Dale blew off Meredith’s repeated texts, setting his phone on Do Not Disturb. As far as he was concerned, he’d given his answer. Hurricane Meredith had blown through and done its worst. He was looking to repair and rebuild. He had no interest in that USB she’d left behind.
He tried as best he could to forget about her visit. She’d go away and the CIA would figure something out eventually, as they always did. It wasn’t his battle to fight anymore, not his world.
Grace’s letter had been interesting. With uncanny intuition, Dale’s daughter had written a few paragraphs about how much she admired her father’s honor. She said they’d been taking a military ethics course at the Academy and it had gotten her to thinking about her dad. She wrote that while she knew that she’d never really know what had happened to her father during his service, her bedrock belief was that he was the most honorable man she’d ever known.
Just like Meredith had said. Uncanny. Had he gotten that letter a week ago, he would have reveled in it. But having been delivered by Meredith along with that USB, it wasn’t sitting quite right.
He went back to thinking about how to finish the Peoh painting, hoping to observe some live details of its northern face to add to the work. But the weather had turned sour and the mountain kept disappearing behind fog. Of all days, he thought dispiritedly, this would have been a good one to paint.
With that option closed, he went to the little gym carved out of a corner of his barn and pumped iron for an hour, trying to kill the remainder of the morning. He followed the weights with a run on the frozen road, up to the peak and back. After, he showered and settled into his worn leather club chair with a book.
Meredith’s USB drive sat on his coffee table. He glanced at it intermittently, interrupting the flow of his eyes over the page. To head off the distraction, he blocked it with a magazine. But then he just kept glancing at the magazine cover.
Annoyed, he finally took the USB to the small digital gun safe in his bedroom closet, where he kept a Glock and three magazines. He punched in the code and tossed it in. Out of sight, out of mind, he told himself, resuming the book.
He read the same page three times and put the book down. He stared out the window at the white sky, waggling his foot. He fixed a sandwich but was only able to eat half of it. He sighed. It was no use.
Cerberus. Yeah, of course he remembered Cerberus. Goddamned Meredith had flipped over the rock and now the memories flew like bats from a cave, rattling around his head.
It’d all started back in the early 2010s. By then Dale was off his recruitment mission in Canada and had transitioned over to CIA’s Special Activities Division, Ground Branch, as a paramilitary operator. He’d been up in the border area between Iraq and Syria, a lead sniper hunting for ISIS scumbags, when the ping had come in.
Broadsword. That was the name of the counter-ISIS op. Rance had been the senior officer in charge of Broadsword back then, based at Forward Operating Base Sykes, near Tal Afar, Iraq. Dale had been Rance’s muscle out in Indian Country, leading a team of five other Ground Branch operatives, a kill squad. His mission had been to grant the fanatics their most fervent wishes of martyrdom with both alacrity and generosity, courtesy of Uncle Sam.
He’d just been hitting his stride in the wilds, living with the Kurds, having picked up a bit of the dialect. He’d also gotten a line on some Iranian Quds spies inserting themselves with the Syrians, and he had been following them too. Then, out of nowhere, the radio call came summoning him back to CIA regional HQ in Bahrain.
It’d pissed Rance off that he was going to be losing his best field weapon, the one making him look good back at HQS. Or maybe not look good. At that point things were just beginning to get out of hand with Broadsword. Bodies were piling up and Rance had begun taking more liberties with targeting assignments, some of them questionable.
For the Agency to reach out and tap Dale to come in to work on another op must have rattled Rance, made him wonder if the inspector general was finally going to start checking up. No wonder he’d been so pissed. But it wasn’t up to Rance. Before Dale knew it, a Blackhawk popped over a hill and scooped him up. He was off to Bahrain, like it or not. Orders were orders.
It wasn’t until he was at the safe house in Bahrain that he realized that Rance had nothing to worry about. He’d been tapped for another reason, something from his past—back when he’d first worked for Meredith, back in Montreal.
Out of the clear blue sky, an Iranian had reached out to John’s old alias, Reza Shariati. The CIA had given him the code name Cerberus.
Cerberus said he remembered Reza from his days at McGill University in Montreal, where he’d been a member of the Muslim Student Association. He said he remembered John’s casual ramblings off hours about supporting the opposition, the MEK, the People’s Mujahideen, which maintained that Khomeini’s rise had been a coup against their man, Banisadr. He said he remembered that John, aka Reza, had seemed approachable, anxious to discuss such things, a kindred spirit.
The whole thing had struck Dale as eerie. Somehow Cerberus seemed to know that Reza was an alias, a front for CIA. Though John had successfully recruited a few assets to go on to do some low-level reporting in Tehran, none of them were this man. None of them had had the background.
