Unmanned (9780385351263) by Dan Fesperman

months, then he supposedly turned up down in Baltimore.”
    Jesus
, Cole thought. Was everyone in Baltimore?
    “So they found him?”
    “Tried to. Or had the Bureau try for them, jurisdictional rules and all that. No luck.”
    “Well, if the FBI couldn’t find him—”
    “Maybe they weren’t looking very hard.”
    “Why, ’cause they hate the Agency? The whole rivalry thing?”
    Bickell shook his head. “Cooperation’s better than ever on stuff like this. I’m betting my people made a decision at some point that they didn’t
want
to look very hard. Far better to hear that a cursory check showed no sign of him, so thanks for trying and call off the dogs untilfurther notice, pretty please. Or maybe they found him but hushed it up. Put him under surveillance. By request, of course. Either way, it’s more cover-up, more stuff no one would talk about. Not when I asked, anyway.”
    “Is that why they pushed you out? For asking about Mansur and Magic Dimes?”
    “Plus some other shit. Even when Wade was still active there was all kinds of noise around the Agency’s Predator program, so I’d already been asking questions.”
    “Noise?”
    “Funny stuff nobody could or would explain. Not even Castle, and he was supposed to be running the show.”
    “Like what?”
    “People coming in and out of our ops center who I’d never seen before. They’d nod at Wade like they were buddies and he’d nod back.”
    “Green badgers? Blue badgers?”
    “No badgers. And no names, far as I could tell. I’d ask Wade and he’d say something about it being strictly need-to-know, so butt out, but I could tell he didn’t like ’em, either. So I averted my eyes, at least for a while. Then I asked the station chief. He told me to drop it, let Wade handle it. So I let Wade handle it, and Wade disappeared.” He shook his head, gazing out across the lake. “Tell me something, in all your ops did you ever get any unexplained visitors to your chat group?”
    “You mean besides you guys?”
    “Hell, we were OGA. Duly announced and reporting for duty. Might as well have been displaying an Agency icon every time we posted. No, I mean true interlopers, guys who might ask a question out of nowhere, with a handle you’d never seen before, then slink off into the ether.”
    Cole thought about it. Drew a blank.
    “Don’t recall any. Nobody beyond the usual crowd, from Al Udeid on down.”
    “Nobody with the handle Lancer?”
    The name stopped him, literally. He stood still on the path. A bird called out from overhead, and a droplet of melted snow smacked his forehead just as he locked on to a memory.
    “Yeah, there was a Lancer. Just once. Or once that I can remember.” Bickell was intense now, staring straight at him. “It was during our recon at Sandar Khosh, the month before the missile strike.”
    “Remember what he asked?”
    “No. But I remember wondering who the hell it was, just for a second. His handle popped up, he asked one or two questions, then he vanished, just like you said. It happened so fast I didn’t think about it again. Until now.”
    “I got him pretty regular. So did everybody in our shop. I asked Wade who the hell he was.”
    “And?”
    “Told me he was a privileged guest, nothing more. After that I always wondered if he was bird-dogging you guys as well. Your CO never mentioned him?”
    “Nothing. Before or after.”
    “Curious.”
    “You think it’s related to all this stuff?”
    “Hell, everything’s related. But how? No idea. Just another part of the noise.”
    They walked on, footsteps crunching frosted mud in the shadows along the shoreline before they turned back into sunlight. Bickell looked up at the sky. A small private plane, a Cessna or a Piper, soared across the far side of the lake. They watched for a few seconds before it veered through a notch in the gray hills, leaving behind only the faint drone of its engine as it disappeared over the horizon.
    During the pause another