Marks put a shaky hand to her face. “This can’t be happening.”
“If it is one of them, which?” said Reel.
“In some ways it doesn’t matter,” said Robie. “We can get into Iran and North Korea, maybe. But we won’t be able to get out. Syria was hard enough and Syria is not in the same league as those two. North Korea might as well be another planet.”
Marks said, “North Korea is another planet. But to get to that target we have to have rock-solid inside people at the very top. How did that happen without my being aware of it? Intel like that doesn’t occur overnight.”
“You haven’t been on the job that long,” said Robie. “It might have happened before you got here. DiCarlo wasn’t on the job long enough to see that through either.”
“That’s true,” said Marks.
“But the DD before her, Jim Gelder, was,” noted Robie, as he glanced at Reel.
Reel looked away. She said, “Gelder could have been involved in something like that. He didn’t just push the edges, he obliterated them. Taking down one of those guys, he would’ve seen it as his crowning glory, even if it did lead to Armageddon.” She paused and added, “He already tried something like that once. Guy’s just full of surprises. Too bad he’s dead. We might want to kill him all over again.”
Robie looked at Marks. “So how exactly does this go down? We’re tasked to commit a hit on a target that is clearly illegal? How do we do that? I’m not going to be left holding the bag on something like that.”
Reel said, “We’ve sat through our psych evals and they keep pounding away at us on one thing: Will we follow orders or will we make up our own? So you tell us, DD, what do we do if that order comes down?”
Marks started to say something but then stopped. Finally, she blurted out, “God help me, Jessica, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Chapter 23
Evan Tucker stared down at the secure email he had read about a dozen times now. And still his mind could not process what it was seeing.
Lloyd Carson found murdered in hotel in Romania. Robbery believed to be motive.
Tucker looked down at his hands, which were shaking. He tried to type a response but couldn’t manage it. He rose from his desk, crossed his office at Langley, poured himself a glass of water, and drank it down. He poured another and accidentally splashed some of it down his shirt and tie.
He sat back down and peered at the screen. Part of him was hoping that the email had somehow disappeared, or had never been there, only a delusional by-product of his overly stressed mind.
But there it was. Lloyd Carson, an envoy from Britain to North Korea, had been found murdered. Robbery suspected because his wallet, jewelry, passport, and cell phone had been taken.
His cell phone.
Tucker made a call and ordered that something be done immediately. It was.
Another email soon fell into his in-box and he clicked it open.
He thought he might be physically sick.
What he was looking at was a list of phone calls made and received by Carson in the hours leading up to his death.
The last one had been placed in the wee hours of the morning in Bucharest. It had been placed to a phone number in North Korea. A very special number that only a handful of people had. The question was, had Carson placed that call? Or had someone else? Like the person who had murdered him?
He sent a secure communication at the very top level of secrecy. He did not expect an answer back immediately, and he tried to focus on other work, but found that impossible. There was no other work that came close to this in terms of importance. He couldn’t wall off his mind to think of other things.
Two hours later a reply came back, and it froze him to the bone.
A call was received at that time but no one spoke on the other end.
No one spoke on the other end.
Tucker played out in his mind what had possibly happened on the ground in Romania. Carson was spooked by something and changed his travel plans on the spot. He made phone calls, all but one to British telephone numbers. One, however, was to North Korea. Whoever had killed him had recognized the country code and simply redialed that number. The person had answered the phone, thinking it was Carson calling again.
Tucker leaned his head back against his chair.
Did that mean what he thought it meant? Did it matter? He couldn’t take that chance. Their ultra-secret operation possibly had just been blown wide open.
He had to inform the president.
His mind knew he had to do this, but his hand did not move to the phone.
He began to rethink things.
That phone number was untraceable. Maybe he was okay. Just maybe.
It might be possible that he need not contact the president. What he needed was to first ensure that the op had not been compromised. And if it hadn’t been he needed to get his team up to speed and into the field so they could execute the op.
They would not get a second chance.
He made a few more calls, setting in motion this process.
Right now he didn’t care if Robie and Reel survived or not. He was not overwhelmed by a sense of injustice that demanded they be punished.
He simply wanted to survive this. The risk had been huge. Too big, he now lamented, but it was clearly too late for such thinking.
He hurried off to a meeting and sat through a presentation that he neither listened to nor cared about. He rushed through a full day of such events, stopping only to eat a cup of soup that felt like acid dropping into his belly.
He was driven home and walked into the house. Ordering his aides to remain behind, he sidestepped his wife, who was coming out of the living room to greet him, and fled to the back of the house where his home office was. He engaged the room’s SCIF features and checked his emails and voice messages.
Nothing yet. That might be good or that might be bad.
He called Marks at the Burner Box and told her to speed up the process. It would be Robie and Reel, he told her. And they would potentially be deployed very soon. He didn’t wait for her to ask questions but simply hung up.
He poured himself a drink of something far stronger than water and then had another. His nerves were wound so tight the alcohol had no effect at all. It was like he was drinking a soda.
He slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes.
He opened them when an alert went off on his computer.
That was a very special alert that he had set up. And it demanded immediate attention.
His mouth dry and his heart pounding in his chest, Tucker opened the email, which contained the very highest encryption features. The message was brief, but each word was like a bullet fired directly into his skull.
He could only stare in disbelief, because whatever hope he had held just a few moments before was now gone.
Irreversibly gone. In fact, this surpassed the worst scenario he could have imagined after he’d been informed of Carson’s murder. Lloyd Carson was the go-between, the linchpin to this whole thing. And he had been uncovered and targeted. And he had gone down.
Well, now they were all going down. But it was even worse than that. This, in fact, changed everything.
He picked up his phone and punched in a number.
APNSA Potter answered on the second ring.
Tucker said, “We’re dead. And we’re dead beyond belief.”
Chapter 24
Tick-tick-tick.
The old-fashioned wall clock’s second hand made its way around the timepiece’s face.
The office Chung-Cha sat in was utilitarian, badly maintained, and depressing. Well, it would have been depressing for most people. It had no effect on her. She sat there impassively waiting her turn.