Authors: Stephen England
“There seems to be a rash of those lately,” Carter mused, his eyes scanning over the sheet. “I’ll need to kick this up the chain—any idea where the boss is?”
“Last word had him on the seventh floor with Shapiro—got pulled in for a meeting of the minds.”
The analyst snorted. “No wonder they needed Kranemeyer…”
2:01 P.M.
Graves Mill, Virginia
The driver’s license and passport were authentic—at least they looked that way. The same with the vacation photos that now filled Carol’s new wallet.
Harry snapped the wallet shut and handed it over to Carol. “I think that should do it,” he announced,
looking over to where Rhoda Stevens still sat behind her laptop. “You’ve been a friend.”
Another raspy chuckle. The black woman stubbed out her cigarette in the engraved pewter ashtray on her desk and rose. “Well, you’ve still got the feds and half the law enforcement in the state breathing down your neck. Where you headed from here?”
There was something unnatural in her voice, a forced casualness. Alarm bells sounded in Harry’s mind as he turned toward her. “Can’t say, Rhoda—any idea what the weather forecast is for North Carolina?”
She laughed, looking over to where Carol stood by the door. “No, I don’t, but I hear it’s beautiful this time of year.”
Eyes were on them as they walked out to the SUV. Harry could feel them on his back and the Colt seemed to stir beneath his jacket at the sense of peril. Carol paused as they got to the vehicle. “I wouldn’t have told her where we were going,” she said, more than a hint of reproof in her voice.
He looked down into her eyes. “You felt it, too.”
She nodded as he pulled open the door of the SUV for her. “There’s something she wasn’t telling us.”
Harry walked around the front of the Excursion and levered himself up into the driver’s seat. It was only then that he looked over at her. “Then you’ll be delighted to know that I lied.”
Rhoda watched them go, watched as the SUV pulled out of her driveway and sped off down the road, heading south. It was only when they were safely out of sight that she stepped back from the window and made her way down the hallway, stopping by the bedroom door.
Silence. She knocked lightly, then pushed open the door without waiting for a response.
“I still think you should have told them,” she announced, shooting a look of frustration at the big man who lay on her bed, his body wrapped in bandages.
David Lay shook his head wearily, wincing in pain at the effort. “There’s no point to it, Rhoda—the knowledge of my presence would only endanger them further. She’ll be safe with him.”
A moment’s pause, and a look of pain not unmingled with despair flickered across the face of the wounded man. “She has to be.”
1:31 P.M. Central Time
Fargo, North Dakota
It took quite a snowstorm to shut Fargo schools, but that was just what they’d had. Twenty-eight inches of the white stuff blanketing the Northern Plains.
Which meant there was no school for her to teach. There had been a day when she would have welcomed the break, but not today. Not since the passing of her sister, less than a month before.
Mary—tall and pretty, long chestnut curls. The cute little sister, four years her junior. Family members had joked that their personalities couldn’t have been more different—Mary cheerful and buoyant, not a care in the world. And her own demeanor, reserved, intense. Analytical. They were the skills that had her teaching algebra in one of Fargo’s many high schools.
Unmarried, she had never attracted men in the same way as her younger sister. It wasn’t that she was without appeal in the looks department, but her personality tended to intimidate men.
She wasn’t the type to hang out at a singles bar on Friday night.
Alicia Workman looked down at the picture of her sister on her computer desk and felt the tears well up in her eyes. Mary’s romanticism, her ability to attract men and fall head over heels into love, had been her undoing.
They’d found Mary dead in her apartment in D.C., dead of an overdose of prescription painkillers. The suicide note was disjointed and rambling. None of it made sense—not unless you had all the pieces.
Her hand moved from the picture to the letter lying beneath it. A print-out of her sister’s last e-mail, five days before her suicide. All of her hopes and dreams, laid out in stark 12-pt Times New Roman.
Her love for a man.
A married man.
Alicia stole a glance out her apartment’s window, at the still-swirling snow. The pieces of a field-stripped Bersa Storm lay beside Mary’s letter, taken down for cleaning.
It was a little thing, a pocket semiautomatic chambered in .380 ACP. Having grown up around guns on her grandfather’s ranch, Alicia knew all too well the capabilities and limitations of the pistol.
Her gaze flickered to the newspaper clippings and computer print-outs that decorated one wall of the apartment. The smiling face of a man loved by so many.
Only one question remained: would it be enough?
