Cold Shot: A Novel

by Henshaw, Mark

  “Not yet,” Jonathan admitted.

  Cooke nodded, picked up a binder sitting on the bench beside her, and handed it to the man. She motioned for him to open the notebook. “Three days ago, the USS Vicksburg pulled a corpse out of the Gulf of Aden a hundred miles off the coast of Somalia,” she started. “African male, midthirties. The deceased was found in a life raft without any means of navigation or propulsion. The captain assumed that he was a Somali pirate.”

  “Probably a safe bet. Not many good reasons for Somali men to be that far out in the Gulf,” Jonathan observed.

  “The victim’s knees had been shot off and his hands had been crushed. The bones were practically powder. NSA Bahrain performed the autopsy, but couldn’t establish a time of death. He’d been out there awhile . . . exposure to the elements and such. Pages two through six. I apologize if you haven’t had lunch yet.” It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  The next several pages were color photographs of the deceased. Jonathan studied each one while Cooke stared away in silence. He reached the coroner’s report and read through the paperwork more slowly than she would have preferred.

  After more than a minute, he looked up. “Burns under the clothes. Interesting.”

  “The Vicksburg’s chief medical officer thought it could be torture but he couldn’t identify the tool used on him. There was no pattern so the CMO theorized it might have been some kind of chemical burn.”

  “You want me to find the ship he came from,” Jon said.

  “Nobody loves a pirate but someone really had a grudge against this one,” Cooke explained. “I’m thinking that maybe his crew attacked a ship that somebody really didn’t want captured.”

  “Maybe,” Jonathan said. “Somali pirates seized the cargo ship Moscow University back in 2010 and the Russian Navy took it back a day later. But it was just carrying crude oil . . . nothing illegal.”

  “Yes, but the Russians publicized that raid. Nobody has gone public with this one, and from the state of the body, the raid happened a while ago,” Cooke pointed out. “This could be Iranians smuggling rockets to Hamas or Hezbollah . . . maybe the Russians running guns into a half-dozen African states. Lots of possibilities, none of them good.”

  “True,” Jonathan admitted. “The time interval would make it tough to identify the ship.”

  “The analysts tell me that there’s no way to find that ship without a starting point in time and space and a general course heading, none of which we have.”

  “You expected a different answer?” Jonathan asked.

  “You don’t sound surprised,” Cooke countered.

  “They’ll look at this as a geometry problem,” he explained. “Take the geographic starting point, multiply the number of hours since death by the maximum possible speed of the vessel and calculate the product of the equation. Pull out a map and draw a circle with the starting point at the center and the radius in miles traveled. Then they’ll wait a month for the State Department to coordinate with a few dozen other countries to investigate every ship that’s docked during the time frame at every port inside the circle. A general course heading would reduce the possibilities, maybe by half, but the problem set would still be prohibitively large.” He turned toward Kathy and finally looked her in the eyes. “You want me to do better.”

  “Isn’t that the Red Cell’s job? To solve the puzzles that other analysts find impossible?” Cooke asked.

  “Only as a favor to you. It’s not actually in the job description,” Jon told her. “The geometry method is one approach to finding a ship. It isn’t the only one, often not the best one, and its utility declines the farther out you get from the starting point in both space and time.” He shoved the photographs back into the binder. “I’m taking this,” he said, holding up the file. “I’ll call when I have something.”

  “Thank you for doing this,” Cooke said. “You could have made it unpleasant.”

  “The day is young.”

  He stood, then paused. Cooke looked up and was surprised to find him staring down at her. She smiled up at him. Not here, not now. There were a hundred office windows with a view of the garden.

  “Jon?” Cooke said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve missed you.”

  Jon didn’t answer for what seemed like a minute. “You know where to find me,” he said finally. It wasn’t a rebuke. “You should leave that office a little more.”

  “President Stuart only had a year left in office when he gave me the call. I thought they would replace me after the election,” Cooke said. “I serve at the pleasure of the president.”

  “I never asked you to resign.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that hasn’t gone unnoticed.”

  Jonathan smiled only slightly, then marched away on the sidewalk that wrapped around the Old Headquarters Building to the northwest entrance. Cooke closed her eyes again. After another five minutes, she gave up and walked in the other direction to the front doors.

  The Farm

  Somewhere in the Virginia Tidewater

  The Glock 17 kicked up in Kyra Stryker’s hands and she pulled it back down until the sights lined up with the target’s head again. The trigger had a smooth five-pound pull; she sent another round downrange and the bullet punched through the paper right where she wanted. The slug sent up a puff of dust from the dry dirt backstop twenty feet behind, one of a dozen kicked up at that moment by other shooters standing to either side.

  She had a rhythm going now, two shots per second, still loud enough to come thumping through her earmuffs. Her first trainers had taught her to aim for center mass and she put the last three bullets there just to prove she could do it right, but today she was pushing herself. The requalification shoot would be the one that counted and going for the head now would make the target’s chest look a mile wide by dinnertime.

