Free Agent X by Noah Boyd

there’s got to be a lot of people with those initials.”
    “Another good question. Unfortunately, one that is going to require a little sleep to answer. I hate to waste the time sleeping, but it’ll be a good investment.” Vail picked up his plate and asked her, “Are you done?”
    “Yes, thanks.”
    “Can you be back here in four hours?”
    “Seeing how the alternative is to let you go wandering off with a new set of credentials and a gun, and then having to answer to the director, I guess I’ll have to.”
    Almost to the minute, four hours after leaving him, Kate pulled up in front of the old Bureau observation post. It was midafternoon, but the temperature was still near freezing. She took his suitcase out of the trunk and carried it upstairs. He was in the room where the meeting with the director had taken place. He had shaved and showered and was reading one of the files that had been provided.
    “It didn’t take you long to get back at it. Anything in there?” she asked.
    “There is one interesting thing. The cell phone they gave Calculus, it tracked him twenty-four hours a day. We have detailed coordinate charts telling us where he went and when.”
    “Nothing else?”
    “Not yet, but I’m already getting the feeling I’m missing something.” He stood up and went over to a computer that was on. “Take a look at this. You’ve probably seen it before.”
    She peered over his shoulder. “Sure, that’s a spy satellite we have access to. How’d you know about it?”
    “I kept reading in the file about transverse tracking. When I turned on the computer, I saw the icon on the desktop.” She sat down in a chair next to him. “I looked through those cell-phone GPS logs. I think they’re important.”
    “Important how?”
    “Take a look at his message again.” He handed her the file. “How do the last three words differ from the first three?”
    To Moscow unexpectedly. Find CDP now!
    “The exclamation point?”
    “And . . . ?”
    She looked for a few seconds and then shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know, what?”
    “Look at my hand,” he said, holding it with the fingers spread as wide as possible. “Now look at the message again.”
    She did and then said, “It looks like there’s an extra space between the ‘CPD’ and the word ‘now.’ ” She thought about it a little longer. “I still don’t get it.”
    “I made some coffee. Would you mind getting me a cup?” His voice was more instructional than demanding.
    Her face shortened into a knot of confusion. “Oooo-kay.” She went into the kitchen and started pouring coffee into a mug. “Black?” she called out to him. Before he could answer, she yelled, “The last sentence contains a message within a message!” Forgetting the coffee, she hurried back into the room. “If he didn’t mean anything by it, the exclamation point would been after ‘To Moscow unexpectedly,’ to emphasize the danger he was in. But using it with ‘now’ and isolating it with an extra space indicates that there are two messages within those last three words: Find CDP and an instruction to do it now, at that exact moment.” She grinned, realizing that Vail had sent her to get coffee so she would stop staring at the forest and be able to isolate one of the trees.
    “And what are we in possession of that can quantify ‘now’?” he asked.
    This time Kate let her mind go blank before trying to figure out the answer. “The exact time he sent the message.”
    Vail said, “And since we have his exact longitude and latitude when he sent it, he might have been giving us a clue to who CDP is.”
    “But he would have to know that the phone we gave him was capable of tracking his movements.”
    “First of all, he’s an engineer, an engineer in the spy business—don’t you think he would assume that? Why would we give him just an ordinary satellite phone? Plus, the phone was turned on. He’d have to know we could track him then.”