Out of habit, Meredith and Dale both noticed the young woman bundled up in a down Patagonia jacket hustling up the street. Neither of them thought much about her, though it was a little odd for someone to be walking in this small town on such a cold night.
Meredith was a third of the way through her T-bone and ready to raise the white flag. She hadn’t eaten this much in a long time, but she stuffed it down to equalize the bourbon. Though it was still early, she had a red-eye back to Dulles leaving around midnight. She needed to get sharp.
“So, Meth,” Dale said, “you still haven’t told me what was so important.”
Her eyes darted to the corners. A napkin went over her mouth. “Yeah. Look, I need to. I do. But I don’t think I can get into detail here.”
Dale held his fork and steak knife stock-still. “What do you mean? Why not?” He studied Meredith’s face. It suddenly dawned on him: this was about work. “Wait. Really? What could anyone with your company want from me these days that we couldn’t discuss here?”
“It’s about something you used to do. Something that’s popped up again. It’s important enough that I’ve been ordered here to discuss it with you. Let’s just put it at that.” She turned toward the waitress and signaled for the check.
Dale studied her. He pushed his plate away and sank into the red vinyl of the booth, shaking his head. “Negative,” he said.
“John, it’s important.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It does. But we can’t talk about it in public.”
“You act like we’re in Vienna or Prague and the bad guys are around the corner. It’s Cle Elum, Meth. People around here get suspicious of anyone without a don’t-tread-on-me bumper sticker. You can give me something. Right here. Otherwise, fuck off.”
Ten feet above them, Maria and Leo crouched on their knees with headphones on, listening. Leo had drilled a tiny hole all the way through the floor, just to the left of a light fixture on the ceiling of the restaurant below. The upturned glass cup of the fixture had caught the small amount of ceiling dust.
Through this tiny hole, he’d inserted a glassy wire with a directional mic on its end the size of a matchstick. They had had to fiddle with the amplifier in order to squelch out electrical interference and adjust the fade to overcome ambient noise, but they were now able to listen to the conversation, if faintly.
Meredith wiped her hands on her napkin and dropped it on the plate. “All right. I’ll see if I can come up with a public version. What’s your favorite news channel?”
“Don’t have one,” said Dale. “I find my mind stays clearer if I avoid the news.”
“Of course you do. Must be freeing to have such an empty mind.” He frowned at her. “Well, I was reading an article in the New York Times on the flight over. It made me think about Grace.”
“Uh-huh. What about her?”
“When she gets commissioned, she may find herself in the Gulf. Maybe as a pilot, maybe as a ship driver,” Meredith said.
Dale nodded slowly. He knew what she was doing, so he just listened.
“As a mother, I’m worried. I need your help. I need to get your perspective on it,” she said. “You were Navy over there once. You know what it’s like. We are all very, very worried. It’s just been terrible.”
His eyes narrowed. “Terrible how?”
“Oh, you know. Same thing that’s been happening for years. The Times laid it out pretty convincingly. Goes all the way back to the eighties, when the Vincennes shot down the Airbus. Then all of the IRGC-sponsored terror ops with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria . . . all of that. Now the nuclear deal has fallen apart and we’ve taken out that Quds general, Soleimani. The Times was talking about how the mullahs are getting desperate, barely holding on to power. That’s why I’m so worried about Grace. I was hoping you could calm me down.”
Dale slumped, listening. Meredith went on. “I mean, at this point it keeps escalating. They’ve seized a British oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. They lobbed some missiles into our base in Iraq. Expecting more, their air defenses are so keyed up that they shot down a Ukrainian airliner by mistake.” She tilted her head forward. “It’s just a lot of bad shit, John. Wondered if you’d heard and thought you might be able to help.”
“Too bad I’m no longer involved,” Dale said. “And no, I’m not worried about it. These things have a way of working out. Neither side wants a war. I certainly don’t.”