That probably meant one of his other assets had talked, giving Cerberus the lead. That kind of thing didn’t happen without someone ending up in Evin Prison, the sprawling den of evil where IRGC tortured suspects into “confessions.” If John’s alias was blown, there was a chance he’d end up there himself one fine day.
But then, there were a lot of things about Cerberus that were hard to figure.
Whoever he was, he was altogether different. Dale guessed he was older, more mature, wiser to the ways of the world. Once secure communications had been established, the would-be spy said he had important info on his government’s plans for nukes. He wanted someone, presumably the US, to stop them.
Normal procedure should have been to establish a face-to-face. Plenty of walk-ins approach with offers to spy, but most are nutjobs, low level, or opposition doubles. After the face-to-face, the next step should have been to hook him up to a lie detector to ensure bona fides. Provided he passed, they’d push him through a training program at a neutral location, probably London. They’d teach him how to avoid detection, establish a communications procedure. They’d work out logistical things like payment.
Cerberus wouldn’t have any of it. He was the one who came up with the protocol and schedule. He wouldn’t take money or submit to a face-to-face. It was unorthodox to say the least. Eerie.
As a final validation step, they tried an experiment. The potential double Cerberus claimed to be working on uranium enrichment, in charge of the lab. CIA created a virus to install on the Iranian SCADA network. SCADA—Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition—is the software that runs machine labs, where scientists make small tweaks to the equipment, learning through rapid automated experimentation. Through John, the CIA sent him the code to install on the SCADA network, a nasty little virus called Stuxnet.
Within a few weeks, there was a massive explosion at the Tehran complex where Iran ran its centrifuges. It actually tipped the Richter scale.
A few days after that, Cerberus was back, reporting for duty, asking for more.
And with that, he was in. Not only was he in, he was pure fucking gold. Operation Active Archer was born. Working on Cerberus’s unusually one-sided terms would be just fine with CIA.
Those terms were actually pretty simple. Cerberus would provide information on the SCADA system, including back doors that CIA could use to hack directly. CIA would work out subtle ways to infiltrate the software and develop malware to ensure enrichment remained unsuccessful. Through one of the suppliers that was selling equipment to an Iranian front company, the Agency would communicate with Cerberus via encrypted documents uploaded to the supplier’s technical support site.
Langley could hardly believe its luck.
There was one area where John had gained some insight. Per his request, CIA provided Cerberus with drugs for multiple sclerosis. This was how John learned about the wife. Over time, Cerberus trusted John enough to also tell him about the daughter; but even that had been cryptic. He’d learned of her only because Cerberus had asked John to develop an escape plan for the whole family in case the Iranians ever closed in on him. He was even fussy about the design of the plan.
Once Cerberus was up and running, communication became infrequent, almost nonexistent. But Cerberus held up his end of the bargain anyway. John passed him off to another handler and went back to hunting ISIS zealots.
As far as he knew, Cerberus barely ever checked in again, but dutifully installed CIA software updates whenever asked. Dale hadn’t really thought much about him again—until Meredith dropped that USB on his coffee table.
His mind found its way back to the present. He stared down at the stub of his pinkie, thinking about how it had all ended.
He looked up through the window at the solid white sky, then at the barometer on his mantel. Both pressure and visibility were dropping. He couldn’t see much beyond the trees now. If there was a sun up there somewhere, it was in deep hiding; there’d be no painting today. How he wished that weren’t the case.
He drummed his fingers on his thighs. Too quiet in this house. The solitude, normally calming, was choking. Classic cabin fever. He put on a Johnny Cash record and returned to his chair with a glass of water. To get his mind off his past, he picked up the letter from Grace and tried to reread it. He put it down halfway through.
“Music,” whispered Leo, lying prone in the snow some fifty yards to the west of John’s house. “The Monk has finally made a sound.”
Vasily lay next to him, nodding.
They’d taken to calling Dale “the Monk.” Other than for exercise, he hadn’t left his property since the CIA woman had departed two nights before. Nor had he made a single sound, other than moving about his kitchen making coffee. He’d sat up reading in his bedroom much of the night. He went to his gym. He read in his chair. It was perhaps the most boring surveillance op the two of them had ever been on.
Vasily and Leo had improved their hide in the tree line. They were still operating the directional microphone and the long-range video recorder. They hadn’t heard from the uptight SVR targeting officer called Zoloto since she’d left them there on that freezing mountain. Settling in for the long haul, they’d draped themselves in camouflage netting and down sleeping bags. To keep warm, they were lying on chemical heat packs the size of throw pillows. Twice, Leo had snuck off to town to resupply.
Every now and then, one of them would have to climb up the hill to take a piss or grab food out of the SUV. Things were not so bad as far as tactical surveillance ops went. Just boring as hell.
