Wild Card by Nick Stevens

Author:Nick Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Stevens

CHAPTER 13

The FBI’s Washington Field Office, or WFO, held none of the majesty of the popular J. Edgar Hoover Building that has graced hundreds of television shows and movies since its commission over forty years ago. Even with its dated and crumbling facade, tourists roamed the halls of the famous building. No tourists lined up for tours of the bland WFO.

Olivia preferred the relative anonymity she gained by working far away from the FBI’s headquarters.

The late hour made parking easy, but the office was never entirely empty or quiet. Agents worked shifts, like any other police department, ensuring at least a few souls haunting desks at all hours of the night, clacking away on keyboards and drinking stale coffee.

Olivia rode the empty elevator from the parking level past the underground floors and into the heart of the WFO. The elevator dinged and Olivia nodded to a friendly face. The woman returned to reading the open file as the doors slid closed.

Olivia cracked her knuckles, an old habit, as the elevator rose, frustrated at her lack of progress investigating Bill Garrett and Red Knight. The pile of evidence she’d collected meant nothing to her boss, Supervisory Special Agent Kelly Loughgren, since everything she’d collected fell outside the Bureau’s jurisdiction.

Loughgren even shut down her request to investigate bribes Red Knight made to officials of foreign governments. Olivia had escalated to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they’d treated her like an overeager intern. The SEC didn’t care about private companies. It particularly didn’t care about private companies with a history of large political donations.

Even Mason Ashford, a man with every reason to want Garrett behind bars, turned her away.

The elevator doors slid open on the fourth floor and Olivia slouched into the hallway. The handful of agents manning their desks looked up and waved in solidarity as she passed.

Frustration over her lack of progress boiled up inside her. Routine sounds were crisp and somehow louder, like the slamming of a filing cabinet or the crunch of dialed phone numbers. The floor, swept and mopped every two days, felt slick and gritty under her shoes.

Dropping her bag on the desk, Olivia logged into her computer and searched through SENTINEL, the FBI’s case-management application. The FBI still relied on paper files for records management and oversight purposes, but every investigation started and ended in its digital case-management system.

Olivia entered each detail of her investigation into Red Knight’s activities into the system, meticulous about dates, names, and places. A keyword search on Garrett displayed every detail she’d logged about him and his business. Another click and the information organized into an interconnected web, linking Garrett’s movements over the globe to people and events.

She filtered and searched the data dozens of different ways, adding the sparse information Mason provided over breakfast. Nothing on Iran, scientists, or nuclear programs turned up on the dusty screen. Hours passed as she tortured the data again and again, each time finding nothing.

As Olivia pushed back from the desk, rolling on the casters of the flimsy office chair, Gerald ambled around the corner.

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