Passenger 19

TWENTY-TWO

Sorensen drove back into work early that evening, passing through security after most of the day shift had gone home. The George Bush Center for Intelligence is necessarily a 24/7/365 operation, yet the vast majority of the workforce keep office hours as regular as any accountant or banker. That being the case, the halls were quiet, and there was no one else working in her section. It probably didn’t matter.

On face value her inquiries were harmless. She needed only to identify a twenty-year-old girl who’d recently traveled to Colombia, which by itself put high odds on one of two scenarios — Kristin Stewart was either a college student on a semester abroad, or a young woman on a church mission trip. Sorensen figured she’d be able to write the girl’s life story by eight that night, leaving time for a glass of Malbec before bed. The passport number was key. It would link a photograph and address to her subject, and from there the CIA’s primary database would thread together driver’s license information, school transcripts, and any recorded arrests. If necessary, Sorensen could go all the way back to a twenty-year-old birth certificate complete with tiny footprints.

She sat down at her desk, logged into the system, and had the research database active in less than a minute. The main page was essentially a questionnaire asking for all existing information on the unknown subject, including a facial photograph that could be uploaded and matched using disturbingly accurate recognition software. Sorensen entered what she had — full name, passport number, and birth date for Kristin Stewart — and then hit the send button. The computer hesitated longer than usual as it digested her request. The response that finally flashed to her screen was one she had never seen before. Indeed, one she didn’t even know existed: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS.

“What the hell?” she muttered.

She considered a second try, but hesitated over the input page where the fields had gone blank. Sorensen suspected a second request would end no differently. She’d seen the primary server go down before, and had more than once sent invalid requests upstream. That wasn’t what she was looking at. Unauthorized Access. She had used this system to research terrorists, Wall Street financiers, foreign heads of state, and at least one philandering United States ambassador. Never had she simply been denied.

Sorensen pushed away from her desk and considered her options. During regular business hours she might have been tempted to call Melanie Brown, her Secret Service friend in Chicago. Melanie had already gone out on a limb for her once, however, and the name Kristin Stewart had obviously raised a flag. Sorensen was sure her denial of access had been logged and reported, and tomorrow would likely appear in a morning brief. But in which nearby office? Homeland Security? The Department of State? Internally within the CIA? It was bad enough she’d been locked out — but had she also unsuspectingly hit a tripwire?

Sorensen shut down her computer and minutes later was in her car. She cut through the nearly empty parking lot at an angle, and was almost to the front gate when her cell phone rang. She looked at the number and didn’t recognize it. She sat through five rings, shrill and loud, before slowing down and taking the call.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Miss Sorensen. I need to meet with you about your very recent request for information.”

Sorensen steered to the curb at the edge of the parking area, coming to a stop at a diagonal against rows of empty white lines, her Ford Focus highlighted by a tall bank of sodium lights. She cautiously put the car in park before speaking. “Who is this?”

“That will become clear. We need to meet. Please be at Volta Park at eight thirty. It’s near Georgetown University.”

Sorensen looked at her watch. Half an hour. Her mind raced. “No. Nine thirty at the western path to the Washington Monument.”

“Miss Sorensen—”

She ended the call and turned off her phone. Whoever it was, if they wanted to see her, they’d do it on her terms. It gave her a degree of control. It also gave her ninety minutes to figure out what the hell she was getting into.

From the bar Davis ran across the street, but nearing the parking lot he slowed. He saw a staff car like the one Marquez had been using, a small crowd gathered around it. Policemen were shoehorning in for a look, but nobody seemed in a hurry.

Davis recognized Rafael, the young man who’d helped him with the video two nights earlier. “What happened?” he asked.

“Colonel Marquez has been shot.”

“Is he alive?”

A solemn look foreshadowed Rafael’s answer. “I do not think so.”

More police pulled into the parking lot, and when another pair of officers cut through the crowd, Davis fell in behind them. The staff car came into view, and he saw Marquez framed in the driver’s-side window, just above the vulture coat-of-arms. The colonel was sprawled back in his seat, a massive splotch of blood centered on his chest and one ear resting on his shoulder. He was definitely not alive.

