The Backup Asset (18 page)

Sylvia Copperwaite watched in a blur how the man sitting across from her raked the entire pot over the green velvet to his side of the poker table. His satisfied, wide grin was disgusting, showing discolored teeth, crooked, most likely about to fall from their rotted gums. A lifelong of poor hygiene, of smoking cheap crap, and drinking moonshine can do that to almost anyone.

She shuddered, thinking how different she was, how she didn’t belong with that crowd, yet there she was, again. She looked around the table, at the four strangers around her.
Horrible . . . this couldn’t be her reality, just couldn’t be true.

The truck driver at her left was about to deal.

“Ante?” he called out.

“Huh? N–no,” she said, after looking at her chips for a second. “I’ll sit this one out.”

“Hey, if you’re at the table, you gotta play, lady,” the man across said. “In, or out,” he said, pointing his thumb over his shoulder in a gesture inviting her to take a hike.

She only had two blue chips left, twenty dollars; that was all. She’d come in at 8.00PM or so with seven-hundred dollars, and now she was down to twenty bucks. She felt tears burning her eyes.

Where did it all go? Where and when had she lost her mojo? She used to win, and win big. She used to be able to read her opponents so clearly that she could almost tell every card they held, with accuracy, in cold blood. She knew who was bluffing and who had a strong hand. She used to know when to bet and when to fold. God . . . One night she’d won thirty-two large ones at a game, bought a new Volvo the next morning. But that was all gone . . . including that car. She’d sold it a year later, to pay off debts that piled up quickly once Lady Luck had decided to be a bitch and hung her out to dry. She drove a beat-up Honda now, bought from a curbsider for less than two grand.

“Hey, lady,” the man across barked, “either ante up, or take a hike, you hear me?”

She got up clumsily, arranging her skirt that clung stubbornly to her sweaty legs, and dropped her purse. Her belongings scattered on the floor—her lipstick, cell phone, car keys, her wallet. The man at her right obliged, reaching out under the table to help pick up her belongings.

“Ah, don’t bother, buddy, that wallet’s empty,” the brute across laughed, “I just cleaned that baby to the bone.” He continued to laugh, a coarse, disgusting laughter that made the other three men look away with embarrassment.

“Don’t mind him, miss,” the man helping her said, “he’s just your garden-variety asshole.”

She heard everyone talk like in a dream. Unable to articulate an answer, any answer, she stood quietly, her mouth slightly open, her brain unable to process her reality. They all seemed far, distant somehow, in an alternate plane of existence. Her eyes couldn’t focus; everything around her was a blur, a cacophony of sounds and images that didn’t make sense.

The man across whistled sharply and repeated the gesture with his thumb, inviting her again to get lost. She grabbed the two remaining chips and moved away from the table, heading for the cashier.

As she walked away, she regained a little more of her connection with reality, and she suddenly realized what was wrong. She was too desperate, that’s why she couldn’t win anymore. Back when she used to rake in all the chips on the table, she was cool about it, did it for fun, and didn’t really care. Now her back was against the wall, all her credit cards maxed out, and the line of credit exceeded and past due. That’s why, she realized, that’s why she felt forced to bet on a losing pair of stupid nines, when the smart thing would have been to fold and wait for a better deal to come. It’s written in the mathematical rules that govern chaos; the better hand will come eventually. All she needed to do was pace herself, so that her money would last the needed time she had to wait for the winning hand to show up. Huh . . . that simple. You can’t win at poker if you’re desperate or in a hurry.

She turned and went for the ATM instead, and put in her debit card as soon as the line of gamblers in front of her cleared up. She entered her pin and saw the option to withdraw cash was grayed out. She checked her balance; it showed $-2,482.27, and available funds $17.73. Even her overdraft protection was maxed out.

One by one, she tried all her credit cards, under the judgmental, impatient, sympathetic, or annoyed looks of customers waiting in line to use the ATM.

Nothing; no stars aligned to give her access to the little cash she needed to win again, now that she knew what she needed to do to get back in the graces of Lady Luck. Nada . . . she was cleaned out, with one more week left until payday.

Stifling a sob, she went straight for the cashier’s desk and actually made it, exchanged her two remaining chips for a twenty-dollar bill. She needed to eat until next Friday.

In the silence and bleakness of her apartment, she sat on the side of her bed, nurturing the few remaining drops of liquor she’d been able to squeeze from the bottom of some empty bottles. Her tears had run dry, getting the emotion out of the way so that her brain could take over and think rationally. She was an engineer; the years of discipline, deductive reasoning, and use of logic finally engaged in the process of identifying what her problem really was and figuring out how to fix it.

In the silent darkness of her bedroom she whispered, “Hi, my name is Sylvia, and I’m an addict.”

The doorbell startled Alex a little; it was almost midnight. She thought it must be one of the guys, with something so urgent and confidential that it couldn’t be handled over the phone.

She smiled, remembering how she had sneaked in to slide a piece of paper under Tom’s door one night, and scared the crap out of both of them when she’d stumbled upon him smoking his cigar on the patio, in complete darkness. Yup, emergencies like that can happen.

She paused the TV, put on a bathrobe, and opened the door widely, without checking the peephole. She was expecting a friend, but the man standing in her doorway wasn’t one of her Agency colleagues.

“You!” she exclaimed, perplexed. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Well, believe it or not, I’ve come to apologize,” Jeremy Weber said, “and to ask you to come back to Norfolk.”

