That was a potential problem.
Moscow was notorious for pushing disinformation in ways that made it difficult to differentiate truth from fiction, but right here and now that issue was above her pay grade. These details pointed to a planned political assassination, and they came with a high analytic confidence rating, which was as good as it got.
No details on where or when or who.
She scanned down the war room’s query timeline.
They were gunning for leads on target through informant networks.
They’d run his gait through Next Generation Identification and pushed his passport photo and multiple variants of the passport name and birth date through aggregated social media and commercial data, financial and credit histories, and law-enforcement databases, but so far the guy was as much of a vanishing act in real life as he’d been at the airport. That just didn’t seem right. Even the best of the best of the killers on the Broker list had some kind of footprint.
She clicked through for the airport security feeds, which, helpfully, had already been labeled according to a corresponding site map.
Images filled her screen in a sort of spliced quick time.
One world faded and another filled its space, and she settled into a rhythm, clicking, scanning, enhancing until her target came into view.
He was impossible to miss.
He glowed on-screen. Well, not a glow, exactly.
The hat he wore was reflectable- or infrared-equipped—possibly both or something else altogether—and light that had been invisible on the ground was a blinding patch of white on screen.
It was a curious choice, the hat.
The only practical reason to wear something like that was to prevent facial recognition from picking up his nodal points, but that made no sense in this environment. The same tech that kept his face out of the data systems created an obvious digital beacon that screamed, “Look at me,” to anyone watching the monitors.
A person with the ability to slip between shadows the way he did should have been more concerned with avoiding attention than drawing a line straight to him.
Target moved off-screen.
She jotted a note, marked the time stamp, continued to the second feed, and accelerated the frame rate until the lighted hat came into view. She was there, too, in that sequence, not nearly as blunderous as she remembered but just as slow.
She tracked target digitally in ways she couldn’t from the ground, and then, one step to the next, he vanished, just as he had in real life.
The speed of it left her breathless and searching for words.
She rewound, halved the frame rate, and watched it again.
Shifting crowds hid him from the camera in that critical beat.
She switched to the third feed.
The angle put him as a dot in the background.
He knew what he was doing. He’d made the switch where he’d cover the least amount of screen real estate. She touched the image, circling the group of burka-clad women, and physically traced the path he’d take.
This time she caught the action.
She cut the speed by yet half again and, finger on the screen, tracked each painstakingly slow sliver, waited for him to shift, and hit PAUSE.
What she couldn’t see—hadn’t seen—from the ground was the ebb of foot traffic, the way it had stalled, and how close two European men had followed behind the women. Like a magician performing an in-your-face, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sleight of hand, target had slipped shoulder first between those two groups and, in one continuous movement, had swiped off the hat, rolled out of his jacket, and turned on his heels.
Just like that, the two-man group had become three.
He’d walked right past her.
She hadn’t seen him, because she’d been looking somewhere else. The desk jockeys at headquarters hadn’t seen him, because they’d been looking for something else.
Angel and her crew weren’t easy to fool, but that hadn’t mattered here.
He had known he was being watched and had set them up.
He hadn’t worn that hat to hide from facial recognition, he’d worn it for misdirection, to focus their attention where he wanted it. The light had been a beacon—the mind just couldn’t help itself—and they’d have searched for that first when he vanished. They would have realized the mistake almost immediately and adjusted for it, but by then they’d have had nothing else to reference what they were looking for.
He wasn’t in the same clothes.
He was carrying a bag he hadn’t been carrying before.
And he was no longer a male traveling alone.
She rewound and watched the vanishing act again.
The birth date on his passport put him at twenty-six.
The file put him somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-eight.
But this high-level tradecraft shit made him look like he’d just walked out of the late eighties, the time before portable technology had become such a critical part of daily life that even the world’s most wanted cycled through burners or put phones in other people’s names rather than do without.
Nobody did without anymore, except this guy.
One active device to act as a digital signature was all they’d have needed for today to have had a different ending. He was an analog agent working in a digital world, the embodiment of the ghost stories old-timers liked to tell.
You kids these days have no idea how good you’ve got it.
Advanced technology, digital tracking.
In my day . . .
She’d give just about anything to see one of those old geezers handle what her team had experienced this morning.
She went back to the first feed, forwarded past the vanishing act, and caught target on the rebound. His pants hadn’t changed. His shoes hadn’t changed.
They hadn’t needed to.
The human tendency was to watch at eye level, heads, hands, and torsos, especially in a crowd. No one followed feet in a crowd—it took too much time and was too obvious—and that’s what allowed his quick-change trick to work.
She pulled more feeds and tracked him from camera to camera, following him through the airport, until frustration hit concern and kept on rising from there.
