"Someone called Jon Harrison."
Rennie couldn"t think. The name sounded familiar, but she couldn"t put her finger on it.
"I"m not sure how this relates to anything, but I need to call in and make a report."
Hannah looked like she was about to say more. Rennie knew she shouldn"t be having this conversation with her, but Hannah was in it as much as she was.
"Is that all?"
"I think so, but I only scanned it."
Rennie took a deep breath and retrieved the sat-com from her pack. The signal was strong here by the river away from the forest"s canopy. She punched in the numbers from memory. She only heard a partial ring before a male voice on the other end said, "Yes." A pause and then, "We"re secure." She thought it was Brian Ryder, who ran night communications at CT3"s central command, but couldn"t be sure from the gaps in the connection.
"This is Agent Rennie Vogel." She could hear a shaky panic in her voice and tried to tamp it down.
"Yes. Go ahead, Agent Vogel."
"Armin is dead."
"Why isn"t Agent Smythe making the call?"
This wasn"t going to be easy.
"He"s dead." She paused. "They"re all dead. We were ambushed the first night as we slept."
She knew he wouldn"t ask why she hadn"t called in then, that wasn"t his role. He said, "You made the kill?"
"Yes."
"Where are the bodies?"
"I can"t say precisely. GPS was destroyed during the jump."
"We"ll have to facilitate withdrawal after you are out then.
Where are you now?"
"I"m at the river."
"Are you safe?"
"I don"t know. We saw action several hours ago from a group of soldiers who came after us. There were six enemy casualties.
We think the rest are focusing on the road as the likely route the shooter took to escape."
"We? You"re not alone, Agent Vogel?"
"I"m with Hannah Marcus."
"She"s with you now?"
They knew. She could hear it in his voice and he hadn"t missed a beat. They had known all along that Hannah was alive.
She continued, "Also, I recovered a doc.u.ment, written in Farsi, from the pack one of the men was carrying. It looks like it was being delivered to the village."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
"Any sign of who it was going to or when or where the meeting was to take place?"
"Yes. There"s no indication of when but there is a map pointing to a boarding house on the corner of two cross streets in the villageBoktar and Lutfi, the northwest corner."
"Do you know what"s in the doc.u.ment?"
"I do now. Hannah Marcus reads Farsi and was able to translate."
"You know she doesn"t have clearance."
Something wasn"t right.
"I thought the potential importance of the doc.u.ment outweighed such considerations."
"You know the protocol and should have called for go-ahead."
Rennie didn"t respond. She wondered if this was just bureaucratic bulls.h.i.t administered at the worst possible time or if something else was going on.
"What"s in the doc.u.ment?"
"A list of names. Of terrorists, most are connected to a London mosque, the Masjid Ibrahim."
"Anything notable?"
Rennie paused.
"One of the terrorists named is an American. A Jon Harrison."
There was a long moment before he responded.
"Okay."
Okay?
"Do you have the doc.u.ment in your possession now?"
Hannah was sitting uncomfortably against the rock, still intently reading the doc.u.ment. Feeling Rennie"s attention on her, she glanced over at her, eyebrows raised. Rennie"s intention of holding out her hand, stopping her from continuing, died before she lifted her arm. Something wasn"t right.
"Yes."
"Good. Keep it safe. How long will it take you to reach the village?"
Rennie thought if everything went right, if they both stayed strong and pushed on with little to no rest, they could reach the village the following night. Two days.
"Three days. The woman is very weak."
"Fine. We"ll send someone in to check out this boarding house. Maybe whoever is waiting on the doc.u.ment is still around. Regardless, the agent will stay in the village to accept the doc.u.ment from you when you arrive. Understood?"
"Yes."
"And check in every twelve hours."
"Understood."
Then there was nothing but silence. Rennie looked at the phone. Her supposed lifeline. Just a hunk of useless plastic.
She wanted nothing more than to hurl it into the river. Her conversation with Ryder had frustrated her and left her with countless questions. Why wouldn"t her team have been told that Hannah Marcus was still alive? Even if the government had no intention of rescuing her, the team should have been informed.
But maybe she was making too many a.s.sumptions. What possible reason could they have for keeping this information from CT3?
There were so many things he hadn"t asked. How it was that Hannah Marcus was still alive? And was she healthy? And why had Rennie ignored nearly every protocol in the book? Why had she? Rennie turned back to Hannah who sat shivering against the rock still looking at the doc.u.ment. It was almost fully light now, but the sun was obscured by clouds and it looked like it might rain. "You can rest for a little while and then we"ll have to get moving again."
Hannah gave Rennie a peculiar look that she couldn"t read.
"What is it?"
Hannah cleared her throat. "There"s something else here.
I missed it the first time around. It"s about this Jon Harrison.
There"s more background on him than I picked up in the first reading."
Hannah paused. Rennie wondered why she was hesitating.
"Yes?"
