She took a step toward him and saw he was dead. Just as she was starting for the dark hall, a searing pain tore through her middle, and a flash blinded her.
Ungrateful bitch, Claire thought, and she took a knee, letting the pain move over her in waves. She’d been shot in the stomach. She forced herself to stand, then walked back to the hall. The woman had fled. And that hall led to a nest of rooms.
The target was dead. The mission was in full clusterfuck. She didn’t have the time or ability to clear this place solo.
She shoved through the front door and started half trotting, half stumbling toward the stairs, her hand clamped over the bloody hole in her lower abdomen.
The rear door banged open, and she hit the street, let the cold air brace her, keep her from falling as she ran, stars in her eyes, edge of blackout, to the next corner, then she turned and ambled, suddenly changed, a woman out for a thoughtful walk, never mind the warmth soaking her shirt and dripping over her belt.
“Urgent medical, urgent medical,” she called into her backup radio.
Gut shots hurt like no other kind, and they were messy with infection, but they weren’t usually immediately lethal unless a major artery was clipped, and she wouldn’t have been able to walk if that had happened.
The pain radiated out and shut down her muscles, but she forced herself to keep going. She pictured the hurt moving out, turning her to stone, to black, as she walked toward the Seine and her backup.
The thirteenth arrondissement was a strange mix of 1960s high-rises and classical stone buildings, and she could see the Bibliothèque nationale de France ahead, four towers looming over a vast and empty plaza like some alien monument. To her left was the Pitié-Salpêtrière. Once a seventeenth-century gunpowder factory and then an asylum where Paris deposited prostitutes and madmen, it was now a world-class hospital, but not for her.
She heard the squeak of car tires and stumbled down the steps to the quai. A shadow came toward her, growing longer, crossing over her, and she raised her pistol.
The Seine lapped against its banks. Yellow light painted the stones. This wouldn’t be a bad place to die, she thought. She’d always dreamed of going to Paris when she was a girl. She wondered what lie they would tell Paul as she aimed dead center at the figure.
One street lamp seemed to grow brighter and brighter, like a giant sun, until it was all she could see.
She came to in a safe house in Neuilly. It looked like a two-star hotel, generic furniture and paintings, except for plastic sheeting taped to the ceiling to transform it into an impromptu operating room. She recognized it. Her backup team must have brought her here.
She lay on a table with an IV in her arm. A doctor leaned down and examined her abdomen. There was a tray of scalpels and clamps and scissors on a stand beside her. Her mind was hazy. They had injected her with something for the pain.
She thought of the woman who shot her. Why hadn’t Claire killed her on first look? Soft; she was getting soft, worried about bystanders, spouses, innocents.
The doctor put a syringe into her IV line. “Count backward from a hundred.”
Even with the drugs, Claire could feel the tear through her stomach. Paul would know a scar from a gunshot wound. He’d seen plenty.
“Wait,” she croaked. “It can’t be a gunshot. Cut it wide, so it looks like a surgery.”
The doctor nodded, and she started counting down. The last thing she saw was him picking up the scalpel.
She would tell her husband it had been a ruptured appendix when she returned to the States.
It was a good joke, in the end, because as soon as she made it home, Paul took one look at the mess of blood and black stitches and puckered skin and surrounding trauma and understood that she was lying about an appendectomy.
She knew deception. She could see it in his face, a reaction halfway between sympathy and distrust. That was when she knew she had to make a choice. The lie was over, but the truth might kill him.
In the trailer now, she ran her finger along the hard scar tissue across her abdomen and then heard a rustle through the window. Someone was coming.
Chapter 31
HAYES COULD SEE patches of stars through the forest canopy overhead. It was hard to imagine he was only three and a half hours from DC. He lifted his watch, left the light off and used only the faint glow of the hands: 0150. He started trotting.
Grays and blacks were all he could see as the branches slapped at him. There were no trails this deep in the wilderness, and he had circled from the forest road to make sure there wasn’t an ambush.
He kept the compass out in his left hand, guiding himself with its tritium needle. He knew his pace bushwhacking at this grade and could dead reckon. He rarely had a chance to use the compass like this, the kind of night hikes and land navigation that he had cut his teeth on in the unit.
All the fighting was in cities now, and he was as likely to be in a skyscraper in a suit as he was to be in a swamp wearing jungle boots.
He hit the ridge and checked his watch. A half a minute off, not bad, given his knee. The joint was crying out, but it felt stable. He took a deep breath and looked over the plateau below.
Strange country. It was known as Dolly Sods. Dolly, an old ranger had told him, was a family name, and sods the Scotch-Irish for these high meadows and balds. The area seemed more like Yukon taiga or Alaskan subalpine than West Virginia hills. The front side had become popular with hikers in the past decade or so, but back here was still off-limits and wild.
A cold wind picked up, and light hail started bouncing down from the leaves overhead.
The task at hand filled his mind: Making sense of the blackness ahead of him, feeling the contours of the ridge with every step, guiding himself across the topographic lines. He would have enjoyed it all if death weren’t so close. His, maybe, or Claire’s.
