Finne’s fridge raid had provided plenty for the two to eat, including left-over lasagna, garlic bread, and the remains of a Caesar salad Tom had prepared. He and Sarah sat next to each other on a fine leather couch on the second story of the boathouse in a well appointed game room in awkward silence. Tom was famished and devoured his plate of food quickly. Sarah, on the other hand, picked at the salad and pushed the lasagna around her plate with her fork feigning eating such a heavy carb meal.
Finally, Sarah broke the silence. “What the fuck? I mean really, what the hell is going on? You show up out of nowhere, pull me from a car wreck, then hijack me to the middle of wherever-we-are tell me you think someone is trying to kill me, but you haven’t really explained shit about anything that makes any sense.”
Finne could see the despair and confusion wringing across Sarah’s brow and knew he had to tell her something to diffuse the conversation and keep her believing in him, even if it would be a lie.
“I know this is hard to understand. I don’t have all the answers. Actually, I don’t have any answers right now. What I do know is limited, but I assure you we are both in a lot of danger. Someone or multiple someones are trying to kill both of us. Who is the question we need to answer. I was given a lead that you were in danger and that is why I was out looking for you on Georgetown Pike. The information I was given was specific. You had been kidnapped but the car that you had been taken in crashed before your kidnappers reached their destination. It was merely luck that I was able to reach you as quickly as I did.”
“Bullshit!” Sarah retorted.
“Believe me or don’t. You can’t refute that the crash happened and you don’t remember how you got there. That is common when someone is drugged like you were,” Tom responded.
“The tip I got lead me to you, so it was real. What I don’t know is who is behind this or what their motives could be.”
Finne stood up and walked to the fall wall where a large oak desk was positioned in front of row of windows looking out onto the river. A 19 inch LCD monitor displayed a colorful array of moving shapes across its screen. Finne recognized the pattern was a standard Windows screen-saver informing him that a PC was powered on nearby. He found the keyboard and mouse in a pull-out drawer in the center of the desk. Finne tapped the spacebar interrupting the pattern displayed on the monitor. To his surprise, the operating system’s desktop was presented without the need to logon through any security application. He clicked on the Firefox icon launching the internet browser.
“Cool, can I check Facebook?” Sarah asked excitedly as she got up to join him at the workstation.
“Absolutely not!” Finne responded. “As far as anyone knows, you and I are both dead. We need to keep it that way until we can find out what is going on.”
Sarah was not happy with his answer. She sat back down on the couch and scowled at Finne.
“I need to check out some information that could help us. I am not going to logon to Facebook, send any emails, nor search for anything that could be directly linked to you or me.”
“Whatever.” Sarah sighed.
Much like any U.S. Intelligence asset can determine daily priorities and communication cipher keys by browsing the weather and classified sections of each day’s Washington Post anywhere in the world, Finne knew where to locate the current status of DC based intelligence activities posted on public websites for those in the know to find. Actually, the web is only a recent medium used to convey the ins and outs of the DC intelligence community activity. Normally, Finne would merely need to tune his radio to WTOP and listen to the traffic reports presented every ten minutes. Their current distance from Washington was well beyond the news radio’s broadcast range. Finne knew that he could obtain the same information from the station’s website, WTOP.com. He pulled up the main page and then clicked on the link to the traffic sub-page. A map of the Washington area with its beltway centered in the image was presented with color-coding indicating where traffic was congested around the region. Instantly, Finne could see that there were major incidents at all of the areas he suspected, including the GW Parkway, the BW Parkway, and downtown at the intersection of 15th St and Pennsylvania Ave, NW. This confirmed for him that the CIA, NSA, and White House were dealing with a crisis, as he suspected.
