Blowback Read online

  “Okay, good. I made coffee. High-test,” she said, deliberately pointing Chris in the direction of the small, sterile kitchen. When he followed her cue, she took her first deep breath since his arrival. Sleep-deprived and running on fumes, Vanessa could safely assume Chris was in a similar state—straight from an eighteen-plus-hour day at Headquarters, where he’d been dealing with the fallout from Austria. Her fallout.

  Seconds later she opened the door to the Agency’s Deputy Director of Operations, Phillip Hawkins. The DDO breezed past Vanessa with eyebrows raised. “Clearly what happened in Prague hasn’t kept you out of trouble or improved your judgment.”

  Damn.

  “At least you made it back in one piece.” But he didn’t make it sound like a plus. As he passed from foyer to living room, impeccable in his black silk tuxedo, he left behind the very expensive scent of Clive Christian 1872, his signature. Clearly she represented a bit of business to settle before he moved on to this night’s benefit or gala.

  Vanessa smoothed the rumpled suit supplied by Prague Station. She’d already lost the Band-Aid, and she’d given up on the ill-fitting pumps, relieved to be barefoot again. A hot shower would be her reward when she completed the debrief.

  “There’s coffee,” she told the DDO, just as Chris appeared from the kitchen with a steaming mug.

  Phillip Hawkins stayed standing, his sharp eyes on Chris, clearly waiting for the answer to an unasked question.

  The thought shot through her wired brain: Christ, was Chris supposed to take me off the op?

  She looked to Chris, unable to keep the shock and disappointment completely hidden. She read a warning on his face.

  He stayed silent long enough that she broke a sweat. Then he took a tired breath. “Vanessa’s prepared to debrief us on Vienna and the intel she got from her asset. I believe it’s worth hearing her out.”

  “Her dead asset, you mean?” The DDO met Vanessa’s eyes with his own icy blues. Long-standing rumors held that he had used those blues to seduce more than his share of women, assets, and political allies over the course of his thirty-year career. Now they stayed squarely on Vanessa, and he frowned sharply. Blowback from Vienna was a personal affront, a black mark on his agency and his ambitions.

  But he sat, sinking into the best of the faded leather chairs, crossing his black-trousered legs and adjusting his left cuff—his gaze flicking obviously to his gold-and-silver Rolex. “Then let’s do this thing.”

  She pulled up with a nod and forced herself to sit. “Right.” But she held off just long enough for Chris to take the black Windsor chair next to the DDO.

  Before the DDO could look at his Rolex again, Vanessa launched in, taking them through the sequence of relevant events as they had unfolded in Vienna.

  “I ran a full three-hour SDR . . . meeting set for 1630 hours, but Tree/213 did not make that meeting . . . at 1725 hours I saw him walking rapidly toward me along the Hauptallee just as my sterile phone went off.”

  Refusing to hesitate, Vanessa looked directly at Chris. “At that point, I was less than ten meters from my asset. We made eye contact, and I made a judgment call to proceed with the meet. He immediately told me about a previously unknown secret underground facility in southeastern Iran. Sistan-Baluchestan Province.”

  The energy shifted palpably. Chris pulled forward to the edge of his seat and skimmed one hand across the flat of his close-cropped hair. The DDO narrowed his eyes, and his nostrils flared. For the moment, she had their full attention.

  “Tree/213 relayed that he’d been to the facility, and they have just started producing weapons-grade uranium. Also, according to my asset the facility has resurrected an earlier program using UD3, uranium deuteride, to test a neutron initiator, a component with no legitimate civilian uses.”

  “A trigger?” Chris pulled up sharply. “Was Tree/213 part of the earlier program?”

  “Yes. And all of that is actionable intel—but he also had vital time-sensitive intel. The Sistan facility is prepping for a visit from a VIP, a non-Iranian, possibly a Westerner. The visit is scheduled for the thirtieth of this month.”

  “That’s just two weeks,” Chris said, his forehead sharply creased. “Did he give you a name?”