He hadn’t told Morgan he was coming, hadn’t told anyone. He thought of that shooting near Claire’s house. Maybe the killer had come for her, and she’d responded to Hayes’s call because she needed help.
If it was true what they said about her, he could be walking into the arms of his executioner. But it didn’t make sense that she was responsible for the murders.
He wasn’t sure what the politicians would do if they found her. They were panicked. He’d seen them kill rather than admit their mistakes. He had been hunted too, been falsely accused. He wanted to get to her first. He owed her that much.
But he knew sympathy was dangerous. And if she was involved in those deaths, if this was an ambush, Hayes trusted in his training. He thought of one of the Pashtun poems: “It’s better that I kill my brother…”
He could see the trailer now, and made out a pale blue light, like gas burning. He’d come along the best ambush routes and seen no signs of others, although given that he was alone with no night optics, that didn’t prove much.
He picked his way through the undergrowth. The trailer’s screen door rattled in the wind. It was a single-wide, rotting plywood and vinyl, nothing charming like rough-hewn pine or piled stone. It looked like a meth house and smelled like dead raccoons.
But it had the high ground, and anyone with a current-generation night-vision headset would be able to see the enemy coming.
“Claire!” he shouted, but the wind took any reply.
He stepped onto the chipped concrete stoop. His hand went to his pistol, but he didn’t want to send the wrong message.
The blue glow wavered on the trailer walls.
“How are you doing, Hayes?” she said. “Come on in.”
He entered. His eyes went to her hips, her ankles, her chest, ticking off the weapons: handgun in a hip holster, concealed dagger on her chest.
She stood over a card table in the center of the room and twisted the valve on a camping stove. The smell of naphtha filled the cabin and reminded him of every shithole outpost he’d ever slept at. An empty foil pouch was rolled up on the table.
“Hungry?” she asked.<
br />
“I’m all right.”
“Tea? I have chamomile.”
The flames pooled and danced, blue and white under the little camping pot.
“Perfect,” Hayes said.
She sat down and placed a tea bag in each of two enameled mugs with chips around the rims. Hayes hesitated. This close together, neither one would have the reaction time to stop a fatal shot. Whoever moved first would get the kill.
He remembered her, in this room, six years ago. So young. He hadn’t had a chance to reach out to her after her husband died. It was when he was in exile. Identification, sympathy; he thought carefully about his emotional reactions to her. He had seen her use them as weapons before, luring in men who took her for a victim, an easy kill.
The openness might be an act. She could be playing him in order to draw him in, to get more names. He was more valuable fooled than dead. That would be the worst outcome. That, in his weakness, he would aid the enemy.
The CIA guys were always tapping out these endless wires back to their stations: numbered paragraphs in all caps running through the suspicions and counter-suspicions. The wilderness of mirrors. Hayes hated it. Gray was the old master of espionage, and Claire was the best student Gray had ever had. This was their world, and Hayes was an interloper. He preferred direct action, combat, where, for all the open sewers and squalid violence, you generally knew who was trying to kill you.
He sat. She poured the hot water into the mugs and slid one to him. The blue light glimmered over the surface as he hesitated, and she killed the stove.
“Do you want to switch?” she said, and she pushed her mug an inch toward him.
“No,” he said, and he laughed in spite of himself and dunked the bag. They’d run a lot of shooting drills up here, and hostage-rescue scenarios with live rounds. In one of the final exercises, he and Claire had stood on the range wearing body armor to do a drill Hayes had picked up from the Russian special forces he’d worked with in Chechnya.
Hayes had a paper target mounted behind him, over his shoulder. Claire would turn and draw, and he would shoot her in the ceramic plate on her chest. Then she would have to fire back and hit the target over Hayes’s shoulder. Another shot to the chest, one more to the target. Back and forth for seven shots until her fear of that gun going off in her face and bullets smacking into her chest didn’t interfere with her targeting and the slow, even squeeze of the trigger.
“How did you know I was there for your interrogations?” Hayes asked. Claire had said to meet him where he’d killed her, and he knew she was referring to the stress phases of her training at this camp. But she had been blind—wearing blacked-out ski goggles—during the most intense sessions.
“It was you and Gray, right?”
“But we didn’t talk.”
“No, you didn’t.”
In her last weeks, they ran a mock-kidnapping and POW scenario. The trainee was told nothing when he or she was hauled out of the back of a car, blindfolded, and brought to these godforsaken cabins. At some point after a few weeks of sleep deprivation, starvation, and mind games, the candidate would begin to wonder, Is this for real?
In the back of this trailer, Claire, blindfolded and with her hands and ankles bound, had been laid out on an old door that was set at an incline, her head at the bottom. Gray sealed her mouth with Saran Wrap, so she could breathe only through her nose, and poured a plastic pitcher of water over her nostrils, slowly.
Hayes hated to see it, but he wanted to be here to make sure nothing went wrong.
Three taps, a doctor they kept on call would tell her. Three taps and it’s over. All you have to do is tell us the names of your people.
She tried not to breathe. They always did, but usually at around twelve seconds or so they’d inhale, and the water would start to fill their sinuses. She’d bucked on that door as the water ran up her nose, and Hayes watched her fingers, waiting for the taps.
