Enemy Agents (32 page)

It was only a week before the bombing that she had bargained for his life, telling Zoeli that she wouldn’t call in red flags if Zoeli didn’t guarantee Peter’s safety. After Zoeli agreed, they went on the training course together, and spent every night together in that motel, living as openly as a couple as they had ever dared. For Fatale, this would have been a deception, a game she played to fool a man into feeling something. But when she was with Hershey, she wasn’t Fatale, she was Erica, and Erica was in love.

She had given five years of service to Hugo Zoeli’s organization, and each year was a two million dollar payday. She now had ten million dollars, the man of her dreams, and no obligations. It was time for “Fatale” to go away, and she had a feeling that wherever they ended up living, her new identity would be named Erica.

The first time they made love in that New York hotel was rough, fierce, almost violent. Hershey had betrayed his nation, his office, he had let people die for her. All that aggression, all the emotional hell of the last few weeks came out of them both in rough, passionate, angry love.

The second time was slower, more like the old them. He was only alive because of her. And the more she thought about it, the more she felt she was only living for him. Her entire adult life had been a series of crimes, of short-term stays among people she couldn’t stand. And then Hershey had come along and she suddenly had a home. He still smelled like the old Pete, even if he had spent a few weeks locked up wherever Mercier was hiding him. When the second session was over, they rolled onto their backs, side-by-side, catching their breath.

“I guess you got over it,” she said.

“Over what?”

“That I’m not who you thought I was.” She rolled to face him, looking deep into his eyes, and she realized that she wanted forgiveness from him. She had lied, betrayed him, she had called in the bomb that killed his entire office. She had ruined his life. Looking at him, she realized that she could never make up for the pain she had caused him.

After the bombing she had tried to be heartless about it. She had treated Thorpe like garbage, attempting to dehumanize him in her mind because she knew that Mercier would kill both Thorpe and his wife, which was another cross to bear. She had tried to bury guilt, to be as cold as Mercier, but now that Peter was back, she started to feel the weight of the last month. She realized now just how horrible it all was that for once in her career she couldn’t justify a kill. She was the bad guy on this, and she had made Peter Hershey her victim. Lying in bed with him, she was more than naked, she was hollow. His forgiveness would do a lot to fill that hole in her heart.

“They explained it,” he said. He reached to squeeze her hand between his.

“How did they do it?” she asked.

“Explain it?” he said, “Explain you?”

“No,” she said, “how did they keep you from dying in the bomb?”

“Oh,” he looked away from her, and she knew she shouldn’t have brought it up. Pete sat up, turned away, and reached to find his underwear on the floor. “They waited for me to come down for my smoke break,” he said, his back to her. “Then a couple guys threw me into a car and drove away, and as soon as we hit the safe distance the building exploded.”

“And then they told you why you lived,” she said, ashamed. “They told you I bargained to keep you alive.”

“Basically,” he said as he leaned over the side of the bed to pick up his pants.

She pulled a sheet over her body as he climbed to his knees on the bed, still holding his slacks in front of his body. He walked to her on his knees, his right hand digging in one of the pants pockets. She stretched out, contented, and smiled up at him.

Hershey pulled a knife from the pocket and tossed the pants over her face.

She swung her left arm up to block the pants from landing over her eyes, and the arm consequently blocked the first stab from the switchblade as Hershey swung it down hard for her throat. The blade cut into her forearm instead of her throat, but Hershey had put his weight behind the thrust and the knife continued down, stabbing Erica in the left shoulder. She screamed and rolled as the knife pushed her left side into the soft hotel bed, so her right arm came up and around Hershey, grabbing at his free arm before he could use it to steady himself. She hooked her right arm around his left, grabbing his t-shirt at the shoulder, and with a turn of her hips she tossed them both off the side of the bed.

In a different situation, this move would have allowed Fatale to land with her attacker in an incredibly painful arm-bar. But as it was, she hit the ground on her left side, where the knife was still buried in her shoulder, and with a shriek of pain she let him go and Hershey rolled away, taking the blade with him.

“Peter,” she said, her eyes flooding with tears. Hershey didn’t acknowledge her voice. All of his tenderness, his affection, his very personality was gone. All Hershey did to acknowledge that the woman who loved him was calling his name was adjust his knife in his hand and go for another killing blow.

But the first stab had woken her up. She wasn’t Erica now. She was back to what she had always been before—Fatale—and Fatale would defend herself. She was figuring out his style now, all recklessness, going for a quick, hard kill, and she was ready for him. She called his name again, in her gentlest, kindest voice, pleading for him to snap out of it, but underneath it she was preparing to move. Peter had been playing her, stringing her along and now that she was done working for Zoeli—or Mercier, now that she knew who he was—Peter was going to get rid of her. She hoped he would interpret her pleas as weakness and go for another foolish stab, and that’s exactly what he did.

