Authors: Matthew Dunn
Patrick inhaled deeply. “I saw Sheridan arrive almost the same time I did. He was seconds behind me when I knocked on your door.”
Ellie nodded. “I’m meeting him at three this afternoon.”
“Him?”
“Will Cochrane.”
Patrick turned onto Calvert Street NW. “I don’t want to know the location of the meeting.”
“Understood.”
“I’m going to drop you at a metro station. After that, you’re on your own.” The CIA officer glanced at Ellie. “I’m sorry, miss, nothing else I can do to help.”
“I know. Thank you for this.”
“Do me a favor. When you see Cochrane, tell him from me that he’s a pain in the fucking ass.”
Ellie smiled. “Sure.”
“Also, tell him there are people rooting for him. Admittedly, not many, though.”
Ellie nodded. “I’m surprised you haven’t asked me what I know about Ferryman. I didn’t see anyone named Patrick on the file clearance list.”
Patrick turned onto Columbia Road NW. “It won’t help me to know, because there’d be absolutely nothing I could do with that information. But there is one thing I want to understand: Is Cochrane doing the right thing? For that matter, are
you
doing the right thing?”
“I believe so. I think there’s something wrong with Project Ferryman.”
“Then that’s all I need to know.” He stopped the car adjacent to the Columbia Heights metro station, leaned across Ellie, and opened her car. “Time for you to go.”
She got out of the vehicle, shut the door, and started walking away.
“Ellie?”
She turned back and saw that Patrick had lowered the passenger window and was leaning toward her.
“Yes?”
“Unless Cochrane can deliver a miracle, you know your Agency days are over for you now, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Got a safe house? Someplace where you can vanish?”
“Of course.”
“Then good luck to you, girl.” Patrick gunned the car and sped off.
Momentarily, Ellie felt disconcerted. She had many sanctuaries, but all of them were places where she’d need to live alone. So far, she’d managed just fine with her solitary existence, but now was different because she was no longer a CIA operator working for a cause. She had no purpose beyond surviving. No, that wasn’t true; not yet, anyway. She still had one true goal: to meet Will Cochrane and tell him what she’d read in the Ferryman files.
C
ome on! Come on! Come on!” Marsha Gage was striding down a corridor toward the FBI operations room. “There’s got to be a trail.”
One of her senior agents was on the end of the line. “So far the trail’s gone cold two blocks from Union.”
“He can’t have just disappeared. Somebody must have seen him escape.”
“We’ve dried up.”
“Dried up?!” Marsha made no effort to hide her exasperation. “We don’t
dry up
. It’s not what we do.”
“Yes, Agent Gage.”
“Run door-to-door again.”
“We were thorough the first time, so—”
“Just do it!”
FBI officers were staring at her with looks of fear and bemusement as she entered the ops room. The place was buzzing, with officers talking fast on phones, hunched over maps of D.C., typing fast on computer keyboards, and jogging back and forth between desks, swapping data with their colleagues. But Alistair, Patrick, and Sheridan were nowhere to be seen.
Marsha placed her hands on her hips, and shouted to everyone, “Where are the spooks?”
One of the agents answered, “Haven’t seen them for a couple of hours.”
Jesus. She’d spent days cooped up with the three old spies, listening to them bicker like cantankerous retirees in a nursing home, and watching Alistair and Patrick do nothing more productive than flicking screwed-up bits of paper at Sheridan, who in turn would flip them the finger. Now that she actually needed them, they’d disappeared.
She called Alistair, who informed her that he and Patrick were having a lovely cup of tea at a delightful restaurant. She told him that the Bureau had plenty of tea bags, that they were to get their asses back to HQ, and that if they saw Sheridan he was needed as well. She ended the call, thinking that child care was sometimes easier than what she had to put up with here.
As she surveyed the room and all activities within it, she decided that right now she had three options open to her to catch Will Cochrane.
The first was continuing to hit the streets, pursuing every lead, and just hoping they got lucky. Though that remained an essential component of the manhunt, it was partly a reactive role, and if there was one thing Marsha hated about her job it was when it required her to sit on her butt and pray for a lucky result.
To enact the second option, she needed help from the three spies seconded to her team.
But the third option could be green-lighted right now.
“Listen up.” She waited for her task force to end phone calls and stop what they were doing. When she had their undivided attention she shouted, “We need all the help we can get, and that includes help from the people of D.C. How are we going to get that?”
One of the younger members of the team put his hand up, as if he were a schoolchild about to answer his teacher’s question. “We rely on their law-abiding natures.”
“That doesn’t mean they’ll help.”
Pete Duggan called out from the back of the room. “In my experience, fear, and wanting life to get back to normal with no SWAT snipers on rooftops, is usually a big incentive to help cops get fugitives off their streets.”
