Chapter Twenty #2
Hanley said, “Jim Pace, who you all know is at CIA, is looking into these breaches. He got put on the assignment yesterday, and today he already has a target. His orders are to pass what he learns to Angela Lacy, who many of you know. Lacy knows about Ghost Town. She passed the intel to Jill.” Hanley turned to her.
“Gumdrop? Fill them in.”
“Pace says there is a woman at ODNI named Irene Ortega, who he finds suspicious.”
“How so?” Court asked.
“First, she had access to the information about the op in Nicaragua the night before last. But Jim found out that her credentials were used to pull up data on virtually all the affected operations after they happened. He thinks it’s strange that after Nicaragua she accessed information about the breaches across the intel community. ”
Travers cocked his head. “Sounds to me like someone just conducting an investigation on what’s going on.”
“But that’s not her job. She’s a mission integration specialist.”
“The hell is that?” Hightower asked.
Jill said, “It’s her job to evaluate resources to ensure an efficient cross-discipline environment through all the INT regions, specifically when dealing with technological assets.”
“The hell is that?” Hightower asked again in the same tone.
The Asian woman furrowed her eyebrows, looking at the much older man like she couldn’t imagine how he did not understand what she was saying.
But Erin Childers answered for her. “Ortega is midlevel; she is tasked with making sure each intelligence agency has the data they need from the other agencies.” Childers shrugged now. “She shouldn’t be investigating anything.”
Hanley added, “Pace thinks it’s possible Ortega is looking into the past operations to see if she’s successfully covered her tracks. She knows all the agencies are conducting investigations into this, so maybe she wants to know what can be found out in the files.”
Court said, “Meaning…maybe she’s the leaker, and she needs to know how worried she should be about a CIA investigator like Pace identifying her.”
“That’s the concern,” Hanley said.
Jill Mori said, “I’m looking into Ortega in open source. She’s single, and very private. She works at an ODNI office at the State Department in Foggy Bottom, and lives near Washington Circle, a mile or so away.”
“Okay,” Court said. “What’s our mission?”
Gumdrop spoke as if the answer was obvious. “Go up there and find out if she’s the spy.”
Hightower made a face. “Find out?”
“Yeah.”
Hanley started to say something, but Hightower spoke first. “Ma’am, we’re not exactly Starsky and Hutch.”
She looked to Hanley, then back to the assets at the table. “I don’t know what that means.”
Court clarified, “We’re not detectives. We’re not investigators.”
Jill said, “Nobody is asking you to decipher the Rosetta stone.”
To this, Hightower said, “I don’t know what that means.”
Hanley stepped in. “We will support Jim Pace’s operation. Be his eyes and his ears, his black bag team. He’ll do the investigating; you’ll do the grunt work.” He looked to Jill now. “You have to talk to these guys like they’re big dumb idiots. It’s not their fault. They’ve all been blown up a lot.”
Now he turned to Hightower. “Speaking of which. Night Train, you’re not on this op. Go back to Boulder, get your MRI, and get yourself cleared for duty.”
Zack looked to the two other assets with him, then back to Hanley. “That’s not for several days. Let me go on this. I’ll drive the surveillance van or something.”
For the first time, Arnold spoke up. “I put a white GMC van on site already in a parking garage on Maryland Avenue. I have four sets of magnetic decals in the back. Different businesses. Three cases of cams, some disguises, other odds and ends. I have a couple other vans and cars in storage nearby. We can rent other vehicles if we need them.”
“Weapons?” Hightower asked.
“Shouldn’t need them,” Arnold said. “But yes. Pistols will be with your ICE uniforms.”
“ICE?” Travers said with a tone of confusion.
“You have a few covers. All in the van.”
Travers cocked his head. “Wait. You did that all this morning?”
“Loaded the van last night. Dropped it in D.C. this morning.”
“It’s eight thirty in the morning now. That’s two hundred miles away.”
“Early this morning, sir.”
“Right.” Travers was impressed. “Cool.”
Hanley had been mulling over Hightower’s desire to join the team. He said, “Zack. Nothing operational. You promise me that?”
“I promise.”
“All right. Conductor will stay here. The rest of us will fly up to Reagan on the jet now. It’s waiting for us at Hampton Roads.”
Hightower said, “It will be good to see Jim again.”
But to this, Hanley held up a hand. “You’re not going to be interfacing directly with Jim Pace. Watkins’s orders. Pace goes to Lacy, Lacy goes to us, we go to you.”
Court let out a long sigh.
Hanley heard the noise, then looked to Court. “There’s a leak at the CIA. No way Pace is part of it, no way Lacy is part of it, but if you guys are physically interacting with CIA employees, it just puts you at risk. Trust me, Six, we’ll get you the intel you need as fast as we can.”
The meeting broke up after this, and everyone shook hands again.
As the three assets headed out to Hanley’s Suburban for the drive to the airport, Travers shouldered up to Hightower. “You’re seeing a doctor in Colorado?”
“Yeah, man. Best in the country.”
Travers was incredulous. “The best gunshot wound doctor in the country lives in Boulder?”
“Yeah,” Zack answered, but he added nothing more.
Court was walking right behind them, and he picked up on Zack’s sudden discomfort.
Travers, however seemed not to. “Shit. I’d have thought the best doc to treat a gunshot wound would be in Baltimore. Maybe East St. Louis, or Memphis.”
“Nope,” Hightower said, and he climbed in the front passenger seat of the vehicle, leaving Chris and Court to get in behind him.
Court knew exactly why Zack had gone to Colorado.
Something Zack had shared a couple of years back, in a moment of vulnerability, about having a kid in witness protection living there.
Court wasn’t going to bring that up, and he knew Zack didn’t want twenty questions from Travers about why he was being treated in Colorado, so Court started chatting away with Travers as Hanley got behind the wheel of the SUV and they began heading to the airport.