Blowback (4 page)

At 17 Rue de la
Bûcherie,
above Librairie du Mille Ciels, Pauk climbed the familiar, narrow staircase quickly, soundlessly.

At the crest of the second landing, instead of continuing up the last flight to his attic rooms, he paused to listen to the faint, flat whine of televised voices, a
fútbol
match, coming from inside his landlady's apartment.

In one hand he held a plain brown sack, and he took care not to crinkle or disturb the paper in any way. He knocked once, then again.

At least a minute passed before he heard the scratch and click of the metal locks.

The door opened and the old woman peered out at him with her milky eyes. The most she could see were shadows, and yet her wrinkled face seemed to literally crack into a smile.
“Vous êtes de retour! Bonjour!”

In return, he held up the sack and gave it a shake.
“Coeur et foie.”

“Ah, coeur . . .”
In a voice of gravel and phlegm, Madame Desmarais admonished him to hurry inside and close the door before the cats escaped.

He obeyed, eyes watering from the stench of cat piss and shit, waiting by the door until she limped her way back to the loveseat. Cats scattered as she turned and dropped onto the faded blue cushions. He shook the bag again for the animals' benefit. Half a dozen multicolored felines clustered around him, squalling and mewling at the scent of bloody organs. A pied piper of sorts, he lured them toward the tiny kitchen, all the while his eyes flickering to the television screen, where—during a break in the France versus Pakistan game—a segment suddenly featured Terek Stadium in Grozny, Chechnya.

His throat clenched as he was sucked back almost twenty years—only to see a boy, weak and spindly and crying like a baby, dragged by an old man with iron claws down a filthy, crumbling staircase. The boy struggled, fighting to run back to the apartment where his mother lay sick and close to death, but the old man was strong, and he forced the boy the rest of the way to the icy, stinking street.

Gray world, filthy snow, bombs, tanks, and rubble.

At the makeshift orphanage, they locked him in a closet so he couldn't run away. When he managed to escape, he ran back to find his mother, but she was gone and strangers occupied what had been his home.

Months later the rebel fighters, the Wahhabi, found him hiding in a ditch filled with raw sewage and freezing rain. Some of them laughed; others shook their heads and said he was an orphan crazy from war. But one day, a rebel put a long and battered rifle in his hands and showed him how to use it.

So then, for the cause and for Allah, they told him to kill one of the Russian soldiers from the camp far across the creek. Whichever one he wanted!

He had no idea if Allah cared or not—or if He even existed—but the rifle gave him a purpose and the faintest sense that he belonged to something.

It took him three days lying prone in the snow and then mud. He shit and pissed his pants. He didn't move. Lay there frozen in the rough weeds. Watching through the scope: one soldier, then another and another. He didn't know which one to kill. By the third day the Russians began to move gear to their trucks. He picked out the biggest soldier who might be easier to hit because of his size. He held him in his scope, squeezed the trigger, and put a hole in his heart.

When the Russians went berserk and crazy for revenge, he didn't know what to do or where to run or hide. If not for the man who pulled him from the weeds, he would have been dead.

The man took him to a room where it was dry and too warm. On the first day he just sat silently and kept the distance between them. On the next day he brought a ball—shiny and smooth, black and white—unlike any ball Pauk had seen in his life. The man asked him in broken Chechen, “How old are you? Twelve? Thirteen?”

The man was a resistance fighter, too, but he came from far away and spoke strange words in a quiet voice. He moved slowly. Even when he made the ball dance and spin and obey, still he moved slowly.

When he finally sat across from Pauk, the boy saw the man's dark eyes were different—his left eye slashed with tiny shards of blue—

A woman's voice cut into his memories:
“Merde!”

Pauk blinked, openmouthed, to see Madame jerk forward in her seat.
“Connard!”

This is Paris, Madame's apartment
—where he was jolted by the cries of the fat tabby.

He took the final few steps to the kitchen, where he selected the sharpest knife and a cutting board. He poured out the chicken parts, arranging them neatly with the tip of the knife. He worked, dicing the organs with precision to the rhythm of the steady drip of water from the faucet. Whenever the cats jumped up on the small, cluttered counter, he gently shooed them away.

In between slices, he opened the cabinet above the sink. Soundlessly sliding the collection of empty canning jars to one side, he slipped the knife blade into the barely visible seam at the back of the shelf. The trick panel released.

