by Mark Henshaw
There were no cars ahead, no blue lights, and she pushed the Ford faster, its engine screaming now.
She saw headlights from the east—one of the Bureau’s SUVs coming down the Woods Road, running at least as fast as she was. It would be a race for the intersection, and there was no room to swerve around at the speed she was driving. She would run up dirt embankments on the other side.
If she won the race, the SUV would not be able to stop before passing through the cross in the road and shooting onto the gravel road on the other side of the intersection to the west. It would take several seconds for it to stop if it didn’t spin out—
She sped up, judged the distance—
She wouldn’t make it first.
Salem exhaled and pressed down on the brake.
She could not dump speed fast enough to stop. She would still overshoot the intersection . . . and the FBI’s driver in the other car saw it. Thinking she was still going to run, he pulled to the left side of the road, putting the SUV in a position to turn right as wide as possible to stay with the target.
He realized too late that she was dumping speed and pushed hard on his own brake. The wheels locked, tires screaming and melting on the asphalt from the friction, white smoke spewing into the dark.
The FBI vehicle’s headlights filled Salem’s own car with blinding white beams. The special agents saw the Israeli woman raise her hands, an instinct that did nothing to protect her.
• • •
The SUV hit the Ford broadside behind the front wheel at just under fifty miles per hour. Salem’s passenger-side doors crumpled as the metal frame was crushed inward, all of the airbags firing at once. Salem was thrown against her seat belt, forward and sideways at the same time, her head smashing into the side post. Her tires were now sliding on asphalt, then on white gravel, spinning to her left. The Ford hit wet grass and slid over the edge of the embankment, down the slope into a fallen tree, where it stopped short, metal crunching close outside.
The FBI driver and his passengers flew forward at the impact, their own belts stopping their momentum, their body armor saving them from long linear bruises along their chests as inertia tried for several seconds to throw them through the front window. The SUV died with a shriek as the metal frame surrounding the motor collapsed, plastic and glass shards from windows and mirrors blowing outward. The front axle crumpled and the forward part of the engine tried to retreat into the engine block, fluids and steam erupting as its hoses breached. The tail of the SUV left the ground as the front end stopped faster than the frame could absorb. The vehicle bent in the middle as the armored car arced upward, and they saw Salem’s car spin away from them onto the grass and then down the short hill into the trees. Then gravity pulled the machine back to the ground just as the SUV behind struck them, unable to stop.
Salem opened her eyes. The world was blurred and tilting around her. She raised her head and the world spun.
Some instinct inside told her to run. Her car was dead, but she could still lose the Americans in the trees, couldn’t she? She didn’t know these woods. Would the men somewhere nearby shoot her? Were they dead? She couldn’t think.
She tried to open the door. It wouldn’t move. She looked out the window and saw the car resting against a dead tree. So the world really was tilting, or at least the car was.
• • •
The FBI team recovered, all suffering whiplash and strained muscles, but every one of them in better shape than Salem thanks to the armor they wore and the lightly armored car carrying them. They were able to open all of the doors save one, the forward passenger door, which was bent in its frame. The four men emerged from the utility vehicle, and the special agents from the two trailing vehicles joined them. Bravo’s vehicle was spewing steam; Delta had managed to avoid the pileup by swerving onto the dirt shoulder of the road at the last second, the embankment alone keeping the SUV upright.
They all wore tactical pants, dark jackets with the FBI letters reflecting in the lights, and thigh rigs for their side arms. They raised the carbines they were carrying and moved toward the wrecked car down the embankment.
The team leader reached the vehicle. The passenger window was missing. “Ma’am! Can you hear me?” The passenger door was smashed shut. He couldn’t reach the woman without crawling through the window.
Salem turned her head toward the voice. Her eyes would not focus properly. “I . . . ken.” Had she spoken Hebrew or English? She couldn’t tell.
“FBI. Please don’t move.” The FBI agent fumbled for his flashlight and shined it into the car. The Israeli woman barely winced as the light hit her eyes. There was blood on her forehead, starting to run down over her cheek. “Emergency services are on the way. Don’t move. We’ll get you out.”
Salem disobeyed the man and fumbled for the seat-belt release. It popped and her body slid down on the seat against the door. She turned back and looked around the interior, but could not find what she wanted. Her mind was not cooperating, her thoughts jumbled and foggy. She felt around the floor and her fingers finally touched the envelope. She pulled it out, then turned back to the broken window.
“She’s trying to get out,” the team lead realized. He shouldered his rifle and moved around the car, tried to move down the embankment, slid on the grass, and managed to push himself back onto his feet. He heard engines in the distance. Rhodes and the rest of the surveillance units were closing on their position.
He pulled himself along the front of the Ford and reached Salem as she pushed herself out of the window. Her balance still compromised, she fell, landing on the ground. The special agent grabbed her, as much to help her as to restrain her. His teammates moved in from both sides. Groggy, Salem took a swing at the man holding her arm, a strike at his nose. She missed, hitting his shoulder, not enough to hurt. She couldn’t orient her body or control her muscles.
