Paul crept down the hallway like a blind man feeling by memory the distance from the stairs, past the empty boys’ bedrooms, past their bathroom, and to the open door of his own room. He couldn’t hear the rhythmic whisper of her sleepy breathing. He dared the light switch.
He stood at the foot of their neatly made bed and called out for his wife. No answer came. She had never come home. A chasm of terror expanded in his chest and he cried out again as he turned on lights in every room looking for her.
His phone rattled in his hands and a strange voice from the sheriff’s department told him what his sins already foretold. They had found his wife dead.
Chapter 14: Tainted Messenger
Constanța, Romania
9:51 a.m., Sunday, June 16
Ethan wandered the trash-strewn streets of Constanța in search of something to eat. He passed a trio of women headed to mass at a nearby church where congregants passed in and out of the elaborate church doorway on their own time. He imagined the three were sisters, each dour-faced and suspicious of an intruder in their decaying neighborhood. They eyed his sunglasses and lengthening stubble as they did the stray dogs that wandered the alleyways sniffing at puddles and empty bottles.
He needed to be free of the cramped bungalow where he and Wade had hidden since their encounter at the villa. Russell provided the safe house, though he scarcely thought of it as a house. Three narrow rooms connected a bathroom barely large enough to hold the toilet and sink. While they waited, Russell’s team became their eyes and ears, alert for any sign that the Russians had returned to the city.
Wade needed the fresh air more than he, but they couldn’t afford the attention. People stared at his friend like they had never seen a black man. Perhaps some of them hadn’t. Wade knew his liability. He heard the muttering comments from a few brazen onlookers these past weeks. Wade sat back in the tiny house surrounded by drab concrete walls while Ethan found them breakfast. Ethan hated the scowling sisters and everyone in the city for confining his friend within those walls. He hated that his superiors sometimes suggested—and sometimes demanded—other officers better able to blend in. They meant someone better suited for the job. Ethan hadn’t found anyone one better suited than Wade, an evaluation his friend had proved at least twice for him at the villa.
Several blocks away he found a small corner shop. He almost passed the place, mistaking it for another residence surrounded by scrawny trees that sprouted from the sidewalk. Through a window covered by white bars he saw a case of pastries. He entered the little shop, and a pudgy man wearing an apron greeted him. He nodded at the man who returned his greeting with a shrug. The shopkeeper approached him and spoke again. Ethan pointed to the pastries.
“Four please,” he said. He held up four fingers and pointed again.
The shopkeeper wagged his head and stuffed a paper bag with the pastries that were twisted like pretzels. He brushed his fat fingers and thumb on his apron and motioned for Ethan to follow. As Ethan reached for a roll of bread and a salami cooling in an open refrigerator nearby, the man brushed him away and added the items in his cradled arms. He laid the food on a counter and began haggling. Ethan paid the man more than twice what the food was worth, though he bargained for two liters of water and left the shopkeeper to pocket the rest.
He emerged from the shop and caught the glance of an old man sitting on a patio next door. The ashen-colored pensioner sat cross-legged at a small table. In the shrinking morning shade, the old man sipped Turkish coffee out of a porcelain cup and watched him without emotion. Ethan wondered how many mornings he had sat there watching neighbors and the odd stranger like him. There wasn’t much chance the man or the shopkeeper were informants. They were simple men living in an old neighborhood. But he couldn’t stay here and risk more attention.
He continued on his way closer to the church, switching back on streets and tight corners until he was convinced only the strays could follow his trail as he wound back to the house where Wade waited for breakfast.
Wade hunched in a chair in the front room with a laptop perched on his knees.
“You get lost?” he asked, his eyes still focused on the computer’s screen.
“Don’t tell me you got lonely without me.”
“You were gone over an hour, man. All I got was hungry. What’d you bring me?”
Ethan tossed one of the paper bags into his lap and placed the other in the small sink at the far end of the room. The space was all the house offered for a kitchen. A simple sink and counter shelf where a scorched hotplate rested, untouched since their arrival.
