“There’s a whole bunch of these things, like a trail of bread crumbs. I’ve been picking them up in case your guys can get a print off one of them.”
“Officer Kaczynski,” Harvath interrupted. “Leave the rest of them. We need to know who is dropping them.”
“Okay, stand by. Let me see what I can do.”
Cordero started to move in Kaczynski’s direction, but Harvath gently grabbed hold of her arm. “Somebody may be trying to smoke us out. Let’s wait a second.”
“We may not have a second,” she said as she radioed the other teams and told them what was going on and to be ready.
Seconds later, one of the SWAT officers came over the radio and said, “I think we’ve got it. Looks like some kind of a homeless person, possibly female. Brown hair, heavy brown coat, dark pants. She’s dropping something from her pockets.”
“Can you see patrol officer Kaczynski?” Cordero asked.
“Roger that,” the SWAT officer replied. “He’s approximately ten meters behind her.”
“Kaczynski,” Cordero said over her radio. “Do you see a female homeless woman approximately ten meters ahead of you? Brown hair, brown coat?”
“That’s affirmative,” Kaczynski replied. “Not only can I see her, I can smell her. Sweet Jesus, it’s terrible.”
“Do not engage. I repeat. Do not engage. They may be trying to smoke us out,” the female detective ordered as she looked at Harvath. “What the hell is going on?”
“I’ve got no idea,” he said, “but I don’t like it. Something feels very wrong about this.”
Cordero radioed the other team members. “Everybody on your toes. The woman in the coat might be a decoy. Keep your eyes peeled on our other ingress points. If one of our targets is being sent in, we don’t want to miss him or her.”
Harvath’s eyes continued to scan the area. He paid particular attention to the historical marker and kept looking toward Devonshire Street. Suddenly, he saw the woman in the brown coat.
Kaczynski’s voice came back over their earpieces. “This woman is crackers. I can hear her repeating some rhyme about someone called Lucy Lockett or something.”
“Officer Kaczynski,” Cordero warned. “Do not engage her. Is that clear?”
“Ten-four.”
“She’s headed our way,” said Harvath.
The female detective could see her now. The woman’s hair was a rat’s nest. She walked with her head down. Like many homeless people, she was overdressed for the warm weather in a winter coat.
“She’s almost to you,” said Kaczynski.
“We see her,” Cordero replied.
Both she and Harvath could now clearly see her reaching into her pockets, pulling out the black cards and dropping them in her wake.
Harvath’s feelings of unease were continuing to build. His gut was telling him something. He just couldn’t put his finger on it.
The woman walked like she was in a dream, mumbling as she moved forward, placing one foot in front of the next. Harvath had seen this before. Where? Why was it so familiar? The alarm bells were going off full force in his head now.
Cordero took a step in the direction of the woman. Harvath reached out and grabbed her arm again.
They watched as the woman stepped out into the street. As she did, a car speeding through the intersection slammed on its brakes. The woman looked up.
One of the SWAT team members watching through a spotting scope identified her first. “Target A. Target A. The woman in the brown coat is Betsy Mitchell. All teams, the woman in the brown coat is Betsy Mitchell.”
Cordero shook off Harvath’s hand and began running. So did Officer Kaczynski.
Kaczynski got to Betsy Mitchell first, knocking her to the ground and throwing himself on top of her.
Harvath got to Detective Cordero just as the suicide vest Betsy Mitchell was wearing was remotely detonated.
CHAPTER 60
“What the hell was that?” Bill Wise asked as Ryan and McGee rushed to the hotel room window.
Ryan got there first. “It sounded like an explosion.”
“It sure as hell felt like one,” McGee added.
They could see an enormous, roiling fireball climbing up into the night sky. The shock wave had been so powerful, it had almost blown out their windows, and as best they could tell, they were a good four or five blocks away. Moments later, the sound of emergency vehicles racing to the scene began to fill the air.
“I hope that wasn’t a bomb,” said Wise. “That’s the last thing Boston needs. We should check it out.”
“No way,” replied McGee. “If it was a bomb, there could be a secondary waiting to go off as first responders get there. Besides, it’s not our problem.”
“Give it time,” Ryan stated as they stood looking out the window. “You’d be surprised how fast problems metastasize when Tom Cushing is around.”
“Speaking of Cushing,” Wise replied, “can we finalize everything now that we’re here?”
After interrogating Samuel, Wise had contacted Reed Carlton, who showed up with two rather large men and a female operative named Sloane. Samuel had admitted that he had a second target—a former Swim Club doctor named Jim Gage. While Sloane and one of the men were dispatched to take Gage into protective custody, Wise warned Carlton about Samuel and provided detailed instructions for where and how he should be held. He then shared what they had learned from the interrogation.
One of the most significant elements, but hardly the most surprising, was that Phil Durkin had held on to several covert programs after the Agency had ordered them shut down. He would go through the steps of firing everyone and closing up shop, but then he’d go back out and rehire the personnel he wanted while he shoved each operation further into the shadows, taking them all full black.
Through some untraceable funding source, he had managed to keep everything afloat and operational. Those who didn’t know anything figured Durkin was providing plausible deniability for his superiors. No one knew exactly how many programs he was overseeing, but the whisper on the black-ops side was that he had cobbled together his own shadow agency.
Bill Wise didn’t know how much of what Samuel shared was actual fact and how much was office gossip. Nevertheless, RUMINT, or rumor intelligence, was something any good operative was expected to be attuned to.
Another significant piece of intelligence was that Ryan’s old team was still active and still being led by a man named Tom Cushing. Samuel admitted to having conducted a handful of operations for them.
According to Samuel, Phil Durkin liked the way Cushing operated and had elevated his status in the black-ops community, feeding him more and more assignments and entrusting him with more and more responsibilities.
Cushing, though, wasn’t Bill Wise’s concern, at least he hadn’t thought so until he asked Samuel if he knew anything about what was going on in Boston. That was when Ryan had stiffened.
When the interrogation was complete, Wise had asked to speak to her privately. When he confronted her, Ryan admitted that she and McGee had traced Cushing, along with two other team members, there. Now that they had arrived in Boston, Wise wanted to know how they were going to nail them.
Ryan stepped away from the window and pulled a large envelope from her bag. “We’re going to nail them with this.”
Wise looked at her. “I don’t follow.”
“You know the old line, how do you eat an elephant?”
“One bite at a time.”
“Correct,” Ryan replied. “One of the last bites of our elephant is going to be Phil Durkin. Before we get to Durkin, we have to go through Tom Cushing.”
Wise interrupted her. “At this point, though, I want Cushing more than I do Durkin. If Cushing is behind these murders and he’s using a killer from Swim Club to do it, we need them stopped ASAP.”
“As long as we take Cushing alive, that’s all I care about. I need answers out of him to take to the Jordanians.”