While Fatale was still lying beside the bed, he dove at her, knife first, throwing everything into a desperate attempt to kill her with one good shot. She exploded from the floor, letting his blade catch in the hotel carpet. His hand punched hard into the bed’s metal frame and he grunted in pain, but by then it was too late. As Hershey landed on the ground, his sore hand searching for the knife beneath him, Fatale landed on top of him, pinning him face-down on the floor. Her hands went to his throat and pulled back hard, strangling him. He stopped feeling around for the knife, which she could see was beside his body, and instead he held his hands up, as if surrendering. She kept choking him. He bucked around, tried to turn his hips, but she adjusted and stayed in control.

“Why?” she asked. “I gave up everything for you, so we could be together.”

Hershey choked out a sound. She relaxed her grip to let him breathe and speak.

“Did you think you were his only mole? When you came along they told me to keep you in line.” She cut him off by pulling back hard, choking him again.

“By lying to me? Sleeping with me? You could have just sent me to seduce another agent. You didn’t have to . . . ” she trailed off, because now the tears weren’t caused by the pain in her shoulder.

“I could see you were drawn to Quarrel. He was so low-level he’d be useless to Digamma, not to mention he’s such a boy scout—ch—ackk”

She squeezed his windpipe hard. “So rather than tell me who you were, you decided to manipulate me until, what?” She stared into his eyes. “Until it was time to murder me?”

Hershey choked again. She held his throat hard for a count of twenty before she let him answer. His voice was raspy, and she knew how much it must hurt to talk. “Mercier cultivated your skills for more than one mission. We couldn’t risk you falling for some kid and blowing the whole thing. And he warned me to never trust you.”

Her fingers were wet, and she realized that Hershey was crying and drooling all over himself.

“I trusted you,” she said. “You were the only one in my whole life I ever trusted. In my whole life . . . ”

He gasped for air and afterward, in an instant where she was readjusting her hands, he said, “I’m so—”

She reset her grip, one hand on his jaw and one on the back of his head, and she jerked her hands around like she was turning a giant screw, and snapped Peter Hershey’s neck in one stroke. His hands dropped to the floor, and when she let go, his head thumped to the carpet like she had dropped a bowling ball. She stood up, naked except own blood and tears, her first love between her feet, and all her dreams about the rest of her life were just as dead as Hershey.

“Not as sorry as I am.”

37

Jessica Swift watched through binoculars as Sam Boswell entered a warehouse on the outskirts of London. It wasn’t some run-down abandoned old building, but rather a fully operational and extremely busy place of business. Large trucks pulled in and out on a regular basis, and men could be seen gathered by a side door, having a smoke on their break. Beside Swift, Khalid Saleb was taking apart the remote control of a toy car they had bought from a nearby store.

“How’s it coming?” she asked, her eyes still in the binoculars.

“It’ll work. You sure this is the place?”

“She’s been here three times. It has to be the place.”

Saleb stopped working on the remote. “If you were going to stash a hostage, would you bring her to a place full of a hundred potential witnesses?”

“Best hiding place is plain sight. Boswell’s the only one of Milton’s suspects who came across the pond, and to the very city where Thorpe lived. We need to see what she’s doing in there. Quarrel’s counting on us to get Mrs. T out of there tonight.”

“Technically,” said Saleb, “you were one of Milton’s suspects. Or me, for that matter.”

“Actually Milton ruled you out. You were unconscious or in prison for all the good stuff.”

“It’s nice to be trusted,” he said with a shake of his head, before going back to work on the remote.

“You can remember how to do all that, but you can’t remember . . . ” she started to say but stopped herself.

“I still have skills. I remember languages, electronics, the alphabet . . . ” he carefully set a screw aside, maybe to be used later. “But I have no real clue about who I was or what my wife was like. Some things give me flashes, sort of like a faint smell, if you know what I mean. Like, you think you smell something but you can’t quite tell what it is until you get closer? That’s what my memory’s like, only I can never get any closer. I can tell certain things once had meaning, but I can’t recall why. It’s floating in front of me, but I can’t place it.”

She set the binocs aside to look over at him. “You’ll have time to remember her. Once her killer’s been brought to justice, you’ll have all the time in the world.”

Khalid smiled. “That’s the problem. When this is done, I’ll have nothing to do. Catching Jupiter is all I have.”

She put a hand on his shoulder and gave a reassuring squeeze. “You can always work as a toy car repairman.” Saleb chuckled and Swift pulled away from the window to look at the tools she had on the table. There wasn’t much here, but she was working under such a tight timeline that it would have to do. She picked up the small, pocket-covered belt she wore whenever she was infiltrating a target, and began the familiar, comforting routine of packing her kit.