8:35 P.M. Local Time
Bonn, Germany
“Mr. President, can we have a statement?”
“Do you have a statement on the possible dissolution of the EU, Mr. President?”
“Statement?”
“Mr. President! Is there going to be an agree—”
The limousine door closed with a satisfying
click
, the noise outside fading away into a low roar.
“Quite a morning.”
President Roger Hancock looked up into the eyes of his Chief of Staff. “That’s the understatement of the year, Ian.”
The economic troubles that had plagued the European Union ever since the Greek debt crisis had finally come to a head. Spain and Portugal had quickly followed Greece into the dangerous realms of default, sending shock waves across the continent.
With country after country going down the tubes, Germany and France—arguably still the strongest economies in Europe—had come to the decision that remaining in the EU was no longer in their best interests.
And that’s why he was here. To use up his remaining political capital trying to convince them otherwise.
At fifty-three, the President of the United States was still a young man, but four years in office had taken its toll upon his once-boyish good looks. Brown hair was now heavily streaked with silver, something his aides had said gave him “gravitas”.
Devil take gravitas.
“Any more news out of D.C.?”
Ian Cahill shook his head. The Irishman had been with Hancock for ten years, ever since the Wisconsin native’s first run for U.S. Senate. First as campaign manager, then Chief of Staff. Born and raised in Chicago, the sixty-two-year-old Cahill had earned his reputation as a street fighter in the notoriously nasty world of Illinois politics.
It was a reputation that had served him well in Hancock’s administration.
“The Bureau’s locking down Virginia tighter than a drum, got agents swarming all over the place,” Cahill replied, looking down at the screen of his smartphone. “So far…nothing. That goes for both Langley’s rogue and the DCIA himself.”
Hancock murmured an oath, staring out tinted windows at the signs waved by protesters down the long street. Then the motorcade picked up speed, leaving the shouts and screams of the rioters to fade away in the distance.
If only all problems could be dealt with so easily.
4:11 P.M. Eastern Time
NCS Op-Center
Langley, Virginia
Thomas looked up over the screen of his workstation as Tex Richards entered the small, windowless cubicle.
“Got your text,” the Texan announced simply. “Were you able to get access to the satellite feed?”
“Negative,” Thomas replied with a shake of his head. “Those are all tied up this morning and heavily restricted—I don’t have access, certainly not from this terminal. No, I went around the backdoor and began checking on utilities.”
Tex crossed the room to look at the screen, at the continually updating graphs of colored lines zig-zagging across it. “And?”
“Right here—around 1100 hours, water and electric usage spiked at the safehouse. Not a great deal, but if McNab’s at work…”
“Is he?” Richards asked, an unusual intensity creeping into his voice as he referenced the retired Air Force pilot who served as the caretaker of the safe house.
Thomas nodded. “He is. I checked with his employers—been at work all morning. Usage levels subsided to their normal levels shortly after noon.”
That only left them with one option, and both men knew it.
“He’s come and gone,” Tex whispered, gazing at the screen. “Harry, what are you trying to do?”
5:02 P.M. Eastern Time
New Market, Virginia
There was no sign that they were being followed. On a good day, the drive from Graves Mill to the antebellum town of New Market took about an hour and a half.
This wasn’t a good day, and driving a surveillance detection route, or an SDR, meant that Harry wasn’t taking the most direct roads.
“Mind if I ask where we’re going?” Carol asked, clearing her throat from the passenger seat beside him. She didn’t mince words, a refreshing change from a lot of the women he had known. And it was probably time to tell her.
Harry took his eyes off the road long enough to glance over at her. “Does the name Samuel Han mean anything to you?”
A long moment of silence, then, “He was one of your men, wasn’t he?”
That she even knew the name took Harry by surprise. He hadn’t expected…
“Yeah. He was,” Harry replied, staring out the windshield at the passing forests of Appalachia, denuded of leaves and covered in a fresh coat of snow. Flakes of white drifted down past the speeding Excursion as dusk fell.
What to say? How to sum up a man’s life in the space of a moment?
Harry had always been good with words—good at using them to persuade, to manipulate.
To deceive…but now, as a flood tide of emotion came swirling back with the memories, words failed him.
Han had been one of the best the Agency had ever seen. The son of a Nung mercenary who had fought alongside the U.S. in Vietnam—Samuel, or Sammy as the men of Alpha Team had called him, had come to the CIA’s Special Activities Division direct from Little Creek, Virginia, the home of SEAL Team Two.
