The Socotra Incident (6 page)

“Ah, Viktor. I warned him not so sell in South America, but he didn’t listen,” Shannon said.

“Wait, you know that guy?” Natalie said and immediately felt stupid for asking the question. After their meeting with a different arms dealer, Natalie wouldn’t be surprised if there was a photo of Shannon and Vladimir Putin on a wall somewhere in the office.

“He’s slime, but he delivered on time.” Shannon waved her hand and dismissed the topic. “We have to win this auction. Eggheads at the National Ground Intelligence Center can dissect it and maybe come up with a countermeasure.”

“Where are we going to get that much money in the next twenty-four hours?” Natalie asked.

“Money isn’t an issue. Overpaying is.” Shannon hit a button on her phone. “Tony, get in here.” She turned back to Natalie. “You’re going back to that hotel tomorrow. Do you have a wig?”

Ritter, clad in business attire befitting an overpaid corporate snob, knocked on the open door of Tony’s lab. The room smelled of ozone and stale pizza as Ritter let himself in. Most technical intelligence analysts kept their workstations impeccably neat but not Tony, who seemed to thrive in the chaos of empty soda cans, cell phones, and computers splayed open in mid-dissection.

Despite the general filth and disorder of Tony’s lab, he had yet to misplace a thing of intelligence value or foul up an exploitation report.

Ritter found Tony behind a wall of computer monitors, headphones blaring some sort of Swedish rock opera. Tony hadn’t kept his New Year’s resolution to drop fifty pounds; a ring of exposed fat lapped over his sides and the bottom of his shirt. Ritter toyed with the idea of dropping a pencil into Tony’s exposed butt crack to teach him a lesson about respecting coworkers.

Instead, Ritter pulled the shattered thumb drive he’d lifted off the mark in Aden and tossed the bloodstained device in a plastic dime bag onto Tony’s keyboard.

Tony froze, then looked up at Ritter with a curled lip.

“Really, Eric? You got to bring me something covered in hepatitis and AIDS?”

“For someone who smells like his mother’s basement and Cheetos, you got a funny set of standards when it comes to cleanliness.”

“No one ever caught Ebola in my office.” Tony picked up the baggie by a corner with his fingertips and inspected the device. “The SSD looks cracked. What did you do—throw the guy under a bus before you got this?”

“Kind of,” Ritter deadpanned.

Tony set the USB in front of his keyboard and pushed himself away from the desk. Tony had a superstition that anything found on a person when he or she died carried a part of the departed’s spirit.

“I don’t know, Eric. I’ve got all this stuff out of Mosul to exploit and—”

“The courier was with the Sayf network, and he had enough counter surveillance around him to catch the CIA officer the Sana’a station insisted on tagging along. The guy wasn’t a fighter, but he did his best to get away from me. Whatever he was involved with was in the kind-of-a-big-deal territory. Prioritize this, and I’ll bring you a pizza from Aviano, okay?”

The air force base outside Vicenza, Italy, had an American-style pizzeria, which was night and day different from what passed for pizza Austria. Despite having a security clearance so high that even the designation was classified, Tony was easy to bribe.

“First, I want bacon on it this time and some of those cheese-covered bread sticks. Second.” He poked at the baggie with a pen. “Eww.”

“Thanks, Tony. You’re my favorite nerd,” Ritter said as he turned to leave the office.

“Geek! Geek—thank you very much,” Tony said.

Ritter made his way down the halls toward Shannon’s office. He passed other “employees” without a word or a second glance. Working in a covert facility meant keeping the work environment unsociable. Conversations in the hallways were forbidden, as details of a compartmentalized operation might leak to uncleared ears. You could always spot the extroverts in the office, as they would look at other people’s shoes.

He knocked on Shannon’s door and looked up at the camera. A buzz and a sharp click told him the door was open.

“The station chief in Sana’a just about had kittens when you left the country. I’ve been trying to smooth things over with the Middle East desk, who is just as angry as the station chief,” Shannon said to Ritter as he walked in.

