Page 99 of Smoke and Shadows
“Recording. The NSA was keeping tabs on Kwon after Marissa put in a request. Playing it now,” Allison announced, regret in her voice.
Marissa slowly expelled a sigh of relief when she heard her father’s part in this mess. He was a pawn. Viktor was feeling another thing altogether. He started pacing, a sure sign of his rapidly deteriorating tether on his temper.
“Son of a bitch.” The expletive ripped from Viktor’s throat with such savagery, Marissa was almost thankful Kwon was not in the same room right now. “This whole attack was to get theAGS and CIA back into the game. His manipulation of Trenton Cole wasn’t intended to break up Marissa and me, but to gauge the extent of our relationship, and he got his fucking answer.”
Viktor looked at her with a proprietary gleam. “He’s going to try and fuck with us. We have to remain vigilant.”
Marissa nodded, unable to speak, still rattled that her father was dragged into this.
“Would it be better if you two cooled it off for now?” Yeager suggested.
“And have her open to another attack?” Viktor snapped.
“I can also provide her protection, Baran,” Yeager shot back. Her normally cool-as-cucumber boss was beginning to lose his temper, too. She needed to make a stand now.
“I’d rather have Viktor watch my back. No offense to the CIA,” Marissa said. “It only makes sense since we’re deeply involved in the case. Even if Viktor and I pretended to cool it off, Kwon is too smart to buy that. Hopefully, his fixation on getting his revenge on Viktor will prove to be his downfall. We have to play it smarter than he does.”
“We will,” Viktor stated resolutely. “We most certainly will.”
Viktor trudgedup the steps to go to the mezzanine level to his office. It was already 4:00 a.m., and he had sent Tim and Nathan home after reviewing files the FBI had transferred to their database servers. Jack, Maia, and Derek conferenced into the briefing, making it known that they were on board to help in any capacity. Jack was eager to get his hands on Owen Reed after Viktor had revealed that the man was the sniper who nearly killed Maia. As for Derek, he was probably doing this for Sophie because Matsuda was a close friend. Regardless of their individual reasons for wanting in on the mission, all ofthem were patriots, and there was a threat to the country that must be addressed.
Marissa was in Viktor’s office working online with Allison to track the call that initiated the attack earlier. They had traced the phone to the provider and were waiting for the company to release the name of the store where the phone was purchased.
Pushing the door to his office open, he found Marissa stretched out on his couch with the laptop sitting on her thighs. She was fast asleep, snoring lightly, her back leaning against the arm of the couch. He massaged his chest, feeling a spasm jolt the muscles underneath. He was pretty sure that muscle was his heart.
He sat down quietly beside her, his woman mumbling in protest when he lifted the laptop away.
“Shh . . . sleep, kitten,” Viktor murmured. Setting the laptop aside, he toed off his shoes and pulled off his jeans, and proceeded to unbutton his dress shirt. He left his undershirt on and stretched out beside Marissa. Thankfully, his couch was long and wide and he was able to shift her lower, so her whole body was on the couch. He tucked a throw pillow underneath his head and pulled Marissa half on top of him, resting her face on his chest. Hugging her tightly, he closed his eyes, knowing that they would need all the respite to face what was ahead.
18
Marissa had workedwith Allison for hours waiting for their query to come back from NSA’s Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) database, feeding it different parameters like first dates and last dates of calls, numbers called, and so on. They refined their search to signals within a ten-mile radius of the attack. Their patience paid off when several telephone identifiers were returned. It took a while for the provider to give them a list of locations where the phones were purchased. Surveillance footage from these locations were picked up this afternoon. The hope was to identify either Reed or Logan and maybe the vehicle they were using.
Tim tried to track the telephone identifiers this morning, but they were offline and probably had been dumped for a new device. The first call made on the phone they were tracking occurred the day after the chemical weapon attack at the Cinemaplex. The last call was made right before the tip-off to the FBI from the supposed Loudoun County police officer. The cruiser was found this morning, no sign of the officer who was assigned the cruiser.
Allison came in to the AGS datacenter this afternoon topour over the surveillance videos with Maia who was assigned datacenter duty until she regained her strength.
By 7:00 p.m., tempers started to flare as Tim and Allison bickered over their methods of cutting through the surveillance recordings. Maia was sitting back, letting the two analysts duke it out, but she was beginning to look impatient as well.
“I can feed the discs through my facial recognition software,” Tim argued. “It would certainly cut back on the time.”
“That’s a half-ass way of doing it,” Allison fired back.
“To you maybe, but it’s worked for us—”
“I wonder how many leads you’ve lost because of this—”
“Our success rate speaks for itself—”
“And what success rate is this?”
Marissa wanted to intervene. She knew that AGS owned very sophisticated software that even the CIA had not yet purchased. Allison herself knew this, but there was a reason for the short tempers. And thankfully, Jack McCord walked in with the solution.
“Dinner!” Jack declared as he strode in with two huge bags of what appeared to be Chinese takeout.
“Oh, thank God!” Maia chirped. She hopped out of her chair to greet her husband.
“No heavy lifting, babe,” Jack told his wife when Maia tried to grab one of the bags from him.