Viking Bay (26 page)

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Five weeks after Anna Mercer disappeared, Callahan pulled Kay out of the training program to take part in an operation.

The pre-op briefing was held in Callahan's conference room. In addition to Kay and Callahan, three other people were present: a good-looking young couple in their twenties named Rick and Sharon—no last names—and a no-nonsense guy in his forties who had short gray hair, was tall and slender, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. The man was introduced as Morgan, and Callahan said Morgan was the one who would be in charge of the operation. Kay never found out if Morgan was his first name, his last name, or an alias.

Morgan began by showing photographs of a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, one exterior shot followed by several pictures of the hotel lobby, the elevators, and a hallway on the sixth floor. He then showed pictures of four Korean men who all looked tough enough to bite the heads off alligators.

“These four men are the subject's security detail, and two are always guarding him,” Morgan said. “You need to memorize their faces, as we don't know who will be on duty tomorrow night. One will be in the hotel lobby and the other will be stationed outside the subject's room, and they relieve each other every two hours. We've only had one day to observe them, but last night the guards switched positions at seven, nine, eleven, et cetera. Odd hours, in other words.

“The operation will start at exactly eight p.m. Hamilton, your job will be to watch the guard in the lobby, whoever he is. If he leaves the
lobby and gets in the elevator
before
eight p.m., you'll call me, I'll abort the op, and we'll regroup. But if he leaves the lobby and gets in the elevator between eight and eight-ten p.m., then you'll get in the elevator with him. If he punches the button for the sixth floor, you will make sure he doesn't get off the elevator. You'll be given a gun that fires a tranquilizer dart to incapacitate him. The reason you were selected for this op is we think he'll be less on guard if a woman gets into the elevator with him.”

“What if there are other people in the elevator?” Kay asked. “What do I do with him after I shoot him?”

Irritated by the interruption, Morgan said, “We'll get to all that. Right now I'm just giving you an overview of the plan, and like I said, your job will be to make sure the lobby guard doesn't get off the elevator on the sixth floor.”

Before Kay could ask another question, Morgan said to the young couple, “As I said, on the sixth floor will be another guard, standing in front of the door to room 618. You two will be the distraction. You'll get off the elevator at exactly eight p.m. and you'll pretend to be a couple of young drunks in love. You'll stagger down the hallway, laughing, playing grab ass, making a bunch of noise. Before you reach room 618, and when you're four or five feet from the guard, you,” Morgan said, pointing at Sharon, “will fall to the ground like you've had too much to drink. As you fall, you'll let out a shriek which I'll hear, and while the guard is looking at the two of you, I'll open the door to room 619, which is directly across the hall from the guard, and I'll tranq him.”

To the young man, Morgan said, “You will also be carrying a weapon that fires a tranquilizer dart, and if necessary, you'll be able to shoot the guard as well as help me overpower him if he doesn't go down immediately. The guard, by the way, will be armed with a gun that fires real bullets, and he will not hesitate to kill you. Once the guard is out, I'll knock on the door to room 618, a man will exit, and you'll drag the
guard into the room. Then all three of you will leave the hotel. Okay? Everybody clear on the big picture?”

The young couple nodded. Kay didn't nod—she looked over at Callahan. Had Callahan been a more sensitive type, he would have known that Kay was not happy with what she was hearing.

“Now,” Morgan said, “I'm going to cover contingency plans, communications, transportation, escape routes, and what to do if things go wrong.”

And that's what they did for the next hour.

When they were finished, Morgan said, “We're leaving for Geneva in two hours, and I want everybody at Dulles with half an hour to spare. That should give you enough time to go home and pack a bag. Assume you'll be gone two or three days. When we're on the plane, we'll go over everything half a dozen more times.”

Callahan said, “I'm sorry, guys, but I got very little notice for this job and the only window we have is for tomorrow night. Okay, get moving and be at the airport on time.”

The young couple rose to leave, but Kay said to Callahan, “I want to speak with you privately.”

“If it concerns this mission, I want to hear what you have to say,” Morgan said.

“What part of
privately
didn't you understand?” Kay said.

Before Morgan could blow a gasket, Callahan made a calm-down gesture with his hands and said, “It's okay, Morgan. Let me talk to her.”

Morgan left the conference room, and Callahan said, “What's the problem?”

“I'm not going to work like this.”

“Like what?”

“I am not going to be part of an operation where I don't know the reason for the operation.”

“Hamilton, this is the way covert ops work. Everything's strictly
need-to-know. Things are compartmentalized. And the reason we do it this way is so if you're caught and interrogated, we can possibly limit the damage
because
you don't know everything. The other reason, quite frankly, is the less people know, the less chance there is of someone leaking information, intentionally or unintentionally. That's the whole principle behind need to know.”

“Fuck need to know, Callahan,” Kay said. “I am not going to shoot a man with a horse tranquilizer without knowing why. I am not going to risk going to jail or getting killed without knowing why. And if I don't agree, uh, morally with the reason you're doing something, then I might not participate.”

Morally
wasn't exactly the right word. What she meant was that she had principles, and although it might be hard for her to articulate exactly what those principles were, there were things she wasn't willing to do.

Callahan looked at her for a moment, his lips set in a firm line. “Okay. If that's the way you're going to be, then I'm going to have to let you go. Good luck finding a job. I'll have somebody contact you in the next couple of days with regard to severance pay, that sort of thing, and to go over the nondisclosure agreement with you again.”

“Fine,” Kay said, and rose from her chair. She had her hand on the doorknob when Callahan said, “Oh, goddamnit, sit down.”

She sat back down, and Callahan stared at her for another few seconds, trying not to smile. “I don't know what I'm going to do with you, Hamilton. I imagine that one of these days I am going to have to fire you, but for now, you've won.” He paused, then said, “I just hate it when somebody calls my bluff.”

