The Target Read online

  Or tried to.

  She had already knocked him unconscious with the paperweight key she had spied on a nearby table. Blood poured down his face.

  She hurried to his nightstand and retrieved the phone there.

  She held it in her hand and looked down at the screen. She knew it was protected not by a password but by a fingerprint scanner. She had seen him access his phone on the train once by doing this. She also reckoned that it would be sophisticated enough to recognize a living man’s print versus a dead man’s print.

  That was why she had not simply killed him.

  She pressed his pulsing thumb to the screen and unlocked the phone. She went into the phone’s settings and disabled the auto lock and turned on the airplane mode. Now it was both open for good and also untraceable.

  She stooped down.

  The blade cut cleanly across his neck. She avoided the arterial spray when it came. She had become practiced at that. Back at Bukchang she had not avoided it. She had wanted their blood literally on her hands.

  She waited for a few moments, listening for sounds outside the room. She heard nothing. The walls in the ancient hotel must be very thick, she thought.

  She wiped the blood off her blade, rose, and hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. After that she went through the various emails and contacts in the man’s phone.

  She had been taught by captured South Koreans how to find ways into computer files, and she made ample use of this training. However, she didn’t find much. She looked at the list of most recent phone calls. He had made two more from his room in addition to the one she had seen him making. Two she recognized by the country code as calls to England.

  The third was far more interesting.

  850.

  That was the country code for North Korea. But it was not the number for the British embassy there, which she knew well. She swiftly calculated the time difference between where she was and North Korea. It would be about 8:45 a.m. there. She turned off airplane mode and then hit the button to call this number.

  The phone rang three times and then someone answered, not in Korean, but in English. The voice spoke again. She listened until it stopped, and then Chung-Cha hit the end call button.

  She left the room the way she had come after quickly staging a robbery in the room. She took the phone, as well as the man’s wallet, watch, passport, and ring. She had not unpacked her bag, so it was a simple thing to leave the hotel quickly and unnoticed, especially at that time of night.

  She proceeded to the train station in time to catch the next train that was rolling through. Ten minutes later she was five miles from the town where she had just committed murder. Four hours later, long before the body would be discovered, she had left that train and boarded a plane back to Turkey.

  Now she needed to decide what to do.

  And how to do it.

  Chapter

  22

  JESSICA REEL PUT DOWN HER weapon, slipped off her sound mufflers, and hit the button to draw the target toward her.

  Twenty shots. Nineteen in the kill zone. One two centimeters outside. She frowned. Not good enough. She had lost her focus on the fourteenth trigger pull.

  She looked at Robie next to her as his target sheet sailed toward him.

  All of his shots were in the kill zone. He looked at her errant shot mark.

  “I know,” she said miserably.

  She had easily passed the test on the firing range even by Burner Box standards. This was her first miss in over two thousand fired rounds since they’d been here.

  Amanda Marks came to stand next to them.

  “I think you’ve proved your marksmanship still holds,” she said.

  They left the firing range and walked back to the main facility. Their days here had been long and arduous, and Robie and Reel felt both exhausted and finely tuned.

  “Two possible targets,” said Reel suddenly.

  Marks and Robie slowed.

  Marks looked at her. “Blue Man?”

  “His visit was timely,” said Robie.

  “It wasn’t at my prompting,” said Marks.

  “We know,” replied Reel. “It apparently was your colleague.”

  “Viola? Now there’s a surprise.”

  “Not if he’s feeling like a fish out of water. Word is he had a one-on-one with Tucker. And came away more than a little nervous.”

  “Hence the call to Blue Man,” said Robie.

  “If Viola is nervous something is off.”

  “Two targets,” said Reel again. “Twin possibilities.”

  They stopped walking altogether and stood in a tight circle.

  “Two heads of state,” said Robie after glancing at Reel. They had talked at length about how to break this to Marks. They had finally concluded that the direct way was best.

  Marks stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The target will be a head of state. And the list of possibilities is pretty short.”

  The look of incredulity still in her eyes, Marks swallowed nervously and said, “Is that what Blue Man told you?”

