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Flynn grinned at him. “Oh, hell, no. I may be loco, but I’m not a complete lunatic. Based on what Khavari told me, it would take an armored battalion with full-on air support to penetrate the security cordon around that tanker. Which doesn’t really seem like the subtle approach Four ordinarily prefers.”

“To put it mildly,” Fox said, matching his ironic tone. “And, of course, that’s setting aside the minor problem of finding a force of spare tanks and fighter planes just lying around for us to borrow.” He turned serious. “So what do you have in mind?”

“Right now, the only real loose thread we have left to pull on is that friend of Khavari’s, Daneshvar — the guy who first clued him into all the weird shit going down at that shipyard,” Flynn explained. “If we can make contact with him directly, we might pick up some of the answers we need.”

Fox frowned. “There are quite a number of ‘if’s lurking there, Nick.”

“Yes, sir, I realize that,” Flynn agreed evenly. “I just don’t see any other way forward right now.”

Slowly, the older man nodded. “Very well, start working up a proposed infiltration plan and any necessary cover stories. But I’ll need to consult closely with my colleagues at the other stations before authorizing this mission.”

Flynn wasn’t surprised by his superior’s reluctance to act without approval from the other members of Four’s upper echelon. From its very beginnings in the earliest days of the developing Cold War, the Quartet Directorate had used a collegial approach to leadership. The reality that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely was abundantly clear to those who’d already risked their lives fighting Nazi Germany — only to see the growing threat posed by the Soviet Union in World War II’s chaotic aftermath.

Four’s first recruits were all veterans of the American OSS, Britain’s SOE (the Special Operations Executive), and the Resistance movements of France, Norway, Poland, and several other Allied countries. Deeply troubled and even angered by what they viewed as the growing politicization, penetration by Soviet moles, and increasing risk aversion of the West’s official government intelligence agencies, these men and women banded together to create an organization that could act swiftly, secretly, and decisively against serious threats to the free world. Aware, however, of the inherent dangers involved in creating a private intelligence group expressly intended to operate outside strictly lawful channels, Four followed one inflexible rule: The Quartet Directorate never involved itself in the domestic politics of any friendly nation. As a safeguard, if time allowed, large-scale or unusually dangerous operations required explicit approval from the separate national stations scattered around the world.

“And in the meantime,” Fox went on, “I’ll pass the key elements of what we’ve learned to a couple of my contacts in the CIA.”

Like most of Four’s senior executives, the older man maintained discreet, arms-length relationships with people in the regular military and intelligence services — though only after they’d been meticulously vetted. And he was always careful to conceal the true nature of the Quartet Directorate’s structure, aims, and capabilities from these contacts.

“Do you think that’ll do any good?” Flynn asked skeptically. His own bad experiences with some of the CIA’s “best and brightest” had soured him on both its basic competence and its real interest in anything except its own narrow parochial concerns.

“Probably not,” Fox conceded. “I don’t have all that much faith in Langley’s ability to separate the wheat from the chaff.” He shrugged. “But who knows? There could always be a first time.”

Five

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
The Next Day

The conference room on the top floor was crowded. A dozen people, all of them high-ranking executives in the Central Intelligence Agency, sat around a large rectangular table. Their coffee cups, tablet computers, and notepads littered the table’s surface. More men and women, senior staffers for those around the table, occupied the chairs lining three sides of the dark-paneled room. The fourth wall held a large digital screen currently showing the CIA’s seal, an eagle above a shield embossed with a compass rose.

A heavyset, florid-faced man sat alone at the head of the table. Charles Horne was the recently appointed DCI, the director of Central Intelligence. His thick lips pursed as he jotted down a quick a note to himself. Finally, with a satisfied nod, he looked back up. “Very good. That last report from Science and Technology takes care of all of our priority agenda items.” He ran his heavy-lidded gaze around the table. “Now, does anyone have anything else we should discuss this morning?”

Miranda Reynolds, head of the CIA’s highly secret Directorate of Operations, hid a grimace. In the weeks since he’d taken over the reins at Langley, Horne had definitely put his own personal stamp on the way things ran. Unlike many of his predecessors, he’d spent most of his government service in the State Department — where talk was more valued than action — and it showed.

Focused one-on-one meetings between the director and his senior subordinates were now rare, replaced instead by seeming endless daily conferences like this one. Not only did these talkathons waste time, something that was always in short supply for those at the top of the CIA’s food chain like her, they were also an added security risk. Bringing so many people into the loop on matters they had absolutely no need to know anything about was just asking for trouble. Unauthorized leaks to the press and to Congress were already a serious problem for the agency. In Reynolds’s cynical view, all these gabfests really accomplished was to expand the list of suspects for any internal security investigation.

She fought the temptation to check her watch. With luck, her colleagues would keep their mouths shut so they could go ahead and adjourn. Important messages from CIA stations around the world were piling up in her email inbox. It wasn’t as though America’s adversaries took a timeout while Horne made his senior people and their top aides suffer through these interminable, unproductive meetings.

Reynolds snarled inwardly when she saw Philip Demopoulos lean forward to catch the DCI’s attention. Demopoulos, a wiry man with wavy gray hair and a stylish goatee, was her counterpart in charge of the Directorate of Analysis. In general, his analysts were supposed to evaluate the raw data gathered by her officers and agents — together with snippets of intelligence accumulated from other sources — and produce coherent, accurate intelligence reports on trouble spots around the world. Sometimes it worked the other way round, when his analysts needed her people to confirm wild rumors or stories they’d picked up elsewhere. All too often, those were nothing but dead ends, a waste of precious manhours and scarce resources.

“It looks as though the Iranians are working on a very unusual project in one of their shipyards near Bandar Abbas,” Demopoulos said. “At least that’s what we’re hearing through previously reliable sources.”

Reynolds frowned. That wasn’t anything her people had dug up, which meant this was another case where the Analysis Directorate was freelancing. Wonderful. She listened intently while he rattled off an impressive-sounding recitation of Tehran’s plans to heavily modify one of their AFRAMAX-sized oil tankers for some unknown purpose.

To cap off his short presentation, Demopoulos pulled up a satellite photo of the shipyard in question. “This image was taken earlier today,” he explained. “During a pass by one of our KH-11 recon birds.” He highlighted the enormous ship occupying the yard’s large drydock. An odd, tentlike structure obscured all but the forward sections of its bow. “As you can see, this image confirms part of what we were told by our sources. The Iranians are definitely taking extraordinary precautions to keep us from seeing the kind of work they’re doing on this tanker.”