“What do we do if the plan doesn’t work?” asked Saleb.

Swift grunted. “I won’t let Mrs. Thorpe die. Or any of those workers caught in the crossfire. So if the plan doesn’t work,” she tucked a packet of folded paper into one of the pockets, “I guess she’ll kill me. But I’ll dial 911 first.”

“It’s 999 here,” he said. “See, memory.”

She chuckled. “Good to know.”

“If we die, Mrs. Thorpe dies with us,” said Saleb. “So if it comes down to it, I’ll kill Boswell. Even if you can’t.”

Swift shuddered. Saleb knew the truth, even if she pretended not to hear him. They were in a kill-or-be-killed situation, and Swift would never kill. As she tucked her tranquilizer darts into the belt, she made sure to get the positioning just right, since this was likely the last time she’d ever do it.

“I’ll take her alive,” she said finally. “I have to.”

#

After the sun had settled below the horizon, Swift was on the roof of the warehouse. She was tucked behind the air conditioning unit for the warehouse’s offices, using the toy car’s remote while staring into the screen of a tablet computer. On the screen she saw the output from the camera that they had mounted to the car, which was now driving through the office’s vents. The air vents in the warehouse were big enough for Swift to climb through, but she assumed that there were too many workers in the warehouse for Mrs. Thorpe to be kept there. It was more likely she was tucked away in an office, where only a handful of people might pass by on any given day. In the office, the vents were big enough for the toy car, but far too small for even a person as small as swift to fit into.

Swift turned the car toward a vent that looked down on an office, then touched the tablet’s screen to zoom the camera through the opening. This was one of the only offices with lights still on, but there was no hostage here. A couple of men, likely employees from the warehouse, were talking. One was leaning on a desk. Swift wished she had a microphone to listen in on their conversation, but the car only sent back visuals.

She zoomed back out, ready to drive on toward the next vent, when a woman entered the office. It was Boswell. She spoke brusquely to the two men, then all three went into the hallway, with Boswell leading the men. Swift turned the car and began to follow them, running above the offices while the trio walked down the hallway that ran a parallel course to that of the vent. She quickly checked each office she passed, making sure that they hadn’t stopped in each one, but after a minute there was no sign of the trio and the vent came to a fork.

Straight ahead there was a vertical drop. She knew the layout enough to know that this was a drop down from the office to the warehouse level, which meant that if she committed the car to that course, she would never be able to backtrack to the office. It would be stuck down there for good. The other option was to turn left and circle around to the offices on the other side of the hallway, which seemed safer. Ultimately, she decided to keep the car on the same level simply to avoid the noise that it would make when it fell down the vertical shaft.

Rounding a couple of corners, she saw there weren’t just downward-facing vents on this side. There was also a single vent that looked out to the side, and there was light coming in through this one. The camera on the car, which was a small wireless device sold in a surveillance shop, was mounted so that it faced forward and down, allowing Swift to see into vents but also drive the car. But now that she was looking out this unexpected sideways vent, she had to run the car’s front tires up the grille a bit, to tip the camera upward to see what was outside. It took a few tries, and Swift silently cursed as she wondered how much noise the toy was making.

Finally, Swift got the Camera to look out, and the vent faced the warehouse floor. She watched as Boswell led the men to one of the loading bays, and kicked the door of the truck that was backed up there. The door lifted upward and revealed two more men standing in what appeared to be an empty trailer. The men exchanged a few words, and then Boswell’s pair climbed into the trailer and the other two got out. Swift realized that there was a faint glow of light inside the trailer, coming from a source that was far enough into the empty trailer that she couldn’t see it. Swift tried to turn the toy car so she could see more of the area in front of the loading door, but the view was limited. From what she could see, there were no warehouse employees around, only Boswell and her cronies.

“I found her,” said Swift.

“Where?” asked Saleb through his earpiece.

“Inside a parked tractor trailer,” she studied the screen. “Bay twenty. At least two armed men inside, two more plus Boswell are heading back to the office.”

“I’ll reposition.”

“Get inside the warehouse by the southeastern loading docks. I’m taking the truck from the outside,” she said, already pulling the toy car away from the grate and setting down the tablet.

“When are you moving in?” he asked.

Swift pulled on a pair of leather gloves. “Right now.”

She kept her head down and ran to the edge of the roof, looking down at the truck parked in bay twenty. It was the only truck parked on this side of the building. There were no people outside the truck. She looked along the wall and saw no cameras watching. She grabbed the edge of the roof, hopped over, and hung against the wall with her back against the cold brick. She bent her knees, pressed the soles of her shoes and the palm of her left hand against the brick, and let go. She slid down the wall, kicking off at the last instant so she hit the ground rolling and came up on her fingers and toes. She cautiously looked around to see if anyone was moving before rising to a crouch and moving to the sliding side door on the trailer.

