Decision Point

“You aren’t really active military, are you?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “What makes you say that?”

“Men with the rank of colonel wear their uniform—understandably—with a great deal of pride. You aren’t wearing yours today.”

“Uniforms attract notice,” he said. “We don’t need that right now.”

“Also,” she added, “military men don’t work alone. Even special ops guys have field teams. You don’t. Not to mention your file is sealed. The only military personnel files that are completely sealed are files of people that don’t really exist. So who are you really?”

He sighed, obviously thinking about her words and what his response would be. “All right, Agent Peterson. Here’s what I can tell you. My name is Matt Cooper, and yes, I am also known as Colonel Brandon Stone.”

“So who is Hal Brognola, really?”

“He’s real,” he said. “We work together sometimes, doing missions that have a vital interest to national security. That’s all you really need to know for our purposes and all you’re going to know, period. Anything else is above your clearance.”

She thought he was probably lying. This man might have dozens of identities. But the President trusted Brognola, and this was the man Brognola said could get the job done. “Fair enough—for now,” she said. “But if you aren’t as capable as Hal Brognola convinced the President you are, I’ll figure that out. I won’t have anyone risking Heather.”

He shook his head slightly. “Agent Peterson, you’ve just summed up the problem with your involvement rather nicely. This mission isn’t about Heather. She’s secondary, and even President Daniels knows that. If you can’t get your head around that idea, hit the road right now.”

“Heather may be secondary to you, Matt Cooper or Colonel Stone or whoever the hell you really are, but she’s primary to me!” Peterson’s voice started rising slightly toward the end of her rant, but she noticed it and toned herself down. “I don’t care about the LTTE or pirates. I care about her. This family means a lot to me, and I will not fail them.”

“Take a deep breath, Agent Peterson,” he said mildly. “One step at a time, okay? I plan to save Heather, but we can’t do anything until we understand what we’re walking into. I don’t mind going into the den, but I’d like to know how big the lions are before we jump into the black.”

She pushed the eggs around on her plate as she contemplated the mess she was in. There were few situations in life she couldn’t handle, but Heather being held captive seemed to be putting her over the edge. She’d known the Daniels family for years—before he became President—and had been around the family so long that they were her family. She’d been there when Heather graduated. And she knew what captivity meant.

She also knew that Cooper was right, she needed to slow down and take one step at a time or she would spend the entire mission running in circles.

The slow, gnawing anxiety of prefield work that once made her adrenaline pump was now almost paralyzing. She was determined not to allow it to control her or the outcome of this mission, but she wasn’t so prideful to only rely on herself. She needed Cooper, or whatever his real name was, and needing anyone was really against her nature. If he really was as good as Brognola had told President Daniels—“He’s the best special operations man I’ve got and if he can’t get it done, no one can.”—then he’d be invaluable.

Cooper’s phone rang and Peterson rolled the fork along the edge of her plate anticipating that this would be the call that would get them moving in the right direction. She was determined to control herself, but inside she could feel the clock ticking and her imagination had no trouble whatsoever filling in the details of what might be happening to a young woman she cared about deeply.

CHAPTER SIX

Finishing his conversation with Brognola, Bolan glanced at his handheld computer and saw that the data had arrived, then said, “Yeah, I got it,” and hung up.

“What is it?” Peterson asked.

“It’s better if I show you.”

Bolan pulled out a small device about the length of a ruler, but circular. He tugged the small cord from the end and plugged it into his handheld computer. He pulled a transparent sheet that had been spiraled inside and spread it out on the table until it formed a legal-size sheet. Bolan punched keys on the handheld computer and the transparent paper came to life. He reached forward and touched the glowing icons, dragging them with his finger and tucking them away.

“What is that?” Michelle asked.

“It’s a fairly new piece of tech I’ve got access to for the purposes of field testing. My phone has enough processing power to work as a PC and this allows me computer access anywhere I go. It automatically links up with a satellite and gets me resources that I might not have otherwise. Some things I can even work on as a 3D hologram, like building schematics, but its interactive capabilities in hologram form are limited and not very responsive to touch.”

