He parked the Volvo on a street a block from the main train station, then took off on foot, spending a few minutes on a simple surveillance detection route to slip anyone who might be following him. He made a cover stop at a café, and another at a bookstore, and saw no hint of a tail. After this he wandered into a shopping mall, used the ATM to get some local currency, then entered a men’s clothing store. He’d tossed his jacket in a rubbish bin during his SDR, and his T-shirt wasn’t that dirty or stained, but his black jeans were soiled through. Still, he didn’t garner any notice from the shoppers around him.

He excelled at moving low-profile throughout the world.

He picked out two full sets of clothes, along with new hiking boots, sunglasses, and other accessories. He changed in a bathroom off the mall’s food court, and by one p.m. he was back outside, walking down the street.

When his phone rang he was most of the way through a rolled-up Turkish pizza he’d bought from a street stand, walking along the River Witham. He quickly downed the last few bites and answered his phone, sitting down on a set of steps that went down to the waterline, far enough away from the footpath to where no one could hear him.

“Any luck?” he asked, knowing Suzanne Brewer was the only person with this phone number.

“Some, but the tail number of the helo would have provided us more answers.”

“Will you please stop whining about the damn helicopter?”

Brewer blew out a little air of frustration, then said, “Three of the four men in your pictures have been identified, all from British criminal databases. Nigel Halton from Southampton, Kevin Ball from Bristol, and Anthony Kent from Nottingham. They’ve all been to prison, they all seem to work for different criminal firms in the UK, but other than that there is nothing that puts them together.”

Court said, “Tell me about Kent.”

“Well, he’s employed as a truck driver and has four convictions for theft. Two more charges were dropped. He’s linked to a criminal firm based in Nottingham, which is only about forty miles west of the abandoned asylum. The group is called the Nottingham Syndicate.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Theft, extortion, a few killings, but only of rival gang members or police informants. They are pretty low-scale for a takedown of a dozen intelligence officers.”

“According to what I heard, Kent was ordered to join this outfit to do this job. His criminal firm isn’t running this show.”

“Well, it’s a fair bet the man in charge of the Nottingham Syndicate knows who hired his man.”

Court nodded. “Who is he?”

“His name is Charlie Jones. He’s the top guy in the Nottingham underworld, apparently.”

“You got all this from the Brits?”

“Yes. Thank God for the Five Eyes. If you were in Germany or France, we’d only have access to our own resources without a formal request, which means we likely wouldn’t know much at all.”

“Where do I find Charlie Jones?”

“We don’t know for sure, but something interesting popped up. Kent’s phone was a burner unit, and location services were turned off, but he did make two calls, both to the same number, both after the ambush at Ternhill.”

“And you got the address?”

“Again, thanks to a database we have via the Five Eyes network. It’s a pub in Nottingham.”

“He lives in Nottingham. He’s English. The fact that he made a call to a pub doesn’t really blow me away.”

“Well, this is not his corner pub. It’s twenty-five minutes’ drive from his flat. We looked into the place and saw that the local police have tied the location to the Nottingham Syndicate.”

“Address?”

“Forty-three Angels Row. Checking archived cam footage in the area, we have seen Jones go in there most every evening around six. He usually stays till eight or nine, then goes elsewhere for dinner.”

“I’ll go check it out.”

“Good,” she said. “Look, you got away with killing on British soil in an abandoned hospital and on a remote highway, but if you shoot up a pub in a major city, you’re going to get photographed and picked up.”

“What do you care? You’ll just disavow me.”

“Yes, I will,” she responded. “So try not to go crazy in there.”

“Yeah.”

“All right, if there’s nothing else, I have to get back to work.”

“Back to work? This is work, Brewer.”

“I have an off-site meeting I’m pulling into now. Have to go.”

She disconnected the call.

* * *

• • •

The CIA contract agent operating under the code name Romantic climbed out of his pickup truck and walked through the parking garage, heading directly for the champagne Infiniti sedan parked in the darkened corner. As he neared the driver-side door he heard it unlock.

Romantic was six feet, two inches tall, powerfully built, with blond hair liberally flecked with gray that he wore slicked back. He had a brownish-blond beard that was trimmed into a short point below his chin, and dramatically cut sideburns. His grizzled skin around his facial hair showed the effects of a half century of sun and more stress than ten average men. He wore a denim shirt, thick canvas work pants, and well-worn roper boots.

He looked more Texas than D.C., which made sense, because he was born and raised near Dallas.

Zack Hightower had begun his career with the U.S. government in the Navy, as a SEAL, and then he was recruited into the CIA’s Special Activities Division. There he spent years as a team leader of a group of paramilitary operations officers tasked with running renditions, hits, black bag jobs, and other tasks around the world in furtherance of American interests.

He was the team leader of Task Force Golf Sierra, the SAD–Ground Branch unit known infamously in the shadowy deep corners at Langley as “the Goon Squad.” One of his subordinates had been a young Courtland Gentry, and that had led to Zack’s downfall several years earlier.

Hightower had fallen out of favor with the leadership in the National Clandestine Service and spent a couple years bumming around Virginia and West Virginia as a hunting guide before being scooped back up, dusted off, and put back into service as a contract agent working for the Agency.

No, not working for the Agency. Hightower worked for Matthew Hanley specifically. Hanley, through Brewer, directed Zack through Poison Apple, just like Court Gentry, though neither Violator nor Romantic had ever heard the name of the code-worded program they were a part of.