Robert Bidinotto - Hunter

Immediately, he knew. Knew what they’d do.

Guessed where they’d go.

He turned to fasten his seat belt. Straightening, he noticed his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. Hard and glittering, like marbles.

Then the anger melted away.

His hands now rested lightly on the steering wheel. As always after he’d made a decision, he experienced a sense of icy physical tranquility and heightened mental clarity.

He shut off the radio. Began to roll it around in his mind. Options. Details. Implications.

It occurred to him that he should be concerned. After all, he might be about to wreck everything he’d been working so carefully to establish during the past two years. Yet that stray thought now seemed an irrelevant intrusion, like a scarecrow hanging impotently in some distant field.

He would deal with any remote consequences, if and when. The only thing that mattered is that he could not let this go, here and now.

Would not let this go.

He sat in stillness for another minute, taking comfort in the low, reassuring purr of the engine. Then he shifted smoothly into reverse, backed from his parking space, and eased forward through the garage, prowling slowly toward the ramp that curved upward toward the exit.

He would make a few calls, change some plans.

He would not go home tonight.

En route to CIA safe house, Virginia

Tuesday, March 18, 9:30 a.m.

The tall hills-as a Colorado native, she couldn’t think of the Blue Ridge chain as real mountains-rose and rolled around them as their trio of CIA vehicles sped west on Route 66. They’d been on the highway since the early-morning meeting on the seventh floor at Langley.

“Nice briefing.”

She lowered the copy of the Washington Post that she’d been reading and glanced at the man beside her in the rear seat of the armored Lincoln limo.

Grant Garrett, the CIA’s deputy director of National Clandestine Services, wasn’t given to compliments. Nor had he looked at her as he said it; he was staring off at the hills. He was a study in gunmetal gray, from his close-cropped hair, to his well-tailored suit, to the pen he tapped idly against the slate-colored note pad on his lap.

As always, Garrett looked morose. It wasn’t a matter of his mood, typically inscrutable. His flinty features exuded an unforgiving toughness. But the sagging skin beneath his pale blue eyes also suggested world-weary sadness, born of decades of ruthless victories and regretted losses.

“Thanks,” she said tentatively, taking her cue from his terseness.

Garrett glanced at her. “Boss didn’t rattle you.”

“Not particularly.”

He grunted. Looked back at the passing hills. She took that as another compliment.

“Lucky that asshole didn’t get you killed,” he added.

“Which one-Muller or Groat?”

He grunted again. In Garrett, that passed for knee-slapping laughter. The grunt turned into a cough. The man was an incorrigible chain smoker. The only thing keeping him from lighting up here and now was gentlemanly courtesy.

They were quiet while she finished reading the Post story about Muller’s arrest. The media frenzy about his chaotic airport takedown was to be expected. But a “high-level CIA source, speaking on condition of anonymity,” had leaked a few sensitive background details to a Post reporter, a guy to whom Agency higher-ups often fed self-serving propaganda. The most disturbing detail was that Muller was “being held for questioning by the Agency at an undisclosed location outside of Washington.” Garrett, who had scanned the paper first, circled that paragraph before he handed her the paper.

She folded and dropped it on the seat, then pressed back into the soft black leather. She was physically drained. Her right shoulder throbbed. She needed sleep badly. She turned to the passing landscape. A power line running parallel to the highway rose and fell rhythmically between poles, like the soothing pulse of a cardiograph. She struggled to keep her eyes open.

“You happy working for Randy, Ms. Woods?”

She looked at him; his face was unreadable, eyes forward. She thought about her supervisor in the Office of Security. “He’s a good guy to work for,” she said carefully. “And I like investigations.”

“You’re good at them. As everyone now knows.”

More compliments?

“Thank you, sir.”

“Please. Grant.”

“Okay. Thank you, Grant.”

A pause.

“I spoke to Randy about you last night,” he continued. “Says you’ve maxed out, as far as promotions in OS.”

“Yes. Unfortunately. Well, we don’t work at Langley to get rich.”

“Tell me about it.”

Another pause.

“Ever think of transferring?”

Where is this going?

“As I say, I like investigations. And, as you say, I’m good at them.”

“Well, it’s clear to us that your investigative talents are being wasted on stuff like background clearances. NCS certainly could use your skill set. In counterintelligence.”

It startled her. “That’s…very flattering, sir, but-”

“Grant.”

“Yes, sorry. Grant. Very flattering. But frankly, I don’t think I could stand working in CIC and having to suck up to Rick Groat every day.”

“I wasn’t talking about the Counterintelligence Center. I meant working directly for me.”

She shifted around to face him.

“Here’s my problem,” he went on. “Yeah, Groat is a royal pain in the ass. But I can’t get the Bureau to replace him. Long as he’s their liaison at CIC, my people there are hog-tied. They spend more time justifying what they do than just doing it.”

“Which is exactly why I wouldn’t want to be there.”

“Which is exactly why I wouldn’t want you to be there, either. I need somebody to function independently from the Center. To help me run special CI ops directly. The old-fashioned way.”

She knew exactly what he meant. Before ascending the food chain in National Clandestine Services-which veterans still called by its old name, the Directorate of Operations-Grant Garrett had been a legendary case officer, one of those “cowboys” that some congressmen despised and some Langley managers feared. But he survived because he got results, and he got results because he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

She wondered why Garrett bothered to stick it out in a bureaucracy that was risk-averse to the point of paralysis. She thought she knew how. Randy once hinted to her in an unguarded moment that Garrett “had stuff on some guys on the seventh floor.” That didn’t surprise her. Garrett was a bare-knuckles guy, heir to the operational style that prevailed in the CIA’s predecessor agency, the OSS of World War II, under its legendary founder, “Wild Bill” Donovan. These days, Garrett was the only reason that Langley still produced any valuable HUMINT at all. They relied way too much on satellites and drones.

“Think of it this way, Ms. Woods-”

“Annie.”

He actually smiled. “Okay-Annie. Think of it this way. If we had a fully functioning counterintelligence section in NCS, we might have picked up something about Muller from the Russian side. But we don’t, and we didn’t. We were completely blindsided. That bastard has cost us dearly. Think of the officers and agents blown or killed. Strauss, Kilwalski, Sokolov, Malone, Ayyad. God knows who else.” He looked down at his hands, his expression even more dour. “I shudder to think what he’s fed to the SVR.”

“Let’s hope he tells us today.”

“Yes. Let’s hope. But over the longer haul, I still need to beef up our CI. And after this, I don’t know who I can trust anymore.” He lifted his eyes. Looked into hers. “Except somebody who’s proved her loyalty and competence.”