Being the tallest bystander, Davis looked over a sea of heads and across the parking lot. It looked no different than it had thirty minutes ago, when he and Delacorte had walked to the bar. The only changes: five police cars and a dead colonel. Davis found himself revisiting his earlier thought. A man living on borrowed time.

He backed away and said in a loud voice, “Did anyone see who did this?”

There were at least twenty people surrounding the car. Not one gave a reply. He spotted Rafael again, and asked, “What happened?”

“No one saw it. We were all inside.”

“Did you hear gunshots?”

“No, there was nothing.”

An ambulance arrived, and a pair of paramedics hustled to the car. With one look their sense of urgency abated. Soon one of the policemen began asking questions in Spanish. The second person he spoke with, an Air Force corporal Davis had seen regularly in the office, pointed a finger straight at him.

Davis stood his ground on the perimeter, making the cop come to him. He wasn’t surprised at all when the man grabbed his elbow and said in English, “You come with me, señor.” Davis stared briefly at the cop, then at his accuser.

He was escorted to a quiet room in El Centro and told not to leave. Davis tried to tell the policeman he had better things to do, that he was investigating the crash of an airliner.

The door shut decisively in his face.

Sorensen had some years ago begun an MBA at George Washington University. She’d seen it as a career-broadening move, one of the square-fillers expected of those seeking advancement within the Company. With no small degree of irony, her good intentions were undermined when a foreign posting intervened. In a recurring theme, and one that extended beyond her professional life, she withdrew from the program after only two months. Yet even if she’d earned no credits, Sorensen had learned valuable lessons. Among them — the Eckles Library was open to the public, kept late hours, and offered computer access on the second floor.

She researched Kristin Marie Stewart strictly from public sources, and after approaching the problem from a number of angles, Sorensen narrowed her hunt to two possible suspects. One was a twenty year old who lived in Mesa, Arizona, a girl who had one arrest for possession of marijuana — less than six ounces — and was documented photographically as having participated in at least three swimsuit competitions at various spring break hotspots. She was a bottle blond who’d apparently undertaken her first boob job at a tender young age, and who looked smashing in a polka-dot two-piece with a T-back bottom.

The other prospect was also twenty years old, but cut from a very different bolt of cloth. This Kristin Stewart had graduated from her Raleigh, North Carolina, high school near the top of her class. She’d been active in a variety of extracurricular activities, including Spanish Club and lacrosse, and received a scholarship from the local Elks Lodge which, according to the blurb beneath a photograph, would advance her pursuit of a degree in soil science at the University of Virginia. She had dark, shoulder-length hair, and exhibited the buoyant smile of a young girl ready to take the world by storm. Also labeled in the Elks Lodge picture was her mother, Jean Stewart, presumably of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Sorensen was certain she’d found her girl.

She checked the time and saw she had twenty-five minutes until her rendezvous at the Washington Monument. With whom, Sorensen had no idea, but she wasn’t particularly worried. The meeting had all the hallmarks of an inter-service turf war. Jammer had inadvertently crashed someone’s delicate clandestine op, and now her parallel inquiries had trampled further onto the hallowed ground of some shadowy agency, likely a three-letter acronym she’d dealt with before. All the same, for a face-to-face meeting Sorensen thought it wise to keep things in plain view. She doubted she was in professional hot water. Not yet, anyway. If that were the case, the meeting would not have been arranged by an anonymous phone call. It would have convened in a Langley conference room by directive, a boulder rolling down the hill that was her lawful chain of command. No, she decided — this meeting under the stars was not on the record.

Sorensen nearly got up from the computer when a last contingency entered her mind. Whoever she was about to meet would likely try to intimidate her, and in the worst case she would get a phone call from her supervisor telling her to back off. If that happened, she would comply, at least on appearances. But she wasn’t going to give up. Not as long as Jen was missing.

It took four minutes more on the computer to find what she needed. She scribbled down an address and stuffed it in her purse.