Target had shadowed her.
He’d stood five passengers behind her in the line through passport control.
He’d followed her out of the terminal and watched her as she’d lingered.
He’d caught her interest in Emilia.
And he’d waited until the guys had joined her.
He’d known exactly how many were on the team and who they were.
Nick, Juan, Aaron, they weren’t strangers to this game—they each had a heightened sense of situational awareness that she would never have—and target had walked right past them. They’d seen him and looked right through him.
But the sequence that set her heart racing wasn’t at the airport.
The last image she had of him was the back of his jacket within a crowd on the crosswalk as he trailed their group to the hotel.
CHAPTER 4
KARA
HER FINGERS HURRIED OVER KEYBOARD AND TRACKPAD, SEARCHING the war room’s databases, hoping headquarters had already tied into the hotel’s security system, while the specter of unmitigated disaster burned its way from her gut into her throat.
She found the lobby cameras, located Nick’s arrival, enhanced the sequence to focus in on the reception desk, and started from there.
With every forward frame, clarity formed and trepidation grew.
Target had waited just off the lobby until they’d gone for the elevators, and then worked the desk clerks. He had their room numbers, might even have their passport information. This was insanity.
The war room had access to these feeds in real time, and there’d been no alert, and not a goddamn thing in the dossier to account for the fact that target was in their hotel. He knew why they wanted him.
The next logical step was a
preemptive strike.
Nick needed to know—needed to know now—needed to see it for himself, and it’d take longer for her to get the equipment to his room, resecure credentials, and start over than to get him here.
She searched for the feeds by floor and found their hallway.
Empty.
That didn’t mean clear.
She leaned over, picked up the room phone, and dialed.
Nick answered with a voice somewhere between dead asleep and panicked alert.
She said, “Sorry to wake you. There’s something you need to see. Urgent.”
He said, “Give me two minutes—”
She stopped him. “Nick. He’s here. In the hotel. He followed us out of the terminal.”
Silence followed.
She said, “The hallway looks clear, but I don’t know. Be careful.”
She dropped the phone into the cradle and returned to the screen.
She needed to get ahead of this.
Target had been conscious of the cameras from the beginning, which made it hard to get a lock on him, but between the various angles she could build a composite of his face, and there were segments that included his gait.
She pushed what she had into the system.
The algorithms churned.
Facial recognition spit back fifty partial matches, not one of which pinged the passport photo. She scrolled through the hits, looking for anything that fit the profile, saved the array, and closed it out. She didn’t have time or bandwidth to pore through the results for clues and missing pieces, so she clipped images from the camera feeds, attached them for high priority, and sent a requisition to headquarters.
The war room had the manpower and computing power, this was their job, and if they’d done it properly in the first place, she wouldn’t be left doing their work.
That was the frustration and irony of where she was this very moment.
She was an analyst, not a field operative. Her skills were a better fit for a war room than a hotel room, but here she was, and that was Nick’s doing.
He was the one who’d talked her into the career fork from naval intelligence specialist to special unit analyst, and if not for him, she’d probably be back to working out of a windowless room in Norfolk, assembling confidence judgments into briefs that more often than not found their way into the circular file than onto a desk.
He had called her up, said he was in town for the night, had invited her out and buttered her up with a few beers and greasy food, and had then dropped the mother of all requests on her.
He was putting together a team, he’d said, and wanted her on it.
She’d laughed.
She could handle a rifle as well as the next guy, was actually a better marksman than most—growing up poor and hunting to supplement the dinner table did that for a person—but she’d be an awful field operative.
“You’re serious,” she said.
“As I live and breathe.”
She swigged from the longneck. “Even if I wanted to say yes, my next reenlistment doesn’t come up for another year and a half.” She clinked the bottom of her bottle against the side of his. “Kind of out of luck there, buddy, but let me know if you’re still hiring in eighteen months.”
He took a swig of his own. “It’d be a deployment change,” he said. “Same NOS on paper but with a rate bump, which is long overdue, if you ask me.” He patted his chest, as if indicating a pocket inside his jacket. “Orders from higher up, a little document shuffling, and done.”
She scrutinized him over the bottle.
Nick wasn’t, had never been navy. He was a jarhead, Force Recon.
They’d met on the USS Boxer when she was in the middle of her first tour. He’d been charming as all get-out and kind in a way most people weren’t, and she’d gone out of her way to avoid him because, in her experience, accepting kindness from a popular kid now meant paying with hell and humiliation later.
Turned out he was a nerd in a jock’s body.
And the body was more of a recent development.
His high school stories weren’t as traumatic as hers, but they’d been enough to connect over and a friendship had been built and they’d stayed in touch.
