C is for Casus Belli (Part I)
Title: C is for Casus Belli
Author: Hope
Disclaimer: Other than being a fan, I have nothing to do with Numb3rs.
Author’s Notes: It’s finally done. Thank you to my triplets, Magister and Math, for their patience and encouragement while I dragged them through the outline of this piece. Thank you to Jels, for hosting the SAC this year (and not banishing me to Never Never Land because I took so long to finish this story). And thank you to all my readers and reviewers, I hope you enjoy this little casefile.
Oh, and for those of you who might be wondering, Casus Belli is Latin for "a cause for war." (Thank you to Magister, the Latin expert, for the spelling correction!)
*~*~*~*~*
Staring at the barrel of a cocked .9mm Sig-Sauer that was pointed squarely at his forehead, Gary Jones began to reconsider the course of events over the past few months. The first and foremost thought was that he might possibly die in the next few seconds, and that was closely followed by the realization that he had gambled everything he had amassed in his life, and lost it all.
*~*~*~*~*
It started with a simple notification of a bank heist from the LAPD: small-time robbery, two perps armed with handguns (maybe; the initial descriptions sounded more like water pistols), a note to a young teller (cut out and pasted together from the LA Times, of all sources), dye pack in the bag (colored an unsightly radioactive green), and no more than a thousand dollars in cash lost (give or take a few hundred).
After the high-stakes of a serial murderer case, it was a relief to have such a low-key and routine investigation land on his desk. He could almost hear the exhausted jubilation of his team when he announced their latest priority. If they were anything less than the professionals they were, he figured they probably would have erupted into audible cheers of tired relief for an ‘easy’ (aka highly unlikely to land you on the wrong end of a gun) case - Hey, he might have even joined in. But his colleagues were professionals, so there was only the slight relaxation of Megan’s shoulders as she turned towards him, the creak of Colby’s chair as he leaned back, the extra two seconds that David allowed himself to find a pen to take notes with, to tell him that his entire team needed a vacation.
A long vacation.
Preferably without him knowing the details.
He wondered if Robin would be able to request a furlong from work (probably not). He knew that her most recent trial was coming to closing arguments within the week. It was entirely possible that he could get her away from the city, maybe up to the mountains or elsewhere equally remote… He gave himself a firm mental shake.
Vacation requests would have to wait until after the robbery case was solved. The case briefing and task delegation were finished in short order. David and Colby volunteered to liaison with the LAPD again while Megan gave the boys a mock-glare before she assigned herself to review security footage, leaving him just enough time to access and look over recent bank robbery cases to see if there were any similar M.O.s before Colby called in an SOS for a “slightly high-strung bank manager.”
Arriving on the mostly calm scene, Don quickly discovered that “high-strung” was a descriptive understatement on Colby’s part. Perhaps he should have taken a cue about the entire situation when David walked by him, muttering something about patience and saints under his breath, but he didn’t pay much attention. He should have. The bank manager proved to be a primo uomo in-training.
By the time that particular witness interview was wrapped up, he should have known that his day wasn’t going to get any better. So why was he still surprised when the ERT technician handed him a field test that indicated the presence of Semtex on the robbers’ note?
Oh, right. ‘Simple’ case. Easy case.
Not a “There might possibly be a large, unknown quantity of high grade commercial explosives in the hands of people with questionable morals who are highly likely wanting to use it in probably very illegal and destructive ways” kind of case.
He looked at the ERT technician with what he hoped wasn’t too much frustration. The other man grimaced in sympathetic apology. This case briefing to the AD was going to be an absolute picnic.
In Hell.
So much for his vacation…
*~*~*~*~*
“Thanks for calling us in,” his partner told the LAPD detective as they walked through the cacophonic main room, phones ringing and officers talking, and into the back corner of the building, where the interrogation rooms were located. The young man smiled briefly, “Your lab was the one that provided us with results.”
David shrugged, “Still, thanks for keeping us in the loop.”
“Hey, with what your ERT found, we’re happy to work with you guys on this.” Draycott said.
Colby’s polite smile - and then accompanying raised eyebrow in his direction when Draycott wasn’t looking - spoke volumes. He could tell that his partner’s opinion of the LAPD’s motivations for being so cooperative was…less than charitable. If anything went wrong on this case (and it would, as sure as gravity existed on Earth), there would be a lot of finger-pointing and no one wanted to be the one holding the fan when that happened, so to speak. This was ass-covering at its finest. Still, while David couldn’t help but agree with Colby, he also couldn’t fault the detective -there were moments when turf wars didn’t turn into a tug-of-war for jurisdiction so much as it turned into a game of hot-potatoes-pass-the-blame-to-everyone-else-except-you.
“So fingerprints on the note came back to a Frederic Hendricks, also known as “Freddy Teddy” on the street.”
