Page 34 of Red Line

“I damned well hope that’s not the case. Possible? Yes. Probable? I can’t take anything off the table. I don’t have the intel. To that end, we received a pin that indicated the exact spot where she was meeting with a man in a blue suit. If you get into the area, see what’s there.Startthere. Her last interaction with her team was sending that pin.”

“Wilco,” T-Rex said.

Watts drew his lips into a hard line. “Listen up. She’s highly skilled and will be using tradecraft. She doesn’t know you’re coming in. She doesn’t know you, so be aware. Her code this week is, ‘Did you buy Johnny new crayons for school?’ The answer is, ‘Can you believe he’s in first grade?’ and lastly, ‘He loves to color.’”

The three repeated the phrases.

“At this point,” Colonel Watts said, “with two check-ins missed, we have to assume that she’s incapable of initiating comms. She has backup routes if she loses the means to use an encrypted channel. None of them were acted on, which tells me we need to be prepared for repatriation or a medical emergency. If the latter, time will be of the essence.”

Chapter Twelve

Nomad

“Hey, Ty, hand me all the money under Rory’s vest. We’ll take it with us in case we need to bribe our way out of a situation.” T-Rex reached out his hand and waited for Ty to pass the stacks of Syrian pounds. He shoved them into his thigh pocket. “All right. You three need to get Poole out of here. I don’t know if they’ll pop the sub up without the cover of darkness, and his meds aren’t going to last much longer.”

They waited to ensure their team got safely over the horizon, then returned to the car. “Havoc, you're driving.”

Havoc slid into the driver’s seat, pulled the night vision apparatus into place, and adjusted the straps on his head. T-Rex sat shotgun, and Nomad put the back seats down and climbed into the hatch where he could find more room for his legs without sitting like a frog on a lily pad.

T-Rex pointed. “Head back down the road and follow it around to the east. As they got underway, T-Rex opened his phone and dimmed the light. “Listen up – this is information on where we’re going in. We’re headed to the town of Tal Afaya in eastern Lebanon. It sits at the bottom foothills of the eastern mountains. That’ll be good if we have to tuck ourselves away. The town is a jumping-off point for the Lebanese and Syrian borders. If we had taken the western road last night instead of our trek to Poole, we would have been to the town in less than an hour.”

“Wow, close. Isn’t that interesting?” Nomad asked.

“Put that thought on the back burner. Let me get through this data. All right, we’re looking at around twenty thousandpeople. So that’s not an insignificant number. The town is populated with U.S., Canadian, and French immigrants. But they’re rooted here now. Looks-wise, we shouldn’t have trouble fitting in. We’ll see what the embassy does about our clothes. Lastly, it's not an industrial or tourist town. This is agricultural.”

“Johnna Red. This is a member of Color Code, right? Grey’s team? And this is the same Grey that sent us after Poole?” Nomad asked T-Rex.

“Same.”

“And now we’re looking for her only an hour away?” Nomad asked.

“Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“Okay, how about this,” Havoc said. “We don’t know what Red was doing on the Syrian border. But it’s possible she wasn’t in the bombing, and she was taken hostage. She might have tipped her hand as a field officer, or it’s also possible that someone realized she was American and wanted a payday.”

“Kidnapped.” T-Rex’s voice was flat.

Yeah, that was a scenario that no one wanted to have played out.

“You know what happens in the moments after an attack,” Havoc said. “All hell lets loose. Someone grabs a woman, and she starts screaming. She looks like every other screaming woman. If she’s not hurt, then the guy is dragging her away because he doesn’t want her diving for a dead relative. No one is paying attention to that.”

“In that case, they wouldn’t have to suspect she was American. They could just see an opportunity for a slave. If she doesn’t want to expose her skills, she might have to go along with the scenario to get to a place where she could free herself without blowing her cover.”

“It would be nice to know what her cover is.” Nomad leaned over the front seat,

“We have her fingerprints; what more do we need?” T-Rex laughed.

“So I take it you haven’t worked an op with her before.” Nomad settled back in the space, trying to figure out where to put his legs.

“I haven’t crossed paths with her, no.” T-Rex opened his phone’s album. “But we have a photo of a hat.”

“She has a chin,” Havoc said. “Neck. Shoulders. Everything where it belongs.”

“Lips,” Nomad said.

Havoc turned his head, then focused back on the road. “Ah, but are they uniquely recognizable lips?”

“When I was in Afghanistan,” Nomad ventured, “we trained some locals who were working for one of the CIA’s Numbers Group, called Double Zero. Is this the same kind of thing as Color Code? Colors and Numbers…”

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