Dark Secret (DARC Ops Book 1) Read online

  “Heard a lot about you,” said Tansy, sitting down next to her. “Is that from Langhorne's computer?”

  “Mira was just live-decrypting it for me,” said Jackson. “I figured you wouldn’t want to miss out.”

  Great... Now she'd have to build up her concentration again. And perform the parlor trick for a larger audience.

  She turned to Tansy and asked, “You’re a hacker, right?”

  Tansy seemed a little surprised. He gave a quick glance to Jackson.

  “He's one of our... technicians,” Jackson answered for him.

  “Can you decode that?” She asked Tansy, pointing to the screen.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I'll watch you first.” He smiled and crossed his arms.

  “Tansy, have you ever seen anything like that?” Jackson asked.

  He shook his head. “Never.”

  “Okay Mira,” said Jackson. “Let's continue. What line are we on?”

  Having been warmed up, it took Mira less time to find her concentration sweet-spot—despite the added distraction of Mr. Military hackerboy, Tansy. She translated the next line to “The second amount decrease if you continue to... have delays. April... 20 is... the hard date, deadline, for shipping, as we need groups organized and... mobilized and they can't go unarmed after April 20.” She stopped to check in on her audience. “Still with me?”

  “Yeah,” said Jackson. “I mean, I'm completely lost. But I'm following what you’re saying. How about you, Tansy?”

  “Hold on...” Tansy was staring hard at the screen. “Mira, can you repeat the first few words please?”

  “Uhh... The second amount decrease? Decreases?”

  “Okay. And what's the Swahili word for decrease?”

  “Kupunguza. K-U-P-U-N-G-U-Z-A. Do you see it?”

  “I don't know...” He kept staring at the screen. “What's... Kiasi?”

  “Amount.”

  “Can you keep going from the fourth line, please?”

  They worked together, decoding the rest of the text. Tansy was only able to get bits and pieces compared to Mira's almost fluent read, but he was at least able to look Jackson straight in the face at the end of it and say, “I think she's legit.”

  Although the vindication came insultingly late, it was a relief. More importantly, and since April 20 was just a few weeks away, they could now start taking some serious steps in thwarting Langhorne's plan.

  But there was Jackson, shaking his head at Tansy's assessment. He almost smirked.

  “What?” asked Tansy. “You don't believe me either?”

  “How can you be so sure? You had to use your phone to translate the damn thing.”

  “Jackson,” said Tansy. “Decrypting a code and translating a language are two separate things.” He looked to Mira. “Right?”

  “Not really,” she said. “But, technically yes. So I agree with the point you're trying to make.”

  “What point, exactly?” asked Jackson.

  “Who cares about the Swahili,” said Tansy. “It's the other conversion that's important. And for her to live-decrypt like that... I don't know. It's crazy, and I still don't know how she's doing it. But she is doing it.”

  Mira heard Jackson sigh in the darkened room. Just the sound of it made her feel like reaching over and choking the man, strangling away any chance that she'd ever hear another of his pompous sighs again.

  “What do you do again?” Tansy asked her. “You're translating for a senator? Jesus...” He turned to his boss. “Jackson, man, you gotta hire her. She's a beast.”

  She didn’t feel like a beast. She felt small, and lonely. What more did Jackson need?

  “Yeah,” Jackson said quietly.

  “Sounds like we know what they're using the weapons for,” said Tansy.

  “Do we really, though?” asked Jackson. “It was awfully vague.”

  “Vague?” Mira finally spoke up. “They’re arming rebels. They even gave a deadline of when.”

  “But who's doing it? And what rebels? Where?”

  “That airport,” Mira said. “Kilaguni. I remember reading it in that first file.”

  “Yeah, maybe” said Jackson, sounding a little disinterested.

  “Hey, what about those names?” Mira asked. “Are you doing anything on this case?”

  Without saying anything, Jackson reached over to his phone and made another call, asking for Dez, and then asking Dez if he'd checked the backgrounds of Langhorne's old hunting buddies yet.

