Veil of Civility: A Black Shuck Thriller (Declan McIver Series) (20 page)

9:36 p.m. Eastern Time – Saturday

Graemont Lane

Charlottesville, Virginia

As his children slept in the luxurious bedroom suites below, David Kemiss sat at the desk in his third floor study. The television in the walnut armoire along the opposite wall flickered with images of the plane carrying Abaddon Kafni's body leaving the Lynchburg Regional Airport. The talking heads of the major media networks were aglow with speculation as to what could have happened to the outspoken professor and author who had frequently appeared on their shows defending Israel and America's war on terrorism, as well as analyzing dozens of other events, from the Arab Spring to the mass casualties in Syria at the hands of that nation's own government.

Their experts, many of them Kafni's colleagues, seemed sure of only one thing: the Islamic extremists who had been trying for years to kill Kafni without success had finally achieved their goal. But who were the extremists? Had it been the act of a lone wolf? Was it a sign of a larger attack to come? The news media seemed barely able to contain itself at the thought of the possibilities. Peppered with bits and pieces of Kafni's life story, this event would give them something to report on for at least a week, maybe longer. But there was only one thing about the entire situation that Kemiss wanted to know as he leaned back in his red leather chair: had the witness to Kafni's death been neutralized? Nervously, he flipped his cell phone around in his hand. Suddenly the phone vibrated and he switched off the television, tossing the remote back onto the desk as he flipped open the phone. Looking at the display, he recognized Castellano's number.

"Have you heard anything?" he asked as he heard a car door slam on the other end of the line.

"Not a thing."

Kemiss sighed loudly. "It's been over an hour since they were supposed to report. Something's gone wrong."

"We don't know that yet. Maybe they had to take him somewhere else. These guys know what they're doing. They handled the situation last night, didn't they?"

"Yes, but I'm not waiting to find out. Every minute that goes by, this guy could be contacting the press or someone else. I don't want anything left to chance."

"He doesn't have anything to go to the press with, David. He can't even make a one hundred percent positive identification."

"That won't stop them from spreading his story all over the airwaves and turning this thing into more of a three ring circus than it already is. All we need is one tabloid journalist to wave some money under this guy's nose and he'll be on the front page in every grocery aisle in America."

"Okay...okay. I'll call them and find out what's going on, but it needs to be kept short and to the point. We have got to maintain as much silence on this as possible. These throw-away phones are only so secure."

"I don't like forcing your hand," Kemiss said, "but you're not the only one with contacts that might be able to help if need be. Use the three-way calling feature. I'll wait."

He listened as Castellano tabbed through the calls received to the only other number that had ever called the phone, the number belonging to the throw-away phone of the man who should at that very moment be trying to wash Declan McIver's blood off his hands. He tensed as the phone rang, followed by the sound of someone picking up the call, a rustling sound perhaps caused by the mouthpiece brushing against facial hair as the phone was raised into the proper position.

"Hello? Who's there?" an accented voice asked.

"Who is this?" Castellano asked severely. But as the words left the agent's mouth Kemiss knew who it was. Declan McIver was alive and had just answered the phone of the man who was supposed to have killed him. He terminated the call by closing the phone and slowly placed the device on his desk, his mind racing as he sat forward in his chair. The owner of the phone not answering could only mean one thing: he was dead. What did they do now?

The phone vibrated again on the desk.

"Yeah," Kemiss said as he picked it up.

"They're dead," Castellano said. "We have to get rid of these phones. Take out the battery and the SIM card and keep them separate from the phone. I'll take care of destroying them, but don't turn it back on or try to use it for any reason."

"Then what?"

"I'll call the state police and monitor any traffic reports. We need to find out what happened and where. You said you had contacts that can help? Now would be the time to call them. This guy knows there's someone after him now and if he's smart he's going to run. We need someone that can catch him."

"I know just the person to handle that."

Kemiss closed the phone and pressed down on the back of it, removing the battery covering. Taking the battery and the tiny black SIM card out, he placed all three items in a neat line on the side of his desk. Castellano could take care of the rest.

Picking up the land line phone on his desk, he dialed a number and waited for an answer.

"Yeah, Allan? It's David Kemiss."

9:43 p.m. Eastern Time – Saturday

National Security Agency Headquarters

Fort Meade, Maryland

"Were you present during the Bush administration, David, or were you just voting that way?" Allan Ayers asked pointedly as he brushed a hand over his goatee. "I know you were there because you were leading the charge against warrantless wiretaps in the Senate."

