Free Spy Catcher: The J.J. McCall Novels (Books 1-3) (The FBI Espionage Series) by S.D. Skye Page B

to fade. She could check the box without drawing undue attention with a flashlight. She snatched her glasses off in frustration and sat back hard against her seat.
    “Nothing. Damn!” she said, disappointed. Against her better judgment, she’d already begun to kid herself, thought Tony’s bright idea might yield a sliver of hope.
    “What were your instructions?” Tony asked.
    “A vertical chalk mark on the south side of the box. This is the south side. No mark.”
    Tony leaned forward and examined the area as if he’d see something with his “man” vision that she couldn’t.
    J.J. rolled her eyes, shot him a glare. “Really?” she asked, her voice slathered in sarcasm. “Nothing’s there.”
    He shrugged. “Dmitriyev was with him so…whadaya gonna do?” Glancing to his right, Tony’s eyes locked on something in the distance. “You want ice cream?” Tony asked. “There’s a shop just up the block.”
    “If this is some feeble attempt to help me eat my troubles away, well...you should’ve thought of it sooner.”
    As he spun the steering wheel to the right, J.J. pressed her forehead against the window. The ice cream shop was just a few hundred feet away. In an act of sheer desperation, she eyed the box from her peripheral vision. 
    She gasped. “Wait a minute. Stop, Tony. Stop!”
    “What is it?” he yelled.
    “Back up to the box! I think I saw something.”
    “Jesus! You scared the crap out of me,” he said.
    She grabbed his arm, pulled him toward her.
    “Look! Right there!”
    Tony’s gaze shifted in circles. Then his chin collapsed into his lap. “How the hell did he pull that off?”
    They’d spotted the faint but visible mark. Plotnikov had placed it on the wrong side of the mailbox. J.J. blinked a few times, believing her imagination had run wild.
    How in hell could Plotnikov mark the signal with Dmitriyev in the car? Her mind churned. Maybe he slipped out in the middle of the night and made the drop? Hmmm. No, the lookouts would’ve seen him leaving and noted the incidents on the log. A piece of this puzzle was missing—something important. And she had no clue what it was.
    But the package was there. Encryption codes. ICE Phantom’s     identity.  The unknowing, the stress was unbearable.
    “We’ve got to check the dead drop location now. We’ll get ice cream after. The park’s about to close.”
    Tony shook his head. “What happened to your priorities?”
     

 
    Chapter 9
    Thursday Evening…
     
    R ussell Freeman, the first African-American FBI director, took the weight of a nation on his shoulders. A little more than a year before, he vowed to leave no stone unturned. The source of the compromises in his department would be identified, and he promised to protect those brave individuals who’d risked their lives to help the FBI accomplish its mission. In the second of his ten-year term, he’d still failed to deliver. Two men had been murdered for political defiance, one man had gone missing, and Freeman still had no idea who the culprit was. Aside from vague references to some ICE Phantom, blaming rogue CIA officers for intelligence failures had been the Bureau way for years, evidenced by the initial botched handling of Robert Hanssen’s investigation. The core of his gut told something he’d denied for too long—the problem was close to home, much closer than he cared to admit.
    Freeman sat behind the stately executive desk in his expansive office. It was decorated with the obligatory accouterment. An FBI seal was mounted on the wall behind him. An array of state and government flags flanked him on either side, all neatly arranged to complement the head-man-in-charge air. He scanned through his daily emails and replied to the most important message, a note from the Director of National Intelligence. He’d requested an urgent meeting with Director Freeman the following week because of the brewing storm, a storm purportedly created by the ICE Phantom or someone