Authors: Stephen England
“I’m sorry they had to be destroyed,” Harry said gently as the SUV continued down the drive.
She didn’t look at him. “Don’t be,” she responded, her voice infused with an artificial calm. “There wasn’t any other way. Sometimes even memories have to die…”
10:39 A.M.
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
Free Fall.
The DCS closed the door to his office, reflecting once more upon Nichols’ final words.
There was a message there, of that he was certain. Despite his statement to Carter and Lasker,
Free Fall
was more than just a distress code.
That
code had been used.
Phantom pain shot through Kranemeyer’s nonexistent right leg as he limped to his desk.
There was a photo on the desk, of him in the Chesapeake 5K. Running for charity just nine months ago. Oh, well…that was nine months ago. Before his own world had been turned upside down by the defection of an agent.
The DCS gritted his teeth against pain as he lowered himself into the desk chair. On this day, he couldn’t have run a 5K to save his own life.
Quite possibly the worse thing about a traitor like Hamid Zakiri was that their defection caused you to start seeing traitors in every shadow. Paranoia was an important skillset for any spook—the trick was to keep it from pulling you over the edge. Devilishly hard.
Kranemeyer buried his head in his hands, striving to remember. There was something there, an elusive memory from the past. But Nichols wasn’t a traitor.
He pulled his cellphone from his pocket and gazed at it a moment in contemplation before dialing in a number.
“Marcia,” he began when the line was picked up, “I need you to retrieve a dossier from Archives. I want everything we have on a CIA black-op run in the West Bank in 2000. Operation RUMBLEWAY, to be exact. Yes, Marcia, I know it’s eyes-only access. That’s why I’m asking…”
10:41 A.M.
The safehouse
Culpeper, Virginia
“You’ll have to forgive the interior decorator.” Standing in the entrance hall of the safehouse, Harry motioned toward the faded wallpaper and chipped paint. “We don’t do a lot of entertaining.”
Carol shook her head. The safehouse was a small rancher, built in a style dating back to the ‘50s. Which was probably the last time it had been decorated.
“Who owns this place?” she asked, looking around. “Langley?”
Harry cleared his throat. “Not exactly. We do, actually.”
“Your strike team?”
“Yeah,,” he replied, unzipping his jacket as he moved into the next room. The Colt remained holstered, only inches away from his fingers. “We just moved in, actually…had to move the safehouse after—well, after Zakiri.”
Even now, he felt his chest tighten painfully at the mention of the name, anger and hatred boiling deep inside him. At the betrayal.
At a dead man.
“Why run your own safehouse?”
“Because of days like today,” he replied, grateful for her question. The distraction. “Have a plan for every contingency—isn’t that what they tell you in training?”
A nod.
“This was our plan for the contingency of our own government being unable to protect us—or coming after us itself,” Harry continued, checking his watch. “We’ll be here two hours, no longer.”
She turned to face him, surprise written in her eyes. “We’re not staying?”
“No. This was never designed as a permanent refuge, just a place to store supplies. I’m headed out to the barn to fuel up our new vehicle,” he said, his hand on the door. “Get a shower.”
“Why?”
“Might be your last chance in awhile. And I’m going to need to search your clothes for any more trackers. You’d probably find it more comfortable if you weren’t in them.”
10:52 A.M.
U.S. Route 211
Virginia
The bodies had been taken away, but the police remained, flashing lights filling the highway as far as the eye could see, the wail of sirens piercing the chill morning air. Chalk outlines marked the positions of the bodies on the freezing asphalt, the agents in FBI overcoats standing over them caught up in a futile endeavor to stay warm.
Sergei Korsakov stayed at a distance, losing himself in the crowd that had gathered despite the attempts of the Virginia State Police to keep them back. It wasn’t every day that a double homicide happened in this part of Virginia.
The CIA officer hadn’t been part of the plan—their intel had been flawed. Fatally so. Everything had pointed toward the man accompanying Carol Chambers having just been a friend. Another analyst. A desk jockey.
Korsakov looked down at the CIA dossier, scrolling across the screen of his PDA.
Harold Nichols
.
Desk jockey? Right.
The former
Spetsnaz
sergeant rubbed a hand through his two-day-old beard.
Know thine enemy
.
If he had known, he would have never sent a two-man team after Chambers, not even with a man as good as Pavel Nevaschkin heading it.
Korsakov turned away, sighing heavily as he made his way toward his SUV. It had been the early winter of 1997, a dark night in Dagestan when he and Pavel had met, both of them part of a
Spetsnaz
team assigned to a tank base at Buinask.
Led by foreign
mujahideen,
the Chechens had struck without warning, small-arms fire and RPGs coming through the wire.
He’d lost friends that night—would have died himself, if not for Pavel coming to his aid when his AK-74 jammed.
He closed his eyes for a brief moment, feeling once again the ice-cold fear of those hours. And now Pavel was dead.
Korsakov put out a hand and pulled open the door of the rented
SUV.The hit on David Lay had started out as business, pure and simple, but he had read Nichols’ message clear in the bullet hole between his friend’s eyes.
Now this was personal. It was war. And it would only end in death.
11:03 A.M.
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
“The Bureau just sent over the pictures of the two dead men found on Route 211,” Daniel Lasker announced as Ron Carter walked by his workstation.
