The Special Agent Jana Baker Spy-Thriller Series

Early Morning Fear

17

Early Morning Fear

With all the tension of her situation, Jana’s emotions bubbled to the surface. Exhaustion had overtaken her, but she could not fall asleep. The realization that Agent Stone thought of her like a daughter swirled with the feelings of exhaustion as Jana finally drifted off, thinking back to her childhood. Flashes of memories formed into a dream, a dream of Jana’s youth. She found herself again catapulted back to the farm, a place that had become the only stability in the life of a young child whose parents had died. It was supper time and she was seated in her grandfather’s lap on the porch. His warm arms reached around her, a fork in one hand, a knife in the other. He squeezed his arms to hug her at the same time he cut into the country fried steak on Jana’s plate in front of them. He put the knife down and lifted the fork to hold the first bite of food in front of Jana’s little mouth. His free hand found its way to her tiny rib cage and he tickled her. Jana giggled and he said, “Come on, sweet pea. Time to eat. Why are you not eating?” But Jana laughed and laughed at his touch.

“I can’t eat!” she said, squirming and giggling in his lap.

“Why not, sweet pea? Come on now, grandpa says it’s time to eat.”

“You’re tickling me!” she said, roaring with laughter that her grandpa found infectious.

While his tickling and her squirming continued, he said, “These are not the tickles. There are no tickles. Now eat your steak.”

A knock on the door at 5:10 a.m. startled Jana her from the dream and back into a frightening reality, a reality in which she would place herself further into harm’s way. As she rubbed her eyes, the sadness of all the loss she’d suffered in her life crashed against the backs of her eyes, like water rushing through a pipe that suddenly finds itself stopped by a valve. The back pressure was building and Jana strained to push the tears down.

She wanted to call someone; she wanted to speak to a friend. But Jana didn’t have many of those. She’d always found it hard to make friends that were women. It wasn’t until her junior year at Georgetown University that her roommate told her why. “They hate you because of your looks,” she had said.

“What looks?” she replied. “I don’t give any of the girls mean looks. I smile at everybody.”

“No, they’re jealous of you, Jana. It’s your beauty, your body. They see you, then look in the mirror as they compare themselves against you. They’re jealous. Then they see the guys swirling around you and it makes them feel inferior. Half of them would kill to get the attention of any one of those guys, but they’re all fawning over you and the girls hate you for it.”

The shock had come like a slap in the face. Jana had grown up in a very quiet, reserved farming town. Boys had always paid attention to her, but it had never gone to her head. In fact, it had never even occurred to her to consider herself superior to anyone else. Her grandfather’s upbringing had taught nothing but love for other people. Jana’s values had been formed during those years, years spent helping her grandpa on the farm, and at church, where he taught Sunday school. No, Jana had no one to turn to in the bleakness of the morning. No close girlfriend she could rely on, no boyfriend she considered to be a soul mate. She was alone, alone with her feelings.

With FBI agents working surveillance around the periphery of her apartment building at all hours of the day and night, she had little fear that the person knocking on the door was any type of threat. Her bare feet hit the cold wood floor and the old oak boards squeaked in protest. She tiptoed to look out the peephole. Agent Stone’s scalp shined back at her, and Jana unbolted the two locks, slipped the security chain off its rail, and pulled the door open.

“Dad, it’s early,” she said through a grin.

As Stone walked into the cramped studio apartment, he said, “You’re really going to call me that?”

“I’m just messing with you, Stone,” she said, this time yawning. “Why are you here?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, I could. Until now, that is.”

“Sorry to wake you. Look, we have to talk about tonight. Tonight is Friday and you are about to walk into the penthouse apartment of someone who’s just graced the terror watch list. And there’s more you need to hear about. My surveillance team has been scoping his penthouse apartment, and there’s a problem.”

“Besides the fact that you think he’s going to drug then sexually assault me?”

“His apartment is surrounded in mirrored glass. The surveillance team pointed a laser microphone at it.”

“A laser microphone?”

“Yes, we use laser mics to listen in on conversations where we don’t have a listening device planted inside. The mic focuses on a window pane, and interprets the vibrations it picks up as a conversation takes place inside. We can hear the voices that way. We have access to an office suite across the street which we’ve been using to surveil him. At any rate, the laser mic isn’t going to work in this case.” He put his hands on his hips and leaned closer to her face. “There’s a stick-on composite film on the exterior of the glass, similar to the way a car window gets tinted. But this is no window tinting. This is countermeasure film. It’s designed to interrupt the pattern of vibrations coming from voices inside the apartment. In short, it’s designed to thwart laser mics.”

“You are sounding paranoid.”

His volume escalated. “Paranoid? What kind of a person puts countermeasure film against their apartment windows? I’ll tell you what kind. The kind of person that wants to make sure the feds are not listening. Jana, no one has countermeasure film like this. It’s not something you order off sss. Am I paranoid? Damn right I’m paranoid. The federal government pays me to be paranoid. He’s got to be a much bigger terrorist than we believed. In fact, we’re definitely getting a clearer picture that it’s Jeffrey Dima, and not so much Rune Dima, that is the ringleader here. Rune may be the CEO of the company, but where these terrorist connections are concerned, Jeffrey is calling the shots.”

“We went over a lot of this last night. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

“You aren’t getting it!” Stone blasted. “When we detected the countermeasure film, my team looked further. And they discovered something else we didn’t foresee.”

“And what’s that?”

“Jeffrey has a maid that comes to clean up about every other day—”

“Oh no!” Jana blurted, her hands finding her face. “Not a maid! Oh, the danger!” The sarcasm was not well received.