“Nothing but carbs,” Wade said. “How do you expect me to keep this physique with the food we eat in these places?” Wade took a bite of the pretzel-twisted pastry and looked at it again. “That’s damn good.”
“I know, I ate mine on the way back. Perks of the job. Sometimes the food is the best part.”
“Take it where you can get it, man,” Wade said, grinning as he chewed. “Any trouble?”
“No, nothing. A few stares from locals. We can’t stay long.”
He leaned against the counter and let Wade finish his meal. Ethan sipped the water. It had turned tepid while tucked under his arm on the meandering walk back. He nodded at the computer pinched between Wade’s knees, the lid already covered in pastry crumbs. Wade brushed the crumbs from the laptop and fetched his second pastry from the bag.
“What are you reading?” Ethan asked.
“I started on the dossier for our new target. What do you think?”
“There’s not much to go on. This Khorasani guy comes from a wealthy family in northeastern Iran. He studies in France a couple years, goes home and publishes a couple papers. The usual academic stuff. He’s there a few years. No wife and kids, maybe he’s married to his work. Then he goes to Russia to work at VECTOR. It’s their version of the Center for Disease Control. He shows no real political leanings. No security red flags. Up to that point, the guy seems almost boring.”
“You mean besides that he’s an Iranian working in Russia on killer viruses? He’s like the hat trick of orange threat levels.”
“No one ever accused you of understatement.”
“That’s not even the crazy part. The man leaves this VECTOR place and just so happens to board the one plane in Tbilisi that gets hijacked by Chechen militants and explodes in midair.”
“It wasn’t the Chechens,” he said.
“What? It sure as hell was.”
“No, I mean they were just hired thugs. A false flag distraction, and an expendable one. They were dupes. All so this Scorpio group could get their hands on Khorasani without anyone realizing it.”
“Well it didn’t work,” Wade said.
“Didn’t it?”
“The Russians were looking for him. They figured it out somehow. Now we know, too.”
He shook his head and stared at the floor.
“It took us and the Russians six weeks to figure that out. Maybe that’s all the time they needed.”
“Needed for what? Who the hell are these people?”
“That’s what worries me. The Russians sure seemed convinced the vineyard was a hot zone. All that gear and the gas masks? They took every precaution. That suggests Khorasani didn’t leave VECTOR empty handed. He may have smuggled out a virus.”
“Son of a bitch, maybe he was working with them all along.”
“Possibly. But it doesn’t explain the restraints on that chair. He was sleeping in a loading dock. Not exactly VIP treatment for the guy.”
“True. But we don’t know it was him in that chair. Even if it was, he could be another dupe.”
Ethan grunted assent. There was much to sort out, but none of it mattered unless they could find Khorasani.
“We have to find him,” he said. “Otherwise we’re facing a group with a plan. With resources and connections. And they’re willing to use extreme force. If we’re right about this, they want a WMD that fits in a test tube. I don’t see any reaso
n to think they won’t use it.”
Paul was right. They would come for him. He took it as a twisted compliment. For all they had been through, they were making progress. This was the trickiest operation of his career. It was all he knew to keep pursuing the target. There would be a reckoning for mistakes he’d made and lives lost. He knew that day would come, yet he drove that thought deep within him for another time. The cost wore on him, but they had to perform. He felt it in his grinding teeth and tensing shoulders. He needed more rest and time to think. He had time for neither.
He thought of Russell’s advice out on the pier. Scorpio would not act as the Russians had. This was no cautious exchange of looks and radio chatter and calculations. They wanted his operation terminated, which meant they probably wanted both him and Wade dead. They had already killed Marcus.
He needed Wade to make this work. They both needed Russell and his crew, too. Involvement for any of them put them in mortal danger. They had to entice Scorpio’s people into revealing themselves. If he did this, he’d put himself in the crosshairs, not the others. The risk was his, and so was the cost.
