140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  Deutsch, on the other hand, went to a different kind of superstore: the armory at Federal Plaza. She finessed her way into signing out a small arsenal for me, which was now stored in the trunk of her car. When she got back I followed her down to the parking garage of her building to check out her haul, and that’s when I noticed the problem.

  She’d managed to bring all the items we’d talked about: helmet, vest, gloves, night vision goggles, stun grenades, M4 carbine with suppressor, CCO optical gunsight, Springfield .45, extra mags for both weapons, spike strip, Smith & Wesson folding knife, comms package. Everything, in fact, short of an MRAP truck—a heavy armored Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, which would have been ideal, given what I imagined I’d be facing—though it might have raised eyebrows if she’d requisitioned one.

  What she’d chosen wasn’t a problem.

  The problem was that she’d brought two of each.

  Standing there in the garage, I turned to her quizzically a second after she’d popped the trunk.

  She cut me off before I spoke. “I’m going in with you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Sean. I’m coming.”

  I felt my insides contract. “Annie. I’ve had enough people around me die because of these pricks. I’m not letting that happen again. It’s not your fight.”

  She didn’t flinch. “It is.”

  “Annie, this isn’t Bureau business anymore—”

  “Screw the Bureau, Sean. This is about me. And you. And Nick.”

  She held my gaze, and for a second there, my eyes scoured her face for a better understanding of what she meant—then it sank in. Nick’s Tinder booty call had been nothing of the kind.

  “You . . . and Nick?”

  She didn’t react for a breath, then she nodded.

  “The night I ended up at his place, after the shooting,” I asked. “He was with you?”

  She nodded again. “He was going to spend the night, but he’d messed up his shirt with some pasta sauce and, well, you know how the guys at Twenty-six Fed can be total dicks.”

  I pictured him walking in, his surprise at seeing me that night. “So you and—”

  “Two months,” she said, anticipating my read, given Nick’s dating history. “We’d been seeing each other for two months. No one knew. Once we both got comfortable with what we were doing, with being together, he said he was going to tell you. I guess he never got the chance.”

  All I could say was, “I wish he had.” I flashed back to Nick and I outside Daland’s house, all those long nights, and how he hadn’t spent those hours swiping through his Tinder, and I felt bad that I’d missed it, that I hadn’t realized he and Annie had a thing going and that we hadn’t had a chance to talk about it.

  “It doesn’t matter, Annie. I can’t have you do this.”

  “And I can’t have you do it alone. It’s that simple, Sean. It really is.”

  We just stood there for a moment, in the dim light of the garage, face to face, a trunk-load of SWAT weaponry at our disposal.

  I couldn’t object. I had no right to object.

  She was in.

  I waited till we were all set to go, then I called Tess using the safe Viber protocol. It was killing me not to have her here, not to be able to see her and hold her tight against me and kiss her before setting off, knowing the dangers ahead, what we were going up against—but it was better this way. It would have been hugely tough on us both to say goodbye face to face and it was still too risky to have her come down here again, for both of us. It was also better to keep her at a distance from it all, knowing she’d have serious objections over what my makeshift crew and me were about to do. Which, sure enough, didn’t take long to materialize once I had her on the line.

  “Sean, you know who these people are,” she said, her exasperation growing with every word since the beginning of the call. “You know what they’re capable of, you know what resources they have to draw on. This is nuts.”

  “Tess, please. Like I said—”

  “Just take a night to sleep on it,” she interjected forcefully, “to think it all through again. Maybe you’ll see something you missed.”

  “We’ve been over it, Tess. I know what I’m doing. And this is the way it has to be.”

  “It’s a trap, you said so yourself.”

  “Yes. A trap we instigated. They’re playing into our hands, Tess. We’ve got to strike before they have too much time to think things through.”

  She went quiet for a moment, just a long, leaden exhale. I could just picture the way her face would be all crunched up with frustration, the way her eyes would be set, all fierce and fired up.

  “I won’t be able to talk to you until it’s done,” I added, breaking the heavy silence.

  “I know,” she said, subdued now.

  “It’s going to be fine. I know what I’m doing, Tess.”

  “I damn well hope so.”

  We’d said all that needed to be said. It was time to go.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I damn well hope so too,” she said, her tone cracking a bit.

  “Give the kids a kiss from me. And I’ll see you . . . soon.”

  “OK.”

  Then I hung up.

  We drove out of New York City that evening after putting the finishing touches to the plan of action I had proposed while cleaning out some takeaway Chinese at Deutsch’s place.

  Four of us, in Deutsch’s Crown Vic: me, her, Kurt and Gigi. Our minds were all busy playing out what we imagined the next day would bring. We’d already gone over what we were about to do several times and the fact that, during the whole drive down, the only time one of us spoke up was to question some aspect of our plan aloud just showed how it was all any of us was thinking about.

  The traffic was fluid heading out of the city on a Sunday night, and with no major roadworks to impede our progress and the snow not strong enough to cause problems, we passed the signs to Philadelphia around two hours later and skirted Baltimore an hour after that. An hour more, and we were checking into a Marriott at Tysons Corner, west of Washington DC and almost exactly halfway between Vienna, Virginia and the CIA’s headquarters at Langley. Two rooms, one for Deutsch and me, the other for Kurt and Gigi.

