Deep Sleep (Devin Gray #1)(13)

“We’ve got company. Single set of headlights to the west, moving toward the intersection.”

Rudd turned to face west, the distant lights flickering between the trees on the outskirts of town.

“Cop?” asked Walsh.

“I don’t see how,” said Rudd.

This little speck of a town didn’t have a police force. It was part of a rural administration district that relied on the county for emergency services. Something he had taken into consideration when planning the ambush site.

“Looks like they’re headed here in a hurry,” said Walsh.

“It sure does,” said Rudd.

“A cop kind of changes everything.”

“It does and it doesn’t,” he said, fiddling with the fake FBI credentials in his back pocket.

“How do you figure?”

“Same plan, but we’ll have to put some serious distance between here and our next stop,” said Rudd. “The whole county will be crawling with cops by sunup.”





CHAPTER 7


Devin clasped the hot mug of coffee with both hands, straining to keep his eyes open. The individual interviews, which felt more like interrogations, had lasted most of the night, eventually yielding to a general debriefing, which dragged on far longer than he’d anticipated. He sensed it all coming to an end, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d come to the same conclusion twice over the past few hours, only to get up and refresh his mug when it became clear he’d been wrong. At least the coffee was good. Nothing worse than sipping a nasty cup of joe for hours—against your will.

The debriefing location wasn’t too shabby, either. A posh estate somewhere in Virginia, about an hour out of DC if he had to guess. He’d quit paying attention about halfway through their three-hour surveillance-detection route. Definitely a welcome change from the fluorescent tube–soaked rooms in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

He took a measured sip, hoping to take this mug past the finish line. Brendan Shea, Devin’s immediate supervisor and tonight’s operation lead, sounded as though he was wrapping up the debrief. Again. When Shea stopped to check his tablet, presumably scrolling through the intelligence feed he’d referenced earlier, Devin sensed they were done. For real this time.

“All five of our friends from room four thirty-four arrived at the KLM ticket counter at Dulles,” said Shea, eyes still focused on the tablet screen. “The counter opens in a few minutes.”

“Are we following them?” asked Jason Hart, the operation’s surveillance lead.

“As far as we can,” said Shea. “You know how that goes.”

“Have we ID’d any of them?” asked one of the DA operatives.

Shea shook his head. “Nothing yet. We’re working our contacts at the FBI for some fingerprint help and running their mugs through all of the proprietary digital identification software. If they have a social media profile or got their picture taken for the local paper at some point during the digital era, we’ll get something.”

“Any guess what we were dealing with?” asked the same operative. “The crew in four thirty-four looked a little crusty to me. Definitely professionals, but maybe not the highest quality? It felt like kind of a bargain-basement team.”

“Same with the stairwell,” said Devin. “The woman in four thirty-two gave off more of an A-team vibe.”

“We probably won’t have any idea until we get an ID hit or pull something from one of their phones,” said Shea. “We grabbed two sets of car keys, one from the room and the other from the stairwell, but it’ll be a little while before we can risk sending anyone into some of the nearby parking garages to snoop around. My guess is the five at the airport will be long gone by then.”

DEVTEK wasn’t dealing with a domestic adversary. Devin had guessed as much when the woman had instantly switched from honey-trap to kidnap mode. The two thugs in the stairwell had sealed the deal. A competitive company with similar resources would have hired a firm on par with MINERVA.

A truly professional crew, playing the long game for their client, would have let Chase break off the honey trap. Nothing lost. Nothing gained. On top of that, they would have stood down the moment they detected the inbound direct-action team, promptly deescalating the situation. Companies spied on other companies all the time. It was pretty much expected. They wouldn’t have resisted. They would have taken pictures and video of the team breaking into the room, threatening to press charges—and MINERVA’s DA team would have immediately walked away.

Instead, the thugs in four thirty-four, like the two goons in the stairwell, chose to fight. They showed little restraint, which suggested either an unsophisticated or arrogantly indifferent adversary. Given the complexity of the cyberattacks and effort put into the honey trap, it was hard to make the argument that they were unsophisticated. The fact that they were sitting in Dulles International Airport at five in the morning, waiting to hop on the next flight out of the United States, rang as a damning indictment.

“We should have taken Devin’s lead and sent them all to the hospital,” said Chris Murphy, the direct-action team leader. “Then we’d have all the time we need.”

The entire team laughed, breathing life into the group slumped at the obnoxiously massive dining room table. Devin nodded stiffly, still unsure where his actions tonight landed on the spectrum of tolerability within the organization. He wouldn’t be entirely shocked later if Brendan Shea pulled him aside to praise him for his quick thinking in the hotel, and just as quickly dismissed him from MINERVA, citing exposure issues or something equally nebulous. He’d single-handedly hospitalized three people within the span of a few minutes. All the yelling, zapping, and screaming in room four thirty-four had yielded nothing more serious than a few black eyes and a broken rib or two—on both sides.