"Lock the door," Viddy said.
He was sitting at the cluttered workstation in his office, surrounded by monitors, CPU switch boxes, patch panels, routers and dangling loops of network cables. Disk-activity lights flickered in the shadowed room, diodes blinking on the server racks, a lamp throwing a cone of light over the file cabinets along the walls. Paxton slouched next to the workstation, drinking coffee and studying a document Viddy had put up on one of the overhead screens. Whatever it was, Drake knew he didn't want to see it. He closed the door, muffling the sound of voices and printers in the Analysis section, then he spun the combination lock and walked over to join them.
"I talked to somebody in HSU," Viddy said, leaning closer. "He was at the briefing. Headquarters admitted that the cargo wasn't nerve gas. It's some kind of experimental deliriant called BLOWTORCH. A military-grade hallucinogen."
"Jesus Christ." Drake met Paxton's eyes.
"It's a strange story," Viddy went on. Talking quickly, he filled them in on the Tangent Facility, the earthquake, Adder's theory about Conwell passing bad intelligence to Ahmad.
"They bought that?" Drake asked when he'd finished.
"They'll buy anything that lets them off the hook."
"You said you had something else." Paxton's face was gaunt, heavy with fatigue. Gena was safely locked in his office and there was still no interest in her arrival. According to the logs, Conwell was being questioned in the Interrogation Unit, but Viddy didn't know how it was going. They hadn't talked to Adder yet and it wasn't clear if he even knew they were in the building. Drake wiped his clammy hands on his slacks, trying to concentrate.
"Yes." Viddy pointed at the document on his overhead monitor, his face carefully expressionless. "This is Chertok's case file from Langley."
It took a minute to register.
"His case file." Paxton blinked at him. "How the hell did you get it?"
Viddy shook his head. "You don't want to know."
"All right." Paxton frowned. Viddy had hacked into the CIA network, a Federal offense. "Has anyone else seen it?"
"No one in HSA is cleared for this material," Viddy said. "The file goes back almost fifteen years and it's officially inactive, but I found something you should see." He scrolled through the document, then magnified one of the pages and zoomed in on a single line of text. Someone had used a pen to circle a timestamp and a two-letter entry in the file. "Someone already caught this, probably one of Langley's analysts. This is an archival scan, but they were working with the hardcopy original."
"EF." Paxton leaned closer to read the letters. "So what?"
Viddy coughed and cleared his throat. He'd been working for almost twenty-four hours straight, juggling a half-dozen assignments, and he looked dead on his feet, his eyes drooping, his wrinkled shirt hanging from his narrow shoulders. Turning back to the monitor, he tapped the desktop nervously. They would have a hard time explaining the file if anyone found out they had it.
"EF is a digraph for the code word EFFIGY," he said. "The code word itself is classified. That's why they referred to it this way in the file."
"But what does it mean?" Drake asked impatiently.
"I can't say," Viddy went on. "EFFIGY is just a code word, a compartmental code designation. This type of clearance requires that anyone with access to EFFIGY material be read into the compartment and sign a non-disclosure agreement. Any discussions about EFFIGY activities have to take place in specially cleared and swept rooms and documents must be hand-carried or transmitted over approved and restricted communications circuits. There's no way to know what this operation was or if it's still running, but whatever it was, it looks like Chertok was given EFFIGY clearance a year ago."
"That can't be right," Drake said.
"There's more." Viddy paged through the file, then maximized a black-and-white photograph, a telephoto shot which appeared to have been taken from the window of a vehicle on a crowded city street. The photo showed a man in a dark suit walking down a sidewalk in front of a large building. Chertok. Drake would have recognized him anywhere.
"This is a mobile surveillance photograph," Viddy explained, pointing at a black smear in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. "The timestamp has been redacted, but I managed to identify the building in the background." He looked up at Paxton, his eyes worried. "That is the Proteus BioCorp Genetic Sequencing Laboratory in Walnut Creek. It's a new building. Construction was completed only fifteen months ago."
Paxton flinched, rubbing the back of his neck. He glanced at Drake, then turned back to Viddy and let out his breath.
"How can Chertok be alive? We've got him dead—killed in Dagestan in 1999. The Agency verified it through the Russian Federal Security Service..."
"Killed after going rogue according to our files." Viddy was staring at a picture of his daughter next to his keyboard, a young girl with amber skin and eyes the size of dinner plates. "No one ever found out who he was working for."
"So they say." Paxton looked almost as tired as Viddy. "This code. EFFIGY. Whatever it means. Are we talking about a US government operation?"