“You are like a daughter. A teenage daughter,” Stone said.

“Very funny.”

“We were suspicious, so we hid an electronic mic, a bug, in her cart yesterday. When she went into his apartment, the listening device transmitted and recorded nothing.” He let the statement hang in space a moment to see if Jana would pick up on the significance. When she held up her hands, he said, “Do you know what that means? It means his apartment is equipped to jam electronic transmissions. Almost undoubtedly, he’s blocking all frequencies outside of the normal cellphone range, which means you won’t be able to wear a wire. Any wire you wear will be jammed. We won’t be able to hear what’s going on in that apartment.” He shook his head. “No. You are five feet, three inches tall. He’s a foot taller and seventy pounds heavier. You’d be all alone in there, and I won’t allow it.”

Jana looked at the ground then into his eyes. “Stone, we’ve talked about the dangers. I know about the Rohypnol, I have a plan, and I can take care of myself.”

“Oh, can you?” Stone said as he suddenly spun Jana around by the shoulders, wrenched her arm behind her back, and placed a thick forearm around her neck in a choking position. “What about now? Can you take care of yourself now?” he said, exasperation oozing from the edges of his voice. “What are you going to do if he does this to you? Huh? If he wants to hurt you, we wouldn’t know about it, and you wouldn’t be able to do a thing to stop him.”

“Oh, yeah?” she gurgled from under the choking pressure on her throat. “Well what if I did this?” She raised her knee into the air and slammed the edge of her bare heel into the top, right edge of his foot, impacting the dorsal lateral cutaneous nerve.

Stone recoiled and his grip abated as the shockwave of pain rocketed up his foot and into his leg. He knelt down and sat on the ground as his hands gripped the foot. “Oh s**t, that hurts.”

She knelt down beside him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Stone, you think I’ve never taken a self-defense class? Look, I’m vulnerable, okay? But I’m not a little lamb. You and I both know this investigation is going almost nowhere. Right now, all we have are records of financial transactions. There’s no crime there. You told me earlier, it’s the reason for the investments that is at question, and the fact that there’s a known terror connection.”

“Okay, let’s say you are able to get into his apartment, pull off the plan we’ve discussed, then you are able to rifle through his laptop and we find clues. What then? Do you realize you might have to testify in open court against him and Rune Dima, against Al-Qaeda itself? You’d have to enter the witness protection program. You’d have to disappear from your life.”

They both stood. “What life? Stone, I have very few friends, and the ones I do have aren’t even there for me. I have no family, and my life here in Manhattan just started. If anyone is in a good position to start their life over, it’s me. I’m ready, and I’m not backing down from this.”

“You’ve got guts, kid, and guts is enough. Where is this chip on your shoulder coming from? What is it you think you have to prove to somebody?”

“Not to somebody, Stone, to me. I can’t name one thing I’ve ever done in my life that’s truly important. Most people never get this opportunity. I’m going to prove to myself that I can do this.”

“One tough kid,” Stone said with a half smile. The phone in his pocket vibrated. “Stone,” he said into it. “Who? Who’s coming up here?” Stone’s right hand found the firearm on his hip as though a magnet had attracted it there. “Okay, get everybody on alert. I want three units out of their position and into the stairwell. Do it now.”

“What’s going on?” Jana said as she backed away.

“Get behind the bed. Lay on the ground. Someone’s coming up.”

“At this hour?” Jana said.

Stone held his hand on his weapon and peered out the peephole in the door. A man wearing a ball cap came into view, holding a long, tall, white box, then glanced at a clipboard as if confirming he was at the correct address. Stone stepped aside, fearing the box might contain a weapon—he did not want to be in the line of fire. He removed his Glock from its holster. The doorbell rang and Stone held a finger to his lips, signaling Jana to stay quiet. After a moment, the bell rang again. Stone waited, then heard footsteps walking away from the door. He glanced out the peephole to find the hallway empty. He opened the door and glanced in either direction. The white box had been leaned against the door frame.

“Flowers,” Jana said as she peered over the bed. “Looks like a box of flowers.”

“Don’t touch it,” Stone said as he held a hand up.

“Stone, give me a break. You think the terrorists are going to drop off a bomb at my house? It’s flowers, for God’s sake.” Jana picked the featherweight box off the floor and opened it. Inside lay a single, long-stem, white rose nestled in white tissue paper. “See? I told you. Try not to be so paranoid.”

“No card? A white rose? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Come on, Stone. Don’t you know anything about women?”

“Of course I do, but my ex-wife would beg to differ.”

“A white rose symbolizes new beginnings, or it can mean thinking of you.”

“It’s from the slimeball, isn’t it?”

Jana nodded. “Yeah, he’s thinking of me; thinking of separating me from my panties, that is.”

“Nice,” Stone said.

“Come on, Dad. I’m going to his place tonight and you know it. Now, did you bring what I asked you to bring?”

“Yes, dammit. Here it is.” He handed her a prescription bottle. “Rohypnol, just like you wanted. And here,” he said as he opened an envelope and withdrew a thin square of paper, about two inches across.

“What’s this?” Jana said as she held it to the light.

“It’s like litmus paper, only this type is made to detect the presence of Rohypnol. Hide this on your person and be sure you discreetly dip it into anything you drink. If it detects the drug, it will turn pink.” He wagged a finger in her face. “Don’t underestimate this guy, Jana. He’s bad news. Don’t drink anything unless you’ve tested it first.”

“Really? Well what if he puts it in my food?”

Stone rubbed his temples. “You’re going to give me a heart attack. And don’t have more than one alcoholic drink. You’ll need all your faculties if you expect to pull off what you have planned.”

“Yes, Dad.”