Mission Critical

Now his life had returned to taking orders, need-to-know-only briefs, and impenetrable ambiguity.

He put his concerns out of his mind and turned on the phone, then slipped it into his cargo pants, along with a cable and a spare battery.

He found a headlamp, which he left in the bag, along with another bottle of water. He then pulled out a tiny case that contained a pair of earplugs. They were electronic noise reduction devices, but they also enhanced softer sounds to twelve times their normal volume. He immediately turned them on and placed them in his ears. The ambient noises around him were cacophonous; birds, the strong breeze, a distant train approaching along the track behind him.

He tapped the earplugs and the enhancement function turned off, and then he slipped them back in their case and into his pocket.

He loaded the M320 with a high-explosive round, slipped it into the go-bag, and then threw in his suppressed pistol, the toolbox, the binoculars, two extra magazines for the SIG, and the climbing rope. He left everything else, including his own backpack and the bike, in the woods and began crawling towards the east.

CHAPTER 9



   Former Russian spy Zoya Zakharova hadn’t hitchhiked in the United States since her college days in California, but after hiding in the woods and then walking aimlessly through backyards for nearly two hours, at four a.m. she managed to thumb down a Honda Civic driven by a middle-aged woman on her way to her job at a call center in D.C. Zoya fed her a story in flawless and unaccented English, a tall tale about her boyfriend kicking her out of his house with only her clothes and shoes, forcing her to leave her purse and phone behind and walk home to her apartment in D.C.

The woman offered to give her a ride home and Zoya directed her to an apartment building just a few blocks from Union Station.

As soon as the woman drove away, Zoya headed for the station, but she did not enter. Knowing cameras would be prevalent there, she found a place to sit on a bench next to the Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain that was shielded from view behind it by a concrete wall.

She focused all her attention on the front of the station.

At this hour there was only a trickle of commuters leaving the station, and Zoya eyed them all. She also noticed a strong police presence in the area, mostly patrol cars. She wondered if they might have been looking for her, but her tradecraft kept her away from both law enforcement and any suspicious unmarked vehicles that might be from CIA or FBI.

It took her almost a half hour to find a target. A bearded man in an expensive leather jacket came out of the station and began walking down the street, heading towards Louisiana Avenue. Zoya rose to her feet and followed, lagging just behind him while maintaining good situational awareness.

The man spoke on his cell phone and pulled a black leather Tumi roll-aboard behind him. He stopped at a street corner with several people waiting there in the dark for the signal to change, and Zoya moved next to him.

She had trained in picking pockets ever since she was a little girl, so she knew what she was doing. First, she’d profiled him as a man carrying cash, and she’d already identified the location of his large folding wallet, in his inside right coat pocket. In addition, the man was focused on his phone call, making him an easier mark.

At the corner he kept talking, his eyes on the crossing sign while he waited there.

Attention steers perception, Zoya had been trained. The man wasn’t thinking about the wallet inside his jacket, nor the woman standing next to him. She nonchalantly moved in front of him, squeezing tight through the group of people standing there, from his right to his left, and while she brushed close in the small crowd her left hand rose, snaked inside his jacket, raised the wallet from the pocket, and smoothly lowered it out of his jacket and down to her waist.

She never even slowed down.

A block and a half away she checked her loot. As she expected, the wealthy-looking man in the leather jacket was a fan of cash. There were three crisp hundred-dollar bills, a small fold of twenties, and a few fives. Just over $400 in all.

Good, she thought. This was enough to get her moving.

 

* * *

 

• • •

The eastbound turning lane off Route 123 into CIA headquarters was infamous. Here, on January 25, 1993, a Pakistani national in the United States on forged papers dumped ten rounds from his AK-47 into cars waiting to turn into the agency, killing two CIA employees and injuring three more.

Suzanne Brewer wasn’t thinking about the turn lane’s history now, even though she sat in the middle of it in her Infiniti sedan, right on top of where the attack took place. She knew all about the murders, for sure, although she’d been in high school when it happened. As a CIA officer she had spent much of her career protecting the Agency from threats and had exhaustively studied the 1993 attack, all the way up to the 1997 arrest in Pakistan of Mir Qazi and his 2002 lethal injection for his act.

Right now Brewer had other, more contemporary events on her mind. With two attacks on personnel in the last eight hours, the former facility threat expert wanted answers, but that wasn’t her job anymore. Now she was Hanley’s working dog. An indentured servant to the deputy director of Operations in charge of managing sub rosa, off-book assets.

She made the turn into the HQ at five a.m., anxious to have a couple of hours in the office before attending the crisis center meeting at seven about Ternhill and Great Falls.

She’d just begun heading up the drive when her phone rang, and she answered it over the car speakers.

“Brewer.”

“It’s Matt. How soon can you be in my office?”

“Parking now, sir. Ten to fifteen?”

“Ten would be better.” Hanley hung up, and Brewer groaned aloud in her car. If he was already here in his office, wanting to speak with her in person even before the seven a.m. meeting, then it was a safe bet he was scheming something, something she would likely be tasked with carrying out.

 

* * *

 

• • •

Suzanne Brewer walked down the hall to Matt Hanley’s office thirteen minutes later. Heavy throngs of men and women passed by, the noise level higher than usual here on the seventh floor, and there was a sense of urgency to the scene.

This had nothing to do with Ternhill or Great Falls, Brewer knew. Instead, everyone up here was busy because of what Brewer saw as a stupid and pointless conference they would all be attending in Scotland in a few days.

Everyone on the floor, virtually all of the executives along with dozens of mid- and upper-level subordinates, would fly to the UK on Saturday. They’d spend a day at the U.S. embassy in London prepping with members of the CIA station there, and then they would fly or take trains north to the Scottish Highlands for the annual three-day Five Eyes conference, to be held in a completely restored and massive fifteenth-century castle overlooking Loch Ness.