The car stopped at the elevator, and the driver held a key card to Natalie.
Natalie took the card, which was bare of markings.
“What am I supposed to do?”
The driver pointed his thumb at the elevator doors. The lock on her door popped open.
Natalie rubbed the card between her thumb and forefinger. Her leaving the army for the CIA, the months of field craft training, evenings spent learning Russian with one-on-one tutors and the promise of making a real difference in the war on terror had all seemed like a brilliant idea up until this moment. Climbing onto the chartered plane that had taken her from Fort Campbell to the war in Iraq had been a great deal easier than getting out of this car.
The lock on her door popped up and down several times, ruining her reverie.
“Sorry,” she said. She got out and straightened her suit.
The elevator was empty; the control panel had three buttons: open, close, and emergency. She slipped the key card into a slot over the buttons and waited. The BMW pulled away as the doors closed, taking her carry-on with it.
The elevator didn’t display floors as it went up or even offer Muzak to calm her nerves.
She felt the elevator come to a stop, and the doors opened to reveal a pentagon-shaped desk protruding into a clear Plexiglas wall. A large frosted logo of a steamship for Eisen Meer Logistics took up most of the wall to her right, over the only door past the wall.
A Teutonic woman with close-cropped blonde hair smiled at her from behind the Plexiglas. A speaker in the wall, like she was a bank teller and not a receptionist for the weirdest company this side of the twilight zone, clicked to life.
“Hello, Ms. Garrow. One moment while I inform Shannon that you’ve arrived,” said the receptionist. There was no hint of any European accent in her voice.
Natalie stepped from the elevator and crossed her hands over her waist. This was the right place, at least.
A man in his mid-twenties arrived seconds later, the bulge of a sidearm under his suit coat. He put his hand on the door and pushed it open as a buzzer sounded. He motioned down the hall with a nod.
Not ones for chitchat, she thought.
Natalie followed him past offices with glass walls. One office held a mess of computers in various states of disrepair. Another had a huge screen that took up almost the entire wall; dots of light marked all the world’s major shipping lanes. Three men huddled together in another office. One noticed her and clapped his hands twice; the glass wall went opaque in an instant.
She followed her guide around a corner and stopped with him at an oaken door, the antique nature of the door at odds with the ultramodern office.
Her guide opened the door, and Natalie went inside.
The office had deep carpets; a Persian rug of exquisite detail lay under a massive desk that barely allowed passage around it. Computer screens glowed behind a high-backed ostrich-skin swivel chair. The occupant was turned away from Natalie; a phone line ran from a receiver around the chair.
“I swear to God, Marco, if you don’t have that shipment in Naples by this time tomorrow, I will pop your nuts in a vice and use your falsetto voice as my new ringtone!” said a woman’s voice from the chair. “Oh, you can have it delivered on time? That’s what I thought. Don’t make me call you back.”
The chair swung around. The woman’s features told of mixed Asian and Caucasian heritage; a few strands of gray hair ran from her brow into long black hair with subtle waves. She wore a white blouse and had a gold-and-diamond necklace that must have cost more than Natalie had ever made during her entire four years in the army.
The strangest thing about the woman was that Natalie instantly recognized her.
“Italians. It’s always ‘demani demani’ but tomorrow never comes with these people.” The seated woman said.
“I–I know you. You’re from USAID. Genevieve? Genevieve Delacriox?” Natalie asked.
The woman rolled her eyes. “You don’t even bat an eye at Carlos who you’d seen in Iraq and was the man that picked up your bag. Or Mike, your diver, who snatched a detainee right from under your nose at a detention center in Iraq. But me you recognize right away. Call me Shannon from now on.”
Natalie stared at Shannon/Genevieve, and suddenly a series of events from her deployment to Iraq made sense. The CIA had been lurking around her unit from the time two Soldiers were kidnapped by al Qaeda to the moment Eric Ritter had vanished from the face of the earth.
“Please”—Shannon motioned to a chair across from her—“before you fall down.”
Natalie accepted the invitation. The leather of the chair was supple and thick beneath her touch.
“Camel leather, latest craze among Gulf Arabs. They found another use for those stink beasts besides racing and milk. You like it?”
Natalie just kept staring at her, still dumbfounded.
Shannon folded her hands on the desk.
“Let’s get a few things out of the way. Yes, I used USAID as cover while I was in Iraq. I went with you to that little army base in the middle of Iraq terrorist country to check up on Eric Ritter, who was working with us to recover the two Soldiers kidnapped by al-Qaeda. You caught our eye, and we approached you after your deployment. You did very well in training, and now you’re here for evaluation.”
Natalie managed to nod while her mind raced. She knew Ritter had gone well beyond the limits of what an officer in the US Army could do to find the two missing Soldiers. Natalie had accepted those means only because they had led to that patch of desert where the Soldiers were buried.
Were Shannon and this organization still playing by those rules? Were murder, torture, and deceit the rules of Shannon’s game?
“So what do you think we do here?” Shannon asked.
Natalie worked her jaw from side to side, a horrible clue alerting anyone paying attention that she was nervous.
“If we’d met like this in Iraq, I would have said counterterrorism. But now… I doubt there are many al-Qaeda cells in Vienna,” Natalie said.
“We still have a counterterrorism mission, just at a higher level than what you glimpsed in Iraq. What does any terrorist need to function?”
“Money… and a populace to hide in,” Natalie answered.
“Very good. As gratifying as it is to shoot a Hellfire missile into some jihadi’s face, that won’t win the long war. We’re here for their money and, by immediate extension, their weapons.”
“How does a shipping company”—Natalie looked around—“do that?”
Shannon smiled and leaned back in her chair, a predatory smile on her face. “Now you’re asking the right questions. Russians, my dear, Russians. The best retirement plan for a Russian officer is to ‘lose’ a shipment of rifles, explosives, IED components. There are other players in the arms black market, but our focus is on Soviet-era surplus.
“A shipping company is good cover for interacting with the sellers and the buyers. We have operations on the buy side of the equation, but that doesn’t concern you just yet.”
“That’s why I had to spend five hours a day, six days a week, learning Russian on top of my field training?” Natalie asked.
“Yes. Your instructor rates your Russian is passable,” Shannon said. “With enough practice we’ll get you to a near native level.”
Natalie swallowed hard. Passable? She could keep up a half hour long conversation over the finer points of Lermontov’s fiction and her instructor rated her as “passable?” She’d display her mastery of Moscow slang and insults the next time she saw the bloated potato-headed bore of a man that taught her the language of the Czars.