by Greg Rucka
When he thinks of that man, though, the man he hates, it all comes back. That man with no name, and with no name no identity, no country, no motive, no reason. That man whom he has never seen and thus has imagined; younger than the soldier, and more handsome, and always well dressed, like those fey male models that used to be all the fashion. That man, the soldier has decided, wears glasses. That man, who maybe had Jamieson killed, maybe was trying to tie off a loose end, to keep his precious anonymity and his terrible secrets.
That man whom the soldier has come to think of as the Architect, because it fits, because calling that man a cocksucking goatfucker is too much of a mouthful, even if he never says it aloud, and because he’s an officer who wears stars, and officers who wear stars don’t use words like that in polite company. That man, as reported by the Bravo-Interdict operator code-named Blackfriars via her control, Captain Abigail Heath, and who has been designated target: Echo. So he is called Echo on paper, but still, in the soldier’s mind, he is the Architect.
Joke’s on you, the soldier thinks. We’re closer than you know.
Just not close enough. Not yet.
Then the phone rings, and the soldier learns how wrong he is.
He stabs the button on his phone with the angry haste that comes when silence is disturbed. The soldier’s wife is asleep upstairs, and even though he knows it won’t, he’s afraid the sound will wake her. He answers it angry, because when he gets a phone call he isn’t expecting at five of five in the morning, something has gone very wrong indeed.
“Brock,” he says.
It’s Heath. “I’m sorry to disturb you at home, sir,” she says. “Blackfriars is about to be blown.”
For a moment, the soldier genuinely cannot speak, suffers the extraordinary feeling of being punched in the gut through words alone. He’s a rational man, but this feels like witchcraft, as if the Architect, wherever he skulks and hides, has reached across miles and matter and pulled the prize straight from the soldier’s mind. His thoughts jumble, trying to remember, but he’s sure he’s never so much as whispered a word of Blackfriars, never even mentioned the name to the woman in the West End. She had everything he could give her, but he never gave her that.
He registers the tense Heath has used, says, “About to be?” He hears the stress in his voice as he speaks, wonders if Heath can hear it, too.
“Conops for an Indigo capture op in Tashkent, targeting Heatdish, just crossed my desk,” Heath says. She’s speaking quickly, and the soldier realizes that any stress in his voice must sound like harmony to what he’s hearing in hers. “They were boots-on-the-ground as of seventeen minutes ago. They have to have the jackpot by now unless they were stopped at the breach.”
Heatdish is the code name used for Blackfriars’s primary target, the man she’s been working, an Uzbeki national named Vosil Tohir. It is Vosil Tohir who ties everyone in Brock’s deceptions together, from the woman in the West End to Jamieson to the events at the theme park in California. It is Blackfriars who leads to Heatdish, who leads, finally, to the Architect, and until this moment, Brock has held faith that he is the only one aware of this connection.
“Jackpot is Heatdish, confirmed?”
“By the conops, yes, sir.” Heath pauses for a fraction, it’s barely there, but it’s what the soldier is thinking, too, and he hears it. “Sir, if it’s a parakeet op, they’ll kill Blackfriars before she can identify herself.”
“Get Ruiz.”
“Yes, sir.”
Heath puts him on hold, and the soldier gets to his feet, wedging his phone between ear and shoulder. He takes his laptop with him, moves it to the dining room table, and the motion awakens the screen, and the machine demands to know who he is. He types his passphrase, then his password, then his second password in quick succession, turns to the bottles of liquor on the sideboard, shifts the phone to his other shoulder, his other ear. Pours himself a glass of whiskey and brings it back to the laptop. He never told the woman in the West End about Blackfriars. He never gave that up, he’s more certain than ever.
So this is something else. The price of asymmetrical warfare fought with a Special Forces sword and shield. Everything happens fast, sometimes too damn fast to track all the elements.
Heath comes back. “Sir, I have Colonel Ruiz.”
“Patch.”