The detective nodded through the one-way glass of the interview room where a muscular man with prison tats running down both arms sat sullenly, pointedly ignoring the two armed guards standing in the corner behind him. Clearly questioning the logic of naming the well-built, two-hundred pound man in the interview room, Colby gave Draycott an incredulous look as he repeated, “Teddy?”
Draycott shrugged, “Rumor has it he’s the kind of teddy that picks you up and breaks you in half.”
“Hence the officers,” he said wryly, wondering how in the world someone like Hendricks, with his rap sheet of assaults, managed to pull off a bank robbery and get his hands on high-grade explosives. Based on his past behavior, Megan had remarked that this man was hired muscles, not the brains of an operation as risky and volatile as a bank robbery, and certainly not dealing with explosives. Looking at him now, David silently agreed with her assessment.
“Hence the officers,” agreed Draycott. “Anyway, he was picked up with two others, Alex Wender and Thomas Phillips. Wender has a rap sheet, pretty much the same as Teddy here. I’m pretty sure Hendricks and Wender aren’t going to talk, but Phillips… Phillips is probably the one who’s going to crack first.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked. The kind of people who would hang around with the likes of hired thugs usually had nerves of steel or lots of brain or more muscle than said thugs; they were the kind of people who could either play dumb like a rock or keep themselves together under interrogation and regurgitate a story without breaking into a sweat.
“Phillips is a kid,” Draycott didn’t look too happy. David figured that the detective was probably new to the badge or new to the area - the man hadn’t quite seemed to grasp the way things worked on the gang-controlled sections of LA. For one thing, even a so-called ‘kid’ could be a seasoned gang member, running drugs, weapons and money through the underbelly of the city. Innocence was difficult to find in those areas and people always knew more than they were willing to say. Street law and justice was often brutal and swift, and far less discriminating between civilian and perpetrator than the police. People were prudently careful about keeping their mouths shut. If Phillips wasn’t a gang member (which given his choice of companions, was about as likely as snow in mid-summer SoCal), then he was still smart enough not to talk.
Colby was staring at David, his expression professionally bland, but David knew what his friend was thinking. He met his partner’s concerned gaze and said, “How about we split up the interviews? My partner and I will take Phillips; you lean on the other two.”
Draycott shrugged, “Fine with me.” He led them back into the corridor and down two doors, gesturing, “Phillips’ in here; I’ll be making friends with Teddy. We’ll compare notes when we’re done?”
He nodded, “Definitely.”
Colby waited until Draycott had wandered back to Hendricks’ interrogation room before looking at him, “You going to be able to handle this?”
“Yeah,” he sighed, “Someone’s got to.”
“I’ll just be in the corner then, being invisible?”
“You could always just go ahead and take Wender.”
“Are you kidding me, man? Wender’s two-twenty, easy. There’s no way I’m going in there without you.” The look in his eyes said what wasn’t being spoken. There’s no way you’re going in there without me.
David repressed a sigh. There were moments when he wished the two of them weren’t such a good team together, moments when he wished Colby would back off and just do what he said. But they were partners who covered each other’s backs, shored up each other’s weakness and built on each other’s strengths. He smiled tightly and asked, “So it’s a no go if I told you to watch from the other side of the mirror?”
“No go.”
This time, David did sigh as he put his hand on the doorknob of the close interrogation room door, “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
~*~*~*~*~
Megan looked up as she heard familiar footsteps moving behind her. She pulled herself out of the flood of paperwork to see Colby and David returning to the bullpen. Taking in their facial expressions - wary with a heavy dose of concern and forced calm while being completely pissed, respectively- she asked sympathetically, “It didn’t go well?”
David picked up a pen from his desk and threw it at his cubicle wall. Colby caught her eye and shook his head. She sighed. It figured that none of the suspects would talk because it was just that kind of case where nothing was going to go right. Megan didn’t want to think about her progress, or more accurately, her lack of progress.
“ERT get anything?” asked David in a level voice. If the death glare he was giving his computer was any indication, his temper was still smoldering. She wondered just how bad the interviews/interrogations went as she shook her head, “Nope.”
Colby looked around their workspace, “Where’s Don?”
“Still briefing Wright,” she responded. The two men winced. Don had gone up to brief the Assistant Director before they had left the building. That was roughly three hours ago, and he still wasn’t done? There were moments when the team knew they owed their boss big time. This was going to be one of them.
“Any luck with tracking the Semtex?”
“Well…” she tried to sound upbeat, but probably failed miserably, “We know its chemical markers and which batch it came out of. Now,” she waved at the piles of invoices, memos and other assorted bits of paperwork, “we have to figure out which shipment it went out in, where it went missing and how much.”
“Joy.”