“Sorry, was I supposed to hang around and get to know the finer aspects of the Yemeni prison system?”

Shannon rolled her eyes.

“They’re all pissed off that you didn’t share whatever you picked up. If it leads to something major, then they want their share of the kudos,” she said.

“Since when do they care about who gets the credit? They’re the national
clandestine
service.”

“Politics, Eric. The CIA is still a Washington, DC, organization, and that comes with plenty of backbiting over rice bowls and stovepipes or whatever buzzword they’re using for bureaucratic posturing.” Shannon sighed.

“I’ve never known you to care so much about their wants and desires,” Ritter said. As a covert arm of the CIA, the Caliban Program had a tenuous relationship with the rest of the American intelligence apparatus. Its actions were hidden from all but a few carefully screened and high-ranking members of the government. Like a black hole, information would flow into the Caliban Program, but nothing ever came out.

“We might need their assistance in the future. I’d rather get it with a polite smile than with twisting arms.” Shannon pressed a button on her keyboard, and the passport picture of the mark popped onto a screen behind Shannon.

The man’s name was Latif al-Kindah. A fact Ritter could have done without.

“Latif was a bagman for the Sayf network. They’re chalking his death up to an accident, which is convenient. There’s no chatter beyond this, which tells us what?” Shannon said, watching Ritter through the corner of her eye. Ritter wasn’t sure whether she’d asked Ritter this kind of question to test him or to confirm her own suspicions.

“His cash belt was empty. There’s no gnashing of teeth over his death. He made his payment and went to the Internet café to report the drop to his handler.”

Shannon nodded slowly.

“Let’s hope Latif’s replacement has worse tradecraft and more sense to look both ways before crossing the street,” she said.

Ritter didn’t laugh at the joke.

“What—my timing’s off?”

“You weren’t there,” Ritter said. The smell of dirt and sweat came back to him; he glanced at his fingernails for the umpteenth time to check whether they were clean of Latif’s blood.

“Fair enough. We have a new intern, and I need you to show her the ropes. She’s still on provisional status, so keep the conversation light despite your history.”

Ritter crossed his arms. “Shannon, after the debacle with the last intern, I don’t—wait, what?”

“Yes, Natalie is here. Dine in; you’re on a thirty-minute recall until that USB is decoded,” she said.

Ritter felt his face flush as a level of anxiety unacceptable to a spy grew in his chest. He and Natalie had spent a furtive weekend together while she was training in Virginia and passed e-mail to each other through a shared e-mail account by saving, not sending, draft messages. The details of her training and Ritter’s fieldwork were never discussed.

“I don’t know how to cook,” Ritter said.

“You’re a spy, Eric. Figure something out,” Shannon said. A red light flashed on her desk phone.

“Go. Someone else needs an ego stroking,” she said.

Natalie rapped her fingertips against a kitchen counter. Ritter had left her alone in his apartment ten minutes ago to pick up their dinner, and the view from his living room bored her. She stood up and stretched, the jet lag from her flight trying to convince her that it was well past her bed time.

She checked her watch, she had a few solid minutes to scout out the apartment.

Natalie peeked around a half-open door and into a bedroom. She knew better than to snoop around Ritter’s apartment, but her curiosity got the better of her. The apartment’s layout was identical to her own: a single bedroom, a bath, a tiny kitchen, and European disdain for closets. This wasn’t surprising, as her apartment was down the hallway.

She slipped a pen in the space between the frame and the door hinge to mark how far the door was open. Everything had to look exactly the same after she’d finished looking around.

The bed was a mess of crumpled sheets. A traveler’s backpack, the kind college kids hauled all across Europe, lay on the bed, half full and unzipped. A half-dozen passports from Canada and western Europe were mashed between clothes, a wig, and a leather pouch soldiers used to hold toiletries. She ran her fingers along the zipped side of the backpack and felt the outline of a small pistol.