He took a passport from his pocket and set it on top of a pile of a dozen others—the identities he used for jobs. Unremarkable men, all in their early thirties, hailing from countries such as Switzerland and France and Canada and the UK.

He kept the tools of his trade locked in a broken freezer, chained shut, in the same private one-car garage where he parked the Fiat. Three retractable hunting knives; his Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunov—the same model of “short stroke” semiautomatic Russian-made Dragunov sniper rifle he used to make his first kill as a boy in Chechnya; boxes of 7.62×54R rounds; extra “cans,” or suppressors; and a Leopold Mark IV scope.

For the garage, he paid cash every month and had the payment delivered to the same box. He and the owner had never met in person.

He ran his thumb along the stack of passports, sensing which he might use for the next job. Then he replaced the panel, carefully arranging the jars just so, the way Madame liked them.

He selected three saucers, dividing the diced organs evenly. He fed the cats, rearranging several of the bolder ones and a kitten, so each had its share.

On the counter, his glass of Beaujolais nouveau awaited.

He sat in his usual chair and settled in to the noise and the company of the woman and her cats. She raised her glass to greet his:
“À votre santé,”
always the beginning of their
fútbol
ritual.

He would be her eyes—for the pretty boys in their bright uniforms—and she would let him. She was his only contact with normalcy. But his mind kept circling back to Vienna, and he felt haunted by the dark-haired woman. What, if anything, had she learned from the Iranian traitor?

Thirty minutes to cover
fifteen miles between Dulles and safe house Stag, a faux-Colonial condo in the congested, crazy Tysons Corner. Ten minutes to splash water on her face, brush her teeth, run a comb through her hair, and rummage up a Band-Aid for her blistered heel. Another fifty-two minutes of mental and physical pacing. Until she finally opened the door to Chris Arvanitis, her direct boss at CPD.

At five-foot-eight, he stood barely taller than Vanessa, and he seemed to live in his silver-rimmed glasses and kept what was left of his receding hair cut in a military buzz. At first glance unprepossessing—at second glance, formidable. He pumped weights, belonged to Mensa, and his dark brown eyes could make you feel you'd been cornered by a tiger. He brushed past her with a black look, the fallout beginning.

She frowned, on her guard. “Where's the DDO?”

“You're lucky I got here first.” Chris pivoted so abruptly he pinned her in the corner with her back against the wall and they were eye-to-eye, his thick lashes magnified behind the lenses of his glasses. “What the hell, Vanessa?”

“Chris—”

“Why the hell did you ignore my order to abort?”

“Why the hell did you call me off?”

Chris shook his head sharply. “Don't you dare provoke me, not after all I've done for you, not after Prague. I covered your ass. Without me you'd be in fucking backwater Montevideo.”

His face loomed so close she flinched. “You're right.” She swallowed, her mouth gone suddenly dry. “Sorry.”

“Goddamn it, Vanessa.” His dark brows pulled together sharply, and his eyes still bored through her, but he lowered his voice and took a step back. “We had intel from MI6 that one of the Iranians at the conference might be a target.”

“When did this come in? I wasn't read in—”

“I don't have to read you in.
If I give you a direct order, you follow it.
What the hell about that don't you understand?” He turned and strode into the living room, and she followed.

“You're absolutely right, Chris . . .” Her voice softened, the corners of her mouth pulling down.
God, she hated this feeling—like a contrite child.
He still had his back to her, but she did her best to reach for words he needed to hear her say. “Of course I need to obey orders.”

Now she reached out physically, touching his sleeve just as he turned to face her. “But I got the intel, and, Chris, it's what we need to put nails into Operation Ghost Hunt, so we can get Bhoot, so at least hear me out.”

“You're missing the point—”

“No, I get that I screwed up, I get that—but if I had obeyed your order, if I aborted the op, my asset would still be dead, and I wouldn't have shit—and this is big. It's what I've been waiting for.”

His eyes narrowed to slits.
“You?”

“It's what
we've
been waiting for,” she corrected herself quickly. “Our team at CPD.”

He stared at her now, intently, and she felt him take in her bruised cheek, the shadows beneath her eyes, her bare feet. His expression shifted among anger, exasperation, and open concern.

