Dale spent about five seconds staring up at the stars, listening to the breeze in the trees, just breathing. All was quiet on the property. No one else had emerged from the Yukon. There were no additional engine noises chugging up the hill. He didn’t hear the crunch of an assassin’s boots coming up through the snow from the tree line. Other than the two dead assaulters, his property was as still and peaceful as the surrounding mountain forest.
He probed the wound to his shoulder with his fingers. Intact but moist, throbbing and stinging. He scooped some snow and jammed it under his shirt, pressing it into the pain. The numbing cold was an instant relief.
He haltingly rose to his knees and then feet, stumbling once. He looked down at the dead man in the snow next to him. Half his head was missing. As he unshackled the man’s AK-12 from his harness, he kept his eyes averted from the mess that had been his face.
Dale pulled the assaulter’s shattered NVGs up from where they lay beside him. He wiped away some blood and tissue to examine them. They were military issue, a five-tube sensor model not available on the open market. He patted down the rest of the dead man’s H-harness and found an additional mag for the AK, which he wrestled free.
With the rifle in his hands and his own NVGs flipped back down over his eyes, Dale went into his house. In the dark of his kitchen, he dragged the first dead operator through the foyer and out the front door into the night air, leaving a smear of blood on the stone floor. He laid both dead men on the snowbank, side by side like two fish in a market.
He went back inside and scrounged through a closet to find a flashlight. With this, he rummaged through a bathroom to find his trauma kit. He removed the NVGs and chanced a look at his shoulder in the bright white of the beam. After stripping off his shirt, he washed himself clean of the attackers’ blood and took a close look in the mirror.
A bullet had nicked the top of his deltoid but hadn’t actually penetrated. It was a deep groove of flesh that wouldn’t be closing on its own anytime soon. Dale poured some peroxide on it and dabbed at it with gauze. He affixed a bandage that he wrapped around his arm, making it tight. The wound would need stitches, but his makeshift bandage would have to do for now.
It hurt like hell. There was a vial of morphine in the trauma kit, but he tried not to think about it. He didn’t want to cloud his reasoning or reflexes.
In his bedroom closet, he dug out his largest waterproof backpack and began stuffing it with clothes. He opened his small digital gun safe and removed the Glock, shoving it into his waistband. He saw the USB Meredith had left behind right where he’d laid it earlier. He zippered it into the trauma kit and stashed it in the bag. He stuffed his laptop in an outer pocket. Finally, he changed his clothes, tossing his bloody ones in a trash can. He circled through his great room to pick up Grace’s letter, stuffing it in a breast pocket.
On his way back outside, he carefully shouldered himself into his heaviest down parka. He slung the backpack over his good arm and the sling of the AK over his wounded shoulder. He trotted through the snow, past the two dead men, down to the snowmobile shed. In the dark confines of the shed, he placed the AK on a workbench. Using his flashlight, he riffled through the big gun vault that he’d opened only twenty minutes before, looking for a hidden seam at its rear. He explored the walls of the vault with his fingers and eventually found the edge of a twelve-by-twelve panel.
He froze when he heard something, ready to spin around and take up the AK. It was an owl hooting in the woods. He went back to work.
Behind the panel he recovered a small nylon bag. He zippered it open, conducting a quick check of the contents with a sweep of the flashlight. There were three passports—UK, US, Canada—three grand in twenty-dollar bills, and four loaded magazines for the Glock. He zipped the go bag closed and stuffed it into the larger backpack.
Dale poured some gas into his snowmobile and cranked it up. He rode it up the small trail to his driveway. He dismounted in front of his house and angled its headlight onto the two dead bodies. He shut the machine down and walked over to them.
One by one, he dragged the dead men to the rear of the Yukon, leaving a red streak of blood on the snow. He opened the driver’s door and scanned the interior. The backseat was folded forward, maximizing the truck’s cargo area. He saw the satphone on the center console and three military-style duffels behind the front seats. The keys were still in the ignition.
He pocketed the phone and went about inspecting the duffels. He found only clothes, regular American labels. Oddly, there was a mishmash of outfits including dress and casual wear, even extra shoes. He noted that one of the bags was filled with women’s clothing. He left the bags where they were.
The snow was picking up. Dale looked back at the bloodstains. Already they were fading under the big flakes.
He opened the truck’s lift gate and tried to pull one of the dead men into the cargo area. But the effort was too much and the weight too awkward. His shoulder was killing him. He had another idea.
He jogged to his barn and found a length of rope among his rock-climbing gear. He wrapped it around the ankles of the two dead men and then dropped to his back, sliding under the truck to tie it to the rear axle.
With the two bodies dragging five feet behind, Dale drove the truck off his driveway and into the far trees, snapping branches of bushes and saplings on the way. At this side of the house, his property fell away into a shallow ravine with a small seasonal creek. As the truck rolled slowly toward it, idling in four-wheel drive, Dale opened the door and hopped out into the ankle-high snow. He watched the SUV plow over more scrub until it found its way to the edge. Finally, it tipped forward and disappeared over the bank with a crash, whipping the two corpses along behind it.
