The Hermetrius Conspiracy Read online

  “They know about the mission and they are watching you. Be careful!”

  Jack thought ‘Which mission. I’ve gone on more than twenty missions for the Agency. And why would they be watching me?”

  #

  Wright focused his eyes intently on the video surveillance monitor. He had watched Preston get the mail and sort through it but there was something about that last letter that caused a change in him. Right after he opened the letter, he had stopped walking, straightened up, and looked around. He picked up the satellite phone and called Jenkins.

  “It may be nothing, boss, but I just saw something on video surveillance that was unusual, maybe even suspicious.”

  He told Jenkins what he had seen and asked “What do you want us to do, get inside when he’s gone and get a look at the letter?”

  “No, if the letter has something he doesn’t want us to see, he would have hidden it by now.”

  “Is there some way we can intercept his mail before he sees it?”

  “Not without a court order, and no judge can know what we’re up to here.”

  Wright thought for a moment. “His mailbox is in plain view of the house, but we could try to sneak up and go through his mail as soon as the delivery truck leaves.”

  Jenkins thought about it for a minute. Trying to stay one step ahead of Preston was something nobody had ever been able to do.

  “If the letter he got makes him suspicious, he’ll be on high alert, so we have to tread carefully here. Let’s continue to monitor his e-mail exchanges with this Martin woman and see what we learn there.”

  Chapter 3

  Jack sat down with the letter to think. He tried to make a mental list of everyone he knew who might want to warn him – or play a joke on him. There were several men from the teams he had worked with on various missions, but he was never close with them and hadn’t spoken to any of them in years. And as far as he knew, they were all either retired like him or they were dead. He couldn’t remember even one of them with a sense of humor. In his business, everything was serious; it had to be. Everyone in the local community just knew him as Jack Preston and had no idea that he had a PhD in computer engineering. He had thought about creating a new identity when he retired, but he knew if anyone from the Agency wanted to find him, a new name wouldn’t help.

  To know about his PhD, the mystery letter writer would either have known him in the short time before he signed on with the Agency, or have access to his records within the Agency. If that was the case, it wouldn’t have to be someone he knew, it could be just some clerk in the records section.

  But why the warning then, if it was a warning. It could still be a joke of some kind, but an anonymous joke was an unlikely answer. Who could he contact for more information? . . . Kendrick – Bob Kendrick. They had been sort of friends at one time, brought together through Helen’s friendship with Bob’s wife, Charlene. They would get together once or twice a month for drinks and dinner at one house or the other.

  Although Bob worked for the Agency, he was a white collar man and Jack had never worked with him in the field. But Bob was one of those information collectors in the Agency’s bureaucracy who knew everything that was going on, even some of the classified stuff. He had once asked Jack over fried chicken at his picnic table about a deep black operation that was in the planning stages. Jack had shot him a stern look and Bob wisely backed off. Bob left the Agency a few years ago, but Jack would bet the farm that he still had inside contacts.

  The problem was how to find him. Jack knew he had taken a job with a private firm that solved the same kinds of problems for the petroleum industry that the Agency solved for the Government. But the last couple of Christmas cards Helen had sent to them had been returned “Addressee Unknown.” Maybe he could find something on the Web.

  He booted up, entered “Robert Kendrick” in the search box, and hit the search key. 542 hits! That would take him days to go through. He narrowed down the search by adding Charlene’s name and this time got only 8 hits. They were all news items – three about her work with a local orphanage, two about a $50,000 donation she and Bob had given to the hospital building fund, and three about her death. All were from the Hartford, Connecticut Courier.

  Now he had something to go on. He narrowed his search for Bob by adding Hartford and hit enter again. Six hits, but all of them were the same ones he got for Charlene. He opened up each hit and scanned them for anything he might use to get in touch with Bob. There was an address, but it was the same one that the Christmas cards had been returned from. No mention of where Bob worked.

  Jack wasn’t through yet. He went to WhitePages.com and entered the name and city. No hits on that one: Bob must have left Hartford after his wife’s death. What next?

  As he stared at the computer screen thinking, his e-mail server showed that he had one unread message. He opened it and saw it was from the Martin woman. He decided to read it to clear his mind from over-focusing on locating Kendrick. She struck a definite friendly tone in this one as she wrote about her granddaughter, where she lived, and the memory of going to the movie with him. She asked if he remembered.

  He had another flash image of sitting next to her in some movie and sweating with . . . what? Nervousness, fear, anxiety? It was so hard to be around girls at that age, when your hormones said “put your arm around her shoulders” but your mind said “but what if she gets mad and leaves.” Was that the only time they had gone out together? In eighth grade it wasn’t really a date, but he couldn’t remember much about her after that movie. He never was one to keep scrapbooks or yearbooks, but there were online sites where you could see copies of your high school yearbooks.

