Chapter 16
The Revere Pub wasn’t nearly as impressive as the man it was named after. Located in a rundown section of the District, it still smelled of the decades of cigarettes that had been smoked in its dark corners and booths before that became illegal.
Brian Steele entered and automatically scanned the room just as the Bureau had trained him to. He noticed several people, but the one he was looking for was in the far back corner of the biggest seating area, watching him with equally sharp eyes. No one else sat anywhere near that table.
Darby Bradford didn’t look like a world-class operative, but that’s maybe a big part of why he was one.
He was a bit under average height for an American and at first glance, you might call him skinny.
He wore loose-fitting clothes, so it was only if you caught a glimpse of his forearms that you might realize he was more whipcord than skin and bones.
Brown hair and brown eyes and a skin tone that, depending on the light, presented as olive or sometimes cafe au lait.
In short, he could be from any number of different countries, and you could pass by a dozen people that looked just like him almost anywhere in the world. He was actually from Brooklyn.
“Ironman, what the hell have you gotten into?” he greeted Brian.
“I’m hoping you can tell me,” Brian said, sliding into the seat across from Darby.
“I get back to civilization and find a message from you while my phone is blowing up from half the US intelligence apparatus. The spook grapevine is going on about some new threats, a mysterious asset, and the Triple Threat Taskforce, and do I know anything. Then you ask about a deceased top-level operative and, worse, his daughter. I’ve had several calls from Fort Benning.
Dude, tell me you didn’t arrest a certain teenage girl? ”
“I didn’t arrest any teenaged girls. I do have one in protective custody.”
“Oh man. I shouldn’t even be sitting here.”
“Why? I mean, she’s shockingly smart and she seemed pretty at home in a Blackhawk, but your tweaking seems overdone.”
“First of all, she could pilot that Blackhawk if she wanted to.”
“What?”
“She’s been a regular at Benning her whole life.
I knew Ryan Blake. Worked with him once.
So where do you think her dad took his daughter for vacations?
Disney? No. He went back to his brothers still in uniform.
I heard the story from a dozen guys in the 75th.
They talk about her. Seems she was there for a family day maybe six or seven years ago, and the pilots were showing off their aircraft.
She got to watch one start up his UH-60 and when he was done, he asked all the civvies what some of the steps he had taken were.
She gave him the exact sequence, start to finish.
One of the base officers heard the story and offered her dad to let her in a simulator.
Twelve years old and she ran her first flight perfectly.
Blew the minds of every pilot on base. She probably has twenty hours of simulator time now. ”
“So some of the brass know her?”
“Try all of them. The next year, the 75th’s commanding officer had Ryan up on the sniper spotting deck for the infiltration course, his daughter with him.
The colonel jokingly asked her if she could see any snipers out in the field.
She reeled off all six with exact grid coordinates from the instructor’s course map.
After that, they had her up dozens of times.
She could always spot the snipers, even when the instructors tried it.
From there out, they got serious about testing her.
She took the ASVAB test at fourteen and aced it.
Qualified for eligibility in any job in the military.
JSOC will fast-track her through basic if she so much as blinks in their direction. ”
“She’s tiny. What would they expect of her?”
“Same thing you do… her brains. When her father was brought back in to serve, she spent weeks with him on base. The things they let her try were likely illegal, but when the general in charge of the base is interested, there’s no limit.
They don’t want to send her into combat; they want her to predict combat so they can win it. ”
“Have you met her?” Brian asked.
“I saw her once when she was like fifteen. They were running force-on-force exercises, and they let her sit in the planning phase with one of the two teams. She has her own team name, you know: Hellcat. Apparently, she’s pretty scrappy.
Anyway, she chose the opposing force, likely because the opfor leader was open-minded.
They let her watch their unit’s drone feeds and study the maps.
She identified two weak points in the other side’s defenses and both a clear trap and a follow-on trap which was pretty sophisticated. Opfor decimated the good guys.”
“Why did they leave her to make her own way after her dad died?”
“No idea, but it likely happened fast. Her dad was stable and then suddenly he was gone. If there wasn’t a team nearby to escort her, then she was on her own. Looks like she tripped up if you found her.”