  “I sure did,” said Dez.

  These men were Kenyan contacts made by the Senator over thirty years ago. What could they be up to now?

  “Two of them are dead,” said Dez.

  Not at good start.

  “Two are nobodies.”

  Meh...

  “Floyd Tenenbaum is a big time politician in Tanzania's opposition party. Ikenna Chidi owns a Kenyan goldmine. And Ted Pratten runs Kilaguni airport.”

  Kilaguni!?

  Jackson ended the call and looked at Mira, rather through her, his thousand-yard stare penetrating her skull and the walls behind it.

  “Langhorne's shipping guns to Kilaguni on April 20,” said Mira. “That's a fact. Are you on-board with me or not?”

  Jackson sighed again. But this time it didn’t annoy her.

  “I've been there,” Jackson said in a somber tone. He stood up and began to pace slowly. “Kilaguni, dirt runways. It's tiny, nondescript. That's why we used it. And it's right by the Tanzanian border.” He walked in-front of the projected text so that the symbols moved across his troubled face. And then he disappeared back into the darkness. “You better watch yourself, Mira.”

  11

  Jackson

  The usual custom for those who dared entering Matthias' office was to wince at his incredibly loud death metal music. Jackson's custom was to go one step further, unplugging the metal-head's stereo before asking him for the thousandth time, “How the hell can you listen to this, let alone get any work done with it blaring?” To which Matthias would usually respond by keeping his head down, working away at his computer as if the music had finally deafened him completely. This response at least told Jackson that he'd been legitimately working on something. On the other hand, if Jackson had interrupted his afternoon of browsing eBay or reading through gun forums, Matthias couldn’t help wading into the losing end of an argument—which was the case today, Matthias looking at him with forced indignation.

  “It helps me concentrate.”

  “On what? Dismembering a corpse?”

  “No, no. That’s a different group.”

  Jackson chuckled and watched as Matthias scrambled to either close an eBay window, or open a work window, or both simultaneously.

  “It was Norwegian black metal,” said Matthias.

  “So, burning churches, then?”

  Matthias rolled his eyes at his computer screen. “What's the problem? Could you hear it out there?”

  “No. But that's not why I soundproofed these rooms.” Jackson had designed them to protect work-related conversations ranging from sensitive to deadly serious. Not to muffle one hundred decibels of guttural screams from some skinny, leather-clad, face-painted singer. But with the stereo safely unplugged, he no longer had to worry about Matthias' dark and deafening ambiance. Instead, there were new worries, like Matthias' college dorm pig-sty of an office. Jackson finally found a chair and brushed off the clutter from the seat, magazines and empty ammo boxes sloughing to the ground. “What are you working on?”

  “Uh, stuff...”

  “Like what?” Jackson sat next to Matthias' bookshelf of old laptops. The man kept his laptops on book shelves and his books in random stacks on the floor.

  “Like, the stuff I had in the queue.”

  “Langhorne?”

  “You asked me to do that a week ago.”

  “I know your pace,” said Jackson, crossing his legs. “What do you got?”

  Matthias sighed. “Well, he's all over Kenya. Big ti
es with the government and industry leaders. Most notably, the Hazina Mining Corporation. Gold mining. And he's also working with NGOs. But it's all pretty well buried.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He's keeping a really low profile in Kenya. But he's damn busy, behind the scenes. It's a little odd because he's supposed to be concerned with East Asia, while everything I'm looking at ties him back to East Africa.” Matthias started clicking around on his computer, then typing something. “Has Mira been translating a lot of Swahili lately?”

  “No,” said Jackson. “Zero. Well, aside from Langhorne's secret documents.”

  “See? That's what I mean.”

  Jackson pulled out his smart-phone and ran an internet search on Ikenna Chidi. Before the results turned up, he asked. “Do you know who runs the Hazina Mining Corporation?”

  “Ikenna Chidi,” said Matthias.

  Jackson spotted a few news articles about the man, some about human rights abuses at his mine, some about his charitable donations to this or that NGO. A nice contradiction. “Who the hell is he?”

