corporal's lips. "If I had all the right cables and the thing wasn't all busted up, yes, I could hook it up to a TV, but I don't have those cables, so it might take a little while to get it running, but don't worry, if there are any images on here I'll retrieve them for you."
The images - that's what this was all about, and this young soldier, if he was able to retrieve them, was in for quite a shock. Hayek still hadn't gotten used to this double life. She hadn't bothered to give the officer in charge, or anyone else for that matter, her alias. There were times where she truly wondered whether she was cut out to be a Clandestine Service officer.
"Listen," she said to the two men in a confidential tone, "the images on that thing are likely to be extremely disturbing. One of our Clandestine officers was kidnapped a few days ago, and we think that camera might contain parts of his interrogation. No one can have access to those images. As soon as you get it working you need to stop."
"Stop . . . doing what?" Floyd asked.
"Stop watching it. If my fears are correct, I don't think I'm cleared to see and hear what's on that drive, and I trust, Corporal, you don't want to have to put yourself through a debriefing on this. It wouldn't be pretty."
"Fair enough. Let me see what I can do. The second I get it working, it's all yours."
Hayek turned her attention to the one thing she could get a fairly quick answer on. Every Clandestine Service officer serving overseas had a DNA sample on file at Langley, and Hayek was in possession of Rickman's. She looked at the six evidence bags that she had collected from the slurry of fluids underneath the hook where it was most likely that Rickman had been beaten. Blood would give her the best match. She took the cleanest sample and gave it to the DNA analyst. "Let's start with this."
Chapter 41
KENNEDY yawned into the back of her hand and hoped no one back at Langley noticed. They were nearly an hour into the secure videoconference. The yawn wasn't from boredom but from fatigue. They had spent the majority of the briefing talking about life and death. The crisis seemed to have no end in sight. In fact, it was expanding like some plague, hopping from population center to population center, creating a kind of minipanic among people in the business, with one side running and the other sensing blood in the water.
The Pakistani foreign minister had been literally dragged from his house by the ISI with the media recording every brutal moment. That visual alone had started a second exodus of lesser assets in Pakistan. Four midlevel spies had shown up at the embassy in Islamabad, despite being told not to do so. Three more had simply disappeared, and it was anyone's guess if they had been picked up or were trying to flee on their own. None of these individuals were mentioned in the video posted on the Internet, but it didn't matter. Once fear gripped the lonely mind of a spy, panic was already breathing down his neck.
The embassy in Islamabad reported that the ISI had stepped up their surveillance around the embassy and they were almost certain to have photographed the assets entering the embassy. It was only a matter of time before an official protest was filed and the Pakistanis started tossing Americans out of their country. On top of that, Kennedy would still have to deal with the fools who had ignored their handlers and fled to the embassy seeking asylum. The Pakistani government would demand that those individuals be turned over, and considering the current climate, Kennedy would be left with little alternative. How many of them would live was impossible to guess, but they would all be brutally tortured. And this was just Pakistan. The deputy director of the Clandestine Service and his staff had just delivered a devastating report.
Thirteen assets, not counting the five in Pakistan, had jumped the reservation. Five had landed on the doorsteps of American embassies throughout Europe, and their handlers were working feverishly to get them to return to their lives before anyone noticed, but so far none of them were willing. Of the remaining eight, they had no idea if they'd been arrested or were making a run for the nearest border and the safety