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  Kurt looked up and saw that Brass was staring at the CDs.

  “What’re you copying, Kurt? You afraid the system is going to eat your hard drive by Monday?”

  Kurt saw Brass’s eyes widen. He knew the nosey bastard had noticed the CDs were marked unclassified, but the last CD ejected had come from the classified computer. It was one of the deadly security sins to mix CDs between classified and unclassified computers. He lifted the CDs and bounced them on edge for a second before taking a pair of scissors out of the top drawer and dropping the CDs in it before closing it.

  Tom Brass leaned down. “What are you doing, Kurt?” he asked in a concerned whisper. “If the colonel saw you doing this he’d have your nuts for breakfast.”

  Kurt shrugged. “I didn’t have time to run out for classified CDs,” he offered, knowing as he said it that Brass’s eyes had shifted to the box of classified CDs near the edge of his desk. “The system administrators are upgrading the system this weekend. You remember what happened last time.”

  Brass licked his lips. “Kurt, I don’t know… you know I’m going to have to turn you—”

  Kurt surprised himself. His right hand drove the scissors up through the soft tissue below Brass’s chest cage, ripping into his heart. The look on the man’s face. Sweat poured down his face as he grunted several times, his mouth opening and closing like a dying fish out of water. Kurt grinned. Brass’s eyes stared directly into Kurt’s. Kurt forced himself to meet the stare; not knowing what he expected to see. I’m getting quite good at this for a novice.

  Brass mouthed, “Why?”

  “I don’t like Old Town,” Kurt whispered in reply. He twisted the scissors as he pushed Brass away. The body fell backwards. Kurt released his grip on the scissors, leaving them embedded in the man. He looked at the eyes. The light was gone. He’d missed it again.

  “Amazing how good government scissors are, aren’t they, Thomas?”

  He looked around the area. “I’m surprised,” Kurt said, looking at the small amount of blood that flowed across the man’s chest onto the floor. “You didn’t have much blood at all. Nope, not at all,” he said quietly to himself. He touched two fingers to his right wrist. His eyes widened. His heart was beating normally. He had expected it to be surging upward. Even his breathing was normal. No turning back now. Not that I ever had that opportunity, after that first meeting.

  He hadn’t been this calm in the past six months. He had come a long way. He had nearly passed out when he made the first delivery, leaving it under a flattened QVC box along Jeff Davis Highway. This second delivery should fix the problems his contact told him they were having with the data from the first. This delivery was to be a face-to-face meeting, because his handler wanted to assess the information before Kurt arrived in Aruba. Kurt was no fool. He knew if the information proved false, the money in the bank would disappear. But he didn’t worry. Either way, he could handle the drop this time. And the information was good; it always had been. What they didn’t know and he did was that the laser weapon didn’t work. Sure you could point the thing at a target and, as long as the target didn’t move for several minutes, you could even burn a hole in it. A hole in tempered steel was even possible. Kurt believed he was selling the buyers unusable data. But it never occurred to him that even unsuccessful gambits saved money and time by identifying avenues that didn’t work.

  He forced himself carefully onto his knees to avoid the blood on the floor. He pushed Brass across the floor toward the desk along the wall, a smear of blood marking the path across the green tiled floor. He’d take care of that later. Kurt pulled the boxes out from under the desk and ten minutes later had Brass’s body shoved against the flimsy wall of the cubicle with the boxes blocking any casual view.

  Ripping linen cloth from a roll, Kurt wiped the blood from the floor and then with fresh linen he wiped his hands. He’d have to stop and wash his hands. With soap. The idea of blood on them was too much to bear along with everything else good that had happened today. Does this make me a serial killer? He’d stop at the bathroom on the ground floor on the way out and soap them up good. He looked down at his clothes and thought the stains at the bottom of his pants were probably blood from the killing. Which killing, he wasn’t sure; but probably Thomas’s since he’d stayed well clear of the system administrator’s body.

