Mission Critical
Seekins said, “All the unknowns are Hispanic fighting-age males. I’d guess cartel sicarios. Sinaloa is the biggest group around the D.C. area, but that’s all just preliminary guesswork on my part.”
Brewer was barely listening. Instead she bent over one of the bodies. “Was this man disarmed after death?”
Seekins stepped up to her. “What do you mean?”
“His pistol is in his holster. I assume he was carrying a primary weapon.”
“This is how we found him. Only the sidearm.”
“The sidearm still on his hip, right? Can you imagine him walking around through this shootout with no weapon in his hand?”
“Would be strange. What are you saying?”
Suzanne’s chest heaved inside her raincoat, and she blew out a sigh. “I’m saying we can assume the guest is now armed.”
“Mother of God,” Seekins muttered. “This just keeps getting worse.”
They continued to the stairs to the basement.
* * *
• • •
In the monitoring room Brewer herself operated the playback on the computer while four other CIA execs stood around. The FBI men were upstairs and had the good sense to know the second the CIA showed up that they needed to secure the crime scene and wait for instructions.
She put all twelve camera feeds on the property up onto a sixty-five-inch plasma on the wall, displayed in a grid, backed up the master recording three hours, and then fast-forwarded the video, expecting to see the beginning of the attack.
But at ten forty-five p.m. on the holding room camera she saw Zoya climb out of her bed and go to the door. William appeared soon after, then left again.
Seconds later the three cameras in the basement flipped off. The others continued recording the house and the grounds outside.
Seekins said, “The security guy shut the cameras down in holding. The hell he do that for?”
On the cams outside and then at the front door Brewer watched the attack begin. It was a large group of men, closing from all directions, and they seemed competent enough, but perhaps not terribly well coordinated.
Anthem appeared in the kitchen and moved to the den. Brewer watched the Russian woman leap down from the mantel, disarm one of the hostiles with her bare hands, and then kill them both. The entire engagement took fewer than three seconds.
“Holy Christ,” Seekins muttered. “What is she?”
Brewer said nothing; she just watched the Russian woman climb back up to her feet, heft the Uzi, and return to the basement.
Seconds later the camera feeds in the basement resumed. Fields was on his back in the cell, bound and struggling to sit up against the bed. What appeared to be a dark liquid was spilled all over the floor around him.
“What is all that?” Brewer asked as her eyes remained glued to the video.
Seekins said, “There are two airplane bottles of cheap cabernet broken on the floor of her room.”
After no more than a few seconds, Anthem entered the holding cell from the hallway. She slung the Uzi over her right shoulder and grabbed the security man under his arms, began dragging him out of the room.
Switching their gaze to the hallway camera, Brewer and the men standing with her watched while Zoya opened the supply closet and pulled the big man inside. Seconds later she returned to the hallway, this time alone, and began running for the stairs.
A minute after this a pair of hooded men with M4 rifles entered the hallway. They bypassed the utility closet door and assaulted the holding room. Finding it empty, they rifled through the clothing they found there, then left the basement at a jog.
Brewer and Seekins exchanged a glance with each other, and then they ran out into the hall and down to the supply closet, just across from the holding cell. It took a few calls with their walkie-talkies to have a set of keys brought down, but once the door was finally opened, Brewer stepped in. At first she saw nothing, and then she moved around the water heater.
William Fields sat there with his hands behind his back, a gag in his mouth. He stared up at Brewer, and she gave him a look designed to let him know that it would have been better off for him if he’d been killed with the others.
She pushed the drawstring down to his neck and ripped the socks out of his mouth.
The first words out of Fields’s mouth conveyed to Brewer that he knew exactly the situation he was in now.
“I want a lawyer.”
She knelt down in front of him. “How about, instead, I give you a deep dark hole in some Supermax prison for the rest of your piece-of-shit life?” She waited a few beats, then added, “Unless you tell me what went down tonight. Every last damn bit of it.”
A CIA officer leaned into the utility closet. “Ms. Brewer? Matt Hanley and Marty Wheeler are upstairs in the library. They’d like to speak with you.”
She stood back up and looked to Seekins. “Keep Fields’s cuffs on. I’ll get everything he knows out of him after I talk to Hanley.”
CHAPTER 6
Matt Hanley was the deputy director of Operations for CIA, having served in this role for only a few months. He was in his fifties, six-two and heavyset, with a broad face, shoulders like a defensive lineman, and blond hair heavily flecked with gray. Poison Apple had been his brainchild; he ran it outside normal operations channels and, just as had been the case with Fields, Brewer could see from Hanley’s worried expression that he understood how much trouble he was in right now.
Marty Wheeler served as the assistant deputy director of Support for CIA. At fifty-one, he was short with a white shock of hair and a weather-beaten face from his decades as a yachtsman on the Chesapeake Bay. Hanley outranked Wheeler, but the two men had been close friends since serving together as Green Berets nearly thirty years earlier.
Like Seekins, Wheeler didn’t know anything about Zoya Zakharova specifically, only the fact that there was a guest at the house, and Brewer wondered how the hell she could talk to Hanley with him standing right here.
Hanley said, “What happened, Suzanne?”
“Coordinated attack on the facility, sir. Jay thinks the dead hostiles might be Mexicans.”
A new man stormed into the room without knocking. Brewer looked up and then stood, unable to mask the surprise on her face. “Deputy Director Renfro.”
“Suzanne,” the man said. He turned to Hanley, who stood next to a built-in bookshelf. “Matt.”
“Lucas,” Hanley replied coolly, not even looking his way.
Brewer could tell by both men’s greetings that they were no fans of each other.
Lucas Renfro was the deputy director of Support for CIA, Marty Wheeler’s boss, and Hanley’s equal in rank, if not stature, as the Operations end of the intelligence community was more highly regarded than the Support end. Renfro had been a CIA congressional staffer for years; everyone in Operations thought of the fifty-five-year-old as more of a politician and less of a career intelligence official, and Brewer was surprised to see him here in this slaughterhouse in the middle of a rainy night. Especially considering the fact that Wheeler, his capable second-in-command, was already on scene.