Rogue Faction Part 1 Page 9

  Six of one, half–a-dozen of the other.

  The Red Queen was happy, so Cyrus let it go.

  “I’m really more concerned about the failure of the first part of the mission,” she said, as her glare fell upon Boone.

  Cyrus could tell by the complete lack of reaction from Boone that he’d considered her focus to be only a matter of time.

  It was clear that the Red Queen expected Boone to explain himself. But since she hadn’t actually asked a question, Cyrus knew Boone wouldn’t play her game.

  “Fine, let us try it this way,” she muttered, also realizing Boone wouldn’t respond to anything less than a direct question. “What the hell happened out there? Why was your part of the operation so far behind schedule?”

  Boone shrugged. The full report had been submitted, even before their flight back from the EU had touched down in the States. Everyone at the table was already well versed on everything that had happened, Cyrus knew. The fact that she was rubbing their noses in these details was only a matter of posturing.

  “As Cyrus explained,” Boone said, “situations in the field are fluid. This one was simply more fluid than most.”

  When Boone left it at that, Cyrus found himself suppressing a grin. Boone could have pointed out that his team had successfully captured Kang Woo-jin, as well as recovered the thermobaric device, but he didn’t bother. For his part, Cyrus knew that the loss of Pete Jenson and the injuries sustained by Team Two were a sensitive subject for Boone. He just hoped that the Red Queen was wise enough not to press those particular buttons.

  Luke Reid cleared his throat and placed his hand atop the short stack of papers on the table before him. “There’s no such thing as a routine field operation,” he said, with a tone of finality. “We can plan all we want, but there will always be at least some degree of chance involved. That’s why we need our best men out there.”

  Reid was clearly doing his best to shift the discussion to a more productive track. “Since we already have three new cases to deal with, why don’t we have at ‘em?” he urged.

  The man’s attempt to move things along earned him a disapproving look from the Red Queen—the gesture wasn’t lost on Cyrus. The truth was, it was more than he expected from Reid. The attempt to waylay the boss’s diatribe was impressive.

  Maybe he did it out of respect for Boone? He was smart enough to know it would be good to have Boone owe him one.

  “Fine,” the Red Queen acquiesced. “What’s our first case?”

  Flipping open the first of the folders before him, Thomas Clayton joined the conversation for the first time. He’d kept his figurative ‘head down’ through the entire prior ordeal.

  “We have an ecological group sabotaging industrial machinery down in Florida,” Clayton explained.

  This brought a derisive snort from Reid. “Since when does something like that land on our desks?”

  The rest of the group began examining copies of the file in question, as Clayton explained the situation.

  “The FBI has uncovered multiple links tying the group’s funding to bank accounts ultimately belonging to China and North Korea,” he began.

  “North Korea again?” This surprised even Boone. “What would they want with a group of tree-huggers?”

  Clayton nodded. “The money trail would’ve been impossible to track given conventional technologies, but our friends over at The Well have been using their new toy. Apparently, they were running some new tests and turned up this little nugget of information.”

  “Excuse me?” Charlie Greene chimed in. “What part of Florida does the ecological group currently operate?”

  It was an odd opening question, but Cyrus thought he knew why their logistics specialist had focused on that fact.

  Luke Reid, on the other hand, wasn’t seeing what Cyrus and Charlie were. Turning in his chair, he looked at Charlie as if she’d just appeared out of thin air. “What in the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  Raising a hand to mask the smirk that had instantly spread across his face, Cyrus waited for Charlie to respond. But when her complexion paled at Reid’s cold statement and unkind words, Cyrus realized that she wasn’t yet accustomed to the man’s caustic ways.

  Charlie swallowed hard. She looked like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, clearly unsure how to react given the circumstances.

  “I ran into Charlie in the hall on the way here,” Cyrus interjected. “We discussed this case briefly. She explained that, given the influx of money from communist states and the group’s geographic location, we should look closer. There are likely links to smuggling from Cuba, since it’s also geographically convenient and there are similar ideologies involved.”

  While all eyes were on Cyrus, he saw Charlie take a slow, deep breath, and then another. She was finding her center. He just needed to buy her a few more moments.

  “And with Florida already overrun with drug smugglers,” Charlie said, as she jumped back into the conversation quicker than Cyrus expected. “Authorities are hardly going to look too closely at the local tree-huggers, as you call them, when they have real criminals to worry about. It sort of makes a local ecological group the ideal front for smugglers moving shipments into the United States.”

  Monica flipped through a folder that presumably contained additional case information. “She’s right,” she concluded. “The group’s activity has been confined to the southern portion of the state. There could very well be a link to Cuba. It’s worth looking into.”

  Everyone at the table considered the unorthodox theory. Even Reid, sitting beside Charlie, seemed to be reconsidering the idea with renewed interest. “That’s actually not a bad plan,” he admitted. “But what would three communist countries be working to smuggle into the U.S.?”

