by Sean Parnell
She had a coiled length of 550 parachute cord in her purse, and a small steel descender—no worries, since her body weight was considerably less than 550 pounds. She checked once more that she had all her belongings, including her Taser, the wire leads, and the prongs. Then she walked out onto the balcony, gripped the purse in her teeth, clipped the cord to the wrought iron railing with a carabiner, locked the descender to the cord, and disappeared over the side.
Chapter 18
Trieste, Italy
Shane Wylie was the first to make it back to Trieste.
Eric Steele’s frantic message to Wylie, relayed in a flash comm through Cutlass Main II, turned him right around in Berlin before he ever left the airport. When his cell buzzed in his pocket and he saw the blinking black diamond icon, he quickly scanned the text, felt the heat flushing his face, and jumped off the people mover with his rollaway.
Wylie first coded in on a voice call to Mike Pitts, trying to get himself the fastest ride he could muster, but there were no Program air assets available in his immediate AO, so he clicked off without further formalities and went rushing headlong for the nearest Alitalia representative, who told him he’d have to go back out to the main terminals and buy a ticket at one of the check-in counters.
Wylie might have been old school, but he was also “quick school” and had decades of experience in the field. He took out his cell again, bought a ticket on the first nonstop to Trieste, downloaded the boarding pass, and went right to the gate. The gate agents, trained to be wary of such hastily purchased one-way tickets made by foreigners at the very last minute, called the airport’s Flughafenpolizei. Wylie, anticipating just such a reaction, switched his standard U.S. blue passport for a diplomatic black passport, and haughtily informed the two young German airport policemen who arrived that he was about to call the U.S. ambassador to Berlin, who was infamous in Germany for his take-no-prisoners approach to bilateral relations.
“Would you like to meet him?” he asked the cops in fluent German. “After all, it’s going to be your last day on the job.”
They let him on the plane.
But that didn’t quiet Wylie’s desperate discomfort. He kept telling himself that this close-range facial recognition hit in Venice on Stalker Six’s alleged killer was nothing but coincidence, and the fact that he couldn’t raise Austin had been totally expected, because she was on R&R and therefore justifiably out of pocket. . . . Right? Still, he called her hotel in Trieste and asked the desk to ring her room, to which they protested because it was already the middle of the night, but he pleaded a family emergency and they rang him through. No answer, and now he knew that if he made a further fuss it would simply raise the ante, set off alarm bells, and risk getting the local cops involved, not to mention Austin’s fury if it turned out she was perfectly hale and hearty and he was behaving like the doting old father she always accused him of being.
So, he rode it out, landed in Trieste, jumped in a cab, and raced through the city to the Greif Maria Theresia hotel. He left his rollaway in the cab and told the driver to wait.
By then it was already morning, and as Wylie slipped past the front desk, trotted up the stairs to the second floor, and quick-marched down the hallway toward Austin’s room, he could hear the hee-haw of approaching Italian police cars, and his stomach flipped over. The door to her suite was open and a maid in customary black-and-white service costume was bawling like a baby on the shoulder of a pale-faced security guard, and she was mumbling “È morta” over and over, but Wylie couldn’t be sure until he saw for himself.
And then he caught a glimpse inside of the bathroom floor and Austin’s red hair splayed over the bloody marble, and his knees turned to jelly and he knew there was nothing left for him there and he spun around, but the Carabinieri were already storming down the hallway, guns drawn, and they grabbed him and slammed him face-first into a wall.
Eric Steele was the next to arrive in Trieste, along with Dalton Goodhill, with whom he hadn’t spoken a word all night. Steele had called into Cutlass while sprinting to his car from Ralphy Persko’s place, had gotten Pitts on comms, and told him he needed to get to Stalker Eight asap because intel evidence was off the charts that she was “Primary One” on somebody’s target package. Goodhill, who was with Pitts at that moment, had jumped on the call and told Steele to stand down and stop acting like some overprotective paranoid little brother, to which Steele had replied, “If you don’t fucking clear this, Blade, I’ll take out my credit card and get my own ass over there. And I fucking promise you this: if she’s dead, and I could have gotten there sooner, whatever happened to her is going to happen to you.”