She was in for twenty, gunning for retirement. He’d done eight and decommissioned for the private sector and then contract work.
This team he was talking about wasn’t within any of the military branches, and yet if he was to be believed—and she had no reason to doubt him—she’d be working for him while still on Uncle Sam’s payroll.
She said, “What kind of team, exactly?”
He hemmed and hedged.
She was smart enough to convert the inference to statement of fact.
Any job that didn’t exist while keeping her on the navy payroll meant a whole lot of risk, and if anything did go wrong, there’d be denial and disownment, and she’d be kissing away a retirement that was close enough she could almost taste it.
She drew another long drag and swallowed.
“I could do the job, might even be decent at it,” she said, “but that’d be testament to sheer force of will and my delightful nature. I’m an analyst, Nick. I’m not built for fieldwork, and you know it.”
“I need an analyst,” he said.
She snorted. “I know how this shit works. Whatever you’ve gotten yourself into comes with a voyeur’s wet dream of twenty-four-seven crackerjack support.”
“Whatever I’ve gotten myself into,” he said, “will at times put me—us—into situations that make accessing that support difficult, if not impossible. I need your brain, Kara. I don’t want you as a field operative. I want you as an analyst—your eyes and ears, on the ground, right there in the moment—because when shit gets real, we’re going to be on our own, running blind, and there isn’t anyone else I trust to get me where I need to go the way I trust you. You’ve already got the clearance. You have a proven record. I can get the transfer green-lit and fast-tracked. Please.”
“Still a hard sell, Nick.”
“Double hazard pay, five million in life insurance, which you can line up to take care of your sisters if that’s what you’re worried about, and guaranteed retirement.”
“That’s not how things work.”
“Okay, everything minus the guarantee.”
She sighed.
“You’re dying where you are,” he said. “Your skills are wasted. You’re doing time, counting the days to freedom.”
“What’s my commitment?”
“Give me six months. If you don’t like it, then quit and pick your duty.”
“Nick, you can’t make promises like that.”
“I absolutely can.”
“See,” she said, “now you’re starting to scare me.”
“Good,” he said. “That means you’re curious.”
“It means you’re a motherlovin’ conniving asshole is what it is.”
Four weeks later she was on a flight to Langley, and two months of field training after that, she was headed to Rome. Two months bled into three, then six, then a year.
The work left her ambivalent.
She hadn’t been naive when Nick had asked her to sign on.
She’d known what she’d be part of, but she wasn’t like him or Emilia.
They had no moral issue with the killing. To them, this was war, and they were soldiers following orders, but it wasn’t really the same. This was a murderous bent masked by terms like patriotism and national security. She didn’t deny that they were patriotic, she just didn’t buy they were doing it only for country.
They enjoyed the thrill of the hunt.
She didn’t.
And the civic side of her had a hard time wrapping her head around extrajudicial killings, especially when those killed were US citizens.
She’d brought that up with Nick after her first six months ended.
He’d said, “It’s not like we’re targeting innocent people.”
She had issues with
that, too.
“Who gets to decide what innocent is?” she said. “I mean, what does innocent even mean? Because you can’t tell me the people we go after don’t say the same thing about the people they go after. That’s like saying if a murderer murders only other murderers that negates murder.”
He thought for a bit. “I’m okay with that.”
“Then that makes innocence a variable that changes by day or dictum.”
“Don’t do the philosophical thing on me,” he said. “I’m not that fucking smart.”
“You’re a fucking liar is what you are.”
He clinked his glass against hers.
She stayed with the job for him, to watch his back, and did the job because it was her job, but any thrill she found was as a puzzle solver discovering connections other people missed and running her pack ahead of the prey. That was what she was good at, was supposed to be good at anyway. This target called it all into question.
She rechecked the hallway cameras.
Nick’s door opened. He stepped out and into center screen.
No movement elsewhere.
She stretched a foot from her bed to Juan’s and nudged him.
He opened an eye.
“Nick’s on his way,” she said. “Get the door.”
“What time is it?”
“Move-your-ass time.”
Juan groaned himself up.
The room echoed with the rap of knuckles on wood.
Juan slid his feet to the floor. Two steps took him to the door.
He said, “That you, Mary?”
Nick’s voice said, “Just the sheep.”
Juan turned the tumbler, held the door open long enough for Nick to wedge his way inside. Juan returned to his bed, and Nick rounded over to hers. He sat.
He said, “Show me what you’ve got.”
She scooted over to make room, started with the vanishing point, and traced target’s trajectory with her finger. “Watch him,” she said.
Nick leaned in closer.
“Show me again,” he said.
She stopped, rewound, replayed. They went at it like that, round after round after round, and finally he said, “Have you seen something like that before?”
Liars' Legacy Page 3