“So who's the man in room 618?” Kay asked.

“He's a North Korean physicist and he's in Geneva because he's attending a convention hosted by CERN.”

“Cern?” Kay said.

“Yeah. CERN stands for the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire,” Callahan said in surprisingly good French, “which
translates into the European Council for Nuclear Research, and just outside Geneva, on the French–Swiss border, is where one end of the Hadron Collider is located. The Korean's there to attend a convention and hear about the latest stuff going on with the collider. It's an egghead convention.”

Kay found out later that the Hadron Collider was the world's largest particle accelerator, which still didn't mean anything to her.

“Anyway, this guy is one of their top guys, and two days ago he passed a note to an American scientist saying he wanted to defect, and the scientist passed the note on to the U.S. Consulate in Geneva. We obviously want the guy, because we want to know where certain North Korean programs stand, like their ability to actually hit California with a nuclear missile.”

“So why doesn't the CIA help him? Why us?”

“The CIA would be happy to escort the guy to the embassy in Bern for asylum, but they are not going to help him escape if that means overpowering his bodyguards. If this operation is successful, in a week or two the North Korean scientist will hold a press conference saying he hired a private security company to help him defect and the U.S. government had nothing to do with it. Nobody will believe him, but that doesn't matter. What does matter is, if you or anyone else on Morgan's team gets caught or killed, the U.S. government will be able to honestly say that you're not government agents, and nobody will be able to prove otherwise.”

“And what happens after Morgan takes out the guard in the hotel?”

“Morgan will take the scientist to another room in the hotel and just sit there with him for a few days until the North Korean delegation goes home, then walk him over to the consulate. Now, are you
morally
okay with this operation, Hamilton? Would you like to help your country better understand North Korea's ability to start a nuclear war?”

“Yeah, I'm okay with this,” she said.

“Well, whoop-de-fuckin'-doo. I'll let the president know.”

The operation went flawlessly, and all Kay did was sit in the lobby and watch the lobby guard for half an hour. When Morgan called her at ten minutes after eight, saying he had the Korean scientist in custody, she left the hotel and drove back to the safe house in Geneva.

—

IN THE FIRST WEEK
of March, two months after Anna Mercer had disappeared, Callahan sent Kay down to Fort Benning to take the survival course. Kay wondered if one of his reasons for doing this was to get her out of D.C. and give her something to do so she'd quit bugging him about the lack of progress in locating Mercer. She bugged him about Mercer at least once a week. And actually she was glad to go; she was tired of attending language classes and was looking forward to something physical.

There were twenty other people in the class; three were women, including her. Half the attendees were military; the remainder were civilians from unnamed government agencies. Kay was registered under the name Karen Hart, and she assumed other folks in the class might also be using cover names. The objective of the class was to teach them how to survive if they ended up behind enemy lines in some spot without food, water, or a cell phone. They taught her how to make snowshoes out of branches, how to snare wee animals for lunch, and how to identify those plants that were edible and those that would poison her. Every day there was a five-mile run to make sure everyone stayed in shape.

For the final exam, a helicopter dropped her off in a remote section of the Blue Ridge Mountains and she was told to make her way to a small town a hundred and fifty miles away in four days. She was given a warm ski jacket to wear, a hunting knife, waterproof matches, a compass, a topographical map, and a GPS device so they could locate her if she got lost. The GPS device also had a button she could push to summon help. Pushing the button, of course, was an automatic failure.

The first day, she dutifully trudged through the woods. She wasn't
worried about water, as the map indicated she'd be crossing streams, but food was problematic. She wasn't going to find a bush laden with blueberries at this time of year. On the other hand, it wasn't like she was going to starve in three days; she had no intention of having squirrel for dinner.

The second morning she came upon a small shack in the woods and her nose—trained by the DEA—told her that she'd stumbled onto some yokel's meth lab. She started to go around the shack, but then noticed two Kawasaki quads—four-wheel-drive, all-terrain vehicles.

She snuck down to look at the quads. She figured the guys inside the cabin would be too busy cooking their meth to notice her. At least she hoped that was the case, because she also figured that they'd be armed. The ignition keys were in both vehicles—which wasn't surprising, considering the remoteness of the location—and there was a knapsack strapped onto the rack behind the seat of one of the vehicles. She pulled the keys from one of the quads and tossed them into the woods, then started up the second machine—the one with the knapsack—and took off.

She wondered how far the meth cookers would have to walk; she doubted that they'd had survival training.

She arrived at her destination point well fed and well rested. The backpack had contained a six-pack of beer and four ham sandwiches. Her instructor praised her for making such good time, and she modestly accepted his praise. She didn't tell him that she'd driven most of the way, nor did she consider that she'd cheated: It was a survival course, after all, and she just did what she needed to do to survive.

—

AFTER SHE RETURNED
from Georgia, she asked Callahan for a week off—she hadn't had any time off since she'd hired on with him—and he told her to take two if she wanted, sounding like he'd be glad to have her out of his hair for a while.

One of the things she did during her vacation was drive to Durham so Jessica could check out Duke University, where it appeared she'd be headed next year. Kay had decided she was okay with Jessica skipping her senior year in high school and heading off to college. And Jessica was definitely okay with the decision and looking forward to college life.

Kay was still somewhat leery about Tanaka—son of the founder of TanTech Research—helping her daughter get into Duke. Being an ex-cop, she couldn't help but look gift horses in the mouth. She used an old pal in the DEA down in Miami to check Tanaka out—to make sure he wasn't some sort of sexual deviate who preyed on teenage girls—but her pal said Tanaka was clean. In fact, he appeared to be more than clean: The guy had even spent a couple years in Africa when he got out of college, helping out over there.