Dark Secret (DARC Ops Book 1) Page 8

  “Fofana's a nobody.”

  “Exactly. So why isn't the General calling me?”

  “I don't know,” said Jaheem. “You want me to ask him next time I'm in the strip club?” Jaheem’s smoker's cackle filled Jackson's office.

  “What I'd like, Jaheem, is for you to find out what they really need from us. It's been way too vague for my liking. If they just wanted mercenaries, well... they're in fucking Africa. Tell them to go out for a walk and just pick the first twenty-five they see.”

  “No, no, no,” said Jaheem. “They're obviously looking for something more nuanced, not just some kid with a gun. They need mercs who can do intelligence.”

  “They have those, too.”

  “My hunch is that it's being kept on the down-low, like someone's looking for something they're not supposed to find.”

  Jackson heard a quiet knock on his opened door. He looked up and saw Mira, standing alone. She looked smaller than Jackson remembered.

  “...Which is probably why you're not hearing it directly from the General.”

  She looked nervous.

  “Probably scared to get too close. You know?”

  “Yeah,” said Jackson.

  Mira took a seat by the door, holding down the middle of her skirt as she crossed her legs. Did she wear a skirt last time?

  “Remember, General Diop's the guy who keeps protecting whistle blowers,” said Jaheem. “He's not very well-liked over here.”

  She looked cold. Jackson tried warming her up with a smile.

  “And lately he's been ruffling some feathers about Dadaab. He's looking to get shot, to be honest.”

  She almost flinched.

  “No, no” Jackson said disapprovingly, trying to put Mira at ease. “Shot? Really?”

  “Well yeah. Tall nail gets the hammer.”

  Looking as uncomfortable as ever, Mira suddenly busied herself by searching through her bag.

  “He's the only one who's concerned about oversight,” said Jaheem. “About reforming the camp. Everyone else just wants it to be a launch pad that sends refugees anywhere else but Kenya.”

  Jaheem was definitely having too much fun in Nariobi. Too much pussy and not enough updates to Jackson about things like the rogue General Diop.

  “He probably wants you to be part of his independent investigation,” said Jaheem. “You know the man, right?”

  Jaheem was the one Jackson had been paying for that very purpose, so he could know people like General Diop. But Jackson’s mind was blank. Jaheem was either a waste of money, or Jackson had early onset Alzheimer's from all the depleted uranium he'd been exposed to on the battlefield.

  “Jackson? You still there, mate?”

  Alzheimer's aside, keeping track of the names of various generals and warlords was no easy task. And after a decade, their biographies had a habit of melding together into a big pool of mush. Maybe if he stopped staring at Mira's legs he'd remember.

  “Yes, I remember him.” Jackson waved Mira over to a chair by his desk. “All right Jaheem, I gotta cut this short.” He leaned over to the phone cradle, readying to end the call. “Keep your ears open and call me in two days. And stay out of trouble.”

  As Mira bent forward to sit at the chair nearest to his desk, Jackson caught a sudden pleasant whiff of hair products. Fresh, beachy, crisply ozonic.

  “All right, I gotta go,” he said to the phone.

  “Cheers, then.” the phone said back.

  He ended the call and got right down to business with Mira.

  “You look really nice today.”

  She smirked.

  “I mean it,” he said, pulling two seltzer waters from a mini fridge.

  “No one ever told you about ending that sentence with 'today'?”

  “What?”

  “You should just say, 'you look really nice', and leave it at that. Adding 'today' means that I didn’t look so nice prior to 'today'.”

  “No, I stand by what I said.” Jackson placed one of the bottles on a coaster in front of Mira. “You looked terrible the other day.” After watching her jaw drop, he added, “No offense.”

  “What a fucking asshole,” said Mira, slowly working up a laugh. “You're right though. I did look terrible. So I guess I'm wrong on a technicality.”

