Chapter 27 Little Red Bow

Chapter 27

Little Red Bow

Anya and I finished our tea party and headed for sick bay, where we found Dr. Shadrack hanging upside down from a bar.

Anya tilted her head uncomfortably far to the right. “This does not look normal.”

“Nothing aboard this ship surprises me anymore,” I said.

The doctor said, “Hey, guys. You should try this. It feels amazing.”

Anya continued to scowl. “Do you have plan for getting down?”

He groaned. “I hadn’t really thought it through yet, but now that you mention it, would you mind giving me a hand?”

I hefted our chief medical officer from his predicament and placed him on the deck. He twisted his neck and stretched. “Thanks. I guess you’re here about the narrowed pool of possibilities.”

I nodded. “We are. So, tell us what’s going on.”

He motioned for us to follow him into the lab, where a pair of techs in blue scrubs sat on raised stools in front of computer monitors. “This is Tina and Ericka,” the doctor said, and the techs stood.

We shook hands, introduced ourselves, and the younger of the two said, “Oh, yeah. We know who you guys are. You own the ship, and she’s the Russian badass, right?”

I chuckled. “Only half of that is correct. I don’t really own the ship. Tell us what’s going on with the DNA matching.”

Ericka, the older tech, said, “When we received the initial cut pool, Sidney Barbour’s name wasn’t in the pool.”

“We know that much,” I said. “What are we doing now?”

She said, “We’re trying to determine if his name appears in any DNA database. Of course, there are dozens of people with that name on Earth, so it’s slow work. When we get a hit, we check that hit against other databases like property tax records, driver’s licenses, passports, etc. It’s slow-going, but we’re on it. I guess we failed the challenge, so we’re not getting the raise, huh?”

I opened my mouth, but Anya beat me to it. “Like you said, Chase owns ship, so he can give to you raise whenever he wants, and I think he wants.”

Tina grinned at Anya. “Oh, I think you are what he wants.”

Anya glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “Do you really think so?”

Dr. Shadrack saved me. “Ericka is being a little modest. They’re not just checking public databases. Thanks to Skipper, we have access to a few lists that aren’t exactly public information, if you know what I mean.”

I said, “My guess is that he won’t show up on those lists, either, but somebody taught him some tradecraft, so he’s likely former military, and I have to assume Sidney Barbour isn’t the name on his original birth certificate.”

My phone chirped, so I thumbed the button and stuck it to my ear. “Hey, Clark. What’s up?”

My handler’s voice didn’t bear its usual lighthearted tone. “Get to the CIC and pick up the secure line. I’ll be waiting.”

Before I could respond, the line went dead. “That was Clark. Something’s up, and he wants to talk to me on a secure line. Let me know if you get any hits.”

Anya trailed but kept up as I sprinted to the combat information center. When we pushed through the hatch, Skipper lifted the headset, and I pulled it over my ears.

With the boom mic pulled to my lips, I said, “All right, I’m here. What’s going on?”

Skipper handed Anya a second headset, and she pulled it in place without bringing the mic to her mouth.

Clark said, “That’s what I’m calling to find out. What are you doing?” His tone changed from concerned handler to angry father in an instant.

I asked, “What are you talking about? You know what we’re doing. We’re trying to find out what happened to Kenneth LePine and who burned down his house.”

He said, “Yeah, well, you’re doing it a little too well. Is Skipper responsible for hacking into the black sites?”

Our analyst took that one. “I didn’t exactly hack. It was more of a side entrance kind of thing.”

Clark said, “Your little side entrance has bells going off all over the world, and my phone won’t stop ringing.”

“What are you talking about?” Skipper asked.

Clark huffed. “You’re not running the DNA database searches, are you?”

She said, “No, I got in for the lab techs, but I’m not running the searches. They’re doing that on their own.”

Clark growled. “Get them out of there, right now. They’re like loose cannons in a china shop, freezing the balls off a brass monkey.”

Skipper quivered. “What?”

I covered my mic and whispered, “Don’t worry. I speak Clarkinese.” Returning to Clark, I said, “We’ll stop them now, but we still need to—”

He said, “By now , I mean right now.”

I shoved one of the ear cups from my ear and lifted the handset to call sick bay, but Dr. Shadrack was already on the line.

“We found him, Chase.”

As understanding overtook Skipper. She threw her hands onto the keyboard and typed furiously. Line after line of computer code scrolled across her monitor, and she got faster with every keystroke.

I spoke into the handset. “Have the techs take a picture of the screen, but do not print anything. Just take pictures and get out of the databases.”

The doctor gave the order and returned to the line. “We got busted, didn’t we?”

“We sure did. Bring the finding to CIC.”

I pulled the ear cup back over my ear. “We’re out of the databases, Clark.”

Skipper held up a finger. “That’s not exactly true yet, but we will be in seconds.”

She kept typing, and I asked, “How bad did we screw up?”

Clark made a noise like an angry bear. “Bad…real bad.”

“I’m working on that,” Skipper said. “I’ll have it cleaned up in seconds.”

“What are you doing to clean it up?” Clark asked.

