“Obviously.” He was silent for second, then said, “My question was, are you going to tell me why you changed your mind about Stonewell or what?”
Alex hesitated.
“Please tell me you heard me this time,” Deuce said.
“I heard you.”
“And?”
“And they need us to help with an extraction.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question.”
“The target, a week ago, she was seen with…my father.”
Silence.
“Are you serious?”
Alex nodded. “I’ve seen the pictures. It was him.”
“Holy shit.”
Deuce had never met her dad, but as one of Alex’s closest friends, he was well aware of the colonel’s disappearance.
Neither of them spoke for a moment, then Deuce said, “So we’re helping because she might know where he is, right?”
“Right.”
He nodded. “I’m cool with that.”
“I knew you would be.”
McElroy checked HIS watch. It was almost eight a.m.
As he paced his office, he fought the urge to look out the window.
Where the hell was Poe?
God help him if she’d decided to back out. He did not want to miss this opportunity.
The tip had come in through one of his Eastern European contacts. Fadilah El-Hashim, terrorist money launderer extraordinaire, had been spotted. And being high on Stonewell’s acquire list, she immediately became McElroy’s priority.
Within an hour, McElroy had dispatched a small team to follow up on the information. The intelligence proved to be good. Excellent, in fact. El-Hashim was still there.
McElroy immediately informed his superiors, and presented them with two options of how to proceed. The first, grab El-Hashim immediately and deliver her to the CIA for interrogation. The second, keep her under observation, see who she met with, and see who else they could net before they brought her in.
When McElroy was pressed for his preferred plan, he said, “It’s a risk, but I think it would be a mistake to apprehend her right away.”
The directors had concurred and approved option two, making it clear that if El-Hashim were to somehow avoid capture, it would be McElroy’s ass in the fire.
The strategy had paid off. Within the first two weeks, they added several new names to their terror watch list, and uncovered a whole new Somalian splinter organization that had yet to show up on anyone else’s radar.
But a trip El-Hashim made to Crimea changed everything.
The moment McElroy saw the photos his surveillance team extracted from a security camera along the waterfront in Yalta, he no longer thought of El-Hashim as his number one target. The photos showed the woman in her everpresent hijab, talking to a man.
But not just any man.
To Raven. The son of a bitch who’d given McElroy’s team the slip back in May.
If McElroy could bring Frank Poe in, especially after the earlier snafu, the reservations that he knew some of Stonewell’s management had about him would disappear, removing the final obstacles to future advancement.
At the same time, it could also backfire on him. If, that was, his bosses knew about the Raven sighting.
While he’d been routinely giving progress reports on the El-Hashim mission, his briefing that day made no mention of the wayward colonel. The only people who knew Raven had been sighted were a limited number of his trusted team members.
Get Poe first, then break the news. That would be best.
To do that, he would have to go through El-Hashim. He knew she must have some way of contacting the traitor, which meant the time had come to bring her in.
He put the nab team in place near her home base in the Czech Republic so they could grab her as soon as she returned from Crimea. Unfortunately, that had yet to happen. Somehow the foolish woman had gotten herself and several of her associates arrested. About the only good thing that had come of this was that the officials in Crimea didn’t seem to know who they had. El-Hashim was listed under a false name — A’isha Najem.
It took McElroy less than ten minutes to get over his annoyance, and realize the new situation might actually provide an opportunity. What if he could get someone into the prison to bring El-Hashim out?
The logistics were solved fairly quickly with the old standby combo of blackmail and money. And with the how figured out, it became a question of who?
The operative would have to be a woman, someone who could think on her feet and blend in with the other female prisoners. While Stonewell did have female security employees, they were few in number and all were assigned elsewhere.
McElroy was looking through the digital archive on Raven when he came upon a mention of the colonel’s daughter and everything clicked. Not only had she spent two years in the army before going to college, she now worked as a domestic fugitive retrieval specialist, or, as most called it, a bounty hunter.
She was perfect.
And she had a Stonewell file, too. But instead of containing a gigabyte of information like her father’s, her dossier was under one meg, consisting merely of reports on previous attempts by the company to recruit her. All had failed.
That didn’t bother McElroy. None of the previous attempts had included the leverage he had.
A link to her father.
As he read through her file again, he saw a cross reference to another Stonewell employee named Shane Cooper. According to the document, Cooper had served with her in the army.
McElroy worked out a deal to have the man temporarily transferred to his group, thinking that Cooper would have knowledge of Alex that might prove useful.
In the end, it wasn’t Cooper’s insights that had helped secure her services, but the man’s ability to take a punch.
Unfortunately, all of his maneuvering would be wasted effort if Alexandra Poe didn’t show up.
But as he started to check his watch again, the door behind him opened, and one of the receptionists stuck his head in. “Sir? Your visitors are parking now.”
The Stonewell compound was in a forested area about four miles outside of DC, down an unmarked road that was easy to miss if you didn’t know where you were going. Fortunately, McElroy’s coordinates had been very precise and Alex had no trouble finding the place.
A quarter of a mile in, a guardhouse stood in the middle of the road, flanked on either side by a gated fence that disappeared into the woods. Topping the fence were large coils of razor wire.
As Alex pulled her Jeep to a halt, a uniformed man stepped out of the guardhouse. This wasn’t some fifty-year-old, potbellied rent-a-cop just doing time, however. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, with the build and demeanor of a human bull.
He leaned down and looked inside the Jeep as she lowered the window.
“Ms. Poe, Mr. Jones. Welcome to Stonewell.”
Alex and Deuce nodded.
“Put this on your dash,” the guard said, handing her a piece of paper through the window. He looked out at the road beyond the gate. “Continue on for four tenths of a mile, then make a right, and that’ll take you to the parking area next to the main building. Your assigned spot is number seventy-two. Please make sure you use only that number. When you arrive, stay in your car until someone comes out to get you.”
Alex raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.
The man took a step back, reached behind him, and pushed something just inside the guardhouse door. The gate began rolling out of the way. “Have a good day.”
Alex was tempted to give him a salute, but didn’t. Instead she hit the gas and started forward again, knowing what Deuce would say before he even opened his mouth.
“Stay in the car, huh? I’ve got a better idea. How about we turn around right now and head back home? It’s not too late, you know.”