  “It's true, through.” Jackson rounded his desk and took a seat. “But you still looked a little nervous when you walked in here. Is everything okay at work? You didn't tell anyone there, right?”

  She huffed. “Of course not.”

  “And you made sure no one followed you here?”

  He watched her eyes wander to the window. Poor girl.

  “Hey, I'm just kidding.” Jackson woke up his computer and pulled up her file. “You don't have to start worrying about that kind of stuff until we really get started. Which, as I look here, uh... Which... Hmm... I'm not sure when we'll, uh...”

  Out the corner of his eye, Jackson saw a dark, flat object land on his desk. It made the slapping sound of a book.

  “What's this?”

  “His memoir,” she said.

  Christ... She didn’t expect him to actually read it, did she?

  “He's got a whole chapter on Kenya.”

  Kenya?

  “Where he made all these hunting friends and political connections in the seventies. He also blabs on and on about his family lineage and their weapons business. It's a shitty read. But the Kenya connection is—”

  “Interesting,” Jackson said, nodding as he looked at the cover. “Yes, it's definitely interesting.” He wondered how many ghostwriters had been fired before Langhorne gave up and settled on such a turd of a title as Triumphant Gamble.

  “The hunting passages are just...” She shuddered. “They're utterly disgusting.”

  “Oh yeah? He's no Hemingway, huh?”

  “No. He's not even L. Ron. Hubbard.”

  “Damn...” said Jackson, pretending to know L. Ron. Hubbard.

  Mira might have seemed clueless about black ops, but she was otherwise one of the most intelligent, sophisticated—and attractive—clients he'd ever interviewed.

  “So,” Jackson said, opening the cover and leafing through to the table of contents. “What are the main takeaways here? Did we crack the case?”

  “Well no, I don't think we... No I'm not sure about that.”

  Jackson wasn't sure about it, either. He checked the chapter titles, and... Yep, Kenya. Chapter six.

  “I don't think anything in there exactly incriminates him.” She took an awkward sip of sparkling water, and then coughed and sniffled as if the bubbles went up her nose “But it's great for context.”

  Fuck context. Jackson was looking for the smoking gun.

  “I found some names,” she said, still sniffing, scrunching up her cute little face.

  “His hunting buddies?”

  “Yep. You wanna write them down, or...?”

  Letting the book fall to his desk, Jackson reached to his office phone and quickly dialed a number. “Hey Dez. Name check.” And then he pointed to Mira – who didn’t say anything. “Go ahead, Mira.”

  “Um... Floyd Tenenbaum?”

  “Huh?” said Jackson. “Are you asking, or...?”

  “Floyd Tenenbaum,” she said, this time with more conviction. “T-E-N-E-N-B-A-U-M”

  “You get that, Dez?”

  “I got that, Jack.”

  Jackson smiled at Mira. “Okay, what else?”

  They went through four more names before Jackson's mind began to wander. He wanted to smell her hair again. He wanted her to show up at his doorway.

  “Ted Pratten... P-R-A-T-T-E-N.”

  He wanted to see it all over again, the shape of her body, how she walked into his office. He wanted to watch her leave. He'd join her later, the two of them walking to her car in the parking garage. He knew a security camera dead spot where they could park, just real quick, where they could lean over the middle armrest, their foreheads touching, his hand starting at her knee...
>
  “And that's it,” she said, smiling.

  “Oh. Already?”

  “Jackson, it was seven names...”

  “Thanks Dez. That's a wrap.” Somewhere along her list of suspects, Jackson's face had become a little flushed. He almost felt out of breath. “Wow. That's a lot of names to remember off the top of your head,” he said while fussing with his collar.

  “Not really.”

  “Oh that's right,” he chuckled. “I forgot who I'm dealing with.”

  “What do you mean?” Mira took a sip from her drink. No bubbles up her nose this time.

  Jackson moved down to his tie, straightening the knot. “You finish this week's crossword?”

  She smiled. “Yep. Last night.”