Peterson reached out and touched the images on the table. The sheet itself reminded her of an overhead projector transparency. The icons moved when she slid her fingers across the page. The icons were so sensitive that she was able to spin one, blow it up and shrink it with just a flick of her finger.

Amused at her response, Bolan asked, “Would you like to play some more or would you like me to show you what we found?” Without waiting for her response, he moved two picture icons up on the screen.

“You’re going to love this,” he continued. “All of our data is starting to come together. This is Kabilan Vengai. We think he’s the current leader of the Ocean Tigers. As we suspected, the Ocean Tigers are a newly formed branch of the LTTE, likely taking the place of the old KP Branch. After the former leader was deposed, there was some dissension in what was left of the ranks. Vengai solved this problem by having his chief opponent strung up by his entrails.”

“It’s not all that uncommon to display the body of an enemy,” Peterson said.

“He wasn’t a body when they put him on display,” Bolan said shortly. “Rumor has it that Vengai made sure they were extra careful when they pulled him apart and kept him squirming for a good long while.”

Peterson swallowed and nodded for Bolan to continue.

“This guy,” he said, enlarging the second image, “we’re not so sure about.”

“Who is he?” she asked. “Do you have an identity?”

“Maybe,” he said. “We ran his image through some facial recognition software against a few of our databases. He’s one of Vengai’s favorites right now, but we don’t know where he came from or really anything else. The only name we’ve got for him is Rajan. He’s in charge of most of the hostage negotiation, but…”

“But what?”

“He seems to show up at critical times and defuse tense situations. He’s not what I would expect from this kind of organization. The LTTE is hard-core and wouldn’t play well with someone who tried to keep the peace. We’ve got some people looking for more information on him, and when we find out more, I’ll let you know. What little we have on him was buried in a highly classified email within the Sri Lankan government server. That suggests that this guy isn’t what he appears to be on the surface.”

“Maybe a plant or a spy of some kind? That might give us an advantage, right?” she asked, trying to ignore the feeling of hope blooming in her stomach. If he was there, maybe he’d try to keep Heather safe.

“Maybe,” Bolan admitted. “He might be someone we can negotiate with or he might simply be another very dangerous obstacle. We can’t take anything for granted right now.”

Obviously trying to shrug off her feelings, she said, “I guess he goes into the bad guy column for now. We have so little that I’m willing to hold out a little hope.”

“We just don’t know,” Bolan said. “He’s an anomaly and anomalies bother me. Organizations like the LTTE don’t survive for very long with dissension in the ranks. You know as well as I do that it’s about making believers out of their troops.” He shrugged. “I imagine we’ll know soon enough.”

Bolan slid several scenes across the device until he came to a financial report. Peterson traced her finger along the columns as he spoke.

“Hal pulled up this data, but with your intelligence background he figured you’d probably spot something faster than one of his analysts.”

Peterson scanned the document once more, then highlighted several transactions. “Can you run a search and correlate on these?” she asked.

He nodded and entered the command for the search function to cross-reference against known terrorist organizations and matching institutions.

“There it is,” she said.

The small screen displayed the information for a political action committee located in the Washington, D.C., area called TPAC. Bolan traced his finger and spun the image back his way and sent out an immediate search for known contributors to TPAC and any connections to known members of the LTTE. While the search was running, a secondary search recorded a media alert. Bolan tapped the icon and an article appeared on the screen, with a man’s name and picture. Tim Wright.

“Oh, that’s right,” Peterson said. “I saw that come across the wire this morning. This guy was supposed to be an amazing programmer and he was murdered last night. Everyone was talking about it because they say he was the best.”

“People always say that when someone dies,” Bolan replied. “It’s human nature to be complimentary to people once they’re dead.”

“In this case, I guess the praise is deserved. There are some people at pretty high levels of defense trying to figure out how his work is going to be completed, let alone continued. He’s one of those Rain Man types that can look at a piece of code and tell you how to get the recipe for grandma’s cookies or in this case crack just about any computer in the world.”