As she met his gaze, he turned away, rubbing the knuckles of one hand hard against his cheek, a familiar gesture of fatigue. He checked his watch. “The DDO should be here any minute.”

“Okay, good. I made coffee. High-test,” she said, deliberately pointing Chris in the direction of the small, sterile kitchen. When he followed her cue, she took her first deep breath since his arrival. Sleep-deprived and running on fumes, Vanessa could safely assume Chris was in a similar state—straight from an eighteen-plus-hour day at Headquarters, where he'd been dealing with the fallout from Austria.
Her
fallout.

Seconds later she opened the door to the Agency's Deputy Director of Operations, Phillip Hawkins. The DDO breezed past Vanessa with eyebrows raised. “Clearly what happened in Prague hasn't kept you out of trouble or improved your judgment.”

Damn.

“At least you made it back in one piece.” But he didn't make it sound like a plus. As he passed from foyer to living room, impeccable in his black silk tuxedo, he left behind the very expensive scent of Clive Christian 1872, his signature. Clearly she represented a bit of business to settle before he moved on to this night's benefit or gala.

Vanessa smoothed the rumpled suit supplied by Prague Station. She'd already lost the Band-Aid, and she'd given up on the ill-fitting pumps, relieved to be barefoot again. A hot shower would be her reward when she completed the debrief.

“There's coffee,” she told the DDO, just as Chris appeared from the kitchen with a steaming mug.

Phillip Hawkins stayed standing, his sharp eyes on Chris, clearly waiting for the answer to an unasked question.

The thought shot through her wired brain:
Christ, was Chris supposed to take me off the op?

She looked to Chris, unable to keep the shock and disappointment completely hidden. She read a warning on his face.

He stayed silent long enough that she broke a sweat. Then he took a tired breath. “Vanessa's prepared to debrief us on Vienna and the intel she got from her asset. I believe it's worth hearing her out.”

“Her
dead
asset, you mean?” The DDO met Vanessa's eyes with his own icy blues. Long-standing rumors held that he had used those blues to seduce more than his share of women, assets, and political allies over the course of his thirty-year career. Now they stayed squarely on Vanessa, and he frowned sharply. Blowback from Vienna was a personal affront, a black mark on his agency and his ambitions.

But he sat, sinking into the best of the faded leather chairs, crossing his black-trousered legs and adjusting his left cuff—his gaze flicking obviously to his gold-and-silver Rolex. “Then let's do this thing.”

She pulled up with a nod and forced herself to sit. “Right.” But she held off just long enough for Chris to take the black Windsor chair next to the DDO.

Before the DDO could look at his Rolex again, Vanessa launched in, taking them through the sequence of relevant events as they had unfolded in Vienna.

“I ran a full three-hour SDR . . . meeting set for 1630 hours, but Tree/213 did not make that meeting . . . at 1725 hours I saw him walking rapidly toward me along the Hauptallee just as my sterile phone went off.”

Refusing to hesitate, Vanessa looked directly at Chris. “At that point, I was less than ten meters from my asset. We made eye contact, and I made a judgment call to proceed with the meet. He immediately told me about a previously unknown secret underground facility in southeastern Iran. Sistan-Baluchestan Province.”

The energy shifted palpably. Chris pulled forward to the edge of his seat and skimmed one hand across the flat of his close-cropped hair. The DDO narrowed his eyes, and his nostrils flared. For the moment, she had their full attention.

“Tree/213 relayed that he'd been to the facility, and they have just started producing weapons-grade uranium. Also, according to my asset the facility has resurrected an earlier program using UD3, uranium deuteride, to test a neutron initiator, a component with no legitimate civilian uses.”

“A trigger?” Chris pulled up sharply. “Was Tree/213 part of the earlier program?”

“Yes. And all of that is actionable intel—but he also had vital time-sensitive intel. The Sistan facility is prepping for a visit from a VIP, a non-Iranian, possibly a Westerner. The visit is scheduled for the thirtieth of this month.”

“That's just two weeks,” Chris said, his forehead sharply creased. “Did he give you a name?”

“Two weeks minus the day it took me to get back here,” Vanessa said. She took a deep breath. “He believed the VIP is Bhoot, the ghost.”

She did not have to remind either man that uncovering Bhoot's identity and unraveling his international arms-smuggling operation had been the focus of CPD's Operation Ghost Hunt for the past three years.

