“Sir, please go back to your bed,” the nurse protested, but Hayward waved her away.
The phone rang. Please, Hayward pleaded. Four rings, then five. A clunk as the line connected. He heard a familiar female voice, the voice that stirred him like none before in his life: “You have reached Katrin Ferdinand-Xavier. Please leave a message.”
No. Please, no. Hayward ended the call, then dialed the same numbers again. “Pick up, dammit!” he said, pacing.
It went to voicemail. He tried a third time. He heard a click after just two rings. His spirits lifted and hope filled his chest. Then his blood ran cold.
“You haven’t held up your end of the bargain, Mr. Hayward.” The voice was icy and unforgiving. It was a different voice, not the same man who’d called him at the hotel and activated the mission. The new voice was familiar, unnerving, and it transported Hayward instantly to the training grounds in northern Virginia where he had wilted countless times under the icy glare of the CIA legend. Artemis Grange.
Hayward was suddenly certain Katrin and her family would soon be dead.
“The safe was empty!” Hayward exclaimed.
“An unfortunate turn of events,” Grange said. “As you’re now aware, we’ve taken other measures.”
Hayward gripped the receiver. His mind raced, searching desperately for a point of leverage, anything he could use to intervene on Katrin’s behalf. But there was nothing. The safe had been his trump card. He’d played it, and he had lost.
It was over.
“If you harm her in any way,” he seethed, knowing his words smacked of desperation and defeat, “I will find you, and I will kill every one of you with my bare hands.”
There was a brief pause. “Mr. Hayward,” Grange said, “you knew the consequences of failure.”
“Goddamn you! She’s done nothing to you, and neither has her family!”
Grange was unruffled and unmoved. “Mr. Hayward, my advice is that you find an easy way to die, and you do it as soon as possible. If you wait for us to find you, your death will be far from pleasant.”
The line went dead.
9
Sam traveled from Baltimore to Toronto on a one-way ticket purchased by Elizabeth Kincaid’s identity. Toronto was the first international departure on the schedule out of Baltimore, and Sam bought the ticket with no further plan in mind. She simply needed to put miles and borders between her and the mess in DC.
In Toronto, Sam checked in with Dan Gable. Dan’s investigation into the listening device and the cyber intrusion at Sam’s home had so far proven fruitless, so he had turned his attention back to the Doberman case. Sam was still troubled by the apparent clash between the Doberman group’s low level of professionalism and the sophistication of the break-in at her home, but Dan had a sense there might be a connection.
Dan had set the Homeland computers a-whirring, digesting and dissecting the connections between the various personalities involved in the Doberman scheme. One name popped up more than two dozen times in the Doberman network analysis: Mehmet Kocaoglu. Connections defined a network, and when a single individual emerged with a larger-than-average number of connections to other players, it always paid to take notice. The math suggested Kocaoglu was someone of influence in the Doberman group.
“It’s a familiar name,” Sam said. “Why is that?”
“Kocaoglu came up several times during our Ezzat surveillance,” Dan said over the burner connection. “They communicated once or twice a week.”
It was more than enough reason to look more deeply into Kocaoglu. “What else do you have on this guy?” Sam asked.
Mehmet Kocaoglu lived in Izmir, Turkey, Dan explained. Once or twice a month, the man traveled to Washington, DC, for reasons that weren’t yet clear. His frequent trips to DC would have given him ample opportunity to open a surveillance operation against her, Sam thought. She still wasn’t sure why anyone would want to put her under the microscope, but it seemed that even if the motive wasn’t clear, Kocaoglu certainly had plenty of opportunity.
“Do you think he’s behind the break-in?” she asked.
“Doubtful. From the message traffic, it looks like he hasn’t been to the US since the week before the incident with Ezzat.”
“It may be worth paying him a visit anyway,” Sam said.
“Haven’t you been suspended?”
“Yes,” Sam said. “And I wasn’t supposed to leave DC, either. But I consider these to be extraordinary circumstances.”
