Andrew Britton: The Operative

“Dressed to kill,” Muloni remarked.

“Cute.”

“No, really,” the woman replied. “You wouldn’t have been watching her hands, would you?”

“Damn it.” She was right. And he was busted.

“My great-grandmother was a painter in Uganda,” the woman said. “Made her own pigments, stretched animal skins for canvas. She painted village life. There were a lot of bare-chested women, and do you know why?”

“It was a hundred and ten in the shade?”

“That, plus it inured men to the sight of barely clad women so they wouldn’t be distracted in tribal wars or in trading,” she told him.

“I wonder what those women thought when they encountered European women,” Bishop said.

“The Zulus thought they were comical,” Muloni told him. “Not the kind of high ground the British missionaries wanted.”

Bishop didn’t want to tell her that overexposure wouldn’t have worked with most of the men he knew. Then again, some of them-like himself-might actually have been studying the woman’s face instead. Veil’s expression was nondescript. No anger, no frustration, no fear. Just neutral. It wasn’t even a kind of practiced blankness that made you think something might be working inside her skull, like a plan of escape. She was simply a woman who was going along with whatever came from moment to moment. Undistracted, if an opportunity presented itself, she’d be ready. That was how assassins worked. But all that aside, there was something riveting about a woman who seemed to have no opinion in her expression.

Bishop reached for a cigarette, thought of his promise, then let it go. He chewed his cheek and watched as the woman shuffled ahead amid her captors, her shoulders squared, her head high and defiant.

The woman the Bureau had code-named Veil-she called herself Yasmin Rassin, though that was believed to be an alias-was responsible for the deaths of at least fourteen individuals around the world. She was wanted in the United States for trying to kill the deputy director of the CIA, Jon Harper, outside his home in Washington, a hit paid for by Tehran, according to a mole in the Majles-e Khobregan, Iran’s ruling council of clerics. The trail that led to her capture had been long and convoluted. Photographed by a street-corner security camera, she had vanished for almost a year after the attempted hit. Eight months ago, a pair of MI5 antiterror agents on another assignment had made a chance ID at Heathrow and taken her into custody. On the way to Thames House in London, their car disappeared. It was later found burning in a field northwest of the city. A month later, the body of one of the agents was recovered from the water under the Westminster Bridge. His throat had been cut with a razor. Pink cotton fibers found in the wound suggested the razor had been tucked into the sweater she was wearing, probably the sleeve. Though her hands had been zip-tied behind her, shavings suggested that the restraints had been slashed, apparently by another razor blade. Rassin had undoubtedly made a lengthwise slit in the back of her leather belt and tucked the razor inside so its edge was even with the top of the belt.

The other driver remained missing.

Despite a hunt involving the cooperation of multiple international security and intelligence groups, Rassin had again gone to ground until last May, when the CSIS got a tip about an Egyptian boy who kept to himself at school, never took gym class due to vague religious restrictions, and-what had surprised fellow students-remembered his locker combination the very first day. Simultaneously, the Mounties turned up an inconsistency in his passport that had been recorded at customs and eventually passed along: the customs agent had clandestinely noted the young man’s travel history-routine with young men coming from the Middle East-but there was no record of his having gone to the places stamped on the document. The Mounties tracked Rassin’s movements, compared photographs of the “boy” with the computer-enhanced security camera image of her, and finally made the arrest.

According to Bishop’s hurried briefing, Rassin did not resist the takedown. With the headmaster of the school present to lend an air of invisibility to the arrest-he was always talking with education officials-Rassin was taken away at gunpoint, outside, during lunch. And that was that.

Bishop watched as she was brought toward him. She certainly looked different from the security camera image he’d seen. She no longer had wavy raven-black hair tumbling to her shoulders. She was a redhead, her hair clipped short, boyish. Her features were more strongly defined, probably the result of Botox and malar or submalar implants. The eyes were slightly more rounded at the corners, and she was no longer wearing blue contacts. Her eyes were dark and piercing. Finally, Bishop noticed that while her skin was still olive smooth, her Mediterranean complexion was lighter, possibly due to topical melanin inhibitors, like hydroquinone or glucocorticoids.

She was slight, no more than a few inches over five feet, and with the proper clothes, he saw how she could pass as a teenage boy. The CSIS had subsequently learned from school officials that her “widower father” was an oil company geologist who was always up north, looking for untapped deposits. Presumably, visitors to her rented home, like her handler, would have come at night, wearing “dad” clothes and carrying luggage. E-mail would be checked only on school computers, which, as a rule, were off provincial law-enforcement radar absent specific tips about violence-which were virtually nonexistent in Canada. With hacking codes provided by her allies, she could even track CIA or FBI pursuers.

It was a brilliant disguise, one she’d maintained for seven months. Unfortunately for Veil, the RCMP was off her radar. It was like the traffic stops that turned into big drug busts: the law usually came at you by accident, from a blind spot.

Leading her across the tarmac, one of the Mounties stopped in front of Bishop and inclined his head formally. “Good morning. I am Inspector Javert.”

Bishop grinned. “Really?”

“Indeed.”

Bishop nodded toward the driver. “Valjean?”

“Yes,” the inspector replied humorlessly, then indicated to the female plainclothes officer. “This is Cosette. She and I will be traveling with the prisoner to her end point.”

Bishop had expected the Canadians to use aliases around their prisoner. It gave them added deniability and would protect their families from retribution if she ever passed them on to her associates. Still, he was used to traditional military-style assignations with Greek letters attached, like Tango-Alpha or Foxtrot-Beta. The Les Miserables references gave this a kind of amateur, community theater feel.

Javert looked at the men in black on the runway. “You are ready for us to bring the detainee aboard?”

“Not quite, Inspector. We have to make some preparations before takeoff.”

“Of what sort?”

“They won’t take long,” Bishop insisted. “In the meantime, you can wait comfortably aboard the-”

“Please answer my question,” Javert said, his face tightening. “What type of preparations?”

Bishop hesitated. There were no written-in-stone guidelines for what he was compelled to share with local authorities. Still, he preferred not to lie to them. That could lead to mistrust at best, complications at worst. Cooperation did not, however, mean he was inclined to share everything.

Bishop let the pause stretch out, still weighing how much to reveal. Muloni spared him the decision.

“We’re going to conduct a body-cavity search on the prisoner,” she said. “We also have different clothes for her. There’s a room in the terminal where she can change.”