  We all needed a good night’s rest, although I wasn’t sure we’d be sleeping sound.

  We had an early start tomorrow if we were going to catch the first of our worms.

  MONDAY

  62

  Vienna, Virginia

  It hadn’t been Tomblin’s best weekend.

  He didn’t like this—playing a waiting game. Not this type, anyway. A lot of the intelligence work he oversaw involved waiting and often felt like watching slow, ponderous moves on a chess board: you put something in play, you hoped your counterpart reacted the way you wanted him to, then you made your next move and so on, in the hope of getting the result you wanted. A result on which lives, often many lives, depended. Then there was the other type of waiting: the nail-biting, pulse-racing wait while an op was underway, monitoring it from hundreds or thousands of miles away in the comfort of a windowless, climate-controlled Langley room, hoping a radio confirmation of a successful outcome would come through.

  This was different. They’d planted the seed on Erebus late Friday night. He’d sat with his analyst and watched as the brief, typed exchanges had popped up on the monitor facing them. The message had been received and understood. The question was now about when Reilly would act, when he’d show up at Roos’s lodge, and what the outcome of that confrontation would be.

  Until Reilly showed up there, Tomblin was uneasy. The agent had shown himself to be an unpredictable bastard and a loose cannon. Tomblin wasn’t comfortable having him out in the wind. Even though he’d fed him Roos’s name and location, he still felt vulnerable. It had been on his mind all weekend—the wait for the call from Roos telling him it was over—and was still on his mind as he slipped on his coat, grabbed his briefcase, and mad
e his way to the garage that abutted his six-bedroom house.

  Moments later, the garage door glided open and he pulled out in his car, an imposing dark grey Lincoln Navigator. He paused at the end of the drive as he always did, glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure the garage door shut properly, then he stepped off the brake pedal and motored away.

  As he drove in the cossetted comfort of the large SUV, he felt good about going to work. There would be a lot going on to distract him from the discomfort that was gnawing away at him. Before long, he’d be immersed in situations and strategies that required his decisions. And the call from Roos would come. Tomblin knew Reilly would not be able to resist going after him, even knowing the odds were stacked against him.

  The snow was still falling, and an inch or so of it had settled on the quiet residential lane, not enough to worry the big tires of his four-wheel drive. He was adjusting his climate control as he reached the stop sign at the T-junction with Wolftrap Road where an attractive, full-figured redhead was waiting to cross the street.

  He brought the Navigator to a complete stop and found himself staring at her, his attention sucked in by the alluring woman who turned and gave him a warm smile to acknowledge his having stopped. His eyes studied her as she started to cross the road, trying to divine the exact contours of what looked like a fetchingly curvaceous body that lay cloaked under her flowing coat. His imagination basked in the moment, transforming her into someone he fantasized about, a broadly similar female actor from a television drama series that was set in the advertising world of the 60s. The show bored him, its machinations far too simplistic for his taste—but he still watched it with his wife in an effort to find more common ground in their increasingly diverging tastes, and enjoyed every second she was on screen. He pictured her as the woman who was now mere feet from his bumper, taking it slow, using careful, elegant steps to avoid slipping, glancing around again to jolt him with her smile—and he was relishing the moment until he sensed a shadow rushing right up to his side window a split second before the window exploded inward and showered him with shards.

  He didn’t even have time to react before a balled fist rocketed in and punched him in the jaw, rattling his brain and sending him flying sideways against the seat belt. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a hand reaching in and yanking the door handle open, then Reilly was stuffing a gun in his face while his other hand hit the start/stop button and killed the engine.

  “Get out, quick,” Reilly ordered as his free hand fiddled with Tomblin’s seat belt and unhooked it.

  Tomblin was too stunned to react. That, his rattled brain, and the handgun pressed against his cheek, made him obey. He climbed out of the car, which was when he saw someone else standing by the back door, also holding a gun, though that one wasn’t aimed at his face. It was a woman he didn’t recognize.

  “Get in,” she said as she opened the rear door.

  He did, hoping a neighbor was watching and was calling it in or that another car would drive by and do the same. Neither seemed to be happening.

  The woman clambered in after him. Reilly was already in the driver’s seat.

  Eleven seconds after the car had come to a halt, it was off again, trailed by an unmarked Crown Vic with the seductive redhead in the passenger seat and headed for the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  63

  Nelson County, Virginia

  Despite the clear plastic sheeting I’d duct-taped in place of the shattered window, it was still pretty cold in Tomblin’s beefy SUV as I drove it down Route Twenty-nine. The snow was intermittent and the temperature gauge was reading minus two, but that wasn’t counting the effect of the wind. I wasn’t too bothered by the cold. It helped keep me alert, especially given what my body had been through, juicing me up with adrenaline and kick-starting any parts of me that were still a bit sluggish. It also helped prepare my esteemed guest for what was to come. I was more worried about the plastic sheeting, and the fact that I had two passengers in the back and no one next to me, attracting the attention of some bored state trooper. I had Deutsch in the car, though, and her badge would come in handy if that were to happen. The flex-cuffs around the wrists of the guy sitting next to her, and the duct tape over his mouth, would probably be less of a help.

