Mission Critical
Initially, the man in Notting Hill just wanted to have Visser taken from the Americans and the British to be squeezed to find out if he’d said anything. But now the stakes had risen. The revelation from Barnacle, the American traitor, that a detainee at an Agency safe house in Virginia knew something about a particular name from the past increased the threat against Mars’s operation exponentially, and Mars knew he had to do two things.
One, remove the compromise in Virginia, and this was under way right now.
And two, find out how and why the name Feodor Zakharov had been resurrected from some dead Agency file and printed for review by black ops personnel.
Could Visser have somehow passed Zakharov’s name to his American captors?
Mars had to unravel this mystery quickly, so he ordered Fox to have the banker held until Fox himself could go and interrogate him to see what he knew.
This was all he could do about the problem in Britain for the time being.
One of his phones rang, and he snatched it up. In his exquisite British accent he said, “Yes?”
“It’s Fox.”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s not good, sir . . . They did wipe out the facility, and they confirm there was a detainee being held there, but she somehow managed to escape in the melee.”
“She?”
“The clothing in the holding cell belonged to a woman.”
“Did they find out who she was?”
“I needed a crew of cutthroats quickly, so I used a dozen men from the Sinaloa cartel. They knew how to kill, but sensitive sight exploitation is beyond their skill set. They suffered four KIAs, and four more injured, and as soon as they cleared the building of hostiles they exfiltrated the area.”
“The bodies?”
“Left at the scene. They’re sicarios, not Marines. No code with those guys. Still, don’t worry about that. It will look like a cartel hit, no comebacks on us.”
Mars kept looking at the televisions in front of him. Finally he said, “The woman who escaped. I trust you have people looking for her?”
“I do, sir. Not the Mexicans. I have others canvassing the area.”
The man in London demanded hourly updates and then hung up the phone.
What is happening? he asked himself with welling panic. He racked his brain, trying to think of some woman who might have known something, anything, relevant to today about a long-buried GRU director.
Nothing came.
* * *
• • •
Suzanne Brewer arrived at the Great Falls safe house at one a.m., pulled up to the front gate, and saw a small group of FBI men and women standing around a body, shining lights in the nearby wet grass. She showed her credentials to a police officer controlling access to the property and was instructed to park her car next to a row of ambulances on the driveway. She walked the rest of the way up the hill to the house; the rain continued softly, and the air around her was cool and misty.
By the time she got to the front door she could see the devastation. The porch was pocked with bullet holes and the windows around it were completely shattered. She entered the building through the open door, passed more FBI whom she ignored, and found a group of CIA officials standing between a pair of bodies.
This safe house was run by CIA Support, the dead were Support security personnel, and no one in the building other than Brewer knew just who Anthem was and what the Agency was doing with her. This was part of a code-word operation so only those with the code word knew, and this meant Brewer and her boss, Deputy Director of Operations Matthew Hanley.
And no one else on Earth.
Hanley himself had created an initiative, code named Poison Apple, that handpicked former singleton operators to work as off-the-books contract agents for the CIA. There were only two agents in the program now, and Anthem was on her way to becoming the third, though she was former Russian intelligence, not American. The DDO had put Brewer in charge of Poison Apple and the agents who were part of it, despite the fact that he knew she didn’t want to be anywhere near the operation at all.
Looking around at the dead, Brewer wished she’d managed to defy Hanley and be long gone from this assignment before this happened. She assumed Anthem was somehow involved with all this killing. Nothing else made sense. There was no hint of any Russian wet operations here in the United States, nor was there the slightest clue that the Russians knew Zakharova was in U.S. hands, and even if they did know, she couldn’t imagine the Russians going to such lengths, even to recover a former operative.
The turning of Zoya Zakharova from a Russian spy to an American asset had been Brewer’s job, the focus of her attention for roughly four months now. That she had been duped, that the woman about whom she’d passed glowing progress reports to the deputy director of Operations had killed CIA security men here at the safe house and then escaped into the United States, made her sick to her stomach.
She looked down at the men. “Ricketts and Jarvis,” she said. She knew all the guards here because she had been to the property nearly every day since Anthem arrived.
Jay Seekins, the assistant to the deputy director of Operations, stood in the group in the foyer. He hadn’t been here at the time of the attack, but he lived close by in Reston. One look at him told Brewer the man was obviously in a state of shock. Still, he had the wherewithal to eye her with disdain. He knew nothing about Poison Apple or Anthem, and it bothered him that an upstart from Programs and Plans was read in on the operation, while he, the number two man behind Matt Hanley, was not. “What the fuck, Suzanne?”
Brewer ignored the comment. “What have you learned?”
Seekins shook his head, his eyes all but unfixed. “Don’t know yet. Man at the guard shack out front is dead. Two more dead in the woods. Two more dead here. We found a total of four bodies of unknowns, all armed, clearly hostiles killed in the raid.”
Brewer didn’t care about any of that. “What about the guest?” she asked.
“The guest is gone, along with William Fields, a security officer. He was on duty down in holding at the time of the attack. We found one more security officer on the second floor, Halperin. He’s alive but wounded. He’s been transported, but he might not make it.”
“Have you watched the CCTV recordings yet?”
“Negative. Was paying my respects to the fallen up here before heading back down to monitoring to do that.”
Suzanne had no desire to pray over dead security guards. “Let’s go.” Seekins followed reluctantly. They passed through the house, stepping through the two bodies of Americans inside the front door. Walking into the den, they encountered two more dead there. From their off-the-shelf night vision gear and other non-CIA-issued equipment, it was clear they were part of the attacking force.