“It doesn’t matter, Annie. I can’t have you do this.”
“And I can’t have you do it alone. It’s that simple, Sean. It really is.”
We just stood there for a moment, in the dim light of the garage, face to face, a trunk-load of SWAT weaponry at our disposal.
I couldn’t object. I had no right to object.
She was in.
I waited till we were all set to go, then I called Tess using the safe Viber protocol. It was killing me not to have her here, not to be able to see her and hold her tight against me and kiss her before setting off, knowing the dangers ahead, what we were going up against-but it was better this way. It would have been hugely tough on us both to say goodbye face to face and it was still too risky to have her come down here again, for both of us. It was also better to keep her at a distance from it all, knowing she’d have serious objections over what my makeshift crew and me were about to do. Which, sure enough, didn’t take long to materialize once I had her on the line.
“Sean, you know who these people are,” she said, her exasperation growing with every word since the beginning of the call. “You know what they’re capable of, you know what resources they have to draw on. This is nuts.”
“Tess, please. Like I said-”
“Just take a night to sleep on it,” she interjected forcefully, “to think it all through again. Maybe you’ll see something you missed.”
“We’ve been over it, Tess. I know what I’m doing. And this is the way it has to be.”
“It’s a trap, you said so yourself.”
“Yes. A trap we instigated. They’re playing into our hands, Tess. We’ve got to strike before they have too much time to think things through.”
She went quiet for a moment, just a long, leaden exhale. I could just picture the way her face would be all crunched up with frustration, the way her eyes would be set, all fierce and fired up.
“I won’t be able to talk to you until it’s done,” I added, breaking the heavy silence.
“I know,” she said, subdued now.
“It’s going to be fine. I know what I’m doing, Tess.”
“I damn well hope so.”
We’d said all that needed to be said. It was time to go.
“I love you,” I said.
“I damn well hope so too,” she said, her tone cracking a bit.
“Give the kids a kiss from me. And I’ll see you… soon.”
“OK.”
Then I hung up.
We drove out of New York City that evening after putting the finishing touches to the plan of action I had proposed while cleaning out some takeaway Chinese at Deutsch’s place.
Four of us, in Deutsch’s Crown Vic: me, her, Kurt and Gigi. Our minds were all busy playing out what we imagined the next day would bring. We’d already gone over what we were about to do several times and the fact that, during the whole drive down, the only time one of us spoke up was to question some aspect of our plan aloud just showed how it was all any of us was thinking about.
The traffic was fluid heading out of the city on a Sunday night, and with no major roadworks to impede our progress and the snow not strong enough to cause problems, we passed the signs to Philadelphia around two hours later and skirted Baltimore an hour after that. An hour more, and we were checking into a Marriott at Tysons Corner, west of Washington DC and almost exactly halfway between Vienna, Virginia and the CIA’s headquarters at Langley. Two rooms, one for Deutsch and me, the other for Kurt and Gigi.
We all needed a good night’s rest, although I wasn’t sure we’d be sleeping sound.
We had an early start tomorrow if we were going to catch the first of our worms.
MONDAY
62
Vienna, Virginia
It hadn’t been Tomblin’s best weekend.
He didn’t like this-playing a waiting game. Not this type, anyway. A lot of the intelligence work he oversaw involved waiting and often felt like watching slow, ponderous moves on a chess board: you put something in play, you hoped your counterpart reacted the way you wanted him to, then you made your next move and so on, in the hope of getting the result you wanted. A result on which lives, often many lives, depended. Then there was the other type of waiting: the nail-biting, pulse-racing wait while an op was underway, monitoring it from hundreds or thousands of miles away in the comfort of a windowless, climate-controlled Langley room, hoping a radio confirmation of a successful outcome would come through.
This was different. They’d planted the seed on Erebus late Friday night. He’d sat with his analyst and watched as the brief, typed exchanges had popped up on the monitor facing them. The message had been received and understood. The question was now about when Reilly would act, when he’d show up at Roos’s lodge, and what the outcome of that confrontation would be.
Until Reilly showed up there, Tomblin was uneasy. The agent had shown himself to be an unpredictable bastard and a loose cannon. Tomblin wasn’t comfortable having him out in the wind. Even though he’d fed him Roos’s name and location, he still felt vulnerable. It had been on his mind all weekend-the wait for the call from Roos telling him it was over-and was still on his mind as he slipped on his coat, grabbed his briefcase, and made his way to the garage that abutted his six-bedroom house.
Moments later, the garage door glided open and he pulled out in his car, an imposing dark grey Lincoln Navigator. He paused at the end of the drive as he always did, glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure the garage door shut properly, then he stepped off the brake pedal and motored away.
As he drove in the cossetted comfort of the large SUV, he felt good about going to work. There would be a lot going on to distract him from the discomfort that was gnawing away at him. Before long, he’d be immersed in situations and strategies that required his decisions. And the call from Roos would come. Tomblin knew Reilly would not be able to resist going after him, even knowing the odds were stacked against him.
The snow was still falling, and an inch or so of it had settled on the quiet residential lane, not enough to worry the big tires of his four-wheel drive. He was adjusting his climate control as he reached the stop sign at the T-junction with Wolftrap Road where an attractive, full-figured redhead was waiting to cross the street.
He brought the Navigator to a complete stop and found himself staring at her, his attention sucked in by the alluring woman who turned and gave him a warm smile to acknowledge his having stopped. His eyes studied her as she started to cross the road, trying to divine the exact contours of what looked like a fetchingly curvaceous body that lay cloaked under her flowing coat. His imagination basked in the moment, transforming her into someone he fantasized about, a broadly similar female actor from a television drama series that was set in the advertising world of the 60s. The show bored him, its machinations far too simplistic for his taste-but he still watched it with his wife in an effort to find more common ground in their increasingly diverging tastes, and enjoyed every second she was on screen. He pictured her as the woman who was now mere feet from his bumper, taking it slow, using careful, elegant steps to avoid slipping, glancing around again to jolt him with her smile-and he was relishing the moment until he sensed a shadow rushing right up to his side window a split second before the window exploded inward and showered him with shards.
He didn’t even have time to react before a balled fist rocketed in and punched him in the jaw, rattling his brain and sending him flying sideways against the seat belt. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a hand reaching in and yanking the door handle open, then Reilly was stuffing a gun in his face while his other hand hit the start/stop button and killed the engine.