“What did your asset offer to confirm it was Bhoot?” The DDO asked the question, and Vanessa directed her answer to him.

“He didn't get the chance to tell me.”

“Did he say who gave him this information?”

“No.”

The DDO exchanged an uneasy look with Chris. “Did he overhear a conversation?” Chris prompted Vanessa. “Did he get his hands on an internal document?”

Frustrated, Vanessa shook her head. “I don't know. He said there were rumors raging and amped-up operations at the facility; they were running tests and drills in preparation for the thirtieth, and this was extremely unusual.”

For a few seconds, no one spoke. Then Chris sat back in his chair. “If your asset was correct, then where the hell is the facility? Baluchestan Province covers about forty percent of Iran.”

“He was killed before he had time to give me the geo-coordinates to memorize.”

“That makes it a needle in a very big haystack.” Frowning, the DDO crossed his arms over his heart. “They've managed to keep other facilities hidden.”

“But they can't hide the procurement trail,” Vanessa said tensely.

Chris nodded. “It explains the amping up of black-market shipments to Iran. It's been driving my team crazy, those of us working on Operation Ghost Hunt. We couldn't figure out where the hell those components were going. Like they were swallowed up in a black hole.”

“Southeast Iran is a
massive
black hole,” the DDO said. “Without coordinates, it could take months to confirm or disprove the existence of an underground facility.”

“And we've only got two weeks if we believe this stuff about Bhoot,” Chris said.

Vanessa pressed on. “I believe that Tree/213's wife has the geo-coordinates that he was going to give me. XYTree/214 is solid, extremely smart, and she will be on the move by now—”

She paused, just for a second, to see if Chris would jump in and state the obvious—the need to get the exfil operation going immediately.

But it was the DDO who said, “It's been more than twenty-four hours since the incident in Vienna. Tree/214 may already be in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard.”

“She knows she's in extreme danger,” Vanessa said quickly. “She has a six-year-old daughter. We have to go on faith that they're both safe for the moment. We need to get them out of Iran
now
.”

“She may be unwilling to deal with you, Vanessa,” Chris said quietly. “Her husband was your asset. And she may blame you for his death.”

Vanessa cleared her throat. “She may blame me, yes, but she's tough and she's smart, and she can't get out of Iran without our help. She'll play.”

A low whine filled the room: the signal of a phone set on vibrate. The DDO stood, reaching into his pocket, and then he disappeared into the kitchen to take the call in private.

Vanessa pulled her chair toward Chris. He was still hunched forward intently. But now he fingered the blue-beaded amulet he always carried on his key ring, a gift from his
yia yia
in Greece. Vanessa knew it provided protection against the
matiasma
, the evil eye. He might be Phi Beta Kappa and a techno junkie, but he was superstitious as hell.

“There's something else you need to know,” she said, diving in. “I got a look at the shooter as I was leaving the park.”

Chris eyed her sharply. “Then go over the file photos tomorrow, see if you find him. Tonight, focus on your summary cable.”

Before she could respond, the DDO reappeared from the kitchen, clearly on his way to the door and his waiting armored SUV.

“I'll come into Headquarters tonight,” she began, following him, “to be there when you move on contacting the Poles about the exfil—”

“We can contact the Poles without your assistance,” the DDO said. “Chris can fill me in on the rest of your intel.”

“But every hour my asset's family is out there on their own—”

Abruptly, Deputy Director Hawkins raised a hand to silence her. “Be at my office at 0900 hours sharp.” At the door, he paused just long enough to lock on Vanessa with his eyes. “We have to consider the possibility that you've been compromised.”

Chris placed something in her palm. She looked numbly down to see her Agency badge—Chris always held it when she was in the field. “Until we sort through this and take a look at what the hell actually happened, the DDO agrees with me that it's obviously not in anyone's interest to have you dealing with sensitive assets.”

Her skin pricked with the heat of sudden anger. “You need me on this, Chris. I may have just moved us years closer to catching Bhoot. You see how important it is not to cut me out now? We're close, I can feel it, we have to stop him—”

Chris wrapped his fingers around her wrist, his grip firm but not hard. It startled and confused Vanessa to read his expression—he was afraid for her. “Write up your summary and then get some sleep,” he said wearily. “And change your clothes. We'll deal with all this tomorrow.”