Free The Siren Project by Stephen Renneberg Page B

wasn’t a
mark on him.”
    “Because I’ve seen it before,” she replied,
falling into a stony silence.
    Mitch remembered what Knightly had said to
him that first night, and the memory chilled him: There are
some things worse than death.
     
     
     

Chapter
5
     
     
    Mitch clambered out of the shower, not
bothering to towel off as he hurried to answer the telephone.
    “Be out front in five minutes.” Mathew
Prescott said quickly, then hung up.
    Mitch pulled on his clothes, then hurried
down to street level where a blue Ford pulled up in front of the hotel. Mitch
climbed in, then Prescott pulled into traffic barely waiting for the door to
close.
    Prescott lifted a finger to his lips
ordering silence, then pulled a small black box out of the glove compartment.
He depressed one of the plain gray buttons on top of the box, then set it down
in the coin tray. “I check the car daily for bugs, but you never know. That
should disrupt any radio signals leaving the car.”
    “Expecting trouble?”
    “Just cautious, considering who we’re
dealing with. Safer here than in your hotel.” He handed Mitch a buff colored
envelope. Inside were the photographs Mitch had given him several days before,
a report pinned to each photograph. Prescott pointed to the photographs of the
two men who'd left the Newton Institute. “Those guys are civilians, an
electrical engineer and a computer systems engineer. Nothing special about
either of them. Both have worked in the defense industries for most of their
careers.”
    Mitch glanced at the notes on each
engineer, then slipped their dossiers to the rear.
    “Now that guy’s interesting,” Prescott
pointed to the picture of the well dressed man in the dark suit who had entered
the Institute. “His name is Richard McNamara. Ex-NSA. He left about two years
ago, and promptly disappeared off the face of the Earth. He’s been involved in
intel ops against rogue states in the Mid East and Africa. It’s all there.”
    Mitch examined McNamara’s history. “Iran,
Yemen, Somalia, terrorist training camps in the Sahara. He’s been a busy man.” Mitch
noticed McNamara’s last couple of years in the NSA were conspicuously obscure. “What
does this mean? Secondment 721?”
    “No idea. The security covering it is off
the scale.” Prescott completed his second pass of the Washington Monument, and
headed off for a third circuit. “I know who, but not what it was. There were
about a dozen NSA people transferred to Secondment 721, all long time
associates of McNamara. All of them left the NSA within a month of each other. Either
Secondment 721 is so stressful, it brings on early retirement-”
    “Or a bunch of high class spooks went into
business for themselves.”
    “Each of them retired ill health, so they
went out with full benefits. Each of their retirement packages were signed off
by one Herbert Norton, then a very senior NSA officer. Way too senior to sign
off on these guy’s retirement plans.”
    “So whatever these guys were doing, they
did it with Norton’s approval. Is he still with the NSA?”
    “Nope. The strain of snooping on the world
was too much for him. He ran his car off a cliff about a week after the last of
the Secondment 721 guys left.” Prescott looked puzzled. “If it was a fix,
they’d have left immediately after he died, with paperwork approved by him just
before he died. That would make the approvals obvious forgeries. But this guy
dies after the Secondment 721 boys are long gone, so
if it was a scam, he would have had time to say so.”
    Mitch flipped to the last of the four
photographs, a picture of the tall well built man with gaunt features. “And
this guy?”
    “His name is Bradick, ex-navy SEAL. He's
done some crazy stuff, sneaking into places no sane man would go. Not someone
you want to mess with. When he got out of the military, he went downhill fast. He
was in and out of trouble with the LA and SF PD’s. He was the prime suspect on
a couple of armed