My best chance to save them is a woman who hates my guts, and an organization that regularly uses me, while offering little in return.

But if this doesn’t work, another option comes to mind. It chills me to think about employing plan B, but I may just be desperate enough to do so.

THIRTY-TWO

   An hour later I’m parked at a gas station near the Italian town of Portogruaro. Talyssa is sitting in the car eating a pastry for breakfast, and I am lying twenty-five yards away in the grass by the parking lot, looking up at the sky. I’m tired as hell again, and I know I’m going to have to find a way to sleep before tonight. But that’s not all I need, so I call Suzanne Brewer back.

She answers, and I say, “Violator,” and then I play the game by the rules. “Iden code Whiskey, Hotel, Quebec, fiver, two, three, India.”

“Confirmed.”

“What did you learn?” I ask.

“I’m transferring you.”

“Transferring me? It’s three a.m. there. You’re at the office?”

“I am now,” she says, her voice no more or less annoyed sounding than usual. She adds, “Hold,” and I do.

There is no hold music at CIA, which is too bad, because it’s a missed opportunity for them to have fun and play the Mission: Impossible theme song or some shit, but nobody at Langley I’ve ever met has that kind of a sense of humor.

Soon the line clicks. “Hanley.”

I launch up to a sitting position on the grass. Matthew Hanley is the deputy director for operations, the top dog in Ops. Brewer somehow got him into the building at three a.m. for this.

Matt and I go way back. He and Brewer are the only two people at Langley who know I’m doing contract work for the Agency, and that’s because I’m essentially doing contract work directly for Hanley, with Brewer as the go-between. Still, though Hanley and I have spoken quite a few times over the past couple of years, I was hoping to avoid going all the way up to him in my hunt for intel about an operation I’m running on my own.

But I mask my unease. “Hey, Matt. All good with you?”

“Not so great.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, it’s simple. I have three operatives in a special sub rosa unit. One of them is recovering from injury, one of them is a pain in my ass, and the other is AWOL.”

I thought I was the pain in his ass until he mentioned AWOL. “I’m coming back. I just got myself involved in something and I need a little intel to wrap it up. Brewer shouldn’t have bothered you with this.”

Hanley replies to this with “The Consortium. That means nothing to us. There are sex trafficking rings all over. In your area, Albania and Turkey are big players.”

I cock my head slightly. “How do you know what area I’m in?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“How is it—”

“Because of Ratko Babic.”

Matt knows I killed the general, or at least he thinks I did and he’s trying to get me to confirm it. If it were anyone else, I probably would play stupid, but it’s Hanley.

“Right.”

He adds, “I wasn’t going to ask you if you waxed old Ratko Babic, although from the minute I heard about his death, I knew that you did. Shit . . . everyone knows. But you’re basically admitting it, so I’ll just go ahead and say it.”

“Say what?”

“Nice work. Not perfect . . . you fragged a bunch of Serbian goons who were active-duty members of their intelligence service. They were also Branjevo Partizans, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over that, but our Balkan desk is running interference, insisting to the Serbs that the former asset who became a rogue hit man called the Gray Man was seen in Santiago, Chile, at the same time as the Babic killing.”

“If I don’t work for the Agency, then why does the Agency give a shit if the Serbs think it was me?”

“We trained you, didn’t we? We installed that wacky do-gooder moral compass of yours, didn’t we?”

“Yes to the first. No to the second.”

“Well, whatever. The Balkan desk will deal with Serbian intelligence. Wasn’t exactly like we had a great relationship with Belgrade in the first place.”

“Roger that. Back to the Consortium. Nothing? Really?”

“Sex trafficking is the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world, behind drugs and counterfeiting. It’s ahead of the sale of illegal weapons. So, yeah, I’m sure what you’re talking about is real, I’m sure the people involved in it are nasty, and I’m sure a lot of poor helpless victims are abused and enslaved by it. But the specifics of what you are telling us . . . the Americans, the South African, the pipeline, this doesn’t line up with anything we have.”

“Can I get some help from you guys on this? Could you get Brewer to do a little digging?”

Hanley breathes one of his trademark long sighs, and I can picture his huge frame inside his too-large suit puffing up and then shrinking as every ounce of air leaves his lungs. I can also picture what he’s about to say before he says it.

I’m about to hear a big fat no.

“No,” Hanley says. “You are a hard asset, a denied hard asset at that, unaligned with any existing structure in the Agency. You are not a case officer, not an analyst, not chief of any station. You don’t have read-ins on anything not directly linked to the work we assign you. You have absolutely no standing to ask for resources.”

“I’m not asking because I think I am owed resources, I’m asking as a friend. I need some help. This is serious shit.”

“You know what else is serious shit?”

Yeah, I do, and again, I know what he’s about to say.

“Your fucking job with us! That’s serious shit. I’ve got a backlog of work I need you to take care of.”

“Get one of the other Poison Apple assets to—”

“They’re already out there, Court, in the field, doing what they’re told, while you’re trying to save the world by yourself. Every day you’re not here pulling your weight is another day Romantic and Anthem are under more stress, more risk. Anthem isn’t even one hundred percent after what happened to her back in Scotland. You remember that little incident, don’t you?”

My voice feels weak in my mouth as I answer back with “Yes, sir.”

And then, just to hammer home a point that needed no further hammering, he says, “You’re risking your girlfriend’s life with all these crusades of yours, don’t forget that.”