He was a clueless Englishman from Whitechapel, born to Bangladeshi parents. He’d traveled to Turkey, trying to join up with the struggle, play action hero, wave black flags, and shoot guns in the desert. If he wanted to die for the cause, so be it. He was the right size and build. They brought him to a gravel factory in Qatar and locked him in a belowground hold. Hynd ordered his vocal cords slit so he couldn’t talk, because it would be a long captivity and guards and prisoners can build rapport.
They needed his body to match up to Paul’s medical records. After they stitched up his neck, four men held him down in an old cream-colored recliner and drilled into his teeth, taking great care. They put in fillings, using the American composition. Three on the top and four on the bottom.
Then they braced his thigh against the brackets of a machine table, put the scissor jack from a car under it, and pressed, turn by turn, until the femur cracked.
They set the bone and put a cast on it. The doctor would check on him every day while he was healing, shoving himself around mute in that cave.
The prisoner stayed down there, hidden from the sun for four months, until the bone had healed. But his spirit was broken, and he didn’t have enough fight left to struggle as they hauled him to his feet. Death was a deliverance.
Hynd stood eye to eye with this man, the same height, the same build. His double. Then he cut his throat, slowly, precisely, two small slices to the carotid on either side, to avoid any telltale cutting of the spine. The captive whimpered but barely tried to resist.
They burned the prisoner’s body. A fuel-oil fire grows hot enough, like cremation, to leave behind only gleanings—melted metal, like fillings or surgical screws—and charred chunks of the long bones, the femurs and sometimes the humeri, from which no traceable DNA can be extracted.
When Paul needed to stage his death in the United States, they used the fuel-oil tank in the garage attached to his office. The structure crumbled, crushed the car, burned everything in it like an incinerator. He had already planted the double’s remains in the vehicle.
When the authorities went through Paul’s medical documents, they would find the records of the broken bone and the X-rays showing seven fillings. The remains offered enough forensic evidence—the gleanings and bone break—for a positive ID. They would match Paul’s records, which had been counterfeited like the rest of his persona before he approached Claire, and were backstopped by the foreign intelligence services that had hired him to eliminate Cold Harvest.
All that work, and the coroner ended up making the ID from the ashes alone and Paul’s missing-person report. No one even noticed the break repair on the femur.
Vera’s grip on the gun relaxed as she listened to Hynd’s and Claire’s voices. Hynd told the story of his year on the run for a second time, and she knew Claire was starting to believe it.
Vera had never understood how he could stand it, living with her, being so close to the enemy. In Paris, Vera had been in the next room when Claire had killed Hynd’s closest friend, then nearly shot Vera, and still Hynd had taken that woman back to his bed.
But now, as she listened, she could see it, how he could live both lives, how he could make her believe. It was amazing to see him work. How he could play up fear and make it a weapon.
Vera took her hand off the rifle and listened to Claire’s voice softening in the earpiece. She could hear her turning, bit by bit.
Hynd was right. She put on that strong persona, but she was weak, so driven by the past, so easy to control. He had her.
They had started killing her teammates in Cold Harvest while Hynd was still undercover. And since he had found the victims through her, all the suspicion pointed to her after he was gone.
Hynd was glad enough to get out, but he had always wondered how much he could exploit the rift between Claire and her former bosses. Each suspected the other. If he kept the killing up, raised the pressure, perhaps he could even make them turn on each other.
Vera listened as he approached the most dangerous moment. They needed to give Claire a reason to go straight to New York, to wherever her teammates were gathering. She was driven by a need to protect, and if they were able to show her a clear threat to the others, she would have no choice but to lead them to the rest of Cold Harvest. But she was also ruled by anger, and if they played her exactly right, they might be able to use that, even provoke her into killing the leaders of Cold Harvest herself.
Hynd’s next step was critical. Vera fixed the red dot in her sight on Claire’s temple and put her finger on the trigger.
Chapter 51
CLAIRE PULLED THE cache box from the bed of the truck onto the tailgate and ran her hand over the top, brushing dirt onto the ground. Paul stood beside her.
He had run through it twice, every detail. Money. Itinerary. Landmarks. Zip codes. Addresses. She ran it out of order, trying to find inconsistencies, pauses. She was trained to spot lies.
She found none. It all worked. There were good answers and, more important, holes, things he didn’t know. It wasn’t too perfect.
“Here,” she said, and she patted his hand on the tailgate. “I’ll clean that up.” The cut at his temple was still welling with blood. She pulled a butterfly bandage from her first-aid kit and pinched the skin closed, ignoring his wince of pain.
“Thanks,” he said, and he stepped down.
She felt the hope coming back to her, clouding her mind, and she laid one hand on the latch of the metal chest.
He smiled at her, then seemed to think twice about it and cast his eyes to the ground. It was like he had forgotten who he was dealing with for a moment.
“What is it?”
“Is it easy for you now? Killing?”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Paul.”
“You do it up close? Face to face?” She knew where he was going with this. As close as we are?
“They were terrorists. It’s not easy, but it has to be done. I told you. I kill bad men.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “The assassin with a conscience. What a cliché. And I believed it.”
