The Assassin. Andrew Britton

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СКАЧАТЬ she walked out.

      Once she was gone, the mood in the room seemed to lighten a little. Andrews glanced at his watch, stood up, and moved to a cupboard behind his desk. After a moment he returned with two half-filled glasses.

      Harper gratefully accepted the generous measure of Glenlivet. The DCI regularly bent the rules by keeping alcohol in his office, but he was strict about its use. If a drink was offered, it was only after close of business, and while a second was consumed on occasion, a third was almost unheard of.

      As Andrews sank wearily into his seat and loosened his tie, Harper brought up Ford’s parting words, and the director nodded thoughtfully.

      “I’m not sure about her yet,” he mused. “It’s hard to know where she stands. Did you know that she served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence?”

      Harper nodded, not at all surprised by the turn the conversation had taken. Although Ford outranked him, Jonathan Harper had been with the Agency longer than Andrews and Ford combined, and the DCI had never been reluctant to take advantage of his subordinate’s extensive experience. “I don’t know that much about her—I don’t get invited to the hearings—but I did see that in her bio when she was nominated.”

      “She also served as the vice-chair on the terrorism subcommittee.”

      Harper lifted an eyebrow. “I must have missed that part.”

      “She backed us up on quite a few things in that position, and that was before she got the nod from the president—before she was even considered, in fact. They had oversight on HUMINT and counterintelligence as well. I do get called to those hearings, John. She could have made things hard for us more than once, especially after what happened last year, but she cut us some slack. That’s why I went along so easily when she was nominated. When you get to the top, you have to pick your battles.”

      “I had wondered about that.”

      Andrews nodded again. “She’s like me…still hitting her stride. This thing with Kealey…I think it bothers her because it could cause us some serious problems. She’s not just being malicious, and she’s right about Kassem. He can’t be allowed to talk.”

      Harper’s gaze drifted to the windows on the west side of the room. Weak light broke against heavy clouds, the melancholy end to a dreary day. “I’ll give Ryan the word once he checks in,” he finally said. “As for Ford…I’ll try to cut her a break, but with Vanderveen active again, we can’t afford to lose Kealey over internal dissent.”

      “I’ll talk to her…She’ll come around. Where do we go from here?”

      “It’s like I said; we have to wait and see if Kassem gives us anything useful. Kharmai’s flying into Dulles tomorrow with a diplomatic courier. Once we have the tape, we’ll get the voiceprint verified on our own equipment. Unfortunately, I think we’ll find that the Brits were right.”

      “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Andrews said. “You know, I already briefed the president, John. He wants to keep Vanderveen’s reappearance under wraps. Nobody gets to know, not even the Bureau.”

      “What about Kharmai’s friend in the Ministry of Defence?”

      “She had to be hushed up, of course. Brenneman placed a call to Ten Downing Street while I was in the room, and the prime minister agreed to keep it quiet.”

      “For how long?” Harper asked. “Until after the election, I should imagine.”

      Andrews addressed the obvious sarcasm. “John, it’s all politics. You know that. The last thing the president needs right now is Vanderveen’s face back in the spotlight. The public would go crazy. Of course, the escalating situation in Iraq isn’t helping, either, so we’ll have to see how it plays out.”

      The DCI fell silent for a moment as he finished his drink. “I noticed that you left something out when you told Rachel about what happened in Maine.”

      Harper shrugged. “She can read about it if she wants to; it’s all on record. It doesn’t really matter, anyway.”

      “It matters to Ryan. What do you think he’ll do? I mean, when he finds out about Vanderveen…”

      “I don’t know,” Harper brooded. He drained his glass and stared out at the flat sky. “I just don’t know.”

      At that precise moment, Ryan Kealey was standing outside an abandoned, crumbling stone house three miles north of Amiriya, a small town situated on the northern banks of the Euphrates. It was a rural area; the closest house could be seen to the west, a gray smudge barely discernable in the dawn light. A rucksack containing a Raytheon AN/PSC-5 satellite radio rested on the ground a few feet away, next to a 20-liter can of kerosene. The radio was still packed away; he had not bothered to set up the collapsible dish, and the proper frequencies had not been loaded into the base unit. As a result, he was unaware of the decisions that had been made in Langley. He didn’t know that what he was about to do had already been cleared, but in truth, he wouldn’t have cared either way. In his mind, he had already decided that Arshad Kassem was going to die. The man had betrayed the Agency’s trust, which, in itself, was not surprising—Kealey would have called it inevitable—but more than that, he had actively worked to procure weapons for the insurgency. Kealey had learned this and a good deal more over the last eighteen hours.

      After his seemingly impromptu actions back in Fallujah, his return to the marine base east of the city had not been well received. Owen had vowed never to work with him again, and while Walland remained silent, the look on his face had said something similar. From there, things only got worse. On catching sight of the bound prisoner in the bed of the third Tacoma, the captain in charge of the guard had placed a hurried call to the office of Brigadier General Nathan Odom, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. The vehicles were stopped just inside the fence, and Odom, a stocky, barrel-chested black man, arrived soon thereafter. He proceeded to ask three pointed questions, each of which Kealey answered honestly. After his response to the third question, the general had stared at him hard, as if gauging his sincerity. When Odom saw that the younger man meant every word, his orders were swift, short, and definitive.

      Kealey did not try to argue with the general’s decision. He didn’t care if he couldn’t conduct the interrogation inside the fence. In fact, he didn’t care where it took place as long as he got the answers he needed. In the end, he simply asked permission to take his prisoner off-site, a request that was readily approved.

      None of this bothered him. If he had told Owen exactly what he was up to before they’d gone into the Jolan district, the other man would never have provided him with the firepower needed to get Kassem out of the city. Even now, with time to reflect, Kealey felt no compunction about misleading his former commanding officer. He had done what was necessary, and he now had the information to prove it.

      Kealey leaned back against the cool stone wall and rubbed his eyes, which were aching from lack of sleep. Seen from a distance, the marks on his hands might have been dirt stained red by the morning light. At this early hour, the pale orange sun was backed by a purple gold haze. The view was beautiful in a stark, desolate kind of way, but there was something strangely sinister in the sun’s slow upheaval. The steady rise in the east promised a new day, but carried with it the constant memories, the weight of things he couldn’t escape. The same old trials and tribulations, all that he had endured for the past ten months.

      Still, he couldn’t turn his eyes away; if he hadn’t known the time, if he hadn’t spent all night СКАЧАТЬ