to find them.”
“I hurt Gentry. I don’t know how badly, but I saw the blood trail, so I know one of my knives cut him. We know he’s not aligned with the CIA, and we know there is no way he would walk into a hospital, or any medical facility that was run aboveboard. So, ladies, the question is, if he were to go somewhere in the city for medical treatment, where would he go? Where is safe harbor for a man like him?”
Anya and Inna exchanged a look. Anya said, “I will make some calls.”
“Excellent,” Maksim said. “And I will continue to sharpen my blades.”
* * *
• • •
Matthew Hanley and his team of Ground Branch paramilitary officers landed at Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport shortly after six a.m., where they were met by Berlin station officers in a trio of silver nine-passenger Volkswagen vans. Once the team’s bags were off the aircraft, Hanley, Travers, and the others climbed into the vans and they all rolled off towards the city.
Hanley had chosen to avoid going into the embassy for this trip. The DDO appearing at a station caused a lot of fanfare, and he needed to avoid that. And the DDO would have to call in on the ambassador, and that was something he desperately wanted to avoid having to do.
Ryan Sedgwick was an asshole in Hanley’s eyes. A longtime Agency critic, he had the president’s ear like no one else, and Hanley knew that Sedgwick asking a bunch of questions right now would involve Hanley telling a bunch of lies, and that would lead to trouble.
Hanley wasn’t here for scrutiny, he wasn’t here for meetings, and he wasn’t here for glad-handing. His objective was open-ended, but his objective was concentrated on one issue.
On one man.
Other than a few of his close operational staff at Berlin station, no one else from the embassy would even know he was here.
The vans delivered the new arrivals to a CIA safe house in Lichtenrade, not far from the airport and a straight forty-minute shot north to the center of Berlin and the U.S. embassy. It was a five-bedroom home, fenced in, and it backed up to an open field of barley. Hanley eyed the safe house guards that the entourage passed on the way in, and was pleased to find the Berlin station security team inconspicuous in work overalls, with their submachine guns well hidden.
Hanley was more concerned with operational security than he was worried about threats to himself. He’d worked in Haiti, in Somalia, in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and a dozen other locales around the world.
Berlin was as safe a place as he knew. He needed this location to meet in a clandestine fashion with people in the city, and he couldn’t very well have his arrival here at the quiet safe house broadcast with an overly robust security profile.
Once he and the others settled in, he received his first visitor. The senior operations officer who had been the lead at Berlin station in charge of looking into Shrike Group had been ordered to run a two-hour, early-morning SDR before arriving at Hanley’s safe house, so by seven thirty a.m. the man had traversed some eighty miles of train tracks, city roads, and shoe leather.
He met with the deputy director in a room in the house that had been swept for electronic surveillance.
In the end, however, the meeting had not been nearly as fruitful as Hanley had hoped. Yes, Berlin station had been looking into Shrike for a few months now, but they still believed it to be an Israeli intelligence operation, something Hanley knew, without question now, was not the case.
The DDO recognized that his station knew very little about what was going on save for the fact that a senior employee of the company had been murdered two days earlier, shot in the temple in a hotel next door to the embassy. The officer offered, helpfully, that he had actually heard the gunshot himself, but this told Hanley the man had been sitting in his office in the embassy and had not been out in the field where he could be of any use.
Berlin station had been using cyber and signals intelligence intercepts to look into Shrike, the officer explained, for the very simple reason that every single time men and women were put in the field around Shrike’s offices, police showed up within minutes to see what they were doing.
Hanley knew the rules about operating in Germany. Officially