  “I don't know,” said Matthias. “A friend of Langhorne's. He's also got a bunch of other friends in jail. Did you know that?”

  Matthias named two people from the Mira's list of seven. They were two names that Dez had skipped over, a politician embezzler doing 15 years, and a drug-runner who died in prison under 'mysterious circumstances'. He was rumored to have been cooperating with the Kenyan Criminal Investigation Department, so Jackson didn’t think the ligature marks around his neck were too much of a mystery.

  Matthias pushed back his chair and stood up. “He's full of contradictions, isn’t he?”

  “Who?”

  “Langhorne,” Matthias said, walking over to collect the empty ammo boxes Jackson had dumped to the ground.

  “You could say that.” Jackson yawned while he watching Matthias dump various scraps of garbage into a wastebasket. “Thanks for tidying up, by the way.”

  “It's hard to believe,” said Matthias.

  “Yeah, I know. I'm watching you and I still hardly--”

  “I'm talking about Langhorne, asshole. He has Mira translating anti arms proliferation policies for Asian countries. And then has someone else drafting up encryptions of arms deals for African countries.”

  “Who do you think he's got doing the encryption?” asked Jackson.

  “You'll have to ask Tansy.”

  “All right. What can I ask you?”

  “You can ask about the weapons.”

  “Ok then,” Jackson grinned at him. “What about the weapons?”

  Matthias sat and leaned back in his chair. “I came across some interesting chatter about serial numbers. There was a story last year about his family's arms company, Langhorne-Littleton, having major production problems that kept backing up their orders. It took them months to re-tool the machines, and their stock value took a really hard hit. Anyway, they somehow ended up with a surplus of LK-491s. Assault rifles. Selective-fire, detachable magazine, 45 millimeter NATO.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jackson said, nodding. He heard about the LK-491. Mainly, that it was a piece of shit M16 rip-off.

  “Okay, so of this surplus, a bunch of them didn’t have serial numbers. And could you believe it? They went missing. How odd, right? It was a big scandal.”

  “And I'm guessing they were never found?”

  “Right,” said Matthias. “They had the FBI up their ass about it. But you know Langhorne. He's got friends.”

  Friends indeed. Pilots to fly contraband. An airport owner to grant safe landings. Any number of crooked Kenyan politicians with secret affiliations with gun-hungry terrorists. And a family business to keep everyone well-supplied.

  “Shady friends and shady coincidences,” said Jackson.

  Goddammit...

  He'd been trying hard to ignore them for Mira's sake. He even tried to quash it a few times by being the bad guy, turning her away before things with her case—and his feelings for her—ran too deep. Although he enjoyed her little office visits, he knew he'd never see her again if he'd pulled the plug. But at least she'd be safe.

  In a perfect world, someone like Jaheem would have tipped him off about Langhorne. Someone he'd been paying. Not sweet little Mira who had nothing to gain but everything to lose.

  In his perfect world, Jackson's own people would intercept the arms deal. Mira would be told to relax and go back to work while DARC Ops took care of everything. And the day she noticed Langhorne getting cuffed and stuffed, she'd come by Jackson's office and he'd ask her out on a date. They could do something boring and safe, like crosswords in the grass of the National Arboretum. A blanket, a bottle of wine, and a happily-ever-after.

  “So what are we gonna do?” asked Matthias, interrupting Jackson's imaginary date.

  “Yeah, well... Tansy's working on interrupting the deal. So we might be able to take care of all this right from our office. And then, uh...” Jackson couldn’t get Mira's pretty smile out of his head.

  “Yeah? Then what? Are we using Mira?”

  “Using her?”

  “What?”

  “We can't expose Mira,” Jackson frowned.

  “I know.”

  “That's the most important thing here.”

  “Of course,” said Matthias.

  “No. It's not just 'of course'.”

  Matthias stared blankly at his boss.