She agreed with Colby’s statement. David, on the other hand, simply grabbed a box and started going through the papers with a single-mindedness that reminded Megan of a frustrated hound that wanted to bite, and hard. It probably wouldn’t do Don any good to come back and see David quietly seething - time to slip away and plot a little intervention. Colby tilted his head toward the break room slightly as he stood up, caught her eye and said, “I’m going to grab some coffee. David?”
“I’m good,” the other man muttered, flipping a piece of paper with a loud snap. She stood up as well, “Well, I should go and check in with Matt, see if anything’s popped up.”
David nodded, burying his anger in the paperwork in front of him. He didn’t even notice that Megan, instead of taking a right turn toward the elevators, walked with his partner into the break room.
“What happened?” she asked, snagging a bag of popcorn from the drawers and opening it up.
“You know how David’s always touchy about kids in gangs.” Colby rinsed out two coffee mugs in the sink.
“Yeah,” she responded, discarding the plastic wrapping and opening the microwave, “it reminds him of the Bronx and probably a lot of bad memories growing up.” Picking up on the logic behind his statement, she looked at him, “There was a teen involved.”
“Yeah, the LAPD picked up three, and the third one was a kid. Probably fifteen, seventeen. He really got on David’s nerves. We tried to get through to him, get him to talk…” Colby grimaced, “and we, well, David, got the finger instead.”
“Did you get anything out of the kid?” Both Megan and Colby turned to see Don standing in the doorway. He was tired, though the only indication of his fatigue was the slightest slump in his posture as he moved into the room, making a beeline for the coffee pot. “You make this, Granger?”
“No, to both questions,” Colby rubbed the back of his neck, “but Phillips pissed off David pretty good.”
“What did Wright say?” she asked, getting herself a mug of warm water and dunking a tea bag into it.
“Not much,” responded Don, ripping open Splenda packets and dumping them into his coffee, “Apparently D.C. wants to treat this as possible terrorist activity, but they want us to, and I quote, ‘not raise false alarms without good cause.’” He looked at his subordinates’ less-than-enthusiastic expressions and sipped at his drink, grimacing at the bitterness before putting it down, “Yeah, precisely. He wasn’t too thrilled with it either. So unless we can prove for sure there’s a terrorist tie, we’re on our own, and treating it as a robbery case. Are you sure you didn’t make this coffee? This is like battery acid.” He picked out a handful of sweeteners and began adding them to the liquid.
“What kind of robbers need Semtex?” grumbled Colby unhappily, pouring two cups of black sludge. “And no, I just got back from talking with Philips down at LAPD Central Booking.”
“There’s an ex-Marine on the floor,” said Megan, not bothering to hide her amusement as she took out her bag of popcorn from the microwave. She paused and looked at Don, “We’re not calling Charlie in here today, right?”
“What?” Don looked at her, “You think he could help us out with something?”
“No,” she tore open the bag and upended it into a clear glass bowl, “I just wanted to be sure that I can eat my lunch.”
“Not interested in contributing to the advancement of science?” joked Colby, adding cream, milk, and a lot of sugar to David’s cup. His partner didn’t usually drink caffeine, but he figured that David could use the liquid hint to calm down and sweeten up a little. Megan glared at him, “I am more interested when I’m not hungry.”
“Okay, break it up,” said Don, trying not to let his amusement show, “Megan, how is it going on tracking down the shipment?”
She sighed as the trio exited the break room, “Not well.”
“Well, maybe think about calling Charlie and seeing if he could help us out with that, all right?” Don ignored the exasperated mock glare she sent his way before she left the two men to their own devices, heading off to see Matt Li in Evidence.
~*~*~*~*~
“Lieutenant,” he said as they approached the taped-off area. The taciturn man nodded sharply in greeting, “Granger, Sinclair. Good to see you again.”
“You too,” responded David, ducking under the yellow plastic tape to join them on the other side.
“So what brings us here?” he asked, patting his jean pocket absentmindedly to make sure he had a pair of clean plastic gloves with him. “You were kind of vague about why you wanted us here.”
Walker began walking them toward the abandoned warehouse in a decrepit section of LA’s industrial area, “Yeah, there’s a story about that. Dispatch received a call this morning made by a young man, name of Thomas Phillips,” Colby slid a look at his partner whose shoulders were tense with frustration and worry. It was a reaction that didn’t go unnoticed by Walker, who added, “He’s alive. He and his sister want to speak to you later.” He gestured toward the floor of activity, “Do you want to take a look for yourselves?”
“Sure,” said David, pulling on a pair of plastic gloves. Colby left his pair in his pocket, “So how did this land in your court, Lieutenant?”
“Well, there’s been an increase in gang activity in this area lately, so the first uniforms on scene recognized the prison tats on one of the bodies.”
“Bodies?” his partner asked.
“Two men, roughly in their early to mid-thirties, bound and shot execution-style.”
