“I do contract work for them, but only on my terms. I am getting paid for the Fan assignment, but they only knew I would do it because of a personal reason.”
“What personal reason?”
“If you’d managed to drug me, you’d already know, because I’d tell you everything.” Court stood. “But since your plan failed, I am free to tell you that it’s none of your fucking business.”
Zoya rubbed tears from her eyes.
Court stepped back into the room, grabbed his phone, and slid the Glock into his waistband, covering it with his T-shirt. “I’m going out to make a phone call. If you want to go, you are free to go while I’m gone, or whenever the hell you want to. You are not a captive.”
Court went to the door, but Zoya called to him.
“Wait.”
He turned back to her but said nothing.
She said, “I’ve betrayed your trust in me. Trust I did not deserve.”
Court did not reply.
She looked away. “Tell your handler I will discuss the terms of my defection at her convenience.”
He turned and left the room.
Ten minutes later Court sat at a table in an open-air restaurant between the resort’s main swimming pool and the beach. A few guests sat at the nearby open-air bar, a few people were doing morning yoga on the beach, and the bartender was making an espresso for a sleepy elderly man in a sun hat reading a copy of the German magazine Der Spiegel. There were a few resort guests at the pool nearby, but Court’s immediate area was clear.
A few more guests, mostly families, lay on the sugary sand or splashed in the waters of the bay. In the distance a helicopter took off from the big yacht that had arrived the night before, and then it flew off to the north.
Court took out his phone and dialed Brewer’s number, then gave the response to her identity challenge. As soon as his identity was confirmed, Court’s CIA handler said, “I’ve been waiting all damn day for you to call.”
Court said, “You’ll forgive me when I tell you what I have for you. How would you like to recruit a new foreign asset and score a defection from a tier-one opposition intelligence service at the same time?”
Brewer was taken aback. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The female I told you about who was working with the Russians.”
“What about her?”
“She’s here with me in Phuket. She wants to defect and is willing to speak with you about terms.”
Brewer was baffled by this. “You flipped her?”
Court had never flipped anyone in his life. He wasn’t a case officer; he didn’t recruit and run agents. He said, “No, not really. She’s in a serious jam with Lubyanka, and they’ll kill her if she goes back to Russia. I think she sees us as her only option. Obviously she possesses a lot of intel, considering her position in the SVR.”
“Okay, you’ve got me on the hook. Tell me what you know, but do it quickly, because I have intel for you.”
Court filled his handler in on Zoya Zakharova, but he left out the sex and the fact that she’d killed another operative, and he glossed over the fact that she’d attempted to drug him just minutes earlier. There was a lot to his short relationship with this woman, and it was all he could do to give a dispassionate accounting of what had happened without putting in his own spin. At the moment he was pissed at her, and he had decided he wasn’t going to let her breach Chamroon’s estate with him when he jumped the fence.
Court had his own trust issues, after all.
Brewer took it all in, then said, “Obviously we’d like to speak with her. I’ll talk to Matt and see how he wants to proceed.”
“Okay.”
Brewer added, “And just for the record. You have my permission to pick up as many girls as you like while you are working… just as long as they are high-ranking intelligence officers from opposition first-tier agencies who wish to defect.”
“Funny,” Court said, and he wondered if he’d really given off the impression he’d entered into a relationship with Zoya, or if Brewer was just making a little quip. He pushed the thought away and said, “As far as Fan… I am operating on the assumption that the helicopter will arrive at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’ve been around the periphery of the estate, but I was waiting till tonight to breach.”
“You can cancel your plans.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because Fan Jiang managed to send a coded message to the U.S. ambassador to Thailand. He is asking for us to rescue him.”
Court couldn’t believe it. “When did this happen?”
“Our ambassador just got it two hours ago, but it was sent ten and a half hours ago. It got scooped up into a spam folder because it was literally a piece of spam, but somehow the ambassador’s secretary found it. Fan says he doesn’t know where he is being held, but we were able to use data from the e-mail to pinpoint a cell phone tower that was used to send the message. It’s located adjacent to the Chamroon estate there in Phuket, which means Fan is already there.”
Court knew he couldn’t have missed the helicopter arriving, but perhaps Nattapong Chamroon had been wrong about that indicator of Fan and Kulap’s presence. Maybe Fan came overland, arrived by boat, or even got here before Court and Zoya arrived. He asked, “How do you know the e-mail actually came from Fan?”
“He gave specific information only he would have known about his escape from China,” Brewer said. “Ground Branch is spinning up right now. They are arranging the helicopters, and they will hit the estate around one a.m.”
Court didn’t like it. “That’s not a good idea. Let me get in there. It’s a big building, jungle all around. I can try to pinpoint where they are holding Fan and then—”
“Negative. We’ve lost him so many times in the past two weeks already. If you go in there early and are detected, he’ll be long gone before the operators hit. Either Chamroon will move him or the Chinese will find them.”
“The Chinese don’t even know about Phuket.”
“That can change at any time.”
Court wasn’t happy about Brewer’s decision, but he saw no way to stop her from sending in Ground Branch. “I’ll stay on the outside of the compound, but I’ll try to get a better fix on his location. I don’t trust your intel.”
Brewer said, “Nothing wrong with the intelligence that ID’d Fan’s location, although I have to say I’m disappointed in the human intelligence asset who picked himself up a Russian girlfriend and is now probably hanging around in his hotel room with no pants on instead of working to acquire his target.”
Court’s jaw muscles flexed. He took a few breaths before responding, then said, “I’ll find where they are keeping Fan if he’s here.”
Brewer said, “No, you will not. You will check out of your hotel and start heading back to Bangkok by midnight. I can’t have you anywhere near the area when the raid comes. Call me back when you are on the road, and by then I’ll have instructions for how to proceed with Ms. Zakharova. She is your objective now. Let Ground Branch handle Fan Jiang. That op is over for you.”
The call ended there; Court didn’t like it, of course, but he could make no reasonable excuse to Brewer as to why he had to be the one to rescue Fan.
It seemed to him that at every turn, the one insurmountable hurdle in his own plan for this operation was finding a way to save Donald Fitzroy from Colonel Dai. He owed Fitzroy, and he knew he was Fitzroy’s only hope, but it continued to look like saving the life of the Englishman was going to be a bridge too far.
The old man had already had two fingers lopped off, but by this time tomorrow he’d probably be in a shallow grave in the hills over Hong Kong.