‘Did he tell you this?’
‘He got a brief message out but the signals in the area are being interrupted, my guess is by Moscow. Putting pressure on the groups opposed to separation includes blocking telecommunications and internet traffic to disrupt appeals to the outside world. Nobody’s heard from him since he was lifted, but a Swedish diplomat saw him thirty-six hours ago. He said he looked OK but seemed to be having a rough time.’
‘So he has to come out.’
‘That’s our advice. The situation is deteriorating and there’s a risk he’ll simply disappear. Foreign media personnel are being given a hard time entering the country and some road trips are restricted by troop movements. The problem is our hands are tied; we’ve been instructed that sending in a team to lift him out would amount to a declaration of force.’
A team. In CIA parlance that meant a group of their own specialists with expertise in escape and evasion.
‘So what’s the plan?’
‘Our best chance — his best chance — is to simply walk out of the hotel. The level of security seems pretty haphazard and the people holding him won’t be expecting him to move. The problem is he has nowhere to go. But with low-profile help he could be clear and away before they can organize themselves.’
It wasn’t a bad plan; if Travis wasn’t under lock and key, and guarded by guys who weren’t professionals, the only thing keeping him inside was the threat of being shot. So walking out was probably the last thing they’d expect him to do.
‘You have somebody local?’
‘Yes. If we can get him to walk, the plan is for you to pick up his trail and shadow him to safety through a series of cut-outs across the border to Moldova. It’s no good trying to fly him out of Ukraine — they’d be on the lookout for him.’ He shrugged as if he was short on choices. ‘It’s a long way but Moldova is really the best bet.’
Cut-outs are a means of passing information or material from one ‘cell’ to another, often in isolation so that one cut-out won’t know — and therefore can’t blow — the identity of another. ‘Who are these people?’
‘Local assets we’ve used for some time, on and off. They’re reliable but non-operational. Civilians. The most we can expect of them is transportation and guidance, not heroics.’
In my opinion such people — assets as they’re known in the business — are heroic enough, living a double life. It doesn’t make them all traitors or spies, depending on which side of the fence you’re on. Some do what they do out of political or religious conviction; some because they enjoy the buzz. Others do it for money.
‘Will Travis know I’m there?’
‘Not if we don’t tell him. If he did he might take risks and go places he shouldn’t. We don’t want that; we’re not looking for a hero’s return. We want him out of the hotel and on his way home. That’s it.’
‘Why not get the embassy involved?’
‘It’s too risky. Our personnel there have been under observation ever since the whole Crimea and Ukraine thing blew up. If any one of them was seen heading east, we’d be accused of fomenting trouble and internal unrest, even though they undoubtedly know Travis is already there and why. The situation for them is getting worse as world attention focusses on the unrest. One way or another Moscow is steering this and waiting to use any situation it can to divert attention away from their own increasing involvement. We want you to get Travis away before that happens.’
‘Who else is in on this?’ I like to know if an operation is general knowledge. If it is, I’m out.
He looked slightly conflicted at that and I could guess why: bringing in an outsider doesn’t always go down well among some CIA die-hards, who regard their own people as the only solution to a problem. The fact is, Langley uses sub-contractors all the time where they need bodies on the ground to intimidate or deter, or where the government insists on the deniability option in case things go bad. But a single individual with specialized skills causes internal doubt, as if it’s a sneaky move, somehow, or an insult to their own special brand of integrity. ‘There’s a restricted list of people in the know on this operation and I want to keep it that way. It includes a couple of people in the State Department, of course, along with my operational support team and senior people. But that’s pretty much it.’
‘I report to you?’
‘When you can, when it’s safe. But you’re accustomed to operating in the dark, right?’
‘Yes.’ In the dark, at long distance and often beyond reach. It sounds insane but it’s the way I like it.
‘Good. Your primary support contact twenty-four-seven will be drafted in from our trainee program. He or she will be your voice and ears during this assignment, with minimal interruption. You need anything, you tell them and they’ll see it gets done.’
‘A trainee?’
‘Don’t worry — they will be selected from the top three per cent. We’re a little short on the ground at the present time, but they will already have some operational experience and will be embedded throughout your time in the field, so you won’t have to deal with any informational gaps.’
Informational gaps. That was a term I hadn’t heard before. But I knew what it meant; whoever my contact was, they wouldn’t leave the building — presumably a darkened room somewhere in the bowels of Langley — until this job was done.
I hoped whoever they selected had balls of steel and didn’t need a lot of sleep.
FIVE
Lindsay Citera was nervous. After being pulled out of a training session on firearms and tactics and told to report to an office on the second floor, she was wondering what she could have done wrong. She’d felt the eyes of her course colleagues following her out of the room and knew what was going through their minds: that she had somehow screwed up and was being dropped … or she’d struck lucky and was being given an early assignment.
Sympathy and envy; they went hand-in-hand where competition for success was intense and positions were eagerly sought. And nobody wanted to be a trainee for ever.
She hoped it was an assignment. She’d been pulling high marks in pretty much every module on the training program so there was little chance that she’d messed up unless it was something she hadn’t been prepared for. Like her age. Or her family.
At thirty-four she was older than most of her intake colleagues. She had a law degree but no previous law enforcement or military experience, and had wondered if the lack of experience would count against her, especially after being comprehensively whipped on the brutal physical exercises by people ten years her junior. She hadn’t actually come in last, though; that honour had gone to a guy who’d tried to take a stockade-style fence in one go and missed. But neither had she broken any finishing tapes on the endurance runs.
Her biggest concern was her family background. She’d answered all the questions about family honestly, aware that applying to join the CIA would open them all to an intensive round of vetting. She doubted her parents separating would count against her, but having a brother, Tommy, currently in a military garrison accused of bringing in drugs from a tour in Afghanistan might limit her scope for advancement, as could a younger sister, Karen, deeply in debt and running with a crowd of delinquents that had already seen her pick up some DUI misdemeanours and a couple of warnings.
While waiting in what looked like an unused second-floor office, she’d checked herself over for presentation. Smart but not too stand-out, clean and tidy with no obvious marks from the pistol range, although a faint smell of burned powder residue hung around her shoulders; hair short and neat, nails just the right side of acceptably long. Make-up light.