Burke took one suspicious look around, making sure that she was by herself, and then stepped back to let her come into the narrow front hall. “Did you have any trouble?” he asked harshly.
Kit Pierson waited for him to close the door before replying. “On my way here? No,” she said coolly. “At my meeting with the director and his senior staff? Yes.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“They weren’t especially pleased to see me in D.C. instead of still out in the field,” she said flatly. “In fact, there were several rather pointed suggestions that my preliminary report was entirely too ‘thin’ to justify coming back in person.”
The CIA officer shrugged. “That was your call, Kit,” he reminded her. “We didn’t need to meet here in person. We could have worked through this problem on the phone if you’d just sat tight.”
“With Smith starting to breathe right down my neck?” she snapped back. “Not likely, Hal.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how much he knows yet, but he’s getting too close. Shutting down the Santa Fe police probe was a mistake. We should have just let the local cops go ahead and try to identify your man’s body.”
Burke shook his head. “Too risky.”
“Our files were scrubbed,” Pierson said stubbornly. “There’s no way this Dolan character could have been linked to either of us. Or even to the Agency or the Bureau as a whole.”
“Still too risky,” he told her. “Other agencies have their own databases—databases over which we have no control. The Army has its own files, for that matter. Hell, Kit, you’re the one who’s so panicked about Smith and his mysterious employers! You know as well as I do that anyone pegging Dolan as an ex–Special Forces officer would be bound to start asking some goddamned tough questions.”
Burke showed her into his study. The small dark-paneled room was crowded with a desk, a monitor and keyboard, two chairs, several bookcases, a television, and racks full of computer and communications equipment. An open half-empty bottle of Jim Beam whiskey and a shot glass sat on the desk, right next to the computer keyboard. A faint stale whiff of sweat, unwashed dishes, mildew, and general neglect hung in the air.
Pierson wrinkled her nose in distaste. The man was disintegrating under the pressure as TOCSIN collapsed around them, she thought coldly.
“Want a drink?” Burke growled, dropping heavily into the swivel chair in front of his desk. He waved her into the other chair, a battered armchair with lumpy, fraying upholstery.
She shook her head and then sat watching while he poured one for himself. The whiskey sloshed over the rim and left a wet ring on his desk. He ignored the spill, instead downing his drink in one swift gulp. He set the glass down with a thump and looked up at her. “Okay, Kit, why exactly are you here?”
“To persuade you to shut TOCSIN down,” she said without hesitating.
One corner of the CIA officer’s mouth turned down in an irritated frown. “We’ve gone through this before. My answer is still the same.”
“But the situation is not the same, Hal!” Pierson said forcefully. Her lips thinned. “And you know it. The Teller attack was supposed to force President Castilla to act against the Lazarus Movement before it was too late—to act as a relatively bloodless wake-up call. It wasn’t supposed to make Lazarus stronger. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to trigger a worldwide spree of bombings and murders we can’t stop!”
“Wars always have unintended consequences,” Burke said through clenched teeth. “And we are in a war against the Movement. Maybe you’ve forgotten what’s at stake in this matter.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t forgotten anything. But TOCSIN is only a means to an end—not the end itself. The whole damned operation is unraveling faster than you can stitch it back together. So I say we cut our losses while we still can. Call off your action teams now. Tell them to abort any ongoing missions and drop back into cover. Then, once that’s done, we can plan our next move.”
To buy himself some time before replying, Burke picked up the whiskey bottle and poured another drink. But this time he left the glass untouched. He looked closely at her. “You can’t run from this one, Kit. It’s gone too far for that. Even if we shut TOCSIN down right now and pull in our horns, your little friend Dr. Jonathan Smith is still going to be out there asking questions we do not want answered.”
“I know that,” she said bitterly. “Trying to kill Smith was a mistake. Failing to kill him was a disaster.”
“What’s done is done,” Burke said, shrugging both shoulders. “One of my security units is hunting the colonel. Once they pinpoint him, they’ll nail him.”
