His good eye welled with tears. And just as he was about to rage aloud, his OPSAT beeped.
< < SIGNAL REESTABLISHED > >
A slight crackle came through his subdermal, and then… “Ben, it’s me. Are you there?”
“Here, Grim.”
“You must be out of range of the jammer now.”
“I guess so.”
“Are you all right?”
“Sergei’s dead… Everyone’s dead. Something happened. Bratus shot everyone. Then someone got to him.”
“We know. Just glad you’re all right. You did well, Ben. You got us what we need.”
“If you say so. I need to get the hell out of here.”
“Just hang in there. We’ll help get you and Sergei’s body out of the country. All we need right now is for you to stay on the road and get back to Vladivostok. I’ll set up a rendezvous point for you.”
“Roger that. Someone took off in Bratus’s car.”
“We know. We’re tracking him now.”
“There’s an Anvil case in that car. I don’t know what’s inside. Zhao and Murdoch are in there, too.”
“All right. You just concentrate on the road. That weather looks horrible.”
“You saw the car leave?”
“We did.”
“Even with this weather?”
“Ben, our birds in the sky are a lot more powerful than you know. Trust me.”
But he didn’t. She knew a hell of a lot more than she was telling him, but he was too intimidated to call her on it. He wanted to tell her about the phantom shooter, but he doubted she’d be surprised. Maybe she’d assigned someone to babysit him, someone who had driven off in that car, which was why all she cared about was getting him home with Sergei’s body, tying up one final loose end. Maybe she’d known Sergei was a traitor all along.
Well, Anna Grimsdóttir wasn’t so sexy anymore. She was cool and cunning and made him feel insignificant, a pawn in her much larger game. But what had he expected? And now he knew firsthand why most operatives guard their emotions. To do otherwise would get you killed. There was only the immediacy of the mission, the task at hand, and your loyalty to your country. To think you were any more important than that was kidding yourself. He glanced back at Sergei and sighed in grief.
With the wipers thumping fast across the windshield, Hansen now leaned toward the wheel and squinted through the chutes of falling snow. He’d slipped on his trifocals, but even with night vision his visibility was down to just a few meters, and the snow kept on coming.
As he neared the petrol station, he slowed to get the tag number from a car parked under the awning; then he drove on.
Ames figured he’d pick his way into the fuel truck and drive it back to the petrol station, where he’d switch to his rental car. As he got to work on the truck’s door, he began to craft the elaborate lie he would feed to Kovac like a T-bone with all the trimmings. But once news of the massacre reached Kovac’s desk, Ames had better be well into a mission for Third Echelon or far away from the man. He could already hear himself saying, “But it’s not my fault. Either Third Echelon was on to us or someone else was. Maybe Zhao. Maybe Bratus. Maybe even that arrogant bastard Murdoch.”
Wincing over these thoughts, Ames finally got the door open, but it took him nearly ten more minutes before he got the truck started. Oh, he was a hell of a lot better with a sniper’s rifle, that was for sure, and the delay was pretty damned embarrassing, but only he would know about it. He threw the old heap in gear and lumbered through nearly a foot of snow that had fallen since they’d arrived.
With one broken wiper blade, he headed out to the petrol station, where he found that the locks on his rental car had also been picked, the wires cut. He raged aloud and got back in the truck.
He drove for about fifteen minutes before he realized that the fuel truck he was driving was about to run out of fuel. The truck sputtered to a halt halfway back to Vladivostok. Ames sat there and finally, reluctantly, got on his satellite phone and called the NSA for help.
12
Hansen was met at the rental car agency by a scholarly looking, leather-faced man who introduced himself as Fedosky. He took possession of the car and Sergei’s body; then another man half Fedosky’s age pulled up in a black Mercedes.
“Get in.”
“Where am I going?” Hansen asked in Russian.
The young punker with a pierced nose raked his fingers through his spiked hair and answered, “The airport. Now shut up. No more questions.”
Hansen climbed into the front seat, and the punk floored it. The international airport was about an hour’s drive from the city, and the punk navigated through the snowstorm, scowling in silence. While Hansen sat there, knowing he’d probably have to wait till morning to fly out, the mission returned in vivid detail. He even flinched as Rugar’s fist came down. The Blu-ray player in his head was caught in a loop, and shutting his eyes only made things worse.
Grim would want to know what happened after Hansen was taken inside the hangar. She would want to know how he’d escaped. He would either reveal the presence of the phantom shooter or not. If Grim already knew about the shooter and he failed to say anything, she’d know he was holding out.
But if she was ignorant in that regard, he could construct the story of his escape. Omitting details to further his career was not a morally sound choice, but maybe there was a way to avoid lying. He realized he would have to feel out Grim, learn exactly how much she knew, before he shared the details of his interrogation by Rugar. Perhaps he could get Grim to admit that another field operative had been assigned to the mission, that she hadn’t really taken a chance on him, and then he could be honest with her.
Or… he could be entirely wrong about all of it. The shooter could be someone completely unexpected, a wildcard from another agency, who’d done Hansen a favor while still accomplishing his own mission to secure whatever was inside that Anvil case. If that was what had really happened, then Hansen was staring at the same fork in the road: Tell Grim he’d been saved… or tell her he’d saved himself.
Three days later Hansen was sitting inside the situation room with Grim. He’d told her he was ready to talk the moment he’d stepped off the plane in Baltimore, but she’d insisted that he receive a complete physical exam and get a day’s worth of bed rest. The X-rays revealed no permanent damage, and his eye, though still purple, was far less swollen.
“Before we begin, I assure you, Ben, that we’re very happy with the work you did. No plan survives the first enemy contact, right? You were able to improvise. Now we know Kovac is watching us. We know he got to Sergei. And we know he had some kind of relationship with Bratus and Zhao and that there’s a list of names.”
“Who drove off in Bratus’s car? You said you were tracking it.”
“We were, but we lost it. And we don’t know.”
He stared at her. “You lost it?”
She returned his gaze. “That’s right. The weather finally cut us off.”
“Any leads? Speculation?”
“A few, but I can’t comment at this time.”
Hansen thought for a moment. “Can I ask you a question?”
She frowned. “Sure.”
“Was I really working alone? I mean, just Sergei and me out there? No one else?”
Without hesitation she said, “I sent you out there myself. One agent, one runner. Why do you ask?”