The truck was completely ordinary, with a plain white semi-trailer. Swift took off the gloves and tucked them into her belt, retrieving both her lock picks and her tranquilizer gun. She checked that the gun was loaded with a clip of tranq darts and a fresh canister of compressed air, then set to work on the sliding door’s lock. The lock was high enough above her head that she had to stand on her toes to pick it, but it opened without any problems.

“Wait,” said Saleb, “I’m not in position yet.”

Swift was too close to the truck to make a sound now, and too close to Mrs. Thorpe to wait any longer. All it would take now was to tranq the two guards, cut Mrs. Thorpe’s bonds, and they could run away without Boswell even noticing. She passed the tranq gun to her right hand, aimed it toward the door, and slid the door open.

As soon as the door opened, one of the guards yelled for help. She hit him with the first shot. The tranq gun was manual, so she had to cock it again, and by then the second guard had his handgun drawn. He fired a shot at Swift, but she had ducked below the door to reload, so his shot missed. If he had been smarter he would have aimed the gun at Mrs. Thorpe, but he wasn’t smart. Swift popped up for just a moment to shoot a dart into his thigh and ducked out of sight again. She heard him hit the floor of the semi-trailer with a thud, and that’s when she popped up again and climbed into the trailer.

The guards were down, nobody was hurt. The noise was bad, but Swift had hoped to be gone before Boswell could react. It was only when she turned to Thorpe’s wife that she realized that that wasn’t going to happen.

Mrs. Thorpe was in a wheelchair, and she wasn’t moving. Swift could see the older woman’s eyes were watching her, saw a hint of pleasure on Mrs. Thorpe’s face, but beyond that there was no sign that this hostage was going to be any help in her own escape.

“Are you Mrs. Thorpe?” she asked.

“Ool-ya,” said the woman. It was like her tongue didn’t really work.

“Is that a yes?”

The woman nodded.

Swift looked over the wheelchair and saw no ropes, chains, or bonds of any kind. Boswell must have taken Mrs. Thorpe’s condition for granted, since there was nothing stopping Swift from taking her away. “I just hope I can lift you,” she said.

That’s when the truck’s rear door flew open, and Samantha Boswell stepped inside, a handgun aimed straight at them. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I figured maybe Quarrel finally grew a pair.”

“I’m taking Mrs. Thorpe out of this,” said Swift.

“Another tranquilizer gun?” Boswell taunted when she saw the weapon Swift carried. “When are you going to learn I’m immune to those things? If you want to have a chance, bring a real gun.”

“How could you do this?” asked Swift.

“How could I not?”

Swift screamed at her. “You have little daughters! I read your file! How can you possibly kidnap a helpless woman like this?”

“You answered your own question,” said Boswell. “Is it horrible to take old Julia hostage? Yes. But you do horrible things to protect your kids.”

“Your kids are in a safe house, protected from all of this. You don’t see me pointing a gun at them.”

Boswell moved her arm a little so the gun was aimed at Julia Thorpe instead of at Swift. “A safe house in the USA. There’s no such thing as a safe house in a country that doesn’t protect its people.”

“You are goddamn crazy, lady.”

“I’m a patriot. I signed on for CIA training when I was eighteen and spent my best years protecting that country. And what did we end up with? Fifty different intelligence agencies, each with its own jurisdictional pissing contests. Each one putting itself above the good of the nation. The safety of the nation. There have been terrorist attacks on our own soil. Assassinations of high-ranking diplomats, American children taken hostage, and every one of them could have been prevented if we didn’t have a million goddamn agencies getting in each other’s way. Withholding evidence, blocking investigations, protecting their own. This country is protected by a shattered, broken shield. And I’m going to replace it with a new one.”

“By kidnapping Thorpe’s wife?” Swift stepped in front of Julia, so that the gun was once again pointed at Swift’s chest. “By firing a giant microwave beam at your own country?”

Boswell didn’t seem fazed by the fact that Swift knew about the Teacup. “I’m showing the world how broken the old system is. Think about it. Shark, one of CIB’s guys detonates a DARPA-DOD weapon, built with the pentagon’s knowledge and armed forces tech, which should have been guarded by the CIA. So many agencies are tied to the Teacup, and they’ll all be torn down when the media learns what happened. No more CIA, bye-bye DHS, no more DOD or armed forces spy agencies. My friends in high places will ensure we replace them with a single, powerful new intelligence agency to keep America safe. We’ll end all this nonsense and get back to protecting the nation.”