  “Two weeks minus the day it took me to get back here,” Vanessa said. She took a deep breath. “He believed the VIP is Bhoot, the ghost.”

  She did not have to remind either man that uncovering Bhoot’s identity and unraveling his international arms-smuggling operation had been the focus of CPD’s Operation Ghost Hunt for the past three years.

  “What did your asset offer to confirm it was Bhoot?” The DDO asked the question, and Vanessa directed her answer to him.

  “He didn’t get the chance to tell me.”

  “Did he say who gave him this information?”

  “No.”

  The DDO exchanged an uneasy look with Chris. “Did he overhear a conversation?” Chris prompted Vanessa. “Did he get his hands on an internal document?”

  Frustrated, Vanessa shook her head. “I don’t know. He said there were rumors raging and amped-up operations at the facility; they were running tests and drills in preparation for the thirtieth, and this was extremely unusual.”

  For a few seconds, no one spoke. Then Chris sat back in his chair. “If your asset was correct, then where the hell is the facility? Baluchestan Province covers about forty percent of Iran.”

  “He was killed before he had time to give me the geo-coordinates to memorize.”

  “That makes it a needle in a very big haystack.” Frowning, the DDO crossed his arms over his heart. “They’ve managed to keep other facilities hidden.”

  “But they can’t hide the procurement trail,” Vanessa said tensely.

  Chris nodded. “It explains the amping up of black-market shipments to Iran. It’s been driving my team crazy, those of us working on Operation Ghost Hunt. We couldn’t figure out where the hell those components were going. Like they were swallowed up in a black hole.”

  “Southeast Iran is a massive black hole,” the DDO said. “Without coordinates, it could take months to confirm or disprove the existence of an underground facility.”

  “And we’ve only got two weeks if we believe this stuff about Bhoot,” Chris said.

  Vanessa pressed on. “I believe that Tree/213’s wife has the geo-coordinates that he was going to give me. XYTree/214 is solid, extremely smart, and she will be on the move by now—”

  She paused, just for a second, to see if Chris would jump in and state the obvious—the need to get the exfil operation going immediately.

  But it was the DDO who said, “It’s been more than twenty-four hours since the incident in Vienna. Tree/214 may already be in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard.”

  “She knows she’s in extreme danger,” Vanessa said quickly. “She has a six-year-old daughter. We have to go on faith that they’re both safe for the moment. We need to get them out of Iran now.”

  “She may be unwilling to deal with you, Vanessa,” Chris said quietly. “Her husband was your asset. And she may blame you for his death.”

  Vanessa cleared her throat. “She may blame me, yes, but she’s tough and she’s smart, and she can’t get out of Iran without our help. She’ll play.”

  A low whine filled the room: the signal of a phone set on vibrate. The DDO stood, reaching into his pocket, and then he disappeared into the kitchen to take the call in private.

  Vanessa pulled her chair toward Chris. He was still hunched forward intently. But now he fingered the blue-beaded amulet he always carried on his key ring, a gift from his yia yia in Greece. Vanessa knew it provided protection against the matiasma, the evil eye. He might be Phi Beta Kappa and a techno junkie, but he was superstitious as hell.

  “There’s something else you need to know,” she said, diving in. “I got a look at the shooter as I w
as leaving the park.”

  Chris eyed her sharply. “Then go over the file photos tomorrow, see if you find him. Tonight, focus on your summary cable.”

  Before she could respond, the DDO reappeared from the kitchen, clearly on his way to the door and his waiting armored SUV.

  “I’ll come into Headquarters tonight,” she began, following him, “to be there when you move on contacting the Poles about the exfil—”

  “We can contact the Poles without your assistance,” the DDO said. “Chris can fill me in on the rest of your intel.”

  “But every hour my asset’s family is out there on their own—”

  Abruptly, Deputy Director Hawkins raised a hand to silence her. “Be at my office at 0900 hours sharp.” At the door, he paused just long enough to lock on Vanessa with his eyes. “We have to consider the possibility that you’ve been compromised.”

