She dropped the second folder on the first, and Crocker reached for it, flipping it open. “Sit.”
Chace barked, once, sounding less like a dog than like a woman trying to sound like one, then pulled up the chair. She leaned forward and lifted his pack of Silk Cut, freed a cigarette, and Crocker slid his lighter across the desktop absently, without looking away from his reading. Chace lit, exhaled, and sat back, waiting for his verdict.
Crocker closed the folder, then reached for his pack and lighter, sitting back himself. “You were diplomatic.”
“I thought honey rather than vinegar.”
“Probably wise. All right, I’ll send it up to C. If she approves it, she’ll have Rayburn present at the meeting.”
“He’ll sell it? We need more money.”
“We always need more money, Tara.”
“On Operation: Lanyard, Mission Planning couldn’t secure seats for Poole and me on the same flight, sir. We ended up flying into Hanoi sixteen hours apart, and that put me sixteen hours in theater without backup. The last time Lankford went out, he flew economy because Budget wouldn’t authorize a first-class ticket.”
“He did all right.”
“He did, but that’s hardly the point.”
Crocker lit his own cigarette. “C will give it to Rayburn, and Rayburn will bring it to Finance. It’ll be taken care of.”
“Nice to have a Deputy Chief we can trust.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Crocker told her. While he didn’t actually grin, he came close.
Tara laughed, then reached into her jacket pocket and removed the printout she’d been carrying there, folded widthwise. “You see this?”
“I’m still working through the ‘Urgents,’ so unless it was graded ‘Immediate,’ no, I haven’t. What is it?”
“It’s about Tashkent.”
“Will it make me happy?”
“It’s not about the last Starstreak, if that’s what you’re asking, no.”
Crocker took the next paper waiting for him at the top of his stack, readying his pen. “You’re still certain they only used three of them?”
“Technically, they used two of them, I used one,” Chace clarified. “And yes, I am certain, as certain as I can be considering that I was unconscious for a time.”
“I don’t like loose ends.”
Chace grunted agreement. In the past sixth months, there’d been no sign nor whisper of the fourth of Barclay’s four missiles, and try as Tashkent Station might, they’d heard nary a whisper of its whereabouts. If it was still in Uzbekistan, in Ahtam Zahidov’s possession, perhaps, there was no proof of the fact. If it wasn’t in Zahidov’s possession, then God only knew who had it, and what they were planning to do with it. Neither Chace nor Crocker nor the DC nor C doubted it would come back to haunt them. Where and when were the only questions.
Chace handed the sheet over, watched as Crocker unfolded it. It was a simple printout out of a news piece Chace had pulled from online earlier that morning, a Reuters story carried on the wire, with a photo. The printer in the Pit was a cranky old laserjet, and incapable of color, though it had tried its best to reproduce the graphic. The photo had been taken in Tashkent the previous week, outside the Bakhor Concert Hall in Tashkent, and showed President Sevara Malikov-Ganiev speaking to the American Ambassador, a man named Michael Norton.
Crocker skimmed the article, examined the photo, then sent it back to her across the desk. “I do not see the missing Starstreak.”
“As I said, this isn’t about the missing Starstreak.”
“Then please explain the operational significance of this photograph.”
Chace pushed it back toward him, this time tapping an index finger on the photograph. “There.”
Crocker looked again, and either didn’t like what he saw or didn’t like where he suspected Chace was going with this. “That’s the boy?”
“Stepan, yes.” Chace took the paper back. In the photo, Stepan was in the background, in the cluster of bodyguards behind Sevara. The boy had been dressed up, wearing what passed for formal clothing for a two-and-a-half-year-old. Chace had looked for, but hadn’t seen, Zahidov in the shot. “I’m wondering if she knew they’d be photographed.”
“It looks unstaged,” Crocker said.
“So maybe the Ambassador didn’t know the camera would be there. But maybe she did.”
“You think she’s parading the boy? Why?”
“I don’t know.” Chace put out her cigarette. “But you read my after-action, you know what I was asked during the torture. If Zahidov was trying to play psychological games along with the physical ones, that’s one thing. But if Ruslan actually escaped, that’s something else. Sevara brings his son out for a photo op, that’s a warning to him. ‘Hey, look—hostage.’ ”
Crocker scowled, tilting forward in his chair. “You could just be paranoid.”
“There’s that, too.” She smiled thinly, to show that she didn’t think she was. “But no one ever confirmed Ruslan’s death, boss. I didn’t get a good look at him, and no one from our team ever saw the body.”
“There were two state funerals held in Uzbekistan the week after you got home. One for President Malikov, one for his son.”
“Closed casket,” Chace pointed out.
“For Ruslan, yes. And if he died the way you thought he died, that would make sense, because he would have caught a faceful of shrapnel.”
“You don’t think he’s alive?”
Crocker exhaled smoke. “I don’t know. There’s been no sign of him, there’s been no word of him. What I do know, however, is that Ahtam Zahidov tortured you and intended to kill you. And you’ve never been the type to forgive and forget.”
“I’ve forgiven you.”
“I’d like to think you don’t group me and Zahidov in the same class.”
“No, of course not.” Chace leaned forward again, serious. “I’m not trying to make up an excuse to go back to Tashkent, boss. That’s not what this is.”
“I don’t think you are,” Crocker said mildly. “But you’re not beyond finding an excuse for me to send you there.”
Chace fell silent, thinking, then sitting back once more and looking away, to the bust of Winston Churchill that Crocker kept atop his document safe. It was one of the few appointments he kept in the office, the bust, a bookshelf filled with the latest in Jane’s titles, and a Chinese dragon print on one wall. He’d had the dragon for as long as Chace had known him to occupy the office, and she sometimes wondered at its significance, but she’d never asked.
He had her number, of course—but that didn’t mean that Chace was wrong about the possibility Ruslan had survived.
Since returning from Uzbekistan, she’d made a point of staying informed about what was happening in the region, and as much as she could claim the interest was operational, it clearly went to the personal. She’d spent dozens of hours reviewing files, viewing photographs, in particular attempting to identify the two men who had helped Zahidov torture her. She knew their names now. Tozim was Tozim Stepanov, the older man with the tools Andrei Hamrayev. She remembered them.
There were nights when she dreamed about Tozim Stepanov and Andrei Hamrayev and, worst of them all, Ahtam Zahidov. Memory had blunted nothing, and Chace recalled him perfectly. Zahidov’s thin-lipped smile and his insistent fingers, and the practiced nonchalance with which he’d hurt her. She remembered Zahidov’s hands burning on her as he had moved to strip the last of her clothes, his eagerness to rape her.
Chace didn’t just want Zahidov dead. She wanted to be the one to kill him. There would be a reckoning, she was certain. The only question was when.