She finally spoke. "His father is a case officer. For the CIA."
Rennie narrowed her eyes. Martin Garrison. Of course. And his son was Jon Garrison, not Harrison. Hannah had misread his name. Jonathan Garrison. Ryder had put it together, but for some reason had deliberately kept it from her.
"You know who he is?"
Rennie turned her attention again to Hannah.
"Yes. I"ve never met him, but I"ve heard of him."
Martin Garrison. Rennie didn"t know too much about him other than he had been a spy under diplomatic cover in Saudi Arabia for years, at least since the Cold War ended. Before that, he"d made his career in Moscow. And had recently gone rogue when responsibility for a bombing at a government building in Philadelphia had pointed to his son. No one was killed but the FBI had gone after Jonathan Garrison aggressively. When they took a confrontational stance with Martin Garrison, he decided to go out on his own and try to bring his son in before the FBI found him and went in with guns blazing. An impossible situation made more impossible by the usual lack of interagency cooperation.
She knew more about the son. An only child whose anticapitalist pacifist leanings emerged in high school, Jonathan Garrison believed the interventionist policies of the United States were ruining the world. In college, when he finally understood that his father was a CIA operative, he broke from his family and disappeared. There had been no sign of him until forensic evidence connected him to the Philadelphia bombing. His pacifism had slipped away and he had adopted the philosophy of terrorists everywhere, that change will come through the barrel of a gunor a homemade bomb or a mushroom cloud.
When a homegrown militia group claimed responsibility for the 0.
bombing, it was thought he had hooked up with them, but there was always some suspicion that he might be working on his own and the militia group was just riding his wave. Regardless, the connection to the London mosque showed that he had indeed moved on.
Rennie took the doc.u.ment from Hannah and secured it in her pack. Armin had to be trading this information for something.
But what? It wouldn"t seem to be in his best interest to betray his colleagues. But what else could it be? Why pa.s.s on such information? Rennie didn"t have the energy to think about it anymore. And it wasn"t her responsibility. Her only responsibility right now was to get herself and Hannah to the village alive and deliver the doc.u.ment. Rennie sat down next to Hannah who was hugging her knees to her chest and shaking from the cold.
"Here," Rennie said, pulling off her T-shirt, her tank bloodied and damp underneath. "It might help a little."
"Thanks."
"I know this isn"t ideal, but I want you to get some rest before we head out again."
"Long way to go?"
"Yeah."
Rennie settled in next to Hannah against the rock. She was exhausted too, but wouldn"t sleep. They had come too far to risk any mistakes that could be avoided. She pulled her pack to her and opened the medical kit. There was a small pharmacy in one of the pockets. Pills for pain, antibiotics, antacids and a little white pill that would be her lifesaver over the next forty-eight hours.
Rennie swallowed the pill with a big gulp of bad-tasting water.
"Are you hurting?"
"No. I"m okay. This will help keep me awake."
Special forces and other military had been taking Provigil since it was introduced a few years before. It would keep her awake and alert and allow her to forgo sleep.
"I don"t even know if I can sleep. It"s so cold."
Hannah was shivering violently and Rennie worried that she wasn"t well.
"Here," she said, spreading her legs. "Lean against me and I"ll try to keep you warm."
Hannah nodded and scooted into her, settling her thin body against Rennie"s chest and thighs. Rennie, her sub-gun beside her where she could get to it fast, held Hannah close. Hannah"s skin was cold but, with their bodies touching, quickly began to warm. Her exhaustion ceded to sleep in a moment and Rennie felt her chest rising and falling, her breath even and deep.
Rennie couldn"t help but note the incongruity of the moment.
This woman she hardly knew, sleeping in her arms. And it felt good. She had never spent an entire night with a woman. Had never slept, never let herself go, allowing consciousness to slip away. Her experiences had always been furtive, always afraid she would jeopardize her career. The closest she had come to a relationship was with Marta. And that was rotten at its core from the start. Two desperate women taking occasional solace in one another. Before that, a few women she had met in bars when she was so lonely she couldn"t bear to go home to her empty apartment. But she always went to their place. And never stayed.
The hour she allowed Hannah to sleep pa.s.sed quickly.
Rennie"s thoughts traveled through dangerous territory, entering places she never allowed herself to broach. Wrong time, wrong place to consider whether she had made the right choices, to ask herself if this life was the one she wanted.
Rennie hated to wake Hannah. She needed more sleep, but she knew that even an hour was incredibly restorative to the body.
"Hey," she whispered in Hannah"s ear. "We need to get going."
Hannah woke slowly, swimming up from someplace very deep. Releasing her, Rennie gave her one of the little white pills to throw off her grogginessshe needed her alert.
A few moments later Rennie crested the bank carefully, scanning the woods for any sign that they had company. The sun still hadn"t broken through the clouds and there was light fog swirling through the trees. It made the woods look otherworldly.