It took her a moment to put it together. There was no way a marshal would use it in a duty weapon. They used jacketed soft points so the rounds wouldn’t penetrate walls and hurt bystanders. Nothing would stop this bullet. It was rare and difficult to acquire, an assassin’s round.
No U.S. Marshal would have bumped her car, stalked her in her house, shot at her without warning, no matter how dangerous people thought she was. There were units that might, like her former employer. But the dead man had been an impostor; he wasn’t a Fed, so there was no need for her to shoot her way out of this.
She ditched the gun, and her face changed as she began to cry quietly, forced a tremble in her hands, and let Tim find her. The dab of black on that bullet had saved his life.
“Carol! Back away!” He stalked toward the body. She had nearly killed him when it was obvious that she hadn’t needed to. Too much killing—her answer to every puzzle. The old ways.
“Are there others?”
“No,” she said.
He put his arm around her shoulders.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“He’s gone. You’re safe.”
Forty-five minutes later, she sat in the back of the ambulance, covered in a foil blanket, with a bandage tugging on the skin of her neck, a blood pressure cuff on her arm, and a pulse oximeter on her finger.
Like she was the one who’d been shot.
Tim stepped into the back door.
“Can I come up?”
“Sure.”
“You mind if I sit?”
“Course not.”
He was asking questions, seeking permission, making her feel in control; proper victim management. He was a good cop.
“How are you feeling?”
“I can’t believe this happened to me.” That’s what victims always said, over and over.
“Take your time with it. You’re safe now. Carol?”
He ran his fingers over the leather cover of his notebook, kneading it, worried.
“Yes.”
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“I think that was it. Thank God you came along. Why?”
“Bill Drummond was up on the ridge. He heard the shots and called it in. He saw some of the chase, too.”
She watched him, waited it out.
“Where did you learn to drive like that?”
“I was scared. I tried to keep it under control as best I could.”
“Drifting a corner?”
“Turn into the skid. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
“Yes,” he said, and he looked down.
“What is it?” she asked.
He looked at the monitor that showed her pulse rate; she guessed he was checking to see if she could handle the questions.
“You shot him twice in the eye, through the same hole.”
“God.” She raised her hand to her mouth.
“Even professionals can’t do that. Your brass was twenty-five yards away from his body. That’s U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit stuff.”
She fixed her eyes on him, forcing him to bully her, using his decency against him, but she was doing him a favor. The truth would only hurt him.
“Is there anything you want to tell me, Carol? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
She put her hand on his and squeezed it gently.
“Can I go home?” She gave him a soft look. “Please.”
“Of course. I’m glad you’re okay, Carol.”
You too.
“Thanks,” she said.
Tim dropped her at home. “Do you want me to stay?” he asked. “Until you get settled? Or I can take you to the station or some family nearby?”
“I just want to lie down.”
“Sure.”
He walked her to the door, and she opened it and then wrapped her arms around him.
“It’s best if you stay close to home until we get this settled,” he said. “I’m sure it will check out, but we might need to interview you again.”
She had a clean truck in a garage twenty minutes away with two prepaid phones, an M4 rifle, and a Glock 26 in the trunk. Everything she needed to run.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Thank you, Tim.”
She shut the door.
There were four cover identities ready to go. The passports were hidden with the guns in the truck, but she knew the faces. She remembered the photos, taken when she was a couple of years younger. She stood in front of the mirror in the master bedroom and watched her face change as she recalled the false personas available to her.
She would become Sasha Behrend, privileged, ridden with social anxiety, hiding behind her scarves and glasses. Her cheeks went hollow. Her eyes narrowed. Her posture straightened. She had a dancer’s carriage. Her neck seemed to grow, and her feet turned out slightly.
Music helped. Carol Duncan was plainspoken, salt of the earth, unpretentious. She liked Patty Griffin and Diana Krall. Sasha Behrend was classical, difficult; Schoenberg, Debussy. Oboes played in her head as she studied her reflection.
“Hello. I’m Sasha Behrend. What gate is flight four ninety-six?” The words came fast; she was rushing through the exchange. She tried it a few more times. Carol was gone. Sasha looked back at her. She felt different.
She wasn’t Carol. She wasn’t Sasha. She wasn’t any of them. And she was. She’d been living this way so long that these names and faces were all she had left. Whoever she’d been when she’d started was dead, destroyed like burned paper.
Because you have to live the lie, forget the past, the truth, yourself. Or else people get hurt. They see the way you drive. They notice two bullets through one hole. They ask questions. The answers are fatal.
She remembered the last days with her husband.
“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Paul had asked. She had wanted to tell him everything. She had wanted all the killing to end so she could remember the person she had been before all this.
Her husband asked questions. He was the last person to find out who she really was, and in short order he was dead.
The reflection stared back at her, and she didn’t recognize the woman in the glass as she opened her mouth and began to speak.
“I did not kill my husband.” She said it with utter conviction. She believed it in her bones.