  Chris placed something in her palm. She looked numbly down to see her Agency badge—Chris always held it when she was in the field. “Until we sort through this and take a look at what the hell actually happened, the DDO agrees with me that it’s obviously not in anyone’s interest to have you dealing with sensitive assets.”

  Her skin pricked with the heat of sudden anger. “You need me on this, Chris. I may have just moved us years closer to catching Bhoot. You see how important it is not to cut me out now? We’re close, I can feel it, we have to stop him—”

  Chris wrapped his fingers around her wrist, his grip firm but not hard. It startled and confused Vanessa to read his expression—he was afraid for her. “Write up your summary and then get some sleep,” he said wearily. “And change your clothes. We’ll deal with all this tomorrow.”

  She almost blurted out the truth—I can’t sleep—

  But she didn’t. Instead, she watched his back until he disappeared down the stairs of the second-story condominium, and then she began the three-hour job of composing a detailed summary cable for Operation Ghost Hunt’s bigot list, the short list of those read in on the op and cleared to read traffic on it.

  • • •

  She clawed her way out of the nightmare sometime between one and two a.m.—the Kurdish boy and girl, bodies splayed out against hard earth; the dead kitten sprawled between them; the strange snow the color of straw falling all around, hot against Vanessa’s skin, apple sweet on her tongue . . .

  Awake, the minutes dragged on and the thin plaster walls of the condo seemed to slant in on her. She pulled a miniature of Maker’s Mark from her toiletries bag, broke the seal, and finished it.

  She sucked in a ragged, shallow breath, silently reminding herself—It happened twenty-five years ago. You were a little child growing up halfway around the world when Saddam Hussein ordered the massacre in Halabja.

  But the recurring dream always felt like a premonition, as if it came from the future instead of the past.

  When she could function, she sent a text message to her brother, Marshall, who was with the Marines in Afghanistan: Second Platoon, Alpha Company, 3rd Recon Battalion.

  A code phrase they’d used between them since they were kids.

  drop—eat dirt—and give me 50 private pierson!

  Almost an hour later when she was walking out the door of the condo, she read his text reply:

  love you baby sis. who’d you po now?

  Pauk strode deliberately along the Quai Malaquais past the Vélib stand with its stable of gray bicycles, quickly skirting the Institut de France to the Quai de Conti, where he jogged through traffic to reach the river. Here, so close to the Pont des Arts, families and tourists filled the quai, but Pauk quickened his pace and they moved out of his path. A young woman glanced at him but quickly looked away. He slowed for a moment as he approached the busy steps of the old wooden footbridge. An unusually warm evening, and the mice had come out to play—picnicking students just back from August break, artists and street musicians, and the ubiquitous trolling bateaux-mouches, their loudspeakers blaring in German, Spanish, Mandarin for the tourists.

  Fine, the crowd served his purpose, allowing him to remain invisible in light or shadow. Even as he climbed the steps, inhaling the hazy cloud of tobacco and dope, he slid his hands into his pockets, fingers feeling for a pulse from the disposable cell phone. It would take him seconds to reach the midpoint of the bridge, past the bouquinistes that were shuttered for the evening—before his time was up.

  He walked quickly, despite the strollers and the stoned couples and the human statues. Always moving, always assessing—the unicyclist pedaling his way, circling now to juggle colored balls, and the small crowd gathering as if choreographed; the couple kissing in the shadows, both of them girls; and beyond, the Americans yelling at their feral brats.

  He carried a book under one arm—Et Si la Mort N’Existait Pas? Madame Desmarais had pressed it into his hands when they first met two years ago.

  Just past the unicyclist’s audience, Pauk slowed again to press himself against the railing. A bateau-mouche nosed from beneath the bridge, a Swedish-speaking tour guide pointing out Notre Dame in the distance. Pauk lit a Gitane, sucked in pungent smoke, let the match drop to the Seine. As he exhaled he pulled the cell from his pocket almost before it began to vibrate with an incoming message.

  He gazed intently at the small, bright screen and the face that filled it. Although the image was grainy, its poor quality did not distract him from his study of the features. He memorized the heavy jaw, the deep-set eyes, and thick, low brow.

