Her temperature still elevated from the morning run, Meredith arrived at the office sweating through the powder she’d applied to her forehead. She’d deal with that later, she told herself, as she had a pile of work to get through first. She hurried through the usual batch of e-mails and then turned to the operational planning.
The details were slowly falling into place.
Starting with Chadwick, the Istanbul chief of station, who’d called just as she was going to bed the night before. He’d met with John in Turkey. He’d set John up with fresh credentials and gotten him the tools he’d need for the extract. He’d come up with an infil plan for Iran, which happened to be via train. According to Chadwick, John now had a weapon, a satphone, and an infrared reflector to use as identification when he approached the Iraqi border. All he needed now was a way to get to the exact meeting site. John would have to improvise all of that, of course—but that was what John did.
Clearly expecting a hearty thanks, Chadwick had then let the conversation wander into the personal. He’d asked about her, how she was, how Grace was, other details of her life that she’d shared previously over too many glasses of wine. Meredith detected it for what it was and became instantly guarded. She liked Chadwick but not that much.
Still, she needed him, so she did her duty. Wow, Steve, you’re the best. Simply amazing job, thank you. She stopped just shy of saying, I owe you one. She believed a woman should never say that to a man.
Whatever the cost, it was one more step to getting John home safely. Grace had been calling in during her limited free time at the Academy, asking where her father was. Though her mother had remained mute, Grace seemed to know that Meredith knew. It rankled them equally, but for opposite reasons.
John was in place almost, but she couldn’t be sure about Cerberus. His WhatsApp check-ins had been almost as sporadic as John’s. At least she’d gotten NSA to spoof the phone’s IP address in order to throw off any monitors, in case the IRGC had gotten some kind of read on him. For all of the gaps in Cerberus’s assigned check-ins, she was at least confident they were secure. There was that.
In the few times she and Cerberus had been in contact, Meredith had relayed that the meet was to take place at a small sheep farm close to the border near a town called Alut. It was a Kurdish village in far-western Iran near the Iraqi border. Not knowing how Cerberus would get there, Meredith had relayed a smattering of geocoords, prominent landmarks, and the equivalent of Google Maps directions. In four more days, Cerberus, Rahimi, was to present himself in that farm field, night after night, between the hours of midnight and four. She’d sent the same rendezvous plan on to John via his satphone through the secure app, though, typical of him, she had yet to receive an acknowledgment.
Provided her case officer and her asset didn’t get themselves arrested, she thought she’d done all she could do.
And yet . . .
Last night, just after the call with Chadwick confirming John’s whereabouts, she’d lain awake, unable to still her ever-waggling feet. Illogically, the knowledge of John’s position had ramped her anxiety. She trusted Chadwick as much as she could trust anyone. Nevertheless, his knowing where John was meant that someone else was privy to operational details, a premise that kept her sheets knotted for the better part of three hours.
Her only comfort, a cold one, was that John himself had appeared for the meeting with Chadwick, voluntarily. He could act accordingly to save his operational integrity, using his own judgment. It would be John’s call, as it had to be in the field.
But she felt miserable about shifting the responsibility.
Something was definitely rotten in Denmark or, more specifically, Langley. She’d been burned in Dubai several weeks back, which inexorably had led to the Russians tracking her to Washington State. But how had they found John in Mumbai? Not even she had known he was going to be in Mumbai until he was there reporting in for help. Only a day had passed between his message to her and the eventual meeting. The Russians couldn’t have reacted that quickly—could they?
As Meredith lay there in bed with her shaking feet, her mind had bloomed with possible faults. Could Cerberus actually be some kind of Russian double? It was, after all, peculiar the way the man had set up the meet in Mumbai, swapping out his wife. Was he leading John right into a trap of Iranian design? But the utterly gullible innocence of Nadia Rahimi and the real-world death of Sahar, their daughter, seemed to discount that possibility. Nadia Rahimi was no spy and her husband was clearly devoted to her. And what would have been the point? Just to take out a recently retired case officer? That didn’t sync. It was John leading them toward something, not the other way around.
And how was that happening?
Could SVR have some kind of tracker on John? Unlikely. He was as paranoid as they came and barely communicated. Even when he did, it was always through the secure app on a fresh burner. If that channel was compromised, then the whole agency was compromised. When it came to communicating, John was solitary as a clam.
