Sarah, maid, boy, codes, all gone.
“Yeah, why would they have a maid?” he asked aloud, his words lost in the traffic rush. That was a significant point. Why would they even want a maid? The house they lived in wasn’t that big to begin with. It would be tight enough with the three of them living there. A fourth person would just be in the way.
Perhaps she was just a housekeeper. You know, one who just comes in the daytime.
No. That wasn’t it. The raid happened at night, and she was there. That meant she was live-in help, a conclusion that just circled him back around to his original question — Why was she there?
Then he got it. At least he thought he did. He turned and walked back to Anton. “You said the Mitchells got away with a maid,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure she was a maid?”
“Who else would she be?” Datsik asked. “You told me that they have only one child. A boy. Our intelligence confirmed. Who else would she be?”
Philip didn’t want to jump to his conclusion. He had a tendency to do that. Once he had an idea in his head, his brain took ownership and then nothing else would make sense to him.
“You look like you’re having a vision,” Anton said. “You seeing God?”
“No,” Philip said. “I think the girl you thought was a maid might be a security detail.”
“Not much of a detail,” Datsik scoffed. “One girl.”
Philip rubbed his head again. “When you got to the Mitchells,” he said, “what was their response?”
“They fought back,” Anton said. “They were better fighters than the Chechens at the drop-off.”
They were also expecting you, Philip didn’t say. “That meant that they were prepared,” he did say. “Which in turn means that they expected to have to defend themselves.”
“That’s what happens when you betray everyone all at once,” Anton said. “Makes friends hard to find.”
“The point,” Philip pressed, “is that if they were expecting a possible attack, then they might want to have personal security.”
“But only one person?”
“Probably for the boy,” Philip thought aloud. “Was she young?”
Anton laughed. “To me, everybody is young. I guess under thirty, but not much.”
Philip nodded. Yes, he’d seen this before. It was a trick used over in the Sandbox when defending important families. Young people are inherently resistant to personal protection, so to combat that, contractors would recruit younger operators for that purpose.
“You’re smiling now,” Anton said. “First vision from God and now something funny. What is funny about armed security guard?”
“It means they had a contingency plan,” Philip said. “And plans have to make sense. To make sense, they have to follow a straight line.”
“Straight line to where?”
He paused a beat. “I don’t know yet.”
“Is lots of help. You don’t know.”
It had been seven years since Philip was last directly involved in running field agents and field ops, so it took him a while to pull the standard protocols from memory. Of course, there was no guarantee that the Bureau would use the same protocols as the Agency, but the elements had to be pretty much the same. You had the routine components, such as never traveling predictable routes, and the tradecraft to recognize and elude tails. Then there were the elements that kicked in at the time when shots were fired — the specific actions to guard the protectees and get them out of harm’s way. Those he knew for a fact were common not just to the two agencies involved in this mess, but also to Secret Service and State. Anybody who protected anyone.
Equally predictable, yet far more fluid, were the protocols to be followed if a protectee under assault was hit in the crossfire. Hospitals would be prequalified for their capabilities and preplanned as a function of the nature of the problem. Most any hospital could help a protectee with a gallbladder attack, but if a gunshot wound were involved, only a shock trauma center would suffice when such facilities were available. When the protectee was a senior government official, certain staffing requirements at the hospitals would need to be proved prior to the trip.
Coming into this meeting, Philip had known that people had been shot during last night’s incident, but a check of hospital records had turned up nothing.
“Other than the mother, Sarah, were there any surviving wounded from either assault last night?” Philip asked.
“Yes,” Datsik said. “But they were all on our team.”
“And where did you take them?”
Datsik’s expression turned dark, defensive. “We took them to what your government likes to call a secret, undisclosed location,” he said. “That means none of your business.”
Philip pointed at Datsik’s nose. “Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
“Exactly the answer. When it is important to remain covert, hospitals are out of the question. At least standard hospitals are out of the question.”
Anton smiled as he got the point. “You have secret hospitals, too.”
Philip confirmed by making his eyebrows dance. “Won’t it be really freaking weird if we both use the same doctors?”
“I doubt that to be the case.”
The irony thing again. It was a strange part of Anton’s personality. The guy had a biting sense of humor and he enjoyed a good laugh, but subtleties were often beyond him. Perhaps it was a language thing.
The question on the top of Philip’s list was how to determine who that doctor might be. It was possible that the Agency and the Bureau used the same medical contractors, but extremely unlikely. Just as it would be awkward to run into Russian FSB operators, it would be equally awkward — maybe even more so — to run into a Bureau puke. The two groups did nearly as much warfare between each other as they did with the nation’s enemies.
It was not uncommon for agents of the CIA to see agents of the FBI as the bad guys, and of course the reverse was equally true. The animosity came from different views of how the world operated, and what right and wrong looked like. Common to both agencies, however, was hatred of the State Department. All State wanted to do was surrender. Philip thought of it as serving the French model.
“I need to make a couple of phone calls,” Philip said. “Private ones. I’m going to wander a few yards toward Maryland, but don’t go anywhere. If you need to make some phone calls yourself to get your team back together, now would be a good time.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jolaine put her Glock in the top drawer of the thin-walled faux-mahogany dresser.
The officer rapped again. “Ms. Bernard! Please!” His tone was harsher this time.
Jolaine looked at herself in the mirror. She saw nothing in the image that telegraphed the nightmare of the past few hours. All she saw was a young woman — an attractive one, she liked to think — who looked a little tired, but there was no tattoo on her forehead announcing that she’d killed people. Jolaine opened the door just as the cop was preparing to knock again. “Good lord, what is it?” she demanded as she pulled it open.
Outside, the officer who was doing the knocking stood off to the side. Another, with his hand resting casually on his sidearm, stood at a distance in the parking lot. Clearly, the agenda here was serious.
“Are you Marcia Bernard?” the cop asked.
With that question, she knew that the call had been placed by Hi-my-name-is-Carl, the only person in the world other that herself to know that she had an alias, let alone what it was.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“May we come in?” the cop asked as his partner moved closer. The partner’s hand never moved from his gun.