  After a brief web search he found myyearbook.com that listed the Coal Creek High School year books from the years he and Lynn were there. He started with his first year of high school, 10th grade, and looked for Lynn Spence in the photo gallery, but she wasn’t listed. He paged through the rest of the book and stopped on a page that caught his eye. There she was! The face he recalled when he saw her maiden name in the email. She was part of a group photo of the sophomore class play cast. The one where Jack had the role of an absent-minded professor. He thought back and vaguely remembered seeing her a couple of times back then, but she definitely wasn’t in their graduating class. He would have to ask her about that when he answered her latest email.

  As he lay in bed trying to sleep – he had a hard time sleeping in a half empty bed – he recalled the warning letter and wondered who they were warning him about. He made a mental list of the projects he had worked on and tried to recall who might want to get even with him. He had worked a couple of dozen cases for the Agency during his career, but most of those ended with the subject dead or in a foreign prison for life.

  Maybe it was one of the foreign espionage agencies he had outsmarted, but why would they hold a grudge. The spy business had it’s own set of unwritten rules and revenge wasn’t one of them. As he finally dozed off to sleep he saw an image of the Agency’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, where many of the D.C. Government offices had moved to. Maybe that’s where the threat was.

  Chapter 4

  Morning coffee on the front porch of his cabin. He wondered why this never got old, never got boring. Maybe because of the wildlife show. Hardly a morning went by when he didn’t see something up close – a few deer, some turkeys, hawks, an occasional eagle, squirrels chattering, trout rising on the lake. Mornings like this never got old for him.

  A flash from among the trees across the lake! What was that. He didn’t react immediately, but slowly set his coffee cup on the arm of the rocker – then rocked back so it would spill on his lap. Now he could jump up and rush inside, wiping the coffee off and swearing, without raising suspicion.

  He headed for the kitchen and grabbed a towel, then stood by the front door drying the coffee off and stealing glances across the lake to look for more evidence of someone’s presence. Nothing there now. He made a menta
l note to nose around over there tonight.

  If he was being watched it was time to check out his security systems. He started inside the cabin with his Spyfinder scanner – a small camera-like device that shows the location of hidden cameras. After scanning every room without a hit he thought ‘Well, at least they haven’t gotten that far yet.’

  Next he made sure his audio static generator was working. If anyone was listening over a hidden microphone they would only hear loud static while the generator turned on. He would leave it off for now and let them listen to his silence, unless he needed to cover up a phone conversation.

  Next he checked his perimeter security sensors. He opened the voice activated door hidden at the end of his closet and went into a second closet where he kept his “hardware” – guns, ammunition, armored vest, spare electronic devices, and the brains of the perimeter security system. He woke up the computer and saw an overhead map of his 25-acre property with blinking dots identifying all the motion sensors and infrared cameras. All were blinking green, which meant they were working and active.

  Next he popped up an array of images from the cameras. One of them showed a broken branch covering part of the view. He would deal with that tonight while he was reconnoitering the site of the glint.

  With everything checked out he opened up his laptop to answer Lynn’s latest email. He didn’t want to give her any details of where he lived, or what he did before he “retired.” He was suspicious that she might be part of whoever was watching him. Until he figured that out he wasn’t about to share anything with her.

  He worked hard to keep himself below the radar on the internet – no personal information of any kind, and using several false identities and credit cards with aliases he had established while he was active at the Agency. Every agent had false identities, complete with passports and bank accounts, that they kept secret from their employers. You never knew when your agency might turn against you. He sat down and started typing.

  Hello, Lynn.

  I do remember you as Lynn Spence, and have a mental image of a good looking red head in 8th grade, but your weren’t in our graduating class. Thanks for filling me in on some of your life. I went to college at WVU after high school and got a degree in engineering. I worked at locations worldwide until last year when I retired to a cabin in the West Virginia mountains at the ripe old age of 56. I’ve kept in shape all my life and now it’s paying off. I go for hikes in the mountains, chop wood, and work on property improvement projects to keep fit. I do some occasional consulting in the engineering field that keeps my brain alive and my creative juices flowing, and I tinker with just about anything I can get my hands on. I’m sort of a MacGyver – I can fix almost anything with parts on hand.

  That’s my life. Fill me in on your history.

  Jack

  That’s done. Now it’s time to address the watchers problem. He started by listing all of his operational assignments for the past ten years in one column. In the second column he listed the target of the operations – governments, both U.S. and foreign, corporations involved in fraud or cover ups, individuals with terrorist links, drug cartels and their leaders. For most of them, Jack’s role was a behind-the-scenes manipulator who turned one faction against another to break up their operations.

  Back up! Just who was the Agency? The Federal Remediation Agency. FRA. What was their mission? Who did they report to? Maybe he should dig into the Agency a bit. He wasn’t going to find anything useful with a Google search. He would have to dig around in the Darknet – the underground version of the public internet. It was filled with hackers, information brokers, classified data sources, and the latest secrets that will hit the news tomorrow. Whenever Jack entered that world he used a special screen name, one that was trusted by most the inhabitants of the Darknet, with embedded digital codes that verified his fictitious identity.

