“Listen to me. The safe house has been overrun. It’s too late for you to help; all your mates are dead or dying. The attackers won’t find you in here if you don’t make any noise.”

His eyes went even wider, and he tried to shout again.

“I’m saving your life, William.”

She drew the HK pistol from his holster and rose, opened the door and, after checking to make sure the hallway was still empty, stepped out of the utility closet, locking the door behind her.

There was only a smattering of gunfire, still at the front of the house, when Zoya made her way back to the rear door off the walk-in pantry. This time she looked out carefully and saw a single man in black moving to the door to the den, fifty feet off her left shoulder. He held his carbine with one hand, and he seemed to be trying to raise someone on the radio with the other. She wondered if he was on the squad with the two men she’d killed in the den and was on his way to investigate their radio silence.

When he disappeared from view, she stepped outside and began sprinting through the heavy rain, down the hill for the tree line.

CHAPTER 5

   Court leveled off at one thousand feet and began scanning for the highway that led northwest away from Ternhill. While he searched the night, he dialed his phone with his right hand, activated the speaker function, and put the device in his lap.

Just then he saw a black van, followed closely by a gray four-door sedan. He banked to position himself behind them, slowed the aircraft, and descended to two hundred feet for a better look.

Court felt through the go-bag he’d taken from the Gulfstream now. Inside he found just what he was looking for—a pair of binoculars. He brought them up to his eyes and scanned the highway below.

In seconds he was certain he was following the correct van, and the gray four-door behind it clearly seemed to be part of the operation, as well.

After several rings the call was answered. “Brewer.” Her voice was clipped and businesslike; Court imagined she was still at work, though it would be nearly eleven p.m. in Virginia.

“It’s Violator. The aircraft has been overrun on the ground at Ternhill. Multiple shooters . . . maybe a dozen or more. They took the detainee.”

Brewer stammered a moment, then said, “What . . . what detainee?”

“The other Ops guys on my plane . . . it was a rendition team. They had a prisoner on board, they delivered him to MI6, and now they’re dead or wounded on the ramp and the prisoner is in the back of a black van leaving the area with a gray four-door sedan in convoy.”

Brewer was slow to understand. “Who are they?”

“How the fuck should I know? I was just along for the ride, I wasn’t read into any of this shit.”

Another pause. “Okay.”

“So . . . do you want me to stay on him? We need this guy?”

Brewer said nothing.

“Hey!” Court shouted. “What do you want me to do?”

She hesitated a moment more, then said, “This isn’t my op. I don’t know anything about—”

“Make a decision!”

Brewer answered quickly. “Stay on the detainee.”

“Roger that.”

“I’ll contact London station and inform them of the hit. I just—”

Court could hear another phone ringing in the background on the other end of the line.

“Violator, stand by.”

Court looked down at the satellite phone incredulously. “You’re actually putting me on hold right now?”

She did not answer him; instead he heard her speak into the other phone—“Brewer”—and then she muted her call with Court.

He scanned the highway ahead with his binos again. He knew the sun would be up soon, and he imagined that the two vehicles carrying the surviving gunmen and the CIA prisoner must be on their way to a safe house or layup position.

He flew a slow wide circle behind the killers, the little aircraft bouncing in the early-morning air.

“Take your time, Brewer,” he mumbled to himself.

After five full minutes she came back on the line. Her voice was unsteady, confused. “Uh . . . Violator, I . . . I have to let you go. You keep after the prisoner, and we’ll notify London station about Ternhill. They’ll take care of it.”

“You’re telling me there’s something else going on that’s bigger than this?”

“Uh . . . I don’t . . . Yes, actually. We’re . . . we’re having a situation here. I need to get back to you.”

“You realize I’m the only link between you and the assholes who just killed a half dozen agency personnel, right?”

“You’re a singleton. This is what you do. You’ll . . . you’ll be fine.”

“What the fuck is hap—”

Court stopped talking when Brewer hung up. He stared down at the phone in his lap in disbelief.

Below him the two vehicles turned to a highway heading east, racing on as the first glow of morning appeared on the horizon.

* * *

• • •

David Mars sat at a walnut desk in the home office of his large Notting Hill home, facing three seventy-two-inch plasma televisions on the far wall of the room. CNN, RT, and the BBC all broadcast morning news here in London, and Mars normally kept an eye on all of them.

But he was especially tuned in today.

He’d just taken another call from Fox informing him that the team at Ternhill had recovered the CIA prisoner and were proceeding to the next waypoint on their journey. They’d lost several men in the process, but they’d managed to remove their dead from the scene.

Dirk Visser was a compromise to Mars and his organization. Mars had no reason to believe that the Dutch banker who worked in Luxembourg knew his identity, but he was the private banker of his traitor high within the ranks of the CIA. The American had been passing intelligence to Mars for the past several months, and Mars had been wiring money to Visser via shell companies. Somehow the CIA had managed to tie the account, and Visser, to the leaker, although Mars could not conceive of how this came to pass.

Visser had been snatched by the CIA, and Mars knew that the moment he talked, Mars’s source in America could be identified. The American traitor did not know Mars’s true identity, but he certainly knew enough tangential facts about him to pose a definite compromise.

And Mars was especially concerned about threats now. The most important operation of his life was just days away. Too much was on the line; Mars would destroy cities if it meant keeping a lid on his operation for just one more week.