There was only one way out. All the suspicions, the paranoia, the midnight fears—they were all well founded. Someone had come to execute her—a former enemy, a former boss, perhaps a former friend. And he would be back to finish the job.
Unless she got him first. She stopped outside Paul’s office, listened to the silence for a moment, and then moved to the rear of the house and put her hand on the screen door.
This had been her home for five years. For five years she had lived as Carol Duncan; she had married Paul under that name. But he was gone, and she would most likely never return to this home. Carol Duncan was dead too.
She slipped out the back door, eyes on the patrol car parked down the street, then sprinted for the edge of the woods.
Chapter 14
NIKO HYND STOOD outside the sedan with the door open, looking over the rounded valleys of Claire Rhodes’s adopted town. Her home was far below him to the left. There were still police lights flashing in the woods near the ridgeline where the man disguised as a U.S. Marshal had been killed. He’d been working for Hynd. The police wouldn’t find any trace of his true identity.
Vera sat behind the wheel with the window open.
He had warned the man in the truck to follow Claire only, not to engage. He couldn’t handle her. Few could.
“I told him to wait,” he said.
“He thought he had her,” Vera replied. “She’s on the move now. Do we take her?”
There was providence in this, and Hynd was glad he hadn’t killed her at the house.
“Let her go.”
“What?” Vera asked.
He thought of what he knew about Claire, h
ow anger drove her to violence, short-circuited any self-control.
“She may not understand how, but she’s on our side. Let’s go.”
The real work was just starting. And the men who paid Hynd wanted results.
Chapter 15
HAYES AND COX had eaten lunch at an Afghan hole-in-the-wall in Alexandria, Virginia, a historic city just across the Potomac from DC. The owner had come to the U.S. in the 1970s. The two men had talked to him in Pashto for a while and he’d shared a few of his favorite tapas, the two-line poems. It was nice to hear the ones about love and hometowns for a change.
From there they went to Fort Belvoir, about twenty-five minutes south along the Potomac. JSOC and the CIA Special Activities Division sometimes used its airfield because it was a convenient staging area near Washington. Cox was headed out with another compartmented task force.
Hayes had visited this base often and spent a lot of time at the CIA’s two classified facilities—Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, and Harvey Point, in North Carolina—as well as at the Joint Special Operations Command’s headquarters at Fort Bragg. He trained a select group of men and women who knew the full story of his return, passing on what he had learned about the enemy and about deep-cover missions during his time in exile.
Hayes and Cox walked alongside a hangar. “How’d it work out with the Pakistanis?” Hayes asked.
“They denied knowing anything about Kashani. We denied having anything to do with a downed helicopter or having any personnel in their country. The usual: drinking tea together with both sides lying through their teeth.”
“Thank God for allies,” Hayes said. When they reached the edge of the tarmac, Cox stopped and turned to him.
“Are you sure about taking this on, Hayes? Everyone who gets involved in Cold Harvest has a target on his back.”
“I told you my answer. I’m going to find whoever is killing our people. I don’t have time for a heart-to-heart.”
“Good,” Cox said, and he patted him on the shoulder. “I’m going to be offline for the next ten days—in the field, no contact—so I won’t be able to step in.”
“Who’s in charge of the program? Tom Gray?” He was the former CIA officer who had run Cold Harvest from the beginning. He and Hayes had worked closely together, and Hayes had helped select and train a lot of the early Cold Harvest crew.
“No. Gray retired; he’s somewhere on the Chesapeake with his family.”
“He deserves a break.”
Cold Harvest had been a huge risk. It was technically illegal. There was no presidential finding to authorize it, and it was organized as a corporation, a contractor operating outside the government. It did the United States’ bidding, but if it was ever discovered, its members would be prosecuted as a group of criminals who had set up their own private kill teams.
Service was voluntary. The Cold Harvest personnel knew the dangers and understood that they were risking arrest, conviction, execution. But they did it because they knew it needed to be done.
That was how it had started, a human sequel to the successful CIA drone-killing programs. Despite the popular misconception of the CIA as a bunch of freewheeling James Bonds, the primary mission of its officers was to gather intelligence and report on situations as they were, not to launch operations or change facts on the ground. The institution was temperamentally risk-averse and had been for fifty years. It only reluctantly embraced lethal missions with drones.
Thomas Gray, the man behind Cold Harvest, had come up in a much bolder CIA, the wild years of the 1960s and early ’70s, before the Senate investigated the excesses in the intelligence community and reined them in. He’d raised the question in a meeting: If we can kill bad guys with drones in Yemen, why can’t we shoot them in the face in Paris?
There were no good answers, and one of the political bosses jokingly asked, “And who will pull the trigger?”
“I will,” Gray had said, and after more than a year of navigating legal loopholes and setting up shell companies, he stood up Cold Harvest. He’d been willing to risk a thirty-year career, his pension, and his life to take out the enemies that couldn’t be reached any other way.
Hayes and Cox paused their conversation as a helicopter roared overhead and rose into the sky. In a hangar to their right, a ground crew loaded unmarked crates onto a Black Hawk.
