Chapter 6
Six
As they biked under the shade provided by thick green trees, John shook his head. Jane was not an outdoorsy woman. Museums, fashion and board games, yes. Willingly dipping into a forest in suburban Maryland in the thick heat of June?
Big fat nope.
Except…she was? She held her arm out to the side, indicating a left turn. There was no trail in that direction. Vivian gunned up the emerald hill, her brown hair bouncing behind her.
Maniac.
His pulse hammered in his neck. He crested onto a street that ran parallel to the trail. After making sure he followed, Vivian delved into an alley bisecting a mixed neighborhood of modest homes and fancy architectural rebuilds.
Up ahead, she stopped next to a tall wooden fence.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Friend’s house.” After she punched in a code, the back gate unlocked. Vivian scanned the neatly manicured half acre of land and the small cottage tucked within it.
“Have I met this person?”
“No.” She shut the gate behind them. “Anjali and I went to college together. She’s a coworker, too. We EOD’d—”
He picked an errant twig from her shoulder. “What’s an EOD?”
“Sorry.” She rubbed her forehead. “Federal government jargon. Entered on duty. We were in the same cohort. She’s one of my best buds.”
John’s brow wrinkled. “But you said you didn’t have local friends. That they live in Denver, London, Casablanca.”
Shit. He’d paid so much attention to her, and she’d treated that like a problem, something to evade, instead of the total gift it was.
“Some of them do.” She grabbed the knocker’s brass ring. “But Anjali’s here, and you’ll like her. She’s a real one. She’ll like you too, because she loves me.”
She knocked three times, paused, then knocked once more.
A short woman with golden brown skin opened the door, shook her head and slammed it shut. “Go away.”
“Anjali, come on, open up.”
“Fuck off, Flint. I don’t want to see your face for six more weeks.”
Vivian pinched the bridge of her nose. This was her self-inflicted wound gesture, like when she’d spent a full minute acting out a title to a movie he’d never seen during charades.
“Best buds, eh?” John asked.
“I begged her to access files I didn’t have clearance to see. It might’ve landed her on swing shift for, uh, three months. She’ll be done in six weeks.” Vivian knocked again. “Anj, come on. I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t critical.”
Silence greeted them.
Vivian sighed. “If you don’t open up, I’ll go say hi to Aunty Meena. I’m not responsible for what happens if she notices my engagement ring and asks me questions about your dating life. And that might force me to tell her about Winegrad.”
John tried to lock in on the names, file them away for future reference. He riffled his hair. What the hell was he doing? There was no future with this person. She’d lied to him for a year, and as soon as she told him the truth, gunshots and goons descended on them.
Anjali opened the door and dragged them inside. “You’re the worst. And you look like hell. It’s bad enough my parents insist I live at home until marriage. Now I have to worry about you ratting me out?”
“You love me.” Vivian shrugged.
“Not today I don’t. Take off your shoes.”
“You need to work on your best buds definition,” John said.
Anjali turned to John. “And you must be John, aka the person who’s been making Flint smile. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Second time someone said that today.
“Wish I could say the same,” he said.
“She loves me, but she can’t admit it.” Vivian extracted the drive from her pocket. “This isn’t a social call. What are the ears like here?”
“Daily sweep came up clean an hour ago. Honestly, my mom’s the biggest security risk.”
She held out the drive. “I need someone to decrypt this, and you’re the best.”
“No argument here, but why not take it to the office?”
“We did. The office got shot up, and MacColl’s not answering. It might have something to do with whatever’s on this drive.”
Anjali darted her gaze among Vivian, her outstretched palm, John, back again to Vivian, then puckered her lips and snatched the drive.
“Well, that’s not good. But the phone tree hasn’t been activated so we should assume they’re okay.
Let me see what I can do. Not like I had anything else on the agenda today besides taking my mom to the farmer’s market. ”
Vivian’s friend possessed the quiet calm of a paramedic handling an emergency. They must teach that at CIA school. He’d seen his girlfriend… fiancée…ex? hunker down the same way since the shots were fired at the office.
“Thanks, Anj.” Vivian rolled her neck.
John blinked his dry, gritty eyes. This woman… Her gestures, her expressions, her voice were all the same as Jane’s, but the things she was saying… She was this whole other person zipped inside the woman he loved.
“I need to sit down.” He slumped on Anjali’s loveseat before his rubbery legs gave out.
“Dude, you look pale,” Anjali said. “Need a Coke or something?”
“He prefers water. Be right back.” Vivian disappeared, then returned with a glass of ice water. “Drink that. You’ll feel better.”