“That’s a lot of blood for a simple shooting,” remarked he calmly, ignoring the way his stomach still twisted at the sight. There were just some things that would always bother him at a basic level, no matter how many crime scenes he visited-too much blood was one of them. He saw just the slightest hint of a flinch in the LAPD veteran’s expression as the other man replied, “That was after they were tortured. It’s not pretty.”
“Oh,” he sighed. Walker picked up on his narrative again, “We got called out, almost shot Mr. and Ms. Phillips, took them into custody and ran their names through the computer.” The older man shrugged, “When he came up flagged for possible involvement in a robbery, we called you.”
“Thanks,” mumbled David, bending his knees and lifting the formerly pristine white sheet. Walker turned to him, “So tell me Granger, what’s gotten the FBI so interested in a robbery?”
He arched an eyebrow in mock astonishment, “Why, bank robberies are well within our jurisdiction.” Walker gave him a clearly un-amused look in response. “It’s complicated.”
David stood up, stripping off his gloves with quiet snaps of latex, and pronounced wearily, “It’s Wender and Hendricks.”
He stared at his partner, a sinking feeling in his gut, “You sure?”
“They’re a mess, but I’m pretty sure.”
Colby swore quietly under his breath. Walker looked between the two FBI agents and folded his arms, a demand for an explanation evident in his grim expression. The partners exchanged looks before David nodded, “Lieutenant, I think we’re going to be taking your two witnesses into protective custody, and you’d better come with us back to the office.”
“I’ll call Draycott,” sighed Colby, fishing out his cell phone. “See if he knows anything that could help us.”
~*~*~*~*~
“Here,” said Megan gently, handing the steaming cup of coffee to the young woman sitting at the conference room table.
“Thanks,” mumbled Sabrina Philips quietly, her hands still trembling from the adrenaline rush of hours before. Oblivious of the coffee’s bitter taste, she nursed the cup for several minutes. Megan sat down next to the younger woman and waited. This wasn’t quite an interrogation, but it wasn’t an interview either.
“So do you want to start from the beginning?” she prompted gently, and received a sullen look in response. Sabrina jerked her head toward the bullpen, “I already told one of your friends out there what happened.”
Megan hung onto her patience, “I know, but you told him about what you saw. I was wondering how you ended up in that warehouse in the first place.”
“There’s nothing to say,” was the dismissive reply. The profiler decided to take a different track, “How old are you? Sixteen, seventeen?”
“Eighteen,” she snapped.
“Eighteen, and your parents nowhere in sight.”
“That’s none of your business, and why do you care?”
“I was just wondering,” said Megan soothingly.
“Like you’re wondering about my rap sheet?”
“Fifteen is a little young to have solicitation charges.”
“Solicitation charges,” mocked Sabrina, “Look at all the fancy legal speak. Lady, why don’t you just drop the nice-act and admit you’re dying of curiosity about why I turn tricks.”
“Lack of parental figures, your brother involved in a gang-”
“Tommy ain’t involved in the gang!” Sabrina glared, fury smoldering in her eyes, “He isn’t involved in anything serious. That was the deal!”
“The deal?”
Megan could almost see the defensive walls slamming back up in the young woman’s mind. She could also sense Sabrina’s wavering, so she pressed, “What deal?”
Sabrina clenched her jaw and looked away in silence. Megan waited, until Sabrina said reluctantly, “I made a deal with Jones. I’d work for him, and he’d leave Tommy alone.”
“Who else would he leave alone?”
Megan could almost hear the other woman’s teeth grinding from where she was sitting. She spat, “My parents.” What went unspoken (and it didn’t need to be said aloud) was that both her parents were probably druggies, deep in debt to her pimp.
“Where are they now?”
Sabrina gave her a baleful look, “Mom’s somewhere; Dad’s in jail…does it matter?” Megan wanted to say that it did, but that was far more likely to provoke Sabrina into silence than be productive. “So you worked for him, and in exchange, he’d leave the rest of your family alone?”
“Yeah.” Sabrina wrung her hands in an unconscious gesture of frustration, “I told Tommy that I was fine, that he should concentrate on school, that Jones took good care of me. But Tommy got worried, so he started hanging around; tried to make sure I was all right…”
“And then he met Teddy.”
The younger woman looked back at Megan, fiercely correcting her, “No, Teddy met him, and told him that if he got involved, I wouldn’t get hurt.”
“So Teddy was running this?”
Sabrina scoffed derisively, “Teddy wouldn’t know a brick if he saw one. No,” she licked her lips, “Gary Jones, that’s his name. He thinks he’s some bigshot hacker.”
“He’s not?”
“No, he is, but he’s stupid-smart. He can hack stuff, but he doesn’t have the brains to password protect his own laptop.”
