“Don’t move!” Sam shouted. She stood in the modified Weaver stance, gun trained on the man’s chest. “Drop your weapon!”
She didn’t look at the man’s face. Instead, she looked at the front sight of her gun and superimposed the sight over the blurry spot on the man’s chest where his heart would be. Just a bit right of centerline—his left—far enough away from center-of-mass to prevent the slug from deflecting off the man’s sternum and missing all the critical pulsing meat just inside his ribcage.
“Jesus H,” the man said.
“Wrong gender. Now put the gun down.”
“This is unbelievable.”
“Last warning!”
The man clicked on the safety and let go of the pistol. It landed on the hardwood floor with a heavy thump.
Sam motioned to a nearby table. “Turn around, legs apart. Lean against the table. Palms out.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“It’ll take the rest of your life if you don’t play it right,” Sam said.
He complied. The cast on his arm made assuming the perp stance awkward but Sam wasn’t sympathetic and made no allowances. The man appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties. He had a trim, fit build. Maybe six feet tall. He seemed exhausted, far more worried about something else than about Sam and her pistol. Sam searched him, zip-tied his hands behind his back, and sat him down in an armchair.
“You look familiar,” the man said. His face was handsome, but his expression was taut and his brow was furrowed. His eyes were intelligent and penetrating but tired and a little bloodshot with dark circles beneath them.
“Maybe I look like that one movie star,” Sam said. She snapped a picture of his face with her phone. She sent the image via text message to Dan. She typed, “Who is this asshole?” While she waited for a response, she backed a safe distance away from the man, her weapon trained on his chest.
“Seriously,” the man said. “I know you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know so.”
Sam shook her head. “Enough. Who are you and what are you doing here?”
The man sighed in frustration. “Listen. Really, I don’t have time for this.”
“I smell propellant,” Sam said. “Somebody shoot a gun in here?”
The man was silent.
“Listen,” Sam said. “This is a safe house for a criminal organization. Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?”
“Some very bad people are holding a pair of hostages. They’ve already murdered a third. This was supposed to have been an exchange, only they didn’t bring the hostages. They thought they’d ambush me instead.”
“Who?” Sam asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Who are the hostages?”
“Spanish. Nobody you’d know.”
“Who are the assholes?”
A pause. A look. Sam could tell he was deciding something, like whether to trust her.
He looked out the window for a moment, shook his head. “The Central Intelligence Agency,” he finally said.
A spark of intuition struck and Sam narrowed her eyes. “Your employer.”
His eyes snapped to hers. “Who said anything like that?”
“Call it a hunch. Educated white guy playing cops and robbers in a faraway land. Not many ways to get into that game.”
“Maybe I work security for a big multinational.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t talk like an enlisted man. You talk like a college graduate with a professional background.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sam’s phone buzzed. Dan responded to her query. “Several positive matches. James Paul Hayward. Adam Flint Keppler. Peter Jefferson Kittredge.”
“Three names? How?” Sam texted back.
“Gets weirder,” Dan responded. “The Keppler and Hayward legends only showed up in the deep search.”
“Meaning what?” Sam wanted to know.
“He’s an operative. They’ve tried to destroy the remnants of his previous identities.”
“But you found them anyway?”
“Skillz,” Dan replied.
Sam rolled her eyes.
She turned her attention to the man across the room seated in the armchair. “No more bullshit,” she said. “You’re Hayward, Keppler, and Kittredge all rolled into one. And you’re a deployed asset.”
She watched his eyes, his body language. She’d gotten good over the years at figuring out when something struck close to the mark. That was the vibe she got watching the man’s face. She didn’t notice any specific tells, like the twitch of an eye or a sudden glance away, a ploy to gain enough psychological distance to make up a story. But there was definitely something. She’d cornered him. “So tell me about your asshole friends.”
He sighed and a resigned look came over his face. “Well,” he said, “one of them happens to be leaking body fluids right now.”
“Sounds like the makings of a good story. I’m all ears.”
The man told her of his trip to Cagliari, his visit to the neighbor’s house, his entry into the safe house basement, and his altercation with the lone Agency goon inside.
Sam pondered what Kittredge-Keppler-Hayward told her. The leaking corpse in the basement meant hanging around the safe house wasn’t a bright idea, so she decided they would take their conversation elsewhere. Sam escorted the man with three names to her rented car. He asked her to remove the zip-ties around his wrists, but she refused. “We need to become better friends first,” she said.
She started the car and drove down the hill, this time heading away from town. Neither wanted to speak in the car for fear it had been compromised with a listening device or video camera, so they drove in silence.
Several kilometers northwest of Cagliari, Sam found a turnoff. Dirt road, poorly maintained, but it meandered into a forest. Sam negotiated the ruts and switchbacks until she came to a clearing. She stopped the car and helped the man from the passenger seat.
A cold wind portended a stiff Atlantic storm. Sam wrapped a shawl, remnant of the old-lady costume she’d paraded around in earlier, around her shoulders against the chill.
“Here’s how I see it,” she began. “Our interests might be temporarily aligned or I might need to shoot you in the throat. I don’t know which yet.”
The man smiled. “Do I get a vote?”
“Vote with your answers,” Sam said. “Real name?”
“James Hayward,” he said.
“The one your parents gave you?”
A faraway look. A long pause. “Peter Kittredge.”
Sam pursed her lips. “Tell me why that’s familiar to me.”
“I couldn’t begin to guess.”
“You’re lying,” she said, and he shrugged. “Tell me where you’ve been in the last five years.”
He shook his head. “This is really what you want to know right now?”
“Humor me. I’m the one with the gun.”
“Spain. Singapore. Portugal. Northern Virginia. DC. Cologne. Caracas.”
Caracas? Sam’s mind flashed to the unpleasant time she’d spent chasing down a vicious little Venezuelan with a penchant for skinning his victims. “When were you in Venezuela?” she asked.
“Just before Hugo Chavez died.”
Sam narrowed her eyes at him. “That was an Agency hit.”
“No comment.”
“Why do I know you?”
“I wouldn’t know. I was drunk a lot.”
“I was in Caracas chasing down some VSS thugs.”
The man’s eyes met hers and anger flashed in them. “They weren’t all thugs.”
Then it clicked for Sam. Three years ago, she had been swept into a bloody conflict between rogue CIA elements and members of the VSS, Venezuela’s CIA equivalent. The Agency muscle had tried to strong-arm American access to Venezuelan oil but the VSS was violently opposed. The Agency had managed to infiltrate the VSS, and the result was a bloodbath that had decimated Venezuela’s intelligence apparatus.
At some point during the chaos, Sam and Brock had stumbled onto a sloppy, hapless drunk named Peter Kittredge, and they had detained him and pressed him for information. The man before her in the Cagliari safe house was a much harder, sharper version of the man she remembered from Caracas, but she now saw the resemblance.
“You were the CIA’s access agent, weren’t you?”
Sadness came over his face. “Unintentionally,” he said.
“There weren’t many survivors, if memory serves.”
He looked at her. “None of the Venezuelans I knew survived the purge. They didn’t deserve what happened to them.”
“Agency again?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Nice guys,” she said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Sam chuckled. “Trust me. I know a hell of a lot more than just the half of it, but here’s what I don’t know. I don’t know why you’re still running with them. Why not leave?”
“I tried. Several times. But they have a way of . . .” His voice trailed off.
“A way of turning you against yourself,” Sam said.
“That’s a really good way to put it. They have a way of turning you against yourself, and they know how to make it impossible to get out from under it all.”
Sam thought a moment. “So you don’t like your job,” she said. “But that’s not the same as shooting your fellow agents. What’s the rest of the story?”