woman standing next to him. She nonchalantly moved in front of him, squeezing tight through the group of people standing there, from his right to his left, and while she brushed close in the small crowd her left hand rose, snaked inside his jacket, raised the wallet from the pocket, and smoothly lowered it out of his jacket and down to her waist.
She never even slowed down.
A block and a half away she checked her loot. As she expected, the wealthy-looking man in the leather jacket was a fan of cash. There were three crisp hundred-dollar bills, a small fold of twenties, and a few fives. Just over $400 in all.
Good, she thought. This was enough to get her moving.
* * *
• • •
The eastbound turning lane off Route 123 into CIA headquarters was infamous. Here, on January 25, 1993, a Pakistani national in the United States on forged papers dumped ten rounds from his AK-47 into cars waiting to turn into the agency, killing two CIA employees and injuring three more.
Suzanne Brewer wasn’t thinking about the turn lane’s history now, even though she sat in the middle of it in her Infiniti sedan, right on top of where the attack took place. She knew all about the murders, for sure, although she’d been in high school when it happened. As a CIA officer she had spent much of her career protecting the Agency from threats and had exhaustively studied the 1993 attack, all the way up to the 1997 arrest in Pakistan of Mir Qazi and his 2002 lethal injection for his act.
Right now Brewer had other, more contemporary events on her mind. With two attacks on personnel in the last eight hours, the former facility threat expert wanted answers, but that wasn’t her job anymore. Now she was Hanley’s working dog. An indentured servant to the deputy director of Operations in charge of managing sub rosa, off-book assets.
She made the turn into the HQ at five a.m., anxious to have a couple of hours in the office before attending the crisis center meeting at seven about Ternhill and Great Falls.
She’d just begun heading up the drive when her phone rang, and she answered it over the car speakers.
“Brewer.”
“It’s Matt. How soon can you be in my office?”
“Parking now, sir. Ten to fifteen?”
“Ten would be better.” Hanley hung up, and Brewer groaned aloud in her car. If he was already here in his office, wanting to speak with her in person even before the seven a.m. meeting, then it was a safe bet he was scheming something, something she would likely be tasked with carrying out.
* * *
• • •
Suzanne Brewer walked down the hall to Matt Hanley’s office thirteen minutes later. Heavy throngs of men and women passed by, the noise level higher than usual here on the seventh floor, and there was a sense of urgency to the scene.
This had nothing to do with Ternhill or Great Falls, Brewer knew. Instead, everyone up here was busy because of what Brewer saw as a stupid and pointless conference they would all be attending in Scotland in a few days.
Everyone on the floor, virtually all of the executives along with dozens of mid- and upper-level subordinates, would fly to the UK on Saturday. They’d spend a day at the U.S. embassy in London prepping with members of the CIA station there, and then they would fly or take trains north to the Scottish Highlands for the annual three-day Five Eyes conference, to be held in a completely restored and massive fifteenth-century castle overlooking Loch Ness.
The intelligence agencies of the five English-speaking nations of the world—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand—were known collectively as the Five Eyes. They shared all manner of intel product between one another, and they worked together whenever they could. The Five Eyes conducted a regular cycle of conferences, each year in one of the five nations. The previous year had been in Wellington, New Zealand; next year it would be in Toronto, but the United Kingdom had host duties for this year’s gathering.
Senior operational, analytical, and executive staff from the intelligence agencies of all five participating nations would get together, some four hundred spies, spymasters, and IC experts in all, and they would attend briefing after briefing about the ongoing and emerging threats facing the Five Eyes’ interests.
Brewer wasn’t going to Five Eyes this year, and she saw it as perhaps the only perk of working on Poison Apple. Sub