“I see…” Megan nodded, sensing there was something else that Sabrina wasn’t saying, but decided not to press. “So this Gary Jones makes a deal with your brother to protect you, in exchange for…”
“We might not be as smart as some people, but we ain’t dumb either. He tried to make sure the two of us didn’t talk to each other, but we figured it out. That’s why we were at the warehouse this morning. We…” Sabrina’s eyes slid away and she stopped.
Megan sensed the brick wall the young woman hit in her mind. She didn’t want to talk about what happened in the warehouse; she didn’t want to make it any more real than it already was to her. Megan could understand that, the detached shock, the way the mind disassociated itself during traumatic events as a measure of psychological protection.
“Thank you for telling me this.” Megan glanced out of the glass door, and caught Colby’s eye. He shook his head and she turned to look at Sabrina again, “Stay here, okay? When your brother’s done, we’ll bring him to you. If you need anything, Agent Bridwell is right outside the door.”
Sabrina nodded sharply, “What’s going to happen to us?”
“Well,” Megan looked at the young woman squarely, “We’re probably going to put you in protective custody until we catch him. We aren’t going to risk your lives.”
“But we stay together, right?” There was a strong undercurrent of tension and anxiety in Sabrina’s voice. Three years on the street as a hooker had hardened her in some ways, but in so many others she was still just a kid, just trying to keep her family together, just trying to build a stable future for herself, and a better one for her little brother. Megan nodded, “Yeah, I think so.”
“Tommy didn’t do anything wrong,” she repeated firmly, trying to stare Megan down. The agent soothed, “I know. I know.”
She stood up to go as Sabrina put out a hand and grabbed her forearm, “Wait.” There was an uncomfortable moment when Megan thought the girl was trying to undress herself, but then she saw the little USB drive in Sabrina’s hand. The young woman handed it to Megan, “Jones tried to play me and Tommy for fools. I’d rather he gets arrested quick so Tommy can get back to his life.”
“And you?” asked Megan quietly, holding the USB drive in her hand. Sabrina shrugged resignedly, “I’m a drop-out, what can I do?”
Megan almost opened her mouth to disagree, but bit her lower lip instead. This wasn’t the time to try to change a young woman’s mind about her future. That talk could be for later, after she was sure that Sabrina still had a future.
“Thank you,” she said again. Sabrina scoffed, “I’m just watching my back, Lady.”
Just before Megan stepped out of the room, Sabrina added, “And could I have a Coke?” She tilted her paper cup with a look of disdain, “This tastes like acid.”
~*~*~*~*~
Early on in his career, Don discovered that migraines always started at the most inconvenient times or wherever there weren’t any strong painkillers available. The little, white, empty container in his hand was mocking him. He took comfort that at least the investigation was moving along quickly, if the rate Megan and David were rapidly swapping information was any standard to judge by. It was making his head spin, in unfortunately less than metaphorical and more literal ways.
“Hold up, you two,” he sighed, “Let’s start at the very beginning…What do we know for sure?”
“All right, Gary Jones is a black hat hacker,” began David, sitting back in his chair. “He’s bragged about hacking into a lot of government and corporate websites and databases. There’s no solid proof to backup his claims. He does, however, seem to be very skilled at making electronic forgeries-mimicking official statements, ships manifest, warehouse inventories, accounting sheets. It might explain why he seems to have a very close relationship with the gangs that run in this area, as well as some shady business owners.”
Megan fiddled with a pen in her hands before she picked up the narrative, “Mr. and Mrs. Phillips both have long rap sheets, mainly possession and use of meth and cocaine, with a couple of intent to distribute scattered in there. According to their son and daughter’s stories, the family was deep in debt to Jones, and he was pretty angry about it. He approached Sabrina and said that if she was willing to work for him as a prostitute, he was willing to forgive the debt and leave her brother alone.”
“Apparently, Jones did the same thing to Thomas,” cut in David. “First it was that if Thomas did a little dealing here and there, then Jones would leave his sister alone. Then Jones told him that if he didn’t help out in the drug-running operations, he’d make Sabrina’s life very hard.”
Megan’s expression hardened and Don made the mental note to keep a close eye on her when the raid went down. He didn’t want her alone with Jones, not even for a second. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her (he did), but he didn’t want to dangle temptation in front of her either. At the way this story was unraveling, he was hard-pressed not to contemplate ‘accidentally’ shooting Jones himself if the man resisted arrest.
“So let me get this straight,” his head was really beginning to pound as he set the Excedrin bottle back on his desk, “The bank robbery was a complete mistake.”
David nodded, “According to Thomas, Jones has been short on cash recently, so Wender and Hendricks decided to ‘help out’ by robbing a bank.”
“And Jones got angry and shot them both?”
