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Danielle drove from Archer to Century City as quickly as she could. On the seat beside her was Patricia Master’s emergency kit, stored in the Archer vault and removed under the co-signature of Director Tower. Inside the kit were duplicates of Patricia’s keys, codes, and security badges.
It also contained a cloned hard drive of her secure laptop, transaction logs and data files for the last thirty days, maintained and updated in real time by ICARUS. By popping out her own hard drive and installing the ICARUS mirrored drive of Patricia Master’s machine, she had an identical replica of her laptop.
Danielle slowed as she approached Patricia’s condo building, past two police cars parked out front. Danielle parked further down the street and got out of her car. She looked up at her boss’s balcony to see the fluttering ribbon of yellow tape used to close off a crime scene. Something bad had happened. She pulled out the condo key and building pass and locked the rest of the emergency kit in her trunk. She walked to the back door of the building, used the key to enter and took the stairs to Patricia’s floor, where a uniformed cop stood by Patricia’s door, which was open. The smell of smoke filled the hallway.
“Excuse me, Ma’am, but this floor is closed to everyone until we complete our investigation,” said the cop, holding up his hands as she walked towards him.
“I’m Danielle Montreau and I’m looking for my boss, Patricia Masters. She lives in this suite. Has there been some kind of trouble? Patricia didn’t report in to work this morning.”
Danielle waited while the cop talked to someone on his radio.
“Wait here, please,” said the cop, looking down the hall.
A tall man in a dark suit walked out of the suite and towards Danielle. His face was grim. He flashed his badge.
“Detective Crosby,” he said. “You worked with Patricia Masters?”
“Yes. I am Danielle Montreau, from the Archer Foundation. Patricia Masters is our Chief Information Officer. I am the deputy CIO. She didn’t report in this morning. She left the office yesterday afternoon. She took ill suddenly and came home. Archer does some sensitive work for Homeland Security,” she said. “So these events could have national importance.”
She flashed her own special badge, issued by Director Tower to a select few Archer employees. It was her Homeland Security SAFE ID, which she had never used before in her life. Now, it was out there in the open, granting her powers just below the President and a few others, if they were in the immediate area. If not, then she was God of all things on the immediate ground around her.
SAFE stood for Security Administration For Emergencies and it was a small rapid-deployment force within Homeland Security. It had broad powers in the field to take command on the scene, outside the usual chain of command.
Only a select few had SAFE status. Within Archer, only Tower, Novak, Danielle, and Patricia Masters had it.
The Detective took a small step back. “Whoa, you’re one of the SAFE people? I’ve never seen one of those badges for real. Okay, what would you like me to do?”
“Show me her suite and tell me every detail of the investigation so far,” said Danielle. “From the top. Don’t leave out a thing.”
“The fire started in the bathroom,” said Detective Crosby as he walked Danielle through the condominium. “This was deliberately set. It was where we found the body, or at least what remained of it. As you can see, the fire traveled out from the bathroom, down the carpet into the other rooms. They filled the bathroom with blankets and towels, doused with liquor, as best as we can figure.”
Patricia looked inside the bathroom. The walls were black, paint peeling. Stains covered the toilet, on the seat and the water tank.
“We found her body on the toilet,” said Detective Crosby.
“Any sign of the cause of death?” asked Danielle, trying to control her voice. Looking at the greasy residue on the seat, the body must have been a sight.
“The coroner said it would take some time. The body was unusual, hollow was how he put it. It wasn’t the usual burn victim remains.”
“How so?” asked Danielle.
“Beats me. Outside of my expertise. The coroner said the body was light, as if someone had removed the fleshy bits. Carved it up into a skeleton. But there were no marks on the bones, no knife marks, I mean,” he said.
Detective Crosby shrugged, looking at Danielle, waiting for a reaction.
Danielle’s mind flashed back to the body of Dr. Fleming on the altar of the temple cavern in Belize. How it looked like his body had exploded from within.
“Was there evidence of anything on the walls?” she asked, looking at the blackened, peeling paint in the bathroom.
“We haven’t got that far yet. They’ve been working all night just getting the body out of the toilet. It’s a tight space to work in.”
“So you don’t have a positive ID on the body?”
“Nope, but it was a female skeleton. In her condo. Her car was in her parking stall. We found her keys on the dining room table, along with her purse. They tagged the body as Patricia Masters, pending confirmation. Dental records, I guess.”
Danielle turned away from the bathroom. “Did you find a laptop anywhere in the suite?”
The Detective flipped through his notes before answering. “Nope. No laptop.”
“I’ll look. I need to find it, if it is here.”
“Knock yourself out, Ms. Montreau,” said the Detective. “Now I have a few questions.”
“Help me look for a laptop and I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Okay. So, did Patricia Masters have any enemies related to Homeland Security, perhaps? Some international bad guys?”
“No comment.”
“What was her role at Archer? What were her responsibilities?”
“No comment.”
“Any idea who might want to carve her up, set fire to her place and disable the sprinklers to make sure the fire was a good one?”
“No comment.”
Detective Crosby closed his notebook. “I guess you can look for her fucking laptop all by yourself, Ms. Montreau.”
The Detective walked out of the condo, leaving Danielle alone in the dining room. She looked for Patricia’s laptop, knowing she wouldn’t find it. Patricia Masters was the only one within Archer with complete access to ICARUS files and protocols. Archer’s weakness was her account, as the designer and comptroller of all the secrets. Now her beloved ICARUS system could be bare as her bones, lying on an autopsy slab in the Coroner’s office.
Danielle left the condominium and walked to her car. She knew the mirrored hard drive in her trunk would have a log of every action in Patricia’s account, before and after her death. It would tell her about the killer’s interest in Archer. It was an after-the-fact record of an intelligence failure of colossal proportions.
“Fuck,” said Danielle, as she sat in her driver’s seat and slammed the door shut. She started dialing Director Tower’s secure number but stopped, flipping her cell phone closed. Not yet, she thought, as she stared at the cars streaming by on Santa Monica Boulevard. Her next move would make or break her career and perhaps her survival. With her boss dead, her promotion opportunity was obvious if she played the loyal corporate team player, despite her failure to close the Kipling Research deal for exclusive rights to SNIPER DNA and grab her bonus. She owed Kip her life. Her odds of staying alive increased the closer she stayed beside him. Tower and Novak would toss her aside to save their own skins. It was a fact of corporate life that your career depended on staying alive. Dead executives don’t get promotions.
Danielle tossed her cell phone into her purse, started her BMW and edged into the traffic heading into West Hollywood and the only safe place she knew.