“Yeah. But I wonder if one can be avoided. The Times thinks it can be done only if we take some actions to de-escalate things, rather than what’s been happening. Maybe behind the scenes. You know?”
Dale slowly shook his head. “Like I said, I don’t think about things that don’t affect me anymore.”
The check came. Meredith pulled her credit card out of her bag. “I got it,” she said. “Business.” She signed and pocketed her copy of the receipt. She stood by the table, looking down on him, absently tapping her foot. “We need to talk more about it somewhere privately. How about your place? I don’t have much time before I have to get back for my red-eye. I’d really feel better about it.”
On the floor above, Maria looked at Leo. She spoke through her Bluetooth to Vasily, who was still in the Yukon outside, watching for threats. “We need to find his house. They’re taking the conversation there. It’s the only place we’ll get anything valuable.”
Vasily answered over the radio. “The database isn’t returning an address for Morris-Dale or just plain Dale. He must go by something else. It’s coming up empty.”
“Govno,” Maria cursed. “We need to tail. If they take his car, you need to follow. Leo and I will take down the rig and be behind you. Try John with both an H and without. Hurry it up.”
She listened to Meredith on the ground floor below, thanking the waitress on her way out. Whatever was driving this, it was about Iran. Since Rance ran the Counterproliferation Division of CIA and Meredith reported to him, it made sense that she would be focused there. But what did it have to do with this scruffy mountain man she used to be married to?
Vasily answered. “Think I’ve got something . . . on the open web. There’s an artist, a painter, named John Dale. He displayed his work in Ellensburg, about twenty miles from here. Not much more about him. We could submit an RFI to Yasenevo to get his address. They could pull up something through Motor Vehicles.”
“No time,” said Maria. “Whatever it is they’re going to talk about is going down right now.”
Out on the street, Dale slid behind the wheel of his 2014 Ford F-150 Crew Cab and fired the truck up. Meredith had forgotten how to get to his house, so he told her to follow behind in her rented Explorer. Wireless coverage and Google Maps were both dodgy out on the mountain roads where Dale lived.
Meredith was uncomfortable following directly. In a fake embrace outside his truck, she whispered to him that she would perform an SDR, a surveillance-detection route, in the town first, then approach at the corner of the road that led to his property. The corner with the old antiques store. Dale nodded reluctantly.
As he warmed up his truck and Meredith drove off, he shook his head, sobering up. Seeing her, listening to her talk about tradecraft, the need to do an SDR . . . it left him numb. The mild two-beer buzz he’d been enjoying when dining with Meredith was gone now, replaced by a cold, empty feeling in his gut.
He’d left this life behind. Patiently, deliberately, and finally. He wanted nothing to do with it. But here was Meth, referencing Grace as a kind of code word to pull him back in. She wouldn’t do that if she wasn’t deadly serious about needing his help. He’d told her to fuck off, appropriately in his estimation; but he also knew he’d have to hear her out.
He made it to the corner and waited in the dark with his parking lights on, as they’d agreed. A few minutes later, he saw her headlights blink and knew they were in the clear. He turned onto the slushy road and started making his way up the mountain, skidding here and there, her headlights a few hundred yards behind him.
It was a slow climb of about two miles of switchbacks before they came to his property. Snow was beginning to fall. A few flurries at first, but picking up with big fat flakes. It was often that way here in the mountains. A perfectly sunny day could end with a blizzard. You never knew.
“Headed up a gravel road now,” said Vasily into the encrypted UHF. “Hard to follow on the GPS. Roads aren’t marked. But I can see their tracks in the snow.”
Maria and Leo acknowledged with two transmitter clicks. Vasily gave them further directions on where to go.
A few minutes later, he said, “They’ve entered a private property. There’s a gate. I can see what looks like a cabin behind some trees with lights on. They must be in there. I’m going to double back. Tracks would be too obvious. We’ll want to find another way up.”
