She knew the article. It had seemed harmless enough when she gave the interview a few months back, but now she realized how foolish she had been. “You followed me from yoga?”
“Just for a bit. I wasn’t the only one. You can assume that is still the case.” The man spent the next five minutes giving her a dizzying array of instructions. How to initiate her surveillance detection route, what trains to get on and off of, where to rent a car without using a credit card, and other means by which to shake the tail he claimed was on her.
He also told her she needed to fight the urge to look for her followers, because that would only ensure they took more care to stay invisible.
The man set a meeting for two p.m. at a restaurant in Union Station that specialized in salads, and then he hung up.
She looked at all the notes she’d written down about the route to take for the meeting to come. This wasn’t the strangest bit of tradecraft she’d employed to meet with a source, but it was truly one of the most ingenious. Even though she was always suspicious to the point of being doubtful about any new source — so few of them panned out into anything worthwhile — the fact that this man knew his tradecraft down cold like this made her more optimistic than usual.
Catherine sat for a CNN live interview during the lunch hour and then immediately headed to the street to catch a cab. Following the mysterious man’s instructions, she went by her bank to withdraw some cash, then headed to a metro station and took the subway to Petworth. From here she walked to a car repair shop, where they rented her a beat-up Honda Civic in exchange for two hundred dollars, plus a one-thousand-dollar cash deposit. She was made to show her ID to a man who made a copy of it, but he did not put it into any computer system, so there was no electronic record of the transaction.
The car smelled old and moldy, but the engine fired right up. She put her purse in the passenger’s seat and then, almost as an afterthought, she pulled her six-million-volt stun gun from her purse and wedged it between the passenger’s seat and the center console.
First-time clandestine meetings with CIA employees were usually the same. The man would want to make certain she wasn’t making audio or video recordings of the proceedings. He’d ask to check her phone and to look through her purse, and the sight of the stun gun had turned off more than one contact. It wasn’t worth the hassle, she decided, so she just pulled it out now while she was thinking about it.
Catherine drove to the station and parked her rented Civic on the roof of the parking garage on 1st Street NE, then she climbed out into the sunny afternoon. She still had twenty minutes before the meet, so she thought she’d employ her own tradecraft by walking around the station to make sure no one was following her. But as soon as she turned to close her door, she felt a presence close, right at her side. Thinking she had accidentally stepped in front of someone passing between cars, she tried to move out of the way, but the figure slipped between her and her car door. She looked up to see a man wearing a hoodie and dark sunglasses, but before she could even focus on his face he took the keys from her hand, quickly but gently. He pressed the button to unlock the passenger’s door and walked her by the arm around to the front passenger’s seat.
As he did this he only said one thing to her, but he said it over and over, in a tone that was both quiet yet commanding. “Look straight ahead, not at my face. Look straight ahead, not at my face. Look straight ahead, not at my face.”
She complied, and she didn’t call out for help only because he seemed so matter-of-fact and sure of his actions. Before she even had time to feel scared she found herself sitting in the passenger seat of her rental.
The lump in her throat grew as the man sat down behind the wheel. She looked up at him but he said the same sentence once again, and she complied instinctively, turning to look straight ahead. As she did this she asked, “What is happening?”
“You are fine. You are safe. Don’t worry. These are standard operational security measures.”
He adjusted the seat and the car rolled forward while, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man adjusting the rearview mirror to match his height.
Catherine’s hands began shaking once they were moving and the reality of what was happening began to catch up. She got the feeling that she must have looked at this man at some point when he came up to her, but now she had not the faintest recollection of what he looked like.
“You are the man from the phone?”
“Yes.”
“But I said I wanted to meet in public.”
“Sorry. My rules today. You wearing a wire?”
“No.”
“What about a GPS tracker?”
“What? No. Why would I?”
He pulled out of the parking garage and turned right.
She said, “I… I didn’t see your face. I swear to God.”
“I know.” His reply was confident. He sounded so… normal.
“People know where I am right now.”
It wasn’t true, and he had to have sensed that, but his reply did not contradict her.
“I’m not going to do anything to harm you. I promise.”
Catherine said nothing, but she shifted in her seat slightly, and while she did so, her hands clutched her purse. The man behind the wheel reached over, took the purse from her, and then gently placed it behind him on the rear floorboard.
She did not protest.
They drove in silence for a full minute, heading north. Catherine kept her eyes straight ahead, her jittery hands on her knees. Finally she said, “You said you were ex-Agency. Was that true?”
“Yes.”
“And you know the man they are looking for?”
After a slight pause he said, “I am the man they are looking for.”
She closed her eyes hard. Furious with herself for not suspecting this from the beginning.
Her eyes reopened, and then her left hand slid back into the tight space between the center console and the seat. She started to turn to him to see if he was looking her way. But just as she began to look up he said, “Eyes out front.”
She locked her eyes forward, but her fingertips walked their way back a little farther, to the item wedged tight between the seat and the console.
While she did this Catherine asked, “What do you want?”
“The same as you, I guess. Information. Answers.”
“Answers? If you are who you say you are, you are going to have a lot more answers than me.”
“Don’t be so sure. I haven’t had the opportunity to interview a bunch of CIA execs on background.”
Catherine corrected him. “Just one.”
“Carmichael.”
Despite herself she nodded a little.
“Had a feeling.”
Catherine’s hand found what it was looking for. The plastic grip of her heavy stun gun.
Her kidnapper turned the vehicle off North Carolina Avenue and onto Lincoln Road NE.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“I’d like to just drive around for a bit, if that’s okay with you. We can talk.”
“Sure,” she said, doing her best to force calm into her voice. In fact, her racing heart beat faster by the second, and she steeled herself for what she was about to do.
And her mind raced along with her heart. When was the last time she had charged the stun gun? The packaging claimed the batteries would hold a full charge for six months. Had she even touched the device in that time? Yes, now she remembered. She charged the gun in early January, less than four months earlier. It should be ready to go.
Although she’d never used the weapon on another person, according to the packaging, it was quite simple to employ. One touch to the skin of the man beside her, ideally in the neck or low back near the spine, would fully incapacitate him for a minute or more.