  The Glock locked open, ready to receive another magazine, but Kyra had expended the four that she’d hand-loaded. The certification test would be for the Glock only, but Kyra tried never to miss a chance to fire something with a little more kick when the opportunity arose. She waited until the other shooters stopped, then ran out with the group to swap out her target for a fresh sheet. She wanted a pristine outline to work with for the other gun.

  The Heckler & Koch 417 was a beautiful piece of work, a gas-operated battle rifle with a twelve-inch barrel and holographic sight. She pushed a clip into the body and chambered the first round. The weapon felt heavy for its size but that’s what slings were for. She took a breath, released it, and stifled the reflex to inhale again. She looked through the sight, picked her spot, put her finger inside the guard and pulled back on the trigger. The barrel erupted, flash and smoke, and the rifle kicked just hard enough to hurt.

  She emptied that magazine, twenty rounds, every burst in the target’s head, then the second and third. She liked this gun, had thought about buying one for herself, but her salary didn’t allow it, not yet anyway. She could be patient. The Agency gave her enough time with its toys to satisfy her urge.

  Her ammo expended, Kyra stretched her arms behind her back to work out the soreness in her shoulder. She would need a heat wrap on it tonight after a long, hotter shower and Kyra still wanted to hit the jogging trail that ran behind the student billets through the old-growth forest that lined the river.

  She swept the empty magazines into her range bag and cleaned her station. Several of the other shooters, all men, she realized, were staring—half at her, half at her target. The bullet holes were all in nice, tight circles at the forehead and center mass of the thoracic cavity and Kyra had been shooting for fun, not for score. Still, she had done as well as any man here could’ve managed and better than most.

  She realized that the closest gawker was speaking to her and had forgotten that she still had ear protection on and couldn’t hear him.
She pulled off the headset.

  “What?” Kyra asked.

  “I said, you’re a SPO, right?” A security protective officer, one of the guards who kept the unwashed masses out of Agency facilities.

  Kyra looked past the man and scanned the firing line, where the other men had pulled down their ear protectors to hear her answer. She wondered if they hadn’t been taking bets. Kyra looked at the man’s face and she saw instantly that he was trying to project confidence, bordering on bravado, but a twitch around his right eye betrayed a sense of nervousness. He was wearing a tactical shirt and pants but both were relatively new, hardly worn. Not an operator. Those were all former soldiers and Special Forces who spent more time in the bush than in buildings, and they all came to the Agency with considerable weapons training. Her talent for observation had suggested it but the man’s target confirmed it. The shot pattern on his target was respectable but not impressive. A case-officer trainee, then, like she had been a few years before.

  That would make you more comfortable, wouldn’t it? she thought. If I had some good reason to be better than you?

  She shook her head.

  “Then who are you?” the man asked.

  She pulled off her safety glasses, dropped them and the ear protection into the bag, and then zipped it up. “I’m an analyst,” she said.

  Half the men on the line whooped, the other half cursed, and her interrogator grimaced as his face flushed red. He turned back toward his comrades and shuffled through the dust. She was sure he’d be on the business end of some late-night hazing now.

  Kyra holstered the Glock, then slung the bag and the HK over her shoulder, and walked back toward the range house.

  • • •

  The jogging trail was a mile of wide gravel and cleared dirt through the pines and old-growth trees, with poison ivy and Virginia creeper on the sides to keep runners on the path. It started by the main road that ran past the dining hall and her billet, bordered a field of unexploded ordnance, or so the signs warned, then curved west into the woods. The Virginia humidity was still on the rise in late spring and the evening air was cooler than normal for this time of year. It had been getting dark when Kyra set out, but the moon was full and she plowed on through the night. She’d even decided to tackle the challenge course despite the inherent danger of attacking such obstacles in the dark. Broken ankles and torn ligaments were real possibilities, as was spending the night in the forest a mile from her billet, crippled, until some other jogger came along in the morning to help her back. But daylight wasn’t a luxury or even a friend in the intelligence business . . . it was the enemy often as not, something to be shunned. Darkness was the ally for those who weren’t afraid of it.

  An intelligence officer who was afraid of the dark was in the wrong business.

  Kyra pushed through the course and made it back to her billet in time to catch the bar with time to spare, a hot shower notwithstanding. She’d missed dinner, but she’d had the dining-hall chow enough times to know that was no great loss and there were plenty of all-night dives close by.

  Kyra rested her elbows on the hardwood trim that lined the bar counter, set her glass down on the granite top, and scanned the room. It was almost empty. The flat-panel televisions were all tuned to news channels that were recycling the same stories for the second time since she’d arrived. The fireplace behind her was framed by a pair of elephant tusks mounted on wooden bases that sat on the stone hearth. She couldn’t imagine how they had made their way to the Farm, or how the Agency had even allowed it, but she supposed that some cowboy from the Special Activities Center had smuggled them in. Three men were playing pool badly at a nearby table. One lonely soul was throwing darts at an old board to her left and Kyra hoped the young man didn’t have aspirations of becoming a professional.

  Her cell phone rang, a Bruce Hornsby song that turned the bartender’s head. Kyra looked at the screen on the phone, then smiled. “Hey, Jon.”

  “You’re at the bar, aren’t you?” he asked without preamble.

