“Yep,” Kara said. “And that’s where they are going to be assembled or moved to an assembly area somewhere else.”
“Well, where is that area?” Hail asked.
“We don’t know,” Kara said. “That’s one of the reasons we need your help.”
“How am I supposed to help with that?” Hail asked.
“We need you to track the parts to the warehouse, or wherever they take them.”
“And how am I supposed to do that? You already told me that the parts are coming in from every direction. How are you or your agency going to track them all?”
“We don’t have to track them all,” Kara said. “All we have to do is track one of the parts.”
Hail thought about the situation for a moment.
“You know where one of the parts is coming in. Don’t you?” Hail probed.
“Yep,” Kara said. “One of the second stage sections of a missile is in the hull of a Chinese fishing trawler called the Huan Yue that is steaming through the Sea of Okhotsk right now.”
“Huan Yue,” Hail repeated. “Doesn’t that mean joyful or happy?”
“Why, yes it does, Mr. Hail. Are you good with languages?” Kara asked, thinking they had something in common.
“Not really, I just remembered eating at a place called Huan Yue and their food sucked. I was neither joyful nor happy.”
The President let out a little laugh.
Hail looked at Pepper. The man was sitting on the edge of the sofa. His face kept twitching. It was obvious that Pepper didn’t like his pretty female CIA person doing all the talking, but it was going pretty well, so Pepper was keeping it zipped.
Hail looked at Kara. She was done talking now, at least for the moment. He liked the way she talked. Direct and to the point. She didn’t posture or make the situation any bigger or smaller than it actually was. She didn’t try to jam in details that would only obscure the focus of the point she was trying to make. Her voice was nice to listen to, as well. It wasn’t husky, but it carried a certain amount of weight to it. Her tone was neither biting nor nasally, but it was crisp and distinct. Her S sounds were precise and controlled. Her diction was crystal clear. Hail detected a hint of someone who spoke more than one language. Maybe more than a dozen languages. When he looked at her and watched the way she spoke, he was certain she had a very talented mouth and tongue; the basics of speaking many dialects.
Everyone appeared to be waiting on Hail to say something or suggest something or agree to something. But at that exact moment there was nothing on the table. There had been a request made by the United States to help the CIA with their missile dilemma, and Hail had made a request for the CIA intelligence group to help him track down more people who needed to die.
Pepper decided to frame the deal and said, “So you need our help and we need yours. Do you think that you can put together an operation that can track this missile section on the Huan Yue until it reaches its final destination inside North Korea?”
Hail mulled it over.
“How many days until the Huan Yue reaches North Korea?” he asked, trying to sound noncommittal.
“Four days,” Pepper said. “Maybe less.”
Hail shook his head. “That’s really tight, almost un-do-able.”
“We would like to offer Ms. Ramey’s services to help with the logistics,” the President told Hail.
“That’s a gracious offer, but if I decide to move forward with this operation; once we have the specifics on the where the Huan Yue is going to dock, then we can take it from there.”
The President looked frustrated, as though her point was clear, yet not understood.
“Marshall,” she said. “We want Ms. Ramey to be part of your team. Wherever it is you are going back to… Madagascar wasn’t it? Well, we would like Ms. Ramey to go to Madagascar as well. We need someone working for us who is also working next to you. We need a measure of control in operations that we feel are extremely sensitive. If you require information or intelligence, we would like Ms. Ramey to vet the request and contact her office for that information.”
Hail looked irritated.
The President sensed his consternation and tried to smooth things over.
“It’s not that we don’t trust you. But we can’t allow a private citizen to simply request top secret CIA information without any type of review or coordination. After all, some of the persons you may be targeting might already part of a current CIA operation.”
“But I don’t understand why you need someone physically on my team.”
“Because that’s the deal,” Pepper said bluntly. “We either have someone on the inside monitoring your missions, your planning, your requests for intelligence, the execution of your missions, or we don’t want anything to do with it.”
Hail was very close to washing his hands of these people and catching a cab back to the airport, but he knew he needed them more than they needed him. They probably felt that he was more a problem to them than an asset.
Pepper said, “Now, if there is someone other than Ms. Ramey you prefer, then we could work that out. But I want you to understand that she is the best we have. She knows most of the players that you are going to come in contact with. She is also an expert in many languages. We could give you someone else, but that would be second or third party information you would be getting from those agents. Kara has personally interacted with the principles and she knows what she’s doing. We trust her and hope you will as well.”
Kara looked at Pepper like, who the hell is this guy? As long as she had known the man, he had never said a single positive thing about her, let alone brag about her in front of the POTUS.
Hail looked at Kara, who was looking at Pepper. It was just so damn difficult to take this supermodel for real. Hail did his best to separate his stereotyped preconceptions from what Pepper had just told him, but failed to do so. As far as he was concerned, the vote was still out on this woman. The only way Kara Ramey could convince Hail of her usefulness was by her actions. After all, her boss had his own agenda.
Hail was not a stupid man. He understood that Pepper wanted to get Ramey into the mix so she could report Hail’s best kept secrets back to the CIA. That wasn’t going to happen. Kara could go back to his ship, but she wouldn’t be a very happy supermodel once she discovered the restrictions she would be under.
“Is that it?” Hail asked the group.
“Well, you didn’t give us an answer,” Pepper said.
“If we have four days then we need to leave now. Do you have any bags?” Hail asked Kara.
“No, I really don’t need anything. I assume they have stores in Madagascar. Right?”
“Right,” Hail smiled.
The President picked up her desk phone. Without dialing any numbers, she said into the handset, “Please bring in Marine Two to take Mr. Hail plus one back to Andrews.”
Hail looked at a smiling and radiant Kara Ramey.
He could think of worse secret agents to have aboard his ship.
Hands had been shaken and good lucks had been thrown all around.
Now Hail found himself standing on the back lawn of the Whitehouse next to his boyhood friend Trevor Rogers, waiting for the helicopter. About thirty yards away and well out of earshot, Pepper and Ramey were having a conversation.
Hail looked at the two and could only imagine what was being said. He could hear Pepper in his head.
Kara, I want to know everything about Hail that you can get your hands on. I want to know about his technology, about his people, size, numbers, dollars, research, production, anything and everything you can get your hands on. I want a full update every day. I want schematics and designs and blueprints and sketches and basically everything about everything that Hail has ever done since the moment of his birth.