Chavez rolled his eyes. “Dude, nobody even knew who you were until you just told us. We just knew the DPRK was meeting some embassy shithead passing secrets.”
Kincaid’s face morphed into a look of abject terror. “But that means… you’ve… you’ve pulled her out, right? You got Jennifer out of there. Tell me you pulled her out. Tell me she’s safe!”
Again the Campus men looked at one another in confusion.
Chavez said, “Calm down! Out of… out of where?”
Kincaid screamed, pulled at his bindings like a maniac. “Fuck! You don’t even know what’s going on here! Jennifer is CIA. On nonofficial cover. She’s in danger!”
Chavez blinked hard. “Your wife is CIA?”
“Damn it! Damn you all! She’s somewhere in Belarus, and they will kill her now that this has happened!”
This didn’t make any sense to Jack. “If your wife is a NOC, how do you even know where she is? She isn’t supposed to tell you any of that.”
“Are you guys fucking idiots? She didn’t tell me! I haven’t heard from her in three months. She told me it would be a six-month assignment.”
“Then how—”
“Because those fuckers in Jakarta, the men you said were North Korean, they showed me pictures of her in the field. They said they could make one phone call and she’d be killed by the group she infiltrated. According to them, she was working as an accountant for some shady Mafia outfit out of Belarus. If the pass didn’t go off as planned this morning, then they would call the Belarusians, and they would—”
Chavez leapt to his feet. “I’ll be right back!”
Up at the front near the galley, he called Mary Pat Foley. She answered in seconds with “I hear there was a shoot-out in Jakarta. Are you guys okay?”
Chavez spoke quickly, “Listen carefully. This man is Ben Kincaid. His wife is—”
Mary Pat gasped. “Jen Kincaid. God Almighty. She’s one of Jay Canfield’s top officers.”
“Yeah, well the DPRK guys told Ben they knew her identity and where she’s working right now. They said if he didn’t play ball today, they’d drop a dime on her to the goons around her and get her killed. Don’t know if that’s all BS or if it’s true.”
Mary Pat said, “Where did they say she was?”
“Somewhere in Belarus, working for a—”
Mary Pat interrupted hastily. “I’ll put you on hold and check with Jay.” The phone clicked, and Chavez could tell Mary Pat was crystal clear on the gravity of this situation.
Chavez put the phone down, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. In the back of the cabin he could hear Kincaid going back and forth between openly weeping and cussing out Jack and Dominic.
The two Campus men just looked up at Chavez, hoping like hell they hadn’t just made a bad situation worse.
A minute later Mary Pat was back on the line. “Canfield confirmed it. Jennifer Kincaid is in Minsk right now, working deep cover in a legitimate company owned by a very dangerous criminal organization.”
“Shit. How the hell could the North Koreans know any of that?”
“I have no idea, but we’ve run into some similar breaches of undefined origin in the past couple weeks. There is a wide-ranging and ongoing compromise we don’t understand.”
“What about Jennifer?”
“We aren’t going through any normal processes. Canfield has men racing to her right this second to get her out of there. To hell with her cover, her future in clandestine service. We’ll get teams around her and pull her out before anyone has time to do anything to her.”
Chavez looked at his watch. “Damn, Mary Pat. We’ve had this guy in our hands for over an hour. He was noncompliant, and we were just trying to get out of the country safely without him compromising us. So we gagged him. The North Koreans have an hour head start.”
“You couldn’t have known,” she said softly. Then, “Look, you know how these things go. The operatives you ran into aren’t going to be the ones to expose Jen in Minsk. They would call their handlers, who themselves would have to kick it upstairs. The contact with the Belarusian group couldn’t possibly take place in under an hour.”
Chavez said, “I wish you sounded as confident as the words you’re saying.”
Mary Pat paused, then said, “Yeah. Well, all you and I can do right now is pray Jay’s men get to her in time.”
Chavez hung up, put on a confident face, and returned to the group.
Kincaid looked at him, tears streaming down his face. “What’s happening?”
“It’s getting taken care of.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means Langley is in the process of pulling your wife out right now.”
Kincaid nodded slowly, not quite believing, and then he looked out the window for a moment. He said, “That intelligence that you protected. The stuff I was handing over. Do you even know what it was?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dom said.
“The hell it doesn’t! I wasn’t handing out launch codes. I wasn’t passing off the travel routes of the ambassador. No… It was a media list. A fucking list of the names of the reporters and producers we go to here in Indonesia to speak on background about issues. Most all of those names and organizations in that binder can be assumed by the press that comes out from them. This was nothing. Nothing! Plus, the men who contacted me said they were South Koreans.”
Dom was incredulous. “Why would South Koreans threaten to kill your wife?”
“They claimed they had business contacts here in Jakarta who were making a play for political office. I knew they were dangerous men, but I didn’t know they were from the DPRK.”
Jack said, “It doesn’t matter. You shared classified material.”
“About nothing consequential, and to save my wife’s life.”
Jack said, “They were getting their hooks into you. That’s all. Once you’d passed over intel, any intel, doesn’t matter what, they could come back to you, hold your previous treason over your head, and turn up the heat on you to get more and more.”
Chavez nodded. “That’s how it works, Ben. Now, just sit there and chill out. As soon as we hear that your wife is safe, I’ll let you know.”
They had just taken off from a refueling stop in Tokyo when the secure phone rang at the front of the cabin. Chavez went to it, took a call, and sat down.
In the middle of the cabin Jack, Dom, and Ben all stared at him, searching his body language for any good news.
Instead, they all got a read on the phone call at the same time. Chavez lowered his head, rubbed his eyes slowly. He nodded, hung up the phone, and just sat there at the bulkhead.
All eyes in the back of the aircraft remained locked on him.
Finally Chavez said, “Dom, will you do me a favor and untie him? Mr. Kincaid, can you come up here, please?”
Ben Kincaid’s face reddened, his eyes misted, but he said nothing. Dom cut off the zip ties securing him to his chair, and the Department of State employee walked slowly to the front of the plane, like a man walking to the electric chair.
Dom and Jack didn’t even look at each other. They sat there quietly, until Jack said, “Shit.”
Dom nodded. “Yeah. Hell of a thing.”
Ten minutes later Chavez headed to the rear, leaving Kincaid at the front of the plane, doubled over in a cabin chair and sobbing softly. He sat down with Jack and Dom; the look in his face was as if he’d lost a loved one. “Jennifer Kincaid’s body was kicked out of a car at the front gate of the U.S. embassy in Minsk. Her throat was slashed so badly her head was barely attached.”