“Oh, hang on,” Vasily said, looking through the video scope. “I think he’s on the move. He just put on a coat.”
“I hear car keys,” confirmed Leo.
He pulled off his headphones and rose to his knees. Their agreement was that if the target left the home, Leo would follow him while Vasily stayed behind to improve their surveillance capability. Zoloto had said not to let Dale out of sight.
“Finally,” said Vasily. “When he goes, I’ll search the house for the USB and the documents. I can also get a real microphone in there.”
Dale couldn’t take it anymore. He had to get out of the house—even Johnny Cash wasn’t helping. He kept wondering about Cerberus, why he’d be reaching out, why now.
Maybe the jig was finally up. Maybe the wife was sicker and he had to get the hell out of the country, triggering the egress plan. Probably so. Dale felt bad about that. He felt bad about a lot of things. He thought about Grace’s letter.
Time to get out of here.
He slipped into his blanket-lined Carhartt, pulled on his Blundstones, and locked up. He debated whether to take the secure burner that Meredith had left and decided at the last second to pocket it. Coverage was better down in town, and if she had something really important to say, he figured he’d better actually listen.
Anyway, there was something he’d been planning to do this week and he needed to go to town. What a blessing to have something to do.
Back in October he’d applied for a permit to hunt bighorns on the Cleman preserve over near Ellensburg. The state had said that due to the lack of natural predators, the bighorn population had become unsustainable and a few animals could be hunted out, an extremely rare occurrence.
Dale had been pretty pumped about it. Bighorns required long-distance shooting. Since he was a trained sniper, it was right in his wheelhouse.
He started up the F-150 and scraped the falling snow off the window, thinking about the ammo supplies he’d need. He used an M91 rifle for this type of hunting, which he’d picked up on the black market after leaving the CIA. Bullets for that thing weren’t exactly off-the-shelf.
It was the same model he’d been trained on and used in Iraq. He’d outfitted it with a thermal scope for hunting at night, just like in Iraq. He had to get powder, shot, and brass jackets down at the gun shop in town to make his own cartridges. He’d build them up in the little shed on his property, where he kept his snowmobile and gun vault. He already had about twenty rounds done, probably enough, but he needed this excuse to go to town, so what the hell?
Once the truck’s heat got going, he climbed in, slipped into four-wheel drive, and made his way out across the driveway. A few inches had fallen and he felt the wheels spin once before they bit.
A half mile above Dale, Leo rode the brakes of the black Yukon XL down the hill, thinking that this was the worst possible kind of surveillance. A single black vehicle against an all-white background with no concealment. But the logging road they’d taken to get up there would have been impassable and he’d lose sight of Dale.
Farther down the hill on the occasional switchback, he could see Dale’s truck. The trick would be to remain far enough back that Dale didn’t notice him, but at the same time not to move so slowly that he would lose him in town.
At least the town was small, Leo reassured himself. The way Dale had left so quickly, Leo wouldn’t expect this to be a complicated trip. He was confident he’d be able to find the truck. But still, better to keep Dale in sight.
Vasily updated him on the encrypted UHF. Leo heard his voice crackle in his Bluetooth.
“I’m in the house,” Vasily said. “Looking for the documents.”
Leo answered with two clicks.
After Dale hit the gun shop, he decided to drive the twenty miles over to Ellensburg to go to the big outfitter he favored. He stocked up on propane bottles, freeze-dried food, some artificial game scent to help disguise his human smell, and some new Gore-Tex snowmobile gloves.
After a few hours in the city, he angled the F-150 back to I-90 and headed home toward Cle Elum. Whatever weak sun that had been hiding up there had finally given up. The sky to the west was gunmetal gray. Dale turned on his headlights.
Rolling down the highway, his eyes swept over the rearview. There, he thought. There was that black Yukon XL again.
He’d spotted it back in Cle Elum, parked down the street from the gun shop. There were plenty of wealthy SUV owners from Seattle who drove nice trucks around those parts. But it’d been parked in front of a Laundromat. Rich people driving Yukon XLs didn’t use Laundromats.
Out of habit, Dale had filed this tidbit away. He’d gone on to hit the NAPA near the tracks and bought some two-cycle oil for the snowmobile. But then, exiting on the far side of town, he’d noticed the Yukon parked near the equipment-rental place.
Plenty of wealthy SUV owners rented equipment for yard work, log splitting, and other types of maintenance on their vacation homes. But the place closed up between Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. Something was up.
Now, rolling down I-90 in the gathering dark, he saw the suspect vehicle six or seven cars back. That was the last straw. He was pissed.
He called Meredith on the phone she’d left with him. It went to voice mail but he was too mad to hang up.