  He had never killed a man before today — or a woman or child. This day was quite the revelation to Kurt. Confidence that was always quickly crushed by his military superiors over the years rose considerably. He felt a rapport with those same military superiors, believing that they experience the same rush he had experienced twice today. Kurt believed he understood why some military types opted for the dangerous, bloodletting missions.

  Kurt grabbed a bottle of water and chugged the cool liquid. He glanced a couple of times to where the body was hidden. He could see Brass’s shoes sticking out, but he was going to be discovered anyway come Monday. The first person in his cubicle who looked around half-heartedly would find the body. He imagined the fright rolling across this office like a tidal wave.

  Kurt straightened his desk, filing papers in the small cabinet to the side and tidying the stack of folders awaiting his attention in the incoming tray. This time Monday, he’d be on some beach in Aruba, sipping one of those drinks with paper umbrellas in it. And, yeah, maybe even with a blue-eyed blond rubbing sun block on his chest and telling him how great in bed he was. He shrugged. It would be a lie, but he didn’t care if it was a lie.

  He reached down and grabbed two handfuls of fat. Look at this honey. These are group-sex handles made for three, so where’s your sister? He laughed to himself.

  The other thing he was going to do was hire a professional trainer and get these excess pounds off. “Yeah, Tom,” he said softly. “This time Monday they’ll find you and I’ll be with her.” Whoever “her” is.

  He shut his eyes for a moment and fantasized about himself a hundred pounds lighter, jogging on some white-sanded beach to the admiration of onlookers. With the right amount of money, you could buy anything, and Kurt had earned enough in the past six months to retire comfortably under a new name. A new name supplied by his handlers along with a new passport from their country and a false biography. Of course, he didn’t have much faith in them, but the papers would serve his purposes until he found the right people to build him another. The next thing on his agenda was to drop out of the sight of his handlers. You never knew in the world of espionage or politics when you became the expendable element.

  He patted the briefcase as he picked it up. He glanced at his watch. Two hours to the drop at the Washington Mall, then Voila! Tomorrow he’d be just one more American at the bank in Aruba changing money from one account to another. He had no intention of leaving the money in an account his handlers had access to.

  Sure, he had enough in his off-shore banking account to live on, but everyone should have a separate retirement account. No need to go yet. There was time yet to relax. To dream. He pulled the chair away from where the body lay hidden, sat down in it, and basked in the fantasies his future held, watching the clock on the wall until it was time to go.

  * * *

  He could even invest in U.S. funds — stocks and bonds — under his new identity. He sighed. Seven o’clock. Time.

  He opened the briefcase, checking for the third or maybe fourth time that the CDs were still there. Kurt wasn’t concerned anyone would stop him when he left the complex. They seldom inspected bags, and the few times they did, all you had to do was tell them they were unclassified and they waved you on. They never checked. The key was to make sure you had no classification markings on anything you took out of the office. With his new confidence, Kurt had no doubt of his ability to appear calm, cool, and collected, even if they did stop him.

  He stood, his eye line slightly above the top edge of the cubicle walls. Fluorescent lights illuminated the office of the head of the MDA Project Phoenix. Kurt could see Colonel Darnell bent over
his desk, writing something — probably screwing over another government servant. The slight bald spot on the back of his head made Kurt wonder why an officer so hell-bent on promotion wouldn’t cover the baldness. Kurt shaped his hand like a gun, pointed it at Darnell, and said, “Bang! Your career is dead.”

  He reached up and brushed a few strands of loose hair over his own bald top. Darnell was probably editing his proposed emails for tonight so they’d look better, more professional, have some quotable sound bites in them. Don’t forget to mention the dead man in cubicle forty-nine, Kurt said silently. Or, the screams from the floor above you.

  He imagined the Air Force generals talking now.

  “Apparently the man was killed within forty feet of where Darnell was writing emails.”

  “Too bad. Thought Darnell was on the ball. Knew what was going on around him.”