Steele was steaming like a Spanish bull at that point, and he heard some harsh murmurs in the background, and then Pitts cleared the trip and the assets. Steele met Goodhill at Andrews Air Force Base at 1700 hours, where the same Program jet that had taken Austin and Wylie over to Europe was just landing to refuel and pick up some Program analysts for a training seminar sponsored by the CIA in Vegas. The kids were left cursing, albeit quietly, with their luggage, on the tarmac.
For Steele, the nonstop flight to Trieste was brutal. He couldn’t sleep, had no appetite, and had to hold his alcohol content down, even though he felt like in this particular state of ratcheted-up tension, he could have downed a fifth of Red Label and not have felt a thing. He and Goodhill sat across from one another on opposite sides of the fuselage, while the female navy steward glanced at them occasionally like a kid whose parents were fighting. Steele looked over once and saw that Goodhill was reading a thick book by the historian Victor Davis Hanson, which surprised him, because he’d already decided the man’s brain was the size of a walnut.
When they landed midmorning—a nine-hour flight plus six for the time change—Steele tried reaching Shane Wylie, who’d last made contact with Cutlass hours before. Nothing. And worse than nothing. All Alpha operators and their keepers had their phones linked by a TS DARPA app to their own biomorphic systems, meaning that the cells “identified with” their owners and “knew” if they were too far away from them. Wylie’s cell was showing that it had been separated from him, which could not have been voluntary.
No one in the Program ever lost a phone. No one.
They jumped out of a cab in front of the Greif Maria Theresia, and Goodhill had to rush around the Fiat and slow Steele down. The place was crawling with police: at least six of the blue-and-white cars with their cobalt-blue lights flashing, an ambulance, and a SWAT truck. A semicircle of young female cops with white Sam Browne belts and white pistol holsters were keeping onlookers back from the scene, while chain-smoking detectives streamed in and out of the lobby, and they all stepped back and lowered their heads as the ambulance crew rolled a corpse in a green body bag on a gurney over the polished marble entranceway toward the open ambulance bay.
Steele knew it was Austin and he was trembling from head to foot, his breathing labored, his fists clenching. An Italian detective in a shiny pearl-gray suit watched the gurney pass by and side-remarked to one of the female cops, “Whoever the bastard was, he took her ear. Maniaco.”
Steele’s Italian wasn’t as good as his Russian or French, but he knew enough to understand that. And just as the poisonous bile surged up from his guts, he looked past the cops and saw the large glass doors of the hotel lobby, and through those he could see a long brown divan, and on that sat Shane Wylie, bent over his knees, and handcuffed behind his back.
Steele grunted something and started to lunge forward. Goodhill grabbed him inside his left elbow and spun him around with remarkable power and slammed him up against the outside fuselage of the ambulance, where at least the cops were out of range and couldn’t see them.
“Let go of me, Goodhill,” Steele growled down at him.
“Get your head on straight, Steele,” Goodhill hissed back up. “There’s not a fucking thing you can do here.”
Steele ripped his arm from Goodhill’s grip.
“Maybe that
’s what they taught you wherever the hell you came from, but I don’t leave men in the field.”
Goodhill then took both hands and grabbed the front lapels of Steele’s leather jacket, and bounced him off the ambulance again.
“She’s dead, Steele. She’s dead and she’s not coming back. And Wylie’s got diplo cover and he’s somebody else’s job now and he’ll come out of it just fucking fine. That’s how this thing works, and you know it.”
“I said, I don’t leave men in the field,” Steele snarled, and he tried to pry Goodhill’s fists from his jacket, but the man was all SpecOps muscle.
“Listen up, Steele, and listen real good,” Goodhill said in a firm, but somehow much calmer tone, and he locked his ice-blue eyes to Eric’s and wouldn’t let go. “You, can’t, save, everybody.”
Eric Steele blinked. He suddenly felt weak, and he dropped his arms by his sides and leaned back against the cold steel of the ambulance.
“That’s what Demo always said,” he whispered.