As the moon crept across the night sky, she’d thought about others who knew something about Archer. Her deputy, Rick Desmond, came to mind. But while Desmond knew the most about the operational details, Meredith knew the most about Desmond. After she’d been burned, the CI team had given her a secret report on Desmond, since he reported to her.
Other than Meredith learning that he was gay—surprising enough—his life was clean. The CI team had surveilled him for weeks, monitored all of his communications, and the result was that Desmond was spotless. The fact that he was gay didn’t matter. It wasn’t like the early days of the Agency when that was a target for blackmail. Desmond hadn’t tried to hide his sexuality out of the office. Meredith simply hadn’t bothered to get to know him. That probably said more about her than him, she concluded, chiding her own management shortcomings.
Whatever. Can’t do everything.
That left General Counsel Sheffield, Rance, and Dorsey. Sheffield knew about the op, but he was removed from the tactical details. Even if Sheffield was dirty, there wasn’t much he would be able to do without raising a forest of red flags. As for Dorsey, he was simply too earnest about pulling Cerberus in. Meredith knew how to read people, knew how to detect liars. If acting, Dorsey was turning in a Tom Hanks–level performance. No way.
Rance.
He’d always been a calculating ass, and God knew she didn’t trust him. But Rance had always acted with one goal in mind: the betterment of his career. That, unfortunately for the rest of the Agency, had been going just fine as it was, partly because of his utter lack of conviction. Depending on how a particular meeting was going, she’d seen him shift positions faster than a senator with sinking poll numbers. If there was one consistency about Rance, it was his inconsistency.
Lying in the dark with nothing better to do than let her mind roam, Meredith supposed she could think of an instance where Rance might sabotage Archer just to pin a failure on Dorsey. But Rance was just as likely to jump out in front of the parade and take credit for Archer if it went well, which it damn well might. Now that she thought about it, she realized Rance was in a fine position for either outcome. Typical.
And yet . . .
Rance had kept her awake for an hour all by himself. There was something about the way he’d been acting. He’d been drinking a lot. She’d seen the hangovers, the pallor, the headaches. He’d also been leaving the office in a hurry over the past few months. She’d almost detected a certain laziness about his work, which was new. Up until now Rance had been one of those guys who practically slept in the office. He’d always had the uncommon ability to merge a suicidal work ethic with a nose for realistic intelligence ops. He might have been a world-class brownnoser, but still, he’d risen to be the head of Counterproliferation because he knew what the hell he was doing. So why did he seem pissed off every time she called in with an update?
Did that sound like the work of a man who was anxious to gather a bunch of info and pass it along to the bad guys? Strangely, he barely seemed to care at all, except when he got the chance to remind everyone that John was some sort of shaky turncoat. If the Russians knew how to track John, and Rance was one of them, then he should have been promoting John as the critical actor in the whole thing.
Ugh, she’d thought around three a.m. This job was enough to drive one mad. She tried to think about something else, anything else.
It didn’t work. Maybe it wasn’t an inside leak at all. Maybe the Russians were just fucking good. Of course they were, she’d finally concluded at four, rolling to her stomach, thinking about that blonde John had encountered in Mumbai.
That was the last thought Meredith had before she’d finally drifted off, managing to grab a fitful hour before her alarm had thrust her into her running shoes.
Now, sitting at her desk, using her phone’s selfie camera to examine her makeup in the brutal fluorescence of her windowless office, she found herself wondering again about the Russians, specifically the blonde. Meredith wished she’d seen a picture of her, but John hadn’t ever been in a position to get one. He’d been too busy dodging sniper fire. But still, he’d noticed enough of her to describe her as striking, a knockout, an eleven. Meredith noted the sweat shining across a few wrinkles in her brow.
An eleven? Fucking John. Leave it to him to piss her off with that description.
Her mood continued to sink over the next hour. She’d heard from neither Rahimi nor her ex-husband. How either of them was progressing toward the rendezvous, she couldn’t say. Meanwhile Rance had texted, asking for an update and then—classic Rance—had sent her repeated callbacks to voice mail. In her role as handler, that left her with the one concrete task she could accomplish for the morning: logistics.
At least Desmond was reliable. They were in a small SCIF, the one on the first floor near the cafeteria that was relatively easy to schedule because it was so awkwardly placed.