“Who’s running Cold Harvest now?” Hayes asked.
“Kathryn Morgan is handling the staff side of things,” Cox said as the noise subsided. Hayes knew her. She was a former army helicopter pilot who’d lost her leg in a crash in Iraq. People tended to underestimate her, but she was hard as nails. He liked her.
“I need everything they’ve got, the names of everyone who was part of the program and any of them who’ve died.”
“Morgan will set you up,” Cox said, and he checked his watch. A Suburban cruised along the access road. Morgan was sending a car to take Hayes to the Cold Harvest headquarters.
“That must be her ride.”
The SUV parked at the far end of the field.
“You coming?” Hayes asked.
“No. I can’t get near Cold Harvest. I’m too close to the president, and that program is—”
“The dark side?”
“I didn’t say that,” Cox said. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Course not.”
Cox shook his hand. “Keep your eyes open, Hayes.”
“Will do.” He turned and walked alone toward the SUV. Two men stepped out. He remembered the last time he’d climbed into the back of a truck. It hadn’t worked out so well.
Chapter 16
KATHRYN MORGAN DROPPED her cigarette butt into an empty plastic water bottle on her desk. She was technically in charge of Cold Harvest, a duty she needed to pass off to someone else as quickly as possible. Smoking indoors was one of the few upsides of running an illegal program. The room smelled like an ashtray, but she no longer noticed.
She checked her watch. Her next appointment was running ten minutes late.
Finally, her phone buzzed. She walked to the back stairs and found national security adviser Kenneth Tucker looking winded. He had a half-empty plastic to-go cup with what looked like the remains of a green smoothie in it. He wore a warm-up suit that read COLBY LACROSSE on the chest. His hair, usually perfect, was a mess. She guessed he wasn’t used to running surveillance-detection routes. He’d changed cars twice on the way here, coming through the underground garages at Tysons Corner.
But Tucker wasn’t running from foreign surveillance or a kill team. He was hiding from the press. He had helped authorize Cold Harvest but couldn’t be seen having anything to do with it, especially not now that the program was in crisis. If they played this wrong, they would both go down with it. No one could know about this meeting.
Tucker had a lock on his party’s nomination for president and was four points behind his opponent and closing fast. The election was four months off. But he didn’t look confident.
“Come on in,” she said.
He followed without a word. The back corridor was empty. At her office door, she slid a plastic card into the lock, then logged in with a six-digit PIN. The lock retracted.
Tucker looked like a news anchor, which had led many to dismiss him as another walking haircut, but Morgan knew better. He was a rich, spoiled prick, no doubt—the entitled son of Westchester lawyers—but that made people underestimate his ruthlessness.
His wife and young son had died in a car crash in 1992, which softened his profile and won him a lot of sympathy during his political career. It had happened on the same night his primary opponent had dropped out of his first House race. Tucker had been on his way to the victory party when he received a phone call from the police in Darien, Connecticut, telling him that his wife and son had been killed by a drunk driver.
Morgan remembered the first time she’d heard him tell the story of that night. She remembered the second time she’d heard it, and the third, and the fourth. Each beat was
the same, with minor variations, and she’d realized that this was an act, that he had sat somewhere and practiced it, used their deaths as a tool to advance his career.
Some might have been disgusted, and she was, but she had learned the hard way in Washington that when it came to the truly ambitious—and Tucker was without peer in that arena, a sort of self-promotion savant—you could either get in their way and be rolled over, or get behind them and roll along easily.
When Tucker was on the House Intelligence Committee, he had secretly given Thomas Gray authorization to set up Cold Harvest. It wasn’t because Tucker believed in the program, really, but because the premise appealed to him. He was a political climber, and the operations were deniable, so the triumphs but not the risks would accrue to him.
Cold Harvest shooters racked up a string of successes—nuclear transfers stopped, terrorists killed, kidnapped Americans freed—all without receiving a word of recognition. Tucker quietly took credit for their achievements among the upper echelons of the political, military, and intelligence establishments, building his reputation on his way to becoming the national security adviser and a presidential candidate.
But it was a dangerous game to run, and Tucker didn’t have the stomach to run it. He’d always wanted to be able to deny any association with Cold Harvest if anything went wrong and had given Gray free rein. But Gray had started to suffer from early-onset Alzheimer’s just when the killings of the Cold Harvest members began.
He was out. And now Tucker and his deputy Morgan were left with the mess. They had met when she was a military liaison to the House. She was the only one he trusted to help him get ahead of this disaster.
As she moved behind the desk, Morgan’s left-lower-limb prosthesis emitted a quiet mechanical whine with every other step. Born in Queens to Jamaican parents, she had striking hazel eyes and a light spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. While some people found religion after an accident like a helicopter crash, she found that she simply didn’t give a fuck about anything anymore except rising to a position where idiots above her could no longer nearly get her killed, as they had on the night they’d ordered her to fly her Chinook straight into what turned out to be an enemy stronghold.
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