“I know.” Goodhill nodded. “That’s why I fucking said it.”
Lila Kalidi was just waking up in her luxurious sleeping compartment to a first-class Continental breakfast.
The Nightjet’s ten-hour high-speed train trip from Santa Lucia Station in Venice, Italy, to the Central Station in Vienna, Austria, was just what she’d needed to decompress after a stressful evening of killing. And with the sun breaking over the Austrian countryside, the rhythmic clicking of the big train’s wheels, and the wonderful scents of apple strudel and mélange coffee, she felt justified in indulging herself with luxuries and was ready to collect her hard-earned pay.
She no longer looked anything like the “shy” girl Leena who’d been so keen to experience the pleasures of lesbian love. In fact, her latest disguise looked more like the pathetic American agent she’d just murdered. Her hair was now Irish farm girl red, and not a wig—she’d dyed it in the private compartment’s bathroom. Her eyes were emerald green, owing to a pair of long-wear contact lenses. Her fingernails were now long and lacquered lime, since she’d had plenty of time to glue them on. And soon she’d be dressed in a tie-dyed blouse, hippy jeans, and Doc Martens, but at the moment she was naked under a thick, white terry cloth Nightjet robe.
She lay back on a puffy leather divan, watched the scenery flashing by, sipped her mélange, and strapped on the voice-altering collar that looked like a velvet neck tattoo. Then she picked up the first of two cell phones lying on her bare thighs and made a call to Russia.
“Good morning, Mr. Snipe,” Lila said in English. Russian was one of her languages, because her father had been educated long ago at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow, but these self-impressed little idiots from Millennial Crude didn’t need to know that. “The Italian property you inquired about has been purchased,” she continued, “and now we kindly request the full amount. That’s one million euros, just to confirm. And we’ll expect it to appear in our Maltese account by close of business today.”
Lila paused for a moment, sipped her coffee, and listened while Snipe said something. Then her arching eyebrows, which she’d also dyed red, knit slightly together.
“You’re not really going to try to renegotiate our price, are you?” she said.
She listened again for a bit while Snipe stuttered and indeed tried to bargain, as urged to do by his lieutenant colonel boss. Then, she’d had enough.
“Snipe, let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you ever suck on your toes?”
She smiled her panther’s smile when he was clearly flustered by the question, and then she cut him off.
“I am simply wondering if you like the taste of your toes, Snipe. Because if that money is not in the designated account by the specified time today, all of your toes are soon going to be stuffed in your mouth, and they will no longer be attached to your feet. Are we clear?”
After giving Snipe enough time to comply while trying not to wet himself, Lila said, “Very good,” and clicked off.
Then she picked up the second cell phone, the one she’d taken from Austin. She scrolled through the contact list, took a chance, and clicked on ICE, for “In Case of Emergency.” She grinned when a tinny male human voice answered at Cutlass Main II and said, “Good morning. Code in.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know your code,” Lila said, “and I just killed the bitch who did.” She let that sink in for a moment, then dropped her voice to a vicious whisper. “But at any rate . . . now you are only seven.”
She clicked off, reached over to the train compartment’s window, slid it open, and hurled Austin’s cell phone into oblivion.
Act II
Chapter 19
Washington, D.C.
The funerals of all Program special operators were held at Washington’s magnificent National Cathedral.
Yet unlike the final farewells for America’s great statesmen and women, a fallen Alpha did not arrive in a motorcycle-led procession of armored limousines, escorted by honor guards on horseback. There were no crowds lining the great circular drive beneath the cathedral’s spectacular twin Gothic towers, nor did pristine-uniformed military personnel carry the coffin through its Ulrich Henn bronze doors.
There would be no choir echoing Gregorian chants inside the grand nave, no one sitting in the pews to appreciate the spectral confetti of Rowan LeCompte’s stained glass windows, and there wouldn’t be a television camera or reporter in sight.
Alpha operators, whenever killed in action, were carried into the cathedral via a seldom-used side door, and had their last salutes raised to them not in the main worshipping space of the cathedral, but in a full-story underground in a chapel vault that most people had no idea was there.