“All right,” he began. His laptop was hooked up to a large TV monitor that was bolted to the wall. “This is a digitally colorized image of the rendezvous point in Alut off the low-earth-orbit satellite we tasked. And here’s our farm.”
He ran the cursor over a patch of green earth in the otherwise barren hilly landscape. The imagery was good enough for them to be able to identify individual fence posts, strands of barbed wire.
Meredith could even see that a few of the sheep had been sheared. But she already knew this farm well. She’d been the one to propose it in the first place.
“Right,” she said, reminding him of this. “What more have we learned?”
He cleared his throat. “SIGINT confirms there’ve been no phone calls in the area, no radio transmissions. The farmer or rancher or shepherd or whatever you’d call a guy like that seems to live over here.” He dropped his cursor down the length of the image. “It’s about a half mile.”
“Family members? Houseguests?”
“We’ve seen a wife hanging laundry. That’s about it. I think they’re pretty old.”
“How does our farmer get up to that pasture up there?” She pointed at the screen.
“He has a small pickup down at the house. Takes this dirt road. Keeps the truck in this little barn, ah, here.” The cursor moved to indicate a small shed-style roof.
“Can someone drive up to the pasture without being seen at the house?”
Desmond shrugged. “Maybe. You can see where the road passes by. But there’s a depression here, sort of a little wadi. We suspect that could mask some sound. Do you think Dale or Cerberus will be arriving in a car?”
“No idea. But this is a long walk from anything else, so it can’t be discounted. What’s this road here?” Meredith pointed to a ribbon of dirt about a half mile from the property.
“That’s the border road. There’s no way around it. It goes the whole way more or less, running north-south.”
“What kind of patrols?”
“Every two hours or so, a lone vehicle comes through, a white IRGC Toyota pickup. It alternates northern and southern directions, so we assess he comes up to this dead end, turns around, and comes back.”
“Assess? Why aren’t we sure?”
“Because it’s too close a view for this quality of imagery from a LEO bird. You think it matters?”
LEO meant “low earth orbit.” For a satellite to get image quality this good, it had to fly low, which meant a narrow field of view.
“I suppose not,” she said.
But as soon as the words left her mouth, she wondered if she would come to regret them. Intelligence failures were infamous for overlooked, seemingly innocuous assumptions.
She let it go. Time was of the essence. Information was never perfect and the die was already cast. She couldn’t change the rendezvous point now even if she wanted to. Who knew when she’d be back in touch with John?
“Okay,” she said after asking a few more questions. “Tell me about our strike plan.”
“Right. We’ll put a drone on-site at the appointed hour, assisting a DEVGRU package that will be on standby here at FOB Hammer. That’s the closest base to the Iranian border we can use.”
“What’s the flying time between there and the border for the DEVGRU team?”
Desmond switched to a high-res map view of the area. He measured the distance with his cursor from the village of Alut in Iran back to the secret military base in eastern Iraq. “I’d say about twenty minutes.”
“Not ideal.”
“No.”
She considered the distance for a few moments, studying the map. It seemed unlikely that John would come tearing across a hill with bullets flying over his back. He was way too cautious for that. If anything went awry, it would be well before he got there, she thought. But . . .
She said, “I guess we can have them in a holding pattern over here as soon as we know our assets are in the area. They know about the friendly IR reflector—we’ve worked that out already?”
“Yup. All set. The drone will catch it.” He circled a spot on the map with the cursor. “When the helo gets close enough, it will have eyes as well. Should be clean.”
She nodded. Seemed straightforward. The farm field was a good LZ too. Provided both her men arrived on-site intact.
“One thing, though,” Desmond said. “DOD has been pretty clear they’re not going to enter Iranian airspace or territory. So they won’t land in that field like we wanted. John has to get across that border road.”
“Good Christ,” Meredith muttered, dropping her forehead into a cupped hand. “When did they tell you this?”
“Yesterday.”
“Sometimes I wonder why we even have a fucking military,” she said, sighing.
Desmond waited until the storm had passed. She shuddered briefly, shaking it off, looking up.
“Okay. How bad is the walk?”
Desmond switched back to the imagery. “In the overhead view, it looks easy enough. Climb this barbed-wire fence, cross the border road, descend into this gully, and you’re in Iraq. Home safe.”
“Yeah,” she said. “On the picture it looks easy.”
She could hear John’s voice in her head. How many times had she heard him going on and on about the lack of consideration from mission planners for the little things? She thought about it for another ten seconds.
