“Exactly,” Peterson said, having intentionally failed to mention something else he’d discovered recently. Peterson’s White House spy had reported to him only hours earlier that Pope was now the head of some kind of top-secret Special Mission Unit: an SMU the informant had referred to as a “presidential hit squad.” Peterson doubted that Gil Shannon was this mysterious SMU’s sole operator, and he doubted equally that Pope would rest until everyone who had participated in the now doomed-to-fail intelligence coup was either jailed or terminated.
With this grim reality in mind, Peterson and Senator Grieves had already agreed that Hagen should be maneuvered into a position to take the fall. Hagen did, after all, have good reason to hold a grudge against the White House, and would make the perfect patsy.
24
“Do you see us now?” Gil asked Midori over a satellite phone. It had been given to him by the Italian GRU doctor who had arrived from Rome shortly after sunrise to treat their wounds.
“I see you,” she said. “You’re standing next to a blue car.”
Gil looked up into the crystal clear morning sky. “Yeah, that’s me. Okay, so how long before Pope’s out of the hospital?”
“About a week.”
“He’s gonna be okay?”
“Yes. He said to tell you you’re still on for the Georgia operation. JSOC has approved the removal of Dokka Umarov. I’m gathering all the latest intel on him now. Also, the Joint Chiefs have arranged for your exfiltration from Sicily via submersible. An SDV team is being transferred aboard the Ohio now. She’ll be on station within eight hours.”
“Roger that. I was worried we’d been forgotten when I heard about Pope.”
“You’re not forgotten, Master Chief. JSOC has assumed control of this operation at Pope’s request.
“Roger that. Then you’ll need to advise JSOC we have to finish off Kovalenko and his team before we exfil. Ivan and I don’t need those bastards dogging us to Georgia when we least expect it — hold on a second.” He turned toward Dragunov, who was talking on his own phone twenty feet away. “Hey, Ivan, what’s the make of that piece of shit Kovalenko’s guys are in — the red one?”
“LaForza,” Dragunov said.
Gil told Midori, “I need to you find a red Italian LaForza SUV. Somewhere in or around Palermo. Start with the outskirts on the east side.”
“Master Chief, you’ve got to be kidding me. That’s over sixty square miles.”
“I’m not kidding you even a little bit,” he assured her, turning again to Dragunov. “And that other piece of shit?”
“A Peugeot.”
“The red SUV will probably be parked near a black Peugeot.”
“A search like that could take days.”
“I can give you a few hours,” Gil said, “but that’s all. We’re running out of time down here. There’s cops all over the place. Use the vehicle recognition software the Pentagon uses for spotting military vehicles. The computer will light up every LaForza on the grid within a few minutes. After that, all you gotta do is sort through the red ones.”
“The shapes of military vehicles are a lot more defined than civilian models, Master Chief.”
“Then enhance the resolution, Midori. I gotta swim over there and do your job for you?”
“Hey, all I’m saying is that I haven’t used the software in that application before. I don’t know what kind of results I’m going to get.”
“Well, I’m telling you if you max out the res, you’ll find the SUV.”
“I’ll get on it,” she said. “Why is your hand bandaged?”
Gil looked at his hand and glanced up. “I got shot. I’m signing off now. I’ll check back in an hour.” He put away the phone and turned to see Dragunov grinning at him. “What’s your problem?”
“Maybe we need a Russian satellite to do the search?”
“I don’t think Sputnik’s up to the task. You’ll get your chance to impress me when we get to Georgia.”
Dragunov laughed, gesturing at the girl. “Claudina wants to take her car and go.”
Gil looked at her. “We still need your car, but you can—”
“Then I go with you.” She crossed her arms in a fashion they were growing accustomed to.
He looked at her. “If the police catch up to us, there’s going to be shooting, and people are going to die. Do you understand that?”
“The car is mine,” she insisted.
Gil looked at Dragunov. “We gotta steal another set of wheels.”
Dragunov shook his head. “Stealing another car is a big risk for us. This is a good place to hide until your people can find Kovalenko. Then we go and kill him, and we let her” — he pointed at Claudina — “take her chances.”
25
Fresh off the plane from Athens, agent Max Steiner showed up at the CIA safe house in Rome for a meeting with Chief of Station Ben Walton. They had served together in the Med with US Naval Intelligence during the latter part of the Cold War, and Steiner had been the CIA’s go-to man in Greece for the past seven years.
“So what’s going on?” Steiner asked. He was in his midforties, very tanned by the Grecian sun, and with thinning dark hair. “I got an operational immediate pulling me out of my province and sending me here. I don’t even speak Italian.”
Walton was a thick, barrel-chested man in his early fifties with a deep voice and close-cropped gray hair. “I sent the OI,” he said. “A rogue element of the GRU hit the Palinouros and greased her entire crew — including Miller. The Italian navy is all over it.”
“A rogue element?” Steiner’s confusion was evident. “You’re talking about Kovalenko’s people — our people?”
“That’s right.”
“What the hell they do that for?”
“They’re tying up loose ends,” Walton said. “Yeshevsky’s dead in Paris; so is Lerher. The entire op is blown.”
Walton and Steiner had both helped to dupe Pope by falsely identifying Yeshevsky as the real Dokka Umarov during his voyage across the Mediterranean.
“Sounds like the nutty professor Pope went on the warpath.”
“He did,” Walton said. “And somebody just tried to kill his ass back in DC, but the hit went bad, and he survived. Now the president’s naming him as director, and that can only mean one thing.”
Steiner’s tan complexion turned white. “Hell, they’re on to us. It may even have been Pope’s people who wiped out the Palinouros.”
“Not likely.” Walton turned to pour from a pot of coffee. “My GRU contacts here in the city tell me it was Kovalenko’s men. I just got off the phone with the Maltese chief of station about ten minutes before you got here, and he said he was ordered by our people back home to hit Gil Shannon in Messina. And that operation fell flat on its face, too.”
“Shannon got away twice?”
Walton nodded. “He’s a slippery fucker.”
Steiner took a chair, massaging his temples. “This isn’t good, old buddy. If Shannon’s operating in the Med, then he knows about us — he has to — and that means he knows who set him up in Paris. Does Pope know about the plot to sabotage the pipeline?”
“I think we have to assume so.” Walton pushed a cup of coffee across the table. “But if we’re blown — or even just under suspicion — why haven’t we been recalled to Mannheim for debrief?” Mannheim, Germany, was the location of the United States’s military holding facility in Europe.
“Shit, that’s obvious, old buddy. We’ve been disavowed.”