  The Darknet search engine was called Giggle – someone had a sense of humor – so he went there and entered FRA. He found a list of all their operations over the past five years with summaries of the missions. He clicked on a couple of his jobs and found innocuous descriptions of the objectives and relevant dates. The Mission Complete dates agreed with his recollection of when he had finished the work.

  As he continued looking at his operations he found one from two years ago that didn’t have a completion date. The unclassified name was Shiloh. There was only that one, but it seemed strange. Was it just a clerical error or did the Agency keep the operation open for some reason? He looked over dozens of operations by other agents and found a few others that weren’t marked complete. So it probably wasn’t a clerical error. Did these operations have anything in common?

  He called up another site that gave him access to more FRA operations information and compared the details of his open mission with the others. There were six in all, including his own. All six involved surreptitious entry into a facility, but the locations weren’t given. The dates all fell within a six month period starting with his mission in late 2012. So they did have something in common, but why weren’t they closed? And who were the agents involved? To find out more details he would have to get into the FRA computers themselves, and even with his skills and special software that would take him awhile, so he put that off until tomorrow. There didn’t seem to be any urgency at this point.

  For now, he wrote down all the details he could remember about the Shiloh mission. It seemed unimportant at the time. The Agency had him break into a silicon valley company and swap some records with files the FRA supplied him. He had blackmailed an insider at the company to get the entry codes for the building and the file room. It seemed unimportant at the time. So why was it still open?

  He checked his security system and found there had been no alarms set off, so he headed into town for some supplies. He wanted to stock up in case he had to stay in the cabin or leave in a hurry. The dirt road down from his place on the mountain was winding and narrow, with a few other small roads branching of to the sides.

  When he first moved up here he spent some time exploring and had a good mental map of where all the back roads went. Some went over the ridge to the next valley to take hunters into the remote deer country, others ended at old coal mines, and some were alternate routes to the nearby town.

  He stayed on the shortest route, but it would still take him 30 minutes to get to town. In bad weather, the mud doubled the time it took, even with his 4.6 liter Ford SportTrac Utility Truck. He had picked up a used 2008 model in dark green and kept it dirty so it wouldn’t stand out among all the other pickups around. With the four-seat interior and a reinforced cover for the truck bed, he could lay the front seats back to sleep and have plenty of room in the secure truck bed for supplies and an assortment of weapons.

  As he neared the highway into town he saw a black Explorer parked back in the woods to his left. After he turned onto the highway he drove slowly to see of the vehicle would follow, but it didn’t. After he replenished his supplies he stopped at Mac’s diner for a quick supper and headed back home. As he turned up the road to his cabin he looked for the Explorer but it wasn’t there.

  By the time he got back and unloaded the supplies it was dark enough to check out the site of the flash he saw this morning. Jack slipped out the back door into the forest and made his way silently around the lake. When he got near the site, he waited to see if there was someone there tonight. After 10 minutes he got his answer – someone coughed lightly. He circled the site and saw two men sitting on a log in front of a small tent with a good view of his cabin. There was a sniper rifle leaning against a tree.

  Jack backed off and made a wider circle around the camp. He found the Explorer parked among some trees. He want to get a look inside to see if he could find any papers, but if he opened the door the overhead light would go on. He saw it had power windows so he took out the bent coat hanger he brought along, slipped it between the door and its frame, and maneuvered it until pushed the window button and heard th
e window lowering. He reached in and lowered both front windows all the way and crawled into the car.

  He used his night vision goggles and an infrared LED flashlight to see what was there. Nothing in the back seat but the remains of several fast food meals. He looked over the papers in the glove compartment, but there were no registration papers or other documents that would tell him who owned the vehicle. He leaned across the back seat to look in the rear and saw some pistols, shotguns and an M-15 carbine assault rifle. Apparently these guys, and whoever they worked for, meant business.

  He took out the Superglue he had brought along for just this kind of thing and gave the firing pins and trigger mechanisms a liberal coating. No one would be using these weapons any time soon. He slid back out the window, went around to the driver’s door and raised the passenger window. Finally he pushed the button to automatically raise the driver’s window and pulled his arm out.

  As he crept through the woods back toward his cabin he stepped in some fresh bear crap. ‘Damn. I just cleaned these boots.’ That gave him an idea. He went home and got some fish out of the freezer to thaw and went to bed. The next morning he set up his 12X zoom binoculars in his bedroom and watched the site. Now that he knew what to look for he had no problem pinpointing them. He watched until midmorning and saw them take the sniper rifle and head in the direction of the Explorer. Time for a trip to town for some more fast food.

  He put the four defrosted trout in a Ziploc bag and quickly headed for their camp. He put one fish in the back corner of their tent, another two in their sleeping bags, and the fourth one buried under pine needles where they leaned the rifle against the tree. Then he hurried back to the cabin, pulled a chair up to his binoculars, and waited to enjoy the show. Hopefully they would get back before the bear showed up.