Pearce went into the motel room first. Wollerton was lying on the bed, watching TV. The bathroom door was closed and the shower was running. Wollerton looked round as Pearce entered.
‘Where did you . . .’ he cut himself off when he saw Brigitte, and after taking a moment to digest the situation, he leaped to his feet.
‘Start talking,’ he said sternly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Brigitte replied.
‘She set you up to get inside,’ Pearce explained.
‘You had no right,’ Wollerton said to Brigitte. ‘How can we trust her?’
‘We don’t have to trust her,’ Pearce replied. ‘We just have to listen.’
The shower stopped.
‘Even if she’s telling the truth, she gambled with my life,’ Wollerton said. ‘If I hadn’t—’
‘If you hadn’t what?’ Brigitte cut in. ‘Had a knife? Had your false identities? Your credit cards? Money? I helped you escape.’
Wollerton hesitated.
The bathroom door opened and Robert Clifton stepped out, wrapped in a towel. He did a double take when he saw the stand-off.
Brigitte surprised them all by barging past Pearce and jumping over the bed. She grabbed Clifton and hurled him against the wall.
‘You son of a bitch,’ she yelled. ‘What have you got us into?’
‘I . . . I don’t . . .’ Clifton stammered.
Wollerton looked perplexed, and Pearce crossed the room and tried to pull Brigitte off the man, but she resisted. Leila entered and shut the door behind her.
‘You sent us over there totally unprepared,’ Brigitte said. ‘You knew what we were up against, and you sent us there alone.’
‘I didn’t,’ Clifton protested. ‘You know what I know.’
‘Really?’ Brigitte challenged. ‘Why was Huxley’s father killed? What was Tate Blaine Carter doing? How did Huxley know about Black Thirteen? About Narong Angsakul and the Egyptian prison break?’
‘Systems,’ Clifton responded fearfully. ‘Algorithms. He watches the world for this sort of thing.’
‘Why?’ Brigitte asked.
There was a moment of silence. Brigitte had asked all the right questions and had shifted attention from herself to the former NSA director and his paymaster. If she was playing Pearce and the others, she was doing it masterfully. Pearce believed her, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility the Red Wolves were using the patch as leverage to force her to betray them.
‘They did things to me over there,’ Brigitte said. ‘Things . . .’ she tailed off. ‘I wasn’t prepared. None of us were.’
She looked at Wollerton, who nodded sympathetically.
‘I’m sorry,’ Clifton replied. ‘I don’t know anything else. I swear. We’re trying our best to figure out what’s going on.’
‘But you know it’s bigger than who controls the drugs coming through the Port of Seattle,’ Pearce suggested.
Clifton nodded. ‘We all know that.’
‘There’s a geopolitical angle,’ Pearce said, finally managing to pull Brigitte away.
The fight had left her and she looked as though she might cry. No one else would understand her emotional turmoil. They might think she’d been tortured, but they’d have no idea she was living with a death sentence.
‘Brigitte discovered an organization called the Red Wolves. Chinese ultranationalists who’ve developed a chemical weapon that’s delivered via fentanyl patches. It attacks the endocrinal system and shuts down the production of PTH, which leads to death through suffocation in seconds. It’s the toxin used in the prison break and the Meals Seattle and community centre attacks. The patch delivers a synthetic hormone that replaces PTH, but the moment the dose runs out or the patch is removed . . .’ Pearce left the implication hanging. ‘The Red Wolves have sought control of the West Coast drugs business so they can get this stuff out to hundreds of thousands of addicts across America.’
There was a moment of stunned silence.
‘This information came at great personal cost,’ Pearce said, as Brigitte stepped into the bathroom and shut the door.
‘They could hold entire nations hostage,’ Clifton remarked.
Pearce nodded. ‘Or kill thousands by cutting off the supply.’
Wollerton whistled. ‘We need to take this in. FBI. NSA.’
‘Brigitte said they’d compromised Chinese Intelligence,’ Pearce replied. He saw Clifton agreeing with him. ‘And Black Thirteen proved MI6 has been infiltrated.’
‘Yeah, but this is different. We’re not talking about a few hundred lives; we’re talking about thousands. Hundreds of thousands maybe,’ Wollerton protested.
Pearce glanced at Leila darkly, and she looked away. ‘We think there’s a link between the two operations; Black Thirteen and the Red Wolves.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Wollerton said.
‘I wish I was,’ Pearce replied. ‘So we’ve got to assume there’s a chance US Intelligence has been infiltrated.’
‘By who?’ Wollerton asked. ‘You’re talking about state-level intervention. There’s only a handful of organizations in the world that could pull off operations like this.’
Pearce shrugged.
‘That’s what we need to find out,’ Clifton said.
The bathroom door opened, and Brigitte entered, carrying a glass. There was a tiny cutting from the patch in the bottom. ‘I was able to get this. It’s a piece of one of the fentanyl patches,’ she said. She took it to Clifton, who shrank back. ‘Huxley has labs. Get his people to analyse this. Find out how it works. If we can’t stop the Red Wolves, the world is going to need a way to cure people who’ve been exposed to the patch.’
Clifton hesitated.
‘The powder is airborne. The patches work by touch,’ Brigitte told him. ‘As long as you don’t touch it, it can’t hurt you.’
Clifton nodded and took the glass. ‘I can get this to one of Hux’s facilities in San Francisco. He’s going to need to know about what’s happened.’
‘And since it seems we can all trust each other again,’ Pearce remarked, ‘we should move back to the building on Union Street. It’ll make a better base of operations than this place. And we’re going to need every advantage we can get if we’re going to work out a way to stop the Red Wolves.’