Two clicks came as a response. Vasily moved the switch on the dash to the Four High drive position and spun around. The snow had accumulated about an inch so far, but it fell on top of many older snows that had melted and refrozen in the sunny weather. He heard one of his wheels spin. He pulled over and studied a trail map. He saw another way. They’d have to hike for a quarter mile through some cover, but there was at least a parallel road.
Leo and Maria found it hard going. Eventually they got to the point Vasily had signaled, pulled over, and killed the Audi’s engine right behind him. They’d already rigged their cars so that the interior lights would stay off with the doors open. Vasily was gathering their gear under the light of a red-lensed flashlight.
He emerged with two sets of night-vision devices. They strapped them over their ski hats like miners’ lights.
Maria switched hers on and flipped the two optical tubes down over her eyes, waiting for them to warm up. With the half-moon lighting the clouds, she was able to see the wintry landscape in shades of green, punctuated by the black dots of snowflakes falling in front of her like static.
“Let’s go,” she said to the two Spetsnaz men.
Meredith had been to Dale’s home once before. But it had been summer then, right around the time the divorce had finally settled. She and Grace had taken a vacation out here, on which they hiked and camped at a nearby glacier lake. John had stayed with them for one of those nights and the three of them had slept here at his home, almost like the family they’d once been. But that was over a year ago. Meredith hadn’t been back since.
Dale let her in and turned on some lights. There was a large stone hearth with a woodstove. Dale went about splitting kindling and tearing newspaper. Within a few minutes, he had a fire going.
Now that she was fully operational, Meredith wandered around the house, looking for vulnerabilities. She didn’t want to freak him out, but she needed to have this conversation in a professional manner, which meant tradecraft. She turned on the kitchen tap, letting the water run.
“Really?” he said, looking over his shoulder from the fireplace.
“Yes.” She looked out at the driveway. No headlights. “What kind of security do you have here?” She started pulling down window shades up front.
“Because my paintings are so valuable?”
“No, asshole.” She crossed to the back windows and started lowering blinds. “Because I need to make sure this is a secure conversation.”
“This is about as safe a safe house as you’re going to find. I may not look it, but I’m still armed and dangerous.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, stopping in front of a window that still had the shades up. “I’ll leave this one alone so we can at least watch the snow.” She collapsed into a leather chair, sighing, rubbing her forehead. “This job made me paranoid a long time ago.” She sighed again. “In my defense, it’s sort of a prereq.”
He nodded, watching her. She was tense. Whatever was on her mind, it was bad. “You have to tell me what’s going on, Meth. For real.”
Meredith riffled through her handbag. She pulled out her secure covcom—agency shorthand for covert-communications device. To anyone else it looked like a normal Microsoft Surface tablet with a flexible keyboard. She performed a number of sequences with codes and gestures before it brought up a separate home screen of secure Agency apps.
Accessing his Wi-Fi over a VPN, she pulled up a LinkedIn page with John’s picture on it. He looked darker in the picture. The name on the profile was Reza Shariati. She tilted the tablet for him to see. “Remember this guy?”
Dale leaned over and examined his own photo. It was a younger version of him. His hair was shorter and his eyes were darker because they’d deliberately changed his skin tone with makeup. “Yeah. Good to see old Reza’s doing so well.”
The legend of John’s former alias had progressed. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’d gone on to a number of professional jobs with little-known consultancies that were all Agency front companies.
“Well, a certain asset just reached out to you, Reza, right here. Through this profile.” She tapped the Surface’s screen.
“Who? What asset?”
“Cerberus.”
Dale closed his eyes and shook his head. He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. He said, “I guess you’ve been read in, then. You know the op or am I about to get water-boarded?”
“I know it. Dorsey himself. Active Archer.”
“Right.”
“Well, the guys that took over running Cerberus for you have a problem. He’s gone off-grid.”
Dale stood up, opened the door to the woodstove, and poked at the fire. A gust of heat warmed the room. Turning back to her, he said, “I would agree that that’s a loss. He was good. Probably my best work at the Company. But how is this my problem?”
“Because he says he will talk only to you. He trusts only you.”