Pierson looked at him in exasperation. “Which means you have absolutely no idea where he is right now.”
“He’s gone to ground again,” Burke admitted. “I sent people to the Santa Fe PD after you called to let me know Smith was snooping there, but he disappeared before they arrived.”
“Wonderful.”
“The nosy bastard can’t run far, Kit,” the CIA officer said confidently. “I have agents watching the airport terminals in both Santa Fe and Albuquerque. And I have a contact in Homeland Security running his name through every commercial flight manifest. The moment he surfaces, we’ll know it. And when he does, our guys will close in.” He smiled thinly. “Trust me on this, okay? For all practical purposes, Smith is nothing but a dead man walking.”
Along the county road below, the drivers of the two dark-colored automobiles traveling slowly without any headlights turned off their ignitions and coasted to a stop, pulling off to the side not far from the gravel track heading uphill. Still wearing the U.S. Army–issue AN/PVS 7 night-vision goggles he’d been using to drive without lights, Jon Smith stiffly climbed out of the second car and walked forward to the vehicle in front.
Peter Howell unrolled his window as Smith came up. Below his own set of goggles, the Englishman’s teeth flashed white in the near-total darkness. “Rather an exciting ride, wasn’t it, Jon?”
Smith nodded wryly. “Perfectly delightful.” He rolled his neck and shoulders from side to side, hearing tense muscles and joints crack and pop. The last fifteen minutes of driving had been nerve-racking.
The night-vision equipment was top-of-the-line gear, but even so the images these third-generation goggles produced were not perfect—they were monochromatic, with a slight green tint, and they were a tiny bit grainy. You could drive without lights while wearing them, but it took real effort and serious concentration to avoid drifting off the road or colliding with the vehicle ahead of you.
In contrast, following the government sedan taking Kit Pierson from the FBI’s Hoover Building to her own home in Upper Georgetown had been a piece of cake. Even late on Saturday night, Washington’s streets were packed with cars, trucks, minivans, and taxis. It had been easy enough to hang two or three car lengths back without being noticed.
Neither Jon nor Peter had been surprised when Pierson took off only minutes later, this time using her own car. Both had been sure from the beginning that this sudden briefing for her superiors was only a blind, a way to cover her real reason for flying back so abruptly from New Mexico. But again, the task of following her discreetly was comparatively easy—at least at first. It had only gotten really difficult once she turned off the highway onto a succession of smaller side roads where traffic was sporadic at best. And Kit Pierson was no fool. She would have been bound to grow suspicious if she saw the same two pairs of headlights gleaming in her rearview mirror through mile after mile of darkened, nearly empty countryside.
That was when both Smith and Peter Howell had been forced to slip on their night-vision goggles and switch off their lights. Even so, they had been forced to hang back farther from her Passat than they would have preferred—always hoping they would not miss whichever turnoff or crossroads she finally took to make her rendezvous.
Smith looked up the gravel track. He could just make out a small house on the crest of a low hill. The lights were on, and he could s
ee two cars parked outside. This looked like it could be the place they were hunting.
“What do you think?” he asked Peter quietly.
The Englishman pointed to the U.S. Geological Survey 1:20,000-scale map open on the seat beside him. It was part of the set included in the equipment left for them at Andrews Air Force Base. The IR illuminators on their goggles allowed them to read the map. “This little drive doesn’t go anywhere else but that farm up there,” he said. “And I doubt very seriously that our Ms. Pierson plans to take her sedan very far off-road.”
“So what’s the plan?” Smith asked.
“I suggest we back up a quarter-mile or so,” Peter said. “I noticed a small copse of trees there which we can use as cover for the cars. Once we’ve got the rest of our gear on, we can make our way quietly up to that farmhouse on foot.” He showed his teeth again. “I, for one, should very much like to know who Ms. Pierson has chosen to visit so late at night. And what exactly they are discussing.”