Two of the agents raised their 9mm H&K MP5 rifles at her head. Their leader waved them off, then directed the others to help him get her up to the road. Someone pulled the package she was holding from her hands and rough hands lifted her by her armpits. She staggered, her legs refusing to cooperate. They reached the top of the embankment as the first of the other vehicles arrived. Someone pulled her arms behind her and cuffed her wrists.
“Do you have anything in your pockets I should know about?” someone asked.
“No.” That came out in English, she was sure.
“Do you have a weapon on you?”
It took her several seconds to process that question before she could answer. “No.” There was no point lying.
They did not take her at her word and patted her down, two men still holding her up while another ran his hands over her body, looking for the gun or knife that she wasn’t carrying. They emptied her pockets of the detritus they found, keys and her passport. Salem couldn’t resist any of it. More vehicles came rolling up, lights and sirens breaking through the silent night. There were seven men around her, all wanting a piece of the arrest.
Rhodes stepped out of the tech van and saw the crash site for the first time. Alpha’s SUV was wrecked beyond repair. Bravo, probably also a total loss. His own van would need bodywork to repair the damage from the tree and the Echo sedan had a bent axle courtesy of the rock it had landed on when it left the pavement for the open field. Only Delta’s vehicle was in good shape.
He cursed under his breath. “I told them to stop her, not try to kill her.”
“No keeping this one quiet,” Fuller said. “The whole neighborhood’s gonna come looking.”
Rhodes nodded. He saw his men holding the suspect up and he walked over, holding out his credentials. “Ma’am, I’m Special Agent Jesse Rhodes. Are you Adina Salem?”
“I . . . I can’t . . .”
One of the agents gave Rhodes her passport. He glanced at it.
“Ms. Salem, we’re going to sit you down in one of our cars until medical help arrives,” Rhodes told her. “Where’s the ambulance?” he asked.
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“En route, still ten minutes out,” someone advised. The Delta driver had radioed the local paramedics before he’d even gotten out of his SUV. “We’re out in the boonies here.”
Salem felt her handlers direct her to one of the cars. The passenger door opened and they lowered her onto the seat, pushing her down as she sat so her head wouldn’t strike the roof. One of the Special Agents began to check her for injuries. He began flashing a small light across her eyes, checking for cranial damage. “I am a legal adviser . . . at the Israeli embassy.” Her brain was finally starting to work again, but her vision still did not want to focus. “You must . . . contact my ambassador immediately.”
“We’ll contact your ambassador after we process you at FBI Headquarters.”
“I have diplomatic immunity,” Salem said. She suddenly coughed, a violent racking in her chest, and it was a half minute before she could speak again. “I am an Israeli diplomat—”
“That’s not all you are,” Rhodes said. “Ma’am, I need to know—”
“I will not answer questions.”
The sound of a siren cut through the dark after ten minutes and Salem saw the ambulance reach the top of the rise in the road to the north and begin to descend toward the crash site. They would cuff her to the gurney while the paramedics examined her, then take her to a hospital for tests. Assuming she had nothing worse than blurry vision and aching muscles, she would find herself in an interrogation room by morning.
None of that mattered. Salem looked around at the armed men and finally saw the one holding the brown envelope. I’m sorry, Shiloh, she thought. Whatever report Shiloh had tried to share, she prayed that it wasn’t enough to lead this person, Special Agent Rhodes, to the man that Salem was sure she had just failed.
CHAPTER SIX
CIA Operations Center
Hadfield dropped his bag by the desk and typed his name and password into the terminal before bothering to sit down. Logging onto the Agency’s internal network was no fast process and he always let the computer run as he settled in for his shift.
The room was quiet. It was always quiet until some horrid thing killed people in large numbers somewhere in the world, but most nights here were full of tedium and coffee, whispered conversations among bored analysts looking to pass the time. So this was no desirable posting. Hadfield had not wanted to take it, but his managers had needed to check a box on their to-do list to satisfy their Seventh Floor masters. They were using him to fill a breach, a living, breathing plug in the dike of management requests flooding in from on high.
“Welcome to another glorious night in the service of your country,” the man next to him muttered. The FBI liaison to the CIA Operations Center was a kindred spirit in his attitude toward this particular job. He was a junior man in the Bureau, had signed on to be a special agent, but his managers had sworn that his computer forensics skills were too valuable to let him out into the field. Then they assigned him to duty such as this, using none of his talents and putting the lie to their claim that they needed him for more than checking those same boxes on their own version of the to-do list.
“How much longer before you rotate back?” Hadfield asked.
“Six weeks. You?”
“Three months and change. Counting the days.”
“You and me both,” the FBI officer said. “You hear anything about a mole hunt going on over here?”
“Yeah, I heard something like that was going on,” Hadfield replied, his voice low.
“I told the bosses that as long as I’m here, I could help out. No joy, I don’t get to play. I’m not one of the director’s stars like the guy running the investigation.”
“Who’s that?”
“A guy named Rhodes. He thinks this is the case that’s going to move him up at the Bureau, so he’s tearing up the world. I heard he arrested someone a few hours ago.”
