Van Horn handed him a rolling bag. “You’ve got the laptop.” She patted her jacket pocket. “And I’ve got the cellphone. Br’er Fox’s technical boys and girls should have a field day combing through them.” She smiled. “Not a bad haul for a harebrained operation cobbled together in just a couple of days. Good thing our lords and masters decided to use the first string for this one, right?”
He grinned back at her. “If you do say yourself?”
She shrugged. “Who? Little me? Never. Remember, modesty is one of my many virtues.”
Flynn laughed. “I’ll bear that in mind.” He looked at the other members of their team. “Everybody set?”
Heads nodded.
“Then let’s move out,” he said quietly. “We’ve got what we came for. But stay sharp all the way out of Austria and back to your respective stations. Let’s not give the other side any opportunities to even the score.”
In ones and twos, the Quartet Directorate team climbed into their various cars and the white van and drove away.
Eleven
Disheveled and dirty after an overnight flight from Austria crammed into the back of a chartered air cargo plane, Skoblin was marched into Pavel Voronin’s private office on the second floor. Two stern-faced bodyguards gripped his arms. Without a word, they pushed him into a chair and stepped back.
Voronin turned away from the window and stared at him in silence for a few moments.
Skoblin looked down at his feet, unable to meet the other man’s icy gaze. This discussion could have only one end, he knew miserably. Rumors within the Raven Syndicate spoke of unmarked graves already scattered through the forest surrounding Voronin’s country estate.
At last, Voronin broke his increasingly ominous silence. “This is an unfortunate turn of events, Viktor,” he said almost casually. “Your mission was to identify and eliminate Arif Khavari’s contact, the foreign spy you initially failed to kill. Instead, your mistakes have exposed this organization to our enemies. Worse yet, you have also managed to rip an even wider hole in MIDNIGHT’s operational security.” The younger man watched Skoblin’s face turn gray. “You are right to be afraid,” he said. “You have been well compensated in my service — extraordinarily so, in fact. But I pay men for success, not for failure.”
Nervously, Skoblin tried to moisten lips that were cracked and bone-dry. “Sir, I—” he said, fumbling for words, any words, of explanation that might somehow help stave off the inevitable end of this meeting. He knew, however, this was futile. For all practical purposes, his fate had been decided the moment his second rifle shot missed the enemy agent who’d been talking to Khavari. Painfully, he forced himself to look up. “I have no excuse,” he said at last, almost too softly to be heard.
Voronin smiled, but it was an expression that never reached his pale, unwavering eyes. He reached out and gently patted Skoblin’s shoulder, pointedly ignoring the way the other man flinched. “That’s true, Viktor. There are no acceptable excuses for your unforced errors and obvious incompetence. Or at least none that I’m interested in hearing. But despite that, you’re in luck all the same. Because I find myself in an oddly generous mood today.”
Scarcely daring to hope, Skoblin stared up at him.
Voronin nodded. “I’m going to give you another chance — though not at the same sort of work, of course. Intricate, subtle operations are quite evidently not your strong suit.” He shook his head. “No, I’ll find you a task that is much simpler and more direct. One that requires guts and brawn more than brains.”
“Thank you, sir… I… I swear that I won’t let you down again,” Skoblin stuttered hurriedly. “I will do anything you ask of me.”
Voronin nodded coldly. “Yes, you will.” He inclined his head toward the door of his office. “You can go now, Skoblin. You’ll be briefed later on your new assignment.” Deliberately, he turned back to the window, ignoring the other man as he was led away.
When the door closed, his deputy, Vasily Kondakov, shook his head in wonder. “You let him off surprisingly easily.”
Voronin glanced at him with a sly, crooked smile. “You think so?”
“Ah,” said Kondakov in sudden realization. “What do you have in mind for Skoblin, then?”
Voronin shrugged. “We’ll put him and his team aboard the Gulf Venture when it sails. He can act as our security liaison with the Iranian captain and his crew.”
Kondakov, aware of their full plans for the converted oil tanker, nodded approvingly. “An elegant solution,” he said.
“It is, isn’t it?” Voronin agreed. “After all, if I’m forced to use someone like our error-prone friend Skoblin, I might as well use him up.”
A tiled veranda ran along the entire length of the lake side of the Spanish-style mansion. A number of battered rattan chairs and settees provided seating, most of them angled to take full advantage of the pleasant view. Ceiling fans mounted under a wood-beamed roof kept the air moving.
Nick Flynn held the door to the veranda open for Laura Van Horn.
A tiny smile twitched at one corner of her generous mouth. “Ever the gentleman,” she murmured.
“Blame it on my childhood training, ma’am,” he replied, allowing his native Texas twang full rein for once. “My mother was very particular on the subject.”
Van Horn’s smile broadened. “I’ll be sure to thank her,” she said demurely. “Should we ever be introduced.”
Fox was seated by himself at a small round glass table set near the far end of the veranda, staring out across the sparkling waters of the small lake. He had a manila folder in front of him. When they reached him, Four’s chief of the American station greeted them with a surprisingly genial nod. “Nick. Laura. Welcome back to Avalon House.”
They took the chairs he indicated around the table.
“First, congratulations on the success of your Vienna operation,” Fox said quietly. “You achieved all of our hoped-for objectives, and did so cleanly — with near-surgical perfection. It’s a rare plan that even survives contact with the enemy, let alone one that unfolds so neatly and so precisely.”
Flynn shrugged. “A lot of credit for that goes to Professor Ayish,” he admitted. “He anticipated almost every move the opposition would make.”
“And to Tadeusz, Alain, Shannon, and the rest of the action team,” Van Horn added. “They executed their parts in the overall op flawlessly.”
Flynn nodded in agreement. “Yeah, they’re all really good. Probably the best I’ve ever worked with.”
Fox smiled dryly. “Points taken.” His voice took on a sharper, more focused tone. “But now, if we’ve reached the end of this little session of mutual praise, perhaps we can move on to other, more pressing matters?”
Flynn and Van Horn exchanged amused glances. Although he occasionally allowed himself a human moment or two, the older man’s all-business, all-the-time nature was never lurking far below the surface.
“While many of the files were encrypted at very high level, our technical experts have still managed to retrieve significant information from the laptop computer and smartphone you obtained so efficiently,” Fox told them. “Among other things, we were able to clearly identify the man you briefly took prisoner, the one who headed up the surveillance operation against Israel’s Vienna embassy.” He flipped open the manila folder at his place and took out a color photograph, obviously a digitally downloaded copy of a formal portrait.