He went back to his snowmobile and took a last look around his property through his NVGs, shaking his head. All he’d wanted to do that day was finish that painting of Peoh.
Meredith’s secure cell phone rang at seven a.m. eastern standard time, just as the Virginia sunrise was beginning to brighten the otherwise drab walls of her Langley office. She was on her fourth coffee. She leapt at the phone, almost knocking her cup over.
“Meth, it’s me,” said Dale.
“John, where the fuck have you been? What happened? Why didn’t you answer my calls? I’ve been up all night. I’ve spun up a team that will be out there in your area about now. I’ve . . .” She realized she was ranting. “Shit, John! Just tell me.”
“Yeah, I got a little busy.”
“Tell me. Now.”
“How secure is this line?”
“I can see you’re on the phone I gave you. We’re good.”
“You’re alone?”
“Yes, I’m alone. I’m at HQS. If this isn’t secure, then nothing is. What happened?”
She heard him take a breath. “You’re burned, Meth. No doubt about it. They followed you to my place.”
She hunched over her desk as though she’d just been gut-punched. She buried her face in one hand while she held her phone with the other. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“Just give me the details. We’ll figure it out.”
He paused. She could almost hear him thinking through the way to handle this conversation.
“There were two of them. One of them was following me in an SUV. I spotted the tail—that’s when I called you. As it turns out, the other was back at the house watching me from the tree line. I picked him up on IR when we were on the phone. He had a machine pistol. He meant business. I ended up taking him down in the house.”
“Christ, John. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“What about the other guy?”
“The second one came hauling down my driveway in an SUV. That was the guy that was following me on the highway. He had an AK. I got him before he made it in the house.”
Still cradling her head, Meredith tightly closed her eyes. The morning light, the coffee next to her, the conversation with her ex-husband about killing people, the fact that she’d been stupid enough to be followed . . . it was all too surreal. She started to feel nauseous. She swallowed hard and opened her eyes, pulling herself back into the job.
“Okay,” she said. She picked up a pen and paper. “You know I’m going to need a lot more information. But give me the current tactical picture.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. But let me just say, Meth, I don’t fully trust your organization. Don’t expect me to come in to some briefing center. You guys created this mess, not me.”
There was rightfully a quavering edge to his voice. But Meredith knew how to deal with adrenaline-soaked operatives. “I understand. Just tell me the current tactical picture. We’ll figure out how to deal with it. You’re not alone in this.”
He was quiet for a moment. “All right. But only you. Okay?”
“Yes.”
He made her promise it. She did. He went on.
“I wasn’t sure what else was coming up the hill. I also wasn’t sure of the nature of the threat, so I wanted to conceal the scene as best as I could before I got out. I sank the SUV and the two dead guys in a creek bed on the side of the house. Then I did an exfil up over the hill to avoid any new threats coming up from town. That’s about it.”
“What kind of exfil? How? You took your car up over the mountain?”
“No, I figured my car is off-limits. If you’re burned, then I am too. Let’s just say I’m off-grid.”
She wasn’t going to press him. Not yet. “I’m sure you did an SSE of their vehicle and equipment. Who were they? Iranian?”
“Negative. Russian.”
“Russians?” Meredith almost choked as she said it. She stood and paced. “How do you know?”
“Their night-vision gear had Cyrillic engraving. High-end military issue. Also one of them had an AK-12 with Russian ammo. It looked military issue, not the shit rednecks build themselves. They looked Russian too, ethnically speaking. Military-age males and all that.”
Meredith paced in a tight oval in front of her desk, the phone squashed to her ear. Russians? “All right. You’re probably right. I’m just having a hard time grokking this whole thing.”
“Are you guys going to clean it up?”
She thought that over. She’d need to get clearance from Rance, maybe even Dorsey. Legally, the CIA wasn’t supposed to go around killing foreign adversaries in the USA, plastering over the mess. Counterespionage was the FBI’s turf. But FBI was law enforcement—cops. FBI would mean stringing up yellow crime scene tape and explaining a whole bunch of things that she wouldn’t have the time or inclination to do.
Since it was her ex-husband’s house high on a mountaintop and only two foreign operatives, she thought she could get away with keeping it in the CIA family. At least that was how she’d pitch it to Dorsey; he’d hate the whole thing and probably make her sign a bunch of nondisclosure forms. But he’d play along.
“Yes,” she said, sighing. “I’m going to ask Ground Branch to secure the site. We’ll want to get a look at these guys, their equipment. It’ll be low profile, I promise.”
“Not HRT?” HRT stood for “hostage rescue team,” FBI special operators who would descend into a hostile environment.
“No, not yet. But let me worry about that.”
“Good. I don’t want my name in the papers. Look, I’m going to drop. I’ll check in with you later.”
“Wait,” she said, stalling.
