Wet Work Read online

  Baldwin could not help chuckling at that. Though he and Skouris only had been partners since shortly after the arrival of the 4400, it had taken little time for the duo to develop not only a pleasant working relationship but also the friendly ribbing banter that Baldwin always had believed was a vital component of solid, comfortable teamwork. Despite their disparate backgrounds—he a former cop and FBI agent, she a scientist specializing in microbiology and epidemiology at the Centers for Disease Control before coming to NTAC—in short order they were learning to merge their strengths, experience, and perspectives into an effective collaboration. Egos did not enter the equation, instead set aside for the good of the mission being accomplished. Though he was not yet ready to admit it to Skouris herself, Baldwin already considered her among the best partners with whom he had been paired.

  Returning his attention to the business at hand, Baldwin placed his hands on his hips as he studied the scene. “I thought you said we had security camera footage?”

  Skouris nodded. “Galanter’s on his way with it now,” she said, hooking her thumb over her shoulder toward the three-story building behind her. With its faux-brick façade and large tinted windows through which Baldwin could almost see the security gates designed to prevent anyone from gaining entry, the building housed a branch office of a large regional bank. According to the preliminary report Baldwin had received, it was fortunate happenstance that the incident had taken place within range of the stationary video camera that was part of the automated teller machine built into the structure’s front wall. The bank manager already had reported that the camera had not captured the entire incident, but perhaps it would be enough to give Baldwin and Skouris some initial clue as to what had happened here.

  “Ryland warned us that there would be people who might act out against the 4400,” Baldwin said. “Could it be something like that?”

  Crossing her arms, Skouris replied, “We’ve both read the reports about certain fringe groups who consider them a threat.” She shrugged. “It’s certainly not impossible.”

  Baldwin considered the notion. During the weeks the returnees had spent in quarantine, local and national news broadcasts had covered rallies and speeches staged by a few such groups. The leader of a religious cult based in Kansas had even likened the 4400 to a plague sent by God as punishment for society’s acceptance of continuing moral decay, which in his mind included homosexuality, premarital sex, and the instant replay review rules in professional football.

  I may have to give him that last one, Baldwin mused.

  “Agent Baldwin? Agent Skouris?” a voice called out from behind them, and Baldwin turned to see David Galanter, one of NTAC’s computer and electronics forensics technicians, emerging from the bank with a laptop computer cradled in the crook of his right arm. Having compressed his stout frame into a wrinkled pair of khaki cargo pants along with an equally disheveled blue dress shirt and a garish, multihued tie that made Baldwin wish he could go color-blind on cue, Galanter presented—as always—the appearance of someone who selected his daily attire from piles of discarded clothing destined for charitable donation or the trash. What the man lacked in fashion sense, he more than made up for with formidable technical skills, which was all Baldwin cared about at the moment.

  “You’ve got the tape?” he asked as Galanter stepped closer, noting the disapproving frown on the other man’s face as he asked the question.

  “It’s all digital in there,” the tech replied, holding up the laptop in his beefy right hand. “Got it all right here, what there was of it, anyway.” Without waiting for instructions to do so, Galanter opened the portable computer and tilted the screen so that Baldwin and Skouris could better see it. Baldwin recognized the familiar features of a common audio/video software presentation application, with a video file opened and paused in the playback window. “I’ve got it queued up to just before Alicia Colbern enters the frame for the first time. There’s no audio, but I don’t think you’ll need it.”

  Galanter pressed the control to restart the video, and Baldwin watched a dark blue or black sedan pass across the camera’s view. It stopped before moving completely out the frame, its rear fender and trunk still visible. Then the now-familiar woman with the short red hair, Alicia Colbern, appeared, wearing gray slacks and an off-white pullover shirt with long sleeves and carrying a knapsack slung over her left shoulder. She stopped walking as two people, a male driver and a female passenger, exited the car.

  “Antennae,” Skouris said, pointing to the car’s trunk on the screen. “Cops?”

  Shaking his head, Galanter said, “Wait for it.”

  Baldwin sighed in minor frustration, but let it slide as the video continued to play. On the screen, a conversation seemed to be taking place between Colbern and the two new arrivals. With one look at their attire, Baldwin knew there was no way they were beat cops or even plainclothes detectives. “They’re wired,” he said. “Check her right ear.”

  “Feds?” Skouris asked.

  Before Galanter could answer, the sedate scene on the monitor dissolved into chaos, with Colbern flinging her knapsack at the female. The man was reaching into his suit jacket, presumably for a gun, but Colbern was on him, striking him in the face and causing him to stumble away from the curb, dropping his weapon in the process.

  “Jesus,” Baldwin breathed, and that was all he had time for as Colbern turned toward the woman, who had drawn her own sidearm and assumed a firing stance. Baldwin saw the recoil as she fired the pistol from nearly point-blank range—and missed—followed by an apparent defect in the video as Colbern seemed to close the distance that separated her and the other woman in the blink of an eye, disarming and subduing her with what he recognized as practiced efficiency in hand-to-hand combat.