There’s a hiss, and then all three of them are sharing a line.
“General Brock,” Ruiz says. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“Danny, what’s this about you running an op in Tashkent?” the soldier, Brigadier General Emmet Brock, asks. “Why didn’t I see a concept of operations before this went green?”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I wasn’t aware Indigo operations needed your approval.”
“They fucking well do when I’ve got an operator in theater. Jesus Christ, Danny, where the fuck did this even come from? Your men go through the door, they’ll drop her on the way to target. I’m ordering you to abort.”
“I can’t do that, sir.”
“I am anxious to hear why not, Colonel.”
“They’re on egress to exfil staging,” Ruiz says. “It’s done.”
Heath swears, certain her agent is dead, and the soldier, Brock, wants to swear, too, but for different reasons. Blackfriars dead means his best reach for the Architect is now gone.
“You have communications with your unit?”
“Due for a sitrep from them in…four minutes.”
“Captain Heath,” Brock says. “You will stay in contact with Colonel Ruiz, and you will inform me immediately on the disposition of the operation. Colonel, the captain is Blackfriars’s handler. You’ll need her to verify that your men just killed one of our operators.”
Brock hangs up before either Ruiz or Heath can acknowledge him. He drops the phone on the table beside his laptop and his whiskey, takes the glass and brings it to his lips, anxious to drink, but stops. Blackfriars had been the reach to the Architect, but if the operation has been a success, there’s still hope, maybe even a better hope for reaching the man. Maybe the Indigo shooters have killed Blackfriars, but it doesn’t really matter, because Blackfriars became irrelevant the moment they went through the door. If they have Heatdish, if they have Vosil Tohir, that’s a tradeup.
He thinks about the woman in the West End again, the woman he knows as Jordan Webber-Hayden. She put Jamieson and Tohir together, albeit indirectly. When Brock asked her about Tohir, about this contact Jamieson was dealing with, she’d claimed ignorance. He’d never mentioned his name to her, hadn’t wanted to reveal how much he knew for fear of it getting back to the Architect. Now he has to wonder what she might know.
He sits down at the table, brings up the encryption and link to his files, opens the one for Blackfriars. A message informs him that the file is currently being viewed by another user, Heath, Abigail Anne, Captain, and he sees the tracking string of alphanumeric code that proves she’s real and authorized. Worried about her girl. The file says that Blackfriars is still “active,” but Brock’s certain that’s wishful thinking.
He thinks about Jordan again, in her West End condominium, the irony of his relationship with her. He works to do to others what she has done to him. All the things he doesn’t know about her, all the things he’s allowed to continue because he cannot stand the thought of not having her anymore. All the things he’s never asked, never really asked, content with her evasions and her lies because he literally fucking hurts, the way his leg still sometimes hurts, at the thought of losing her. Thinking that maybe, if Heatdish, if Tohir, doesn’t give him what he needs, maybe it’s time to entertain the unthinkable.
Maybe it’s time to ask Jordan Webber-Hayden questions in a way she can’t refuse to answer them anymore.
His phone rings again.
“Brock, go.”
“She’s out.” Heath exhales relief in his ear. “She’s alive, she’s with them, and she’s out.”
“And Heatdish?”
“Wounded
but stable. They’re coming back through Hurlburt. I’d like permission to fly down and be there for her reintegration.”
“That’s negative. You know protocol, Captain. Leave it to Counterintelligence. You can do her debrief at Belvoir.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything else?”
“No, sir. We got lucky the Indigo who found her held his fire.”
“Yes, we did,” Brock says, and he hangs up, wondering if it was skill or luck that saved Blackfriars’s life.
Or maybe the shooter was just slow.
Chapter Four
BRICKYARD NEEDS HER NAME.