  “Unknown,” Clayton replied. “But that’s the case before us. We need to decide what to do with it. Do we take it on ourselves and open an investigation, or is this something better left to another agency? Maybe the D.E.A., since they already have a strong presence in that area and a great degree of latitude with which to operate? Or perhaps the A.T.F.? There’s a good chance the Reds are smuggling some kind of weapons. Maybe even supplying them to some sort of anti-government groups already on U.S. soil. If that’s the case, the A.T.F. will know the players. Hell, we could even throw this one over to the CIA and let them begin the investigation with the financial transactions being made outside the country.”

  As the conversation shifted into the plusses and minuses of keeping the investigation in-house versus sending it off to another agency, Cyrus’s attention returned to the stack of files on the table before him. This operation would be a quagmire of political red tape. He would stay as far away from it as he could. Maybe one of the other cases would be more to his liking.

  Chapter 13

  Memorial Tower

  8:50 am

  The debate continued. It wasn’t unusual for these meetings to run for hours, but Boone hoped this wouldn’t be one such event. He was jet lagged and already feeling the physical aches and pains that followed every mission that involved combat. Plus, his patience was starting to fray. To start the morning with Monica second-guessing his mission when he was literally just off the return flight, had nearly been too much. And when she’d started the meeting by crawling up Cyrus’s ass? Boone had stifled the urge to throttle the woman right then.

  Still, Cyrus had handled Monica with more professionalism than Boone thought anyone could muster given the circumstances. In fact, the more he considered it, Boone realized that the young agent had played her like a finely tuned instrument. First of all, Cyrus hadn’t cowed to her condescending tone. Doing so would’ve laid the groundwork for the future of their professional relationship. Nor had he shown her too much patience. That would’ve been a nearly equal mistake. Instead, Cyrus had briefly explained the facts as they’d appeared in his written report, and then stood by them. Best of all, when she pressed him as to why things had not gone to pla
n, Cyrus had rather eloquently explained to her that, in the field, shit happens!

  That confrontation alone had brought Boone’s morning out of the gutter. He’d been relying on a massive infusion of caffeine to sustain him, but that little display had done far more to brighten his dark mood.

  Even the operational questions Monica leveled at him were a minimal irritation by that point. Monica had started the meeting confrontationally. She was a live grenade just looking to go off in their faces. Yet, right out of the gate Cyrus managed to place the pin back in that figurative grenade, effectively pacifying her for the remainder of the meeting.

  As Boone sat there content in his amusement—the discussion surrounding the Florida based ecological group being nothing more than white noise in his ears—his eyes fell on the group’s newest member. He hadn’t even known that Joe Lieberman was being replaced. He had no idea when Charlie Greene had taken over the position. It was a rare situation when a field operative needed to speak with the head of Logistics. The Logistics Department contained several dozen agents. Even Boone didn’t know exactly how many people were on staff, but an entire floor of the building was dedicated to them. All he knew was that they were available 24/7, and the field operations guys had immediate access to them from anywhere in the world. These were the people who could arrange transportation, accommodations, safe houses, munitions—just about anything a field agent needed. In many ways, they were an operative’s lifeline. They made sure the grunts had the tools they needed on the job.

  That Cyrus seemed to have hit it off with the young woman wasn’t at all surprising. The kid had a way with people. At least, when he wanted to. Boone had seen him go from a stone cold killer to someone who could sell an air-conditioner to an Eskimo in the blink of an eye. It was one of the reasons he was so efficient undercover. He could be anyone he needed to be.

  It also wasn’t lost on Boone how the kid had pulled Charlie’s butt out of the proverbial fire, either. She’d frozen when Reid got in her face. And while Boone was fairly sure that the conversation Cyrus claimed to have had with Charlie had never taken place; nonetheless, the kid had been on the same wavelength as the young woman and covered for her brilliantly.

  Now she had settled in and seemed exceptionally comfortable with the conversation regarding the potential placement of agents in southern Florida.

  Boone suddenly realized that he no longer had any idea what was being said. He had fully tuned out the group.

  Caffeine. I need more caffeine, if I’m going to make it through this damn meeting…

  Chapter 14

  Memorial Tower

  8:55 am

  The group was still discussing different methods for dealing with the ecological group, but Cyrus had tuned out that conversation. He was most often tasked with the cases that no one knew how to handle. There was no shortage of options when it came to the issue in Florida, so he moved on to the remaining cases. Due to the time crunch, he’d never had a chance to review the associated files.

  The second report did little to pique his interest. It looked like an open and shut case of industrial espionage. There were high value properties involved, but none of them fell under the Coalition’s purview. The case centered on plans for a revolutionary new mining device—essentially intellectual property. It was a deep core drilling and mining technology that would allow for the extraction of rare earth elements from the depths of the earth that were never before reachable. It was an interesting case, but it was largely a legal issue in the end. Not the sort of case that necessitated Coalition involvement.