  “It has to be a glitch,” Galanter said, as though anticipating the question. “I’ll check it out when I break down the whole thing back at the lab.” Baldwin said nothing as he watched the man Colbern already had wounded move in for another attack, which she defeated with more astonishing speed and agility, laying him out on the sidewalk in scarcely a few heartbeats.

  “Who the hell is she?” Skouris asked, her expression a mixture of shock and confusion. On the monitor, Colbern paused over her handiwork for a few moments, staring at something offscreen. Then she ran across the frame and out of sight, leaving the security camera to linger on the fallen forms of her apparent adversaries.

  “Well, she’s not who she said she was,” Baldwin replied.

  Pointing to his laptop, Galanter said, “Hang on. There’s one more thing.” He fast-forwarded the video, bypassing what essentially was nearly a minute of still-life footage before another car, also a dark sedan, came into view. Two more people jumped out of this car, both males, coming to the assistance of Colbern’s unmoving attackers.

  Definitely Feds, Baldwin decided as he absorbed what he had just seen, but who? It certainly was possible that the CIA, FBI, or some other group from the vast alphabet soup of government agencies had taken an active interest in one of the 4400, but none of them had approached NTAC. Background checks had been run against the returnees and a few had even turned up criminal records, but those mostly were for minor infractions. Of course, the review had only been comprehensive with respect to those who had been taken more recently. Information on returnees taken more than thirty years back had been of varying quantity and detail, and a few had come back with no results whatsoever.

  “Galanter,” Baldwin said, waving toward the other man’s laptop, “go back and see what else you can dig out of that. License plate, a clear head shot for the facial recognition databases, whatever you can find.” He was doubtful that anything useful could be gleaned from the low-quality video, but that was why people like Galanter were in the computer labs in the first place.

  The tech nodded. “We’re on it, boss.” He smiled as he gathered his equipment, no doubt enthused by the challenge of prying something of worth from the video footage.

  As Gal
anter left, Skouris looked to Baldwin. “What do we do?”

  Baldwin shrugged. “Not much, at least not for the moment.” Even with the 4400 released from quarantine, it was not as though NTAC’s workload had diminished to any significant degree. With the returnees heading for different locations around the country, the regional NTAC offices were responsible for monitoring those who opted to settle within their areas of responsibility. The Seattle office would be keeping tabs on nearly eighty returnees who had elected to stay in the area, along with more than a hundred who had chosen to live in the quarantine center until they got themselves a better handle on their current situation. Most of those people had been taken decades ago and had no apparent remaining family, thus they had so far been unsuccessful in locating someone with whom they could connect from their former life. In addition to handling weekly updates from each of the returnees, the NTAC investigative teams would continue to investigate the puzzle of why the 4400 had been abducted—and returned—in the first place.

  “We can put in a call to the regional office wherever she’s headed,” Baldwin continued. “Florida, I think it was. Ask them to let us know when she checks in.”

  “If she checks in,” Skouris countered. “I read her file, Tom. It says she was an accountant in Tampa. How many accountants do you know who can disable two armed opponents without breaking a sweat?”

  “No argument here.” Adjusting his holstered Glock so that it sat more comfortably on his right hip, Baldwin said, “We can put some feelers out to other agencies, too, but something tells me that’s a dead end even before we get started. Whoever was after Alicia Colbern, they wanted to do it on their own terms, and to hell with us.”

  It was a mystery, and Baldwin hated mysteries. In this line of work, the unknown and the unexplained had a way of conjuring further problems, which in turn might evolve into warnings and alarms before blowing up in your face, or biting you on the ass.

  “Maybe we let them out too soon, after all,” Skouris said, and Baldwin saw the doubt in her eyes.

  Baldwin grunted in disagreement. “We had no right to keep them, Diana.”

  “Not because we think they’re a threat,” she replied, “but maybe for their own protection.”

  This was not the first time the topic had been debated. There was nothing for them to do save abide by the instructions they were given, and at the time the decision was handed down, Baldwin had deemed it a waste of time and energy to question the orders.

  Now, however, he had to wonder if Skouris was right all along.

  Yeah, Baldwin decided, I really do love my job.

  NINE

  CIA HEADQUARTERS LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  NICHOLAS MCFARLAND STARED at the report in his hands, reading it for the fourth time and still not believing any of the words printed on the page.

  “She initiated the confrontation?” he asked, feeling his jaw tighten in confusion. “Even after you verified your identity?”

  From where she stood before the deputy director’s desk, her right arm in a sling thanks to the separated shoulder she had received as a result of her scuffle with Lona Callahan the previous day, Agent Deborah Wright nodded. “Yes, sir. There was no question she understood the protocols. She issued the correct challenges and recognized the expected responses.”

  “We explained why we were there, sir,” added her partner, Agent Richard Malick, “and she appeared to comprehend that.” Reaching up, he touched the X-shaped bandage adorning his broken nose. “She simply wasn’t interested in coming with us.”

  “An understatement, by the looks of things,” McFarland replied, sympathizing with the bruises on Malick’s face and the heavy swelling around his eyes. Wright also sported other souvenirs of their altercation, in the form of scrapes and abrasions along the side of her neck and face. In all honesty, McFarland was baffled that the two agents were even still alive, given that she had killed in self-defense on more than one occasion. To the best of his knowledge, however, such actions had never been taken against American intelligence or law enforcement personnel.