Bell turns to the woman, hands zip-tied at the small of her back, kneeling on the concrete bed of the hangar, hair mussed and hiding her face, with Steelriver standing guard over her. She’s barely half dressed, had managed to get herself into a pair of black jeans and some kind of sheer black tank, or perhaps she was already in them when they crashed the bedroom but hadn’t made it as far as shoes, socks, or a shirt. The top doesn’t cover as much as promise more, the kind of thing women wear because men want them to, and Bell can see scars on her, one recent, one long since healed; a scoring along her shoulder that might have been made by a bullet’s touch, the other visible just above the right hip, where an inch or so of flesh was torn away. Her hair is as black as the tank pretends to be, and neither is as black as her mood. Dark brown eyes glare at Bell from behind the curtain of her hair when he relays the question.
“Blackfriars. The word of the day,” she adds, “is biplane.”
“Your name,” he repeats.
“Blackfriars. Biplane. Fuck you.”
Bell brings the sat phone back to his ear, gives Brickyard that answer. Far away in the TOC, in the tactical operations center, Bell imagines Colonel Daniel Ruiz looking expectantly at the duty officer as he or she runs this new information through the computers. While he waits for the comeback he crosses to Vosil Tohir, now laid out on a stretcher. Chaindragger is guarding while Cardboard finishes putting a line into the man’s arm. Tohir is unconscious, and Bell suspects he didn’t go there easily or without a chemical escort.
“Stable,” Cardboard tells him, looking up. “He’s going to be hurting when he wakes up.”
“Ready to move in two,” Bell says.
Both men nod.
“Warlock,” Brickyard says in Bell’s ear. “Confirm presence of Blackfriars—Nessuno, Petra Graziella, chief warrant officer two, United States Army, in your AO, attached Bravo-Interdict. Cannot confirm proof of life at this time. Grade provisional as friendly. Will update as information becomes available.”
Bell looks back to the woman, who, Ruiz says, has quite probably been telling them the truth. The black mood makes the smile she shoots him positively poisonous. Bell’s heard Bravo-Interdict mentioned before. He’s heard the nickname, too.
Bitches Incorporated.
“Cut her loose and bring her back,” Brickyard says. “Your ride should be wheels-down now.”
“Affirm,” Bell says, and kills the call. Outside the hangar, he can hear the approaching whine of the Learjet. He stuffs the phone away, motions Steelriver from his post, and points him to the doors of the hangar for overwatch. The other soldier moves without a word, and Bell frees his knife, thumbs the blade to out-and-locked while moving behind CW2 Petra Graziella Nessuno, called Blackfriars. She tracks his every move until she’s sure of what he’s doing, does it without a sense of satisfaction or even impatience, and when the zip-tie binding is cut, she’s back to her feet almost immediately. She rubs her wrists, kicks out her legs, easing the ache in her knees, restoring circulation.
“I gave you the word of the day.” There’s no accusation.
“You gave me tomorrow’s word of the day.”
“It is tomorrow. You shifted time zones.”
Bell hears Cardboard chuckle.
“Board.” Bell doesn’t look at him. “Give the chief your shirt.”
Combat climb to thirty-eight thousand feet before they’ve leveled off and are streaking west. Tohir strapped down, still in his chemically assisted slumber, lying across the bench on the port side of the cabin. Cardboard, known as Sergeant Freddie Cooper, without his shirt but still wearing his jacket, now zipped half shut, sits opposite the prisoner, watching him, occasionally leaning forward to check the dressing on the wound or to adjust the flow from the IV. They’re closest to the cockpit, and when Cardboard isn’t attending the package, he sips water from a plastic bottle, lost in his own thoughts. It’s his way after action, Bell knows; they’ve served together for more than a decade, they know the scent of each other’s tears. After the fight, Cardboard always goes inside.
Chaindragger and Steelriver are parked on the benches midcabin, and if Chaindragger wants to follow Cardboard’s example, nothing’s doing. Steelriver keeps peppering him with questions as the younger man attempts to read a book on his tablet. Steelriver is spacing the questions out for maximum annoyance effect, testing the other man’s patience.
