The sun was rising, edging above the hills. Slaton pushed through foliage wet with dew as briny air swept up the cliffs. He’d been moving on a steady run since leaving the point, but as he came close to the villa he was forced to slow.
Maneuvering carefully, he tried for an angle that would give a comprehensive view of the place. He paused in a small stand of trees eighty yards distant, slightly below the level of the main house. Slaton spotted two men near the front door and easily pegged them as security—manner, physique, not to mention the weapons they displayed openly in shoulder holsters. They were standing under the large portico, engaged in an animated discussion. He wondered how many like them were inside. One of the men was thin and rangy, and wore dark sunglasses in the dim morning. The other looked more like a mob enforcer than professional security, all crude thickness and muscle.
Two cars were parked nearby. Both were sedans, one tan, the other white. The trunk of the tan car was open, and on the ground next to it was a case similar to the one he’d seen on the promontory. He also saw four standard rollerbags—three were lined neatly on the driveway next to the white car’s rear quarter-panel, one by the tan. The implication was clear—departure was imminent.
The rangy man was doing most of the talking, and he pointed off in the distance. Slaton followed his gesture and saw something he hadn’t before—a big truck parked at the top of a nearby hill. Then he did a double take. There was no mistaking the vehicle’s stout frame, nor the array of antennas on top. It was the truck he’d taken a picture of last night at the airfield—or at least its twin. Last night the truck had seemed lifeless, but now one of its rooftop antennas was rotating, and light shone distinctly in the front window. Taken with the fact that it was situated on the highest terrain, he could draw but one conclusion—some kind of operation was in progress.
Slaton had silenced the burner phone in his pocket for obvious reasons, yet he’d checked it minutes earlier and seen a missed call. It wasn’t from Christine’s number, which left but one possibility—she’d gotten word to the CIA about how to reach him. He’d ignored the call, thinking he had more pressing matters. Now Slaton revisited that conclusion.
What the hell is going on here?
An impulse to check the phone again was interrupted by movement on the villa’s sprawling seaside terrace. Two men came outside and paused by a table stocked with food and a coffeepot. One Slaton recognized instantly: the thickset form of Vladimir Ovechkin stood with a coffee mug in hand, gazing out at the northern sky. The other man Slaton had never seen. But of course he knew who it was. In his late twenties, he was wearing drab olive pants, and an untucked cotton button-down over an undershirt. He was of medium height, lean and fit, and moved with an economy Slaton recognized all too well. Standing on the veranda sipping coffee, he could not have appeared more casual. A visitor to a pleasant seaside retreat. Or an operator basking in the afterglow of a successful mission.
That these two men—a shady oligarch and a confirmed assassin—were sharing coffee on a patio held any number of implications. Slaton had already considered the possibility that the two might be in cahoots, but something about that scenario seemed simplistic—even more so considering the cold-blooded setup that had put Zhukov under Slaton’s own sight. Whatever their interactions, it was beyond what Slaton could compute in that moment. These two men had tried to kill him. By extension, they were a threat to his family.
That was all he needed to know.
Slaton made one last update of the picture before him. The truck on the hill was unchanged. The two men under the portico had begun loading suitcases into the white car. He studied the terrace, and for the first time noticed the unmistakable profile of a Barrett fifty cal resting on a lounge chair in a shadow. The assassin was ten steps away from the gun. Twelve steps after he sided up to the crumpet table. Slaton watched him stab a toothpick into a cube of cheese.
He began to move.
* * *
The CIA was efficient. It was also lucky.
By virtue of Morocco’s position as a gateway to sub-Saharan Africa, the NSA had years earlier established a standing hack into that country’s air traffic control network. It was a weakness that was rarely leveraged, but occasionally useful in monitoring arms smuggling, state-sponsored meddling, and the odd warlord taking flight. The Saudi royal 747 was easily extracted from the banks of traffic, and could be seen at that moment descending through thirty thousand feet, marginally south of El Jadida along the coast. There was still no contact with the aircraft, despite repeated attempts, and as far as anyone knew the Saudis were not yet aware that a threat to the royal family was brewing. Director Coltrane sensed a specific manifestation of that peril, but he needed proof.
It was here that luck came into play.
The technician manning the ops center’s “internal comm” station was by chance a retired Navy air traffic controller. “Are we filtering this air traffic data to exclude primary returns?” he asked.
“What are those?” Coltrane responded.
“Raw reflections of radar pulses. Right now what we’re looking at involves participating aircraft—airplanes that use transponders to verify airspeed, altitude, and call signs. Primary data is no more than a blip on a screen. If a jet was trying to stay off the scope, that’s all you would see. What we’re looking at seems to be a managed feed, with the primary returns screened out.”
Since discovering that a MiG had taken off from the RosAvia complex, all focus had been on finding it. There hadn’t been time to debate the implications, but the prevailing assumption in the room was clear—that the MiG might be targeting the king’s 747.
Coltrane gave the go-ahead to look for primary radar data. Fortunately, it didn’t take long. The source data was reconfigured, and the main screen flickered. A new air traffic map presented only raw reflective returns. Of these there were but a handful. A very low and slow target paralleling the beaches off Casablanca was, according to the Navy man, most likely some kind of single-engine propeller plane towing a banner. Two blips to the east were also low and slow, most likely training aircraft flown by student pilots. Then a fourth primary target blinked into view—quite literally. It was situated southeast, and on an azimuth that could well have sourced it from Tazagurt’s airfield. The reflection displayed only intermittently, a tiny white dot ghosting in and out of view. The former controller said, “That one’s sporadic because he’s flying low.”
Erratic coverage aside, two more facts soon became evident. First, the aircraft was traveling at a very high rate of speed. The second revelation was even more disconcerting. When the sporadic new track was overlaid with that of the Saudi 747, the two aircraft were clearly—for lack of a better term—on a collision course.
For the next five minutes the ops center shifted its focus, and three salient points were nailed down. First, unsure if the MiG might be armed, analysts renewed their study of the photos from the Tazagurt hangar. They saw no evidence whatsoever of air-to-air missiles—no rails on the MiG’s hardpoints, no loading equipment in the hangar. Second, with a satellite brought to bear on the coastline, it was discovered with some surprise that the antenna-laden truck that had yesterday been at the RosAvia complex was now parked on a hill near Ovechkin’s villa. The final revelation came from a different tack, and was perhaps the least surprising of the three—they’d learned that Slaton had a burner phone in his possession, and its location had been triangulated. He was presently near the villa. And moving closer.
“Still no luck with the Saudis?” Coltrane asked impatiently.
“We’re trying constantly,” said the comm leader. “They’re not responding.”
“What about Slaton?”
“No contact there either.”
“Keep trying!”