TEN

“What people?” Court asked.

“People working for the Israelis.” Drummond’s face darkened. “People working with me. We hacked into Iranian intelligence servers in several European embassies, we were able to see some of their personnel files. We thought this was all going to be used to target spies for surveillance, or to get them deported by the host countries. But that’s not what happened.”

“What happened?”

“Miriam came to me and told me they wanted to be able to alter files in the Iranian servers. I agreed, at first. It was theoretically possible to do, and it could help turn the screws on the embassy spooks. But when my team and I got the targeting list of files they wanted to change, we knew something was wrong.”

“Why?”

“We were turning regular consular affairs guys into Iranian spooks, and Iranian spooks into consular affairs guys. We were, basically, creating false positives and false negatives in their systems. This meant that America, Germany, anybody else who broke into the Iranians’ servers, they wouldn’t be able to determine who was an IO and who was regular embassy staff.”

“What was Miriam’s objective with that?”

“She didn’t say, but it looked like she wanted Quds Force personnel and other Iranian officers to move freely within Europe, even though they were on a watch list.

“To me, and to my colleagues, this was absolutely wrong. It could hurt friendly nations’ capabilities versus Iran. It had nothing to do with the stated goals I was brought over from the U.S. to achieve. I’m not a traitor, no matter what Hanley told you. I’m an achiever, and I thought Israel was actually going to do something to cripple the mullah’s power in Iran, while we in the U.S. have been playing patty-cake with them for forty years.”

“What did you do when they asked you to alter the databases?”

“My lead software engineer, Tony Hutchens, went to Miriam and demanded to speak to someone above her. He was persistent. He insisted on hard proof that this was, in fact, an Israeli intelligence initiative we were all involved with. He thought we were actually working for the Iranians the entire time, which, of course, was crazy. Hutchens, like an idiot, threatened to go to Spiegel or Stern or some other German publication to tell them what we were doing, what we had done.”

Court said nothing now, because he knew something more was coming.

Drummond went on. “And then, nine hours later, Tony Hutchens died of a heart attack in his car outside a restaurant in Charlottenburg.”

“You think he was murdered?”

“Would you believe a coincidence like that?”

“I didn’t know Tony Hutchens, so I couldn’t say.”

“He was thirty-four, he wasn’t about to drop dead on his own. Someone killed him.”

“So, you ran?”

“Not when Tony died.” He paused. “I ran when Gretchen died.”

“Shit,” Court said now.

“Gretchen Brust. She was Swiss, not Israeli, but she was a case officer. The Israelis like using foreign talent, I guess. She ran a human intelligence cell for them in Zurich. I only met her a few times in the course of our work—they keep their cells separate—but our two groups coordinated on a . . . a thing. Anyway, she came to my apartment in Berlin one night after Tony’s heart attack and told me she thought he’d been murdered. She said her cell was actively working against Swiss intelligence in Zurich, and she’d had enough. She went to Miriam, complained about overreach. Miriam told her she’d kick her complaints up the chain of command. But nothing happened.” He held up his hand. “That’s not true. Something did happen. She grew a tail.”

“Someone was following her?”

Drummond nodded. “Middle Eastern men, that’s all she knew.”

“What happened to Gretchen?”

“Stabbed to death in the street four blocks from my place. Her purse was taken, but that was just for show. I knew that if they had been following her, then they probably knew she’d come to see me. I had to get the hell out of there.

“I played along for another day, just long enough to upload PowerSlave on a remote server based in Romania. Then I flew to Buenos Aires. Made my way here a week later.”

Court wasn’t writing any of this down. He’d been trained to keep large amounts of information memorized. “Miriam. What else can you tell me about her?”

“Not much. Nice looking. Midthirties, I’d guess. Serious. A good intelligence officer, which means I barely knew her. I received orders via encrypted message, exchanged files on a dark web link, text messages and calls via double encryption services. I had a bank account in Luxembourg to draw funds from as I saw fit. It was like that the entire year I was in Berlin.”

Court was incredulous. “And you didn’t see that as shady as fuck?”

Drummond sighed; he was clearly pained by what he’d done to his life by running from America to work for some opaque organization. “The mission was good, at first. When it wasn’t good, I left. I didn’t do one single thing over there that I regret.”

Court rolled his eyes. “When the mission was good, that was just them feeling you out, grooming you to do the dirty work. You get that, right?”

“I see that now, yeah.”

“Was this even an Israeli operation?”

Drummond shook his head, but he didn’t seem sure. “I . . . I still believe so.”

Court countered, “It could have been anybody with a lot of money and a high level of sophistication.”

Drummond agreed. “Yeah. There was a lot of money involved, and the few people working for them that I had dealings with were all first-rate. But most were Israeli, the mission was Iran. I just assumed—”

Court checked his watch again and then he stood, startling Clark Drummond in the process. “Hanley is going to need to find this Miriam. How will he do that?”

“I have a picture. I took it covertly, shortly after her first bump.” He looked over to his computer.

