“Roger. Well, as soon as we get this end taken care of, I’ll happily go after the asshole responsible for all this. Is the compromise limited to aircraft? That would definitely put the traitor somewhere in Transpo.”
Again, another pause. Court was getting used to Brewer’s reticence about giving him information. Finally she said, “It is not limited to aircraft, unfortunately. It seems to be slightly more broad.”
He didn’t know what the hell that meant, but he did know he wasn’t going to get anything more out of Brewer on the subject.
“I need to know who this prisoner I’m going after is.”
“He’s a Dutch banker, working in Luxembourg.”
“Since when do we perform extraordinary renditions on Dutch bankers?”
“He has information about the owner of a private account. We think that owner is the CIA employee who has been passing intelligence to bad actors.” She added, “He is the only person we’ve identified who possibly knows who the traitor is.”
“This banker has at least a half dozen armed men around him. What do you expect me to do?”
“Your best, Violator.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we still don’t know for sure the British aren’t involved in this exposure over there. Until we do know for sure, you’re on your own.”
“Such a blast to be working with you again,” Court said, and then he disconnected the call.
Court thought, and perhaps not for the first time, that sometimes it almost seemed like Brewer wanted him to die.
* * *
• • •
I wish he would hurry up and die, Brewer thought.
She hung up the phone on her end and put her head in her hands. She wanted out of this. She couldn’t blow the lid on Poison Apple; she was too inexorably tied to it, thanks to Hanley’s maneuvering and blackmail, to survive the inevitable fallout should the media learn about the program. But if the program failed, or perhaps even if one of the assets failed spectacularly, then Hanley would have little recourse but to shut Poison Apple down.
If Violator died, Hanley would abandon Poison Apple; she was certain. Brewer would do what she could to limit support for the asset and cover her ass with good handling when she saw no other way to avoid it, but she would always have her eyes out for a time when she could make this whole problem go away with some sort of incident in the field that ended Hanley’s dangerous program.
But Violator simply refused to play by her rules. He was quite possibly the best singleton asset in the world, and she chalked it up to her bad luck that he was so good and she wanted him to fail so bad.
But he was a man not afraid to risk it all, and she was a woman not afraid to throw him into peril, time and again, in hopes that someday her luck would change.
And for that to happen, all she needed was for his luck to change.
* * *
• • •
Court saw the silhouette of vehicles ahead of him, parked together off a dirt road under a thick canopy of fir trees. He recognized them as the van and the sedan he’d been tailing across the Midlands, so he drew the SIG pistol he’d taken from the Agency flight attendant and approached warily. Behind the van and the car he saw bloody gauze and sterile pads lying in the pine needles on the ground as if they’d fallen out of the backs of the vehicles as men climbed out.
Court didn’t know if the prisoner had been hit in the melee, but he hoped like hell all the blood meant some of the men involved who’d survived the airport would be unable to fight here if it came down to it.
He looked inside the sedan and found it empty other than some blood smeared on the wall and flooring. But when he opened the back of the van he found six dead bodies lying in a heap.
He quickly picked through them for a moment looking for identification, weapons, or cell phones, but they had been stripped of everything save for the clothes on their backs.
It occurred to Court this might explain why no one came out of the woods while Court circled above. Stripping a half dozen dead and dealing with wounded surely would have taken them some time.
He followed a sporadic blood trail to the south one hundred yards, to within sight of the edge of the trees. Leaving the bike there, he crawled forward. Directly in front of him he saw a small gravel lane, and in front of it a massive redbrick monstrosity that looked like something from the nineteenth century.
Several smaller buildings of the same red brick were all around.
Scanning both the main structure and the outbuildings, Court determined everything in the area had been abandoned for some time. He thought the main building was probably an old hospital; half the windows were boarded up and the other half fully broken out. These he began peering into, and soon he saw a shadow of movement in an open window on the top floor. Further inspection revealed a man just inside, using the darkness of the room to keep himself undetected from the outside, although Court’s trained sniper’s eye managed to pick him up.
In the darkness of the room he couldn’t tell much about the man, but he certainly seemed to be a sentry watching to the north. A scan of the other run-down redbrick buildings in the area revealed no more activity, so he returned his focus to the structure that looked like a hospital.
Soon he saw a second man step out of a doorway and stand there, looking out across the open land to the trees. He was fit, black, with a bloody dressing on his shoulder, and he wore a pistol in a drop leg holster.
Definitely the right place, Court thought. He reached into the go-bag for his binoculars, and as he did so his hand ran across the M320 grenade launcher. For a moment he fantasized about dropping a few rounds of “forty mike-mike” into the hideout of this group of killers, but he knew he had to make an effort to recover the prisoner alive.
He pulled out his binos and settled in, quickly detecting two more men walking around the western side of the hospital towards a large garage.
Shit, he said to himself. If there were four men in sight, that likely meant there were a lot more he couldn’t see.
He backed into the woods and opened the go-bag. Inside he found prepackaged food and water. He broke both open while looking through the other items. He chewed on a protein bar and drank water from a bottle while he pulled out climbing ropes, which he put to the side, along with fire-starting materials and water purification equipment.
He found a smartphone in a waterproof case. He knew it would be loaded with all manner of communications and tracking software, as well as encryption and decryption applications. His own phone had a few commercial apps for clandestine work, but this one would be far superior.
The good thing about his own phone, however, was that it was virtually untrackable. In contrast, with this device from CIA, he knew that as soon as he turned it on the Agency would know where he was, something that, for most of the past five years, would have utterly terrified him. Before his recent détente with Langley he’d lived off grid as a burned asset, targeted by the very organization he now served. His truce with the Agency was only a few months old, and in that time he’d caught himself more than once missing the simplicity of working alone, an assassin for hire, only taking contracts that he believed served the greater good.