Skipper struck one final key and leaned back in her chair. “I made it look like the brass monkey in the china shop was a Russian hacker named Kolzak Zaytsev. He’s a notorious snake on the world-hacking scene. The NSA bloodhounds will be chasing their tails all night.”

Anya smiled. “Is his name really Kolzak?”

Skipper shrugged. “Who knows? That’s what most people call him.”

“Do you know what this name means in English?” she asked.

Skipper and I shook our heads, and she said, “In English, Kolzak means slippery . This funny for me.”

Skipper grinned. “I like it. Anyway, Clark, we’re out, and we’re clean.”

Clark said, “You better be, and don’t do stuff like that without telling me first. If I have to run interference for you, I need to know what lies to tell.”

Skipper grimaced. “I’m sorry. I should’ve called you. I know better. It won’t happen again.”

Clark sighed. “Next time, I want you to do the snooping. Don’t give a couple of science geeks keys to the castle. They puke on the floor and burn the curtains.”

“That’s quite a visual,” I said. “I apologize for not keeping a thumb on things. Like Skipper said, it won’t happen again.”

Clark cleared his throat. “Consider yourselves appropriately scolded. Now, tell me how it’s going.”

I briefed him on the events of the past thirty-six hours, and he said, “It sounds like I missed quite a party.”

Ericka came through the hatch with an old-school digital camera in her hand. Skipper took it and plugged it into her computer, and we watched closely as the picture filled the screen in front of us. I read through the gibberish that looked more like a bowl of alphabet soup than a DNA database record.

Skipper covered her mouth and gasped. “Oh, my God. He was a PMOO.”

I suddenly felt like a third grader in a college calculus classroom. “What’s a PMOO?”

Anya answered before Skipper could. “Is paramilitary operations officer for Central Intelligence Agency. This means he is like you, Chasechka, but making only small salary for government.”

“This guy was a spook?” I asked.

Skipper said, “No, not a spook. He was a hitter. Give me a minute.”

She opened several windows and typed furiously. Sixty seconds later, she said, “This guy is wanted all over the world. He apparently went rogue on an operation in South America in nineteen eighty-eight. It looks like he’s been out in the cold ever since.”

Clark moaned. “Of course he is. Why wouldn’t my team break into some guy’s house in Texas and apprehend the most wanted former ops officer on the planet? Why do you drag me into cesspools like this, Chase?”

I threw up both hands, even though Clark couldn’t see me. “Hey, I’m innocent here. I broke into the house and barn, and I rolled up a couple of people, but I thought they were an oil exploration company CEO and his wife. I had no idea we were sparring with a rogue former CIA officer.”

Clark chuckled. “Yes, you’re practically an altar boy. Squeaky clean and innocent.”

I ignored my handler and asked, “What’s his real name?”

Skipper said, “Steven McDuffy from some place called Vonore, Tennessee.” She continued typing until a new stream of text scrolled across the monitor. “He graduated from the University of Tennessee with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He was on the wrestling and swim teams. Officially, he’s listed as killed in action in Honduras. His mother got the two hundred fifty grand in life insurance, but she died six weeks after her beloved son from a home invasion gone bad.”

I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “We’ve got a professional killer gone rogue from the CIA who probably iced his own mother. What am I supposed to do with that?”

Anya said, “We have now ultimate bargaining chip. If he does not tell to us everything we want to know, we will give him to Central Intelligence Agency with little red bow on top of head.”

I pulled off my headset and stood. “Let’s go down and have a little chat with our new friend.”

Skipper held up a sheet of paper with the gibberish from her screen. “Here. Sometimes a visual aid makes things easier.”

I took the printout and headed for the dungeon.

On the way down, I asked Anya, “Did you and Shawn do any irreparable damage while I was sleeping?”

She said, “We did not harm hair on outside of his head.”

I stopped in my tracks. “That’s an odd thing to say…even for you. What do you mean by outside of his head?”

She shrugged. “Maybe I whispered into his head for three hours. Not even you can repair damage I did on inside of his head.”

“That’s terrifying,” I said. “Did you get anything out of him?”

“He never spoke single word, but muscles inside neck were strained many times. This is good sign, yes?”

I laughed. “It’s a good sign when you’re not the guy with the strained neck muscles. He’s not going to chew off his own tongue or anything like that, is he?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Or I could cut his tongue into two pieces. I have done this before. You remember, yes?”

“How could I forget?”

We cleared the high-security door into the brig and then the hatch into the cell, and I held Skipper’s printout in front of me and gave it a shake. “You’ve been a very bad boy, Mr. Barbour.” I made a show of scanning the page. “Or should I call you Steven McDuffy?” He showed no reaction, so I continued. “Swim team, wrestling team, poly-sci, go Big Orange. Is any of this ringing a bell?”

The man remained stoic, so I pulled my red-hot poker from the fire and held it to his eye. “Maybe this will jog your memory. After going rogue in Honduras, you murdered your own mother for the two hundred fifty grand they paid her to convince her you were dead.”

His head snapped sharply, and he bore holes through my eyes with his. “I did not kill my mother. That was a CIA hit team. They tortured her to get her to give me up, but she didn’t know where I was. They pushed too hard, and now every one of them has a star on the wall at Langley.”

“You killed the hit team? The whole team?”

“They chose a dangerous profession…just like you did.”