“Just in time for lunch,” was Carter’s sardonic response. “Run them through the database and send the results to my terminal. There you are, Ames, just looking for you.”
A young man at the espresso machine looked up at Carter’s hail.
At twenty-two, Luke Ames was one of the youngest analysts on the NCS staff, and arguably one of the best-looking—at least among the men. He was also new, having been brought into the fold only days before the Iranian crisis of September.
“Catch,” Ron warned, tossing a set of keys underhand across the op-center.
Luke smiled easily, holding his espresso in one hand while plucking the keys out of mid-air with the other.
“Real simple job, Ames,” Carter continued, forcing a tone of light banter into his voice. Anything to distract himself from what the morning had become. “I need you to go down to the parking garage and open up Chambers’ car so that the boys from the Security Directorate can work their magic. A job even a batboy can handle.”
“Right.” He’d been in the NCS long enough to know that being the new guy meant being the go-fer. As he swiped his access card to leave the op-center, he tossed one back over his shoulder, “Just for the record, Ron, I was an outfielder, not a batboy. Not that you’d know the difference.”
Lasker watched him go. “Gotta say, the kid’s got potential.”
Ron looked over at his comm chief and couldn’t suppress a smile. Coming from the cherub-faced Lasker, that was quite a statement. “Yeah, you’re right. Now where were we?”
“Dead Russians.”
“I knew it was somewhere pleasant.”
11:16 A.M.
The safehouse
Culpeper, Virginia
The shower was probably as old as the house itself, a shade of avocado green roughly the color of vomit. He hadn’t been kidding about the decorator.
But the water was hot.
Carol leaned back against the tiles and closed her eyes, letting the water wash over her body, steam billowing from the shower stall to fill the bathroom.
Four hours.
It seemed impossible that one’s world could change so drastically in such a short time. Yet it had.
She turned off the water and stumbled out of the shower, brushing wet strands of golden hair away from her eyes. A man’s housecoat hung from the peg on the back of the door and Carol wrapped it about her body, noticing absently that it came to her ankles.
A man’s housecoat. A tall man. Like her father. She glanced into the foggy mirror, barely recognizing the shadowy silhouette as her own.
Four hours.
She could still remember the sound of his voice when he had called the previous night. He’d just called to check on her, so he said. He’d been doing that a lot lately, ever since shortly after the Jerusalem op.
He had known. The realization came washing back over her with the strength of a flood tide. He had known.
And now he was dead. Or, perhaps worse, taken hostage. She’d worked at Langley long enough to understand the ramifications of that.
Gone, either way. She caught herself with a start, realizing that the tears would not come, the sorrow of those first few hours having been replaced by a brittle, equally terrifying calm.
Carol took a deep breath and turned the doorknob, letting herself and a blast of hot, moist air into the adjoining bedroom.
If she’d expected to be alone…Nichols stood by the side of the bed, busy loading ammunition into the rifle magazines strewn over the sheets. Her clothes were neatly folded and laid across from him, her top and skirt in one pile, her underwear in another.
She felt a hot flush creep across her face and almost reflexively tightened the sash of the housecoat. Couldn’t he have gone elsewhere?
“I’ll be out of here momentarily,” he announced, as though reading her mind. “You’re clean.”
“Oh,” Carol responded, realizing a moment later that he was referring to GPS trackers. Of course.
He looked up. “I’d wait to get dressed. At least until I cut your hair.”
“Give me a moment,” she responded, still unsure of herself. It all felt so strange.
“Of course.” Harry laid the AK-47 back in its polymer carrying case, along with five fully loaded magazines. One hundred and fifty rounds of brass-jacketed 7.62mm—enough to start a small war.
Or end one.
He closed the case and hefted it on his back, closing the door behind him as he made his way out to the waiting SUV. There was no way of knowing how much time they actually had.
11:18 A.M.
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
There were already five officers from the Security Directorate surrounding the car when Luke Ames arrived, accompanied by a German Shepherd dispatched by their K-9 unit.
Chamber’s car was a light-blue Toyota Camry, a four-door sedan.
The agent in charge of the security detail glanced over Ames’ credentials as he advanced toward the vehicle. “Everything’s in order, sir. Our preliminary scan isn’t picking up any explosives.”
The young analyst just nodded, his mind elsewhere. That Carol could be gone—it seemed unimaginable. She’d been the one that had shown him around the headquarters building his first day on the job, and they’d developed a close friendship over the last couple months. Never had gotten quite to the point of asking her out, but…
And now the DCIA was dead. And she’d been kidnapped. By one of their own.
Ames punched the Unlock button on the remote as he moved toward the car. Nothing.
Well, hey, batteries died all the time. Without a second thought, he slid the key into the lock and turned it.
As the key turned, it activated the triggering mechanism that had been built into the car’s door earlier that morning by “Alex Hall”.
Seconds later, the electrical pulse reached the two pounds of Semtex inlaid between the panels of the door. Luke Ames never felt what happened next.
He never felt anything ever again…
11:31 A.M.
The safehouse
Culpeper, Virginia
As he’d told Carol, CIA field officers were trained to prepare for every contingency. That didn’t mean you actually expected the day to come.
Harry placed the third long gun case under the false floor of the massive Ford Excursion, the one containing his Heckler & Koch UMP-45 submachine gun. It was a duplicate of the gun he had carried into Jerusalem, the gun that had mortally wounded Hamid Zakiri.