“Rick, who at DOD said they wouldn’t enter airspace? Was that CENTCOM himself?”
“No, it was his J-2. Admiral Miller.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“Something like . . . for instant action in the heat of battle, he said he’d need the order to come from an SES Level Five CIA officer, on-site.”
Meredith cursed whoever Admiral Miller was. This kind of bureaucracy was the thing she hated most. She happened to be one level below the crucial SES level. She was a GS-15, the equivalent of a military full colonel. The level up from her, SES, had all the real trust of the US government. She’d have to get Rance to be on-site, but he’d probably go wobbly right when it mattered.
Before heading next door to lunch, she zigzagged her way to the basement office for travel. She wanted to get to Cerberus and John as soon as she could, personally. Given the knowledge of the Iranian nuclear breakout, she considered every moment precious. She planned to debrief Cerberus right there in Iraq on the spot, then keep grilling him on the plane all the way home. His days of manipulating the CIA were going to be over, by God.
But CIA officers of her rank didn’t simply waltz onto US combat bases in Iraq. It took days of numbing paperwork to get cleared to go up to the FOB. While she waited, Meredith figured she’d preposition herself in Doha, capital of Qatar, to be near CENTCOM. That way she could easily hitch a ride on a military aircraft up to the base as soon as her orders came through.
Consequently, she’d be traveling under nonofficial cover (NOC) via civilian means. After an hour’s work, the Agency travel desk had set her up with a flight plan, a secure driver, and a hotel, all to be used under one of her favorite cover identities, Maggie O’Dea, an Irish-American international management consultant who specialized in the oil industry. Meredith liked posing as Maggie because she got to wear a red wig and green contacts. She thought she looked particularly good as a ginger—John had always thought so anyway.
An eleven. Bastard.
Just off the elevator, on her way back to her desk, Rance called. Anxious to get it over with, she ducked into a copy room. It was the end of his day in London. As usual, he seemed in a hurry.
He began without preamble. “What’s the situation on Archer? We a go? Still using Alut for a border crossing into Iraq? Anything new?”
The directness of the questions struck her cold. She’d lain in bed not seven hours ago, wondering about this man. Was she really prepared to give him intimate details of the operation days ahead of time? But how could she not? He was the boss. Eventually he’d have them.
She needed a minute to think. “Hey, Ed—I’m sorry. You caught me in the ladies’. I’m not alone. . . . Can you give me just one second? Hold on.”
“Oh, I . . .”
That ought to leave him thinking, she thought.
She put him on mute and bit the inside of her cheek, her arms crossed as she leaned against a paper shredder the size of a foosball table. What could she do?
She took the phone off mute and heard her voice quaver. “Okay, sorry. I can talk now,” she said.
“Meredith, I sincerely apologize. I didn’t realize you—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she cut him off. “I’m heading over to Doha tonight. We’re still planning the meet—haven’t finalized the details.”
“But it’s still Alut, right?”
Well, she supposed, he already knew that much. “Yes,” she confirmed.
“Have we set up military? What base?”
She realized that withholding information was going to be challenging, if not impossible. Rance was the head of Counterproliferation, the ultimate owner of the entire op.
“Yes,” she said, her anxiety climbing. “We’ve set up a DEVGRU team out of FOB Hammer.”
He would need to approve that, so it was just a matter of time before he’d know.
“Any sign of John since he entered Turkey? What about Cerberus?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing on either of them. John’s MIA, as usual.”
She’d just lied openly to her boss. Egregiously. She’d better tell Chadwick to keep his mouth shut.
“Okay,” said Rance. “I want to be there too, on-site at FOB whenever it’s called. I’ll meet you in Doha in, what, three days? Friday?”
“Yes.”
Well, she thought, at least she’d have an SES Level Five officer to authorize action into Iran if necessary.
“You flying civilian NOC or military?”
“I’m going NOC. Going to stay in town at the Doha W until the DOD details come in.”
“Nicer than staying on base. See you there.”
After she hung up, she retraced her steps to the travel office. The same guy who had just taken her orders for Doha stood up to greet her.
“Change of plans,” she said immediately, flashing her ID again. “Cancel Doha for me. I’m going to Dubai instead.”
If Rance was the leak, she’d need to actively duck him. She’d rather run John directly out of Dubai with her team than be sitting under Rance’s watchful eye.