Dark Secret (DARC Ops Book 1) Read online

  “Okay, fine,” Mira said. “Let's pretend for a second that I did make this whole thing up.”

  Jackson barely raised his eyebrows.

  “What would be my motivation? What's the payoff?”

  He began to say something but stopped himself, opting for a simple, non-committal shrug.

  “Basically, why the fuck would I do that?”

  Jackson sighed and tapped a few fingers against the table. “Can you show me some of these symbols? Have you sketched any of them in your book?”

  Mira gladly produced a full page of sketches which Jackson quietly stared at. It was almost a blank, dead stare, save for a faintly twitching left eyelid.

  She couldn’t wait any longer. “What do you think?”

  Before he could answer, someone knocked very lightly on the door. Jackson, after excusing himself to answer it, spent a half minute murmuring to someone through the slight gap he'd cracked open. When he returned to his seat, he was shaking his head.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Something wrong?”

  “It's just... a little... incredible.”

  “What is?”

  “And I mean incredible in the bad way. I'm sorry, Mira. I am. I like you, and I'm not trying to be rude here. But it's just really difficult for me to believe that you've live-encrypted this code, this language that you've never seen before. It's even new to me. And this is what I do.”

  Going into the meeting, Mira had felt a slight nagging suspicion that it would—despite what Lashay kept insisting—be a complete fucking waste of time. Turns out she’d been right.

  “You can understand that right? I want to believe you. And I'm going to look into this and get to the truth, and—”

  “You think I really want to believe that a United States Senator is making deals to arm children soldiers in Kenya?”

  “I'm sorry to inform you, Mira. But that's just a drop in the bucket. And it's a big bucket. Welcome to your real country.”

  Another soft knock at the door.

  “Later,” Jackson growled.

  The knocking stopped.

  “Look, I'll have my guys poke around and—”

  “We don't have time to poke around. Jackson, the weapons fly out in six weeks.”

  “But it'll only take me a few days to know if you're paranoid delusional.” Damn, he said that with such a straight face. “And when I verify that you're not, because you seem nothing but intelligent and logical and just a charming, pretty young lady whom I've enjoyed talking with, then we'll get together again, in a nicer room, and you'll sign some papers and we'll plan our attack.”

  Mira was suddenly acutely aware of how awful she looked, how tired and lonely she felt, and how long and dark and quiet the night ahead was going to be for her.

  “Hey, it'll be alright,” he said, getting up from his chair. “You did the right thing. You’re here. That's the most important part.”

  5

  Jackson

  “Of course I don't believe her.” With a quick stab of the accelerator, Jackson's black Mercedes powered up the incline of his building's underground garage. Three seconds later, the car was bathed in the orange glow of streetlights as it crawled along a congested Connecticut Avenue. The road shimmered black from a brief afternoon shower, the rain having arrived right around the time his security alerted him about a woman named Mira. He distinctly remembered the darkening approach of rainclouds as he stared out of his corner office window, him saying “Thanks, let her in,” in his most bored, slow-workday drawl. He also remembered how his workday was suddenly filled with interest at the sight of a petite blonde who, despite her adorable nerdiness—or maybe because of it—looked, sounded, and moved just like the type of woman he'd find himself naturally gravitating towards in dimly lit cocktail lounges or someone's latest crowded banquet for this or that D.C. vanity project charity. The only problem was that she was batshit crazy. Or, at the very least, harboring a borderline personality disorder. Sad because he loved the smart ones. And Mira was definitely smart. Why were all the smart ones crazy?

  Now, the weather and workday having cleared, Jackson sat in the plush leather seats of his car, debating with his passenger, Matthias, about how seriously he should handle Mira's case. Or if he should even handle it at all.

  “She's too pretty,” said Jackson.

  “So?”

  Jackson remained quiet. There was no need to elaborate.

  “So now you think she's a honey pot?”

  “Set up through your friend, your ex. Yes. I do.”

