his traitor high within the ranks of the CIA. The American had been passing intelligence to Mars for the past several months, and Mars had been wiring money to Visser via shell companies. Somehow the CIA had managed to tie the account, and Visser, to the leaker, although Mars could not conceive of how this came to pass.
Visser had been snatched by the CIA, and Mars knew that the moment he talked, Mars’s source in America could be identified. The American traitor did not know Mars’s true identity, but he certainly knew enough tangential facts about him to pose a definite compromise.
And Mars was especially concerned about threats now. The most important operation of his life was just days away. Too much was on the line; Mars would destroy cities if it meant keeping a lid on his operation for just one more week.
Initially, the man in Notting Hill just wanted to have Visser taken from the Americans and the British to be squeezed to find out if he’d said anything. But now the stakes had risen. The revelation from Barnacle, the American traitor, that a detainee at an Agency safe house in Virginia knew something about a particular name from the past increased the threat against Mars’s operation exponentially, and Mars knew he had to do two things.
One, remove the compromise in Virginia, and this was under way right now.
And two, find out how and why the name Feodor Zakharov had been resurrected from some dead Agency file and printed for review by black ops personnel.
Could Visser have somehow passed Zakharov’s name to his American captors?
Mars had to unravel this mystery quickly, so he ordered Fox to have the banker held until Fox himself could go and interrogate him to see what he knew.
This was all he could do about the problem in Britain for the time being.
One of his phones rang, and he snatched it up. In his exquisite British accent he said, “Yes?”
“It’s Fox.”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s not good, sir . . . They did wipe out the facility, and they confirm there was a detainee being held there, but she somehow managed to escape in the melee.”
“She?”
“The clothing in the holding cell belonged to a woman.”
“Did they find out who she was?”
“I needed a crew of cutthroats quickly, so I used a dozen men from the Sinaloa cartel. They knew how to kill, but sensitive sight exploitation is beyond their skill set. They suffered four KIAs, and four more injured, and as soon as they cleared the building of hostiles they exfiltrated the area.”
“The bodies?”
“Left at the scene. They’re sicarios, not Marines. No code with those guys. Still, don’t worry about that. It will look like a cartel hit, no comebacks on us.”
Mars kept looking at the televisions in front of him. Finally he said, “The woman who escaped. I trust you have people looking for her?”
“I do, sir. Not the Mexicans. I have others canvassing the area.”
The man in London demanded hourly updates and then hung up the phone.
What is happening? he asked himself with welling panic. He racked his brain, trying to think of some woman who might have known something, anything, relevant to today about a long-buried GRU director.
Nothing came.
* * *
• • •
Suzanne Brewer arrived at the Great Falls safe house at one a.m., pulled up to the front gate, and saw a small group of FBI men and women standing around a body, shining lights in the nearby wet grass. She showed her credentials to a police officer controlling access to the property and was instructed to park her car next to a row of ambulances on the driveway. She walked the rest of the way up the hill to the house; the rain continued softly, and the air around her was cool and misty.
By the time she got to the front door she could see the devastation. The porch was pocked with bullet holes and the windows around it were completely shattered. She entered the building through the open door, passed more FBI whom she ignored, and found a group of CIA officials standing between a pair of bodies.
This safe house was run by CIA Support, the dead were Support security personnel, and no one in the building other than Brewer knew just who Anthem was and what the Agency was doing with her. This was part of a code-word operation so only those with the code word knew, and this meant Brewer and her boss, Deputy Director of Operations Matthew