  Robie said, “Not directly. But circumstantially, the way this is stacking up, that’s the only thing it could be. And he’s in agreement with that assessment. That’s what Tucker is putting together and it’s apparently eating him alive. That and figuring out what to do with the two of us.”

  “But that’s illegal. Tucker would never go out on a limb like that.”

  “He would with appropriate alliances.”

  “There are very few alliances that would justify that sort of mission,” said Marks sharply.

  “And not all presidents are built the same,” noted Reel.

  Marks stared at her for a long moment. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “But that’s an im—”

  “Impeachable offense,” interjected Robie. “That’s why the need to know is so tight it’s almost nonexistent.”

  “So Iran or North Korea,” said Reel. “Place your bets. Our two badass enemies. The remaining two of the old axis of evil. Now that Iraq is all nice and peaceful and full of terrorists.”

  Marks looked around. The area was deserted, but she still did not look comfortable discussing this. She said, “Clandestine ops like this are my whole wheelhouse as the DD. They’re mine to direct. Or not. And I know nothing about this.”

  “Apparently, Tucker is the only one at CIA to know.”

  Reel added, “And the president and Potter, the APNSA.”

  “This is crazy,” said Marks in a low voice. “How did Blue Man find this out?”

  “By doing what Blue Man does better than anyone else: working his sources and reading the tea leaves and the faces of his superiors in the organization,” said Robie. “Tucker doesn’t have the greatest poker face. And he didn’t come up in the intelligence field. He’s a politician. I’m sure Blue Man has ways to find out things at Langley that Tucker can’t even imagine.”

  Reel said, “So Iran’s president or the ayatollah. Or North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Un.”

  “This is absolutely insane,” said Marks firmly. “North Korea has nukes. Iran is close to having them. And they have death squads all over the world, including right here. If they’re deployed in force with chemical or biological weapons?”

  “Then we retaliate. And the Russians get involved. And then the Chinese. And Israel gets attacked. And we go to bat for them,” said Robie.

  “Then it’s all over,” said Reel. “As in apocalyptic over.”

  Marks put a shaky hand to her face. “This can’t be happening.”

  “If it is one of them, which?” said Reel.

  “In some ways it doesn’t matter,” said Robie. “We can get into Iran and North Korea, maybe. But we won’t be able to get out. Syria was hard enough and Syria is not in the same league as those two. North Korea might as well be another planet.”

  Marks said, “North Korea is anothe
r planet. But to get to that target we have to have rock-solid inside people at the very top. How did that happen without my being aware of it? Intel like that doesn’t occur overnight.”

  “You haven’t been on the job that long,” said Robie. “It might have happened before you got here. DiCarlo wasn’t on the job long enough to see that through either.”

  “That’s true,” said Marks.

  “But the DD before her, Jim Gelder, was,” noted Robie, as he glanced at Reel.

  Reel looked away. She said, “Gelder could have been involved in something like that. He didn’t just push the edges, he obliterated them. Taking down one of those guys, he would’ve seen it as his crowning glory, even if it did lead to Armageddon.” She paused and added, “He already tried something like that once. Guy’s just full of surprises. Too bad he’s dead. We might want to kill him all over again.”

  Robie looked at Marks. “So how exactly does this go down? We’re tasked to commit a hit on a target that is clearly illegal? How do we do that? I’m not going to be left holding the bag on something like that.”

  Reel said, “We’ve sat through our psych evals and they keep pounding away at us on one thing: Will we follow orders or will we make up our own? So you tell us, DD, what do we do if that order comes down?”

  Marks started to say something but then stopped. Finally, she blurted out, “God help me, Jessica, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Chapter

  23

  EVAN TUCKER STARED DOWN AT the secure email he had read about a dozen times now. And still his mind could not process what it was seeing.

  Lloyd Carson found murdered in hotel in Romania. Robbery believed to be motive.

  Tucker looked down at his hands, which were shaking. He tried to type a response but couldn’t manage it. He rose from his desk, crossed his office at Langley, poured himself a glass of water, and drank it down. He poured another and accidentally splashed some of it down his shirt and tie.

