the building. There would probably be one or two armed security types patrolling outside, and more waiting within.

  It wouldn’t be impossible to get in unnoticed; after all, the government trained me to do things like that. And I did have my bag of toys.

  I turned a corner and drove another block, then pulled over and stepped out. With the backpack over a shoulder and the gun in my waistband, I crossed the street and headed toward the target.

  Near the fence on the backside of the building I knelt and scoped
out the property. As expected, besides the lonely guy in the guard shack there was one more trooper patrolling the grounds. He looked to be going through the motions, probably as unhappy with his work as you’d expect of a guy walking back and forth in a desolate field in the middle of the night. His presence helped, too; it meant motion detectors likely weren’t in use outside. All I needed to do was slip past him with a distraction. That was easy enough.

  Pulling wire cutters from my pack, I snipped a small section at the bottom of the fence near a pole, just enough to squeeze through. Once inside I lay prone, estimating the distance to the building’s shadow at about 150 feet. When the sentry passed me and reached the limit of his route, I found the fob to my Jag and thumbed the red panic button.

  It did not disappoint. The obnoxious horn cut through the stillness of the night, reverberating off nearby structures. I didn’t wait for the guard’s reaction; I knew what it would be. I bolted, only looking around as I neared the sanctuary of the shadow. Sure enough, the man’s feet were planted, and he stared through the gloom in the opposite direction toward the disturbance. I shut off the car alarm.

  So simple, and yet so effective.

  Everything I needed was conveniently nearby. A utility door was placed not twenty feet from the secure junction panel I needed. Picking the lock on the panel was a breeze, revealing an array of connections. Retrieving a small device from my pack, I hooked its alligator clips in the appropriate spots, dialed up the code I wanted on the tiny LED screen, and hit the engage button. Just like that, the building’s alarm system was mine. It was now in stand-by mode, which meant no squawking with a problem because, to the system, there wasn’t a problem. It was just resting.

  Any and all cameras inside and out would be essentially paused; looking back later—assuming they had a reason to look back, which I did not intend to give them—it would be a seamless splice. The only way they’d be able to tell would be the jump in the chronometer readings. But they’d have to be looking for it.