CIA HEADQUARTERS
Jenna hung up the phone and walked to Calibrisi’s office. She knocked on the glass door. Calibrisi was standing behind his desk, stuffing papers into his leather briefcase. He waved her in.
“We need to get back to the White House,” said Calibrisi. “Are you ready?”
“I just spoke with Dewey,” she said.
Calibrisi paused.
“Thank God,” said Calibrisi. “Where is he?”
“South of Pyongyang. He’s on foot.”
“What did you tell him?”
“To get to Talmadge’s apartment. If the second antidote survived, that’s where it will be.”
“I want you to start thinking about how we extract Talmadge and Dewey,” said Calibrisi. “Whether the two of them make it or not is beyond our control at this point. What’s not is having a plan to get them out of there. Work directly with General Tralies.”
“Okay,” said Jenna.
There was a long pause. Calibrisi looked at Jenna and forced a sympathetic nod.
They were thinking the same thing. What if Talmadge wasn’t there? What if the second dose was destroyed in transit? One of the worst aspects of operations was the unknown and the sense of powerlessness for those people not out in the field, like, at this moment, Calibrisi and Jenna. Watching from afar with little information.
“We need to focus on Kim and the nuclear threat,” said Calibrisi. “Dewey is on his own. You can’t beat yourself up and you can’t worry about him. It won’t help but it will distract you from the bigger threat. Dewey is tough and he’s resourceful. Put a plan in place to extract him if we get to that point.”
Calibrisi shut his briefcase and buckled it.
“Now get your stuff. We leave in—”
Suddenly, there was yelling in the hallway outside Calibrisi’s office. Mack Perry came running to Calibrisi’s door and pushed it open.
“You two have to see this.”
They followed Perry to one of the conference rooms down the hallway. A small group was seated around the conference table. This was the task force working under Jenna’s command, attempting to monitor what was going on in North Korea.
A large OLED screen on the wall showed a grainy live feed of an American. He was bald and wore a khaki military uniform. This was Colonel Nate Smith, the senior-ranking American in the DMZ. Smith was standing in some sort of building that looked like a barracks.
“Go ahead, Colonel,” said Perry.
“We discovered him inside one of the Joint Security Area buildings ten minutes ago,” said Smith.
As the camera followed Smith, he walked through a door into a building that was painted bright blue. Inside was a plain-looking table with chairs on both sides. All the chairs around the table were empty—except one. In it was a man, seated, his head tilted to the side, almost on top of his shoulder, limp. A rope was tied tightly around his neck. His face was badly bruised. Beneath his nose, running down his chin, neck, and the front of his shirt, was a large patch of dried blood, damp-looking, as if still fresh.
Jenna gasped.
“Do you know who he is?” said Smith.
Jenna started to say something, but it was Calibrisi who answered.
“His name is Talmadge,” said Calibrisi. “Take care of him, will you, Colonel?”
“Of course. Should I send him back to Andrews?”
“No,” said Calibrisi. “Clean him up and put him in your best coffin. Then send him to Heathrow.”
“Roger that.”
Calibrisi turned and walked out of the conference room with Jenna just behind him. On the elevator to the rooftop helipad, he spoke:
“Let Derek know,” said Calibrisi. “River House should send a greeting party to meet the body.”
“What about Dewey?” asked Jenna. “If he finds out Talmadge is dead—”
“Let him know too. Get Dewey the location of the apartment and make sure he understands: if they found Talmadge out, they’ll be swarming the apartment, searching for other stuff. He’s going to need to come in hot.”