Blowback (9 page)

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Five hours later,
at Ankara
Airport, Vanessa boarded a Lufthansa flight headed to Cyprus. With luck, Yassi and Zari would have a few days to rest before they boarded a military transport that would take them to Frankfurt. They might spend weeks in Germany before they moved on to the United States and a new life. It was only the beginning of a journey that would demand incredible strength and resilience, especially with a new baby. She hoped they would find a way to begin again.

The moon illuminated
the midnight ferry sliding out of
's harbor, sailing south across the Mediterranean to the island of Cyprus.

Pauk sat alert behind the wheel of the beige Fiat 500. He fingered the ferry receipt—an open return for a standard car and driver. He'd almost been delayed a day in
by reports of a Turkish strike, then of a Greek strike—typical local bickering—but finally the long lines of vehicles were allowed to board the massive ferry. He should arrive in Kyrenia on Northern Cyprus before dawn, an unremarkable journey undertaken by a seemingly unremarkable man.

With the windows cracked, he caught the bite of gasoline from the trucks and buses along with the smoky scent of meze from the vendors. A jet rumbled overhead. Music and voices speaking mostly in Turkish drifted from the rows of cars around him. A baby's cry pierced the early morning, followed by a man's deep voice raised in quiet song and a woman's laughter shivering abruptly through darkness.

These sounds of life meant nothing to Pauk.

Two children ducked between the cars in front of him. A boy and girl, hide-and-seek. The girl hesitated for a moment to stare in the direction of the Fiat. Out of habit, Pauk slowed his breathing as he retreated internally, a way of “disappearing” that seemed to translate externally so that others paid him no attention.

When the boy called out, his voice teasing, the girl pivoted, darting after him.

Abruptly, the urge to escape the car's containment filled Pauk with restlessness.

But he had trained himself long ago to deal with silence and immobility. So now he tucked the brim of his soft hat lower on his forehead, covering eyes that remained open but sightless. He stared into darkness and settled into the semiconscious state he knew as sleep. He could gauge the passage of time with surprising accuracy, and the occasionally rough waves of the Mediterranean seemed to find their own rhythm. He could let his mind embrace the blackness—he had already prepared for the business he would attend to on Cyprus.

Vanessa let herself
in through the wrought-iron gate to her landlady's garden in Nicosia, where the air held the bittersweet scent of lemons. The widow always clucked over her tenant,
koukla mou,
my sweet little doll. In turn, Vanessa willingly called her landlady
yia yia
, grandmother. A night bird fluttered from
yia yia
's fig tree as Vanessa strode barefoot, her duffel over her shoulder, through the patch of lush grass.

She jogged the exterior staircase to her second-floor apartment. After the flight back from Ankara, she was impatient to see if Headquarters had passed the code to NSA decryption division. If Arash was right, they had eleven days until Bhoot would be in Iran visiting a facility that could already be producing nuclear weapons. She had to believe it was possible to respond to the immensity of the threat.

As Vanessa slid her key into the dead bolt, something warm brushed her ankle: Vasilias,
yia yia
's huge gray cat. He darted into her apartment, racing a beeline to the kitchen, and she followed. She hit the TV remote and it brought up the voice of
MasterChef
UK's Gregg Wallace discussing caramelized frog legs with a contestant; the show, one of Vanessa's favorites, caught on Sky TV Cyprus via the four-meter dish on
yia yia
's rooftop.

Still moving, Vanessa tossed down her duffel. She spilled cat kibble into a saucer and poured herself a generous shot of her favorite bourbon, pausing a moment to watch a sweet-faced, curly-haired wannabe apron winner dicing onions. As he tossed them into a sizzling pan, she carried the tumbler into her office. She took a glancing assessment of her personal calendar and new e-mail tally on her laptop, and then she logged on to her secure program.

She pulled up files from CCTV cams located on streets that ran between Iran's delegation hotel and the Prater. Vanessa had taught Arash about surveillance detection routes. Plan the predetermined stops and factor time and distance ratios.
If you spot someone at point A, and then you spot that same someone again when you are at point H, chances are very good that you are being followed.

Vanessa knew the streets in that part of Vienna. She also knew something about Arash and his habits. He'd loved sweets, especially the Viennese specialty, the chocolate and marzipan Mozartkugeln, or Mozart balls. Even late and hurrying to Prater from the Hilton, he would lean on habit and choose a familiar route, perhaps the one that took him past the confectionary Furst. If she was right, he'd passed one of these cameras on his way. If she was lucky, the camera had caught an image of his assassin in careful pursuit.