"There's no way to know," Viddy said. "I can't identify the originating authority. The files are CIA material, but that doesn't mean they were running EFFIGY themselves. They could have been keeping an eye on it for all we know."
"The timeline fits with Hahn's story," Paxton said, glancing at Drake. "We know the Agency fired her after the Belgrade thing, but she told me they approached her a year ago, brought her back in to penetrate Chertok's group in the United States. She says she was working directly for the Deputy Director of Operations."
"Emerson?" Drake hadn't heard that part of the story.
"That's what she told me. Maybe Emerson found out Chertok was still alive and sent her in to find out who he was working for. We know she was romantically involved with Chertok in Yugoslavia. Emerson could have used that connection to get her inside."
Paxton was staring at the floor, avoiding Drake's eyes.
Gena was a touchy subject. Drake had met her in Yugo. Winter of '97. She was a surveillance technician attached to the CIA's Belgrade station, a borderline alcoholic, and he was a Collection Management Officer in over his head. A one-night stand turned into a drunken three-month shouting match that finally blew up when he learned she was screwing Chertok and half the station behind his back. They had a brawl in a hotel room, the proprietor called the police and the papers had a field day with the scandal. The security breach was bad enough, but Gena's involvement with Chertok made a lot of people very nervous.
Chertok was bad news, even back then. He was a ghost. He didn't exist. A professional terrorist, he didn't work for the Special Operations Group and the station, very definitely, had never heard of him. He went rogue during the war and died a few years later trying to blow up a munitions train somewhere in the North Caucasus region. That was the official history, anyway. After the scandal broke, Gena was fired for being a "drunken sexual provocateur" and Drake was rotated back to the States. He cleaned up his act, married Nastya, went to work for Paxton after 9/11, but his thing with Gena was a permanent stain on his record.
"She could have been working for Chertok all along," Drake said. "Jesus Christ, Cable. One way or another, this is going to blow Adder out of the water. He wants to shut her up. That's why nobody was here to meet us. He's suppressing the whole thing—"
"Slow down." Paxton squeezed his eyes shut, rubbing his temples. "We can't use any of this, Matthew. Chertok's files are classified and Emerson would move to suppress on grounds of national security. We could never use them as evidence and we'd have to explain how we got them in the first place."
"That would not be good," Viddy said.
"Brief headquarters sub rosa," Drake argued. "We've got solid evidence that Chertok was alive a year ago and we know the Agency was either running him or keeping him under surveillance. Gena's connected somehow. She knew where the canister was planted. Somebody tried to kill her in the garage." He checked his watch, but he had trouble focusing on the dial.
"It's risky," Paxton said. "We'd have to go over Adder's head and there's no telling what kind of reception we'd get. They may not want her story to come out. We've got to find out what's going on."
"We can't sit on her any longer."
"Agreed." Paxton started to go on when his cell phone rang. Glancing at Drake and Viddy, he took it out, checked the caller ID and raised his eyebrows, holding up his hand.
"This is Paxton," he said. "Right...about fifteen minutes ago...she's in my office..." He bit his lower lip, the muscles tightening in his face as he listened. "All right, I'm leaving now. He'll be there...don't worry..."
Staring into space, he put away his phone.
"What is it?" Viddy asked.
"That was Adder," Paxton said. "Headquarters agreed to Hahn's deal."
"They're giving her immunity?" Drake was incredulous.
Paxton nodded. "The lawyers are heading down to my office with the paperwork." He took a deep breath, scratching the stubble on his jaw. "They approved a raid on this warehouse Chertok's supposed to have in Roseville, but they're keeping it quiet." He held up a hand to cut off Drake's protest. "That's why nobody was waiting for us. They're using the chopper that just landed and they want you to go along as an observer. You're supposed to report to the helipad in thirty minutes. East checkpoint..."
"Me? What the hell for?"
"They're taking Hahn as a spotter," Paxton said. "She claims she doesn't remember the exact location of the warehouse, but she says she can find it again if she's there." He shook his head. "They want you to take charge of her, Matthew. The Deputy Secretary asked for you personally. Two NBAC scientists are going along to handle spills and intentional releases. Bartholomew and MacMillan." He checked his watch. "Just be careful. For all we know, your friends at the parking garage are going along for the ride."
"You think Chertok's got somebody inside?"
"I don't know." Paxton glanced at the surveillance photograph on Viddy's monitor. "I don't know what to think anymore..."