Greg Rucka - The last run

She could hurt them quite badly.

"You showed this to C?" Seale asked, after a second. "She knows?"

"It was on her desk this morning, before she returned to Downing Street."

Seale looked at the papers in his hand, then offered them back to Crocker. "I haven't seen this."

"Julian, you can't do that."

"Paul, if I report this to Langley, there'll be hell to pay. And if I have to bring them a second list, of the things you guys might've missed in the first one, it'll only make matters worse. Take it back, sit on it for twenty-four hours, at least. Give me the master document. If you're going to cut the throat of the Special Relationship, at least do it in one slice."

"Twenty-four hours." Crocker scowled, then reached out and took the papers, adding, "It won't help."

"Maybe, but it won't hurt, not at this point."

There was more to it, Crocker knew, but Seale had the good grace, unlike C, not to say it. If Chace died, she wouldn't be able to tell the Iranians anything, after all.

"You had lunch?" Seale asked. "Let the Company buy you lunch."

"I should get back to the office. I appreciate the offer, however."

"You know where I am."

"If we hear anything, I'll let you know."

"Do something about that list, Paul. You're going to kill us with that list."

Seale turned away, heading northeast, towards Grosvenor Square.

It started to rain.

"Where the hell have you been?" Kate demanded when Crocker stepped into the outer office. He was wet and cold and depressed, and from her words, he immediately assumed the worst, that the news about Chace had broken while he'd been talking with Seale.

Then Kate shoved a signal into his hand, from Tehran Station, flash precedence, immediate for D-Ops. STATION NUMBER TWO REPORTS CONTACT WITH MINDER ONE VIA TELEPHONE AT 1449 LOCAL, DURATION OF CALL 87 SECONDS…

Crocker read the rest of the signal in a rush, then almost threw the paper back at her, sprinting into his office, for the red phone, shouting, "Find C! Get D-Int and DC, tell them I need them to meet me in her office."

"She's still at Downing Street!"

"Then tell DC to get her out of the meeting, we need her here." He stabbed at his phone, wedging the handset between his neck and shoulder as he tried to remove his sodden overcoat.

"Duty Ops Officer."

"D-Ops, for MCO, get me the Tehran Number Two, secure voice, immediately. I'm coming down."

Crocker used a finger to kill the connection, jabbed another key, transferring the phone to his opposite shoulder, letting the coat dump onto his chair, where it then slid to the floor. He kicked it out of his way, looked up as Kate stuck her head into the office.

"DC needs a reason to pull C from the Cabinet meeting. What can I tell him?"

"The first part, that Minder One's in the open again."

"That should do it."

"I'd fucking well hope so."

"Minder Two," Poole said in his ear.

"Ops Room, I'll explain when I get there," Crocker said, then hung up and rounded his desk, heading for the door. He stopped at Kate's desk long enough to point back to his overcoat, lying on the floor. "The list for Seale is still in my pocket."

"What should I do with it?"

"Destroy it," Crocker said, and then he was out of the office, racing down the halls, making for the Ops Room. Hoping that he hadn't been premature; praying that he wouldn't need a new copy of the list to hand to Seale anyway. "I need a name and an operation," Crocker shouted, as soon as he hit the Ops Room floor, on a straight line for the MCO Desk. Poole had just beat him in, was at Duty Ops with Arthur Grey, and grabbed the clipboard before Grey himself could.

"Name: Cougar," Poole called back. "Operation: Icecrown."

"It's a Special Op, put it up on the board, Minder Two allocated, and bring in a control." Crocker reached the MCO Desk, took the headset Lex was offering him, closed his fist around the mike. "And find out the status on Bagboy, if Lankford is free to move."

"Yes, sir," Grey said.

Crocker pulled on the headset, his eyes checking the clocks on the wall. "Caleb, D-Ops. Confirm, please, time elapsed since contact, sixty-seven minutes."

There was a pause, the static chatter of the scrambler filling the void, before Caleb Lewis answered, "I have sixty-seven minutes, yes, sir."

"Her location was south of Natanz at that time." Crocker snapped his fingers, pointing at the map, and someone knew what he meant, because almost immediately a callout appeared on the Iran map, marking Natanz, some one hundred and twenty miles southeast of Tehran. "Heading which direction, did she say?"

"No, she didn't, sir."

"We are designating her package as Cougar, do you understand?"

"Cougar, yes, sir."

"Do the locals know that Cougar has gone walkabout?"

"Think so, yes, sir."

"Explain."

"Station Number One has been making inquiries, sir, he's out of the office at the moment, still pursuing, but he called in twenty minutes ago to say that there's been a hell of a lot of Sepah activity around the MOIS. Mission Security is reporting active surveillance of the embassy, as well."

Crocker swore. He'd hoped for more of a lead, but if the embassy was being watched, then there was no question that VEVAK knew what was up. If the pursuit of Chace prior to her capture had been intense in the face of Hossein Khamenei's death, the effort to keep her leaving the country with the now-former Chief of Counterintelligence would be monstrous. In the first, it had been an issue of political value; this time, the value was far more concrete, a target with direct strategic and tactical knowledge that the Iranians could, under no account, allow to escape.

For a moment, Crocker wondered who would have to prepare the list of operations compromised by the defection of Youness Shirazi. He shut down the thought as grossly premature.

"Sir?"

"Just thinking, Caleb. There was nothing in your signal about her health."

"She said, and I quote, 'no exfil by air.' "

"And Cougar didn't have an exfil plan of his own?"

"My impression was that he had been relying on us to provide one, that he had believed the Caspian route was still viable."

"It isn't," Crocker said.

"No, sir, Minder One had already determined that. She didn't say which way they were headed. I think she was concerned the call might be intercepted."

"It probably was. All right, inform immediately if anything else develops. We'll be in touch."

"Yes, sir."

Crocker pulled the headset free, tossed it back to Lex, staring up at the board. Poole came in at his shoulder, mimicking his pose, both of them staring at Iran.

"So who's Cougar when he's at home?" Poole asked.

"Right now?" Crocker said. "He's the man who's saved Chace's life."

Gordon-Palmer, Rayburn, and Szurko were all in their regular seats in the sitting area of C's office, and each of them stared at Crocker as if he had dropped, naked, from the womb, in front of them.

Then Szurko began to laugh, a hearty, gleeful roar that had the merciful effect of pulling both C's and the DC's attention from Crocker to D-Int for the moment. "Oh, that's brilliant," Szurko managed. "That's just-that's bloody brilliant, that's what it is."

C glared at him for a second longer, then pulled her attention away, placing it on Crocker. "Clearly Daniel sees something I don't."

"It worked, though," Szurko said, trying to control himself. "The problem was she was too good, don't you see? If she'd been worse, if she'd been slower or stupider, if she hadn't realized Falcon was wrong, it'd have come off perfectly!"

"I still don't-"

Crocker opened his mouth, but Szurko beat him to it, leaning forward on the couch, holding out his hands, index fingers pointing at C as a visual aid. He wiggled the left one, said, "Falcon," then the right, "Shirazi," and then crossed their positions, saying, "Just say Shirazi everywhere you would say Falcon, makes perfect sense."