With the cover of being a businessman, it was easy for him to arrange a business trip to Rome without arousing suspicion. The rest of the team was waiting for him there, including the two women operatives who would act as the bait. They were made up to appear to be in their late teens, although both were college graduates.
The girls rendezvoused with Martin at the famous Trevi, a magnet for tourists, and guided him to the nearby sidewalk café. He planned to take them out later for dinner and a sightseeing trip around Rome by night. It had worked before, and he had a confident swagger as they reached the table, which had been set aside by the cooperating Italian police, the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna, or AISI, one of whom had become their waiter. Martin took the chair beside the street so his guests could watch the passing throng. The opening chitchat was friendly.
“Thirty seconds.” Dan Laird pressed a button on his cell phone, and the phone in the back pocket of one of the girls vibrated silently. Swanson watched the agent casually dab her lips with a white napkin, then say something to her girlfriend. She never looked up to locate the sniper. Her friend asked Martin where the bathrooms were located. He pointed inside, the two women smiled, promised to be right back, and pushed out of their chairs. The waiter also vanished. There were no other customers, and police a block away were quietly detouring tourists around the site. Martin, confident of his quarry and very pleased with himself, did not realize that he was alone on the street. He took a drink, fished his own phone from a pocket to send a coded message that once again, the kidnap operation was going very well.
“Area is clear. He’s all yours.” Laird’s words were businesslike, but Kyle could sense the tension and his peripheral vision caught the agent’s hands moving to cover his ears. Kyle preferred not to wear ear coverings, balancing the need to hear what was going on around him against the unconscious anticipation of a loud explosion.
Swanson had no further adjustments to make. The head was as big as a Halloween pumpkin in the scope, and steady. He slowly brought the trigger straight back with no lateral pressure, felt the slack disappear, and then came the explosion as the sniper rifle boomed. A .50-cal shot in the tight confines of an urban center sounded like a cannon blast, and the first thought of unaware people who heard it was that a terrorist bomb had been detonated. Pedestrians and tourists scattered, and pigeons soared away in flapping panic. Sirens began to whoop. Kyle soaked up the mighty recoil and brought the glass back on target.
The body of Roland Martin had been jerked almost out of the chair, but was still in it, canted sideways over the strong metal arm. The head was gone and the debris of the skull and brains had spewed in a long trail toward the parked truck.
“Done,” he said.
“Done,” agreed his spotter. Laird kept the camera recording as police vehicles wailed up to the curb, uniformed cops set up a perimeter and as soon as the two women came out, they were roughly arrested and cuffed and put into a marked van. That was part of the show in case ISIS had a watcher. The pair of agents was released as soon as they were out of sight.
“Strange,” said Dan Laird, looking at his cell phone as Kyle packed away the rifle. A police car was waiting for them downstairs.
“The boss is in town.”
“Marty?” Martin Atkins, the deputy director of clandestine operations, was long past his days as a field officer, but ran the secretive clandestine operations department with meticulous planning, including the care and protection of agents at the sharp end of the dark CIA spear. From the Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Atkins was like a spider in his web, controlling everything, and he seldom left it.
“Yeah. Probably wants a firsthand briefing on this op.”
Swanson had the Excalibur safely in its case and was straightening his clothes as Laird finished packing. “Maybe he wants to post that video on the Net. The op was symbolic and intended to remind those ISIS crazies that we can and will reach out and touch them whenever we please.”
Laird gave a deep laugh. “It would go viral in ten minutes. Let the social media pass the word for us.”
They took their time getting downstairs. Nobody was hunting them because the cops were in on the action, although they had not been told any more than they needed to know. The small unmarked car that met them had another agent at the wheel, and Swanson and Laird climbed into the rear seat. Kyle started thinking about dinner tonight, wanting something special before he and Laird left tomorrow to take out another ISIS recruiter, a British predator operating out of Cairo whose game was convincing gullible American kids to come visit the pyramids in Egypt.
The Agency safe house was west of the Tiber River in the working-class neighborhood of Trastevere, far from the grandeur of the Vatican but equally a part of Rome, a city that was saddled with a Madonna-whore complex. The people who served the upper-crust Italians and rich tourists had to live somewhere, too, and the squalid apartments along the tangled medieval streets of Trastevere had housed them for generations. The CIA had a multistory building with a middle-aged Italian couple living on the street level, where the stew was always warm in the little kitchen and the floor tiles were always chilly. Marty Atkins was waiting on the upper floor in a soundproofed room that had bulletproof glass in the window and was examined for electronic eavesdropping equipment daily.
His gray hair had grown out since the last time Kyle had met with him several months ago, and the new style gave him a more distinguished look, an obvious loss of some weight had sharpened his features. Laser surgery on his brown eyes meant he no longer wore steel-rimmed glasses. Atkins had figured out that further advancement in government required that he moderate his former hell-for-leather lifestyle and look like a gentleman when meeting politicians. His temper still needed work.
He was reading briefing papers when they entered, and put them aside to greet his visitors warmly. There was a tenseness about him, and a sense of apprehension. “Dan, hate to seem rude here, but I need some private time with Kyle. If you go on over to the hotel, I’ll spring for drinks for everybody in about thirty minutes.”
Laird shrugged. “Free drinks sounds good. Can I ask if this concerns tomorrow’s mission?”
Atkins exhaled and shook his head. “Yes. That job is not going to happen.”
Dan Laird had been around the Agency long enough to know when he was a supernumerary. Only two people were to be part of this conversation, and Laird made three. Counterintelligence was a fluid, ever-changing game. Nothing personal. Just part of the job. He winked and left without another word. They would tell him what he needed, when necessary.
Atkins motioned Swanson to an awkward overstuffed chair beside the table near the window, and picked up one of the briefing papers he had been reading. He studied the sniper. “Do you know a Russian by the name of Strakov? Ivan Strakov?”
Swanson did not recall the name immediately, but slowly an image swam into shape. Long ago, there was an intense, skinny enlisted man on an exchange training program between Russian naval infantry and the U.S. Marines. He wanted to be an elite sniper. Kyle, as the instructor, washed him out of the program because of poor shooting scores and had ordered him to undergo a thorough medical examination. The Russian had been hiding the fact that his vision was failing, but the scores spoke for themselves. He was a lousy shot. Strakov could no longer hack it, which meant the end of his career in the Russian marines.
“Yeah. I remember him, vaguely. Very intelligent and great with numbers, but so bad with a long gun that we called him Ivan the Terrible.”