“So you’re going to call Mace and tell him what you’re up to?”
“Absolutely not,” Sam said. “There’s no guarantee Homeland isn’t compromised. Hell, every time I think about calling McLane, thoughts of Tom Jarvis pop into my head.”
“That was a long time ago, Sam,” Dan said. “Jarvis is dead and gone.”
“Right,” Sam said, “so that kind of thing could never happen again?”
Dan didn’t respond.
“Getting out of North America seems like a really attractive option right now,” Sam said.
There was a long silence. “You’re going to ask me to keep a secret again, aren’t you?” Dan said.
“Only a small one.”
Dan didn’t answer.
“What should I have done?” Sam asked with an edge in her voice. “It’s not like someone drove by my house and threw a rock through the window. These guys hacked my goddamned alarm and my surveillance system, and they dropped a high-end bug on me without my noticing. They were professionals.”
Dan sighed. “I’m not going to lie for you,” he said.
“I’d never ask you to. When they ask, just tell them you haven’t seen me. Totally true.”
“Fine,” Dan said, “but what about when they ask whether I’ve heard from you?”
“You’ll think of something.”
Dan didn’t reply.
“Dan, if you have any better ideas, I’m all ears. But I don’t have a death wish and I’m not going to sit around hoping this will just go away.”
“Okay, Sam,” Dan finally said. “I’ve got your back. But please be careful. And don’t you dare screw me over.”
“Have I ever?”
“No comment.”
“So you’ll send me Kocaoglu’s details?’
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Thanks, Dan. You’re a lifesaver. And a lonely American girl could sure use a friend in a strange city.”
“I’ll see what I can do on such short notice.”
“My money’s on you,” Sam said.
Sam bought a ticket from Toronto to Izmir using her Catherine Bachner legend. Two hours later she found herself looking out the little oval window at the Atlantic Ocean thousands of feet below, mulling over the strange set of circumstances and second-guessing her decisions.
Perhaps Kocaoglu knew something about why Sam was suddenly in the crosshairs. Or perhaps he knew nothing at all about it. Either way, there was something to learn from the man, and traveling to Izmir was also a great way to satisfy her immediate need to put as many miles as possible between herself and the mess in DC. So why was she conflicted about her decision to fly to Turkey?
Sam went to the lavatory and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror. It momentarily startled her. She wore a platinum blonde wig, and heavy eye makeup made her look like a rock-and-roll groupie. Tinted contact lenses turned her fiery green eyes blue. It wouldn’t be enough to fool any of the facial recognition algorithms in use around the globe, but Sam was betting it would be enough to buy her at least a few seconds against her human adversaries.
She returned to her seat from the lavatory and closed her eyes, hoping for some much-needed sleep. But it did not come. Instead, the bloody scene in the park assaulted her mind. Tariq Ezzat’s bullet-riddled body in a heap just feet from the brightly colored playground equipment. The smell of gunfire hanging in the air. Sarah Beth’s limp form hanging from her mother’s arms. Elizabeth McCulley’s shatterin
g panic and despair. Sam’s throat tightened and her stomach knotted.
To distract herself, she tried to focus on operational factors, probing for some link between Tariq Ezzat, Mehmet Kocaoglu, and the sudden and unnerving interest someone had taken in her. She couldn’t make the pieces fit together. She was missing something important. Perhaps she would find it in Izmir.
Sam disembarked and walked straight to the ladies’ room. She secured a stall, reached into her oversized overnight bag, fetched a change of clothes and a dark wig, and transformed her appearance yet again. She stopped at the mirror and added more eye makeup in the heavy-lidded style common among cosmopolitan Middle Eastern women.
Her appearance was far from inconspicuous. A pair of white capris hugged her hips and a bright snug blouse accentuated her curves. She garnered quite a bit of attention as she walked briskly toward the airport exit, but the looks were far more sexual than operational. She was hiding beneath her own skin, which played perfectly into the cover she had devised: a journalist doing a fluff piece on young international businessmen and their jet-setting lifestyle.