  “I'm stuck on fourteen down.”

  “Jobim.”

  No way... She was like Rain Man.

  “Antonio Carlos Jobim” she said. “You know? Girl From Ipanema?”

  “I know who she is, but... How the hell do you do that?”

  “I don't know.” Her mouth formed a devilish grin. “It's sorta like how I live-decrypted that text, huh?”

  He laughed and handed her Langhorne's book. “Yeah, maybe.”

  She didn't reach for it. “Still don't believe me?”

  Jackson drew back the book and placed it on his desk. “Put it this way, if you really want to speed things along...” He trailed off.

  “Yeah? Of course I want to speed things along, we only have a few weeks before the--”

  “And I don't want to tell you to break the law,” he said, titling his head up and speaking loudly for the 'microphones'. “Let's get that straight. All right? I'm certainly not telling Mira Swanson to somehow access the Senator's account and pull that file into a USB stick and then bring it on over here so we can play it like a crossword.”

  “And I, Mira Swanson, state for the record that I totally would never have already thought of that. After all, I'd have no use for a encrypted file because I actually can't live-decrypt, or decrypt anything at all, including crossword puzzles.”

  Jackson laughed. He enjoyed Mira's new look. Comfortable, well-rested...

  She kept going “Though I like to tell people otherwise, mainly to garner attention and to waste the time of DARC Ops employees.”

  “All right, all right, I get it.”

  She looked back to him, smiling

  “We actually should do a crossword puzzle together sometime. Ever try that?”

  “No. It sounds... annoying.”

  “Which makes it perfect for us.” Jackson handed her the book again. This time she grabbed it and stuffed it into her purse. “We'll play,” he said. “But first, you've got some homework to do.”

  10

  Mira

  Mira enjoyed watching the subtle changes in Jackson's face, the evolving sincerity of a slowly furrowing brow, the melting away of an incredulous smile since he'd plugged her USB stick into his computer. It was a smile she both loved and hated, and her goal that day was to erase it from his repertoire. Jackson's new look, born from his attempt to read Langhorne's encrypted documents, was a squint-eyed concentration plus a fidgety bottom lip. He'd been wearing this look for the last thirty excruciatingly slow seconds.

  Eagerly awaiting his response, Mira finished the last potent drops of her espresso before placing the small cup on its saucer. From her first delicious sip, she knew it had been a mistake. Her nerves had been shot to hell since leaving work with the stolen files. But she couldn’t have just sat there doing nothing. Put a cup of cyanide in-front of her and she'd probably down that, too.

  “So?” she finally said, impelling him to break his maddening silence.

  “Well...” Jackson began, still not looking up from his screen. “You definitely got my interest.”

  His interest? She didn’t risk her career for his interest.

  “But where's the original file?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t find it. But it looked just like that. The same type of encryption.”

  “Hmm.” He finally took his eyes from the screen. “I can't believe you can read this.”

  “I know you can't.”

  He went back to the file. “Okay, so how'd you get access? Did Langhorne ask you to root around his computer again?”

  “I did it from mine, actually. I know his password.”

  “Nice. I always tell my guys that the simplest way is the best way.” Jackson did something on his computer, and a few seconds later the room began to transform into a personal theater. The window blinds shut as the lights dimmed. A projector which hung from the ceiling splashed light onto a lowering white screen.

  Mira expected one of his bookshelves to slide over and reveal a dazzlingly lit, fully stocked bar. A stiff martini would've been a nice way to negate the effects of her espresso, and the jitters of her whistle-blowing on an international conspiracy. But the transformation ended with something far less glamorous: the encrypted text of Langhorne's alleged arms deal projected against Jackson's screen.

  “Ready to do your magic?” asked Jackson.

  Shit. She really could use a drink.

  Jackson highlighted the first line of text, leaned back in his chair and said, “Let's start from the beginning.”

  “You want me to read that?”

  “If you can, yes.”