Court said, “I’ll give you a number to text it to. Print it out, as well. I want the hard drive to that computer, too. Anything else?”

“We always met at Ben Rahim coffee shop, near Alexanderplatz. She loves Middle Eastern coffee, I guess. I could tell the staff there all knew her, so she was a regular. Might be a good place to start.”

Drummond went over to the computer now; as he logged in, he said, “Call Hanley, tell him I want to come home. I’ve got more to trade if you bring me in. SEBIN is not going to be happy about what happened tonight. I’m no longer safe in Venezuela.”

“I’ll call him as soon as we’re out of here. Those guards will be waking up soon, and they’re gonna be pissed.”

Court stepped to the veranda to look out over the rear of the property and the hills around. It was all but black outside, even though his eyes had had time to adjust with the low lighting in the library.

“You’ve got a car, I assume?” he asked back into the library.

“Yeah. A Wrangler. It’s in the garage. We can’t go to the airport, though.”

“No shit,” Court replied. “Some asshole gave the Venezuelans the means to identify any intelligence asset coming or going through their immigration.”

“You’re safe from PowerSlave, Gentry,” Drummond countered. “You were too black to be on any list, anywhere. Even when I was on the hunt for you I wasn’t allowed to upload any of your stored biodata onto the master server. Me, on the other hand: the Venezuelans have a ton of ways to ID me, especially since I’ve been working with the government here for the past few months.”

Court began to turn away from the open French doors. “We’re not going to the airport. I’ve got another way out of—”

But then his head swiveled back outside. As he was turning away he thought he’d detected movement in the darkness down the hill, but he wasn’t sure. Quickly he pulled his thermal monocular out of a chest pouch and held it to his eye.

First he saw only a few howler monkeys in the trees, but as he scanned over to the left he picked up more heat signatures. There were four of them, moving up the driveway on the other side of a cluster of tall brush, ascending quickly until they disappeared around the side of the house to his left.

These four men had been spaced evenly. Their movements had been tight and practiced; one bounded while another rushed forward, took a position, and then was followed by the man behind.

Their tactics were familiar to Court.

These guys weren’t Venezuelan security goons. No way.

These were special forces of some sort, and Court had never heard much that impressed him about Venezuelan special forces, so he assumed them to be foreign.

“Turn off the stereo,” he demanded.

The laser printer to the left of the desk hummed as Drummond turned to Court. “Why?”

Court did not answer. He drew his suppressed .22 in a flash and spun, fired once into the glass panel of the stereo receiver near Drummond’s desk. The music stopped abruptly.

The printer disgorged a single page, and then it went quiet, as well.

The room fell silent.

Drummond looked terrified now. “What the hell are—”

“Shut up.”

Just then Court picked up a faint noise through his hearing enhancers. It was the long scraping sound of the front door opening.

Court said, “We’ve got company.”

“Your people?” Drummond asked.

Court shook his head as he holstered the .22. “I don’t have people. Hanley sent me here alone.”

“Who is it, then?”

“My only guess is that you were right to worry about the boys in Berlin coming for you.”

Court rushed towards the door to the hall, lifting up the Venezuelan guard’s Uzi that had been hanging from a sling over his shoulder as he did so. He unfolded the tiny stock, pulled back the charging handle on the top of the receiver, and let it go, chambering a 9-millimeter round.

Drummond held his hands up. “Wait a second. You aren’t actually going to fight them, are you?”

Court looked out with the weapon at his shoulder, found the space in front of him clear, then moved back into the library, shutting and locking the door as he did so. Sarcastically, he said, “Do you think I can talk them into surrendering?”

Drummond’s terror increased by the second. “They won’t kill me. They can’t kill me. They have PowerSlave now, but they know that I’m the one who built it, I’m the only one who can operate it effectively. They need me.”

Court said, “Trust me, I’d rather run than fight, but first I need to know what I’m up against. Get into the bathroom and wait till I call for you.”

Drummond moved to the bathroom in the corner near his desk, while Court crouched low and then moved out onto the veranda, staying out of the line of sight in case there were others with eyes on the back side of the home. Peeking through the railing at the terrain below, he decided that though he really didn’t want to go down the steep hill, especially with an older, untrained man in tow, he didn’t see that he had any choice.

He wiped the film of sweat off his brow, even though the late-night air was cool at this altitude. He had twenty meters of rope in his backpack, and it was fewer than ten down to the hillside. He was confident he could make this work, although the thought of having some asshole holding on to his back, his arms pressing against the dozen stitches in Court’s shoulder, didn’t appeal to him in the slightest.

He attached the carabiner hanging on one end of the rope around the metal railing of the veranda, then threw the black line over the side.

He was almost back to the French doors to collect Drummond when he heard a new sound, loud and immediate. It was something clanging down onto the veranda, metal striking ceramic tile, then bouncing against a wooden chaise lounge to Court’s right.

He recognized the sound, and he recognized the danger.

Throwing himself through the doorway he screamed, “Grenade!”