Sam checked her watch, did the time-zone math, and decided it was time to buy another burner. She used the credit card with Catherine Bachner’s name and her own likeness over the holographic bank logo to purchase a small pre-paid handheld, which she activated immediately.
She typed a long series of digits, and on the seventeenth ring, precisely as planned, a computer answered her call. A robotic voice prompted her for a passcode which she dutifully typed. A dozen digits later, the computer prompted her to state the date and time. Sam obliged and hoped the airport background noise wouldn’t give the voice-recognition algorithm any problems.
Technology won the day, and the robotic voice soon informed Sam that she had one message. Dan Gable’s baritone filled her ear, diminished by the cheap phone’s tinny speaker. “Hope you survived the trip,” he said, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Sam’s dislike of the universally dehumanizing airline experience.
“The algorithms discovered an IP address match between four different personas in the Doberman group,” Dan’s message continued. “Each one of those personas had about as many connections as our man Kocaoglu, which makes sense, because the IP address match was with his Internet router.”
English, please, Sam silently exhorted.
“In English,” Dan’s message went on, a knowing smile evident behind his words, “Mehmet Kocaoglu is using four different identities to communicate with lower-level people in the Doberman group. My hunch is that he uses a different persona with each of four different cells. That means he’s four times more important than we originally thought.”
“He used a different computer to communicate with each group,” Dan’s message said, “but he sometimes kept all of them in his apartment in Izmir, and they auto-connected to the same Internet router for software updates, which is what gave him away.”
Sam smiled. It was a lucky break. Kocaoglu had been sloppy to leave such an obvious link between disparate sub-groups, but that was often how things went. People made mistakes, and for every ten cases Sam solved, at least nine of them hinged on the bad guys’ errors, however slight and innocuous they might have seemed at the time. And most mistakes were technology-related. There was just too much stuff going on inside humanity’s ubiquitous glowing boxes, and only a handful of people on the planet really understood how to cover their tracks.
Dan ended his message with a brief set of instructions which Sam committed to memory. He wished her a safe and productive trip, then signed off.
Sam strode out to the cab line and looked down the queue of taxis at the curb. She searched for the taxi with the David Beckham bobblehead glued to the dashboard. The cab was eighth in line. There were only six people in front of her, so she made a show of patting her pockets and rummaging through her purse as if she’d lost something. She stepped out of line, retraced her steps for a few paces until someone took her place, then took position at the back of the line.
When her turn came, the cabbie popped open the trunk and took her bag from her. “A glorious day, madam,” he said in formal and mildly accented English.
Sam recalled the appropriate response from Dan’s message: “More so by the minute,” she said.
She buckled into the backseat. As the cab pulled away from the curb, she shoved her hand into the storage pouch sewn into the back of the passenger seat in front of her. Her hand touched cold steel. A Beretta, chambered in .40 caliber, with a full magazine of hollow-point rounds. Enough to stop a rhino on cocaine, she figured.
“Don’t forget the extra magazine,” the cabbie admonished with a smile.
Sam reached into the pouch a second time, retrieved the spare ammunition, and placed it carefully in the side pouch of her handbag.
“Now you are ready to party, madam,” the cabbie beamed.
Shopping wasn’t Sam’s preferred pastime, but she had great taste and she never minded spending someone else’s money. She meandered through the upscale galleries and stylish clothiers on the posh strip adjacent to the Four Seasons Hotel, her accommodations for the evening. She spent most of the time checking for tails—none so far, though she’d have felt more comfortable if she’d spotted at least one. Seeing no one following her only made her paranoid that she wasn’t looking closely enough.
She used the Catherine Bachner credit card to buy a set of extremely sexy undergarments, a skimpy but shockingly expensive cocktail dress, and a pair of Jimmy Choo counterfeits. That she could tell the difference between real and fake designer shoes was a fact that Brock often lamented—it betrayed an affinity for the finer things that occasionally found its way onto her credit card statements.
