Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski

she knew better. She knew David Murphy was up to something else, and used this line about an “ultrasecret wing of the intelligence community” as a ploy to dupe other wise good people into doing his bidding.
    Some agents may have seen this as a babysitting gig, but notNichole. She was keeping tabs on one of the most notorious operatives the Company had ever known. One who had suddenly retired a few months after 9/11, then opened up a “financial services” corporation.
    We can smell a front company a mile away,
Nichole’s handler had told her.
We want to know who he’s fronting.
    Nichole had nodded.
    We want you in there, and we want you to stay in there until you find out.
    Whatever he had cooking on the side—and Nichole’s bosses were fairly sure David Murphy had
something
cooking on the side—she would be there to assess and act, if necessary.
    So when Murphy had called them in here on a Saturday morning, she
knew
something big was breaking. But it frustrated her to no end that she had no idea what it might be.
    And that would be a failure.
    Whatever Murphy had going, she should have been on it from the beginning. This completely blindsided her.
    She’d installed an undetectable key logger on Murphy’s machine a few days after she started, and changed the gear every month. She knew every e-mail he sent, every Web page he browsed.
    She’d recorded every closed-door conversation Murphy ever had.
    She used compressed air, a digital camera, and many long nights with Photoshop to read his sealed mail.
    She’d collected every shredded bag of crosscut papers and reconstituted them in her suburban apartment, one bag at a time, one long weekend at a time. She’d used tiny paperweights to hold them in place and worked one piece at a time. Many nights she’d dream about strips of paper.
    She entered into a clandestine, sex-only relationship with the mail guy—and every mail guy henceforth—even thoughmany of them had a devil-may-care attitude toward personal hygiene.
    She’d even burned through countless cheap wristwatches, placed under the back tire of Murphy’s car—oh how relentlessly old school
that
was—to fastidiously track his movements.
    Over three years of clandestine operations, she’d earned the sobriquet “Workhorse” a dozen times over.
    And nothing.
    “Keep watching him,” her bosses told her.
    She did as instructed, only occasionally pausing to conduct other operations now and again. She was too valuable to waste on David Murphy full time.
    That was when Nichole began to grow paranoid. Perhaps she was missing something when she was conducting her other ops.
    Maybe Murphy knew about her, and conducted his other business when she was otherwise engaged. Just to make it look like he was being a good corporate choirboy, heading up a successful private business.
    Maybe he had a way around her key logger.
    Maybe he switched out her surveillance tapes.
    Maybe he purchased bags of shredded nonsense from another company, and switched out his own shredded documents for a ringer.
    Maybe he was on to the watches. An old-head like him probably would be.
    Maybe he was just messing around with her head.
    If that was the case, one thing was for sure: For six months now, Molly Lewis was helping him.
    Her surveillance of David Murphy had become increasingly frustrating during the past six months, and it was too much of a coincidence that Murphy had hired Molly right around the same time. The moment Nichole first shook Molly’s hand, the bad juju alarms went off in her head. She immediately huntedfor evidence, had the Company screen Molly’s background hard, but nothing came up out of the ordinary. Born in Champaign, Illinois, to a conservative Catholic family. Attended a year of UI, agricultural college. Dropped out to marry an actuary named Paul.
    But the only evidence she could find of any kind of intelligence background: the slightest hint of a Russian accent.
    Which would be kind of weird coming from the