Dale laughed in spite of himself. “Yeah, that’s probably hard for you guys to believe.”
“It’s not. You were always a better case officer than you ever acknowledged. A great handler.”
“Uh-huh. Keep working me, Meth. I like it. Handle me.”
“I’m serious. Look, he’s gone away at the point where we need him. We don’t know where or why.”
Dale nodded, remembering his correspondence with the man. It had always been on Cerberus’s terms. “Is his wife still alive?”
“Yes. As I dug into the file, I learned we’ve been feeding her MS meds. I assume that started with you.”
“Right. That was a big part of it for Cerberus. Do we know where he’s working now? He was on the research side when I had him. We communicated through the company I was supposedly working for—Baramar, based in Dubai . . . machine-parts distributor. One of those parts happens to be Swiss-made centrifuges for medical research. With a little work, they’re sanctions-proof.”
“Who is he?”
“I never knew. Somebody that remembered me from my rabble-rousing at McGill. But I never knew who he really was.”
“How did you establish his bona fides?”
“The Agency did. He claimed he could manage the code of their centrifuges. We didn’t know if it was true or not, but we didn’t see the harm in passing him some tainted code of our own. If it was a trap, what were they going to do? The only damage would have been to my cover. We all thought it was worth the risk since I didn’t have any other real business going in Iran. None of us did.”
“So what happened?”
“We sent him some code and he installed it. Their Swiss-made centrifuges have been a tiny bit off ever since. It must be driving them nuts.”
“That’s what Dorsey and Rance said. According to them, Cerberus is the only firewall we have that’s keeping them from going nuke.”
“Rance . . . ,” Dale said, shaking his head. “He’s in this?”
“He’s running Counterproliferation. My boss.”
“Fuck, Meth. You need to get away from that guy. He’s dirty.”
“I’d love to. But you know him. He keeps climbing. Look, I wouldn’t be here if this were just Rance. Dorsey’s on it. So’s the director.”
“I need a drink,” said Dale.
He went around the corner to his kitchen. He offered something to Meredith but she declined. He threw in some ice and poured himself two fingers of Maker’s Mark. He sat by the fire, sinking into a worn leather club chair, taking a sip, looking through the one unblocked window at the falling snow.
“You shouldn’t,” said Meredith. “This is serious.”
“I should. Because it’s serious.”
“Fine, have it your way.”
Dale took another sip. “So what am I supposed to do? Be his pen pal? Become old Reza again?”
Meredith nodded. “For starters, yes. We need you to come in. We need you to communicate with him closely . . . and we need to be ready for anything he does. How is your Farsi these days?”
“How do you think? It’s rusty as hell. But that doesn’t matter.”
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“I told you. I’m not participating in any of this. I’m out.”
Meredith leaned forward. A vein sprouted where her neck met her collarbone. “What? John, are you fucking kidding me? We’re just about at war with the Iranians. The only thing keeping them from enriching enough uranium to build their own nukes is one guy. That one guy will only talk to you. And you won’t do it? What the fuck?”
Dale took a slug of bourbon this time, a real mouthful. How many times had he endured arguments with this woman?
“Listen,” he said, pausing, letting her profanity echo off the stone floor. The booze burned his throat. “It may be that cut-and-dried to you, Meth. But let me remind you of something.”
He held his right hand before her, stretching out his fingers. The pinkie had been severed at the middle knuckle, healed over now as a stump. He wiggled it.
“The last time I worked for you fuckers, I lost this little guy, thanks to some Stone Age cave dwellers. They did that to show me what my beheading would be like. It was supposed to be the opening act.”
His hand started to shake. He brought it down to his side and clenched the fabric of his jeans to stop it.
He leaned forward. “Then when I fight my way out of that hellhole, the very people that sent me into it call me a traitor. Me, Meth! Me!”
His whole arm was shaking now. He kicked a stray log into the woodstove with a loud metal clang before tossing the rest of the bourbon over his teeth.