She forwarded through the digital images until she reached the time/date stamp ninety minutes before Arash's death. She clicked play.

Forty minutes later, she paused the files. 1730 hours in D.C., and still no word from Chris confirming the handoff to NSA decryption.

Nothing from Zoe or her guy in Tech.

Did you find a match or not? she pinged Zoe via secure IM.

Reaching for the tumbler of bourbon, she saw a reflection distorted in the window. For a moment she didn't recognize the raw, wired woman with the tangled blond hair. She took a long drink, letting her gaze move irresistibly back to the flickering CCTV images.

0030 hours, Cyprus.

Vanessa started at the familiar burble,
the Skype bubble bouncing in the corner of her screen. Her mother's face appeared in the icon prompt.
Shit.
Vanessa arranged her smile.

Her mother (one of only three people outside the Agency who knew where she really worked, the others being her brother and her college friend Marie) would see the dark lines around her eyes and the faded bruise on her cheek, and she would know that something hard had happened. Vanessa couldn't go there.

Her mother would also carefully avoid any mention of Vanessa's brother, Marshall, and the latest casualties in Afghanistan. Instead, she would fill the silence with talk of Vanessa's father, Colonel Jack Pierson, and the cancer and his death ten years ago, until she closed the one-sided conversation with the latest Agent Orange litigation and the new research on generational birth defects.

Vanessa's father's exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange was a legacy of his Air Force service in Vietnam in his early twenties. Career military and deeply patriotic, he went on to serve three decades at other dangerous posts until he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer. When research linked the cancer to Agent Orange, he refused to blame the government. What was past was past. As for the future, he died without acknowledging that his two children might pass birth defects to their offspring.

Vanessa's mother would remind her daughter, “You really should talk to a doctor about getting tested—”

Not tonight.
A quick guilty breath, the fortifying taste of aged whiskey, and Vanessa clicked ignore.

She let the endless looping flow of gray CCTV images draw her back in until a new prompt box popped up on her secure screen. Zoe Liang responding to her request for secure face time.

Vanessa remembered to push the tumbler of bourbon out of sight just before she linked.

Zoe's scowling face filled the box while, behind her, activity in CPD's ops room played out visibly and audibly. The teams were monitoring signal and satellite imagery for any sign of unusual activity in southern Iran. Analysts were scouring through open-source intel, while translators tracked chatter for references to Bhoot and any activity in his worldwide network. Operation Ghost Hunt was moving forward—without Vanessa. But she wasn't going to let any vulnerability or resentment show. So she scowled back at the analyst. “Good to see you, too.”

Now Zoe smirked. “Heard you had a great time in Turkey and discovered the newest Dead Sea Scroll.”

Right, from a pregnant widow who risked her family's life escaping Iran.
“Glad it went to NSA and not to you.”

“You really believe we're going to find coordinates?” Zoe let the unspoken implication linger—
while the rest of us are doing the real work?

“No, I just get a kick out of wasting everybody's time and resources,” Vanessa said, not quite controlling her anger. She took a quick breath. “But your relevant question should be:
Will they break it fast enough so we can use it to capture Bhoot?
”

“Hold on.” Abruptly, Zoe turned her back to the screen cam to deal with a muted question from a female CST, or career service trainee, someone Vanessa didn't recognize. She tried to control her frustration until, a good minute later, Zoe turned to face the screen cam again. “I've got to get back to the grown-ups, but I wanted to let you know Tech got a lead on your hit man.”

Letting the insult pass, Vanessa pulled up in her chair. “A match?”

“Remember, you owe me.”

“My firstborn, right. What do you have?”

A click of keys, and Vanessa's screen filled with two images: the first, an enhanced and enlarged partial of the very faded tattoo on the hit man's wrist from the original Hilton security footage; the second, a striking image of a black wolf, framed with a full moon, and ringed by a distinctively ornate border.

“If we overlay the images like this,” Zoe said, accomplishing it on-screen as she spoke, “we get an eighty-five percent match on the border, where the nine dots or marks run symmetrically.”

Vanessa's temple throbbed, and she felt the shiver of her blood quickening.

“The official seal of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” Zoe said. “And apparently, during the Chechen Wars, one particularly hard-core faction of Chechen rebels liked the tat displayed on the wrist.”

“So the shooter's not Russian, he's Chechen.”