“Apparently, he made them an example first, if Cla-the M.E.’s report is anything to go by, to discourage anyone else getting ideas. Thomas said that he’s been on edge for the past couple of months, working on a big project. It’s supposed to be ‘big,’ which he said was either Jones bragging or being dead serious.”
“Before she met up with her brother in the warehouse, Sabrina copied stuff off of his hard drive,” added Megan. He nodded, “And Matt’s got it now?”
“Yeah, and Charlie too,” she responded. “Some of it’s encrypted. Colby’s over at CalSci to pick up the info now.”
“Okay, so this ‘big’ project: do we know what it is?”
“Well, neither of them have any idea what Jones would be doing with Semtex. Thomas flatly denies even seeing the stuff, even though his fingerprints are on the robbery note Wender handed to the tellers. On the other hand, his hands have absolutely no chemical traces of it.”
“So he’s probably telling the truth?”
“Yeah…”
“That still brings us leaves us with the question of what the big project is, and what, if anything, the Semtex has got to do with it.”
“Maybe it’s just that,” suggested Megan. “The big project is this shipment of Semtex to someone who shouldn’t have it. I mean, this is a highly-controlled substance that’s only sold to licensed companies who keep it under lock and key. It would have been immensely difficult to divert a shipment without anyone noticing, and I mean, that could explain why we haven’t found anything missing from the invoices. It’s just simply not there.”
“Okay, let’s say that it is,” he was willing to play with that theory. “So the Semtex is here in L.A., or at least the paper Wender and Hendricks used was from the same place it was stored. What are the chances that it’s already changed hands?”
Megan and David looked at each other for a long moment before David said, “Thomas thinks the handover hasn’t happened yet.”
“Megan?”
She tilted her head slightly, “Well, Jones killed Wender and Hendricks as an example, a way to assert his dominance over the people who work for him. It was overkill, his way of compensating for the lack of control he feels in the situation. I’d say that the Semtex is either still with him or not in the city, not yet. He’s panicking, and he wouldn’t do that unless the deal isn’t closed.”
He sighed, running a hand over his face and thinking furiously, “Do you think we’ve got enough for me to go to Wright and Washington?”
“And sound a terror alert?” Megan nodded, “Yeah. Semtex is used in demolitions. It has no other usage other than bringing buildings down.”
“We’ve got bigger problems than that,” said Colby grimly, walking into the bullpen.
“What do you mean?” he swirled around his chair to see the younger man’s expression. His brother’s voice said, “We think he’s got access into the DOJ.” Charlie’s concern-over Colby, over the situation - was clear when he stepped out from behind the older man’s back.
“Access? Like he hacked into the DOJ?” asked Megan.
“No,” answered Colby, “like someone in the DOJ leaked information to him.”
~*~*~*~*~
It took several hours before the uproar calmed down into a controlled frenzy of activity. While Don was ‘assisting’ Wright in a secure teleconference call with Counterintelligence and D.C. headquarters, Charlie had bundled Amita and Oswald into a conference room and set up shop with Matt Li, the four computer geniuses working away at deciphering precisely what information Jones had gotten his hands on, who he got it from and/or how he got it, how that information was being used, and generally how bad the entire situation was. Megan began making calls to the LAPD and the Port Authorities, giving them the heads-up on a possible shipment of Semtex running loose in the city, before moving on to knocking on the doors of their sister agencies - NSA, ATF, DEA, and so on - for information. Other than compiling a list of possible target sites (unfortunately, long, very long) and a very short list of possible uses for plastic explosives (none of them nondestructive), David had the unenviable task of keeping an eye on his partner, just in case. They (in other words, everyone) silently conspired to make sure that beyond making a few phone calls to old contacts from before, Colby was stuck with the task of trying to figure out where the explosives were being stored.
Being essentially coddled by his team wasn’t making Colby very happy. There a subtle tension to his shoulders, and he was ignoring David’s presence. Not that there was much conversation going on between the two men, but he was being entirely too focused on his computer screen for it to be normal. Despite everything-the Chinese, Dwayne Carter, the commendation - David could tell that his partner still struggled to understand the reasons why a person would sell out his country or break her oath. It just simply didn’t calculate for a person who was raised to believe in and live out honor and loyalty, duty and sacrifice. It also was just simply unfair that he seemed to attract all the cases that involved espionage and turncoats.
“Agent Sinclair, Granger,” Bridwell’s voice called David out of his working trace and he looked up from his computer, “Agent Li wants to see you in the conference room. Apparently, something’s cracked in the algorithm.” There was just the faintest hint of confusion in the other agent’s last word.
David nodded, as if the news was something he heard every day (which, if he thought about the number of cases Charlie had consulted on over the past four years, was true to a large extent). Saving his work, he glanced to see if he needed to drag his partner with him to see the latest development. He wasn’t embarrassed to admit that a part of him sighed with relief to see Colby finishing up his current task.