It felt like drowning—he knew; he’d been through it half a dozen times—felt like an execution, but there was air trapped in the lungs. She wouldn’t die, not for a long time.
She held on. Twenty seconds.
He knew from her gagging it was heading down her trachea toward her lungs.
“Just tell us who you are and who you work for and we will stop. Just tap.”
But she didn’t move. The water kept flowing onto her face.
Twenty-five seconds.
She stayed calm.
Thirty.
That’s when Hayes had quit. But she held on.
Thirty-five.
Her body tone disappeared. She blacked out. Hayes hauled her off the board while they pulled the Saran Wrap off, then tilted her head forward. Water poured from her mouth and nose. So much water. He checked her pulse as the doctor stepped in with a bag-valve mask and started the rescue breathing.
Hayes watched her chest; when the doctor stopped bagging her briefly, it didn’t move. Then finally the breath came, gurgling through all the water in her airway. After she finished throwing up water, she lifted her head up, still wearing the goggles, and asked if she had given up.
“No,” the doctor said.
Claire sipped her tea. “I knew it was Gray because of the smell. That shaving soap he used. Harris Windsor.”
Hayes nodded. Gray had come up old-school army infantry and was a prick about grooming standards.
“You remember Korea?” Hayes asked, smiling at the memory of Gray in a bitterly cold tent on the side of a mountain in Korea trying to shave with a frozen badger brush. He’d held it against his cheek, hoping it would thaw.
“And how did you know I was there?”
“No way you’d let them do that without looking out for me.”
Hayes nodded. It was true. He had a soft spot for her. He hadn’t thought they should use her because of the way anger fueled her. He’d read her psych profile. He had watched the footage from her screening interviews, when a psychologist spent hours probing the most sensitive parts of her history. Often the questioner had to do an elaborate dance to draw out the details from a candidate, but as soon as the shrink began asking about her family’s past, Claire saw where he was going. She looked straight at him, cut through all the psychological games, and told the story.
Her father had been an oil executive for Shell. He was a drinker, and abusive. He’d beaten her mother to death one early morning in the house they were renting in Singapore when Claire was eight. She had heard her mother cry for help from behind the closed bedroom door but felt too paralyzed to do anything. The authorities weren’t interested in making any trouble for the wealthy American.
She related the whole incident in a calm, even voice and then stared at the camera in the interview room as if to say, That’s who I am. Can you use it or not?
Claire was a bullet in search of a target, driven by anger and that frustrated desire to protect the innocent. She was just what they needed for Cold Harvest.
Hayes knew how they used the profiles to control their people. It was the same for him. He grew up never knowing where he’d come from, always looking for a home, a place to belong. That’s how he blended in so easily behind enemy lines.
“Do you need help, Claire? Who’s after you? You don’t have to do this alone.”
“You shouldn’t be involved in this, John. They’ve taken plenty from you. You should be with your family.”
“You can talk to me.”
“You can’t have two lives, Hayes. Eventually they touch, and then it all burns. The people closest to you get hurt. How can you work for them after everything this country did to you, after they hunted you down like a criminal?”
Rage. He felt it every day while he was in exile. She thought that the only way to deal with it was to give it some outlet, bend it toward justice. But Hayes had never given in to it, never turned on his country, never sought revenge. Then he’d have been no better than the enemy. He’d seen that anger hollow out some of his teammates. They didn’t make it. They
never should have used her trauma as a tool. It was too toxic, too hard to control.
She chewed her lower lip. She was withholding. God, did she think he might be involved with the deaths?
“I saw Gray last night,” she said.
Hayes focused on his breath to dull any reaction. At the same time, he was thinking through the draw, the first shot, anticipating her news. What was this? Confession? An invitation to join her?
Careful, John, he told himself. All the signs pointed to her. Why shouldn’t he just take her out now and end this?
“Gray is dead, Claire.”
“What?”
“Last night. Someone shot him.”
She looked into the empty corner.
“Claire. Did you kill him?”
He didn’t want to shoot her. He watched the shock work through her and saw the muscles around her mouth tighten like a snare. Hayes always looked for that reflex. It was involuntary, a sure sign of a coming reaction.
There were ways to conceal lies, defeat the polygraphs, clench your ass at the right times, but they were cheap, and an expert could detect them in the baselines. But Claire went a step beyond. She was the best they’d seen. Whatever emotion was needed, she could bring it to bear, because she believed it herself.
“No. Christ. It’s happening.”
“What’s happening?”
“Gray warned me. They’re killing us all to hide the truth. It’s someone inside the program. Morgan called off the investigation into my husband’s death, John. Who told you about Gray?”
It was Morgan, but he wasn’t ready to tell her that. Claire seemed able to read his reaction, though.
“Morgan is behind this, Hayes. Wait. You met with her. Are you working for her?”
“Not like that.”
Her hand twitched on the table. “That’s why they never cleared your name. They’re holding it over your head; they’re forcing you.”
Hayes couldn’t understand, if her doubts about him were this strong, why she hadn’t tried to kill him already. It was only their past that was keeping them from moving, and that wouldn’t last. “Claire, I’m here to help.”
Dead Man Switch Page 12
