“Not too smooth,” Vlad agreed. “Messy.”
“We’d better hurry. That made a lot of noise.”
Vlad nodded and went to the copier. He took the sheets of paper from the table — the stack that had already been photographed and the pages that hadn’t. He put the paper back in the manila folder, picked up Benton’s OPSAT, and dropped it on the carpet. He then lifted his hard-heeled shoe and brought it down forcefully, smashing the device.
“Do we need anything else?” he asked his partner.
“Look in the bedroom. See if his laptop is there. Bring the American’s weapon if you can find it quickly,” Yuri answered. Vlad grunted and went into the bedroom. Yuri walked over to Benton’s corpse and kicked the man’s head.
“Fuck you,” he muttered.
Vlad returned with a laptop and a Five-seveN, the weapon of choice for NSA intelligence officers. “Look what I found.”
“Good. Now let’s get out of here.”
After cracking the door open, Yuri made a quick check of the hallway. He nodded to his partner and they left, shutting the door behind them.
Three minutes went by before there was a knock at the door again. The silence prompted another knock.
“Room service.” It was a woman’s voice this time.
Knock knock. “Hello?”
The waitress used a passkey and pushed the door open a bit. “Room service. Hello?” She swung the door wider and saw Verbaken’s bloody body on the floor. The waitress gasped, took in the sight of the other corpse on the far side of the room, and ran from the suite screaming.
3
I live in a townhouse inside the triangle formed by I-695, York Road, and Dulaney Valley Road in Towson, Maryland. This suburb of Baltimore has a reputation for being “hip” since Towson University is located here. I guess it’s hip. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not very hip. I’m not a social guy. I don’t date, I don’t go out, and I stay pretty much to myself. When I’m not on an assignment for Third Echelon, I lead a relatively boring existence. I have no friends to speak of, my neighbors probably think I’m some kind of recluse, and the only shops I frequent are the nearby grocery store, a liquor store, and the dry cleaners in the strip mall over on York Road.
I like it that way.
The townhouse is much too large for a single man in his forties. I have three floors in which to spread out. I indulge myself in simple pleasures such as a supersize flat-screen television, DVD player, and a surround-sound system. I keep a library of reference material in the lower floor, and that’s also where my home office is. If someone were to look at the books in my library, they’d think I was a geography professor or maybe a history lecturer. For my work I study the countries of the world. I try to keep abreast of everything that’s happening politically and economically, especially in the so-called hot spots. Sometimes a single bit of knowledge about an unusual item that exists only in a given country can save your life. Knowing who’s really on your side and who’s not is of primary importance when you’re in the field. So every day I try to learn something new about a place. It keeps me sharp.
I live near Towson Town Center, a huge indoor mall that attracts all the beautiful people in the area. I avoid it like the plague. I detest shopping malls because they’re all the same. Same shops, same franchises, and the same ignorant people going about their daily business of spending money — usually someone else’s. When I need something, I go to out-of-the-way mom-and-pop shops. I can find clothes anywhere. If I want DVDs or CDs, I buy them online and get them mailed to me. In fact, I do an awful lot of online shopping. It keeps my personal interactions to a minimum.
I want to remain as anonymous as possible.
I cook my own meals. I’m pretty good at it, too. That’s one of the things that Sarah appreciates about me. She visits infrequently, but when she does she always wants me to cook for her instead of going out to a restaurant. That’s fine by me. Being able to cook is yet another valuable skill that’s helpful in my profession. You wouldn’t believe the number of strange and inhospitable places I’ve been where I’ve had to whip up a meal from whatever I could find around me. I’ve learned to eat some pretty disgusting stuff in my time, so being able to cook a decent gourmet meal on my own is a gift.
Although I don’t go out much, there are a couple of places I frequent. One is a gym that’s farther south on York, past the university. It’s actually just over the line separating Towson with Baltimore. It’s a funky little gym that appeals to minority toughs. Only a few white guys go there. It’s mostly Hispanics and African-Americans who are into boxing or weight lifting. I imagine a lot of them are in gangs, but they don’t bother me.
The other place I go, and on a much more regular basis, is the Krav Maga studio that’s in the same strip mall as my dry cleaners. It’s close enough that I walk there from the townhouse. And that’s where I go today after breakfast.
I put on my workout clothes — a jumpsuit, really — and make sure the security system is on. I leave the house and begin the ten-minute walk to the strip mall. It’s a fine day outside — spring has come early this year and we didn’t have a bad winter. Of course, I was gone most of the winter, so it didn’t matter. The assignment in the Far East took nearly three months. I was in Hong Kong for most of that time doing the preparation for the job in Macau. The assignment also involved a couple of trips to Singapore. Tracing the Shop’s arms pipeline in that area turned out to be more difficult than was originally predicted.
I received mixed reviews for the Macau job. Lambert was pleased with all the stuff I got out of the casino’s computer, but he wasn’t happy about the killings. Kim Wei Lo was indeed a very bad man and probably deserved to die, but Lambert felt we could have gotten more information out of him later. He would have gone down in the subsequent arrests that the Chinese government will surely initiate once the NSA provides them with the proof of the Shop’s existence in their country and territories. Hell, I didn’t set out to kill him, it just happened that way. It was either him or me. Lambert understands that, but he was still perturbed. He’ll get over it, though.
As Splinter Cells go, I’m pretty lucky that I’m not assigned to a static location. Dan Lee, the agent who was killed in Macau, lived and worked in the Far East territory. Of course, the guy was Chinese, so that made sense. But there are other Splinter Cells stationed in parts of the world where I certainly wouldn’t want to stay all the time. I like coming back to the States between jobs, even if it’s only to hip Towson, Maryland. I guess I have a special designation within Third Echelon. Being the first Splinter Cell and an agent who can adapt easily to just about any place they send me, I’m more useful as a “contractor.” In the old days, spies were often diplomats or embassy intelligence officers stationed in the country where they did the spying. I guess that still goes on. With Third Echelon, though, the Splinter Cells are guys that have no affiliation with the U.S. government — at least, they don’t in a public sense. I’ve used numerous cover identities when I’m on a job and I have to sometimes learn trades and skills to make the cover more legitimate.
I was in the CIA before I became a Splinter Cell. I hated it. Too much bureaucracy. Too much in-fighting and not enough cooperation between the other big agencies. In the CIA I had to spy in the traditional way — usually posing as a diplomat or someone in an official capacity. I had to be in more social situations than I cared for. I’m not good at entertaining some prime minister and his wife and talking about the local politics. Later on I moved to a stateside job in weapons development. I thought I came up with some pretty good theoretical work on information warfare, but the bureaucratic machine hampered my creativity. It was extremely frustrating. I’m a man of action and that’s why I left the CIA when Colonel Irving Lambert asked me to join Third Echelon.