“She made one mistake that happened to occur in Sondra’s hometown. Then she clued us in to the New York attack and its real perpetrators. As for us finding her, we had both outside help and… well… she waited for us to catch up.”
“Shit. Why?”
“She has a mystery she can’t solve on her own.”
“Holy shit. I thought she fucked up, but she might be the perfect operative.”
“She did make a mistake… seems she’s too helpful sometimes.”
“Correctable. So, dude. You realize that there are likely several teams watching your fancy hideout.”
“They would operate on US soil?” Brian asked. “Over an intelligence source?”
“You’re being a little slow. She’s not just a source. The higher-ups in the military think she’s a national security asset. But whoever is watching is just backup. I would expect your director to get some of the same calls I did.”
“William Cramer wants her,” Brian said.
“Ah, of course he does. Got that AI thing he’s schlepping to the powers that be.”
“What do you know about that?”
“Just rumors. It gets real results but it’s glitchy. And there’s whispers that human testing was involved, or worse.”
“Worse?”
“Worse.”
“Alright. Thanks, Darb.”
“I was never here, and you don’t know me,” the other man half joked.
When Steele got back to the Tiki, he went straight to his team’s bullpen. “Where is she?” he asked Red.
“She’s down in the Cold Case Corner, ripping through that serial killer business from the early two thousands. Already found a new line, and the investigator pool is fired up to dig into what she’s seen.”
“And you’re here?”
“I’m digging into Cramer.”
“Be careful. He’s connected.”
“Teach me my trade, oh sensei.”
“Just saying,” Brian said with a grin. Then he wandered over to the corner where cold cases were left out like jigsaw puzzles for anyone with free time or a new insight to work. He found Rose Carmine watching over Cassie as she talked with two agents.
Agent Carmine glanced his way, then handed him a photocopy of a page of notes from a spiral notebook.
The printing was clear and concise, and the information was laid out in one of the most intuitively easy formats he’d ever seen.
In seconds, he was up to speed. Cassie had felt the order of victims was wrong, a feeling every investigator who had looked at the case had felt too.
Six blonde, blue-eyed girls and one brown-eyed brunette who was listed as victim three, found two weeks after victim one.
The brunette’s parents hadn’t reported her missing until a few days before she was found.
Cassie thought number three was number one—a gateway victim, as she put it in her notes.
Then she looked at a file photo of the girl’s bedroom and noticed instantly that there were fade marks on the wall apparently too faint for anyone else to notice.
She concluded that the girl ran away, took a few posters with her, and the parents reshuffled the rest. The reason for both those actions was a high likelihood that the father had abused the girl.
With that reasoning, it seemed equally likely that the brunette knew her killer.
Her body was found in early March, frozen, but the autopsy indicated freezer burns on the skin.
Cassie felt those were more likely due to an actual freezer than weather.
Ergo, look for a frozen food driver whose route started near victim three’s home and followed the course of the other murders.
A name from the original persons of interest came up instantly, a neighbor of victim three.
Two agents from the shared pool were only too happy to jump in on the case.
“Like sharks circling a dolphin,” Carmine said aside to Steele, watching her young charge.
“Dolphins fight back,” he replied. “You’ve had a change of perspective?”
She snorted but didn’t deny it.
Cassie finished talking with the agents and spotted Steele. “Agent Steele,” she greeted him.
“Being useful, are we?”
“Eh, we’ll see. It’s not concrete but it fits the facts, so maybe they can shake it loose.”
“How many FBI cases do you consult on? You speak like an old pro.”
“Hey, I watch as much television as anyone,” she said with a grin. “But I had a thought on that political violence serial killing thing.”
Steele glanced at Carmine, who just raised her own brows as if this was the first she’d heard of it.
“Happened while I was talking with those two,” Cassie said with a nod at the other agents. “This killer followed a pattern that is matched by a delivery driver’s route. I think there might be a similar angle with the political killing case.”
“The case that we barely know we have?” he asked. “The case I sincerely hope is just a figment of your imagination?”
“Yeah. Do I tell you guys or Agent Frayer or what?”
“Well, let’s go see Leah and you can tell all of us.”