Mission Critical
He stood, and Brewer followed him to her feet. They shook hands and Renfro asked, “Can you keep him off me while I work? I’d like to have this dealt with before I leave the country tomorrow.”
Brewer said, “Ordinarily, yes, but Hanley is in direct contact with the asset. If I pull Hightower off the assignment for much time at all, Hanley will know something’s going on.”
Renfro conceded this point. “Fine, keep him on me till I get Hanley’s future with the Agency sorted out. And when I do, you will be able to write your own ticket.” He smiled. “At that point, perhaps my relationship with the director will begin to impress you.”
* * *
• • •
Renfro walked back to his car, his hands and armpits dripping sweat. There was a lot to process about what he’d just learned.
First, he told himself that he believed Brewer really did want to parlay her warning into some sort of improved situation for herself in Agency HQ; he had no sense this was all some sort of act to garner information or to deliver a subtle threat.
He’d forgo the hearings this afternoon; he could get out of them, and instead he would head to the office to begin digging into this man Hightower. After that he was determined to head back into D.C. to see Trina. Tomorrow he would leave for the UK; he’d have to pack and fulfill family obligations first, and sneaking out would be nigh on impossible then.
He felt better now than he did before speaking to Brewer, immeasurably so. But his fears about the secret he’d been keeping at the Agency remained, and he still couldn’t shed himself of the terror that his world was crashing down around him.
As he climbed into his car he spoke aloud. “If I’m going down, that prick Hanley is going down with me.”
CHAPTER 37
ONE MONTH EARLIER
The three Range Rovers rolled through a cool afternoon in the Scottish Highlands, traveling the twenty miles between the parking lot where the helicopter landed and the passengers climbed into the SUVs and Castle Enrick, the site of the upcoming Five Eyes intelligence conference. The castle appeared over a rise, and Janice Won gasped at its majesty. It was an immense fortification, ringed with an ancient wall and perched on a hillside overlooking Loch Ness.
The structure was off-white in color, not the brown stone of many castles, and its size did not give it an ominous appearance at all. It was imposing, but welcoming, with flags waving in the breeze and ornate landscaping along the drive up to the gate.
The vehicles rolled through the gate of the curtain wall around the entire facility, its parapets still intact, the crenellations maintained, as if archers were standing by even now to protect the castle hotel from marauding invaders.
There were several buildings inside the walls, but the keep was the largest, strongest, and most well-protected part of the entire fortification, and it was also the location of the majority of the conference. They parked in a small lot here, then entered through the gatehouse, walking under the iron portcullis held up by thick rope.
The original castle had been built in 1269, but it had been a simple tower keep at first, and only over the next century was it built up into the massive complex it was today. A great hall, an entry hall, and larger living quarters were added. In the 1800s bathrooms and electricity and improved ventilation were put in, and in the 1970s the family that owned the property turned it into a luxury hotel and conference center.
After they dropped their bags in their rooms, Mars, Fox, and Won met back in the entry hall. Jon Hines did not make this trip. Even though he virtually never let his protectee out of his sight, Mars thought the six-foot-nine-inch behemoth to be too striking a presence in the middle of a covert intelligence mission.
They didn’t come here to be remembered.
Together they walked the grounds for over an hour. The three did their best to envision the intelligence summit that was soon to take place, to picture where the guests would be housed, seated for dinner and for meetings. They strolled through the gardens, looked out past the wall down on Loch Ness, lying out before them in beautiful turquoise, just at the bottom of a sheer cliff one hundred feet high.
It became obvious to Won that David Mars knew his way around this property.
“You’ve been here before?” Won asked.
Mars replied, “Oh yes. Twice already in the past three months. It’s a marvelous place for a holiday, even if it didn’t have value to me in other ways.”
Won was particularly interested in the air itself, the breeze drifting in from the water, the movement in the manicured trees around the property. At one point she turned to Mars. “We will check the conditions the day of, but if it is like this, then the pilot will have to make a low pass, flying just east of the castle, over the grounds but not over the building itself.”
Mars nodded, but he didn’t appear to be paying close attention.
Back inside they dined on venison and grouse in a dining room off the great hall. Won did not touch her wine, but Fox and Mars indulged in an easygoing and relaxed manner.
Both men were operational, but they also both knew how to operate in cover. Mars had been a spy in one capacity or another all his adult life, after all, and Fox was a Russian intelligence agent who’d infiltrated Russia’s notorious Solntsevskaya Bratva, so they were both exceedingly good at this.
Won was a trained intelligence asset, but the tradecraft she’d learned in the DPRK did not encompass dining out in the center of an intelligence target. No, she’d learned dead drops, countersurveillance, resistance to interrogation, and the like. The hard skills of a spy.
They retired to their rooms after dinner, but just twenty minutes later Mars and Fox stepped out in the hall and went downstairs.
They walked into a main hall, exchanging pleasantries with other guests and employees of the castle alike.
Moving on to the east wing of the large building, they kept an eye out for cameras or castle security; then, when the coast was clear, they slipped into an employee-access-only stairwell off the great hall. They descended two flights into increasing darkness and ended up on the bottom floor, engulfed in pitch black.
Fox turned on a flashlight and they saw that they were in the stone basement, a several-hundred-meter-long warren of halls and rooms. The castle dungeon had been here once, as well as catacombs to house the dead in the walls, a place to keep wine and dry goods, even an armory and a furniture and blacksmith’s shop, but now it was mostly used for storage for the hotel and conference center.
It was musty down here, the smell of water evident.
They walked along, passing under archways above which massive iron gates hung, held up by cordage as thick as Won’s arm.
The men knew where they were going, in general, but it was such a maze that Mars referred to a map. He’d studied everything ever recorded about this building, going back to sixteenth-century writings that described the original keep.