“Where do we start?” Wade asked.
“We give them a reason to come to us.”
◆◆◆
They left for Bucharest in the cool cover of darkness. Russell met them at a petrol station on the west edge of the city, but he reported only the absence of their adversaries. In the course of two days, every contact vanished, everyone replaced by strange faces. The changes seemed to concern Russell as he tugged on his cigarette with his eyes downcast. He waved them off and promised to meet them in Bucharest.
For miles, they traced the same route they had taken to the villa. Ethan looked down the unlit road toward the far-ranging vineyards as they passed his passenger window. The road vanished into the night, trailing somewhere toward the empty villa. In the dark spaces between towns, Ethan’s thoughts dwelled on Russell’s silent worries. Russell was a worn weathervane that sensed the same shifting winds Corso had warned about. Ignoring his instincts was foolish, even dangerous. He and Wade precipitated that change. They interrupted the motives of a human effort, not some force of nature. That gave him some hope for finding answers—if they could weather the coming storm.
“Always thinking, aren’t you?” Wade asked as he drove.
“One of us has to.”
“Watch yourself now.”
Ethan looked over the shrouded fields where night lay across the slopes. The villa was just miles away in the darkness. He could still see it in his mind like a flashing strobe that stretched moments into hours like the passage of his dreams. He nodded to the north.
“You did some quick thinking the other night. I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for you, and not for the first time. I know you’re going to say you’re just doing your job. But it’s a hell of a job. So, thanks. I owe you.”
“Just doing my job,” Wade said with a wide grin curled across his face. “And you do owe me. But look, don’t get all soft on me just yet. I don’t know what we’re getting into now, and I don’t like that shit one bit. You make good on what you owe me and see that we both keep this lousy job.”
Bucharest swelled before them like a swarm of fireflies. A summer’s night haze hung above the city. They passed empty car parks and the joyless apartment complexes along E81. Much had changed here for the better, Russell told him. But the city bore old scars. They rode into downtown where it became more beautiful and elaborate. Ahead of them loomed the Palace of Parliament, a massive building awash in electric light that seemed a far-off mountain on the horizon. Traffic bloomed, and they blended into it.
“We’re going to need more cars At least four of them,” Ethan said.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Leave the station office out of it. Do it on your own. Or Russell can help. Pay with cash.”
Wade nodded his head as he maneuvered the van around a pack of haggard looking dogs that crossed the street in front of them. A gang of sickly youths walking nearby paid them no attention. They looked gloomy and tired, and the dogs danced among their legs as they stumbled along oblivious to the parade of cars swirling around the city’s hub.
Ethan pointed out the side street turn to an office building Russell rented out in the old Jewish neighborhood. A precarious scaffold of lumber and plastic sheeting covered half of the white building. The remainder of the modern edifice rose above the street where they parked, standing erect in bright contrast to the old milky plaster houses and nearby stone basilica. He liked the location—an empty space afforded to them by Romania’s unsteady economy. From the looks of the graffiti and shreds of plastic sheeting on the scaffold outside, construction had halted months ago. The place was less secure than either of them would like. But it was near the city center where they could orchestrate a plan, practice it, and await the opportunity to act.
“All the comforts of home,” Wade said.
They entered the office suite. The floors were unfinished concrete, the walls painted with white primer. Powdery dust hung in the air and clung to the surfaces of the desks and tables someone had placed inside. Wires bundled with tape sprouted from holes in the ceiling and walls, but fluorescent lights hung from above with a switch that dangled from a hole in the wall.
“It’s not much, is it?” Ethan said.
“Maybe you forgot where I’ve been staying for the last couple weeks? This is the Ritz by comparison, though the decor’s about the same. Hope you like sleeping in chairs.”
They wandered the office rooms with the single row of lights overhead to illuminate the dark corners and side offices. Wade procured a slender flashlight and a small black scanner from his duffel bag. He paced through the rooms for several minutes.
