The Fix (Amos Decker 3)

“Take it down,” ordered Bogart.

The portable ram was brought up and it slammed against the doors, bursting them open. The agents poured through.

It was an enormous house with lots of places to hide. But they didn’t have to look very hard.

The library was a beautiful room, book-lined with a marble mantel topping a mammoth blackened fireplace. An ornate writing desk was set in the middle, a high-backed leather chair situated at the kneehole. There was a black leather sofa against one wall and two wing chairs on the other side of a wood and wrought iron metal coffee table that had probably set the owners back five figures.

Not that they cared anymore.

The man was in one of the chairs. The woman was sprawled across the couch. They each bore the blackened tag of a bullet entry smack in the middle of their foreheads.

“Alfred and Julia Gorski,” said Bogart.

“They’re taking care of loose ends,” opined Milligan.

Bogart said, “We need to search this place from top to bottom

.”

“I’ll call in the tag-and-bag team,” said Milligan. He pulled out his phone and moved over to a far corner of the room.

Bogart looked at Decker. “So they used this dying kid as a means to pass classified material?”

Decker nodded. “They knew Joey was dying. That’s why they picked him to ‘adopt.’ They never had any intention of doing that. They brought him to Dominion Hospice. And that’s why Berkshire started going there. It was a perfect cover to pass the secrets. I mean, who would have suspected? We discovered that Jenkins got the job as the night manager when the woman who’d originally held the position didn’t show up for work. I wonder when they’ll find her body?”

“Damn. This thing just keeps expanding,” exclaimed Bogart, rubbing the back of his neck.

“So does the universe,” replied Decker.

A voice said, “But the good news is we’re dismantling their spy operation by default. They’ve now lost four operatives and counting.”

They turned to see Harper Brown standing in the doorway.

She came forward and looked down at the couple.

“You know them?” said Bogart.

“I know of them. The Gorskis host charity balls, cut ribbons on hospital wings, throw great parties, one of which the head of my agency has attended.”

“What’s their background?” asked Bogart.

“They were immigrants. From Poland. Built a huge import-export company.”

“I guess we know what they were importing and exporting now,” said Jamison.

“I’m surprised if they’re so prominent that they didn’t get negative publicity for what they did with Joey,” said Bogart. “I mean not adopting him.”

Brown said, “That’s why you have PR people. And they were paying for his stay at hospice. No one’s going to ding them after that, if anyone really even knew about it. They’ve funded construction of a new at-risk youth facility in Southeast. No one’s going to hold one kid against them, as awful as that sounds.”

“I wonder how the PR folks will spin their being spies,” snapped Jamison.

Bogart said to Brown, “How did you end up here?”

Brown looked at Jamison. “Alex called me and told me. I appreciate the heads-up.”

“You’re welcome,” said Jamison as Decker gave her a curious glance.

“Do you have any idea who the Gorskis could have been working for?” said Bogart.

“Obvious suspects are the Russians, of course. But you can’t rule out the Chinese, the North Koreans, or some of the players in the Middle East.”

Jamison said, “Would Middle Eastern terrorists use people like the Gorskis? You wouldn’t think they would trust them.”

“Lots of people who look like you and me have been radicalized,” replied Brown. “The same for North Korea and the Chinese. And sometimes it comes down to money.”

“Well, if the Gorskis have been this rich for decades and have been spying this whole time, we might be able to rule out the Middle East,” said Decker. “That didn’t come into play really until after 9/11.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Brown.

“Were the Gorskis in a position to actually steal the secrets?” asked Bogart. “Or were they bankrolling those who did?”

“The latter. Neither of the Gorskis could have come into contact with places where the secrets are actually located. But they also moved in high circles and they came into contact with people who do have those secrets. Some at the highest levels. I’m talking politicians, military, bureaucrats, executive leadership of defense contractors. They’ve all probably been in this house at some point.”

“That’s a lot of very high-level possibilities,” said Bogart.

“Just calling it like I see it, Agent Bogart.”

“So we think the secrets that Walter Dabney stole moved through this network?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the Gorskis paid off Natalie’s gambling debts in exchange for the classified information. It might have gone from Dabney directly to Berkshire. She then passed it along to Jenkins and he on up the chain.” She looked at Bogart. “My people have broken the code in the Harry Potter book.”

“And?”

“There were at least nine months of classified info on there in various colors that fluoresce. As we suspected that included a back door into three highly sensitive DIA databases. That was what we believed Dabney stole. Our undercover ops overseas have been severely compromised. We’ve already lost five assets on the ground because of it.”

“But Dabney wasn’t stealing secrets nine months ago,” pointed out Bogart. “His came later when Natalie got into trouble with the gambling.”

“He’s obviously not the only spy they were working with,” said Brown.

“But surely he wouldn’t have had that information simply because he was a contractor to DIA,” said Jamison. “That sounds more like something you guys would keep internally.”

“It absolutely was. But Dabney used his relationship with key people there to ferret out the entry passcodes for that data. We figured all this out after the fact, of course, but by then the damage was already done.”

“What assets?” asked Decker. “That might narrow down who’s behind this.”

“Syria and Libya.”

“Does that help us take some players out of the equation?” said Decker.

“Thirty years ago, it might have, but Russia is so heavily invested in the Middle East’s geopolitical equation that they could be behind it. Putin is ruthless and he has firmly in mind a plan to make Mother Russia a global player once more. And to do that he needs influence everywhere, particularly in the desert. And we can’t rule out China either, because they have similar goals. All you need is to see what they’re doing in the South China Sea to understand that. And both countries are beefing up their military capabilities. And then you have Un in North Korea as a wild card who’s determined to build a nuke that can reach the West Coast.”

“Sounds like Doomsday is coming sooner rather than later,” said Jamison in a resigned voice.

“Unless we can knock out spy operations like this, I wouldn’t make any retirement plans,” said Brown. “They might prove unnecessary,” she added ominously.