The Hidden Vector: A Spy Thriller

by Mathew Snyder

  The door pressed open, and he stepped into the cool, stale air within. He checked the door frame and the nearby walls. No sign of an alarm. He exhaled.

  “Hello?” he said “Anyone here? Got a delivery for a … David Caspari? Hello?”

  No one responded.

  He passed the front room and entered the kitchen. As he walked, his footfalls on the wood laminate clattered throughout the house. He sorted through a stack of mail on the counter but found only an Arlington county bill and junk mail addressed to Dave Caspari. He needed confirmation this was the target of his suspicion.

  He opened a door along the back wall. The heat of the garage wafted around him like an open oven. A shadow leapt at him from below. He caught the sudden movement from the corner of his eye. His instincts took hold, his body moving without thought. He reached for a weapon that wasn’t there. He needed anything. He grasped his keys. The blur moved past his legs and into the kitchen where it let out a long whine.

  “Christ almighty, cat,” he said. “You nearly killed me. Some field officer I’ve turned out to be.”

  The cat growled an achingly hungry reply.

  As Paul closed the garage door, he caught sight of the garage’s only vehicle. He stepped down into the garage and turned on the light to reveal a black Chevy Tahoe with a mangled front-left bumper. He squatted at the Tahoe’s front and ran his hand along the bumper. The plastic had bent and stretched into streaks of white, but flecks of steely blue mixed in with the streaks. His teeth clenched. He stared at Janey’s favorite color. The blue streaks on the Tahoe removed all his doubts and replaced them with a flutter in his stomach.

  He moved more quickly, sorting through kitchen cabinets and drawers. In the bedroom to the rear he found an unmade bed that still bore the indented shape of his wife’s killer. He searched through a dresser containing socks and a stack of old birthday cards. In the closet hung gray and blue sport coats and slacks, a wardrobe rather like his own. He pushed these aside and found a locked rifle case and a stack of boxed .223 ammunition on top.

  In the hall he stopped at a framed photo collage of four men in pullovers showcasing their deep-sea fishing catches. Another showed Caspari at some restaurant patio wearing sunglasses seated next to a pretty brunette that had a few years on him. The photos themselves seemed years old, and a rim of dust had settled on the edges of the frame. Paul captured the photos on his cell phone camera and moved to the nearby room.

  It was Caspari’s office. A tall bookshelf held the remnants of old college textbooks mixed in with an array of books on foreign policy, some on Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, others on the Middle East. Paul had many of the same books on his shelf. There were two worn dictionaries, one Russian and another for Turkish. Hidden behind these he found a Georgian dictionary, and he pulled it from the shelf. He thumbed through the dog-eared volume. Inside the front cover he saw the initials M.H. written in tiny capital letters.

  He heard the squeal of a door open from the outside.

  “Hey, puss, how’d you get in here?” said a woman’s voice. “Dave? Honey, are you home?”

  Adrenaline shot through his body like an electric surge. He clutched the book and padded his way to the room’s closet door. From inside the closet’s cramped dark, he pulled the door almost shut. In the crack he saw the box and clipboard he’d left on the desk. He held his breath. Blood raced through his system, and his heart beat like a bird’s without release from his lungs.

  The woman leaned into the room. “Dave?”

  Through the narrow slit of the closet door, he saw the tips of her brown hair and sweat on her puzzled brow. He wondered if she knew her lover was a killer. He waited, each furious pulse just beneath his ears beating like the toll of a clock that stretched each second longer than the last. He could knock her down and run. He plotted his path out the back door. He was old, but he could still run. Damn it, why was I so stupid?

  She walked away. He heard her steps move down the hall into the bedroom. Behind him, the gush of the shower rumbled through the thin walls. He had to get out.

  He crept into the room again and realized he still held the Georgian dictionary. On the shelf he found the gap and jammed it into the empty space that had narrowed from the packed row of books. He wedged the dictionary into place, sliding and pushing the other books for room. As he did, several photographs edged out.

  He looked back toward the shower room. No time. Then he tugged at the photos’ corners and rifled through the images.