“It’s true.”
“Reza Dinari.”
“What?”
“Reza Dinari. He was a lawyer, an Iranian exile in London. He died at home in late April three years ago. You were traveling at the time. You told me you were in Scotland.”
Her face went hard. “Paul, what are you doing?”
“Sara Khouri. Died in Corsica. Did you go there right before we went to Crete?”
They were all people she had killed. “What is this supposed to be?” Claire asked.
“I had a lot of time on my hands in that trailer in Montana. I knew your old travel schedule. I looked for the victims. They were innocent, Claire. A human rights activist. A political dissident. She was killed before she could expose corruption in the house of Saud. Did you know?”
She picked up the gun, looked for reassurance in its weight in her hand.
“No. I can’t talk about this, but we were surgical, better than the drones. We couldn’t afford mistakes.”
But the intelligence. It came from Cold Harvest. She’d checked every target a dozen times, but they could have fed her false intel. There was no way to verify the lethal findings. They came from special access programs.
“No,” she said. She clamped her jaw like a vise.
She had wondered why the bosses of Cold Harvest would be killing their own soldiers. It started to make sense. If Cold Harvest had been taking down innocent people, if the program had been corrupt, then they would need to get rid of them to keep the truth from coming out.
What if all the victims were innocent? Jesus, it made sense. The world seemed to tint; the blacks and whites of the night forest took on colors, reds and blues. She put her free hand against the cap of the truck.
The day they buried her mother, her father ran his hand through her hair and said, You’re a good girl, Claire.
People misunderstood her. What fueled her wasn�
��t revenge—it was the need for atonement. She killed to take the evil out of the world, to protect. It drove her so strongly because she had failed to protect her mother. She had done nothing that morning even as she heard her cry out. She had let an innocent die.
“Claire, the gun.” Paul stood and stepped back.
She had it ready in front of her, looked at it strangely.
It was her worst fear come true. Her whole life, she’d run from the injustice of her father’s getting away with his crime, trying to use that anger to do something decent, but it had taken her in the end. She was just like him. She had become the corruption. And the killings of her teammates finally made sense.
They had always wondered how Morgan commanded such sway in foreign capitals, how Tucker, a stuffed suit, managed so many foreign policy breakthroughs. Did he use Cold Harvest to trade favors, to kill for the oil dictatorships and repressive regimes?
It explained why they would be wiping the program now: to cover their tracks. Her mind was moving too fast, the adrenaline pushing her to act.
She felt her breath coming in and out too quickly, tried to focus to slow it down, but the faces of the dead crowded in. The pistol went back into her holster.
She turned and opened the box, and Paul looked over the contents: a case for electronics, four hand grenades, six flash-bangs, and a Remington concealable sniper rifle. There were four hundred rounds of ammo, one hundred for the rifle and three hundred for the pistol.
She didn’t know what to believe. Part of her wanted to put a hole in Paul’s eye and roll him into the river and forget everything he had said.
That would be her life, wouldn’t it, to kill the one decent thing in her world because she couldn’t accept decency as anything but betrayal in disguise?
God, they’d fucked her up.
The wilderness of mirrors. What if Paul was telling the truth? Maybe they had tried to kill him because he knew about the program, or maybe they’d been trying to kill her. He had been driving Claire’s car that day.
She knew her former teammates were gathering in New York. If what Paul was saying was true, she needed to get to New York and stop Morgan and Tucker before they killed them all.
And if Paul was lying? That meant he’d been lying the whole time. If he was some kind of mole, if this was all a trap, if he had the resources to pull off a con like that, his story would seem every bit as true. It would be backstopped and rehearsed until there were no holes. Only the Russians went this far with their long-term undercover spies—known as illegals—but it was conceivable.
If he was lying, she needed him alive. If he was lying, he wasn’t working alone, and they would kill her as soon as she tried something against him. She needed to move fast, to get him out of his comfort zone. She needed to stay with him to find out what he was doing, who he was working for, and what sort of threat they posed. If she lost him, she would never be able to clear her name. If he was lying, she needed to play along.
She had to keep him close no matter what. She brushed a speck of dirt from one of the grenades, then shut the case and shoved it back.
Lies or the truth. Both roads led to the same place. She needed time to read him, to draw him out. She had her husband back, and she had six hours to decide what she believed and whom she was going to kill.
“Get in the truck,” she said; she slammed the tailgate closed and circled to the driver’s seat.
“Where are we going?”
“New York.”
Chapter 52
HAYES TOOK A circuitous route through the underground garage at Rockefeller Center to remain in the security cameras’ blind spots. Their lines of sight were as clear to him as picket fences.
Morgan had sent him the message: Meet her people in Manhattan by eight p.m. “Let’s make this easy on everyone.”
Hayes knew what that meant. Knew what the hard way was—the FBI would keep coming after him. His name was still sketchy as hell. They could just lock him up. Everything he’d done was illegal. There was no formal presidential finding for his actions, no permission slip from the top. He was a criminal.
He didn’t like anything about the spot where she had told him to go for the meeting, far uptown, near the northeast corner of Central Park in East Harlem. It was a good place to take someone down.
