Page 109 of One Minute Out

My best chance to save them is a woman who hates my guts, and an organization that regularly uses me, while offering little in return.

But if this doesn’t work, another option comes to mind. It chills me to think about employing plan B, but I may just be desperate enough to do so.

THIRTY-TWO

An hour later I’m parked at a gas station near the Italian town of Portogruaro. Talyssa is sitting in the car eating a pastry for breakfast, and I am lying twenty-five yards away in the grass by the parking lot, looking up at the sky. I’m tired as hell again, and I know I’m going to have to find a way to sleep before tonight. But that’s not all I need, so I call Suzanne Brewer back.

She answers, and I say, “Violator,” and then I play the game by the rules. “Iden code Whiskey, Hotel, Quebec, fiver, two, three, India.”

“Confirmed.”

“What did you learn?” I ask.

“I’m transferring you.”

“Transferring me? It’s three a.m. there. You’re at the office?”

“I am now,” she says, her voice no more or less annoyed sounding than usual. She adds, “Hold,” and I do.

There is no hold music at CIA, which is too bad, because it’s a missed opportunity for them to have fun and play the Mission: Impossible theme song or some shit, but nobody at Langley I’ve ever met has that kind of a sense of humor.

Soon the line clicks. “Hanley.”

I launch up to a sitting position on the grass. Matthew Hanley is the deputy director for operations, the top dog in Ops. Brewer somehow got him into the building at three a.m. for this.

Matt and I go way back. He and Brewer are the only two people at Langley who know I’m doing contract work for the Agency, and that’s because I’m essentially doing contract work directly for Hanley, with Brewer as the go-between. Still, though Hanley and I have spoken quite a few times over the past couple of years, I was hoping to avoid going all the way up to him in my hunt for intel about an operation I’m running on my own.

But I mask my unease. “Hey, Matt. All good with you?”

“Not so great.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, it’s simple. I have three operatives in a special sub rosa unit. One of them is recovering from injury, one of them is a pain in my ass, and the other is AWOL.”

I thought I was the pain in his ass until he mentioned AWOL. “I’m coming back. I just got myself involved in something and I need a little intel to wrap it up. Brewer shouldn’t have bothered you with this.”

Hanley replies to this with “The Consortium. That means nothing to us. There are sex trafficking rings all over. In your area, Albania and Turkey are big players.”

I cock my head slightly. “How do you know what area I’m in?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“How is it—”

“Because of Ratko Babic.”

Matt knows I killed the general, or at least he thinks I did and he’s trying to get me to confirm it. If it were anyone else, I probably would play stupid, but it’s Hanley.

“Right.”

He adds, “I wasn’t going to ask you if you waxed old Ratko Babic, although from the minute I heard about his death, I knew that you did. Shit... everyone knows. But you’re basically admitting it, so I’ll just go ahead and say it.”

“Say what?”

“Nice work. Not perfect... you fragged a bunch of Serbian goons who were active-duty members of their intelligence service. They were also Branjevo Partizans, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over that, but our Balkan desk is running interference, insisting to the Serbs that the former asset who became a rogue hit man called the Gray Man was seen in Santiago, Chile, at the same time as the Babic killing.”

“If I don’t work for the Agency, then why does the Agency give a shit if the Serbs think it was me?”

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