  “Well, you must not know what’s going on around you if this traitor kills a man within feet of you and you don’t hear anything.”

  “Maybe he did hear something, but—”

  “No, I think if he’d heard, he’d have done something.”

  “Well, we’ll never know. Too bad. He was a great officer.”

  Kurt undid his tie, pulled it from around his neck, and stuffed it in his briefcase alongside the CDs. Thought, Yeap, Colonel Darnell, you were a great officer. Until they realize what I’ve done anyway. But with good ole Tom Brass resting in his own blood right over there, you’re on your way to wherever the Air Force sends officers who have no future. Probably a base without a golf course.

  Kurt reached for his coat, stopped and dropped his hands, staring at the blue dress coat. He didn’t have to take it. He could leave it here. It’d be just one more thing Monday for them to figure out. Maybe he should drive his car over to one of the parks, cut himself and drip some blood around so they’d have some DNA, leave the keys in it for some unsuspecting young juvenile delinquent to steal, and laugh when the man was caught and charged with his murder. Be just his luck to do all of that and then actually get mugged and murdered for his briefcase while he walked away. What a waste. Besides, it may confuse things while they’re trying to figure out what happened, but it wouldn’t confuse them for long. And he didn’t know if he had time to do it. The security lines at Dulles were notorious for being endless before an international flight, and what if he went to all that trouble and missed his flight?

  Kurt had an immediate urge to urinate. Don’t even think about missing the flight. He looked at the body one last time. A pool of blood lined the edges of the boxes. Does that mean Brass is still alive, or is it just blood from earlier still spreading? he wondered curiously. Kurt shrugged. Well, I’ll just wait until the papers come out and see whether or not Brass was dead when I stuffed him there.

  He reached up, took his coat, and draped it over his arm. Carrying his briefcase in his right hand he walked toward the door, glancing at Darnell’s office. He didn’t see the man, but he was in there somewhere. For a second, he thought about killing Darnell, but just as quickly dismissed the idea. Darnell would beat the hell out of him. He wasn’t some little nondescript coworker with no combat experience.

  A sense of freedom enveloped him for a fraction of a second as he neared the exit. Then a second idea swelled forward clouding the first: he might miss his flight tonight. But he said to himself, Nothing bad is going to happen. After all, who else could kill men with office instruments— twice in one day — within the nation’s most super-secret technology development agency with work going on around him, and have no one notice? Probably put him in Ripley’s Believe It or Not—most office workers killed by office instruments in one day by one man.

  He punched the red button at the door. The gears whined. As he waited the few seconds for the door to open, Kurt glanced at the office where Colonel Darnell worked. He was there the whole time. He was looking at Kurt through the glass wall that surrounded his office. Kurt smiled and raised a couple of fingers to his head in a mock salute and, without waiting to see Darnell’s reaction, stepped over the threshold, heading toward freedom. By the time he walked down the marble steps to the executive parking area in front of the Navy Annex, he was humming. He felt clean now. It had only taken a few minutes to wash his hands and use the urinal.

  He raised his right hand and then his left, shifting the briefcase so he could look at them. The soap had done the job. Then he spotted blood on the right sleeve of his white shirt. He hadn’t noticed it inside the building. Kurt looked around, saw no one, so he put the briefcase down long enough to slip his coat on. In doing so, he noticed the time on his wristwatch. Another hour and he’d be done. Then, when the sun was rising over Washington tomorrow morning, this boy would be stepping off the aircraft to Aruba. “Aruba, Aruba, Aruba,” he said aloud — never to return.

  He was still humming when he reached the guard gate, nodding to the Defense Protective Service officers manning the turnstiles. The computer-generated database recognized his badge swipe, a green arrow appeared, and Kurt Vernigan was outside the compound. God, if he wasn’t afraid of passing out from the exhaustion, he would’ve danced down to the bus stop.