“Yeah?” Hadfield asked.
“Yeah,” the Bureau officer said, bitterness in his tone. “The grapevine back at the Hoover Building says that it was some diplomat trying to retrieve a dead drop out in Loudoun County somewhere. A woman, I heard, but no idea which country she’s from. Rhodes will probably make sure we’ll all read about it in the Washington Post tomorrow or Monday.”
Hadfield shrugged. “One more spy off the streets of DC.”
FBI Headquarters
J. Edgar Hoover Building
Washington, DC
The doctors finally cleared Salem’s release from the hospital midmorning. She had a concussion with the expected headaches and nausea, for which she was given Percocet and Kytrel. The special agents doled out the drugs on a schedule, lest the woman decide that suicide by overdose was an honorable way to serve her country. Jon had thought the precaution moronic. Salem’s diplomatic immunity guaranteed her quick release, so killing herself would’ve been a truly stupid tactic. They could only hold her long enough to confirm her credentials.
Now the Israeli sat alone in the interrogation room where Rhodes had left her an hour before. Jon and Kyra had watched the special agent question her all morning. It had been a futile display. Salem hadn’t uttered a word other than to repeat her demand that someone contact her embassy. The CIA analysts were sitting in the observation room, off to the side because the six other special agents in the room had refused to make room in front of the window. Neither analyst cared about the professional slight. They’d seen what they needed to see. Jon had quietly predicted that thirty seconds into the interrogation the FBI officer would come up empty and he’d been correct.
Rhodes had spent the last hour with his team trying to settle on some new tactic that might force their suspect to talk before the deadline. Kyra had listened to the useless discussion as patiently as she could manage, but Jon’s intolerance for stupidity had rubbed off on her over the years and it was finally more than she could bear. “This is a waste of time,” she finally said when the circle of officers reached a silent slump in their conversation.
The entire group turned in her direction. “If you have some magic CIA way to crack her open that doesn’t, you know, violate the Geneva Conventions, then share, by all means,” Rhodes told her.
“These days, the ‘magic CIA way’ is to recognize a lost cause when we see it and spend our time thinking about what we do know, not trying to pressure a suspect who knows we’ve got no leverage,” Jon advised, his tone even.
“She’s got immunity and Tel Aviv isn’t going to wave it, so all she has to do is wait and she’ll get to walk out of here without saying jack,” Kyra said, piling on. “I think we’d do better to focus on what you did gain from the raid while you’ve got the time, because once she goes back to Israel, the mole is going to know that you’re looking for him and life is going to get a lot harder.”
“And just what else do you think we got, Miss Stryker?” Rhodes demanded. “You and your partner there were the ones saying we should bring her in. Fine, there she is and we can’t get her to talk. The intel in the package she was carrying is compartmented, so we can’t do anything with it until CIA reads us in. We traced the rental car and it led to a disposable credit card and a fake driver’s license—”
“Have you asked why the dead drop went down in Banshee Reeks?” Kyra asked, cutting him off.
“It was a remote location—”
“No!” she said, her temper finally starting to rise. “Who do you think picked the drop site?”
“She did,” one of the men said, nodding over his shoulder toward the interrogation room window at Salem.
“No, she didn’t,” John corrected him. “Are you really that dense?”
“Hey, you’re here as a courtesy,” Fuller told him. “So you listen—”
“We’ve done nothing but listen for the last hour. I can’t speak for Kyra,” Jon said, “but I’m stupider for it. The fog of war, we can deal with. The fog of stupidity, to which you are adding every minute, not so much.”
“All right, Jon, that’s enough,” Kyra told h
im, her voice soft. The man frowned and went silent. She turned back to Rhodes. “Mossad is one of the most professional intel services in the world. So unless she and all of her colleagues have gone insane in the last month, there is no possible way she would have picked Banshee Reeks for a dead-drop site. It’s forty miles outside of Washington, which put her at least an hour away from her embassy, assuming she didn’t run into traffic and was willing to run the toll roads, which would leave an electronic and video trail. If she drove the side roads, it would take her twice that long. She had no cover for action going in to a locked site after hours and had to commit an illegal act just to get in there, so any sheriff’s deputy wandering by would’ve had grounds to detain her, much less the Bureau. And that road leading into the site was a mile long and open only at the ends. It was a trap waiting to happen.”
Rhodes considered Kyra’s argument. “You think the mole picked the site.”
Kyra nodded. “Of course he did. The only question is why they let him.”
“Not a chance!” Fuller insisted. “Letting the mole run the op runs counter to every rule—”
“The Israelis just watched a dirty bomb contaminate a very large chunk of one of their largest cities,” Jon interrupted, his voice even. “You might consider whether Mossad’s rules have changed. Desperate people are willing to consider desperate options. So if our mole has already passed them valuable intel and promised them more, they might be willing to take serious risks to get it.”
“Like letting the mole pick his drop sites,” Kyra added. “The question is why he would pick that site.”
“Because he would be familiar with it,” Rhodes said.
“That’s obvious,” Jon replied. “Why is he familiar with it?”