  I didn’t want to listen to him, and I didn’t want to talk to him either. We had a two-hour plus drive, and I wanted him shut out and seriously rattled by the time we got to our destination. I imagined the panic that had to be building inside him. CIA big shot, head of the National Clandestine Service—I don’t care who you are—getting grabbed like that by someone with my skill set who you know to be out to settle a score and who looks like he has nothing to lose is going to trigger some major panic in you. I imagined he was also wondering how we got him, how we even knew who he was. After all, he’d tried to subvert our efforts by stepping in quick and having one of his minions log into Erebus and hand me Roos on a silver platter. I was sure he was behind it. According to Tomblin’s plan, I was supposed to be hightailing it straight to where Roos was holed up—where I would no doubt have a few determined heavies and a sniper or two waiting for me—instead of coming after him with the help of a buxom redhead. And yet, we’d found him. His name had risen out of the sewer, courtesy of another anonymous poster on Erebus, one Tomblin’s minions couldn’t—and clearly hadn’t—have seen.

  Kudos to Daland and his programming genius.

  The genuine mystery informant, whoever he was—assuming it was a “he”—hadn’t elaborated on why he was selling them out, and although he hadn’t said—typed—much, I was pretty sure his native language wasn’t English. Still, he got me the name I was missing. “FF” was actually Edward Tomblin, of the CIA, the “Frank Fullerton” to Roos’s “Reed Corrigan.”

  Kurt and Gigi had had a hard time fleshing out his persona beyond the broadest of strokes of his career. The guy clearly valued his privacy and hadn’t exactly embraced social media either. They were helped, though, by the fact that Tomblin wasn’t a particularly common name, and they ended up getting his home address pretty easily. His wife was one of a hundred and forty-five million eBay users whose personal details were on a database that had been hacked from the site a few months back, the only Tomblin within commuting range of Langley.

  We’d disabled the trackers on both cars before setting off, and I’d removed the battery from Tomblin’s phone and the SIM card from his car phone. It wouldn’t be long before they realized he was missing. We had a limited time in which to act. So we set off as quickly as we could and, a little over two hours out of the DC metro area, we were skirting Charlottesville before continuing on south.

  The landscape got progressively more dramatic around us as the traces of human settlement receded—forests of tall trees, both bare and evergreen, cushioning the parallel two-lane strips of blacktop that hardly had any cars on them, and glimpses of the Blue Ridge mountains beyond, all filtered through a glaze of light snow and set against a white-grey backdrop.

  It wasn’t long before we were cutting through some glorious Virginia country. Abundant mature hardwoods on either side blanketed rolling hills that climbed up to the mountains, nature’s full majesty gone wild over centuries and millennia, an outstanding corner of the planet within a stone’s throw from several big cities. This country was truly blessed in that sense. Tess and I had driven through these parts a couple of years back, one of those idyllic road trips through Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. We’d timed it perfectly, cruising down in the full glory of fall, visually drunk on a surreal palette of blazing reds, russets and gold of the ridges and the smell of woodsmoke in the air. The landscape was no less heart-stirring this time of year, but I felt it for entirely different reasons. What we were doing here was obviously far from idyllic.

  We reached the area we had reconnoitered online and I veered off onto a narrow, single-lane road. I guided the Navigator a couple of miles up into the Miran Forest, then turned into a dirt track that didn’
t seem like it had seen much traffic lately. It felt as if the mountain was preparing to swallow us up. We followed the narrow, winding trail for about a mile and a half until we reached the strategically placed small clearing we’d chosen.

  I pulled into it and killed the engine.

  Gigi, driving the Crown Vic, tucked in behind me and did the same.

  Leaving Tomblin in his SUV, the four of us got out and walked up the clearing. We checked our location using Gigi’s tablet, confirmed we were in the right place, and got a visual sighting of the direction our target was in.

  Then we got to work.

  “Eddy?” Roos asked as he answered the phone.

  He hadn’t expected to hear from Tomblin. It was more Tomblin who was waiting to hear from him, once it was done.

  He knew something was wrong the second he heard the caller’s voice.

  It wasn’t Tomblin.

  “Try again, Gordo.”

  Roos’s grip tightened around his phone. He’d never spoken to Reilly, but—besides the fact that he’d heard his voice on surveillance tapes—he knew it wouldn’t be anyone else. “You do know how to ruin a party, I’ll give you that.”

  “Next time, maybe you should draw up your invitations more carefully. And put an RSVP to avoid disappointments.”

  “Oh, I’m not disappointed,” Roos said. “I’m looking forward to meeting you. That’s what this call is about, isn’t it?”

  “You know me so well,” Reilly said. “Hang up. I’m going to call you from another phone. This one could be a bit hot right now.”

  Clever bastard, Roos thought. He hung up. Seconds later, his phone rang again. “So what’s on your mind?”

  “I’ve got your boy here,” Reilly said. “And I’ve got this decision to make.”