A big man, the direct contradiction of the stereotypical Asian, Sammy had been a gentle giant, probably the kindest man Harry had run across in fifteen years of running clandestine operations.
Lethal on the battlefield, at home he was a loving husband and father of two small boys. Of course, that had all been before the fall.
“Yeah,” Harry repeated, almost more to himself than her. “Sammy was a friend.”
5:12 P.M.
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
On any other day, Michael Shapiro would have already left for home, punctual to the dot of five. Particularly this month, with Christmas shopping to be done.
The twins had deposited their wish lists in his cereal bowl this very morning, a whimsical touch to start off a day that had quickly gone sideways.
Nothing this day had gone according to plan. If it had…well, as it was, the morning had provided fresh proof that sometimes cleaning up one problem only created another. Even when you went to the best.
“One final thing,” he said, raising a finger. Bernard Kranemeyer stood in the doorway of Shapiro’s office, preparing to leave.
“Yes?”
Shapiro took a deep breath. He had never been comfortable around the DCS. The former Delta Force sergeant just didn’t
fit
into the Beltway culture. And someone that didn’t fit—you just couldn’t trust them to react predictably—to shut up and do what they were told when the situation required it.
“I need you to sideline Alpha Team.”
Raised eyebrows. “Why?”
Shapiro swore silently. Delta Force, or the Unit, as insiders sometimes called it, was made up almost entirely of non-commissioned officers—no one lower. And with that reality, the D-boys weren’t used to taking orders without question. Unit briefings had been known to turn into shouting matches.
“They’re too close to the developing situation.”
“Bull,” Kranemeyer replied, light flashing in those eyes. “The Bureau is handling the ‘situation’. I need every man I’ve got on stand-by for the extraction operations we’ve initiated.
Every
man—Richards and Parker are two of my best.”
The DD(I) took another deep breath. He wasn’t used to confrontation. “In October, Alpha Team’s second-in-command, Hamid Zakiri, was found to be a sleeper agent, working for the ayatollahs. This very morning, their Team Lead took a hostage from
this
building and is currently the subject of a manhunt. My order stands, Kranemeyer. Put them on leave, get them out of the circle before it’s too late.”
“Done,” the DCS assented, nodding his head. “Will there be anything else?”
“No, no, that’s all,” Shapiro replied, at once relieved and taken off-guard by Kranemeyer’s sudden capitulation. It wasn’t natural.
And then Kranemeyer was gone, but the vague sense of disquiet remained. Shapiro stared down at the screen of his computer, at the phone number displayed there. Something wasn’t right…
5:34 P.M.
Cypress Manor
Cypress, Virginia
Darkness had fallen, but the lights set up by the dozen or so FBI agents swarming over the old antebellum mansion lit up the yard and lane, casting monstrous shadows in the form of the boxwoods lining the walk.
It had been dark here, completely dark on his last visit to Nichols’ home. A visit just as unprofitable as this one.
Vic looked up from searching the credenza to see Marika Altmann descending the mahogany staircase. Her hands were buried in the pockets of her windbreaker, the look on her face anything but reassuring.
“What’s the good word? Manage to crack Nichols’ safe?”
The glare told him just about everything he needed to know. “Yes. And no. He had a self-destruct code programmed into the mechanism.”
“And?”
She swore under her breath. “And all the documents inside were charred to ashes, Vic.”
Caruso closed the drawer of the credenza with a gloved hand and nodded. “Coming up dry here too. Nothing in the least bit damning.”
“I’ve worked some paranoid suspects before, but…” The older woman looked over at him. “This one takes the cake.”
5:41 P.M.
Staples
New Market, Virginia
The snow was falling faster as Harry closed the door of the SUV and looked over at a woman loading bags of groceries into the trunk of her sedan.
The plaza of the shopping mall was full of cars, no doubt due to the snow. It would never fail to amaze him, but every time it was the same—no one was ever prepared ahead of time.
But he wasn’t here for the groceries. He took a look ahead, taking in his target—the Staples store—then back across the parking lot to the two Virginia State Police patrol cars parked at the Dunkin’ Donuts.
With any luck, they were cold, hungry, and tired of looking for a phantom. No use in depending on luck.
He checked his watch. Five minutes.
A snowflake stung his cheek and he pulled up the collar of his leather jacket against his face, striding into the warmth of the store.