The morning’s work had been an unmitigated disaster. Danni had run him through five more courses. The route varied, but the objective remained the same. Spot the four tails. Each time, he had failed. His senses weren’t as dull as a butter knife. Sandstone was more like it.
Danni opened the door and led him into a foyer with concrete floors, a high ceiling, and paint chipping off the walls. They ascended a flight of stairs and stopped at the first room on the right. “Thirty seconds.”
Jonathan opened the door and stepped inside.
The room was pitch black.
Panicked, he ran a hand over the wall until he found the light switch. The question was whether to turn it on. He decided he must, or what was the point? He flicked the switch, and a bulb hanging from a threadbare wire threw a weak light around the room. Should he move or stay still? He took a step, and the floorboard groaned loudly enough to be heard in Syria. There was a king-sized bed with a ratty cover and four filthy pillows. There were two night tables with several books stacked on each. A chintz sofa took up one corner, a standing mirror another. He took another step, and the ungodly floor creaked even louder. If he were being judged on stealth, he had failed already. For some reason he found himself staring at the curtains, which were purple with green polka dots. At the far end of the room sat an imposing desk with lion’s paws for feet. He tried to see if it had locks, but the light was too dim, and the sensitive floorboards left him nervous about making so much noise. So far he’d seen nothing of the least interest to an intelligence agent.
Frustrated, he decided to forget about the creaky floor and set off on a circuit of the bedroom. He rushed to the desk and tried the drawers. All were locked with an old-fashioned key. There was a television with some papers on top of it, and next to it an electric fan. He kept moving and found a closet. The door was open. Inside was a safe, and on it another stack of papers. He reached for the papers just as a hand shoved him headlong into the closet. He hit the floor and turned in time to see Danni closing the door.
“I said, ‘Look, don’t touch,’” she said.
“How did you get across that floor without me hearing you?”
“Be quiet and tell me everything you saw.”
The dark in the closet was absolute. Jonathan pulled his knees to his chest and tried to re-create the bedroom. “A king-sized bed, some dirty pillows, a desk that I couldn’t open, and a stack of papers on top of a safe.”
“What about the diamonds?”
“What diamonds?”
“And the Kalashnikov?”
“Come on.”
“You didn’t see the terrorist hiding behind those horrid curtains?”
“Danni, let me out of here.”
“You’re right, there were none of those. But did you at least notice something else by the side of the bed?”
Jonathan imagined the night tables bracketing the bed. He saw two stacks of books, three on one side, four on the other. There was more. A pair of glasses. A pack of chewing gum. Trapped in the dark, he was able to examine his memory as if it were a photograph. “Yes,” he said. “On the right table, there’s a box with a black button on it.”
“That’s a panic button. Balfour keeps one identical to it next to his bed. He is paranoid to a fault. And the television?”
In his mind’s eye, Jonathan made a new circuit of the room. An old twenty-inch cathode-ray model sat in one corner. “Yeah, I see it.”
“Anything on it?”
“Papers.”
“Can you see what they say?”
“No… I mean yes.” His mind’s eye held a clear image of bold writing across the top of the paper. “‘Weapons and Armaments Available for Immediate Sale,’” said Jonathan with surprise, reading from the picture in his memory. “There are lots of items under it, but I can’t read them.”
“Try harder.”
“M4 automatic rifles. Grenades… ammunition… The rest is a blur.”
The door opened, and Danni helped Jonathan to his feet. “Are the papers his?” he asked. “Do they belong to Balfour?”
“They’re out-of-date. Otherwise they’re authentic.”
Jonathan walked directly to the television set and picked up the papers. His recall had been accurate. He looked at Danni, amazed. “Well?”
“Not bad.”
25
Sometimes you had to pull in a marker.
Frank Connor tossed the piece of metal in the air and caught it in his palm. For a moment he gazed at the chunk of misshapen lead. The odds were fifty-fifty, no better. Fourteen years was a long time, and memory warped the past. Too often, people remembered events as they wished they’d happened. Still, Malloy was an honorable man, as most Navy SEALs tended to be. If he said no, Connor wouldn’t blame him. After all, he was asking a lot.
Slipping the metal into his pocket, Connor turned up the collar of his coat against the rain and locked the door of his car. It was a secure government lot, but that didn’t mean it was safe.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, was situated on the grounds of Fort Belvoir in the rolling hills of northern Virginia, not far from Arlington National Cemetery. Its brief was simple enough: to provide imagery and map-based intelligence solutions to the U.S. defense establishment and private industry. The NGA was a jewel in the crown of the intelligence community, one of the sole agencies that produced an actual physical product that could be used to tangible effect by both public and private organizations, and as such, a moneymaker.
Connor entered the smoked-glass doors of the West Tower and presented himself to the security desk. “I’m here to see James Malloy. He’s expecting me.”
As he waited to be cleared, he looked around him. The complex consisted of three buildings. The West Tower and East Tower each stood six stories and were built like the two sides of a clamshell. In between them stood the Core, an eight-story glass cylinder that housed the NGA’s Source Directorate, where all mission-critical operations were conducted.
“Go ahead, sir. Mr. Malloy’s office is in the operations office on the sixth floor of the Core. Someone will be waiting for you on the landing.”
Connor slipped a visitor’s ID around his neck, passed through security inspection, and rode the elevator to the sixth floor. The doors opened and he stepped into the welcoming arms of six-foot-three-inch, 220-pound James Malloy. “Frankie, good to see you.”
Connor stood awkwardly, briefcase in one hand, as Malloy hugged him. “Likewise, Jim. How’s tricks?”
Malloy released him and ran a hand through his black hair. “Just made watch officer.”
“Watch officer? Nice. You must be putting in the hours.”
“Just doing the job,” said Malloy.
“How many years now?”
“Five. You were right about me being a good fit. I owe you.”
“Nonsense,” said Connor, but his hopes rose a notch.
His relationship with Malloy dated to the ’90s, when Malloy was an operator attached to SEAL Team Six working in Bosnia. During a hunter/killer mission targeting the rebel leader, Radovan Karadzic, Malloy and his team were caught in an ambush. Malloy alone survived and was taken captive. Connor heard the news and sent a Division asset to recover him. The affair got messy before it even began. There were gunfire and civilian casualties, along with a dozen or so Bosnian regulars killed. In the end, the asset’s cover was blown. It was a disaster all the way around, except that Malloy had escaped with his life.
Malloy set off down the hall at a demon’s pace, with Connor struggling to keep up. It was hard to believe the man had a prosthetic leg, but of course, that was the point. Unable to meet the SEALs’ rigorous fitness standards, Malloy had left the navy and moved to the civilian side of things. He’d worked for a few of the bigger private contractors before Connor arranged for him to come back to the government. It was time to see if his good deed would pay off.