Eric Steele had long ago learned to accept it, but it was still depressing as hell. And because this was going to be Collins Austin’s funeral, he couldn’t extinguish the fury in his heart. The rain didn’t help dampen his ire, and it was coming down like a monsoon from clots of gray and purple clouds rolling above Washington, as if the capital’s better angels, of which there were few, were weeping.
She wasn’t supposed to go before me, he thought, feeling much like an older brother whose favorite sis had undertaken some risky profession that always made him nervous, which was basically true. She wasn’t supposed to go at all.
Then he had a flash memory of an incident a couple of years back, when all the Alphas had been brought down to Fort Bragg and the Salt Pit for a physical fitness assessment. For the hand-to-hand module, USASOC had delivered a squad of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to “play” with this small group of strange “OGA” (Other Governmental Agency) civilians. Collins Austin had selected a twenty-year-old E-4 as her partner, a big kid and former cage fighter from Tennessee, and had thoroughly kicked his ass. Even worse for the battered soldier and his mates, she was wearing skintight black leggings and only a sports bra at the time, and she was barefoot.
“I think you just terminated all hard-ons in that platoon for the next thirty days,” Steele had remarked with pride as Collins walked off the pitch.
“Naw.” She’d grinned as she wiped some blood from her nose where the kid had landed one good one. “Those guys are all Airborne. They like pain. I think it actually turns them on.”
“Good point,” Steele had said with a smile.
And the thought of that now made him smile again, but only for a millisecond, until he returned to the present and the soul-crushing fact that Collins Austin was gone. He stood there beneath a gray marble portico on the northeastern end of the cathedral, just outside a pair of glass doors that looked more like an emergency room entrance than the respected portals to a final port of prayer. Hands in the pockets of his navy-blue funeral suit, he waited for Collins’s hearse and looked up at the cathedral’s spires, then down at its hidden rear doors.
Above are all the glories, below are all the stories, he brooded in a black poetic moment. Then his gaze drifted over to a circular m
ound of mowed grass about the size of half a football field, bracing the cathedral’s north side off Woodley Road and Thirty-Sixth Street. And like all special operators everywhere, he reflexively assessed the space as a landing zone. A tall flagpole with the Stars and Stripes whipping in the wind jutted up from the mound’s northern perimeter, but closer by and just off the south side, a black stanchion mounted with floodlights reached about thirty feet up to the sky.
A Little Bird could make it in here, he thought as he pictured the small MD-500 helicopter. But a Blackhawk? Not so sure. Pretty dicey. Then he chided himself, because he should have been thinking of nothing but Collins, yet the issue was solved as the hearse with her corpse arrived.
It was pearl gray, followed by a black limousine and two black bulky Suburbans, all of which barely fit into the tight little circular driveway. The doors of the last Suburban opened and a whole bunch of Program security personnel emerged like clowns from a circus Volkswagen and fanned out to make sure there were no nosy reporters or photographers around. Two of them headed across the grassy knoll and up the side drive toward the cathedral’s visitors’ entrance, where a pair of glass boxes that housed the elevators to the underground parking lot were spilling a few Asian tourists despite the downpour. The security men politely discouraged them from wandering down the hill, or using their cell phone cameras or Nikons until they were safely inside the church.
Steele took a deep breath, stepped into the rain, and joined the other five pallbearers to retrieve Collins’s coffin. They were all wearing dark suits, sunglasses, and sundry hats, which reminded him of a macabre version of the Blues Brothers. Shane Wylie, who’d been sprung from a Carabinieri lineup by the U.S. ambassador to Rome, looked pale and sickly, and Dalton Goodhill’s jaw was set even harder than usual. Stalker Two, an operator named Martin Farro, had been recalled from the field and, having gone through the Operator Training Course with Collins, had begged to be part of the funeral, even though Program protocol stated that no more than two Alphas and keepers were to attend such events at a time. Ralphy Persko and another analyst brought up the rear. Mike Pitts and Meg Harden got out of the black limousine, and Pitts, using his cane, stalked around to the other side and opened the door for a tiny, bent elderly woman.
