Storm Rising by Becker Steven

Author:Becker, Steven [Becker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: The White Marlin Press
Published: 2016-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

***

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“I’m not the boy,” a strange voice said.

She closed her eyes and thought for a second as the voice ran through the database in her head. “Storm? Is that you?”

“Yeah. They’ve got Mako.”

She suspected something bad had happened after not hearing from him. “Explain,” she said, and listened carefully as Storm recounted the abduction. She was about to ask how he could let that happen when she realized that if he had interfered, they might both be dead. “You know the Agency’s not paying for this,” she said.

“So I heard, but there won’t be an Agency if we don’t stop them.”

Her email icon popped up with a new message. “Gotta go. Hold on to the phone and I’ll call you back.”

She opened the email screen and saw the address as coming from Lloyd’s of London. Wondering if she had overreacted and it was just an ad, she looked at the message. When she saw the attached picture of Mako dropping from the air-conditioning duct, her heart caught in her throat. Switching off the communications with Cody to run the dive charter had caused her to make a rookie mistake—she had never shut off the security cameras. Hoping this was not as bad as it looked, she scanned the message. There was only a name and phone number that said to call anytime.

It was almost midnight Eastern time, and though it was five a.m. in London, she opened her encrypted voice over Internet program and entered the number. Seconds later it was answered.

“Thank you for calling so quickly,” a woman’s voice said.

Alicia was silent for a moment, and she continued, “My name is Valerie, and I am head of security here at Lloyd’s. It seems that someone reporting to you had an incident here last Saturday.”

The woman knew enough. “Is this line encrypted on your end?” Alicia asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “Your agent took some data off our system.”

There was no point in denying it. “Yes. It is a matter of national security.”

“For us as well. Does your government think we are so greedy that we would help the Iranians?”

“Well, no,” she stuttered. This was way over her pay grade. “We were working on a contract. I do not make the decisions as to what the missions are and why. We only execute them,” Alicia said.

“Maybe we can agree that both our intelligence agencies are not very intelligent,” Valerie said.

Alicia was getting anxious about Mako and had no idea where this was leading. “What can I do for you?”

“Lloyd’s is willing to triple your contract for retrieval of the encryption code.”

Alicia sat up in her chair. This was a lot of money. “Go on.”

“Do you have the data?”

She hesitated. “It was lost in the Thames.”

After a long pregnant pause, the woman continued. “The encryption code on that drive held the key to Nitro Zeus. Have you heard of the operation?”

Before she answered, she opened a secure window and typed in the name. The screen, linked to a back door in the Agency’s database, showed the program.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.