“Thanks,” he told Bridwell who nodded once and vanished back into the maze of cubicles in the war room. The partners didn’t say anything of importance to each other as they wove their way in and out of the office space and other agents to arrive at the conference room where the computer geeks had holed themselves up.
The two of them walked into the middle of a conversation between an exhausted boss and a caffeinated mathematician. While David chose a seat close to Don who looked like he was fighting against the onset of a migraine (and losing), his partner lurked toward the back of the room. Megan was oddly absent from the meeting, though her laptop was sitting on one of the desks, the bland FBI screensaver indicating that she was logged onto the servers.
“Charlie,” Don sighed, “those are highly classified documents that-”
“Yes, they are, but I don’t think we have a mole here,” said Charlie, gesturing at the projection screen. From his seat in the back of the room, Colby said dryly, “We have several?”
“No, actually,” responded Matt, leaning back in his chair, “we think there’s no leak from the DOJ at all. Their security firewalls need a lot more work, but it doesn’t look like anyone was actively and purposefully passing on information.”
The glass door squeaked as Megan walked in, purse slung over her shoulder, her hands occupied with holding several take-out boxes stacked on top of each other. She smoothly began handing people various boxes, distributing lunch with a quiet efficiency.
“As far as we can tell, these are confidential emails that were intercepted and copied,” continued Amita. “What we think Jones did was hack the firewall and set up a program that would scan the internal email system.”
“Whenever an email was sent, the program would scan it, and if it matched Jones’ search parameters, it would automatically send a BCC to him.”
“Okay, wouldn’t the DOJ have noticed this?” asked Megan, handing Don an unopened can of soda and a small bottle of Excedrin Migraine. Charlie smiled, “Ah, yes, they would have… if the emails were being sent to an out-of-system inbox, but they weren’t. Not entirely.”
“What he did was pretty smart,” explained Amita, entering in a few commands and pulling up the group’s work on the projector screen, “First he set up a dummy inbox within the email system, and rigged it so that it looked like it had all the security measures that all the other inboxes had. Then he made it possible to access the inbox from an unsecured computer, tying it to only one IP code.”
“IP code… you mean, he didn’t cover his tracks?” asked Colby, a hint of surprise in his voice. “So we can track him?”
“Well, he tried, but he didn’t do a great job of it.” Oswald smirked, “It’s kind of like following a float at the Rose Bowl Parade. Once you know what the float looks like, you can follow it the whole way.”
“Yes,” responded Matt, a bit more directly to his colleague’s question, “but it has to be in real time. He’d have to be online, doing something for us to trace it back to his location.”
“All right, can you get started on that?”
“Already done,” grinned Oswald. “We’ve got the program loaded up.” He reached over to Amita’s laptop and hit a key. A long strand of computer code popped up on-screen before an e-mail inbox bearing the seal of the Department of Justice appeared.
“Whoa!” Don snapped to attention, almost dropping his soda. “Charlie, what did you guys do?!”
Oswald held up his hands, “It’s cool, seriously. We just duplicated-”
“Don’t worry,” Charlie put up a calming hand, “we asked permission first. They know about what we’re doing.”
Taking the unspoken cue to continue, his protégé shrugged at the interruption, “We duplicated their system, and dumped his program into our mainframe.”
“He won’t have access to the FBI database,” reassured Matt quickly. “We’ve got him isolated in a secure dummy network. Any information he might get his hands on won’t cause any sort of damage. Or more damage than he’s already done,” amended the technician.
“Now, we’re going to bait him with this email.” Amita typed out a generic reply to what David assumed was either an email with misleading information attached or an older version of an important email. “Then all we have to do is wait for him to check his inbox.”
“Once he does that,” grinned Oswald, “his goose is smoked.”
“So what is Jones after?” asked David, joining the conversation for the first time. Matt snagged his laptop and hijacked the projector screen, “He’s been gathering information on something called Operation Pendragon. It’s a conference of some sort?”
“Wright mentioned something about that,” Don sighed, closing his eyes briefly. “There’ve been security concerns for a long about it, but it’s not our priority. Counterterrorism has its eye on a few suspects that they want to move in on, but they don’t really have any solid evidence to get a warrant. If we can bring Jones in and get information…”
“So are we merging our investigations or are they going to get credit?” asked Colby. Their boss and friend shrugged, “At the moment, we’re still treating it as two separate cases until we can get our hands on solid evidence that links the two without a doubt.”
“Our program can do-” began Charlie, but Amita laid a quieting hand on his arm and Matt quickly interrupted, “Actually, if nobody minds, could we break for lunch?”