She mumbled some oaths and, after thinking for a few seconds, reluctantly got out of the way.

“Come in,” she said eventually, “take a seat. Need anything? Water? Beer?”

“Beer would be nice,” he said, sitting down on her couch, uneasy. “It’s been a long flight.”

She brought cold Stella Artois for both of them, took an armchair, and folded her legs under her.

“So,” she said, “let’s hear it. What could have possibly been so serious to make you hop on a plane and waste a whole day in flight when you’re supposed to be chasing spies in Norfolk?”

She was making him uncomfortable, irritating him, and she was doing it on purpose. He was clasping his hands together, and obviously refraining from being his usual douche-bag self that she remembered clearly from earlier in the morning. She almost chuckled; she wasn’t gonna make it any easier for the jerk.

“Walcott considers . . . well, actually they believe very strongly you should be involved in this investigation.”

“Huh . . . do they now?” she replied pensively.

“They believe it so strongly that my director was persuaded before I even got back to the office this morning. We have his approval. We’ll set you up as an FBI contractor, have you take the polygraph needed to gain full access to this case, and we’re ready. We should be ready in twenty-four hours.”

“Wait a second,” she snapped, “I haven’t exactly said yes, now have I?”

The smug asshole! That was his version of an apology? Where did the feds find these people?

“You don’t really have a choice, Ms. Hoffmann,” he replied serenely, a crooked smile showing on his lips.

“Yeah? And how’s that?” She stood and started pacing angrily, her bathrobe fluttering around her like a fuzzy superhero cape. She didn’t care if he saw her jammies; she just wanted the fucker out of her house, pronto.

“I’ve done some research on you, to find out why exactly you’re so damn critical for Walcott’s investigation.”

“And?” Alex asked impatiently, tapping her bare foot on the carpet, her clenched fists stuck firmly in her pockets.

He leaned back, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “I know what case you’ve just worked on.”

She felt a rush of blood to her head and the fist of adrenaline hit her bowel.
Fuck!

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she managed to articulate, sounding calm and plausible.

“Oh, yes, you do. I’m talking about the twenty-something laws you and your team broke just by knowing about that threat and not calling us in. I’m talking about the elections case. I’d say this fact limits your options somehow, wouldn’t you agree? It should definitely improve your attitude for starters,” he scoffed.

She weighed her options quickly, then replied dryly, “Well, if you know that much, Agent Weber, then you probably must already know that the last asshole who sat where you’re sitting right now ended up dead, and my only problem with it was that I had to replace my favorite couch.”

He laughed, stood up and approached her with his extended hand. “It’s Jeremy.”

“Huh?” she reacted.

“You can call me Jeremy.”

Alex looked at him for a second, thinking. He obviously wasn’t there to arrest her for her work on the elections case, and she
was
interested in this challenge. Her gut was telling her that by working with Walcott she could come closer to identifying V, her elusive Russian mastermind, the mystery man taking the front and central spot on her crazy wall. That gut feeling, that thin wisp of hope was worth putting up with Agent Weber. Maybe there was room for some decent collaboration between the two of them. Maybe.

She shook his hand and replied reluctantly, “Alex.”

“Shall we start again?” Jeremy asked insidiously.

She grabbed her Stella and gulped down half the bottle, then sat back in her armchair.

“Tell me again, why do they need me? Or why do
they
think they need me?”

“Here’s the long story, short. Two teams of engineers used the corporate van between detailings. On Tuesday, the fleet manager found an illegally copied document in the van. One of these eleven people dropped it by accident, but that means someone made an illegal copy of a file containing critical state secrets, the laser cannon technology I was talking about this morning.”

“And?” she asked. “I still don’t follow why me.”

“You can infiltrate technical teams, that’s what you do, right?”

“Right . . . That’s what I do. So what’s your plan of action?”

She reached over to the coffee table and grabbed her laptop.

“What are you doing?”

“Booking us flights. Never mind me, what’s your plan?”

“Get you acquainted with the case, get you credentialized first, then we proceed from there.”

“Polygraph, huh?” Alex asked, thoughtful and a little concerned.

“Yup,” he said.

“Mandatory?”

“Gotta do it.”

“Then you better make sure they don’t ask me the wrong questions,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“About the case I’ve never worked on,” she said and winked, “the elections case.”

“I think that can be arranged,” he replied coolly. “What else would you need?”

“I need reading materials about the laser cannon. I can’t hope to infiltrate those teams without having the slightest idea of what that is and how it works. And I’ll need Walcott’s procedure manual, or someone who’ll walk me through everything I need to know about making copies, gaining access to documents, that kind of stuff. I think Mason Armstrong can take care of that.”

“What else?” Jeremy asked, taking notes.

“I need you to work with me and run background checks, people’s profiles. I need access to their files, work histories, financials, all that. Just routine for you.”

“You got it. How are we doing on flights?”

“Like hell,” she replied, frowning and slamming the laptop shut. “With these options we won’t make it to Norfolk before 10.00PM. Let me make a call.”

“It’s 2.00AM!” he exclaimed.

“He won’t mind . . . I hope.”

She dialed a number from her cell’s memory, and the call was answered immediately.

“Brian? Sorry to bother . . . I need your help badly. I need to bail out on your case, and I need to borrow your jet.”

She paused for a minute, listening to Brian’s answer, and watching with amusement how Jeremy’s jaw dropped. Then she thanked Brian and closed the call.

“Who are you, people?” Jeremy asked.