He wasn’t going to walk into an ambush or let her set the terms. He didn’t think that she was behind the killings, not directly, but he still wasn’t taking chances. Hayes had chosen instead to surprise her here because she wouldn’t try anything this close to a political rally.
Hayes slipped past the NYPD officer watching the northeast stair. Hayes had served on presidential security details dozens of times. He knew their routes, their radio calls and routines. And they didn’t have a full Secret Service team up for a candidate like Tucker, though Hayes was surprised to see how large a detail he did have. He was protecting himself because of the attacks.
He waited for a moment until his target appeared, then crossed quickly into the long service corridor and staging area for the ballrooms. He’d followed Morgan for the last hour. They were in the third basement of Rockefeller Center. She paused when his shadow passed her—good instincts.
She turned and made a strangled noise.
“Hayes. What? The meeting is at—you can’t be here!”
“I was in the neighborhood. I thought I would push it up.” He was putting himself in a dangerous spot, but he had to at least try to get her to see the truth, talk to her face to face. She’d been an army officer and had sworn the oath. He knew her. She wouldn’t let her own people get killed. And if she did try to haul him in, he would improvise.
“You’re making a mistake, Kathryn,” he said. “Don’t gather Cold Harvest together. You’re playing into the killers’ hands.”
“Don’t you—” she said, then stopped as the door ahead opened. Tucker stepped out, a Starbucks cup and a sheaf of papers in his hand. He saw Morgan first.
“What are you doing out here?” Tucker asked. “We have—”
Then he caught sight of Hayes.
“What is this?”
“Good,” Hayes said. “We can all talk.”
Tucker craned his neck around, looking for Secret Service and finding none. Hayes stepped closer. Tucker was terrified but trying not to show it.
“You killing us all, Tucker? Everyone in Cold Harvest?”
“How dare you? You and this program are shut down. There has been enough bloodshed. You have failed in the mission.”
Hayes ignored him. A grand conspiracy, organized by ruthless and far-seeing masters? Hayes didn’t think so. It would be almost reassuring to think people that competent were in charge, but no. The real enemy wasn’t usually one twisted kingpin. The enemy was everywhere, in everyone. It was everyday weakness—cowardice and ass-covering. The political players he met in DC were afraid to openly disagree with their bosses, let alone order up a few homicides of American personnel that they’d taken twenty years and as many millions of dollars to train.
Their presence here was what finally convinced him. Tucker and his deputy wouldn’t be anywhere near such a gathering of Cold Harvest if they were really going to kill, or let someone else kill, the rest of the team.
“No. I didn’t think it was you,” Hayes said, ignoring Tucker’s last remark. “It seemed too bold. You’re more the type for sins of omission.”
They had simply turned a blind eye to the killings, hoping it would all blow over. And, God, they were so wrong-footed by trying to put a lid on the program. They were gathering everyone, offering a perfect target. Maybe the killers were counting on this sort of weakness.
“You’re done,” Tucker said. “And Cold Harvest is done. This violence all came because of this program, and we end it by ending the program.”
“Do you really believe that? That surrendering and giving the enemy exactly what they want will end this?”
“You’re cut off. We’re bringing you and everyone else in
the program in and parking you until this blows over. It’s finished. Morgan’s making the announcement tomorrow.”
“You want to tell them yourself?”
Tucker’s head moved back a few inches. Morgan scanned the staging area.
“Jesus,” she said.
A tall man with black hair stepped out from behind a pillar. It was Josh Drake. Two more came out at the end of the corridor, and others emerged from a side hallway. There were six of them in total, Cold Harvest operators. Hayes and Drew Ochoa had called them. They found out Drake was already in New York after Morgan pulled him out of his undercover role in Algeria.
Hayes had liked Drake from the day he’d met him eight years ago, fighting in Somalia. He was a West Coast SEAL and Team Six operator. The guys constantly gave him shit about his looks—he could have been a movie star—and called him Hollywood or sometimes just Wood. It fit the stereotype that SEALs, especially the West Coast teams, were a bunch of vain beach bums. During force-on-force simulations, other guys would sneak hair gel into the California guys’ magazine pouches as a prank.
Drake had helped reach out to the others who were already in New York. Hayes had wanted to come alone, but they weren’t going to let him walk into a potential trap without backup, and they wanted to see this go down.
“You brought them here?” Tucker seethed. “What is this, a coup?”
“You brought them here. And you did a bad job. Blowing covers in daylight, using known CIA assets.”
“How did you get away from the security team?” Morgan asked.
Drake gave her a Come on look.
“You’re all going to prison,” she said.
Hayes shook his head. “You don’t see it, Morgan. They found us by following the funerals. They’ve been able to kill us because we gathered together. Now you’re offering them a perfect target.”
“Even if they did attack, how would they be able to overcome a few dozen of our most experienced operators in the best-policed city in the United States?”
“They’ve been successful so far. You put a target on all of our backs by rushing this and breaking people’s covers. It would have been easy to trace. When will the rest of Cold Harvest be here?”
Dead Man Switch Page 18
