The remainder of the crew began to talk amongst themselves. Some conversations were animated; others were factual and a few were stilted and sullen.
Hail looked down at the timer. He pressed STOP and the meter read 00:03:23.
Hail told Renner, “Please save a copy of Chang taking his table face plant to my NAS. I have an email to write.”
“No problem,” Renner responded.
“If Chang comes back to life, you will notify me immediately,” Hail joked.
“You will be the first to know,” Renner smiled.
The hubbub in the mission center wound down and then drifted off to nothing. Everyone wanted to hear what Hail had to say.
Hail got to his feet and looked around the room, nodding his head in approval. He bunched up his face and then smiled. For a moment, to the crew it looked as if Hail was a little choked up and was trying to hold back a tear.
Hail rubbed his stubbly chin and thought about his wife and his kids.
When he spoke, his voice sounded distant, as if he were physically in the room but his soul was a million miles away.
“We are all here for the same reason,” Hail began softly. “We all do what we do for the same reason. And today we have done something good. Something that will make a difference. Something that will change how the game is played. And don’t fool yourself for a moment. This is a game to all these tyrants. A game played with human lives.”
Hail paused for a moment and looked back at the screen. Chang’s servants were slapping him softly in the face; a rudimentary method of revival.
Not even your supreme leader is going to be able to bring that guy back, Hail thought.
Hail continued addressing his crew.
“You should all be very proud of yourselves and what we have accomplished. Your loved ones would be proud of you. I can guarantee that. Your country is proud of you. I am proud of you.”
The crew in the Nucleus’s mission room began clapping and cheering.
Three thousand miles away, the crew in the Hail Proton’s mission room began clapping and cheering.
And five thousand miles further around the globe, the crew in the Hail Electron’s and Atom’s mission room began clapping and cheering.
They had all been watching the feed. They had all shared the same experience.
Hail stoically walked to the door, pulled it open and stepped through to the other side.
He then turned around and made sure the watertight door was closed securely.
He no longer heard the crew and knew they couldn’t hear him.
Only then did he allow himself to scream the word YES and pump his fists in victory.
Moscow, Russia ― Sheremetyevo International Airport
Kara saw the man, the guy who had been following her since she flew out of Nizhniy Novgorod at five o’clock that morning on Aeroflot 1223. He was good. Better than most tails she had encountered during her time as a spy for the CIA.
“Spy for the CIA,” she hummed, thinking it could be a gitchy pop song. “I was a spy for the CIA, something… something… something, because crime don’t pay.” Maybe not. She was pretty happy right now. She had taken a Valium and a Xanax. It wasn’t great tradecraft to be super-stoned while she was still on the job, but her fear of flying was so debilitating, that without the drugs she would have either been climbing the walls or simply not flying.
The guy that was tailing her was dressed in summer Russian attire, which for most of the Russian public was anything they could afford. The bottom half of the man was clad in American jeans, Levi's 569 loose straight jeans, Kara thought. But the ironic thing about this particular man was his choice in black tee-shirts. The one he was wearing had three big letters that read KGB.
Kara stifled a laugh. How audacious. Some people, even Russians, might not know that the KGB on the man’s shirt stood for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Translated to English it meant Committee for State Security. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the KGB had been split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The original KGB didn’t even exist anymore.
The KGB guy was having coffee at the tiny café that looked out onto the crowd waiting to board the connecting Aeroflot flight to Fairfax, Virginia. He was pretending to be either texting on his phone or possibly playing a game. But he was holding his phone at an odd angle. Most people would typically hold their phone so the back of it was pointing toward the ground. But Mr. KGB was holding his phone almost perpendicular to the ground, where the back of the phone was pointing directly at her. Kara surmised that the man had the camera turned on and was watching her by watching his phone. Not the most inventive method of observation she had ever seen, but then the man was wearing a tee-shirt boasting a spy agency that had been dead for forty years. So, what could she expect?
The tee-shirt was kinda brilliant when she thought about it. After all, what spy would wear a shirt that said, “Hey, I’m a spy.”
No one. That’s who. So it was the perfect camouflage. Maybe she should consider wearing a CIA tee-shirt.
The airport was busy. Kara guessed that more than five hundred travelers were clustered between the two active gates and preparing to board. She knew that the man wouldn’t make a move with all these people around. All these witnesses. And there could be other agents lurking around as well; those men or women who were aligned with other countries and had a vested interest in Kara and her mission.
Kara couldn’t worry about all that or it would make her go insane. The best way to deal with cling-ons was one of three methods. Loose him, confront him or kill him. And at this very moment, Kara was tired. She didn’t feel like those three options, so she opted for the fourth option, which was ignore him.
Back in Nizhniy, in her hotel room, she had waited until Kornev had plugged his phone into the CIA charger for the night. Five minutes later, all the data from the Russian arms dealer’s phone had been mirrored to her own phone. In order to draw as little attention to herself as possible, she had dressed down in comfy baggy grey matching sweat pants and matching shirt and white tennis shoes. All of her curves disappeared under the baggy fabric. Before she left the hotel, she removed as much makeup as would come off with soap and water. The bulk of everything else she had brought with her went into her big suitcase. Ten minutes later, she was in a cab and heading for the airport. That resulted in zero hours of sleep. This assignment was starting to wear on her.
By now, Kornev would have inquired about her with the desk clerk to get her room number. The desk clerk would have looked her up on his computer and told Kornev that Ms. Merkulov had checked out. The desk clerk would have then handed Kornev the envelope that Tonya had instructed him to give to Mr. Kornev.
Psychologically this worked out better than Tonya simply disappearing in the middle of the night. People who checked in and checked out were responsible people with places to be. People who just left in the middle of the night were much more suspect. Kara understood that Kornev would still be suspicious about her and she didn’t want to freak him out to the point where he possibly panicked, leaving his luggage, toiletries, and God help her, his new iPhone charger in his room. Hopefully, Kornev would read the note and assume that she was what she appeared to be; a flighty kooky silly horny woman who had too much money and not many brains. If the situation played out in her favor, he would email her and they might develop a relationship of sorts. This was a one-way street, however. Kornev had to contact her and invite her to meet him. There was no way that she could run into him a second time by mere coincidence. That would get her killed.