Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
Chapter Thirteen: The Barton-Brown Caper
It was night in Washington, about a week before Thanksgiving. The agency halls and offices were dark, their dark blue blinds shut and all the doors closed.
A strip of light shone from under one door, obscured now and then by the shadow of a man pacing to and fro within the office. If anyone had been there to see it, they might have realized that he was waiting for news.
The phone rang at last, and the pacing steps ceased. There was a moment of silence, then an eager voice on the other end of the line began to speak.
"I believe we have them, sir. I gave the news to Mr. Stetson today, and it should be making its way through to Mr. Baynes any moment."
Somewhere else in the agency, Francine Desmond listened intently as the bug planted in the phone did its work. She waited a long time for a reply, but it never came. Instead, there was a soft click. The next moment, she jumped violently as her own phone rang at her elbow.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Then it went to voicemail and the voice of her superior spoke — not through her phone, but through the very same bug she had been monitoring a moment before.
"Ms. Desmond, this is Dr. Barton-Brown. It's imperative that we speak at the earliest possible moment. If you are in your office, please call me immediately."
There was a pause, then he cleared his throat and went on.
"It could be life or death for Lee Stetson, Ms. Desmond."
The thrill of dread and horror she hadn't realized she had been expecting all these weeks shot down her spine, and for the one eternal moment between the click of the receiver and the first blink of the red light indicating that she had a new voicemail, she froze. Then she steeled herself and picked up her phone.
The phone in Lee's pocket buzzed rhythmically, humming instead of ringing. It was incredibly frustrating, this phone — it had rung aloud for the first few weeks he had had it, then one day it had stopped ringing and just buzzed whenever he got a call.
He'd tried turning it off and then turning it back on, like Jamie had instructed him to do with all this newfangled technology, but it hadn't helped at all. He had even opened the internets and searched up "my phone is buzzing please help" but all the googles in the world had not helped him.
He sighed and pulled it out of his pocket, getting it out just as the phone stopped buzzing. At least this phone let him see who had called; he didn't have to wait for the person to call back anymore. He held it in front of his eyes, adjusting the distance until the number became visible.
It was Leonard Baynes.
"Spencer Randall here," he said when Baynes answered. "Is everything all right?"
"No, Mr. Randall," was the reply. "I'm afraid not. We have information that a Russian courier is set to make contact with Mr. Thompson at the society in exactly one hour. You need to intercept this courier and bring me the information he is carrying."
"All right. What's the password?"
"He will say, 'It's chilly out tonight, isn't it?' and you will reply, 'Yes, but at least we are able to be somewhere warm.'"
"That sounds like something anyone would say," Lee protested. "It's thirty degrees out there."
"Yes, but then he will say, 'I am planning to go to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. New Jersey is beautiful at this time of year.' You will reply, 'New Jersey is beautiful at any time of year'."
Lee chuckled a little. "All right, I'll do it."
He left for the society about twenty minutes later, having bundled up well against the cold of the November night. The streets were empty and the wind gusted through them with no resistance, blowing empty cans around in hidden corners and startling him with their clatter.
As he reached the society doors, he slipped a little in an oil spill. A large hand reached out and steadied him, then a low, accented voice said, "It is chilly out tonight, is it not?"
"Yes," Lee replied, "but at least we are able to be somewhere warm."
He would never quite remember how quickly the cloth was put over his mouth and nose, but he remembered falling and being caught by strong arms. He remembered stumbling to a waiting car, and hitting his foot against the tire as he was shoved into the back seat.
He awoke in a dark room, shivering a little. His coat had been removed, and his arms and legs had been tied tightly to the chair in which he sat.
"Hello, Mr. Stetson," said a falsely pleasant voice. "Nice of you to drop in."
He knew that voice. It was Leonard Baynes.
"Your friend has been telling me about your work for him over these last few weeks," said a new voice. It seemed vaguely familiar — a voice he had heard before somewhere, but only once or twice.
A light turned on, and he saw to his horror that he sat in an office in the agency. The carpet was the same; the blinds over the windows were the same. Wherever he was, this was an agency conspiracy.
"Unfortunately, it's come to our attention that the information you have been feeding us has been false," the voice went on. "You seem to have realized that you were part of a pipeline to channel information to Russia and to Al Qaeda, and the information you have passed us has not helped them at all. We have used your information for the past few weeks, and it has led to defeat after defeat at the hands of American forces."
Lee would have smiled, but the gag prevented it.
"Mr. Stetson," said Leonard Baynes, "you've seriously inconvenienced our cause."
This time he could at least incline his head, as if to accept an accolade. It seemed to enrage his captors.
"That was what you were planning all along, wasn't it?!" growled the unfamiliar man, and he raised his hand to strike.
"I don't know where he is, Billy," Amanda said breathlessly. "He called me to tell me that the fish had risen to the bait, and that he was going out. Do you know anything?"
"Now, Amanda," Billy assured her, "you know Lee. He wouldn't have done anything without setting it up carefully first. I suggest contacting Francine."
"I knew there was some sort of information pipeline," Barton-Brown told Francine. They had arranged to meet at the agency parking garage, and now they were in his car racing down the Washington streets toward the philanthropic society. "So I planted one of my men there without telling anyone, and then I began an official investigation into the philanthropic society. It was as good a place as any."
"It didn't occur to you to talk to me at all?"
"I'm sorry, Ms. Desmond. You were more valuable working on your own."
"And why did you get Lee involved?"
"He was the best. Everyone said so."
"Tell me the truth," Francine snapped.
"Okay," Barton-Brown sighed. "He was out of it all. He couldn't be part of whatever treason was going on at the agency, because he wasn't part of the agency. He'd always been loyal, too. Smyth even said so."
"Supposing I believe you. What now?"
"Like I said, the official investigation helped me see who was really at the bottom of it all. My man, Thompson, told Lee incorrect information. Lee told Leonard Baynes the same information, but sometimes he added or detracted from it. Baynes didn't know that I also had Lee's apartment bugged, so I could verify what Lee told him. The information that arrived at my desk from Baynes was never quite the information Lee told him. But the information that was being fed to the Russians was clearly the information that Lee was giving to Baynes."
"So you knew that Baynes was involved," she said. "And you didn't think to tell Lee?"
"How could I?" he asked. "His wife had already told him that I was involved."
"So you knew Amanda was involved, too," she said. "Don't you think there was a simpler way to do this?"
"Of course there was," Barton-Brown replied. "But not without alerting Baynes, and through him the rest of the pipeline. Besides, Amanda wouldn't let anything happen to Lee. And with you on the case as well, pretending to be Amanda, I knew that you wouldn't let either of them be hurt."
She shook her head.
"Where are we going now?"
"We're going to meet with Thompson. He set up the meet for Lee tonight, and he put a nice puddle of a special harmless radioactive oil where they were supposed to meet. Any footsteps or car tires that went through that puddle should be easily traceable."
He could probably feel her look of horrified incredulity, because the next sentence was far more sheepish than anything he had said in his self-assured tone so far.
"We got the idea from Agatha Christie. Tommy and Tuppence, you know."
She shook her head again.
A/N: As for the review saying that Philadelphia is in Pennsylvania and not New Jersey, that's what makes it a code.