Marsha nodded. “I’m thinking the HRT commander’s assessment is a more realistic one.” Her gaze darted between each member of her team. “And I’m going to throw in another incentive. It took a bit of browbeating from me to get Director Haupman to agree to this, but I got my way in the end. We’re going to put a price on Cochrane’s head, and I want you all to spread the word—post it on our Most Wanted list, speak to your contacts in the media, and tell our agents and every other law enforcement team who’s on the streets so that they can tell citizens when they’re doing door-to-door.”
Duggan asked, “The price?”
Marsha smiled. “Two million dollars.”
Ellie Hallowes felt like a fraud as she followed her antisurveillance route to reach the Lafayette Park café. Not that there was anything wrong with her drills. She’d chosen a starting point at the Park Hyatt Washington hotel, approximately one mile northwest of the café; had predetermined five locations along the on-foot route where she could stop without it looking suspicious for her to do so and subtly look for a second or third sighting of someone she’d seen earlier. She ended her walk with absolute certainty that there was no surveillance team on her. As important, had there been a team following her, she would have been able to abort her meeting with Cochrane without the team knowing that she knew they were there.
She’d done similar routes countless times.
But always as a fully paid-up member of the Western intelligence community.
Now, she was an outcast, and that made her feel that she had no right to act like a spy.
She wrapped her arms tightly around her chest, entered the café, and immediately realized why Will had chosen the venue. It was small and quiet, with only two other customers sitting at one of the tables. It would be a devil of a job for surveillance specialists to sit in here without being noticed.
She sat at a table at the far end of the café, her back to the wall so she could see anyone entering or exiting.
She wondered if Will was watching her now.
Marsha pointed at Alistair and Patrick as they entered the FBI ops room and gestured for them to follow her into the adjacent office. After she shut the door behind them, she asked, “Where have you been?”
Alistair smiled. “I told you on the telephone—partaking of some much-needed refreshments.”
“I didn’t give you permission to go off site.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Marsha felt exasperated. “If I have to put electronic tags on you and enforce a curfew, then I’ll do just that.”
Alistair’s eyes twinkled. “We’ll take them off and break curfew, just to keep you on your toes.”
Patrick said, “You know Cochrane’s in D.C. and you’ve got every man, woman, and dog looking for him. You don’t need us around right now.”
Marsha folded her arms. “Right now, you’re wrong. I need to persuade Sheridan to do something he’ll plain and simple refuse to do, and you can help me because you know how he thinks.”
She told them about the second strategy she wanted to set in place to capture Cochrane.
Alistair and Patrick glanced at each other, both suppressing the desire to smile because what Marsha was suggesting could get Sheridan off Ellie Hallowes’s back.
Patrick said, “You got our help. But if I may make a suggestion, let’s tweak your idea a bit.”
Ellie checked her watch. Four twenty-five
P.M.
—only five minutes left until she’d have to follow Will’s instructions, leave the café, and await a call from him tomorrow. The fact that he hadn’t come also meant that there was a strong probability the café was under CIA surveillance and that she’d be grabbed the moment she stepped outside.
If that happened, all would be lost.
She muttered, “Shit,” bent down to grab her purse to pay for her tea, sat upright, and let out an involuntary gasp.
Will Cochrane.
Standing right before her.
He was thinner than when she’d last seen him, though he still looked very strong.
“You got here” was all she could blurt, because she was overwhelmed with relief and emotion, but she was also overwhelmed with the knowledge that this was the moment armed men would choose to burst in and gun them down.
“I got here.” He sat next to her, his back to the wall, his gaze locked on the entrance. His hand was in his jacket pocket, gripping his pistol.
Ellie too was watching the entrance.
Both operatives were tense.
“You look different. That’s a good thing.”
“I
feel
different.” Will’s expression was focused. “Mostly, I feel like shit.”
“You and me both.”
Will whispered, “Did you access the Ferryman files?”
She hesitated, then responded, “I did.”
There was something in Ellie’s tone that made Will ask, “At what cost?”
Ellie briefly glanced at him. “Sheridan knows what I did. He’s looking for me.”
As Charles Sheridan entered Marsha’s office next to the ops room, Patrick wanted to stride up to him and punch him in the throat. Despite his age, Patrick knew that he still had the strength and skill to make the devastating blow, and he also knew that a few minutes later Sheridan would stop writhing on the floor and would be dead. Trouble was, Patrick had killed two men in precisely the same way, so none of his peers in the CIA would believe him if he claimed he’d been trying to punch Sheridan in the face but missed.
Sheridan leaned against a wall opposite Patrick, Alistair, and Marsha, who were sitting facing him. “What do you want?”
