Court gritted his teeth. “Provoked them? They broke into my fucking hotel room.”
“Couldn’t you have kept your cover? Stuck to your story?”
“They tried to drug me with scopolamine. It’s a drug made from a South American bush. The Colombians call it Devil’s Breath. It’s an old truth serum. Very nasty.”
“Christ. Sounds like something from a bad movie.”
“Welcome to my world.”
Suzanne Brewer took command of her emotions and challenged her agent now. “Still… could you have taken it and fought off the effects? Aren’t you trained in resistance to chemicals? It’s in your file.”
Court didn’t answer.
After receiving no response, she softened. “Look, I get it. I’m not in the field; you are.”
Court snapped back. “We can fix that easily enough. Why don’t you fly out to Hong Kong? We can walk this op together. It would give you a feel for fieldwork.”
“I’m your handler. It’s my job to question your judgment.” To that, she added, “But if you say you had no alternative to lethal means, I understand.”
“I had no alternative to lethal means.”
She let it go after a long pause. “Do you want to close down the operation? After this I can pull you. I should pull you.”
Court shook his head as he responded. “No. You get this cleaned up, and I’ll do my part to keep the Chinese from finding out I was involved.”
Finally she said, “All right. But don’t stay at the Peninsula tonight.”
Court wanted to bark back, No shit, and tell her he was already a mile north of the hotel and off the main drag of the city, but he didn’t have the inclination to explain himself any further.
Instead he said, “I’m back offline for now. I’ll report in as needed.”
He ended the call and slipped the phone back in his pocket.
Suzanne Brewer hung up her phone and immediately dialed an in-house extension. This was bad, she knew, and although she’d done everything she could think of to fix it from where she sat, she knew she still had one thing to take care of.
This wasn’t about Violator; this wasn’t about the operation in Hong Kong that had turned into a fiasco before her agent in the field had even arrived at the opening stage of the mission.
No. Suzanne Brewer wasn’t thinking about Court Gentry. Suzanne Brewer was thinking about Suzanne Brewer. She wasn’t about to swing in the wind alone with her agent in the field. Nope, she was going upstairs to pull someone else in with her.
Getting a meeting with the man in charge of all of CIA’s intelligence operations would normally require a significant amount of work for a midlevel exec in the Agency’s Programs and Plans department, but Brewer was handling Violator, so she knew she could get away with just walking right into Hanley’s office or calling his mobile in the middle of the night. The current situation warranted giving Hanley an immediate update, but still, Brewer didn’t want to look frazzled and out of her league, so she called Hanley’s secretary and asked for ten minutes of D/NCS’s time.
That Hanley himself came on the phone after a few seconds reasserted to Brewer the importance of Violator’s op.
“Hey, Suzanne. Jill says you need a face-to-face?”
“Yes, please.”
“How’s the leg? I can run down to your office if you need me to.”
Hanley’s offer was a nice touch of chivalry, but there was no way she was going to look weak and needy.
“Very kind offer, Matt, but I am managing just fine.”
“Then come on up,” he said.
Suzanne Brewer had broken her leg just above her ankle in a savage car wreck weeks before, and it would be another week before the hard cast came off, and then only after six more weeks in a boot would her orthopedic surgeon allow her to walk normally again. In the interim she moved around with the aid of a knee scooter, a device that allowed her to step with her right leg while she kept her casted left leg bent to avoid bearing weight on it. With the bicycle-style handlebars used to steer her wounded appendage, she looked more than a little ridiculous kicking along the seventh-floor hallway, but she was still in the “sympathetic look” stage from her colleagues, and everyone got the hell out of her way, so she saw some additional benefit to the awkward contraption.
Just minutes after her call Suzanne Brewer struggled off her knee scooter and sat down in front of Hanley’s desk. “This damn thing in HK is already going south.”
Hanley raised a critical eyebrow Brewer’s way. “He’s on the ground fourteen hours and you’re having problems?”
“Violator claims he was tailed from the airport. He doesn’t know how he was compromised. I’m looking into the aircraft to see if it could have been exposed to the Chinese somehow. The surveillance team attacked him about an hour ago, he says, at his hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui.” She paused. “He retaliated.” After a sigh she added, “He killed both men, Matt.”
Hanley seemed concerned but oddly unsurprised. “Does Gentry know who they were?”
“He thinks they were MSS operatives.”
Hanley sat back in his chair now. Brewer knew he was thinking about the fallout, just as she was. About telling the head of the CIA that an Agency asset had killed two Chinese intelligence operatives in a five-star hotel in Hong Kong.
Brewer felt certain Hanley had more to worry about than Violator at this point, while she was in the middle, and safe from both gunmen in Asia and politicians in Washington.
The only person she had to fear was Hanley, and from the expression on his face, he wasn’t looking to throw her under the bus for this.
Not yet, anyway.
He said, “Shit. We knew he’d run into them. But we didn’t know he would do it in the course of deplaning a CIA jet.”
“No, sir.”
Hanley rubbed his thick face, pressing red marks into his cheeks around his eyes. Brewer just looked on. She wondered if he was already thinking beyond Gentry, what he would do if his asset on the ground failed.
After a moment she said, “It’s bad, no question, but if you look hard enough for good news, there is some. We’ve got facial recog spoofed at his hotel, he can’t be ID’d from the cams, and he says no other MSS personnel could have made him. We’ve got cleaners from MI6, Australia’s SIS, and our local station helping to maintain his cover, and he’s clear of any other followers.
“Still,” she added, a darkening tone to her voice, “there might be operational fallout for the men Violator killed. When he does come in contact with MSS, if they tie him to the Peninsula, which ties him to us… his secondary cover will be blown.”
She added, “If I were him I’d be on the first commercial flight out of Asia.”
Hanley replied, “But you’re not him.”
“No, sir. He wants to go forward.”
Hanley thought it over a moment. “He is the best. If he took those men out, it was so he could stay on mission. I don’t question his judgment in the field, and you shouldn’t, either.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, but she didn’t even try to make herself sound convincing.
Hanley leaned forward, propping his arms on his massive desk. “Suzanne, you know what success on this op means for us.”
“Success could bring great advantages to the U.S., absolutely. But failure, more failure, could be extraordinarily damaging.” She hesitated before saying, “Some might say doing nothing would be the prudent course of action.”
Hanley leaned back in his chair. “It comes down to this, Suzanne. I have more confidence in Gentry than you do. You’ll have to trust that my confidence comes from a long relationship and an understanding of his capabilities.”