  She had never live-decrypted for an audience before. Hell she’d only managed it once before, period, and that had surprised the ever loving fuck out of her. It was slightly irritating how Jackson expected her to jump right in as if it were some well-rehearsed party gag. Even her most routine translation work had been done alone and in a relatively stress-free environment, a familiar and comfortable place where her credibility as a sane human being never hinged on a single line of text.

  “Can you see it okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Can you just stop talking for a minute?” Mira took a deep breath and pushed aside her agitation. She tried focusing on the characters, her brain willing the foreign symbols to begin their transformation into something she could interpret.

  But the magic just wasn't there.

  Was she forcing it too much? Maybe it was a different encryption... Or maybe she was just a sad, delusional person claiming to have special powers at the expense of Jackson's time and Langhorne's reputation.

  No. Let's re-focus. Let's close our eyes and breathe and refocus. And try again.

  Mira tried to get as loose and care-free as her first decryption in Langhorne's office. She tried to forget about Jackson's watchful, scrutinizing eyes, and that incredulous smile that was no doubt forming in the dark.

  “Should I give you some time alone, or...?”

  “Shhh.”

  “Sorry.”

  Just when her eyes began to ache, when the room around the screen went completely dark as if Mira and its white glow were the only two things that had ever existed, she finally felt the tinges of meaning. Tinges turned to smatterings, symbols into Swahili, and then into something she could finally say to her skeptical audience: “You need to talk to your... carpenter... and teach him better manners.”

  “Carpenter?”

  “We had small... two small leaks. On our... boat... But they are gone now. We, um... We know...”

  “Wait, are you reading past the—?”

  “Be quiet,” said Mira.

  “It says be quiet?”

  “We know you have leaks, too. Consider, uh... repairing... them. For good. As for the gold, we are... in agreement. Please send more details on... exchanging... to exchange it.” Mira took a deep breath and turned to Jackson. “Should I keep going?”

  “Hold on.” Jackson leaned over his desk to make a phone-call. He asked for someone named Tansy to stop by his office.

  “Who's that?” she asked.

  “Tansy is... someone who works for me. He knows a thing or two about cryptography.”

  “Does he know Swahili?”

  Jackson pursed his lips together and thought for a
moment. “Not that I know of.”

  “It decrypts into Swahili.”

  Jackson coughed into his fist a few times. “So, how'd you learn all these languages?”

  “Mostly through travel. My dad was a diplomat and we traveled around when he worked the different embassies. But I also picked up some languages from the people I've lived with.”

  “You mean, boyfriends?”

  “No,” Mira chuckled, watching Jackson squirm around in his seat.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t implying...uh... I dunno.”

  “What?” she asked, savoring this rare show of discomfort. “What weren’t you implying?”

  “I don't know.” Jackson coughed again. “So who were these people?”

  “My parents brought in a lot of foreign exchange students. That's how I picked up Swahili, actually. And an addiction to masala chips.” She noted his blank stare. “The Kenyan version of french fries and gravy.”

  “Your exchange students were from Kenya?”

  She nodded.

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “No. Just South Africa and Botswana. We mostly stayed in Asia.”

  “I worked in Kenya a few times. Didn’t stay long enough to learn the language, though.” He smiled. “I didn’t have ten years to spare.” Jackson paused. “Just how many languages do you know, exactly?”

  “Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Afrikaans, Swah—”

  A knock at the door interrupted Mira’s list, as well as Jackson’s growing incredulity and respect.

  “Come in,” called Jackson, as he looked above Mira's shoulder and smiled. “Tansy, meet our new code-cracking genius.”

  Mira turned around to see Tansy stroll across the room. He was clean-cut, blonde, and wore an aloof expression, plus a black hooded sweatshirt, tactical pants, and steel-toe boots. With each new introduction she kept expecting to find a stereotypical computer nerd, or at least some little speck of V-necked hipster. But the DARC Ops building was turning out to be an upscale army barracks.