The Beltway Assassin by Richard Fox

Author:Richard Fox [Fox, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triplane Press
Published: 2015-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Irene stirred powdered creamer into her oily coffee and sneered. This was what passed for caffeine in the FBI? Before being recruited into the Caliban Program, her time at the CIA’s cubical farm at Langley had come with a perk of fresh-brewed and moderately palatable coffee—not to mention access to a hot dog vending machine. How anyone could sustain brain function on the slop in her hand was a mystery to Irene.

She glanced at a clock as she went back to her workstation. There was another hour yet before the next brainstorming session on the design of the IED that had blown up McBride on the Beltway. The TEDAC bigwigs had sliced her and a dozen analysts off from the main brain trust to focus on the McBride killing once word of the explosion on the Beltway had reached the FBI. Irene hadn’t complained; it wasn’t like the results of the other investigation were hidden from her.

“What do those grey beards think they’re doing? This is complete crap,” a skinny man in plaid pants and white lab coat said. He gave Irene a once-over as he walked past her.

“How do they expect us to get anywhere if they cut us off from test results?” a second man asked. He had a bald pate and a belly that bespoke of too much time in a chair and easy access to doughnuts. Irene recognized them both from the bombings team and stopped to admire the motivational poster on the wall.

“I mean, if they got the results, give them to us, and we can start building out the guy’s network,” the skinny guy said. He lifted the coffeepot to his nose and smiled.

Irene sipped her lousy coffee and went back to her cubicle. She opened her computer and stuck a tiny thumb drive into a USB port. Her screen flickered, and a plan-text file opened of its own accord. Irene tapped out what she’d overheard and waited. Everything she typed would go straight to Tony through enough encrypted routers and dummy servers the NSA would take weeks to unravel.

A few seconds later, the words “I’m on it” along with a host of smiley faces appeared in the text file. So long as Irene kept the thumb drive in place, Tony had full run of the FBI’s system. Whatever Tony found would go on the thumb drive. He could send text and search commands through his link, but he couldn’t pull out a large file from the system without setting off every alarm the FBI’s IT department had installed.

“Wut R U whering???” popped on the text file. Irene rolled her eyes and minimized the file before someone else saw it, or before she decided Tony needed a good talking to from Carlos once that very large and protective man returned from Europe.

Irene opened up a program for mapping criminal and terrorist networks and pretended to work.

****

Garcia shivered in his seat, one hand cuffed to a ring on a table bolted to the floor. The shakes were part of withdrawal, not from the ambient air temperature.

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