Lucas Renfro addressed Brewer exclusively. “I came as soon as I heard. What the hell happened?”
She filled him in on the attack but left out any information about the woman being held on the property.
She wasn’t surprised that Renfro picked up on this.
“And the guest?”
Brewer glanced to Hanley for the all clear to answer, and when he gave her a frustrated nod, she said, “Escaped, sir. Not with the attackers. At present we don’t know the guest’s location.”
He shook his head in frustration, then asked, “Why would the cartels hit this facility?”
“Must be a mistake on their part. Bad intel,” Brewer said.
“Are you sure about that?” Renfro demanded.
Hanley sighed. “Well, Lucas, unless your Support Directorate has a sideline gig running drugs out of the safe house, then I can’t imagine what interest the Sinaloans would have here.” The big man took a breath, then added, “This just happened, and we just arrived. You’ll have to give us a little time.”
“While the guest runs free in the city? Am I safe to assume that you had the guest in secure holding for a reason? What’s his threat level? Who is he?”
It was clear to Brewer that Renfro knew nothing about what was going on here at all, not even that the guest was female. Like Wheeler, he wasn’t read in on Poison Apple, but obviously a lot of Support personnel knew that a woman was the lone guest at the Great Falls safe house.
But Brewer imagined Renfro wasn’t one to sully himself by talking directly to his facility security people.
When she didn’t answer his question, he repeated himself. “Who is he?”
She glanced again to Hanley, and Hanley said, “We can’t get into that.”
“For God’s sake!”
Hanley changed the subject. “You’ve heard about the flight at Ternhill?”
“Only just. You lost some men, I hear.”
Hanley nodded. “Doug Spano was killed.”
“Shit.” Then Renfro added, “You’ve got a leak in Ops.”
“Bullshit!” Hanley replied, hardening up again in an instant. “You’ve got a leak in Support! You are in charge of Transpo and Facilities, we’ve had three aircraft compromised in the past four months, and now we’ve had a domestic facility overrun!”
“All four incidents involved your operations, Matt.” Renfro didn’t rise to Hanley’s level of vitriol. “Besides, the inspector general ran an inquiry into Support after the first two aircraft incidents and found nothing. If I were you, I’d look into your off-book activities, because the IG isn’t able to do so. That’s where you’ll find your leak.”
Hanley fumed a moment, then said, “Lucas, Marty . . . can you excuse us? Suzanne and I need to talk.”
Renfro didn’t look happy, but he motioned to his subordinate and they both stepped out of the library.
When they were gone Brewer asked, “Why are they here?”
Hanley sat down at the table in the middle of the library, then looked around. “Cams? Mics?”
Brewer fought an eye roll as she sat across from him. Of course she had no recording devices running while they were talking. “All off.”
Hanley said, “You know why. This facility is the domain of Support. They aren’t read in on Anthem, or Poison Apple, but they are responsible for this place, and this place got wiped out. Hell, FBI is here, and they don’t know what the hell is going on either.”
Brewer said, “It will make finding Anthem a lot harder if Support is nosing around.”
“I’ll talk to Wheeler, he’ll back off. Renfro, on the other hand, is always a pain in the ass. If he learns anything about Poison Apple then he could make a lot of trouble for us.”
“Agreed.”
Hanley changed gears. “When you called you said Violator was in pursuit of the prisoner in the UK. Any more word?”
“No, sir. He hasn’t called back, and I’ve been too busy here to reach out to him.”
“These two situations can’t be related, can they?” he asked.
“How can I answer that, Matt? I don’t even know who the prisoner on the Gulfstream was.”
“A banker. We picked him up in Luxembourg yesterday. He managed a private account that wired a total of three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin in three payments to a computer terminal at the Agency. All three payments coincide with the three compromises to Agency aircraft over the past few months.”
“So you are saying this banker knows the identity of whoever is passing information about Support activities to everyone who has targeted the three Agency flights before tonight, and . . . and whoever the hell snatched the prisoner tonight? He facilitated payments directly to the traitor?”
“It looks as straightforward as that, yes.”
“Why would the traitor use a computer here at Langley?”
Hanley replied, “There is only one reason. He or she is trying to frame someone else.”
“So you are saying you know whose computer received the Bitcoin?”
“I do, but I’m not going to tell you, because I am certain this person is innocent.”
“But—”
“The person implicated is innocent, Suzanne. We have to find the real culprit. End of story,” Hanley said flatly.
Brewer didn’t press. Instead she said, “If this leak came from the Agency, why were we handing the witness over to MI6?”
“The director ordered me to deliver him to the Brits because the nominating entity of the private account was in the name of a business registered in London. He was trying to keep this as aboveboard as possible in case we had to turn this all over to the FBI for a criminal prosecution of the Agency employee, but . . .”
His voice trailed off.
“But what?”
“I asked you to recall Court Gentry to the States because I didn’t want to see the traitor arrested.”
Brewer understood slowly. “You were . . . you were going to task Violator with deleting an Agency employee?”
“He’d have done it, too.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “But now he has to find the banker and get him away from the men who took him, because the banker’s our only link to the traitor.”
“Sir . . .” Brewer drummed her fingers on the table. She looked across to Hanley, seated where Anthem had sat six hours earlier. “I’m just going to say it. Poison Apple is a ticking time bomb. Both assets in the program now, Violator especially . . . are highly unstable. Completely untethered. Anthem isn’t even an official member, but she was weeks away, and already she detonates.”