“I will contact you soon.”
“Immediately,” Galina said, raw panic in her voice for the first time. “The second missile, us. Everything is on the line.”
“We know,” Lana said.
The link ended. No one said a word for a full beat. Holmes spoke first: “We must get her out of there. I believe her. What about you?” He looked at the two voice analysts.
“She’s either the very best liar we’ve ever encountered, or she’s for real,” the senior of the two said. The woman next to him nodded.
So did the psychiatrist. “Very difficult to assess much at this remove and with such brief exposure to the subject.”
All the caveats Lana had come to expect from the psych corps, but she still wanted to hear his thoughts, which made his preamble all the more frustrating.
“But I would say she’s genuinely frightened. Did you see the way she held her daughter? Both arms around her, like the camera itself were a weapon.”
“Which it could be if we fail her trust,” Lana said. “There’s no telling for sure if she’s just been exposed.”
“But you have no doubts about Bortnik herself?” Holmes asked her.
“I always have doubts,” Lana replied, “but very few about her.”
“Find out which coastline she’s near,” Holmes said. “We may be able to pin it down with the signal, but then again, that’s not always bankable. It’s going to be difficult to exfiltrate them. We are stretched beyond the limit here.”
“But we will, right?” Lana said.
“Yes, we will,” Holmes agreed assertively. “Somehow. But a big military operation, like the way we got you out of Saudi Arabia last year, is going to be terribly hard to pull off. We’re all dealing with sea-level rise, while Russian security services are on full alert from the New Siberian Islands to Tartus.” The latter was on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. It contained a small Russian naval base, the country’s southernmost, and the only one outside Russia proper.
Before her colleagues even filed out of her office, Lana was back on the IRC: “We’re committed to getting you and your daughter. You must tell me where you are.”
In seconds, as promised, Galina fired back. “I’m hiding in Sochi. I want to get out of here. I’ve been seeing water getting higher and boats leaving. Should I find a place to charter one?”
“We’ll need to coordinate that. Please don’t make any arrangements yet. Just find a safe place for the night, but a place where we can be in touch. Okay?”
“Yes. I’ll try.”
She sounded nervous, Lana thought. Who can blame her?
Lana ran the chartering business by Holmes right away.
“I was thinking of something like that,” the deputy director said. “A very low-key effort that would take advantage of the challenges that every seaport is having. Boats are heading out to sea everywhere to try to avoid the destruction that will come with being moored on a coastline. But we’ll have one of our people handle the charter. For security reasons, Bortnik can’t be risking that kind of move.”
“So send in the navy? I could talk to Jensen.” Reminding Holmes that her number two at CyberFortress had been a navy cryptographer.
Holmes was shaking his head. “If we send a military unit in there and they get caught taking them out, the Russians might claim it was an invasion. I don’t want to even think about what that could mean. And let’s not forget, the way this is playing out the Russians are likely to be the world’s preeminent power.” He looked out his window. “If they aren’t already.”
“But I have to go.”
“That’s right, and you will go precisely because you’re not military. Let’s face it, Lana, if you get caught, they’ll love you to death just like they loved Snowden, in hope that you’ll eventually turn the world over to them. But your expertise is not in exfiltrating operatives and smuggling them into our arms on the high seas. We’ve got to find a private citizen, preferably a shady character, who knows how to operate below the radar screen, in every sense, in the middle of chaos and vast surveillance.”
“A drug smuggler?” Oh, my God, she thought. He’s been leading me there all along. “Donald Fedder?”
“What do you think?” Holmes asked her.
“My ex?” She was so flabbergasted she had to confirm that she and Holmes were talking about the same person.
“Yes, that Donald Fedder.”
“He’s a flake.”
“Not as much as you might think. I’ll get to that in a minute. Just tell me what you think of him, other than he’s a flake. Then I’ll tell you what we think of him.”
“Well, he’s a great sailor. There’s no questioning his seamanship. He could sail without electronics. Hell, he could sail without a rudder. But I think there’s plenty to question about his character. He just got out of prison, you know.”
“I do, but he spent a great deal less time behind bars than you think.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s been working with the DEA since his arrest. But he had to go through the courts and get sentenced and do some time to establish his bona fides. All the time you thought he was incommunicado in prison, though, we had him back down in Colombia moving drugs with FARC. The drugs ended up in the ocean but the intelligence he gave us on FARC was remarkable. It’s a key reason some of FARC’s top guerilla leaders have died in targeted strikes.”
“You are—” Lana almost blurted “shitting me.” But what Holmes had just said would explain why Doper Don looked like he’d spent his four years in a country club: he’d been cruising the Caribbean.
She had to sit down. “That guy never breathed a word of this to me.”
“There’s a reason he was recently paroled, Lana.”
“Does he have any training with guns, that sort of thing?”
“Quantico. The full course.”
“To be honest, Bob, till this moment I just considered him a ne’er-do-well.”
“All the better. Has he said anything notable about what’s going on?”
“Yes, at first he told our daughter that it was nothing but a conspiracy theory of the military-industrial complex.”
Holmes laughed. “Oh, boy, was he ever jerking your chain. Anything else?”
“Yes, last night he sang a different tune to Emma. He said that if he ever got his hands on the people who did this, he’d break them into pieces.”
“He’s playing it all to script, except now you need to know.”
“So you’re planning to have Donald Fedder, with me aboard, smuggle Galina and her kid out of Russia?” It sounded so improbable to Lana that she could hardly form those words into a sentence.
“It’s not ideal, but given exigencies here and our resources, we don’t have a lot of options. Fedder has been thoroughly tested. He’s pulled off tougher coups than this.”
“Will there be any backup?”
“Yes, but they can’t sail away with Galina and her daughter. You can. So can Doper Don.”
“That’s my nickname for him.”
“I know. He told us. Lana, it’s everybody’s nickname for him now, except we use it ironically. I suspect you will, too. Right now, you two need to talk privately. Your daughter cannot know any of this until you and Don bring the Bortniks back here safely.”
“I’ll go home and talk to him now.”
“No, I’d suggest you go down the hall to the SCIF. That’s where he’s waiting. We’ll leave you two alone to sort things out.”
“He’s here, in a SCIF?”
“Correct.”
“Who’s in charge?” Lana asked.
“You’re in charge of the operation,” Holmes said. “But he’ll be the captain of the ship.”