  They looked about a decade old judging from the clothes and the quality of the glossy prints. A younger Caspari grinned at the camera. A different woman with shoulder length brown hair leaned into him. Paul knew her. He rifled through the other photos squinting at the faces for others he might recognize. He saw her again. It was Maria Hessler. He remembered the initials in the dictionary.

  Some of the other faces he thought he knew. Agency officers he’d seen over the years, now spread out across the globe on assignments. One he had supervised himself briefly. He scanned the last photo. A large man loomed over the lot of them, his great wingspan cradling all. It was the last face he expected to see mugging at the camera.

  Panic set in as the shower faucet squeaked. He stuffed the photos into his pocket and grabbed the box and clipboard from the desk. He raced out the back door and trotted down the blacktop lane past two more townhomes where he tore off the brown shirt and hat and tossed them in a recycling bin. He threw the box and clipboard after and ran his hands through his hair in disbelief.

  He hurried around the block, then doubled back to his car where he sat and stared at the photo again in the sunlight. The face of a younger Harley Gilchrist stared back at him.

  Chapter 19: Loyal Dog

  Brașov, Romania

  3:18 p.m., Friday, June 21

  Ethan cupped his hand to his brow and shielded his eyes from a utility light that blazed white just yards away. The brilliance pierced through his fingers and into his eyes and pounding head. The ringing in his right ear persisted from the Range Rover’s detonation the day before. The high pitch had subsided overnight to a monotone that dulled his brain. When the armed men brought him to this room minutes earlier he could barely hear their terse commands, though neither of them touched him.

  Andrei had brought Ethan to this industrial facility somewhere in the Carpathians. Ethan did what he could to recall his whereabouts. As Andrei dragged him into the building, he stalled to observe the cameras mounted along the walls and the magnetic locks at every door. He managed to piece together and memorize the straightest route to the loading dock outside.

  They first kept him in an empty lab office where he sat alone picking tiny bits of rock from his scalp and clothes. Bruises swelled at his forearms and along his side, and he had a scrape along one shin with no idea how it had happened. It would heal, which was more than he could say for the Romanians he’d watched Andrei slaughter. He feared the same end for Russell and Wade. He couldn’t see them after the flames and pungent smoke of the explosion. He wondered how he still lived but realized while sitting in the dark room that they wanted him alive all along. Even Andrei, whose arm had bled through his sleeve, seemed to keep him at a distance, more a shepherd than assassin.

  Now he sat in a metal chair, unshackled and blinded by the intense light. It reminded him of the empty chair from the villa cellar where Kamran Khorasani had faced the same captors. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he saw a glossy tile floor and a steel countertop along the left wall. The larger room was well kept and clean, much like his makeshift prison cell.

  A voice came from behind the light. He squinted and turned his left ear toward the sound.

  “Hello, Mr. Pierce.”

  The voice hung thick with melodious accent, emanating from the dark shape of a man standing beyond the light. A halo of light shone white around his heavy beard and wave of whitened hair. Next to him, Ethan recognized the rigid silhouette and buzzed scalp of Andrei who stood silent and menaci
ng. Between them hovered a red dot and the glint of a camera lens trained directly at him.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m surprised at you, Mr. Pierce. For all your efforts, and still you know so little.”

  Whoever it was, he led this insane enterprise. Ethan recalled Kay Linh’s work to sort out the phone calls from the hijacking. This was the man who made the call that set everything in motion—the call from Cyprus just before the hijacking. That explained his Mediterranean accent.

  “Whatever you want, I’ve got nothing for you,” Ethan said.

  “That’s much better. But your mistake is granting me greater purpose than I deserve. What do we want? That is the question you are asking without asking. I can take so little of the credit. I play my part, but we want something—as you say—you can’t provide.”

  Let the man’s ego do the talking, Ethan thought.

  His interrogator sat at a small table and peered down at a stack of papers. Ethan could see a little more of his face—twin pinpricks of glint from his reading glasses perched upon his large nose.