  The Coalition’s mandate was varied and wide ranging, but many of the cases Cyrus had been tasked with involved cutting edge science or technology; the sort of new breakthroughs that had world-changing ramifications. Case in point, the mission he had just returned from: Kang Woo-jin, a North Korean brokering a deal that included a revolutionary new thermobaric explosive. It was a fuel-air bomb that was an order of magnitude more devastating than any explosive its size, and it was undetectable using any current tests.

  And while the operation had spiraled into something larger than he or Boone had originally intended, the opportunity to capture Aubin Sutter, Kang Woo-jin, and Eartzie the bomber, was simply too appealing to pass up. Curiously, the Red Queen quickly adjusted the mission parameters and made Eartzie the primary target of Cyrus’s undercover operation. Certainly things had gone a little off the rails before the end of the mission, but in the end they had brought two of the three men back alive, closed down Sutter’s operation, and captured two tons of illegal armaments. The fact that a deranged bomb maker didn’t make it through the operation could hardly be considered a strike against the mission’s success. They would chalk it up as another win and move on.

  Cyrus would’ve preferred one good night’s sleep in his own bed before being assigned to the next case, but that didn’t seem like it was meant to be.

  Reading through the rest of the file detailing the industrial espionage investigation, Cyrus made a note in the corner of the manila folder. He then moved on to the last of the three case files.

  Debate over the Florida operation continued without him.

  The third case caught his attention from page one. His blood flowed faster as he read further. It was exactly the sort of case that fell within the Coalition’s purview, and just the type of strange situation that he found interesting on a personal level.

  According to the information provided, a Russian scientist had been experimenting with different ways to augment human memory. And though the file didn’t detail as much specifically, based on the invasive details in the report, Cyrus guessed that the Coalition had been keeping an eye on the scientist for some time.

  The name of the scientist in question: Rutger Voss. Born and raised in Russia, the man had studied a wide range of specialties at universities all over the world. He even did post-doctorate work at Cal-Tech, in the United States. Following the death of his wife approximately twenty years prior, Voss had taken his family and left where he was working in Germany, moving to the Isle of Kapros. He’d resided there ever since.

  Looking further, Cyrus was both surprised and impressed to find Voss’s name listed on over two-dozen pharmaceutical patents for drugs used in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as a number of other neurological disorders. According to the cross-referenced information on Voss, he was apparently one of the world’s foremost experts in cognitive research.

  The more Cyrus read, the more fascinated he became. Though he had yet to find what landed Doctor Voss on the Coalition’s radar, he was enamored with the work the man was doing. Cyrus suddenly deeply regretted leaving his laptop back in his office. He couldn’t wait to get out of the meeting so he could start doing more extensive research on the man.

  Turning the page, the Coalition’s interest became manifest. Voss was working on a device designed to capture memories directly from the human brain. It seemed Voss believed that such technology would lead to breakthroughs in numerous memory and mental health related areas. For the first time, therapists would have the ability to literally put themselves in their patient’s minds, seeing and experiencing the actual events that had scarred them. Not surprisingly, such a technology would have applications in the area of law enforcement. No longer would there be any question of a person’s guilt or innocence. Not if technology existed to review a suspect’s memory as easily as the files on a computer hard drive.

  Voss’s latest project was ambitious. And if successful, it wasn’t a stretch to see how it would prove useful in espionage. The ability to directly access the memories of another person was, in many ways, the ultimate weapon. It would allow access to an enemy’s greatest secrets. And despite all of its potential benefits to mankind, Cyrus knew the technology would be seen—first and foremost—as a weapon. Offensive or defensive, it would become a weapon no matter what.

  But none of these benefits touched the primary intent and Voss’s ultimate goal, if his stated ob
jectives were to be believed. He wanted to use the technology to gain practical clinical insights. He was building a tool he could use to examine the nature of memory loss in Alzheimer’s patients. And, if memories could be captured and reviewed, perhaps they could be saved, even archived, giving patients stricken with the disease a chance to regain what they had lost.

  As strange as it sounded, according to the notes Cyrus was reading, all of the research Voss was doing was conducted with Alzheimer’s research in mind. He’d been working for decades on memory-related studies. But as Cyrus flipped further through the file, he still couldn’t find the one piece of information he believed to be missing. There was no mention of a relative or friend linked to Voss—someone directly affected by the disease that had brought about his passion for the endeavor.

  As detailed as the file appeared to be, Cyrus knew that it didn’t hold the entire story. Something had spurred Voss’s crusade, and Cyrus felt oddly compelled to discover what drove the man.

  Reaching the last section of the report, Cyrus scanned the details. He could hear the debate over the Florida operation winding down. It would take only a few more moments to complete his review of the file.

  But when his eyes fell on the last pages, Cyrus felt his stomach drop and the room begin to spin. Looking more closely, he hoped there was some kind of mistake. In spite of himself, he knew that wasn’t the case. He found himself suddenly unable to move further down the page. His eyes blurred as his mind drifted, confronted with circumstances that he never could’ve foreseen.

  This changed everything.

  It didn’t matter what the Red Queen had to say, Cyrus knew he would be taking this assignment for himself. He would settle for nothing less.