  “Matty, you've only been out of the FBI for a few years.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don't think you've really seen what can happen to whistle-blowers from the other side. Especially with arms dealers. They'll dig her up and snuff her out, where ever she is. And they won't care that she's a civilian, or a woman. It’s imperative that we do everything we can to protect her, and that starts with you doing some counter-surveillance.”

  “I'm on that?”

  “We're both on that.”

  “Okay,” said Matthias. “Starting when?”

  “Yesterday.” Jackson stood up and looked around the room. “And can you actually clean this place properly? Looks like a shit hole in here.” Jackson turned to the door and left the room without saying anything further. He was too angry. Too emotional. He marched down the east wing hallway, a vague feeling of dread gnawing at him. One way or another Mira was going to get herself—or perhaps both of them—killed. Or at least completely ruin him through some romantically catastrophic bullshit.

  “Hey Charlotte,” he said, not breaking stride as he passed by the reception desk. “Have you heard anything from Africa? Any strange calls or anything? Or any strange calls from anywhere?”

  She giggled at his questions.

  “Yeah I know. I'm going nuts.”

  “No,” she said. “It's been pretty quiet today.”

  Jackson thanked her with a wink and continued on to the west wing. Although he actually was going nuts, he at least had to hide it from his staff.

  Smile and wink. Everything's totally normal.

  He smiled and continued down the hall to Tansy's office, where he poked his head in the doorway to see an office quite unlike Matthias' clusterfuck. It was spartan, immaculately clean. Not a single magazine or book or even paper to be found anywhere, the benefits of Tansy's work being purely digital. Best of all, no music. Just the humming of cooling fans for his multiple beefed-up processors.

  “Yo, Tansy,” called Jackson. And out came a curly blonde head from behind a wall of computer monitors. “Who the hell is working with Langhorne to encrypt these things?”

  “I don't know,” said Tansy, ducking his head back behind his work. “I was about to ask why they're not already on your pay-roll.”

  “Maybe they are.”

  “No way,” Tansy chuckled. “The work's too good.”

  “It didn’t fool Mira.”

  “So? I don't know what could.”

  “Osprey, maybe?”

  “I dunno. You're supposed to hire her so I can find out.”


  “Yeah, right.” Jackson wanted to see more of the woman, but definitely not as a member of staff. He could think of far better ways of seeing more of Mira.

  “We'd make a good pair, Jackson.”

  “All right. Take it easy.”

  “Hacker and cryptologist,” said Tansy, nodding so that the top of his head kept appearing above the monitors. “Some old-school new-school shit right there.”

  “So is that how Langhorne's doing it? Using a hacker to set up the messages and a cryptologist to decode it?”

  “Or it's just a program.”

  Jackson laughed. “Oh, is that what I should do? Replace you with a program?”

  “If all you were trying to do was send secret messages? Yeah.”

  “Sounds cheaper,” said Jackson.

  “And more reliable. Just get a program or a key in place. The only problem is that someone like me can come along and fuck it up.”

  “Do you think that's more likely than there being some evil Kenyan version of Mira working on the other side?”

  “That's what I'm working on, Boss.”

  “All right,” said Jackson. “And that's why I'll leave you alone.” He slapped the side of the doorway twice with his hand as if saying, “Go get 'em,” before spinning around to the hallway and walking back to the reception area. Just as he jabbed his knuckle against the elevator button, Jackson heard the Charlotte’s chipper voice.

  “Still nothing from Africa,” she said from behind her desk. “But that reporter called again.”

  * * *

  “What's the scoop, Jack?”

  “Ah, you know, just some boring capitol news.” Jackson closed his blinds to the harsh low rays of a late afternoon sun. “Treason. Conspiracy. Illegal arms trade.”

  “Go on.”

  “Done by a US Senator.”

  “Mmm...” The woman's sultry moan oozed out of his phone's speaker. “I like that.”

  “I thought you would,” said Jackson, wondering how many years it's been since he'd looked at her face in dim light.

  “I really do, Jackson. Tell me more?”

  Annica was a bad girl. She was also an investigative journalist at the Washington Post and a key media contact for Jackson. It was all a matter of walking along a tight-rope...