Three…four. And then column five — a dark corner maybe ten feet from the nearest light — well away from the closest security camera, the concrete damp with moisture beneath his fingers as he dropped down on one knee.
Nothing. For a moment, he thought he had misinterpreted the message — that perhaps it was another column, another level of the garage. Or perhaps not a real column at all. If he had been wrong…they were running out of time.
Free Fall.
And then his groping fingers closed around a small waterproof pouch, pulling it toward him. The pouch contained a small cellphone, prepaid, most likely — and he leaned back against the wheel of the nearest car as he held it up, powering it on. It was his means of contact. Had to be.
Nothing was saved in the contacts. No numbers to be redialed under “missed calls”, no way to get a signal underground if there had been. The phone seemed to be perfectly clean — a burner, clearly. But for what? Lay had been dead for almost an hour. If he didn’t move quickly.
And there it was, under a data folder…a small.mp3 file of recorded audio. Selecting the file brought up a password screen and he tapped Free Fall into the box, watching as it opened. He glanced around the garage once more, marking the position of the nearest camera as he raised the phone to his ear.
“Harry,” a man’s voice began. So familiar. David Lay. “If you’re listening to this, I’m most likely dead — my enemies have made their move. And I’ve lost the battle. I’ve known it was coming, just always thought I could stay ahead. Foolish, maybe, but I have no regrets. It was the only way — for the sake of the country. A couple years back, none of this would have mattered, and I never would’ve dreamed of bringing you into this. That was before Carol walked back into my life.”
A pause and the iron voice faltered, trembling ever so slightly. “She’s all I have left, and I swore to never fail her again. They will try to reach her as well — there is no way for them to be sure of what she knows. The Agency will move to protect her after I’m gone, but none of that will matter. There’s evil in high places at Langley, and no one is safe. Take her, Harry, take her and run — far and fast. Go dark. Trust no one. Remember the Moscow Rules, Harry. Anyone could be under the control of the enemy.”
Anyone. Elevator doors began to open in the distance, back from where he had come. A threat?
“As for what has brought me to this place…that needs to end here. With me. With knowledge comes dangers.”
It was a bureaucrat, one of the hundreds of drones that populated the headquarters building — a briefcase in his hand as he moved toward his car. Harry held his breath, sheltering the phone’s speaker with his hand as the man passed. “I can trust you to do this, Harry. I know you. I know what you’ll do. Vaya con Dios.”
Go with God.
And then there was silence. Harry closed the phone, cold, hard resolution coming over his face.
He had his orders. That they came from a dead man made not one wit of difference.
It was time to carry them out…
“I know, I know — put Michelle on it,” Carter instructed, slipping a thumb drive into the side of Daniel Lasker’s terminal. “I need you running comm for the extraction.”
At twenty-eight, the short, fair-haired Lasker looked more like an office temp than the head of CLANDOPS communications, but such was his title at Langley. And he was one of the best. “We ever tried to pull off an operation on this scale, Ron?”
Carter responded with a shake of the head. “Twelve assets. Nine countries. And it’s only the beginning.”
He felt a presence at his elbow and turned to find Harry standing there. “How are things coming along?”
“We’re positioning teams across the Middle East,” Carter responded. “Try to pull our people out before they can be snapped up.”
“You could drive a car through the hole that’s gonna leave in our HUMINT network,” Harry observed, a grim edge to his voice. Human intelligence, the community’s ace of spades.
“I know. But until we find the Director…we have no other choice.” The analyst shrugged. “Was there something you needed?”
“Matter of fact, yes. I need to speak with Carol.”
Ron frowned. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea. Why?”
“She didn’t finish running the profiles on Korsakov. I just need to talk with her a couple minutes, figure out where she was headed, particularly on any possible U.S. connections. Where is she?”
“Down in Interrogation Room A-13,” Carter responded after a long pause. He reached for the phone on Lasker’s desk. “I’ll tell them you’re coming.”
Parting with his brother had not been one of the highlights of the trip for Richards, but that was nothing new. Relations had been strained ever since he had left the family ranch in Texas to join the Marine Corps at the age of nineteen.
They had been a man short that summer with him gone, a bad summer of drought — disease among the cattle. Not much he could have done to stop it, even if he had stayed, but there were elements of his family that viewed his departure as something akin to desertion.
Five years later, the ranch had gone under and his family had moved back to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico. End of story.
He sighed, watching as the Gulfstream IV taxied in from the west, an unusual sight on the small runway. He only had one bag, traveling light as he had for the past fifteen years of his life.
A chill December breeze rippled across the small airfield, his jacket flapping back to expose the holstered Glock on his hip. He was ready. It was time to go…
The NCS ready room was deserted, just as Harry had expected it to be. He left the lights off and moved quickly to his equipment locker, on the far side of the room.
Swiping his CIA identification badge unlocked the door and he reached inside, withdrawing his Colt 1911 and another pistol-sized weapon.
The Colt was loaded, as it always was. He racked the slide and chambered a round, carefully putting the safety on before slipping the big pistol into the paddle holster on his hip. Cocked and locked.
Moving across the room, he laid the second weapon, a Taser X3, on the table. The stun gun, which looked for all the world like an artist’s conception of a laser pistol gone bad, had been developed in 2009 as a response to the law enforcement community’s main critique of the original X26: its limited, single-shot capability.
The new and improved Taser aimed to address that problem, utilizing a neuro-muscular impulse rotating across the firing bays to engage multiple targets. It was capable of three shots, one right after the other. And then it was empty, but that didn’t bother Harry in the least. From the surveillance footage of the interrogation room, he only had three targets.
Finishing the weapons check, he slipped the Taser into an inner pocket of his leather jacket, in a cross-draw position. Eight minutes past eight o’clock. He had fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before someone realized he had looped the security footage down in the interrogation rooms.
It would be time enough…
“How many died?”
Nasir al-Khalidi looked up from the breakfast dishes to see his brother Jamal standing in the kitchen doorway of the small apartment they shared.