Serious Risks. Rachel Lee
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her business card. Arlen’s gray eyes twinkled down at her.
“You’re better prepared than I am,” he confessed. “If something comes up, I’ll call.”
He took his leave almost with a sense of relief. Damn it, Arlen, he thought, the lady’s young enough to be your daughter, and you’re too damn old and wise to get tangled up with her.
And maybe, he thought a few minutes later, she wasn’t as young as she looked. Maybe he was going to start feeling again whether he wanted to or not. Three years was a long time. Maybe even dead feelings came back to life after enough time passed. Maybe, no matter how much you wanted them to stay gone, they just came back anyhow.
Chapter 2
Arlen arrived at the Bureau offices in the morning to find things in an uproar. One of the agents, Ted Wilson, was cooperating with the Secret Service in a sting operation, and overnight they’d rounded up five major drug dealers who were selling crack and coke for food stamps. The Drug Enforcement Administration had gotten involved somewhere along the way, and as near as Arlen could tell they had U.S. marshals, DEA agents, Secret Service agents and even, unless he was mistaken, a Customs agent, in the hallways and offices of the Bureau. They lacked only a U.S. Attorney, and it wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before one showed up. Carolyn Granger came downstairs with a tape recorder, warning everyone that unless somebody gave her some good reasons to use with the judge, the dealers would be out on bail in a couple of hours.
Arlen paused at Ted Wilson’s office door and leaned in to congratulate the young agent. Wilson, looking tired and rumpled in jeans and an FBI windbreaker, grinned up at him. “Thanks, Chief. It feels pretty good.”
“What’s all the congregation for?”
“Well, they’re painting all the Treasury offices, which means the Secret Service guys and the Customs guys are grabbing any excuse to stay out of there. I think DEA’s just curious.”
“Arlen?” The voice of his secretary, Donna, rose above the din and reached him down the length of the hall.
“Yo!” Twisting his head and leaning backward into the hall, he could just see her.
“It’s someone named Jessica on the phone.”
“Tell her I’ll be there in just a minute.” He looked back at Ted. “We do have some other work to accomplish here today.”
“Sure thing, boss.” Ted’s grin broadened. “I think it’ll calm down pretty quick. These guys were supposed to be at their desks ten minutes ago, anyway.”
It was impossible not to grin back. This was Ted’s first bust, and Arlen had no trouble remembering the exhilaration he’d felt his own first time. Walking down the hall, he edged around similarly jubilant men and escaped into the quiet of his own office.
Three of the lines on his phone were lit, so he buzzed Donna and found out that Jessica was on two.
“Jessica,” he said pleasantly into the phone, swiveling his chair to look up at the gray sky that promised rain before the morning was out. For years he’d worked in an office without a window, and the nicest part of his current assignment, he sometimes thought, was the window, with its view of the sky. “Are you calling from work?”
“Yes, I—”
He interrupted her quickly, but kept his tone casual. “Don’t tell me you’re canceling our lunch date.”
At the other end of the line, Jessica drew a total blank. Lunch date? She didn’t remember making a lunch date with Arlen. “I was just going to—”
“I can change the time if that’ll make it easier for you to meet me,” he said smoothly. “Noon instead of one o’clock? Would that be better?”
“I—I guess.” Flabbergasted, she didn’t know what else to say.
“Good! I’ll pick you up out front at noon, then. I’m sorry I can’t talk, but you know how it is at work. I’m already late for a meeting. See you at noon.”
At her own desk on the other side of town, Jessica listened to the hum of the empty phone line as she looked down into the safe drawer. The document was back, all right, stuffed down beneath the other folders so that it lay on the bottom of the drawer. If Arlen hadn’t predicted it, she would probably be thinking she was losing her mind. There was no way she could have missed it in her search yesterday, and yet she would have wondered anyway.
And for some reason Arlen didn’t want to discuss the matter over the phone while she was at work. At least, that was the only conclusion she could draw from their crazy conversation. But she’d wanted to ask him what to do, because it had occurred to her that the red folder or the pages of the document might have fingerprints on them. If she called security first, they would probably send someone up to check things out and ruin all the prints. If there were any.
Troubled, she closed the safe and sat back in her chair. Well, she could wait until after lunch to tell security she had the document. It would make her look even dippier, but what the heck. There was evidently no way she was going to come out of this looking good.
In the meantime, she had a great deal of work still to accomplish on her design for this new software project.
And someone had been in her safe again last night. The idea sent chills racing up and down her spine. In that safe were highly classified details about the Western world’s electronic countermeasures systems. There were threat estimates and survivability estimates, all of which would be very useful to America’s enemies.
In defense work, there were three main levels of classification. Confidential, the lowest, was given to information that could cause serious damage to national security if it fell into the wrong hands. Secret, the next highest, was given to information that could cause grave damage. Those were the levels in her safe. Quite a serious problem, to have someone rummaging around in those documents.
But what if that someone also had access to the guarded vault downstairs? That was where the Top Secret documents were kept, documents that by definition could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security, or even provoke war. It was downright scary even to think about.
And whoever had the combination to her safe probably did have access to the vault, because that was where copies of the combinations for every safe in the building were kept. Somehow this person must have gotten to that copy. And that meant everything in the building was open to him.
It was not yet nine in the morning, but Jessica found herself rubbing her temples to ease a growing throb. Take some aspirin and forget it, Jess, she told herself. Just focus your mind on work.
“Hey, Jessica.” Bob Harrow stood in her office door, looking his usual seedy self, with his hair standing up wildly and a stain of some kind on the front of his T-shirt. “Did you finish your part of the design yet?” As project director, Bob had the unenviable task of trying to keep the team on track.
“Not yet, Bob. Sorry. Yesterday blew me out of the water.”
Bob looked sympathetic. “You don’t look any too great this morning, kiddo. Don’t beat yourself over the head about it, Jessica. You won’t be the first programmer up here who’s spaced something out and found it two days later. Why do you think they put the digital locks on the door? I keep waiting for them to come up with retina identification equipment so they don’t have to worry about one of us scribbling the door code on our pant leg or something.”
But Jessica’s mind caught on something he said. “You mean other people have mislaid things up here? When did that happen?”
“It happens all the time.” Bob shrugged. “Well, not every day, but it was…oh, maybe a month ago that Jerry couldn’t find some report or other on some NATO test. It turned up under a stack of papers on his desk the next day. If you ask me, the only mistake you made was telling security about it. Those guys are completely useless. Did they find it for you? Nope. They just drove you crazy, and yet they’re