  “Ethan Allen Pierce, born 1982 to parents Edward and Carolyn Pierce,” the man read. “Graduated cum laude from Cornell University. Failed to enter Officer Candidate School after an incident with a drunk driver. That must have been very disappointing for you. And for your parents, perhaps? Your patriotic father? A real cowboy, I understand.”

  “You tell me. I’m sure it’s all in your file there.”

  “So you say. I found your Agency record surprisingly incomplete. That incident in the car. It leaves out many details regarding the death of your friend. What was his name? Eric, I believe? So lucky for you to survive. So unlike your father’s pitiful failures.”

  Ethan showed no reaction. He hadn’t seen his dad since the day he married Sarah. If this man wanted some means to rattle him, Eddie Pierce was not the means to do it.

  “At any rate, you wandered Europe before taking that fateful leap to the CIA. It seems you excelled. Several times in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan, Turkey. Iraq, of course. What would they say of you, Mr. Pierce? That you are a good soldier. Isn’t that the phrase?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “A good spy then, yes? An eager and willing participant in the chronic meddling of the United States. Do you like your work? You seem to. Does it bring you pleasure in an otherwise miserable existence? You are a targeting officer for the CIA. How very official. Do you always get your man?”

  Now the man pried closer. Whatever his angle, whatever calamity he hoped to inflict on the world, Ethan couldn’t let it happen. He didn’t know how Scorpio had infiltrated the CIA or how they had dismantled his team and stripped Paul Corso of everything short of his life. They’d take that too if they wanted. No one was coming for him now, so he had to lean on the one thing that mattered most in targeting work—the patience for his target to make a mistake.

  “Not always. Some of them end up dead,” he said with a hard look at his captors.

  “Like Seda Alaskhanova,” said the bearded man. He sought no answer, but merely mentioned her name like an item in a catalog, the parts of a plan he’d pieced together far away from the lives chewed up by his machinations.

  “Yes, like her,” Ethan answered. He turned to Andrei who stood unmoved, even at the mention of her name. “That was your doing.”

  Andrei reacted with a shrug. Ethan knew the kind of man he was then. Passionless. Psychopathic. He doubted Andrei even shared Scorpio’s aims, content instead to thirst after the adrenaline and spilled blood. It made him dangerous, but in knowing it he also knew Andrei’s limits.

  “What about your woman?” the bearded man asked. “Do you always get the girl? I neglected a relevant portion of your profile. Married August 16, 2008, to Sarah Manchester. Born 1984 to parents John and Kathleen Manchester. Father deceased. Graduated magna cum laude Cornell University …”

  The man peeked up from the file with a mocking glance for him.

  “That must have been a point of contention, hmm? She attended law school at the very time you—what do they say? Went to find yourself. You backpacked the wonders of the continent. I wonder if she knew what she was getting into with you then?”

  He returned to the file with a sigh.

  “Sarah Pierce employed since 2013 as a lobbyist for Decker-Reliant pharmaceuticals in Washington, D.C. Divorced in October 2017. I see she kept your name.”

  He was doing what they had already done to Paul Corso. Ethan felt the first pang of helplessness well in his throat like a sickening gap that ached almost into his lungs. Paul must have felt the same when he realized what they did to Jane. Ethan couldn’t explain to his colleagues how he ignored his fears in the field. He couldn’t explain it even to himself. He did his job without a sense of fear because he had to. It was the only thing he believed in higher than himself. For the first time in doing what he had to, he felt fear—for her.

  “She’s got nothing to do with this,” Ethan said. “Leave her out of it.”

  “Or what, Mr. Pierce?”

  “Or I swear I will come to kill every last one of you.”

  The man paused. The light surrounding him changed shape, glowing through the white halo of his beard, beaming. The man smiled

  “Such violence, Mr. Pierce,” the man said. “And as for your wife, there, too, we disagree. She has everything to do with you, and that has everything to do with me. We have a mutual acquaintance who informs me you are rather sensitive about your ex-wife. Ms. Hessler was quite emphatic on that point, in fact. But I have not finished. Where was I? Sarah Pierce, et cetera, et cetera. Here it is. Married Kerim Osman June 15, 2019. Why, that was just last week. She is currently enjoying her honeymoon, not far from where we sit. What a remarkable coincidence.”