  Matthias sighed as he thumbed through his smartphone. “Now you're the one sounding paranoid.”

  “When haven’t I been paranoid, Matt?” He thought it was a pretty good question, one that bought a little more silence from Matthias. “Think of the world we live in. Comes with the territory.”

  Jackson navigated his car around the traffic loop of Dupont Circle before turning on to Massachusetts Avenue. He'd always liked the opulent, old-world architecture of the District's premier residential street. Maybe he'd sell his suburban eyesore and move into one of its finely bricked mansions with someone like Mira—minus the delusions.

  “She scares me, Matt. I don't know why.”

  “Yeah you do. You don't want to go rooting around in a senator's wastebasket.”

  “I don't care about that,” Jackson said. There had been a hundred decidedly less glamorous tasks that he'd been assigned as a Navy SEAL. “You know I've got a thing for destroying the lives of corrupt pencil-pushers. That doesn’t bother me. It's the girl. Who the hell is she?”

  Matthias shrugged. “My ex's friend.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Mira,” said Matthias. “Translator by day, master cryptanalyst by night. It's no wonder you've got a thing for her.”

  “Hmm, I dunno. But I'll tell you what I don't have a thing for. Someone's covert operative getting a little too familiar with our building and our protocols, and anything else she'll be witness to if we take on her case.”

  “If she was sent from someone, why would she tell such an unbelievable story?”

  It was a good question. Jackson had no idea of the answer.

  “Look how much it got your attention,” Matthias said with a chuckle. “I doubt you'd be feeling this way if it was just another piracy case.”

  Jackson was shaking his head. There had to be more to it. He'd been living in the world of dirty tricks for too long. “There must be something really nasty with Langhorne. Some can of worms. Maybe we're being tricked into opening it.”

  “Yeah, which would make Mira look pretty credible. Wouldn’t you say? If there really was something wrong?”

  “At that point, it wouldn’t really matter.”

  Matthias stared at his boss. “Then what the hell are we talking about?”

  “We're talking about doing a little homework on Mira,” Jackson said as he steered around another traffic circle, guiding the Mercedes deep into the heart of Embassy Row. One by one they passed the various flags. Burkina Faso, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Paraguay, Malawi, Cote d'Ivoire, Republic of... “We're talking about you doing the homework, specifically,” Jackson continued. “Which should be easy since you already know her so well. Let's do school records, grandma-grandpa, the whole bit.”

  “Alright,” Matthias muttered. “Fine.” He muttered a lot. It seemed like every day Jackson would discover a new reason why girlfriends like Lashay jettisoned his relationships. “When she comes back clean you can buy me a beer.” He was moping now.

  “I have zero problem with that.”

  “Which reminds me...”

  “What, that you're an alcoholic?”

  “Not me,” said Matthias, offering no further elaboration.

  Was he starting to clam up already? Fuck. Some days it was like dealing with overgrown children. Just the toys were a little different, instead of building blocks they got guns and radar scramblers.

  “Okay, well who is?” asked Jackson.

 
; “Mr. Davis.”

  Mr. Davis was really Tom Davison, a youngish nobody that may or may not have some useful information. He was a lower level IT guy for Osprey. In essence, he was trying to fortify what Jackson had sent Tansy to infiltrate. An air-gapped network. That was tech-speak for a system not on the public internet, but physically isolated on a secure, independent network. Tansy had been hacking on it for weeks and Jackson was getting a little impatient. Sometimes a real world hack works better.

  “Think he's at the bar?” asked Matthias.

  Jackson made an abrupt right turn down a tight residential lane. They were now heading in the general direction of Swinies', a neighborhood pub where Tom liked to imbibe over-priced draft beer while hitting on anything female that moved. Jackson and Matthias liked catching him there when he was at his sloppiest. Maybe one night he'd tell the bartender a secret, or conveniently lose his phone, or maybe he'd get kidnapped and then water-boarded until he coughed up some answers. In lieu of water-boarding, DARC Ops personnel were always sure to keep him well-stocked with tiny little tracking devices. After five or six beers, you could put a bowling ball in his courier bag and he wouldn’t notice.