He listened to the uncomfortable silence on the other end of the line as he rested his elbows on the black Government Issue desk in his office, on the seventh floor of the National Security Agency's headquarters fifteen miles southwest of Baltimore. In his position, the last thing he wanted when he came to work was a phone call from a sitting senator, even if that senator happened to be a friend of the family.

Under normal circumstances, the politicians that called expected a favor to be done for one of the many new recruits that passed through the Live Environment Analyst Development, or LEAD, facility that sat just outside of Ayers' office. The recruit would likely be the offspring of an influential but not necessarily wealthy constituent. He or she would have recently graduated from college and have somehow figured out his or her way through the absolute maze that was the federal hiring process, and now their parent's political connections would be brought into to play to ensure that they received as high a pay grade as possible at the agency of their choice, which for computer science majors, was always the NSA. Ayers had seen many of these individuals rise through the ranks rapidly after his aid in securing them the highest possible scores on the agency's systems and some had even surpassed him in the chain of command, which made filling more such requests far more difficult. But tonight, just as he was about to begin loading in a fresh batch of targets for a class, Senator David Kemiss had called for an entirely different type of favor, one that Ayers didn't want anything to do with.

"Don't insult me, Allan," Kemiss said, after allowing the uncomfortable silence to grow to a cacophony. "I was there and so were you, thanks in no small part to my intervention on your behalf. It's time to pay the piper. I need wiretaps and a team of analysts searching for two individuals and I needed it done five minutes ago."

There it was. The advancing locomotive that Ayers had seen coming a mile away, his dirty little secret plastered to the front of it like a windswept Christmas wreath. He too, as an unemployed IT worker from Silicon Valley, had once reached out for help the same way many of his students did. He'd always reasoned to himself that his situation had been different, that he'd had a family to feed and that waiting for the dot-com industry to repair itself after the bust in the late nineties would have meant stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for a decade while his children were raised on food stamps. But in reality, the scenario was the same as for a recent college grad needing to pay back the student loans taken out to finance their education, and as Kemiss had so pointedly put it seconds before, the piper always came calling.

"So you're telling me that this is a matter of national security and that these people are suspected of involvement in the attack in Virginia?"

"He is; she just has the misfortune of being married to him."

"Then why isn't this going through the Surveillance Court and up to one of the analyst centers with a warrant attached?"

"Because we don't have that kind of time. Within the last hour this guy killed at least two men sent to apprehend him and he's going to be on his way out of the country in a matter of a few hours more. Now, if we find him this way the Richmond Field Office can put a collar on him before he even leaves the region and no one, including him, will ever know the NSA was involved."

Ayers looked over the two dozen computer terminals lined up in rows of four in front of a 216" x 96" blank LED monitor that, during a training operation, would be filled with the images of whoever it was he had loaded into the system for his students to hunt down. These days most of the individuals, known as mice, that he would load into the system were terror suspects that had already been caught or killed, but whose movements had been sporadic and had led authorities on a global chase as they left clues in, out, and around businesses, airports and other facilities, clues that the budding analysts could track until they found where he had placed the mouse.

Could a real individual be traced with the training system? Of course, it was the same system used in the upper floor analyst centers and, just like those centers, all the data collected by the analysts went directly to their team leader before being sent up the line. Being the team leader in this case, he made sure the collected data was stored in a training file where it would be scored by senior analysts and then deleted from the live system. So what Kemiss was proposing was not only possible, but also easy to do. Was the risk of turning him down really worth it? He thought it very likely that every senior analyst and team leader at the agency had probably had a little fun with the system at least once in their career. Whether it was something as innocuous as checking out an old high school flame or something more nefarious like listening in on your neighbor's phone conversations, it happened. Was losing his job for something that could be so easily covered up worth it? The immediate answer was no. He wasn't willing to risk the federal pension he would be enjoying in less than a decade for someone who had just killed two federal agents.

"Alright, send me everything you have."

"It's all located in an attachment in the draft folder of an email address set up at mailer.com; I'll give you the login information."

10:10 p.m. Eastern Time – Saturday

Porter's Exxon Station – Route 60

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia

"Who do you think it was?" Constance asked. "Do you think there are more of them?"