  He heard Sarah’s voice replay in his head from the tin box recording on his phone. So, I hope you’ll be okay. I know you will. There was no going back to her now. Ethan focused his rage, willing himself to remember every detail about the interrogator’s obscured face. For later, he told himself.

  “Have I said I admire your tenacity, Mr. Pierce? I do. Call it a professional courtesy. After all, you have caused us some complication. And now you alone sit here. None of your peers have joined you. I would not call you heroic. Noble, perhaps. Clever. I do give you credit for cleverness. But you are tenacious most of all. Like a dog who won’t let go of his master’s prey, even when it is called back.”

  His interrogator stood up and entered the light, moving his hand as he talked like a toothed maw that clasped onto his other arm. “You bite down and refuse to let go. You refuse to see what’s going on around you. You don’t even seem to know why, just like a loyal dog.

  “Whereas we are like wolves,” he said. Now his hands moved in slow circles, fingers snapping together in sequence as he did. “There are many of us. All around you. We bide our time and bite when we must. Until our prey tires, and its demise becomes inevitable. You see? As I said, you alone are here, not the looming threat of your drones. Not your special forces. Only you. And for that I credit my own tenacity.”

  The man approached him and crouched to his level so close Ethan could smell his musky cologne and bitter breath. He saw the man’s face in full, an older man with white hair and darker wild eyebrows with a wedge of a nose stabbing at his face.

  “You asked me earlier what it is we want. Despite appearances, this is no interrogation. You have already given us what we want.”

  He motioned to Andrei, who manipulated the camera. Ethan heard the squawking of his own voice, almost unrecognizable to himself. Then he heard it. I swear I will come to kill every last one of you. The voice was someone else, an angry shadow of his. It was so unlike him, but he felt its anger and knew the truth of it. He had said it, even meant it.

  “You see?” The man wandered back to his table.

  Brilliance again blinded Ethan as the man left the light. He looked away, and the mote of a bright sun followed his vision.


  “Your tenacity forced me to alter our original plans. Some would call this my flair for the dramatic. I confess the truth of it, but it is no mere vanity. You have become remarkably convenient for us in your way. You were so very close to everything, after all. Now we have you to thank for providing the means to conceal our current undertaking. We need only advance our schedule and see to it your lost love’s honeymoon receives a truly unique gift. Perhaps from a jilted ex-husband? She will be part of my great experiment. A field exercise. Call it a study in human behavior, if you like. I’ll leave you to guess the outcome.”

  At once he knew the depths of it. They were ready to unleash Kamran Khorasani’s virus. They would start with Sarah, wherever she was, and blame him as the jealous lover. In a hurried breath, a greater rage filled the emptiness in his throat and consumed whatever fears he held within him. It didn’t matter if they killed him. He couldn’t let them do this to her.

  He leapt from the chair and pulled it from beneath him. To his right, he sensed Andrei’s movement as the more dangerous man facing him crouched to intercept. Ethan heaved the chair with both hands. Andrei ducked and raised his arms to bat away the awkward shape of the flying steel chair. Ethan heard a grunt as the thing crashed into Andrei. It gave him a moment to act.

  Ethan launched himself at the bearded man.

  He knocked over the light as he charged, and the room spun in a spiral of light and shadow. The man stood wide-eyed and frozen, his arms half raised. Ethan dove over the tabletop. He felt the fine cloth of the man’s suit and softer flesh beneath. Together they slammed into the far wall and fell to the ground. Ethan’s hands felt for the man’s neck. He ignored the man’s weakening attempts to pull his hands away.

  Andrei struck him with the chair. He felt the pain on his back. The agony surged through his body. He couldn’t breathe in air. Still he clutched to the man’s neck. With another blow, the light exploded like a burst in his brain and the bearded man’s gasping face faded from his sight.