That welcome suggestion was met with murmurs of agreement. David turned around and cleared the nearest table of papers and computers. Chairs scraped over the linoleum as they all rearranged themselves around the table. Soon the appetizing smell of Italian pasta and freshly-baked bread filled the room. For the next few minutes, the team was too occupied by eating to talk too much beyond asking for a napkin or the plastic bread knife. Conversation, when it started up, was pointedly light, and mainly cared on by the academics in the group.
“Oh,” Megan pointed her fork at the mathematicians during a lull in the discussion, “Larry called and said that he’s still waiting for your calculations.”
Charlie immediately looked guilty, “I think I left it at the house…”
“Oh, that’s fine. He said that he’s going to drop by later, if you’ve got them ready.”
“Sure,” said Amita, giving Charlie a look that forbade him from disagreeing with her, “and I’ve got my computer with me, so I can go over our current Higgs-Boson data when he’s got time.”
Megan nodded absentmindedly, “All right.”
Her male colleagues exchanged looks at the conversation, but mutually decided in silence to say nothing. Teasing her about her relationship with Larry wasn’t worth the pain later when she wiped the floor with them in the gym.
“So…” asked David awkwardly, “anyone see the Dodgers game last night?”
At the stares he garnered (because all of them had gone home long after the game had ended the night before), he said defensively, “Some of us have DVRs!”
*~*~*~*~*
Jimmy, or Slick Jim as he was known on the street, was in a spot of trouble.
All right, several spots of trouble.
It wasn’t his fault that a few months ago, he’d broken into some hotshot’s warehouse (you’d think that someone rich enough to have that many expensive computers would be rich enough to rent one of those nice buildings downtown and hire a security guard too, but no!) and gotten caught by the muscle. He didn’t think people could be that big. Those gangsters were freakin’ huge! And they were totally set to break his kneecaps before they snapped his neck when their boss just stepped in and said that he “could be useful.”
At that point, Jimmy was far more interested in staying in one piece and alive to care about what the pudgy geek had to say about him being ‘useful.’ So he agreed eagerly to anything the man, Jones, had said. For the past few weeks, it had been a few simple jobs: slip in and out of a few houses, deliver a few messages here and there, nothing serious. It was a bit unnerving having someone else calling the shots, but Jimmy decided it wasn’t that bad. After all, as long as he was ‘useful,’ the longer he wasn’t mashed into a bloody pulp with a broken neck or a bullet hole in his head. Plus, all of the things he had to do weren’t risky enough to get him snatched by the cops. Things were going well, for being in a tight spot.
But then two days ago, Big Muscles hauled him into an empty warehouse and Jimmy was totally convinced that he was going to die. Turned out that he was half right; he didn’t die but two other dudes did and the way they… Just thinking about it made him want to puke because, seriously, he didn’t sign up to work for a homicidal manic. Now everyone, including Big Muscles, was pretty much terrified of Jones because that man was serious whacked out.
Slim Jim’s hands were slippery with sweat as he tried to pop the window catch. The longer he was out here, the more likely some busybody neighbor would see him, call the police and then he’d be totally screwed because they’d find the gun (not good! Totally not good! He was a burglar! Not some glorified thug who robbed people with guns. Guns were not good news. Ever.) tucked in the back of his pants (because seriously, it wasn’t his idea to have a gun. He was a burglar, as in, does not carry gun. Not some hitman.) and then they’d throw his scrawny ass in jail and then he’d be completely shanked and dead before the end of the day. The window popped open and he nearly crumbled with relief before he started pushing the window up.
It jammed before it was even halfway open. Pounding on it a few times didn’t make it open up any wider. He eyed the gap and figured that he could slip through it. After all, he wasn’t called Slim Jim for nothing. Tucking in his stomach and holding his breath, he started climbing through the narrow crevice.
Just as he thought he’d made it through, he found himself crammed uncomfortably in the window still, half in and half out of the house. Wiggling just seemed to make the problem worse. Tugging and pushing against the inner wall must have worked because one moment he was stuck and the next he was jammed into the narrow fissure between the back of the couch and the wall of the room.
Jimmy picked himself up and took a step, only to fall flat on his face, almost bashing his head through the coffee table in the small living room. Muttering vicious curses under his breath, he untangled his feet from the thin straps of a lacy bra before pulling himself up again and taking the gun out from his waistband. His hand shook, but it wasn’t like he had a choice about anything, from the gun to the target to the entire situation, not if he didn’t want to end up dead, and Jimmy liked being able to breathe, thank you very much.
Jones was very clear in his instructions: A professor lived in this house with his old Pops. The prof was a genius who worked for the cops. He was a possible problem that had to be taken care of and Jimmy was the lucky SOB who got to do it. The gun was to give the prof a bit of a hint about shutting up. If the prof couldn’t be frightened into shutting up, then Jimmy had to shut him up.
Permanently.
*~*~*~*~*
Part II