“We’re good,” Wade said. He shrugged his shoulders and returned his gear to his bulging bag.
“Good?”
“Either that or they are very, very damn good. It’s clean.”
Wade left him in the large central office while he patrolled the other vacant office suites in the building. Ethan settled in a black leather chair and began the first step of his plan. If they were coming for him, he needed to see them coming. He thought of only one way to do that. If Corso was right, someone at Langley scoured his reports. His newest dispatch would get their attention.
Reports were his habit, a necessity of the profession that fueled the machinery of intelligence. He had written hundreds of them, often late at night in strange rooms like this one with the weariness of late hours clouding his vision. Now the task took on an unfamiliar form. The report wasn’t for Corso, who would—he hoped—recognize it as eyewashed babble. Paul recognized Ethan’s work and knew the tenor and tone of his writing. Now he wrote not genuine intelligence but calculated enticement. A lure that balanced the plausibility of his searching with the absurdity of what he sought. He invited his own assassins to parley.
He chose words deliberately, a labor to which he was unaccustomed. Mention of the Scorpio Compact must appear within the text, of course. He mentioned the group in defiance of Corso’s directive. That alone would alert someone who would pass it along to another down a chain of someones he could only guess at for now. His report had to prod that chain of colluders to return a signal that would find its way to him. Mentioning Kamran Khorasani seemed too obvious for now. He needed something indirect that they would take as a sign he knew more than he actually did.
This began the fabrication, rooted in his confidence that they now possessed a deadly virus. He filled the report with a trail of leads on medical equipment, providers of specialized filters, or protective suits—anything they might need to contain the pathogen. The idea wasn’t far-fetched, but he lacked the resources to pursue each avenue quickly. Worse, he lacked faith in the Agency’s special collections to pursue it without inviting more disaster.
The response would take days, he guessed. Or he would write more reports, each subtler than the first to conceal him angling for their at
tention. They did not know his work as Corso did, but they would sense his desperation if he pressed too hard and too often. He and Wade could spend that time with Russell’s team practicing their surveillance and tailing unaware civilians until they mastered every route and street and turn.
By the next afternoon, the skeleton crew of Russell’s team arrived at the office building while Wade secured their transportation. Tereza brought him a hunk of dark bread and a cup of ciorbă that had cooled on the way. They sipped the sour broth as they reviewed the nearby streets together on a map. She pointed out the electric rail routes and best times to avoid the heaviest traffic.
Leo, who had tracked the Russians in Constanța, interrupted their planning with a baby-faced grin, a look that every cab driver in the country seemed to share. He teased the pair with his thick accent. Ethan laughed a little and admitted he was impressed with his skills. Tereza had already explained that Leo grew up in Cleveland.
At last, Russell appeared in a long jacket that was far too warm for the June sun. Sweat rolled down his forehead. He sat at the far end of the long conference table they had designated as their operational hub and took his time finishing a cigarette. The others had busied themselves arranging their own quarters in the tiny office rooms.
“Everything all right?” Ethan asked.
Russell leaned down and extinguished the stub of his cigarette on the concrete floor.
“Have you spoken with Langley?”
“Not directly. Not since we came to the city. We’re barely settled in. Why?”
Russell eyed him with a vacant look.
“Paul’s wife is dead.”
“Jane?” he said without thinking. His voice faded as Russell nodded confirmation.
He heard the news as if Russell spoke another language, an accented trick like Leo’s teasing. He met Jane Corso a couple times. She was as sweet as her husband was irascible. When he and Sarah were still together, Jane invited them into her home at a time when they knew almost no one in the city. He recalled how at ease Paul was with Jane, so unlike his Agency self. And how generous they were to their guests and to each other as they shuffled around their kitchen preparing an elaborate meal. He envied that comfort in them, even then. Paul would lose all that without her to come home to.
The Hidden Vector: A Spy Thriller Page 18