Page 12 of Sherwood
“Mark’s information was good?”
Ferns rustled against me as I walked along the edge of the path to give Joshua enough room to skirt a puddle. “It’s always good, Joshua. It’s the price that’s the problem.”
I could feel his gaze sliding over to me. “Do I want to know what the price was?”
“Probably not.” EvenIwished I could unknow the information I’d given Mark Trevena in exchange for the details he knew about the girl who’d once stolen Lox’s heart here in Sherwood. But what was done was done.
“I don’t like working with him,” Joshua muttered as we passed a fallen spruce. Its dead trunk was massive enough that new trees were growing on top of it, their roots draping over the moss-covered sides of the log like ribbons. “I don’t trust him.”
“I don’t either.” Of all the people I’d met in my life—both as a Green Beret and as a CIA officer—Mark Trevena was one of the few who truly scared me. “But he’s a necessary evil.”
“He’s the devil,” Joshua muttered. “The devil in a good suit. And with a BDSM club.”
That BDSM club—called Lyonesse and nestled in the heart of Washington DC—was precisely the reason why Mark had the information he did, but Joshua already knew that, so I didn’t bother to point it out.
“I just don’t know if it’s a good idea to involve him in anything,” Joshua went on. We were close to the scenic overlook now, our boots crunching over the wet gravel as we approached where the trail skirted against the lip of a steep green valley. A quick-moving stream at the bottom sparkled through the fog. “Surely, we can get what we need from SIGINT.”
SIGINT—or signal intelligence—was data intelligence agencies pulled from things like emails, texts, phone calls—and even from unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with Lidar and Radar sensors. This was opposed to human intelligence gathered from people: assets, allies, and captured enemies alike. Joshua, as a former NSA mathematician and current Assistant Regional Director of the newish Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency—and whose entire world was computers and cryptography and data—obviously preferred SIGINT.
As an officer of the Special Operations Group—the paramilitary arm of the CIA—I had a partiality for human intelligence. As did Mark Trevena.
“Signal intelligence only gets us so far,” I said, coming to a stop at the overlook’s damp wooden railing. “And John Lackland himself approved using Mark, you know.”
Joshua snorted. “Lackland is a brainless jackass and you know it.”
I did know it. Lackland was the director of the NSA—a position he came into via combination of nepotism and better candidates getting pulled elsewhere—and he’d done nothing during his tenure but sow distrust and make ethically dicey choices. Ethically dicey choices that were still deemed okay by the powers that be, but when those choices were made by design to be plausibly deniablebythe powers that be, that approval didn’t mean very much.
Still, he was the boss. And while I was on loan from the CIA to the NSA, he wasmyboss.
“At least we all have the same goal,” Joshua said, flicking away the raindrops that had accumulated on his map. “And I don’t think anyone wants to find Lox more than the three of us.”
No one wanted to find Lox more thanme, but Zhang didn’t know about the twisted romance Lox and I had once shared, and I’d rather keep it that way. It was only because Lox and I once had an official working relationship via joint intelligence missions that I’d been tapped to help find her now. Only I knew exactly how personal this mission was to me.
“I can’t believe I never saw this coming,” Joshua said. “Three years on the same team with her, and I had no idea.”
Neither had I, and Lox and I had been a lot more than teammates. The American government had gone from having one of the world’s best cryptographers to having that cryptographer actively stealing some very important secrets from government databases…and to what end still remained an utter mystery. She hadn’t sold any information to any of our usual enemies—at least that we knew about—and she hadn’t made any of it public through the press.
She hadn’t done anything, actually, other than go into hiding and continue to steal things that definitely did not belong to her.
“But hey, you’re the best operative in the CIA—or at least you are now that Mark Trevena left to start a spanking club or whatever,” added Joshua. “If anyone can find Lox, you can. With our help, of course.”
“Right,” I said, bracing my elbows on the railing and trying to make out the trees on the other side of the misty divide. “Tell me what we’ve got.”
“We’ve got three CISA specialists and two NSA agents arriving tomorrow. They’ll be bouncing between the safehouse here in Sherwood and our temporary headquarters in Olympia, where we’ll be housing anyone else who wants to join the Lox-hunt. You’ll have all the big imaging and listening toys, too; Lackland basically wrote us a blank check when it came to this mission. I just hope you’re right about Lox coming back here.” Joshua pulled off his glasses and ran his sleeve over his pale gold features, which were now thoroughly damp and be-misted.
“If I were Lox,” he went on, “I’d be in a country without any extradition laws. Or up in the Yukon or something, where no one could find me and I wouldn’t need any extra energy to cool down my rigs.”
Cooling. Rigs. Right. “But she will need to keep her machines cooled here, won’t she?” I asked, already knowing the answer. The kind of encrypted information Lox was stealing required more than a laptop to intercept, decode, and store—it needed the kind of hashing power that only came from a warehouse full of CPUs and GPUs. “We’ll need thermal imaging of the area to start.”
“Already put in the order for it,” said Joshua. “But we should do the entire peninsula, just to be thorough.
“Good idea,” I murmured, even though I privately thought it would be unnecessary. Lox was here in Sherwood. I was certain of it. “And we should be looking for people in the woods when they shouldn’t be—in the middle of the night, alone. Maybe small vehicles too, but I’d imagine they’d beverysmall. Tell the imaging people to think ATVs, not trucks.”
“Makes sense,” Joshua said. “So we’ll start with thermal. And then there’s the girl, which you’ll deal with.”
“I’m building rapport now,” I said, looking down at my hands. Hands that would be tangled in Marian Fitzwalter’s hair tonight. Joshua and the team didn’t knowhowI’d be building rapport—neither did the higher-ups at the NSA or the CIA. Frankly, my bosses had never cared how I’d gotten things done, as long as they’d been done in the end.
Well, done and with no one getting hauled in front of the Senate afterward.
