She told Zahidov everything.
In the end, though, it wasn’t enough.
In the end, they put her in the tub and filled it with boiling water.
The NSS officer who had served as her informant was arrested before nightfall, and shot before midnight.
Zahidov would have done it himself, but he was too busy arranging the arrests of the extremists responsible for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Dina Malikov. One of them was a schoolteacher in Chirchik who had continued to try to incorporate passages from the Qur’an into his lessons. The other two had also insisted on practicing their religion outside the manner permitted by the state, and one of them, a woman, had led a group of forty in signing a petition to be presented to President Mihail Malikov demanding their right to worship as Muslims. All three were arrested by midmorning the next day.
Near the home of the schoolteacher, half buried beneath rocks, was discovered the body of the missing Dina Malikov. She had been horribly beaten and burned, her teeth shattered and the nails of her fingers and toes torn from their digits.
She was so disfigured, in fact, that Ahtam Zahidov had to send a request to Ruslan Mihailovich asking that he come at once, to identify his wife’s body.
CHAPTER 2
London—Vauxhall Cross, Operations Room
10 February, 1829 Hours GMT
Paul Crocker had known Operation: Candlelight was a bad idea the moment it crossed his desk.
He’d known it the same way he’d known his elder daughter had become sexually active, long before he’d heard the fact from his wife, Jennie. He’d known it the way he’d known that he’d been passed over for promotion to Deputy Chief, long before his C, Sir Frances Barclay, had smugly confirmed it for him. He’d known it the way he’d known he was losing Chace when she came off the plane at Heathrow eighteen months earlier, and he knew it the way he knew that Andrew Fincher would be a poor replacement for her when Donald Weldon, in his last act as Deputy Chief of Service, railroaded Crocker into taking the agent on as his new Head of the Special Section.
Part of it was instinct, part of it was experience, honed from almost twenty-five years in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, through countless operations all over the globe. Jobs he’d worked, jobs he’d planned, jobs he’d overseen. The successes, and more important, the failures.
Candlelight had been bad news from the start, and what Paul Crocker saw now on the main plasma screen of the Ops Room wall—or more precisely, what he wasn’t seeing—only drove the point home.
He should have been looking at a live satellite transmission from Kuala Lumpur, where, according to the callout on the world map on the wall, Operation: Candlelight was “Running,” and the local time was two-thirty in the morning. He should have been seeing what Minder One, Andrew Fincher, was seeing, as the Head of the Special Section made his way along the harbor to the target site. He should have been hearing it as well, the susurration of the water, the hushed transmissions relayed between Fincher and Minder Two, Nicky Poole, stationed at the ready point with the SAS brick, waiting for Fincher’s go signal.
But no, instead, Crocker got static. Static to look at on the plasma wall, in the box above Southeast Asia where the feed should have been coming through, and static to listen to on the speakers, instead of the low calm of the voices of men, preparing to do work.
Julian Seale, seated at the map table to the left of where Crocker now stood, glaring at the garbled screen, coughed politely.
“Might want to do something about that,” Seale said.
“You think?” Crocker snapped, not bothering to look at him. Instead, he strode forward, to the Mission Control Desk, where William Teagle was frantically attacking his keyboard with his fingers. “Bill, what the hell’s happened to the feed?”
“Checking now, sir.” Teagle twisted in his chair, turning to another of the consoles surrounding him at the MCO station. Teagle was new on the desk, only three months in, and Candlelight was his first major operation, and Crocker thought the stress of it showed on the man’s face, the perspiration shining on his forehead. If he’d been inclined to it, Crocker might’ve been sympathetic. As it was, he didn’t have the time.
“Is it the upgrades?” Seale asked Crocker.
Crocker frowned at the plasma wall. “Possibly.”
The entirety of the Ops Room had seen a renovation in the past year, from the plasma screens to the computers to the secure communication arrays that kept the SIS headquarters here in London in touch with stations and agents around the world. It had been long overdue, and when it had happened, Crocker had believed it to be a good thing, and it had given him hope for his new Deputy Chief of Service, Alison Gordon-Palmer. It had been Gordon-Palmer who had forced the proposal through the FCO, it had been Gordon-Palmer who had bullied C into securing the necessary funding, and it had been Gordon-Palmer who had gone out of her way to consult with Crocker as to just what the upgrades should entail. By the end of the process, Crocker had come to believe two things about the new DC.
First, that even without a background in operations, Alison Gordon-Palmer understood the Ops Directorate’s importance in the grand scheme of SIS, and as such, Crocker could count her as an ally; and second, he wanted to maintain that relationship, because he now had no doubt how difficult his life would become if she decided he was her enemy.
Crocker turned back to Seale, calling across the room. “They don’t know we’re coming? You’re certain?”
Seale shook his head. “Our intel puts the cell in place and standing by until the morning, when they’re supposed to meet their friends in the Straits. They’re being careful, but they’ve got no reason to think we’re on to them, Paul, none at all. Not unless something’s happened on your end. But nobody from the Company’s tipped the Malaysians.”
“I’ve half a mind to send an abort, call the whole thing off.” Crocker looked back to the wall, at the static, fighting the urge to grind his teeth. “If we let them slip, any chance we can catch them on the water before they try to take the tanker?”
“How?” Seale asked. “They get into the Straits of Malacca, we’re going to lose them.”
Crocker nodded quickly, as if to say that yes, he got the point. “Dammit, Bill, what’s happening with the fucking feed?”
“Lost the signal, sir,” Teagle said, turning to another screen. “There’s a tracking error on the CVT-30, I think. I can’t bring it back up.”
Behind him, Crocker heard Seale mutter a curse. He turned, covered the distance to the Duty Operations Desk and Ronald Hodgson in three long strides, saying, “Ron, get onto the MOD, now. Tell them we need to piggyback their link to Candlelight, and we need it five minutes ago.”
Ronald Hodgson nodded, already reaching for one of the four telephones arrayed around his station.
Crocker turned to Seale, said, “You’re certain we can’t abort? Try to take them at sea instead?”