Alexandria, VA

2016

Mass confusion and panic were the only injuries sustained by the public from the street side explosion in Dupont Circle. The black SUVs and mercenaries, cleared out as quickly as they had arrived. The press was on-site immediately and, of course, built it up with speculation. It was the second explosion in DC in 24 hours and public paranoia had begun to stir. BNA news was already brewing on the scene, but there was nothing to learn about the tenant of the apartment, for he was a ghost.

Mac was now on the move with Xander. They knew that they needed haven where they could have the time to analyze the evidence hacked from the NSA database. Fortunately, Xander had his own safe house in downtown Alexandria where he often conducted Spartan business. Within thirty minutes of circling back on their routes to ensure they had no tails, they arrived in Old Town Alexandria, a city that had retained much of its charm through antiquity and remained one of the most prominent historic districts in the region.

Mac and Xander entered the apartment to a rush of stale air. It was a neglected studio apartment, with brick walls and large translucent windows. Only the silhouettes of office buildings could be seen through it but enough natural light came through to rely on during the day hours. It had a hand-me-down college dorm couch and a couple of thin mattresses laid out on the floor. Xander opened the window bay to filter out the bottled up months that had been trapped in the confines of the apartment. Mac immediately swung his bags off his shoulder and began assembling a workstation with the three laptops connected to hard drives that he had grabbed on his way out of the door. The small coffee table had transformed from a wobbly old foot prop to a top of the line command center in a matter of minutes. Xander inspected the apartment, looking for a stash of canned foods and old clothes he had planted.

"Nice digs!" Mac said, dripping with sarcasm.

"It's clean of bugs and no one knows it exists... better than I can say about your apartment..." Xander jibed back at him. Mac's neck rotated toward him, his head settled, his face frozen. "Too soon?" Xander asked before surrendering to a fit of laughter.

"When are we going to be able to run this flash drive? Hamal Abadi is our only lead to opening this box. We need to see what Anni pulled on him," Xander explained.

"Let me set up security and then we will be ready."

"Well, how much security have you got to set up?" Xander was eager to see what Anni was able to retrieve. Mac noticed the lack of patience in his tone.

"Do you want this apartment to end up like mine?" Xander conceded the point and remained silent as Mac's fingers tapped a drum roll out on the keyboard. Xander paced through the room mentally reviewing the recent developments in the mission.

"To me it's a no-brainer. Duke disappeared just before Agent Zero surfaced. Do not find the timing of it all curious?"

"Yeah of course I do. But you have to understand we must approach this objectively and exhaust all possibilities before branding Duke a traitor," Xander explained. He went over the phone conversation with Agent Zero in his head over and over again. He was very careful to remain objective in his decision making and investigation as he heard Agent Zero's distorted words repeat.

There's the choice, Xander, will you act on emotion, or reason? I know that conflict is in you.... And I really want to know the answer.

After an hour, Mac's rolling fingers slowed to a stop. He cracked his knuckles and leaned back on the couch as if to signal his completion of the task at hand.

"Firewalls up, encryption installed, server's secure, now let's see what we've got." Xander unpocketed the flash drive and handed it over. After inserting it, Mac combed through the hundreds of files until he found the two that Anni had uploaded.

"Let's take a look at who was following us..." Mac spoke over his work, as he navigated to the facial recognition results. After clicking it open, a thousand faces flashed sequentially over the screen, searching for a match. Xander peered closer in anticipation but backed up from the screen when the match was made.

"What the hell?" Mac asked.

A different photo of the same man gave them a facial match. But the bio on file was blank.

"His file has been scrubbed... Agent Zero definitely has help from on high." Mac sat back in his chair and considered the hypothesis. He then turned and nodded to Xander affirming his theory with a nod.

"Let's see what else we have." Xander instructed.

Mac spun back to computer and opened the second file. There was a headshot of Hamal Abadi, followed by a much more in depth profile including known associates. There were twelve pages to the profile, all of which Xander filed away to his memory like any other file.

"Now that's more like it..." Mac responded upon seeing the wealth of information.

"A few known associates of interest... could have a lead there, nothing concrete or immediate though. No recognizable names," Xander assessed the file. "Cross reference those associates with the directory of the government employees."

"If Agent Zero is in fact connected to a man on the inside – it would most likely be an operative, government official or a high rank in the military. As you know the ability to clear someone's name from the US customs watch list is almost an impossible task," Xander speculated aloud, dissecting the variables as Mac ran a search.

Thousands of headshots blinked by on the monitor at rapid speed. After a few minutes of waiting, the search results came.

No Results Were Found.

"Damnit..." Xander exhaled.

"You didn't think it would be that easy did ya?"

"Open the next file..." he directed sternly.

Mac navigated back to his J drive and clicked on the second file extracted by Anni. A local program with sound waves came up on the screen similar to the screen that Anni 2.0 had spoken through.

"It's an audio recording, looks like a tapped phone call." Mac cued it up. Mac pushed the play button and they both leaned an ear toward the speaker.

"Is this line secure?" a distorted voice answered. The cadence amid its manipulation was different from the distortion heard from Agent Zero.

"Yes... Agent Zero needs to get stateside to carry out Phase 1," Abadi's voice answered, unfiltered. Xander deduced the owner of the voice from the aged tones and foreign English in his diction.

"My man will meet you to provide what you will need. You will have the target?" the distorted voice asked.

"Yes. Per instructions from Agent Zero, you will receive the location for where we plan to detonate the device. Can you ensure there will be no reconnaissance on our meet?" Abadi asked.

"Yes... You have my word."

Xander turned to Mac and quickly identified the parties on the call.