Of the four Indigo shooters, Chaindragger—Isaiah Rincon—is the youngest, assigned to Bell’s team for just under a year now. Twenty-six years old, Afro-Caribbean, slight and serious, he’s got nothing to prove to Bell or, frankly, to anyone else. But Steelriver, Master Sergeant Tom O’Day, is a substitute on their team, pulled to fill in for another of Bell’s shooters who’s currently convalescing from the cracked ribs his vest gave him in trade for saving his life. Normally Steelriver heads up his own team, and that gives him certain privileges. One of those is to heckle the new guy, even if the new guy is only new to him.
“So what’s that you’re doing?”
“Reading.”
“And what’re you reading?”
Chaindragger never looks up. “A book.”
O’Day shoots a grin at Bell, then asks Chaindragger, “Any dirty parts?”
“Nope.”
“So what’s it about?”
“The corruption of American politics as predicted by Eisenhower.”
Long pause this time. “Say again?”
“How it is we’ve become the bitch of the military-industrial complex.”
Pause, not quite as long as the last. “And why the fuck would a lean, mean door kicker like yourself be reading something like that?”
“Know your enemy.”
And so on.
Bell gives his attention to the small collection of objects recovered from Tohir’s person. They’ve been tagged and labeled and stowed in Ziploc bags. There’s a knife, not unlike the one he himself is carrying, taken from the man’s pocket; a very nice Patek Philippe watch, taken from the man’s wrist; a metal cigarette lighter from another pocket that shows scratches and wear but no insignia or design. There’s a wad of bills, euros and dollars among them, retrieved from the man’s Skivvies. There’s a smartphone from another pocket, and, despite the temptation, Bell leaves that thing alone. The techs will go to town on it, and if there’s security keeping the device protected, they’ll go to town on that, too. No sense risking a data wipe.
Blackfriars, who is really Nessuno, emerges from the shitter, where she disappeared shortly after takeoff, almost half an hour ago. She grabs a bottle of water for herself from a galley cabinet, then drops into the leather-upholstered seat opposite Bell. She’s a big girl, maybe five ten, but Freddie’s shirt is still large on her. Her compromise has been to knot one edge of the hem above her scarred hip and to roll the sleeves up to her shoulders. Before, in the house and again in the hangar, there was no personalization to the skin she was showing. Now that her body is more concealed, Bell finds himself oddly more aware of it. She is soldier-fit, and there’s a fading flush on her cheeks. He watches her for a moment too long, and she catches him at it.
“Why wasn’t I warned you were coming?” Again, no accusation, but she’s looking directly at Bell, and the gaze has strength.
“Same reason we didn’t know you’d be there. Someone didn’t see fit to share.”
�
�He’s mine.” She indicates the items spread out on the small table between them, each in its bag. “I’ve been working him for sixteen months. All this is mine.”
“We can sort it when we’re back home.”
She weighs Bell’s decision not to argue. Takes a drink from her bottle.
“Sixteen months,” Bell says.
“And a year to get into position, to earn his trust.”
Her eyes are not so much brown as amber, a touch of red, like rust. There’s no emotion in them for Bell to read, just as there was no inflection in her words. He doesn’t want to imagine what is required to earn the trust of Vosil Tohir. But more than two years on an operation, that raises questions for him, and he makes a mental note to bracket Ruiz and see if an explanation or two might not be forthcoming.
“Two years. Over in less than a minute,” she says, like she’s in his head. Her voice is oddly monotone.
“Tohir wasn’t the primary target?”
Nessuno shakes her head slightly, answering and refusing at once. No, Vosil Tohir wasn’t her primary target, and no, she will not be telling him who was. There is no smile, no frown.
“Someone owes you an apology.”
“It’s standard operating procedure, right?” she says. “SOP, I was an unknown, a potential threat. I’d have punched me in the gut, too.”
There is no smile, and Bell can’t tell if she’s joking, but he grins anyway. “You were the source of our intel.”
