The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [29]
Stokes stared down at the wide brown stain left behind on the rug. A call to housekeeping would raise too many questions. He settled on cleaning the mess himself.
As he made his way out from the vault, a small ring tone chirped inside his jacket. Stokes paused in confusion and pulled out Roselli’s PDA. A confirmation flashed on the display: ‘2 MESSAGES DELIVERED.’
Liberated from the vault’s thick walls, the PDA had finally caught some airwaves.
‘Great,’ Stokes huffed.
Navigating the BlackBerry’s menus, he hunted for the draft copy of Roselli’s first message. But he found nothing. Almost immediately, however, ‘undeliverable’ error messages started bouncing back from the intended recipients’ e-mail accounts. Stokes was relieved to see that the addressees were the scientists who’d partaken in the 2003 cave excavation. The message began with a warning about Stokes’s malicious intentions. Next came a rally call for each recipient to contact authorities with all information pertaining to his or her time spent in Iraq. Also included in the e-mail were hyperlinks to classified material and documents that detailed the project’s true mission. What Roselli hadn’t anticipated was that Stokes’s NSA contact had already deactivated and thoroughly emptied said e-mail accounts - stage one of the clean-sweep that would be complete only when each name in this e-mail wound up being the subject for an obituary. That task was well under way.
‘Nice try, Frank. Always a step ahead of you.’
The PDA’s grimy keyboard was making his fingers sticky; some tacky white powder that could only have come from the doughnuts that had led to Roselli’s equally doughy belly. Disgusted, Stokes paused to wipe his hands with his handkerchief before hunting for the second stealth e-mail.
But sifting through the SENT and DELETED items, he could not find a second draft. If Roselli set the message to automatically delete upon transmission, there’d likely be no way of retrieving it or determining the recipient.
After two more minutes, however, Stokes did manage to determine the e-mail address to which the second message had been sent. The domain was registered to Our Savior in Christ Cathedral - Stokes’s personal e-mail account. Rushing over to his computer, Stokes went into his e-mail client. Some spam about cheap health insurance and solar heating systems managed to sneak through, but nothing from Roselli.
What tricks did Roselli have up his sleeve? he wondered.
Cursing, Stokes tossed the PDA in his desk drawer.
From a utility closet adjacent to the elevator, he collected some cleaning supplies and made his way back into the vault. He began by thoroughly spritzing the air with odour neutralizer. Then off came his blazer and he got down on his knees to squirt the soiled mess with commercial-duty rug cleaner. He used a scrub brush to attack the stain, blotted up the resultant frothy goo with paper towels, and repeated the process. The heinous act reminded him of shitter detail back in the Corps. Though nothing could match that raunchy mix of kerosene and flaming excrement - truly the stuff of nightmares.
Satisfied, Stokes rounded up the supplies and filled a trash bag with the waste.
15
BOSTON
‘Your green tea with honey,’ Agent Flaherty said, and set a paper cup in front of Brooke Thompson, waiter-style.
‘Thanks. You’re pretty good at table service.’
‘Got me through college.’ He set down a second cup for himself - black coffee - then sat in the chair on the opposite side of the cafe table. He took a second to peer out the floor-to-ceiling window at the wind whipping the snow drifts that carpeted Calderwood Courtyard. ‘God, I hate the cold.’
‘Then you might consider moving. Because last time I checked, the Boston summer lasts about two weeks.’
He chuckled. ‘I grew up in Southie, youngest of seven. Leaving isn’t an option. How about you … leaving Florida to come here? Not exactly the picture of sanity.’
‘I prefer beaches and sun, but I had to follow the work.’
Like many pallid Bostonian Irish, Brooke thought, the guy