Smith nodded grimly. He was suddenly quite sure that some of the answers he needed were locked away in that dimly lit house on the hill.
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
Near Meaux, East of Paris
The ruins of the Château de Montceaux, known as the Château of the Queens, were hemmed in by the forest of Montceaux—a stretch of woods rising above the southern bank of the undulating River Marne, roughly thirty miles east of Paris. First built in the mid-1500s on the orders of the powerful, cunning, and crafty Queen Catherine de Medici, the wife of one king of France and the mother of three more, the elegant country palace and its vast park and hunting preserve had at last been abandoned around 1650. Now, after centuries of neglect, little remained—only the hollow shell of a grand stone entrance pavilion, the oblong moat, and sections of crumbling wall lined with gaping windows.
Strands of mist curled between the surrounding trees, slowly burning away as the morning sun climbed higher. The bells of the Cathedral of St-Etienne in Meaux, five miles away, rang out, summoning the faithful, few though they were these days, to Sunday Mass. Other bells pealed across the peaceful countryside as the smaller parish churches in the nearby villages echoed the summons.
Two vans hauling a pair of trailers sat in a large clearing not far from the ruins. Signs emblazoned on the vehicles identified them as part of an organization called the Groupe d’Aperçu Météorologique, the Meteorological Survey Group. Several technicians were busy near the rear of each trailer, erecting two angled launch rails aimed almost due west. Each launch rail included a pneumatic catapult system powered by compressed air. Other men were fussing over a pair of propeller-driven unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, each roughly five feet long, with an eight-foot wingspan.
The tall auburn-haired man who called himself Nones stood close by, watching his team complete their work. Periodic reports from the sentries posted in the woods around the clearing crackled through his radio headset. There were no signs of any unwanted observation by the local farmers.
One of the UAV technicians, a stoop-shouldered Asian man with thinning black hair, rose slowly to his feet. He turned to the third of the Horatii with a relieved expression on his lined and weary face. “The payloads are secure. All engine, avionics, UHF, and autonomous control systems have been tested and are online. All global positioning navigation way-points have been configured and confirmed. Both craft are ready for flight.”
“Good,” Nones replied. “Then you may prepare for launch.”
He stepped back out of the way as the technicians carefully lifted the UAVs, which weighed roughly one hundred pounds apiece, and carried them over to the twin launch rails. His bright green eyes followed them appreciatively. These two unmanned aircraft were modeled on drones used by the U.S. Army for short-range tactical reconnaissance, communications jamming, and airborne nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons detection. Now he and his men would pioneer an entirely new use for these robotic fliers.
Nones switched frequencies, contacting the newly arrived surveillance team he had stationed in Paris. “Are you receiving data from the target area, Linden?” he asked.
“We are,” the Dutchman confirmed. “All remote sensors and cameras are operational.”
“And the weather conditions?”
“Temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed are all well within the preset mission parameters,” Linden reported. “The Center recommends that you proceed when ready.”
“Acknowledged,” Nones said quietly. He swung round to the waiting UAV technicians. “Don masks and gloves,” he ordered.
They quickly obeyed, putting on the gas masks, respirators, and thick gloves intended to give them enough time to escape the immediate area if one of their aircraft crashed on launch. The third member of the Horatii did the same, donning his own protective gear.
“Catapults pressurized and standing by,” the Asian technician told him. The technician crouched at a control console set between the two angled rails. His fingers hovered over a set of switches.
Nones smiled. “Continue.”
The technician nodded. He flicked two switches. “Engine and propeller start.”
The twin-bladed propellers on both UAVs suddenly whirled into motion, spinning with a low-pitched whir that was almost impossible to hear more than a few yards away.
“Engines at full power.”
“Launch!” the tall green-eyed man commanded.