  Thank God for small favors.

  Malick shook his head, “She knows her stuff, I’ll give her that. I’ve never seen anybody move that fast.”

  “She was a blur,” Wright said, her brow furrowing, “like she anticipated when I was going to fire and ducked out of the way just in time. Damnedest thing I ever saw.”

  “Well, I for one am happy you missed,” McFarland said, reaching for the ashtray on his desk and retrieving the smoldering cigarette there. “I ordered you to bring her in alive.” Before Wright could say anything, he raised his free hand. “I know you were defending yourself, but next time find a way that doesn’t involve your pistol.” Bringing the cigarette to his lips, he inhaled long and deep in defiance of four or five regulations prohibiting smoking anywhere on the premises. He did not smoke at home, mostly due to his wife’s demands that he quit altogether. Linda knew he indulged at work, and in truth he had reduced the number of cigarettes he smoked during the day to less than five, a drastic change from the two packs per day he had puffed up until just three months ago. It was only during the longer, more stressful days that McFarland tended to backpedal on his promise to rid himself of the habit once and for all.

  Days like today, for example.

  “This doesn’t make any damned sense,” he said, more to himself than either of the agents. “She had to know we were trying to bring her in.” Granted, debriefings in the past had been held at locations of Callahan’s choosing, and usually only with McFarland or one of the other handlers cleared to oversee her activities. Regardless, this situation was markedly different, which McFarland would have expected Callahan to recognize, for her own safety to say nothing of operational security. Even after her twelve-year absence, some things still needed to remain secrets.

  In her case, he reminded himself, pretty much everything will have to stay classified. Forever. If the details of even one of Lona Callahan’s Agency-approved missions ever were to see the light of day, Lynn Norton, Fred Morehouse, and McFarland himself, the surviving officers responsible for overseeing her activities, would likely go to prison for the rest of their lives.

  “She could’ve thought we were trying to neutralize her,” Malick suggested after a moment. “It’s been twelve years. Maybe she figured you had no further use for her.”

  Rising from his high-backed leather chair, McFarland grunted his disagreement as he made his way around the oversized mahogany desk and across his spacious office to the set of three bay windows that formed his office’s outer wall. “Don’t take this personally, Malick,” he said, pausing to take another drag from his cigarette, “but I’d have you killed before her. We invested far too much time and resources into cultivating her. Even though she was a freelance asset, she never failed to come through on any mission she was given. She may have been a mercenary, but she was a damned loyal mercenary, even if it was only to the money we were paying her.”

  “Besides,” Wright added, “it may have been twelve years for us, but for her that was all yesterday.” She paused, frowning. “Or six weeks ago. Whatever.”

  McFarland nodded. Whether six weeks in quarantine or six seconds separating her from 1992, he felt that it surely could not have been enough time to convince Callahan to desert her benefactors, and in such violent fashion.

  Still, the agents had raised an interesting point. After twelve years, Callahan likely deduced that her support network was gone, and she would have been correct. It had been disbanded years earlier, after it was assumed that she either was dead, captured by a foreign government, or simply had opted for “retirement.” All that remained of her original chain of command was McFarland himself, and the files he kept buried in the deepest, darkest hole he could find.

  Standing before the windows and looking out over the wooded terrain surrounding the CIA Headquarters complex, McFarland shook his head and released a tired sigh. The leaves had turned weeks ago and many of the trees alread
y were shedding, draping the forest floor with an immense, vibrant quilt. Fall always had been the season he welcomed with anticipation. It was his favorite time of the year, which often brought with it change and new opportunities or challenges.

  Yeah. That’s one way of putting it.

  “Well,” he said, stepping away from the window, “for whatever reason, she broke contact, and who the hell knows where she’s gotten to by now. What about this motorcycle rider who picked her up? Do we know anything about her?”

  Wright shook her head. “A woman, but the images we pulled from street cameras didn’t match anything in our databases. She’s a ghost.”

  “Damn,” McFarland hissed between gritted teeth. “It has to be someone she knew before, somebody she managed to contact while in quarantine. Find out from NTAC who she listed as next of kin or someone to notify.” He knew it was a fruitless suggestion that likely would lead to a false identity and a dead end, but the lead had to be followed even if it ran straight into a brick wall.

  Reaching for the ashtray on his desk, he ground out the stub of his expended cigarette before retrieving a fresh one from his desk’s center drawer. He could almost feel Linda’s disapproving scowl as he lit up, but right now that was the least of his problems.

  “Speaking of NTAC,” he said after taking the first drag on the fresh cigarette and blowing a plume of smoke into the air above his head, “what do they know? Your report said you were picked up by a security camera. Do we have containment on this?”

  Malick, uncomfortable in the smoke-filled room if his eyes were any indication, replied, “The camera caught the bulk of our fight with her. NTAC’s investigating, but they don’t have much to go on. I checked the footage, but it didn’t have a good shot of the bike she left on. No way to run a license plate.”