“The CO. Is he a shooter?”

He heard her typing for a moment. “Well . . . of course he’s been through the Farm, but . . . that’s about it.” The Farm was the CIA’s officer training program at Camp Peary. A former Ground Branch Special Activities Division paramilitary officer like Gentry considered the firearms instruction at the Farm to be just step one of one hundred to becoming proficient in shooting and close-quarters battle tactics.

But Court knew he was nowhere near one hundred percent himself. “I’ll take the asset, and I’ll take the CO as a driver, just in case we’ve got to move in before Jenner gets here.” He next asked, “What are my orders, specifically?”

“Your orders are to kill Feodor Zakharov.”

The possibility that he himself would be tasked with killing Zoya’s father had somehow not occurred to him. He’d been looking for a missing prisoner, who’d turned up dead, and then his mission morphed into trying to save Zoya. Now he was being sent to kill her dad. It put a lump in his throat, but he said, “Understood.”

“Violator?” Brewer added. “I need you to understand something. Zakharov is the primary objective. Killing or capturing Primakov is the secondary objective.”

When she said nothing else Court said, “But?”

“But nothing. There is no tertiary objective.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Anthem is not, I repeat, not, mission critical. Accomplish your primary and secondary, and then get the hell out of there.”

The lump in his throat was replaced by anger welling deep within him. “Anthem is an asset, same as me. My life isn’t more important.”

Brewer hesitated a long moment. Court wondered if she was trying to calculate whether the life of either of her assets was important to her.

“How grateful is she going to be if you kill her father and then try to save her?”

“It’s not about gratitude.”

“My point is, we don’t know if she is in league with General Zakharov. Making contact with her might just put your mission in jeopardy. You need to consider her a hostile until you learn otherwise, and I don’t know how you are possibly going to learn otherwise while hitting that building alone.”

He didn’t argue the point, because it would just waste time. Instead he said, “I don’t even know what this guy looks like.”

“I’m sending you three images. One is Primakov; another is a photograph of General Zakharov back when he was the GRU head. The third is the image taken of the man in the Mercedes who I think could be Zakharov.”

Court replied, “Get me the images, the address to their location, and the iden codes on the two who will be joining me.”

“You don’t need iden codes; you will recognize both of the men coming to assist you.” She gave him the address; he typed it into his GPS and saw that it would take less than ten minutes on his motorcycle, once he got down the hill to retrieve it, to get there.

“Roger, I’m en route,” Court said, and then he hung up. He was ready to continue on with his mission. His mission, not Brewer’s, because despite his clear orders from her, there was no way he was going into that building without making every effort to leave with Zoya.

* * *

• • •

   Seconds later Court was out of the men’s room, faking a normal walk and a placid face so as not to draw any attention to himself from the dozens of patrons in the pub. On his way out the door he stopped and looked to the bar. It was midday, and he was operational, carrying a firearm in a capital city in the United Kingdom. Under most any circumstances he wouldn’t consider drinking now, but he needed to be able to move, and he told himself the good effects of the alcohol would, in this instance, anyway, outweigh the bad.

He ordered a double scotch; the bartender reached for a menu containing descriptions of the dozen they had to offer and he started to mention his favorites, but Court just said, “Dude, I don’t give a shit. Something strong, wet, and cheap.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow, reached down into the well in front of him, and drew out a bottle. He poured a double into a glass, took the pound notes, and turned away before Court shot the entire contents in two gulps.

It tasted to Court like singed horsehair, and the bartender apparently was aware it was awful because Court caught him grinning.

The American put the glass down with a nod, then headed for the door.

CHAPTER 50

   Thirty men arrived in Scotland in three black Zodiac boats that had been disgorged from a freighter in the North Sea. They’d landed on an Uplands coastline at three-ten a.m., exactly on schedule, and then they carried all their gear, one hundred forty pounds of kit to a man, across barren landscape, moving slowly but surely, boots sinking into the blanket bogs and thighs straining with the climbs up and down rolling hills.

By ten a.m. they had been hiking nearly seven hours and had not seen one other human being during all that time. Their route had been carefully chosen to keep them away from meddlesome locals, so by the time they neared their rally point, they knew they’d infiltrated the United Kingdom undetected.

They were all Russian, with hard faces and tattoos and body armor on their chests and backs, poorly concealed under oversized raincoats. There were rifles hidden in their oversized packs, Kalashnikovs mostly, though some other weapons were represented.

These men worked for David Mars now, but they bore little resemblance to the other armed men Mars had utilized here in the UK. No, those had been mafia shooters and hired security, dangerous and skilled enough, but they weren’t cut from the same cloth as the formidable new arrivals at all.

At the rally point they climbed into a pair of sixteen-passenger vans with all but the driver’s seat removed and sat in back on their gear for the two-hour drive to their destination. They left the highway for a road, left the road for a gravel track, and left the track for a muddy field with a few other tread marks directing the way. Here they ascended a hill and parked at the stone fence around a cemetery in front of a formidable-looking stone church.

A high-end executive helicopter caught the men’s eyes in a nearby field, but there were, at first, no signs of life around.

* * *

• • •

David Mars himself stood in the doorway to the old gothic church on the far side of the cemetery. He’d only just arrived from Edinburgh via helo, and he watched the men as they climbed out of the vehicles, moving silently through the gray, wet afternoon, hefting impossibly large rucks, and then heading up in his direction.

All thirty entered the sanctuary and began placing equipment in the few old pews lying around the shuttered house of worship, taking off their coats and adjusting the equipment on their bodies.