She expected a lot from water.
“Might be overkill, but I’m black boxing this shit.” Anjali opened the living room’s armoire doors and revealed an evil genius level of tech, then unhooked a cable and flicked a couple of switches. “Where’d you get the drive?”
“From the frame of a Rocksy painting I appraised on Thursday in London—the one Rocksy destroyed at the auction yesterday.”
Anjali glanced at her ceiling, brow puckered in irritation. “Bitch, why didn’t you start there? That’s obviously related to whatever went down at the office.”
“I agree, but I need more evidence. FYI, the buyer’s unknown but is based in the Cayman Islands. MacColl wants you to dig into them.”
“That is literally almost nothing to go on. This drive might tell us more.” Anjali plugged it into a hub adapter. “How’d you walk away with it if you were delivering it to MacColl?”
Vivian sighed. “I mixed it up with a drive of wedding plan info John brought.”
“OMG, that’s hilarious.” Anjali clapped. “The star pupil is too pre-cockupied to do her job. Well done, Johnny boy!”
Heat washed over John’s cheeks. Better to wander away from their conversation than get roped in further.
“Shut up,” Vivian said through a laugh.
“I will not. And ooh, this is a mess. But nothing quantum computing can’t solve.” The screen filled with gibberish. Her fingers flew over the clicking keyboard, copying and pasting relevant alphanumeric text. “Ugh, Viv, grab a mint. Your coffee breath is rank.”
While they bickered, John found a beaming Jane—whoops, Vivian—in a framed picture. He almost didn’t recognize her with a riot of auburn curls. Must be from college since she wore a Hoya T-shirt. She stood in front of a kegerator and held what look like huge golden clock hands.
His chest tightened.
When they’d been dating for two months, Thomas and Logan invited them to dinner. During dessert, she’d pored over the family albums Thomas had inherited when their parents moved to Luxembourg. John assumed she didn’t have childhood pictures, but he never asked.
How could he have been so incurious?
Anjali’s whoop caught his attention. “I am a god!”
In the glow of her monitor, Vivian’s and Anjali’s twin victory smiles fell. This must be bad. Nothing threw Jane. Obstacles were puzzles to be solved, not to fear.
“Those are…” Vivian covered her mouth. “Those are staff lists, complete with home addresses and phone numbers, from BSL-4 labs around the world.”
“What’s a BSL-4 lab?” he asked.
“Biosafety level four,” Anjali answered.
“They contain pathogens that cause serious disease for which there’s no treatment or vaccine, ostensibly so the scientists can study them.
There are fifty-nine BSL-4 labs around the world, and the greatest concentration of them is in Europe.
If any are compromised, it could trigger another pandemic. ”
The seriousness of this situation thudded into John. There was no good-for-humanity reason for anyone to buy that kind of information.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Fuck indeed.” Anjali leaned closer to the screen. “The README file says this is the first of three drives and left instructions for the next handoff at a charity auction in Monte Carlo.”
“When?” Vivian asked.
“Three days from now.” Anjali wrote digits on an index card. “Who sold the Rocksy painting in London? And why split up the delivery of the BSL-4 intel?”
“Dragomir Mihailovic’s holding company sold the Rocksy painting. He’s a Croatian underboss from an up-and-coming crime family. As for why they’re split up, my bet is the full price for all the intel is more than a single auction can fetch.”
Vivian worried her silver pendant.
She did that whenever she was deep in thought. Planning an exhibit, strategizing a Settlers of Catan win or figuring out the best route across DC at rush hour.
“Jean-Michel said he was headed there.” She invaded Anjali’s space again. “He’s been trying to crack the Monte Carlo scene for years.”
“Who’s Jean-Michel?” John asked.
Vivian and Anjali exchanged an awkward glance.
“You want to handle that?” Anjali asked.
Vivian cleared her throat. “He brokers lots of Rocksy sales in Europe.”
“Among other things.” Anjali flicked some switches, then loaded an elegant website. “Is this the Monte Carlo auction?”
Vivian hit keys to magnify the page. “Yes. Shit, they’ve got work from one of my artists. In London he said he’d secured a Rocksy donation and several wet-paint pieces from emerging artists.”
“That’s your territory, isn’t it?” John asked. “Wet-paint work?”
“Yes, and he’d like to take it over.” Vivian twiddled her pendant. “Wet-paint works are ripe for exploitation. My operation leverages that to catch bad actors using art sales to launder dark money. My question is, why didn’t I know my artist had pieces in this auction?”
John scratched the back of his neck. “Am I supposed to answer?”