Sabrina slipped her hand into the back pocket of her jeans to extract her cell phone. She dialed the number Arnold had given her and waited.
“Hello?”
“Is this Assistant Director Krueger?” she asked, somewhat surprised. Arnold must have given her the CIA director’s personal cell phone number as a way to cut directly to the chase.
“Yes?”
“Arnold Salinski is dead.”
“I know. Sabrina Masters?”
“Yep.”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Then, “We should talk.”
She could practically feel the weight of this moment and the impact it was going to have on her life.
“Yep.”
The night was bitterly cold, as it should be in January in Pennsylvania, but the sky was as clear as glass. Krueger had chosen Gettysburg to meet. A full moon glowed over the frozen battlefields adding a touch of eeriness that, quite frankly, it did not need. The place was spooky enough in broad daylight. Sabrina wished she’d told Krueger to meet her at a damn diner in town.
Shaking off the creepy factor, she focused on the clandestine meeting ahead. Following the winding drive through the various memorial sites scattered about in the woods, she stopped at the third one. The name Cowan etched in stone caught her eye.
She bounced out of the Jeep and shut the door behind her, glancing around the area as she did. The wind caught her hair and sent it flying about in a bad imitation of Medusa. She wished she’d thought to bring a hat. Her ears were going to freeze. Forcing her hands into the pockets of her down-feather coat, she hopped up and down a few times to keep her circulation going and, if she was honest with herself, to keep her nerves at bay.
He materialized out of the trees like a ghost and once again Sabrina was reminded why CIA operatives were often called spooks. Because she didn’t know what Krueger looked like, she wrapped her hand around the Colt Defender inside her pocket. A girl couldn’t be too careful.
“Krueger?” she asked.
“Masters?” he wanted to know first.
She nodded, then he stepped closer to her. Apparently, he knew what she looked like because his shoulders seemed to relax slightly. He was a hair over six feet and had a broad build. His face was deeply lined, probably a combination of stress and age. He wore jeans, a ski jacket and sneakers. And a hat. A practical man, she decided. And a prepared one.
“We’ll talk in your car,” he suggested.
Secure enough to release her hold on the gun, she opened the door, got back inside and leaned over to unlock the passenger door. He lifted himself into the seat.
“I checked your record. You were fired from the CIA almost ten years ago,” he began.
“You’re not the most subtle fellow, are you?” Then she admitted what he already knew. “I was.”
“Willful insubordination.”
Sabrina winced at the description It was a phrase that never failed to irritate her. It was on the tip of her tongue to remind him that she had been barely out of her teens when she’d been given that label, but she held back. That’s not what this was about. Besides, the description wasn’t inaccurate. Or at least hadn’t been at the time. But that was ten years ago. People change. She was sort of hoping she was one of them.
“And here all this time I thought it had been my attendance.”
He didn’t smile. “As you know, Arnold has selected you to continue his project.”
“I do.”
“What do you know about it?”
Sabrina shook her head. “Not much. I know he was working from a secure location. Even he didn’t know where he was. I know it was important. I know that he thought I was the only one who would understand what he was doing.”
“You really believe that’s true?” Krueger asked her.
“I don’t think I’d be sitting here right now if you didn’t believe it was true.”
Reluctantly, the senior agent nodded. Sabrina could tell he was pissed, though. It was there in the clench of his jaw and the way his mouth turned down into a deep scowl, entrenching the crevices of his face.
But his anger didn’t make sense unless…A few pieces of the puzzle she’d been playing with fell into place and quickly she understood. She smiled at Arnold’s audacity even from the grave. “This isn’t about me continuing his work. You’ve lost access to it, haven’t you?”
Krueger said nothing. He didn’t need to.
“Arnold wasn’t a team player,” Sabrina remarked. It was something that the CIA should have known.
“For sixteen years he worked under contract for us,” Krueger spat in reply. “But that was the only arrangement he would agree to. He never wanted to work officially for the United States government. I guess he thought it would corrupt him.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Sabrina told him. “Arnold wouldn’t have worked for any government. He didn’t believe in sides. He didn’t believe in ideology. He believed in science. He believed in math. You guys paid him the most, and gave him the best opportunity to pursue his work. That was all that mattered to him.”
He turned to her, his scowl still in place, and she knew he was lumping her with Arnold. She twisted a little in her seat. “What do you want from me?”
“What I’m about to tell you is—”
“Classified,” Sabrina finished. “Spare me the security and national interest lecture and get to it.”
Krueger looked down at his hands, then turned to her with an extremely serious expression on his face. “Get to it? All right. Ms. Masters what if I told you some very important people in the Company believe you may be the key to bringing down one of the most dangerous men on the planet?”
She allowed a moment for the words to sink in. This is what she wanted. What she’d imagined when she first read Arnold’s e-mail. This is what she’d been waiting for, for almost ten years. This was a new beginning for her. And it wasn’t until now, until she actually was confronted with it, that she knew how precious, how important that beginning really was to her.
But Krueger didn’t need to know any of that. Instead she offered him a flippant response, one that he probably expected.
“Does this mean I’m going to get my job back? Because I’ve got to tell you, these days it’s hell finding work for a genius.”
“The project Arnold was working on was known as Deep Throat,” he explained, his tone flat. “It was an ingestible isotope. A variation on lithium-6 that targets the epidermis. When it’s digested it breaks down over time and a body’s exposure to sun’s ultraviolet rays and emits a pattern of low-level radiation that can be detected by a high-powered X-ray machine contained in a satellite. Once the target is identified, the satellite’s computer continually sends a series of Global Positioning coordinates that allow us to track the movements of those who have been tagged.”
Sabrina absorbed the information. “Radiation? How can you distinguish between the targets and every cancer patient undergoing treatment in the world?”
Krueger shook his head. “All I know is that the pattern is distinct because of the nature of the isotope. Only Arnold knew all of the logistics of how it worked. But it does work. It has been the single most significant breakthrough in the war against terrorism. You’ve read about the many failings of the intelligence communities in the past few years. Our human intel is weak. We can’t infiltrate cells because often all the members are blood related. We can’t turn them with money because of