  “Yep.” Really, Jon? Where’s the trust?

  “Beer?”

  “Ginger ale,” Kyra answered. And proud of it.

  “Ginger ale and what?”

  “And ice.”

  “Good for you.” He wasn’t being condescending, she knew. Kyra wasn’t an alcoholic, but she’d come close and working a job where one’s coworkers were hard drinkers was a prescription for trouble. Jon knew it and was being protective, which was a rare thing for him. She’d learned to appreciate it, slowly.

  “How was the range?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “It was good. I requalify on the Glock first thing in the morning.”

  “I heard you were shooting the place up with the heavy artillery.”

  Kyra half smiled and wondered who at the Farm was part of Jonathan’s network of informants. “I wanted to play with something that had a bit more kick.”

  “The joys of life are in the small things, I suppose,” he said. “You’re wrapped up down there?”

  Here it comes. She was surprised he’d taken this long to get to the point. “Just the one test left, yeah,” Kyra admitted. “Why?”

  “I need you back. The director gave us an assignment this morning,” he told her. “We have to track down a ship.”

  “And you haven’t found it by now?” Kyra teased.

  “I have some thoughts, but I thought you might like a chance to look things over.”

  That’s generous. It was also unusual, for Jon anyway. Jonathan didn’t like letting a puzzle lie unsolved and he was stubborn and socially distant, so these kinds of gestures were as close as he ever came to admitting any affection for her, and they were rare. Kyra checked her watch. She couldn’t get to Langley until well after midnight at the soonest. “I’ll head out first thing after my range test,” she said.

  “Get here by lunch.” Jonathan disconnected.

  Kyra set the phone back down. Well, she thought. That calls for something a bit stronger.

  She tapped the counter. “I’ll take a Coke.”

  • • •

  The rising sunlight was cutting through the river fog when Kyra decided it was time to leave. Then she stood there another ten minutes anyway. Jonathan could wait that long. If he complained, she would blame the delay on traffic. Route 95 north was always an iffy proposition and the Washington Beltway was forever a tangled mess. It would be a lie but the view here was worth a sullied conscience.

  Kyra sat on a fat granite boulder on the shoreline, no coat, enjoying the morning air. She did love the Farm. It was very much like home, Scottsville, which sat farther inland along a Virginia river like this one. This would be a fine place to end a career, teaching a new generation of case officers their trade. But that would be years away if ever.

  She looked east along the trail and found the spot she was looking for. It was overgrown now with cattails and marsh grasses. Pioneer had sat there a year ago the day after she had exfiltrated him from China. He had lived here for three months after so they could debrief him and set up his new life. She had seen despair in the man’s eyes that afternoon, the first time he had realized the full price he would finally pay for treason. To never go home again . . . she couldn’t imagine it. Kyra had sat down beside him that afternoon for an hour, saying nothing because she spoke no Mandarin and he spoke almost no English. It occurred to her that this place, which felt so much like home to her, must have felt like an alien world to him.

  The day they moved him out, she’d driven him to the airfield. He’d learned a little more English by then and was able to offer a broken farewell. They loaded him on the plane and she watched as it took off into a cloudless sky and disappeared. Now she wondered where he was. She knew the Clandestine Service wouldn’t tell her anything. Pioneer was no longer an Agency asset but his case was compartmentalized as heavily now as it e
ver had been.

  Kyra heard movement in the brush behind her and she turned. A family of white-tailed deer, unafraid of humans, was grazing near her truck, which she’d parked on the paved one-lane trail that doubled as a bike path along the shoreline.

  Time to go, she thought, and this time she forced herself to move. Kyra trudged up to her Ford Ranger and crawled in. The deer looked up when she started the engine but didn’t run.

  She drove out to the main road and it took five minutes to reach the main gate. Kyra rolled down her window and passed her badge to the guard at the shack.

  “You coming back?” he asked.

  “Not today,” she said.

  He filed her badge away in a box to be recycled. “Have a safe drive.”

  Kyra nodded and pulled out onto the highway and pushed the truck ten miles over the limit.

  CIA Headquarters

  The traffic had mostly stayed out of Kyra’s way but the Agency parking lots hadn’t been so cooperative. A failed twenty-minute search for something better left her parked by the Mail Inspection Facility and had given her more than a quarter-mile walk to enter headquarters.

  Kyra navigated the crowd by the cafeteria, then finally bypassed it altogether through a stairwell by the library that opened into the 2G corridor. Kyra plodded down the empty hallway, swiped her badge against the reader, and the door to 2G31 Old Headquarters Building clicked open.

  She didn’t bother to announce herself. Jon’s door was cracked open and the vault was small enough that he would hear her entrance.

  “The file’s on your desk,” he called out from his office.

  Kyra dropped her satchel by her chair then leaned over the desktop. A manila folder was laid open there, a photograph on top of the papers. She glanced at the picture and regretted it.

  “And this couldn’t wait until after I had lunch?” Kyra asked him, staring at the photo. A burned, bloated carcass of an African male looked back at her. Kyra was not squeamish, but someone had died slow and ugly. She skimmed over the Vicksburg CMO’s description of the remains.