Her stomach tightened as she thought of him. She was probably only a thousand miles away from him at this very moment, she mused, but he might as well have been on the moon. She longed for just a few moments with him to reconnect and re-center. She was never more alive than when they were together, and his lengthy and involuntary deployment had left her feeling dark and lonely. She longed for his embrace and comfort, but had settled for a few brief and labored phone conversations each week with a brutally annoying transatlantic delay. They’d spent half the time apologizing for talking over each other and the calls had left her feeling lonely and isolated. And the Sarah Beth McCulley disaster had obviously done nothing positive for her state of mind.
She fantasized about sneaking off to see Brock, but the thought died quickly. There was no way in hell she would be able to wrangle a visit to the prison-like air base he was stuck on. And she had no idea which of Uncle Sam’s many Middle Eastern air bases currently held him captive. She sighed, feeling the kind of tired that sleep couldn’t remedy.
She took a circuitous route back to her hotel, pausing at several shop windows, pretending to admire the goods while using the reflection to scan behind her. Still no sign of a tail.
Once at the hotel, Sam took a long, hot shower, tended to her legs and bikini line, toweled off, and set an alarm to wake her just before midnight. Worn out from the long journey and stress, she quickly fell asleep.
10
The driving club rhythm throbbed in Sam’s chest and she moved her hips to the beat as she pretended to sip her drink. Nubile girls and chiseled young men half Sam’s age danced in cages suspended from the ceiling. Deep blue lights bathed partiers in a surreal gleam, and modern sofas supported couples in the early stages of the human mating ritual.
Getting too old for all of this, Sam thought. But she knew she could pull it off. She had the confidence and self-assurance of a mature woman, but her strenuous workout routine and Spartan diet had given her the body of someone much younger. She stood five-ten in flats and her build featured ample acreage where it was desirable and none where it wasn’t. Despite the stress and sleep deprivation of her work at Homeland, her face was remarkably wrinkle-free. She looked a decade younger than her forty-something years. She was still eminently doable, in other words, a ch
aracteristic that formed the backbone of her plan to exploit Kocaoglu for access to his Doberman information. Maybe she would also learn something about who was targeting her.
She wore a jet-black wig with long bangs that draped over her eyes, and she wore much more eye makeup than normal. If Mehmet Kocaoglu was more than peripherally involved in the surveillance operation against her, there was a risk he would recognize her. Sam wanted to bias the odds in her favor.
Izmir’s international bright young things gyrated to the beat and Sam marveled at the sight. Turkey wasn’t known for its cosmopolitanism, but then Izmir wasn’t exactly representative of the rest of the country. It was by far the most Westernized of Turkey’s cities. It was the seat of the opposition political party and tended to be less influenced by Islam’s strictures than the rest of the country. Izmir was also far away from the Kurdish trouble in the east, which gave the place a far more relaxed atmosphere than the one that gripped cities closer to the insurgency.
It didn’t take long for Sam to spot Kocaoglu. He was slightly older than the average clubber, immaculately groomed, extremely fit, urbane, and in the company of two coquettish vacationers of nondescript European descent. His face held a mixture of sexual interest and boredom as he talked to the girls in his orbit. He was willing to settle for meaningless conquest, but searching for something more challenging, Sam assessed.
Sam could do challenging. Her eyes lingered on him as she put the straw between her lips. An obvious veteran of the game, he felt the energy of her gaze, and Sam read interest in his eyes as they met hers.
She turned away, her disinterest not entirely feigned. In another life, maybe Kocaoglu’s charms would have had more of an effect, but Sam had long ago embraced unadulterated monogamy with a man she loved deeply and madly. Tonight would be strictly business.
As if on cue, Kocaoglu appeared at her side. “You’re on holiday,” he said.
The Blowback Protocol Page 5