Agent X, стр. 37
He knew that what had happened to Dellasanti wasn’t Langston’s fault, but right now the investigation had been brought to a halt. Vail had no choice but to proceed by himself. He’d given Langston and the others the serial-number possibility because he knew that the combinations would be infinite and would keep them busy while he checked out what he’d seen in the photos.
He parked outside the off-site and went upstairs. He needed to recheck Calculus’s movements the day he’d originally planted Dellasanti’s package in the park. After putting it under the bridge, he had walked around the area for a couple of minutes, not something spies do. The longer you’re there, the greater your chances of being connected to whatever you left behind. Get in fast, get out faster.
He turned on the computer and went to the wall with a pencil and paper. All the coordinates and times at the park varied little as Calculus moved around those few minutes after being at the bridge. Then Vail went back to the computer and linked onto the Bureau satellite. After zooming down into the park, he carefully manipulated the mouse until he could see Calculus’s exact path that day. Did it indicate that he’d hidden something else? Something, even under torture, he hadn’t told the Russians about? It would be a way for a dying man to get even with them. Retracing the movements once more on the computer, Vail memorized the terrain Calculus had moved through.
It was a little over an hour’s drive to the park in Maryland in the early-afternoon traffic. He parked in the same lot where James Dellasanti had been killed the day before. At the entrance to a footpath, he saw small traces of blood where the body had lain on the ground. He looked around and decided there were a number of different locations from which the bomb could have been detonated.
The footbridge where the package of evidence had been secreted was about a quarter of a mile in, about a five-minute walk along the winding path. Included in the pictures he had seen that morning was a shot of the exact spot where the plastic-wrapped material had been picked up. It was an all-metal bridge, cleverly constructed almost entirely of two-inch-square steel tubes. About twenty feet long, it sat less than two feet above a small brook, which was dry this time of year.
He stepped down into the streambed and tried to re-create the angle at which the photographer had taken the picture. What had caught his attention was a small mark on one of the five steel tubes that ran under the bridge’s flooring pieces as supports. At least he thought it was a mark. It was hard to tell in the photograph; it looked like an elongated checkmark or a single-barb arrow, pointing down. He had seen similar ink markings in engineering drawings, and since Calculus was a trained engineer, it could have been made by him. With each clue left for the FBI, subtlety had become the Russian agent’s signature. And the mark had been the same medium blue as Vail had encountered twice before on items left by Calculus.
There it was. He moved closer. It was an abbreviated arrow drawn in blue marker, its line thin and barely noticeable. But pointing to what? There was only about a foot between the sloping stream bank underneath it and the supporting steel tube. Reaching under it, he probed it with his fingers but couldn’t feel anything. He checked the arrow again and wondered if it meant that something was buried in the streambed directly below.
The ground was mostly sand and stone, now stiffened by winter temperatures. Any attempt to dig it up would have been difficult to disguise, and to his eye the streambed appeared undisturbed. He looked more closely at the arrow. The square tubing had rounded corners, and the arrow was drawn completely on the side except for the point, which wrapped slightly underneath the tube. Vail got down on his back and shimmied under the bridge. Drawn in the same blue ink on the underside of the tube were two concentric circles inside an oval, a simple rendering of an eyeball.
Vail stood up and took off his topcoat, brushing the back of it while he thought. After a few moments, he decided he had no idea what Calculus had intended. Maybe it was one of those instances of being too close to something to accurately assess it.
Walking back fifty feet along the bank of the small stream, he examined the structure. The steel tubes supporting the walkway were completely hollow, and from that distance he could actually see light coming through the one with the arrow drawn on it.
That was it.
He hurried back to the bridge and squatted down so he could look through the marked tube. The only thing directly in his line of sight, thirty yards on the other side, was a sign marking the path in case of snowfall. Because its purpose was seasonal, it was set in a concrete-filled rubber tire that allowed it to be taken away and stored during warmer weather. Apparently Calculus had moved it so it could be sighted through the steel tube.
Walking over to the sign, Vail tipped it over. The base was hollow. He reached up under it and could feel a small plastic-wrapped object taped to the inside. He pulled it out and opened it. It was a computer flash drive, a device about the size of a thumb that was capable of storing a large amount of digital information. Its shell was plastic and on the back side, handwritten in Cyrillic, was the word
Vail put the device in his pocket, along with the plastic it had been wrapped in, and headed for his car.
As he came off the footpath into the parking lot, he was stunned to see Langston and Kalix standing next to their car. There were four other cars in the lot, each with a lone driver—FBI surveillance.
Vail couldn’t believe that he’d been followed and hadn’t noticed. He scanned the sky looking for a Bureau airplane. There didn’t appear to be any, at least not any longer. After his three years as an agent in Detroit, he had always been surveillance-conscious. Even when he returned to the everyday existence of a bricklayer, he couldn’t help being vigilant. But, more important, he wondered what had made them follow him. He’d given them a plausible distraction, which apparently they hadn’t bitten on. Had he underestimated them? Then he thought of Kate. She was probably the only one capable of figuring out what he was up to. She had even accused him of it after the meeting. But it was hard for him to believe that she would have given him up.
Without a word, Vail walked over to Langston and handed him the flash drive. “And whatever it was wrapped in,” the assistant director demanded.
Vail pulled the section of plastic out of his coat pocket and gave it to him. “I guess I underestimated you,” Vail said. It was a statement of apparent surrender carefully designed to judge Langston’s reaction, to see if following him had been his idea or someone else’s.
“One of arrogance’s consequences,” Langston said, his response giving no clues.
Vail smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Then it would appear that my work here is done.” He took off his Glock and handed it to Kalix, along with his credentials. “As always, working with management has been a delight.”
“The real question is not whether you underestimated us but whether you overrated yourself,” Langston said. “Please be out of the off-site by noon tomorrow.”
Vail watched the two men get into their car and speed out of the lot. The four surveillance vehicles fell into line behind them and within seconds were gone.
17
Once Vail reached the highway, he stayed in the right lane and drove at the posted speed limit, forcing cars to stream around him so he could lose himself in thought. He still couldn’t believe that he’d missed the surveillance. But being followed wasn’t the issue. He was using it to avoid thinking about the possibility that Kate had told Langston of his deception. Someone had figured out what he was doing, and the others in the room didn’t seem to possess the aptitude to get a read on him that easily. Kate knew how, given the slightest opportunity, he gladly sent bosses in the wrong direction. If it had been anyone but her, he would just have confronted the person, but he realized now that he was afraid what he might find out.