  Jackson received a call just as he parked along a curb a few blocks from Swinies'. It was Tansy.

  “We're checking in on your boy,” Jackson said. “You need all the help you can get.”

  As he and Matthias walked to the pub, Jackson queried Tansy for his opinion of Mira's amazing talents.

  “I've never heard of her,” Tansy said. “If she could really do that, I would know her.” Tansy's modesty knew no bounds. But he still was one of the net's leading underground figures. The guy used to have LAN parties with Edward Snowden and other misguided youth who'd grow up to be the NSA's leading hackers.

  When they neared the pub entrance, Tansy had some final advice that Jackson didn’t want to hear. “I wouldn’t automatically dismiss her, though. As you know, I'm somehow terrible with a Rubik's Cube. But my autistic cousin can do it in fourteen seconds. Some people just have those crazy abilities, like a savant.”

  There was that word again.

  “Is she autistic?” asked Tansy.

  “No. That's the problem.”

  * * *

  Mr. Davis had apparently been thirsty after work. Jackson and Matthias ordered drinks, found a corner booth, and began the stakeout. Across the room, their subject sat alone with a froth-laced half-glass of beer. His phone was plugged into a wall outlet. He was texting, his back hunched almost perpendicular to the table. He momentarily straightened his back to take a sip of beer.

  “The connections are all there,” said Matthias, reading off the screen of his encrypted cell. “The family arms business. The big game hunting in Kenya. Maybe that's how he met his unsavory friends? Illegal hunting. Poaching. That's a big business out there.”

  Jackson half-listened as he scrolled through some files on his own phone.

  Matthias had more ideas. “Do you think he could be forced into it, like through blackmail? Maybe he's compromised.” He took a sip of beer and continued. “Maybe someone's threatening to release a video of him shooting an endangered elephant or something.”

  “Matthias, stop making sense and just drink your beer.”

  “Well, we should be doing something in case she's right about that document.”

  “We are,” Jackson said.

  “How? Right now we're watching some loser get drunk.”

  “No, that's what you're doing” said Jackson, still on his phone. “Or rather, what you should be doing. I'm refreshing my memory about Kenya. And that airport, Kilaguni. You know I've been there?”

  “I just figured you've been everywhere,” Matthias said. He glanced at Mr. Davis. “Hey, he's leaving.”

  Jackson looked over to the kid. He was unplugging his phone. And then standing.

  “It's perfect,” whispered Matthias.

  Mr. Davis, heading for the bathroom, left his table with a phone charger cable laying across it.

  “Let's do this,” said Jackson as he fought back an unprofessional, mischievous grin. He felt like a kid, savoring the rare adrenaline rush of the internet security business.

  Matthias quickly strolled over to the Mr. Davis' table, grabbed the cable, and headed towards the bar. He made the switch on his way, stuffing the cord in his right pocket and then pulling a new one from his left. This was the cord he showed to the bartender, saying, “Hey, I think some guy left this.”

  “No he didn’t,” called Jackson from his seat, his voice projecting across the room. “He's just in the bathroom.”

  “Oh, okay, whoops,” said Matthias, the good Samaritan. “My bad. I'll just put it back.”

  Jackson paid their tab as Matthias plugged the new charge cable into the outlet. And that was it. No big deal. Just someone trying to be nice.

  6

  Mira

  One of the perks of working on Capitol Hill was its close proximity to a variety of interesting lunch break locations. Even on shorter "coffee breaks", Mira could circle the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court, and the Library of Congress, all in a 15 minute walk. In nice weather, she'd eat lunch on a concrete barrier in front of the gleaming white dome of the Capitol, or on the wide steps of the Thomas Jefferson Building, home to the second largest library in the world. It was also home, for the better part of most weekdays, to Mira's friend, Lashay.