“Meth, it’s me. Not cool that you left a couple of your people to watch me. I’d appreciate if we could just keep this between us. Call off your goddamned dogs.” He hung up and punched the gas, fuming.
Leo called Vasily on the satphone since they were out of the range for UHF. “I think I’m blown,” he said.
“What?” replied his partner. “Why do you say that?”
“He’s starting to drive like a madman.”
“Where’s he going?”
“He was over at this town called Ellensburg. We’re about fifteen miles away, headed back to Cle Elum. I think he’s probably heading home. Are you back in the hide?”
“No, I’m still in the house. Couldn’t find the USB. The letter was nothing related to the mission. Just something from a kid, a daughter. Now I’m wiring up some passive audio.”
“Well, the Monk is on his way home.”
Dale had the F-150 up to ninety, moving fast down the right lane. He’d heard on the radio that the snow was falling up at Snoqualmie Pass some thirty miles ahead and there was a big tractor trailer on its side. If that was the case, he was pretty sure the highway patrol would be occupied with it for this stretch of road. He accelerated through ninety-five, weaving to avoid traffic, looking at the rearview. He lost sight of the Yukon.
That ought to teach those fuckers, he thought. He came up with some ideas about how he’d screw them up when he finally got home.
The satphone by Leo’s seat rang. “I’m out of the house,” said Vasily. “I got two transmitters installed. Would have been better to get three or four. Where’s the Monk now?”
“He’s somewhere ahead of me. He jumped up to a hundred miles an hour trying to lose me. There’s no sense in my attracting that kind of attention, so I fell back. Where are you now?”
“I’m back in the trees, freezing my ass off.”
“Good. There shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Even though I’m burned, he’d have no reason to suspect anything off at the house. Let’s see what he does.”
“Okay. But get back here, just in case I need a ride.”
“On my way.”
Dale chose an exit three miles before Cle Elum to use the back way into town. He skidded through the backstreets, anxious to keep the tail from catching up. When he finally got to the gravel road that led up to his house, he noticed a second set of tire tracks. Fresh truck tracks overlaid on his own. He swore under his breath. Meredith’s CIA surveillance team had set up to watch him at his house, he thought. Now he was really pissed.
He flew up the snowy mountain road in the half dark, gunning the engine out of anger, his tail skidding around corners. Once up to his gate, he hopped out, drove through, and closed it behind him. He drove straight down to the shed, where he kept his snowmobile and his hunting gear. He slammed the truck door.
He went into the shed and opened up his large gun safe with a few spins of the dial. He pulled out his sniper rifle, leaving it unloaded. He put away the new gear and returned to the rifle, setting it on a workbench. Though it would mean he’d have to resight it, he detached his expensive thermal scope from the weapon. If Meredith’s surveillance team was out there in the snow, seeing them on IR was the way to find them.
But the last thing he wanted to do was wave his rifle around, looking for them through the scope. That’d be a good way to get himself killed. Controlling his temper, he detached the scope and turned it on, giving it a quick inspection.
He walked up to the cabin, unlocked the side door, and entered with the lights off. Kicking snow off his boots, he went upstairs in the dark to the deck, the place with the best view of the surrounding woods. He put the thermal to his eye and swept the tree line. The secure phone in his pocket buzzed.
With the scope still to his eyes, Dale put the phone to his ear with his free hand.
“It’s Meredith.”
“Hold on,” he said.
He saw something in the trees. A heat signature of a man. The man was lying on his stomach, a classic prone surveillance position.
Gotcha, dickhead.
“Yeah, Meth,” Dale said, angry. “You get my message?”
“Of course. But I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about your goon squad. I’ve got eyes on a surveillant in my tree line right now. You need to call him off. Tell him to get the hell off my property. Go ahead and make the call. I’ll stay on the line and watch him as he leaves or I’ll call the fucking cops. Deal?”
The timbre of her voice surprised him. “John, listen to me. We don’t have anyone watching you.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, waving away the doubt. “If you don’t, then Rance probably does. We both know how that asshole works.”
He focused his eyes in on the man in the tree line, a hot white blob against the blackness of the snow. As he spoke, the gray-white man shifted, then raised himself to a crouch. In silhouette, John could see what looked to be a snubbed-off rifle with a long mag. It looked like an HK machine pistol.
Her voice now had that professionally firm quality he knew so well. It chilled him. “Listen to me, John. Just listen. It’s not us. Whoever it is, I don’t know—but get the fuck out of there. You hear me? Call me back from a secure spot and we’ll figure this out. Get out now and evade. You hear me? Go!”
Dale hung up and slipped the scope back into his jacket pocket. He turned and ran to the rail of his deck and vaulted over the side, landing five feet below in the snow. He slid a little farther down the hill on his side, keeping his profile low, then jumped to his feet and sprinted full speed for his shed.