Marsha made no attempt to hide her anger. “The names of everyone who’s Project Ferryman cleared.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Shut up.” Marsha’s eyes were unblinking and hostile. “The names?”
Sheridan’s eyes narrowed. “While you’re at it, why don’t you ask me who really killed JFK, whether the moon landing was a fraud, the identity of the Zodiac killer, and the location of Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse? You’re as likely to get answers to those.”
Alistair said, “I thought we were on the same side.”
“Did you?” Sheridan folded his arms and said in an over-the-top posh English accent, “Guess all you British
old boys
can’t get your head around the fact that the world doesn’t revolve around good manners, cups of tea, and fair play.”
Alistair’s blue eyes were glittering and cold, though he held back a response.
Marsha Gage said, “We need the names of the Ferryman-cleared readership for a reason.”
Sheridan looked like he was going to slap her. “And I told you never to use that word again!”
“We don’t—”
Sheridan unfolded his arms and took a step closer to her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,
policewoman
.”
“I’m not a police . . .”
“No, you’re not! You didn’t have the brains to make it into the Agency, so instead thought you’d play at being a cop.”
His last comment genuinely shocked Marsha. She tried to think of a retort, but was lost for words.
Alistair wasn’t. “Mrs. Gage has personally removed from American streets three serial killers, fourteen murderers, eight kidnappers, four extortionists, and two foreign spies. You haven’t. And during that time, she has also raised two children. Oh, and I nearly forgot: she got the Stanford University School of Law’s highest grade point average in twenty-seven years. Had she chosen to apply to the Agency, she would’ve sailed through its selection and training program.”
Marsha glanced at Alistair, wondering how he got that information and why it was that his chivalry constantly caught her by surprise. “Actually, it was twenty-six years.”
Alistair placed his fingertips together while keeping his cold gaze fixed on Sheridan. “During which time I know for a fact that Stanford’s law exams had become progressively tougher.”
Sheridan waved a hand dismissively. “I don’t give a shit. She hasn’t got what it takes. Too by-the-book. Too much snooping into matters that are way over little missy’s head.”
Patrick said with deliberation, “Little
missy
has a reason for wanting to know the Ferryman clearance list. Obviously, you know why.”
Sheridan was silent.
Alistair smiled. “Please tell me that your superior intellect comprehends the purpose behind Marsha’s enquiry.”
Sheridan’s gaze flickered between the three people in front of him, but his eyes failed to conceal his confusion.
Patrick asked in a voice that mimicked Sheridan’s poor attempt at sounding British, “Come on,
old boy,
surely this isn’t beyond your capabilities?”
Sheridan now looked like a schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. “I don’t answer to you!”
“No, you don’t!” This came from Marsha. “But you’re a dead man if you don’t answer my question.”
“Dead?”
Marsha nodded. “Dead.”
Alistair closed his eyes while keeping his fingertips pressed together. “Dead, dead, dead.” He opened his eyes. “Will Cochrane will tear you and anyone else privy to Ferryman to pieces to get answers. He won’t stop. You’re dead. So we’d like to put you and everyone else on the Ferryman list under protective custody.”
Marsha smiled. “We will put some expert Bureau heavies around you and your pals. Cochrane comes to you for answers. We get the drop on him. Simple.”
Sheridan frowned. “You want to lay us out as bait?”
“Yes.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe.” Marsha drummed her fingers over her leg. “But I’m told that in days, maybe even hours, you’re a dead man walking.”
“I can look after myself.”
Patrick smiled. “Against Cochrane? Good luck with that. He’ll butcher you.”
Uncertainty was showing on Sheridan’s face. Only one thing was more important to him than Ferryman, and that was his neck. Clearly, the three people in front of him had realized that and had pressed the one button that could make him talk. In any case, he reckoned Patrick would easily be able to access Agency databases to find out who was on the Ferryman clearance list. Sheridan wouldn’t be betraying anyone or anything by answering Gage’s question. “Senator Colby Jellicoe, me, Ed Parker, an analyst named Helen Coombs, the head of the Agency, the British prime minister, and the American president are cleared to know every detail about Project Ferryman. Others know what it can deliver, but the aforementioned are the only ones who know the key players in the mission.”
Marsha nodded. “The premiers are obviously already taken care of, but the rest of you need to be taken out of the equation.”
“Equation?”
“Away from danger. Protected.”
Alistair pointed a finger at him. “Marsha’s original idea was to put Project Ferryman Agency personnel under discreet surveillance. But Patrick and I thought that was far too dangerous, and Mrs. Gage has agreed with us.”
However, Marsha didn’t know the real reason why Patrick and Alistair had tweaked her idea—that 24-7 protective custody would stop Sheridan from hunting Ellie Hallowes.
Alistair continued. “You can come and go from here as much as you like.”