  One of the perks of knowing an archivist at the Library of Congress was the occasional access to a variety of otherwise restricted areas. This time it was the scan room, where Lashay had been digitizing old posters with an oversized scanner.

  “Just a little personal project,” said Lashay, her gloved hands flattening a weathered sheet of canvas on the scan bed. “I'm actually supposed to be scanning some phone book from 1932. But this is so much more important. It actually says something about us as a culture.”

  As the machine began to scan its document with a low buzzing sound, Lashay held up the next poster in line so Mira could see the print. Backgrounded in white was a small black silhouette of a bomb. Circling it was a red circle with a cross through the middle. Next to that was a circled “A” with no cross.

  “I found these on eBay,” Lashay said, smiling like a child who with a new toy. “They're from the mid-seventies when some members of the Clamshell Alliance spoke at Berkeley. Anti-nuclear stuff, obviously.”

  Lashay had been on an anarchist kick ever since Mira had first met her, which was back in their slightly pot-hazed undergrad days at GWU. She remembered it was Lashay's anarchy "A" wrist tattoo that first caught her attention during an elective Hegelian philosophy class. A few days later, Mira would watch her future anarchist friend climb up the campus statue of George Washington, bull-horn in hand, to give an impassioned speech against paternalism from her seat on the first president's shoulders. She found it amusing that her friend went from an undergrad of rebellion and pot smoke to a job of name badges and security clearances.

  “I thought you were trying to take a break from all that,” Mira said as she flipped idly through a small stack of already-scanned artwork.

  “From what? Collecting posters?” Lashay switched out a new poster and began the process all over again – aligning the document, pressing through various settings on the touch-display, and then watching her digitized image arrive in vertical bars on a nearby computer monitor. “I'm scanning them for inclusion in the archive as important cultural artifacts. It's a vital service to the country.”

  “Scanning is one thing,” said Mira. “Printing and distributing is another.”

  “And that's what I'm taking a break from,” said Lashay, who had a habit of using government resources to print and circulate anti-establishment manifestos. “But I'll always be an anarchist.”

  “An anarchist archivist,” said Mira as she pulled her hand out of the poster pile. “Will you always be an oxymoron?”

  “Will you always be a faceless bureaucratic stooge? A translator of terror fo
r an imperialist senator?”

  “Maybe not for much longer.” Mira walked away from the stack of posters, no longer interested in their political messages. She had enough injustice to worry about.

  “You're quitting?” asked Lashay.

  “Or getting fired, because I just can't…I can't do the work anymore.” Mira collapsed into a leather office chair which faced an over-sized computer monitor. Sick of looking at monitors, she swiveled the chair away. “So, I guess something has to give.”

  It had only been two days since her discovery. The first day she went home "sick." And today she was taking an extra long lunch break, which at this rate might be her last.

  Lashay walked to a set of metal drawers on the other side of the small room. “I found some reading material for you,” she said, opening a drawer and pulling out a thin paperback. “In case you suddenly have a lot of free time on your hands.” She handed the book to Mira.

  Triumphant Gamble: My Early Politics.

  The book had a solid green cover with no images. Although its aesthetics dated the book at least 30 years, it looked brand new. No dog ears. No spine crease. No signs of it being read.

  “It's by your favorite author,” said Lashay.

  Mira's eyes traveled to the text at the bottom edge of the book.

  William D. Langhorne.

  It sparked pain in Mira's chest.

  “I can loan it out for you if you want.”

  Another perk of knowing a Library of Congress librarian.

  Mira turned the book over, finding that it only contained two things: a barcode and a black and white photo of the Senator on safari to some vast African grassland. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, baggy khakis, and the beady-eyed smile of a degenerate who'd just killed something. A shotgun rested in his hands. A dead buffalo slumped at his feet. “What the hell is this?”

  “A memoir,” said Lashay. “From 1986.”

  Mira opened the book and flipped through the first few pages.