“Ah, yeah, McColl. Tightass. You make sure he remembers who we’re working for, okay?”
“I’ll make sure he knows the Ambassador’s in charge.”
“Not the Amb, Chuck. The President. We work for the President.” Tower’s grin dropped a fraction. “Don’t ever forget that.”
“I won’t.”
“Good man,” Tower said, and he flashed the grin one last time, then moved out of the way, and Riess continued on, past the Marines and the locked doors, to the relative safety of his desk.
Where he sat and wondered if Aaron Tower didn’t already know about a British agent named Carlisle, and why she was coming to Uzbekistan.
CHAPTER 11
Uzbekistan—Tashkent—Hotel InterContinental
16 February, 1924 Hours (GMT+5:00)
It was a nice room, recently renovated, with new carpet and modern furnishings and a sleigh-backed king-size bed, and it reeked of a scent that Chace was certain came advertised as smelling like “Spring” or “Flowers” or some other nonsense printed on the bottle. She locked the door after her, threw the deadbolt, fixed the security bar in place, then dumped her duffel on the bed and pulled back the curtains, looking out at Tashkent at night. Lights glittered off a body of water in the near distance, some artificial lake in the nearby park, and she watched as headlights drifted along the road to the south—Husniddin Asomov, she remembered—and winked in the windows of the nearby apartments.
She was tired and sore, and it made her feel acutely aware of how long she’d been out of the game. She’d been unable to sleep on the flight, despite her best efforts, and that bothered her, too. In the past, she’d always managed to steal sleep on the way to a job, with the knowledge that once things started rolling on the ground, rest would be hard to come by. This time, as often as she had closed her eyes and repositioned herself in the too-narrow-and-not-enough-legroom seat on the plane, sleep evaded her.
She watched the lights flicker on the lake, and wondered what Tamsin was doing. She wondered just what she was doing.
She closed the drapes, and brought out the guidebook and map she had purchased at the airport after she’d cleared Customs. The guidebook was rife with typos and misspellings, badly translated from Uzbek, and full of useless advice about the sort of things she absolutely must do before leaving Tashkent. Apparently, seeing a ballet at the Alisher Navoi Opera House topped the list, followed closely by enjoying a traditional meal of samsa—a meat-and-onion pie—and plov—a pilau rice dish.
She tossed the book into a corner, then unfolded the map, and was heartened to see that it, at least, looked to be more useful. After studying it for several minutes, orienting herself in the city, Chace refolded it and placed the map aside on the desk. Then she opened her duffel, digging out first a GPS unit she’d bought in London, then the satellite phone she had purchased when she’d bought the pager she’d given to Porter, and finally, its charger.
The GPS unit was nothing out of the ordinary, and Chace switched it on, making certain the battery was still charged and that it still functioned as it should. The LCD lit up, and she moved to the window, canting the device to capture an uninterrupted signal. She took a reading, read the numbers, then cleared the screen and took a second reading, seeing that the figures matched the first set. Satisfied, she switched the GPS off and replaced it in the duffel, then picked up the satellite phone.
At first blush, it looked like nothing more than a slightly out-of-date mobile, and could be easily mistaken for such, until one extended the antenna. Stowed against the back of the unit, it swung out and away from the phone, a thick, black baton. Chace deployed the antenna, switched the power to on, then punched in her access code. For several seconds, there was nothing on the display but the luminous green glow, and she’d just begun to think something had gone wrong with the device when it beeped in her hand, and the word “Iridium” appeared on the screen. The bars marking signal strength expanded, then settled, and Chase released the breath she’d been holding, relieved. If the phone failed, the exfil would go all to hell—she’d have to find a way to procure another, and in Tashkent, she doubted that would be easy.
But the phone was working, and that, at least, meant that she had a way to get home.
Chace switched the phone off, collapsed the antenna, then plugged the charger into the outlet by the desk, grateful that the hotel sockets didn’t require an adapter. She hooked the phone to the charger, waited until she was certain it was drawing power, then turned once more to the bed.
The telephone on the nightstand rang.
Chace started, stared at it as it jangled a second time, its message light shimmering in time with the noise, and she felt her stomach contract with sudden vertigo.
She hadn’t been made at the airport; she was creaky, she knew that, she was maybe off her game, but she was sure of at least that much. There’d been no surveillance in the lobby that she’d seen when she’d checked in, no one casually disinterested in her business, nobody carefully avoiding her gaze.
No one knew she was here. No one was supposed to know.
But her phone was ringing, and unless it was a wrong number, unless it was the front desk calling, it meant that she was wrong, that she had been made. She had the sickening fear that it was someone from the U.K. Embassy on the other end of the line, someone from the Station who wanted to know why Tara Chace was in Tashkent, and what she was planning on doing here.
The phone rang a fourth time, and finally Chace answered.
“Ms. Carlisle?” The voice was male, American.
“Yes? Who is this?”
“I heard from a mutual friend that you were coming to town,” the voice said. “I thought maybe I could show you around?”
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“I’m sorry, it’s Charles. Chuck.”
“Tracy,” Chace said. “A guide would be wonderful, Charles. Is there anything in particular you’d like to show me? I’ve heard the performances at the Alisher Navoi are not to be missed.”
He laughed. “If you’d like to see ballet, sure. There’s a lot to see in town. Would you like to get together, so we can discuss it?”
“I’m a little tired after my trip, I don’t much feel like going out.”
“I can come there, if you like.”
“Would you?”
“Take me about an hour and a half.”
“Call me from the lobby when you arrive,” Chace said, and hung up.
Charles called from the lobby one hour and fifty minutes later, and four minutes after that, knocked on the door of Chace’s room. She loosed the security bar and the deadbolt, turned the knob just enough to free the latch from the wall, and stepped away, putting her back to the wall.
“It’s open,” Chace said.
The door swung in, and a man stood on the threshold, slender, perhaps an inch or two shorter than Chace, brown curly hair, wearing a black wool coat and heavy trousers. He entered in a lean, one hand at his side, the other still on the doorknob, looking around as he said, “Tracy?” and from the posture and the motion, she knew he wasn’t, at least, an immediate threat, and she felt the tension go from her shoulders and back, felt her stomach settle a fraction.