A moment’s pause, and a look of pain not unmingled with despair flickered across the face of the wounded man. “She has to be.”
Chapter 5
It took quite a snowstorm to shut Fargo schools, but that was just what they’d had. Twenty-eight inches of the white stuff blanketing the Northern Plains.
Which meant there was no school for her to teach. There had been a day when she would have welcomed the break, but not today. Not since the passing of her sister, less than a month before.
Mary — tall and pretty, long chestnut curls. The cute little sister, four years her junior. Family members had joked that their personalities couldn’t have been more different — Mary cheerful and buoyant, not a care in the world. And her own demeanor, reserved, intense. Analytical. They were the skills that had her teaching algebra in one of Fargo’s many high schools.
Unmarried, she had never attracted men in the same way as her younger sister. It wasn’t that she was without appeal in the looks department, but her personality tended to intimidate men. She wasn’t the type to hang out at a singles bar on Friday night.
Alicia Workman looked down at the picture of her sister on her computer desk and felt the tears well up in her eyes. Mary’s romanticism, her ability to attract men and fall head over heels into love, had been her undoing.
They’d found Mary dead in her apartment in D.C., dead of an overdose of prescription painkillers. The suicide note was disjointed and rambling. None of it made sense — not unless you had all the pieces.
Her hand moved from the picture to the letter lying beneath it. A print-out of her sister’s last e-mail, five days before her suicide. All of her hopes and dreams, laid out in stark 12-pt Times New Roman.
Her love for a man.
A married man.
Alicia stole a glance out her apartment’s window, at the still-swirling snow. The pieces of a field-stripped Bersa Storm lay beside Mary’s letter, taken down for cleaning.
It was a little thing, a pocket semiautomatic chambered in .380 ACP. Having grown up around guns on her grandfather’s ranch, Alicia knew all too well the capabilities and limitations of the pistol.
Her gaze flickered to the newspaper clippings and computer print-outs that decorated one wall of the apartment. The smiling face of a man loved by so many.
Only one question remained: would it be enough?
“Mr. President, can we have a statement?”
“Do you have a statement on the possible dissolution of the EU, Mr. President?”
“Statement?”
“Mr. President! Is there going to be an agree—”
The limousine door closed with a satisfying click, the noise outside fading away into a low roar.
“Quite a morning.”
President Roger Hancock looked up into the eyes of his Chief of Staff. “That’s the understatement of the year, Ian.”
The economic troubles that had plagued the European Union ever since the Greek debt crisis had finally come to a head. Spain and Portugal had quickly followed Greece into the dangerous realms of default, sending shock waves across the continent.
With country after country going down the tubes, Germany and France — arguably still the strongest economies in Europe — had come to the decision that remaining in the EU was no longer in their best interests.
And that’s why he was here. To use up his remaining political capital trying to convince them otherwise.
At fifty-three, the President of the United States was still a young man, but four years in office had taken its toll upon his once-boyish good looks. Brown hair was now heavily streaked with silver, something his aides had said gave him “gravitas”.
Devil take gravitas.
“Any more news out of D.C.?”
Ian Cahill shook his head. The Irishman had been with Hancock for ten years, ever since the Wisconsin native’s first run for U.S. Senate. First as campaign manager, then Chief of Staff. Born and raised in Chicago, the sixty-two-year-old Cahill had earned his reputation as a street fighter in the notoriously nasty world of Illinois politics.
It was a reputation that had served him well in Hancock’s administration.
“The Bureau’s locking down Virginia tighter than a drum, got agents swarming all over the place,” Cahill replied, looking down at the screen of his smartphone. “So far…nothing. That goes for both Langley’s rogue and the DCIA himself.”
Hancock murmured an oath, staring out tinted windows at the signs waved by protesters down the long street. Then the motorcade picked up speed, leaving the shouts and screams of the rioters to fade away in the distance.
If only all problems could be dealt with so easily.
Thomas looked up over the screen of his workstation as Tex Richards entered the small, windowless cubicle.
“Got your text,” the Texan announced simply. “Were you able to get access to the satellite feed?”
“Negative,” Thomas replied with a shake of his head. “Those are all tied up this morning and heavily restricted — I don’t have access, certainly not from this terminal. No, I went around the backdoor and began checking on utilities.”
Tex crossed the room to look at the screen, at the continually updating graphs of colored lines zig-zagging across it. “And?”
“Right here — around 1100 hours, water and electric usage spiked at the safehouse. Not a great deal, but if McNab’s at work…”
“Is he?” Richards asked, an unusual intensity creeping into his voice as he referenced the retired Air Force pilot who served as the caretaker of the safe house.
Thomas nodded. “He is. I checked with his employers — been at work all morning. Usage levels subsided to their normal levels shortly after noon.”
That only left them with one option, and both men knew it.
“He’s come and gone,” Tex whispered, gazing at the screen. “Harry, what are you trying to do?”
There was no sign that they were being followed. On a good day, the drive from Graves Mill to the antebellum town of New Market took about an hour and a half.
This wasn’t a good day, and driving a surveillance detection route, or an SDR, meant that Harry wasn’t taking the most direct roads.
“Mind if I ask where we’re going?” Carol asked, clearing her throat from the passenger seat beside him. She didn’t mince words, a refreshing change from a lot of the women he had known. And it was probably time to tell her.
Harry took his eyes off the road long enough to glance over at her. “Does the name Samuel Han mean anything to you?”
A long moment of silence, then, “He was one of your men, wasn’t he?”
That she even knew the name took Harry by surprise. He hadn’t expected…
“Yeah. He was,” Harry replied, staring out the windshield at the passing forests of Appalachia, denuded of leaves and covered in a fresh coat of snow. Flakes of white drifted down past the speeding Excursion as dusk fell.
What to say? How to sum up a man’s life in the space of a moment?
Harry had always been good with words — good at using them to persuade, to manipulate.
To deceive…but now, as a flood tide of emotion came swirling back with the memories, words failed him.
Han had been one of the best the Agency had ever seen. The son of a Nung mercenary who had fought alongside the U.S. in Vietnam — Samuel, or Sammy as the men of Alpha Team had called him, had come to the CIA’s Special Activities Division direct from Little Creek, Virginia, the home of SEAL Team Two.