She stopped pacing. She could see Rance through the vertical window next to her office door. She’d been calling him all night, trying to bring him up to speed, but he hadn’t bothered to answer. She saw him now, leaning against a cubicle in his gray suit, talking to his executive admin. He looked pale. Wait till he gets a load of this, she thought. That will be world-class pale.
“John,” she said. “We still have to talk about Cerberus. I still need that. Did you look at the file I left you? I texted you the password. It’s good for another day.”
“Not now, Meth. This is way too fucked up.”
“You realize this thing is with the director at this point? It’s going to go before the National Security Council.”
“I don’t care.”
“Listen to me. I can’t make sense of what happened to you. But the Cerberus thing hasn’t gone away. If anything, if the Russians really are involved, then it just underscores how serious this is. Have you seen the news? The Russians are heavily involved in the Iranian nuke program via that reactor in Bushehr. That means yellowcake going in right past our sanctions. You’re still the only way we’re going to keep this thing . . .”
Meredith suddenly realized she was talking to dead air. He’d hung up.
Rance scheduled the meeting with Dorsey for two that afternoon. By then, Meredith had done what she could. At least Dorsey had given her the authorization to take care of it. A Ground Branch paramilitary team that had been training in the mountains of Idaho was flown in to the tiny Cle Elum Airport, where they were met by a hastily dispatched case officer who worked on recruiting Chinese immigrants in nearby Vancouver, Canada.
Posing as county inspectors, the team drove up to John’s property in a white SUV with government plates. They found the vehicle, the site of the gunfight, and the two dead operatives. They didn’t have the equipment to haul the SUV out. Instead, after searching it for intel, they cut down a beefy lodgepole pine to bury the vehicle under a mountain of branches.
Rance was furious about the whole thing. He was pissed at her for being burned, pissed at John for disappearing, pissed at himself for having to explain all of this to higher-ups.
Aside from his general surliness, Meredith thought he looked terrible, like he’d been awake all night. His skin was gray. He kept belching into a closed fist as though he were on the verge of throwing up. When she asked him if he was all right, he just got more pissed. She assumed it was a hangover. But a pretty thick one for a garden-variety Wednesday.
Dorsey leaned on the conference table in the SCIF, steadying himself with two fists, a pen in his mouth, his standard crisis-management pose. After hearing a recounting of the saga, he said, “All of this and we’re still no closer to getting someone to talk to Cerberus.” He lowered his head, frustrated, chewing furiously. “What intel did we get from the bodies?”
“Everything seems to indicate they’re Russian,” said Rance. “The clothing labels were American, but we found Russian equipment. The Yukon was rented at the Seattle Airport. We traced the bill back to an SVR front company. We’re running a picture of the one guy’s face through our recognition database.”
“Why not both of them?” asked Sheffield.
“Because the other guy’s was shot off,” said Rance.
“My guess is they’re Spetsnaz Alphas,” said Meredith. “That was John’s assessment too.”
“Operating in the US?” Dorsey shot. “What the fuck? Why go after Dale?”
Meredith started to say something but Rance cut her off. “I think you remember the WMD buy Meredith was coordinating in Dubai, sir, the bioweapons-Syria thing. Our asset there, the seller, got snatched. We think it was SVR. I’d say this confirms it.”
“I remember it. You’re saying Meredith got burned on that op? Led them straight to Dale?”
It galled her that they spoke about her like she wasn’t in the room. “Yes,” she said, inserting herself. She had to reluctantly admit to herself that Rance might be right. “That appears to be the case.”
“But why would they be following you so closely back in the US? Even if you were burned back in theater, why would they be following you back here? The beauty of your cover was that you are an actual wife visiting an actual husband.”
“Ex-wife, sir,” she corrected.
“I don’t know,” said Rance. “It could be something fishy about Dale too.”
“What?” Meredith blurted. “How the hell could it be John’s fault?”
“I mean, we just don’t know what he’s been up to.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “It’s not that. John’s not been in any of this stuff. He’s retired . . . by us, I might add. No. This is an Occam’s razor thing. You guys are right that my cover was blown in Dubai. I picked up an SVR tail and it stayed active when I got back for whatever reason. That’s all.” She looked toward Dorsey for support.
“A tail that went all the way from here to Seattle, to the mountains. Two Spetz Alphas in the woods,” Dorsey replied, looking back at her. “Smells bad. But I doubt it’s a Dale problem. I’m with you, Meredith. You’re blown and they followed you. Somehow they got a bead on Dale as being important, which he unfortunately is.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Has Cerberus surfaced at all?”
“No,” said Rance. “He left pretty explicit instructions that we’re not to come back to him without Dale. He’s still dark.”
“And Dale? Where’s he now? We need to bring him in, obviously.”
Rance looked at Meredith. “You want to tell him? Or should I do it?”
She took a deep breath. “John’s spooked, sir. As you might imagine, he’s taking extreme measures to protect himself. That means, unfortunately, that he’s not answering his phone right now.”
“Of course not,” said Dorsey. He crossed his arms and raised one hand to his brow, smothering his eyes, chewing on the pen. “Jesus, it’s almost like we’re trying to fuck this up.”