"This is Abadi talking on behalf of Agent Zero and the distorted voice has to be the Inside Man if they are talking about safe passage and transit to the States..." Mac nodded and listened closely as the conversation continued.

"How can you guarantee that?" Abadi asked back. The Inside Man began laughing through its distorted condescension.

"Really? Do you know who I am? Well let me tell you, I am a powerful and influential figure in the US government, not some common Jihadist like yourself. Why wouldn't I offer a veil of protection? If this is traced to me, I'm finished and I'm no good for our cause. And let's get something straight. Your employer works for me. So you don't question my abilities," the distorted voice almost yelled – the sound waves spiked on the screen. Then a long silence ensued only broken by Abadi after a considerable pause.

"Okay then... I will meet your man in the market of Loi Kolay Village in the Kunar Province of the Korengal Valley at 9 AM local time on June 20th." Abadi's voice was clear and calm, despite the lashing he had just received.

The distorted voice did not respond. The Inside Man to whom it belonged just hung up the phone, leaving Xander and Mac to their speculations.

"This is Agent Zero's insurance..." Xander realized.

"What do you mean?"

"The first question was: is this line secure? It wasn't, hence why we were able to find it in the NSA database. Agent Zero must have instructed Abadi to not secure the line. If Agent Zero's man on the inside did not in fact ensure a veil of privacy to the meet, which they didn't, causing the meet to blow up, which it did, quite literally, the hunt would be on and we would inevitably find this piece of evidence." Xander marveled at the cleverness of Agent Zero.

"You think Agent Zero planned all of that?" Mac asked.

Xander nodded with a grave expression, now fully aware of the genius they were dealing with.

Now I've left you enough breadcrumbs to follow.

"What about the Inside Man saying, 'Your employer works for me.' Do you think there could be a larger network here?" Mac questioned.

"It's definitely a possibility, we may not just be dealing with the Skeptics but a larger terrorist network that Agent Zero is only a part of," Xander explained.

They both fell to their own thought as they let the theories marinate. After a minute of considerations, Xander turned to his fellow Spartan.

"Mac, is there any way we can make that voice clearer and get behind the voice manipulator?" Xander asked.

"Yeah, it will take a while though. I'll have to realign the scrambled voice inflections. It'll be like putting the pieces of a shredded piece of paper back together," Mac answered almost as if it were a challenge.

"Get working on it." Mac nodded and immediately narrowed his focus on one sentence, and how to rearrange the components of the sound wave. It was a trial and error process that neither Mac nor Xander knew how long would take.

Xander was left to his thoughts. He stared at the large blank wall of the apartment, dimly lit by the translucent window bay facing it. He folded his arms, cocked his head to his shoulder looking sideways at the blank canvas before him. He tapped his foot and jittered toward a thought.

"I need to get organized..." he murmured to himself.

Xander walked over to the kitchen and flung out a drawer where a hodgepodge of writing utensils were stashed. He grabbed the black sharpie in the bunch, decapped it and brought it to the dry wall. He began mapping out the events of the last forty-eight hours. With both Mac and Xander fully consumed in their work, the only sounds throughout the apartment were the clicking of the keyboard and the squeek of the Sharpie marker. The large blank wall had become etched with over a hundred notations, including the players in the game, identified or unidentified.

The Inside Man - The Financier

Identity: Unknown

Position: US Government Official/Financier for Agent Zero

Notes: Shares a common cause with Agent Zero but remains his or her superior within the cell. Samir Vashad (deceased) was courier, delivered money to Hamal Abadi (see below).

Agent Zero – The Terrorist

Identity: Unknown

Position: Leader of the Skeptics

Notes: Associated with Project Sparta, Has Group of Mercenaries, Subordinate to Inside Man, Made Direct Contact with Xander

Hamal Abadi (The Courier)

Notes: Appears to be right hand man to Agent Zero, organizes affairs. Escaped meet in Afghanistan.

There was also a timeline of events listed and the full phone dialogue between Xander and Agent Zero. It was a complex mystery – one Xander knew he had to approach in an organized manner to solve. He reviewed the wall to see if anything would surface. Words from the phone call jumped out at Xander again.

There's the choice Xander, will you act on emotion, or reason?

It had been a couple of hour when Xander heard Mac's typing stop. He then turned to Xander.

"I think I cracked it." If it wasn't such good news the voice would have startled Xander. "I had to sift through the sound map and take out the manipulating waves. Parsing it out and finding them was pretty difficult, but I think we're ready to hear the one line I was able to manipulate back to its original state. And I don't think it is an Inside Man, either." He pushed 'play' on the unscrambled sentence.

The scrambled voice was that of a woman's. "And let's get something straight. Your employer works for me."

Xander's eyes widened as his ears perked. He deciphered whose voice it was midway through the sentence. It was a woman from their past. She was a shade of a person left to the rumor mill among the Spartans - one of the most mysterious presences in the Compound. And now she was betraying her country to aid a terrorist cell, alongside someone else from the Project.

"That bitch!" Fire ignited behind Xander's eyes, Mac saw the intense realization written on his face.

"Who is that?"

"Mac, we need to bring the team in, all hands on deck. Send the signal out to the Spartans."

"You got it. It'll be in tomorrow morning's paper, but won't you be effectively inviting Agent Zero into your house?"

"I could be, but we are running out of time and we are going to need the help." Xander walked over to the table, grabbed a sharpie and approached the wall of notes.

"What's going on? Whose voice was that?" Xander bit the cap off and spit it out on the floor. He crossed out the words Inside Man on the wall and wrote the name.

Senator Helen Bashfield

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