  His eyes flickered over the brief text: cyprus 0920.

  A tiny roar rose from the crowd, and he glanced up just as the unicyclist caught a yellow ball in his mouth. The women still embraced, and the American brats clustered on the opposite side of the bridge from their parents.

  Pauk took one last look at the screen before he powered it off. He pinched out the Gitane, exhaling bitter smoke. As he approached the American kids—three boys and a ragamuffin girl—they launched stones off the bridge. A parent yelled, “I’m warning you!” And Pauk peered over the railing to see if the children had done damage. No passing boats. It was easy enough to toss the phone into the dark waters of the Seine—and with it all traces of his next kill.

  The target snapped into place forty yards in front of Vanessa. She slid the magazine into the Glock and felt it lock. Her stomach clenched, her arms pulled up, fingers of her right hand closing around the grip frame.

  Was it only thirty-six hours ago that she annihilated targets with a toy gun while waiting for Arash in the Prater?

  She exhaled slowly, pressing her feet into the concrete floor, adjusting her stance. The Glock belonged in her hands. The first firearm she’d ever fired was a .243 Winchester when she was ten and finally allowed on a hunting trip with her father and Marshall. She was at home here inside the shooting cage at the Agency firing range. How many times had she practiced this ritual? Fifty? A hundred? In the early hours of the morning, her only company was the invisible range master. It was all so familiar: the muting cradle of her earmuffs, the lingering smell of gunpowder, the faint glow from the call-indicator light.

  Vanessa lowered the Glock and wiped the sweat from her hands.

  Was she here to kill the impotence she’d felt in Vienna?

  She knew how to deal with loss and pain and whatever else her life and the job demanded. She knew how to get on with it, to do what needed to be done. And yet here she stood, almost frozen.

  She focused again on the Glock’s front sight. She squeezed off the first round, the pistol jumping stupidly, the shot wild.

  She shut her eyes and bit down on her lip. At first all she heard was the drum of her own heartbeat. She pushed the earmuffs back and caught the soft fall of footsteps and the light clang of metal as another shooter entered a cage.

  She raised the Glock, returning her attention to the sights, even as she remained aware of the shadowy silhouette of the t
arget beyond.

  This time, Vanessa fired evenly and solidly, unloading the remaining rounds into the target’s paper heart. When she pulled it from the line, all six holes overlapped almost perfectly.

  For the third time in five minutes, Vanessa checked her watch: 0903. Another ninety minutes until the briefing with DDO Hawkins, and still no update from the Poles on Yassi and her daughter Zari. There should be something by now, she thought, staring uneasily at the desktop screen at Headquarters.

  She scrolled quickly back through the latest cables from Operation Ghost Hunt’s bigot list, skimming through content just to make sure she hadn’t missed something. As she worked, another part of her remembered the frigid weekend in Berlin, the meetings with Yassi and Arash, when they’d gone over how it would all work, this business of spying.

  “If something happens,” Vanessa told them, avoiding the most horrifying words—arrested, tortured, killed—“then you will need to get to the Polish embassy.”

  For a moment, Vanessa avoided their eyes. “You will give them a code phrase—tell them ‘We are friends of Ms. Dalton’s, and we were told we could reach her here.’” Even now she remembered how her mouth had gone dry as she pushed the words out. She hated making promises when she could not control the outcome.

  Now, to take her mind off Yassi and her daughter, Vanessa caught up with the intel feed from other agencies. She even checked open-source FBIS, Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service cables—a kidnapping in Yemen, a bomb threat at the Frankfurt Airport, an Afghani soldier opening fire on his American allies.

  As she read she drummed the desktop with the fingers of one hand. Making noise. Because CPD—a football field of gray carpet and cubicles located in the basement of the new Headquarters building—felt too quiet. Even for the early hour. A few keyboards clacking and coffeemakers bubbling, the soft drone of CNN and other news feeds, the constant stream of data from international intelligence links. Way too quiet . . .