  He sat back down and peered at the screen. Part of him was hoping that the email had somehow disappeared, or had never been there, only a delusional by-product of his overly stressed mind.

  But there it was. Lloyd Carson, an envoy from Britain to North Korea, had been found murdered. Robbery suspected because his wallet, jewelry, passport, and cell phone had been taken.

  His cell phone.

  Tucker made a call and ordered that something be done immediately. It was.

  Another email soon fell into his in-box and he clicked it open.

  He thought he might be physically sick.

  What he was looking at was a list of phone calls made and received by Carson in the hours leading up to his death.

  The last one had been placed in the wee hours of the morning in Bucharest. It had been placed to a phone number in North Korea. A very special number that only a handful of people had. The question was, had Carson placed that call? Or had someone else? Like the person who had murdered him?

  He sent a secure communication at the very top level of secrecy. He did not expect an answer back immediately, and he tried to focus on other work, but found that impossible. There was no other work that came close to this in terms of importance. He couldn’t wall off his mind to think of other things.

  Two hours later a reply came back, and it froze him to the bone.

  A call was received at that time but no one spoke on the other end.

  No one spoke on the other end.

  Tucker played out in his mind what had possibly happened on the ground in Romania. Carson was spooked by something and changed his travel plans on the spot. He made phone calls, all but one to British telephone numbers. One, however, was to North Korea. Whoever had killed him had recognized the country code and simply redialed that number. The person had answered the phone, thinking it was Carson calling again.

  Tucker leaned his head back against his chair.

  Did that mean what he thought it meant? Did it matter? He couldn’t take that chance. Their ultra-secret operation possibly had just been blown wide open.

  He had to inform the president.

  His mind knew he had to do this, but his hand did not move to the phone.

  He began to rethink things.

  That phone number was untraceable. Maybe he was okay. Just maybe.

  It might be possible that he need not contact the president. What he needed was to first ensure that the op had not been compromised. And if it hadn’t been he needed to get his team up to speed and into the field so they could execute the op.

  They would not get a second chance.

  He made a few more calls, setting in motion this process.

  Right now he didn’t care if Robie and Reel survived or not. He was not overwhelmed by a sense of injustice that demanded they be punished.

  He simply wanted to survive this. The risk had been huge. Too big, he now lamented, but it was clearly too late for such thinking.

  He hurried off to a meeting and sat through a presentation that he neither listened to nor cared about. He rushed through a full day of such events, stopping only to eat a cup of soup that felt like acid dropping into his belly.

  He was driven home and walked into the house. Ordering his aides to remain behind, he sidestepped his wife, who was coming out of the living room to greet him, and fled to the back of the house where his home office was. He engaged the room’s SCIF features and checked his emails and voice messages.

  Nothing yet. That might be good or that might be bad.

  He called Marks at the Burner Box and told her to speed up the process. It would be Robie and Reel, he told her. And they would potentially be deployed very soon. He didn’t wait for her to ask questions but simply hung up.

  He poured himself a drink of something far stronger than water and then had another. His nerves were wound so tight the alcohol had no effect at all. It was like he was drinking a soda.

  He slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes.

  He opened them when an alert went off on his computer.

  That was a very special alert that he had set up. And it demanded immediate attention.

  His mouth dry and his heart pounding in his chest, Tucker opened the email, which contained the very highest encryption features. The message was brief, but each word was like a bullet fired directly into his skull.

  He could only stare in disbelief, because whatever hope he had held just a few moments before was now gone.

  Irreversibly gone. In fact, this surpassed the worst scenario he could have imagined after he’d been informed of Carson’s murder. Lloyd Carson was the go-between, the linchpin to this whole thing. And he had been uncovered and targeted. And he had gone down.

  Well, now they were all going down. But it was even worse than that. This, in fact, changed everything.

  He picked up his phone and punched in a number.

  APNSA Potter answered on the second ring.

  Tucker said, “We’re dead. And we’re dead beyond belief.”

  Chapter

  24

  TICK-TICK-TICK.

  The old-fashioned wall clock’s second hand made its way around the timepiece’s face.

  The office Chung-Cha sat in was utilitarian, badly maintained, and