  He was still humming when four black sedans sped up and flipped on their sirens. Men wearing shirts with the large black letters “FBI” across the front leapt out. He had barely ceased humming when one of them tackled him from behind, knocking the briefcase out of his hand. As Kurt fell, he saw the black briefcase and his future spinning over and over toward the grass on the other side of a chain that paralleled the sidewalk.

  Dampness soaked his leg, and he realized that he had wet himself. The crying clouding his ears was his also. This cannot be happening. So close. So unfair. And the crying rose in intensity. “Unfair, unfair, unfair,” he mumbled through tears, the mumbling continuing even when they jerked him to his feet, twisting the arms handcuffed behind him. He cried from the pain.

  When he glanced around, standing at the edge of the FBI agents surrounding him stood Darnell, alongside an Air Force general.

  A red haze of rage broke across him, adrenaline surging free from places he never knew existed. Kurt managed to free himself from the two men holding him on each arm, and, screaming at the top of his lungs, he ran toward Darnell, who calmly turned toward him and laughed. Kurt screamed louder, ignoring the shouts and cries around him. He ignored the agent who ran forward with his club raised and slammed it against Kurt’s temple. Darnell’s laughing face was the last thing Kurt saw. The knowledge that he would make general because of Kurt was the thought he had as darkness slammed across his mind as his body fell toward the pavement where his face cushioned the fall.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Skipper, the F-16s are on radar,” petty officer Schultz said. Without waiting for acknowledgement, the former high school tight end adjusted his headset over his ears and returned to monitoring his screen. The broad-shouldered Operations Specialist’s right hand rested on a baseball-size roller mounted on the desk in front of him. His fingers rolled the ball slightly. On the integrated radar screen, the cursor shifted off the forward video speck to another radar return directly behind it. His right thumb pressed a flush panel alongside the mouse and immediately a circle encompassed the small speck generated by the radar return. Information appeared in a small box below the upside down half-circle that identified the hooked radar return as a friendly aircraft. Course, speed, call sign, and altitude were illuminated in the box for any viewer in the Combat Information Center and the bridge of the USS Winston S. Churchill—United States Arleigh Burke — class destroyer, hull number DDG-81.

  Commander Troy Harrison slid to the seat edge of the captain’s Chair in Combat and, with a quick shove of both hands on the chair arms, jumped to the deck. Harrison leaned over Schultz’s shoulder, watched the radar track of the approaching aircraft, and read the information on the Naval Tactical Data System as the OS petty officer worked the mouse around the radar returns.

  Schultz shifted slightly in his seat, forcing
the skipper to take a half-step to the left to see over the former ‘I love football, y’all’ hometown high school hero from Concord, North Carolina. Harrison was used to adjusting to a Navy that seemed hell-bent on keeping his head level with everyone else’s shoulders. At five foot seven he was shorter than the average male naval officer — if he stretched his neck, at that. What irked him more than this self-generated statistic was a belief that most women officers also matched or exceeded his height.

  He never mentioned the height thing. He didn’t have to. His classmates at the Academy, fellow officers — and enlisted men — he had served with during his career, and now his fellow commanding officers made sure he knew. There wasn’t a short joke he hadn’t heard. ‘Hey, Troy, stand up! Oh, sorry — you are standing!’

  Image was everything in the military. The image he projected when he hopped down from the captain’s chair was like a young child leaping petulantly off a highchair. On the other hand, he was the gawldamn skipper of this floating bucket of bolts, and the officers and crew could think what they pleased as long as they kept it to themselves—and no short jokes, by God.

  On the Naval Tactical Data System console, short generated lines ran from the half-moon icons overlaying the four Air Force F-16s, revealing to the viewer the direction the aircraft were flying. The length of the line told him or her the relative contact speeds to other objects.

  Operations Specialist Second Class Schultz sequence-hooked the radar returns into the computer, and, when he clicked the left button, the computer hopped from one contact to the other. New data, indicating type of aircraft, appeared in the boxes during sequencing, blinking. When the computer sequenced the first time to new data, it would blink until the user sequenced off.