With a soft whoosh, the first pneumatic catapult fired—hurling the UAV attached to it up the angled rail and into the air in a high, curving arc. For an instant, at the end of this arc, the unmanned aircraft seemed ready to fall back toward the ground, but then it climbed again—buoyed now by the lift provided by its own wings and propeller. Still ascending, it cleared the trees and headed west on its preprogrammed course.
Ten seconds later, the second unmanned flier followed its counterpart into the air. Both drones, now almost invisible from the ground and too small to register on most radars, climbed steadily toward their cruising altitude of three thousand feet and flew toward Paris at roughly one hundred miles per hour.
Rural Virginia
Staying low, Jon Smith followed Peter Howell west across a wide field choked with tall weeds and thickets of jagged brambles. Their surroundings glowed faintly green through their night-vision goggles. A couple of hundred yards off to their left, the paved county road cut a straight line across the darkened landscape. Ahead, the ground sloped up, rising gently above a stagnant scum-covered pond on their right. The gravel access road Kit Pierson had turned onto snaked back and forth as it climbed the low hill in front of them.
Something sharp snagged Smith’s shoulder, stabbing right through the thick cloth deep enough to draw blood. He gritted his teeth and went on. Peter was doing his best to lead them through the worst of the tangled vegetation, but there were places where they just had to bull through, ignoring the thorns and briars tearing at their dark clothing and black leather gloves.
Halfway up the hill, the Englishman dropped to one knee. He scanned the terrain around them carefully and then waved Smith forward to join him. The lights were still on at the farmhouse up on the crest.
Both men were dressed and equipped for a night reconnaissance mission across rough ground. Besides their AN/PVS 7 goggles, each wore a combat vest stuffed with the surveillance gear—cameras and various types of listening devices—left waiting for them at Andrews Air Force Base. Smith had a holster for his SIG-Sauer pistol strapped to his thigh, while Peter had the same kind of rig for the Browning Hi-Power he favored. For extra firepower in a real emergency, each also carried a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun slung across his back.
Peter shook off one of his gloves and then held up a wetted finger to test the direction of the soft, cool night breeze whispering around them. He nodded, pleased by the result. “Now there’s a bit of good fortune. The wind is from the west.”
Smith waited. The other man had spent decades
in the field, first for the SAS and then for MI6. Peter Howell had forgotten more about moving through potentially hostile territory than Smith had ever learned.
“This wind won’t carry our scent ahead of us,” Peter explained. “If there are any dogs up there, they won’t smell us coming.”
Peter slid his glove back on and led the way again. Both men crouched even lower as they came out onto the top of the shallow rise. They were within yards of an old, ruined barn—a hollowed-out, roofless wreck that was more a pile of broken, rotting boards than a standing structure. Beyond that, they could make out the shapes of two parked cars, the Volkswagen Passat belonging to Kit Pierson, and another, this one an older American make. And there was enough light leaking out through the mostly closed drapes of their target, a small one-story farmhouse, to make it glow brightly in their night-vision gear.
Smith saw that whoever owned the place had gone to the trouble of whacking away the tallest weeds and brambles in a rough circle around the building. He followed Peter down onto his belly and wriggled through the low grass after him, crossing the open space as quickly as possible to gain the cover provided by the parked cars.
“Where to now?” he murmured.
Peter nodded toward a big picture window on this side of the house, not far from the front door. “Over there, I should think,” he said softly. “I thought I saw a shadow moving behind those drapes a moment ago. Worth a look anyhow.” He glanced at Smith. “Cover me, will you, Jon?”
Smith tugged his SIG-Sauer out of the holster. “Whenever you’re ready.”
The other man nodded once. Then he crawled rapidly across the patch of oil-stained concrete and disappeared into a patch of tall brush growing right up against the side of the farmhouse. Only the night-vision goggles he was wearing let Smith keep track of him. To anyone watching with unaided eyes, Peter would have seemed nothing more than a moving shadow, a shadow that simply vanished into blackness.
The Englishman raised himself up onto his knees, carefully examining the window above him. Satisfied, he dropped flat and signaled Jon to come ahead.