The pack was Ritter’s “bugout bag,” a single portable he could take when it came time to disappear quickly and efficiently.

She opened his closet, where a row of designer suits hung from wide hangers. She flipped open one of the jackets and saw a label for Scheer & Söhne, a tailor she recognized from her shopping expedition earlier that day. That shop had offered only bespoke suits that were so expensive, they didn’t bother with price tags. The floor of the closet was a jumble of leather shoes that looked handmade and bore different sets of gold-inlaid initials on the heels.

How could he afford all this?

Tucked into the edge of a mirror was a photo of Eric and Natalie, in their army-gray, digital-pattern uniforms, hands joined in a diamond shape. They stood next to a professional wrestler, who flashed his signature hand sign. On the other side of him was another pair of army officers, Jennifer and Joe Mattingly. Jennifer was dead, killed by an IED. Natalie had never gotten the whole story, but Eric had killed the insurgent responsible for Jennifer’s death, an insurgent who had become their ally in the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

At the end of the rack were a bulletproof vest and an Applegate-Fairbairn knife sheathed next to a holstered Glock 19 with a custom-molded grip.

She moved to the nightstand and was about to touch it when she saw a dusting of powder on the handle. An old trick to mark the passage of an unwelcome visitor.

Suddenly paranoid, Shannon left the room, made sure the door was open the right amount, and went to the kitchen. The refrigerator held a half-empty bottle of sparkling water and something foul in a cardboard box. Dishes in the glass cabinets were covered in dust.

Other than the bedroom, the apartment looked like it had been vacant for months.

The lock to the apartment door beeped, and Ritter came in, carrying a paper bag, grease spots seeping through the sides.

Natalie flashed a smile, giving her best “not guilty” expression.

Ritter pulled a bottle from the bag.

“Water. Sorry, I’m on call,” he said. “Why don’t you take a seat. I’ll get this ready.”

Natalie sat at the two-person table on the other side of the sink and watched as Ritter fumbled through his cabinets. Didn’t he know where he kept the plates?

“What did you get?”

“Doner kebabs and falafel. There’s an Iraqi refugee a few blocks away who makes falafel just like that stand at Camp Victory,” Ritter said. He wiped down a pair of plates and opened the Styrofoam containers. The smell of spiced lamb and lemons wafted from the kitchen.

“Do you speak Arabic with him?” she asked. Ritter was one of the few army officers who could speak fluent Arabic, a fact that had made him invaluable during their time in Iraq.

“I guess this isn’t what you were hoping for in the way of genuine Austrian food. There’s a schnitzel place in Salzburg we can go to once things calm down…if you want,” Ritter said.

“And how many days of ‘calm’ have you had?”

Ritter placed a plate of thinly sliced lamb, mixed with onions and lettuce over a piece of pita bread, in front of Natalie. He sat across from her and let out a slow breath.

“I think I’ve spent at most three nights in a row in this apartment. When we aren’t doing work for the shipping company, we’re doing work for…the company. If that makes sense,” he said.

“It’s starting to. Is there a language bonus for doublespeak?” she asked.

“Not that I’ve seen on the pay stub. I kept up with our unit after I was reassigned, but all the information was broad brush. How’re folks at Dragon Company and at headquarters?”

“You didn’t keep up with Shelton?” she asked. Shelton was the company commander of the two missing Soldiers Ritter had helped find. She had been there when Shelton confronted Ritter over the death of their former insurgent ally. Their parting had been cathartic and unamicable.

“No, haven’t tried.”

A cell phone in the kitchen buzzed. Ritter looked down at his untouched meal and sighed.

“Never fails,” he said as he stood and went into the kitchen. Natalie heard a few terse words before Ritter came out of the kitchen.

“Sorry, Natalie, I have to go in,” he said.

“Not me?”

“I asked but no. You’re still on probation, and this is a red ball recall.”