Actual Stop (Agent O’Connor #1)(47)
“O’Connor.”
“Where are you?” Mark’s gruff voice demanded.
I gritted my teeth against the urge to snap at him. We’d just had a wheels up, for crying out loud. What did he expect me to do? Beam myself back to NYFO?
“Manhattan.”
“Are you planning on coming back to work today?”
“Technically, I’ve done my eight hours, Mark. I could go home now if I wanted.” Okay, arguing about my hours with my boss was probably not my best plan. But clearly I was all about doing the exact opposite of what was good for me these days.
“Not planning on working your LEAP today?”
LEAP stood for Law Enforcement Availability Pay. All gun-carrying federal agents get paid a little extra over and above their base salary to work what amounted to a fifty-hour work week rather than a forty-hour one.
Our HQ tracked LEAP by the quarter rather than the week, so as long as I had enough total hours to cover three months’ worth of work, no one looked very closely to see how the hours were distributed. In some agencies, I knew, agents crammed all their LEAP in at the beginning of the month or the quarter, depending on how theirs was accounted for. And I also knew agents who procrastinated and put it off for as long as possible, which usually resulted in them scrambling to pack in an astronomical amount of hours in a few weeks.
I was the kind of girl who preferred to shoot for a weekly target of at least ten LEAP hours, though I’d often have more than that. I liked having that cushion to fall back on. It was almost like putting hours in the bank on the off chance that something would prevent me from working my required hours on a day here or there. I didn’t get paid extra if I worked more LEAP, but I also didn’t get in trouble.
I clenched my fists on the steering wheel and scowled. Why the hell was Mark giving me shit about this? It said a lot about his feelings toward me that he was concerning himself with an issue like my LEAP. Next, he’d probably be scrutinizing my gas-card receipts and my EZ-Pass records. Or perhaps how many minutes I’d used on my cell phone. Fabulous. I wasn’t particularly worried about it. I followed those rules to the letter, so there was nothing he could ding me for. But it was still a hassle, and even a mere suggestion from him of impropriety on my part would grate on my nerves something fierce.
“I’ve worked more than enough LEAP in the past few days to cover the rest of the week, Mark.” I kept my voice deliberately light, but it was one hell of a struggle. “In fact, I probably have next week covered, too.”
The silence on Mark’s end of the phone lasted so long I started to think we’d been disconnected.
“Mark?”
“You’d better be here for the PT tests,” he snapped. A loud clatter told me he’d hung up on me.
Okay, so going to NYFO right now was out. I was definitely not in the mood to get into a knock-down-drag-out with Mark over nothing. Sure, I had work to do, but something told me if I went back there, I’d spend more time arguing with him than I would actually accomplishing anything. I wracked my brain for legitimate ways to kill time until I absolutely had to make my appearance.
A quick glance at my watch confirmed I still had a couple of hours before the PT tests were scheduled to start. Maybe now would be a good time to show my face at the JTTF office. I hadn’t been there in a few days, and the impending Iran visit guaranteed I’d be out for several weeks. It couldn’t hurt to stop by. I could make my calls to D.C. regarding the Iran advance as easily from there as I could from NYFO, and I could spend the rest of my time running Akbari’s info through the FBI’s computer databases. Sure, I had no reason to suspect I’d find anything, but it was something to do, and it kept me away from NYFO that much longer, which was motive enough.
Normally, parking in the area near the JTTF office building was a nightmare, but luck was on my side today. I scored a prime space a few spots down from the front door. In no time at all, I’d stowed my gear in its required place outside the office itself and was sitting at my desk, making my calls to D.C. to ask about intelligence regarding the upcoming visit while I waited for my computer to boot up.
On a blank piece of paper, I jotted down some reminders. I could run basic criminal-history checks on anything I might uncover today from NYFO. It was just easier. The FBI had a special unit of analysts who did that sort of work for them, but it took a few days to get the results, and you needed to submit an active case number for the query. They wouldn’t accept the request without one, and since I wasn’t necessarily planning on opening an official case on Akbari—and even if I did, it’d be a USSS one and not a JTTF one—I’d need to do that database check myself. I also made a note to ask Amanda to run any new leads through the databases that she had access to for exactly the same reason.
Then I turned my attention to running Akbari’s name, address, and social security, passport, and phone numbers through the FBI databases to see whether they popped up in connection to any current or previous FBI investigations. Their system was superior to ours because you could pull up actual report text right on the computer. With just a few keystrokes, I could get an idea of the context of an investigation by reading the actual memorandums submitted in correlation with it. That was extremely helpful.
I fell headlong into my work. As much as I enjoyed being in the field and participating in interviews and arrests, I was much more interested in following trails and uncovering associations between people. I could sit for hours at a computer linking threads and tracking money as it bounced from bank account to bank account all around the world. It was like putting together a really big puzzle.