“Matters are drawing to a head.”
Patrick agreed. “Rapidly.”
“And all you and I can do is gently nudge events.”
“But do so in a way that helps our boy.”
Their boy, Will Cochrane.
The son of CIA officer James Cochrane, who’d surrendered to revolutionaries in Iran in order to save the lives of Alistair and Patrick; the young boy who’d never known that his widowed mother was secretly given financial support from the two men who would feel lifelong guilt that they were alive and James Cochrane wasn’t; the MI6 trainee who would be taken under their wing and subjected to a brutal instruction program that some might think was sadistic, but others in the know would realize was the one thing Cochrane needed at that time to prevent him from losing his soul; the spy who’d stepped up to the plate on their behalf and three times stopped genocide; the man who would forever remind them of their brave former colleague and friend.
At no point were Alistair and Patrick ever going to fully comply with the CIA or Marsha Gage.
It just wasn’t in their makeup.
“The SMS to Sheridan?”
Patrick answered, “Deleted by me.”
“No more than two hours before Parker sends him another message or tries calling him.”
“I’m working on the basis of one hour max.”
“And you read Parker’s message…?”
Patrick looked at his watch. “Sixteen minutes ago.”
“Have you tried calling Hallowes?”
“Yes, from a pay phone. Her cell’s switched off.”
Alistair stirred his now cold tea and tapped his silver spoon hard on the cup’s rim. “That’s not good.”
Ellie was sitting in her room in the huge Washington Marriott Wardman Park hotel. Ordinarily, she’d love being in a hotel like this — not because it was luxurious, but because it had over a thousand rooms located on ten floors, meaning she could come and go using different entrances and elevators and ultimately could move around the place unnoticed. But now, the vastness of the hotel made her feel that she was an insignificant speck of dust.
She supposed she should show her face in Langley at some point this afternoon. Not that anyone cared whether she checked in to the Agency HQ. Most people in the CIA didn’t know her, and the few that did viewed her as a spook without a portfolio who needed to be returned to the shadows because she reminded them that real spying was wholly unreflective of the clean-cut ambience that pervaded Langley.
She switched on her TV and looked for updates about the hunt for Cochrane. She saw live images of D.C. — police helicopters hovering beneath the dark clouds over the city; cop cars racing along the streets; tactical teams carrying assault rifles; and snipers and their spotters on rooftops. The camera switched to an interview with the chief of the Metro Transit Police Department who was standing outside Union Station and saying that he hoped legal charges against Cochrane would lead with his attempted murder of four cops.
Ellie turned off the TV, feeling that all was now hopeless. Even a man like Cochrane wouldn’t keep going to get answers within an environment as hostile as this. He’d realize that his only option was to flee. Maybe he’d try to get back to Europe. No, it would be just as bad for him there. Much better would be for him to travel south and covertly cross the border into Mexico. Either way, there was no doubt in Ellie’s mind that there was nothing more he could do to get to the bottom of Project Ferryman.
She grabbed her coat and handbag with the intention of heading to Langley, then froze.
A noise was coming from inside her bag.
She knew what it was, but simply couldn’t believe she was hearing the sound.
Urgently, she thrust her hand into the bag and withdrew her cell phone.
Not the one the Agency knew about. She had switched that off because nobody called her.
Instead, the one whose number she had secreted in a box in Chinatown.
The screen showed a local landline number.
Someone dialing a wrong number?
She told herself to snap out of it and answer the damn thing.
As Charles Sheridan walked through the entrance to the Wardman Park hotel, his overriding thought was that it was going to be a pleasure putting his hands around the throat of the duplicitous bitch.
Parker had called him twenty minutes earlier, asking why he’d not responded to his SMS. Sheridan hadn’t received that message; strange, though he was still struggling to come to grips with this stupid childish cell phone technology. But a good old-fashioned telephone call had cleared things up, and he’d wasted no time in getting over here so that he could haul Ellie Hallowes’s ass out of the hotel and take her somewhere quiet for a chat.
Ellie couldn’t believe she was hearing his voice. He sounded tired, and was speaking loudly because there was a lot of background noise. Probably he was calling from a street pay phone somewhere busy. But there was no doubting who he was.
Will Cochrane.
She tried to concentrate as he gave her precise instructions: at three this afternoon she needed to be sitting in Teaism, on Connecticut Avenue at Lafayette Park. Though she wouldn’t be able to see him, Will would be watching the café and would approach at a time of his choosing. If he hadn’t made the approach by four thirty, it meant he suspected she was under surveillance. If that happened, she needed to leave, and he would call her the same time tomorrow with new instructions.
Will ended the call.
Ellie stared at the phone.
Part of her felt overjoyed.
The rest of her knew Will was insane to remain in D.C.
Sheridan smiled as he rode the elevator to the sixth floor. He and Parker were in no doubt about what had happened a few days ago. Hallowes had deliberately targeted the analyst Helen Coombs because she had clearance to read the Ferryman files. Hallowes had gotten her so drunk that she couldn’t make it to work the next morning, had stolen her security pass and used it while Coombs was still sleeping off her hangover, and had pretended to be her so she could read the files.
Sheridan had to admit that Hallowes had displayed incredible bravery by infiltrating one of the Agency’s most sensitive archives while in disguise. But that admiration wasn’t going to get in the way of what needed to be done to the traitor.
The elevator stopped at the sixth floor. Sheridan exited and walked along the corridor toward Ellie Hallowes’s hotel room.
Even though she had two hours to kill before she needed to be in the vicinity of the café, Ellie was desperate to get on the road. But she knew she had to make preparations. She opened her laptop and browsed the Internet. Within seconds, she was staring at a map of the café and its surroundings. Her mind processed street names, points of interest, and routes. It was second nature to her, and within one minute she had a mental picture of the on-foot antisurveillance route she’d be taking to reach the venue. She wholly trusted Cochrane’s ability to spot anyone following her, but she also owed it to him not to bring any hostiles close to him.
She deleted her browsing history, exited the Net, snapped shut the laptop, and got ready to leave.
Then she heard the loud ringing of the doorbell to her room.
And someone knocking hard on the door.
Sheridan placed his hand on his gun, deciding that when Hallowes opened the door he’d shove the barrel in her mouth and keep it there when he pushed her onto her back. He imagined the terror in her eyes, her limbs thrashing wildly but to no avail as he pinned her down, and cocking the gun’s hammer in order to scare the shit out of her.
Then he’d tell her she had two choices: go calmly with him so that this delicate matter could be dealt with discreetly; or make a fuss, meaning he’d have to keep her in the room until an Agency team could arrive, inject her so that she was unconscious, and remove her body in a bag.