“By everything, I think she meant her conspiracy theory,” said Devin. “And its connection to her death.”
“I’m all ears,” said Berg.
“I don’t know any more than I did when we last spoke,” said Devin, testing the waters.
Berg pushed his glasses back and squinted. “Seriously? She just put us together in a crab shack to see what might happen? Helen had to have told you something.”
“I think she intended for us to take a trip together,” said Devin. “She apparently has a Bat Cave. A secret apartment or something. My guess is it contains whatever research she’d conducted over the years.”
“And you know how to find it?” said Berg.
“I can access the location,” said Devin, leaving out the part about the file for now.
“I don’t know what to say, Devin. Your mom became obsessed with her idea,” said Berg. “I guess it really doesn’t surprise me to hear that she had acquired a safe house to work on this. She would have been paranoid about secrecy, convinced they were following her so they could finally erase the evidence and eliminate her.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Berg, dismissively. “It’s all a fantasy. She probably conducted long SDRs prior to arriving at her secret lair, re-creating the most intense parts of the work she’d done for the agency—years ago. Let me guess: She led you on some kind of decode-the-next-step journey to find the apartment?”
“It doesn’t matter how I ended up here,” said Devin.
“She did, didn’t she?”
“For good reason. I removed two GPS trackers from my car this morning before starting the first SDR.”
“Interesting,” said Berg, finally sounding genuinely intrigued.
“I also took pictures of the team that placed the trackers.”
“You made the surveillance team that quickly?” asked Berg. “Were they wearing black trench coats and pointing telephoto cameras at you?”
“Funny. No. The tracker placement was professional, and they had good reason to break cover. I more or less forced their hand,” said Devin. “I do this for a living, remember?”
“Yes. I remember,” said Berg. “Could it have been the FBI, local police, or some other federal agency?”
“I don’t think so. The trackers were high end, but still the kind of stuff you can buy off the shelf. Definitely not the kind of gear we used in the FBI.”
“How did you locate the trackers?” asked Berg.
“Radio frequency detector,” said Devin.
“How long did you spend on the tracker sweep?”
“Not long enough to detect something that transmits infrequently, but I eliminated that possibility later,” said Devin. “Helen’s decode-the-next-step journey included a vehicle swap, a high-end, untraceable satellite phone, and about ten thousand dollars in cash. She’d obviously put a lot of thought into how to get me here undetected, and she took a number of these steps as recently as three weeks ago.”
“She must have gotten mixed up with some bad people while chasing down this thing,” said Berg. “Maybe she pissed off the Russian mob? I could see her getting desperate enough to go after them for information. Possibly staking them out. Now that I think about it, this whole thing kind of makes sense. If she’d put herself on Solntsevskaya Bratva’s radar by pissing them off, it wouldn’t take much for them to pull the trigger on her. Sorry to be blunt.”
Devin shook his head. His mother’s death wasn’t a Russian mob hit. The people following him this morning didn’t fit that profile.
“How much did Helen tell you about her theory?” asked Devin.
“Hold on,” said Berg, nodding in the direction of an approaching waitress.
They ordered beers and a dozen crabs each, Berg continuing when the waitress was out of earshot.
“Helen was pretty guarded about what she’d tell me. I got the impression through some of the things she’d said that she was trying to protect me from ruining my career,” said Berg. “She gave me just enough to test the waters. Enough to keep the channel of communication open.”
“What did my mother think she’d uncovered?” said Devin. “I won’t repeat any of this. I promise.”
Berg looked torn.
“You didn’t hear this from me. Understood? This is all still classified, as far as I know.”
“Understood,” said Devin.