The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3

by Karen Robards

  “We’ve got a problem,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. No greeting, no preamble. Hanes’s gut tightened. The speaker was Greg Wafford, Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service, which oversaw the SOG. Wafford was Hanes’s boss, and one of the few in the know about Thayer’s capture. It was midnight in Langley, Virginia, where Wafford’s office was tucked away deep in CIA headquarters, but the operation Hanes had been waiting to hear about was mission critical. Wafford wouldn’t have left the building until the word had come down. “She got away.”

  She being Nomad 44, also known as Beth McAlister, also known by multiple aliases, the current one being Bianca St. Ives.

  Remembering in time what a tight-ass Wafford was, Hanes swallowed a curse. “You found her? The intel was good?”

  “It was. She was located right where you told us she’d be. Unfortunately, they failed to kill her and she escaped.” The heaviness of Wafford’s voice told Hanes what a blow that failure was.

  “She can’t have gotten far. She was in Savannah, Georgia, for God’s sake. Where could she go? The team can still get the job done. How hard can it be to kill one lone girl?” Hanes ran a hand over his face in frustration.

  “There’s where we have the problem. She’s no longer alone. She’s working for Five Eyes.”

  “What? How did that happen?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is we failed to kill her, and she somehow hooked up with a contractor who hooked her up with Five Eyes. You know what that means.”

  “Our hands are tied.” Hanes felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

  “That’s right. Under the terms of the UKUSA Agreement—” a pact for joint cooperation among the Five Eyes countries in signals intelligence, military intelligence and human intelligence, it was pronounced yew-kew-zah “—we’re pledged to cooperate with each other. Which means we can’t hit her. Officially.”

  Hanes absorbed both the words and the underlying meaning. Officially was out. Unofficially, however, was still on the table. “I understand.” He frowned as a sudden thought crystallized into a near certainty. “Would that contractor be Colin Rogan of Cambridge Solutions?”

  “It would. You know him?”

  “Our paths crossed in Macau. He was hunting Thayer.” While Hanes had been hunting Nomad 44. “But he showed interest in the girl.”

  Wafford made a sound that might have denoted mild amusement. “Pity we can’t contact Rogan and offer to trade Thayer for her.”

  “It is.”

  “We have an unacceptable degree of exposure in this matter that reaches into the very highest echelons of our government. The only way to eliminate it is to eliminate all traces of the Nomad program. Nomad 44 is living, breathing evidence of a project that should never have been undertaken in the first place. It was not only illegal, it was immoral. And you and I, who had nothing to do with creating it, are tasked with cleaning up the mess. Whatever it takes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I can trust you to see to it?”

  “You can.”

  “Good man. As expeditiously as possible. And remember, no fingerprints. Nothing that can be traced back to us.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And we need the body. Intact.”

  “I understand.”

  “Then take care of it.” Wafford disconnected.

  Hanes looked up to find Thayer watching him. It was impossible that he could have heard the conversation, but there was a mocking twist to his mouth that made Hanes’s own mouth thin.

  Dropping the phone into his pocket, scooping up the iPad that lay on the desk near where the phone had been, Hanes headed for Thayer’s cell. His weapon was practically burning a hole in its shoulder holster, he wanted to use it so bad.

  One of the reasons he’d had Thayer placed in that particular cell was that, with its drain and the multiple recessed water nozzles built into the ceiling and wall, it was an ideal place to execute someone by gunshot without leaving a hell of a mess.

  Thayer watched him enter without altering his position by so much as a twitch of a finger. The eggplant bruises covering his left side from shoulder to knee, the fading redness of still-healing burns, the jagged black lines of the sutures closing the cuts he’d suffered, seemed to bother him not at all.

  “Trouble, Special Agent?” Thayer’s tone was mocking.

  “I brought you something,” Hanes said. “A present.”

  Careful to stay well out of Thayer’s reach, he turned on the iPad and held it out so the other man could see it as the screen came to life.

  “Mummy, do you think Father Christmas will be able to find us here?” The speaker was Thayer’s seven-year-old daughter, Marin. Round-faced with big brown eyes and chunky brown pigtails, the little girl plopped down in a wooden chair pulled up to a small square table in an outdated kitchen in a farmhouse near Mittenwald, Germany. She was wearing a pink hoodie with jeans and seemed about to tuck into a bowl of something that waited for her on the table. Seen through a window behind the girl, the lavender of a dawn sky served as a backdrop for a snowy expanse of meadow and, beyond that, the steep rise of a majestic mountain.

  “Of course he will.” An attractive thirtysomething brunette in a fuzzy blue housecoat walked into the frame. She was Thayer’s wife and the child’s mother, Margery. She sipped from a cup as she spoke. “He never gets lost. Reindeer are better than a GPS for—”

  A knock, loud and authoritative, sounded at the door.

  Margery turned sharply to face it. The cup she was holding visibly shook. Marin’s eyes went huge. She jumped up from the chair.

  Through the window it was possible to see a helicopter settling down not far from the house.

  Margery set the cup down, grabbed for Marin. “Quick, we must—”

  Boom.

  The door burst open. Armed men in flak jackets poured into the room. Marin screamed and clutched her mother. Margery’s arms wrapped around her—

  Satisfied, Hanes turned the iPad off. Thayer’s face was absolutely expressionless. It told him everything he needed to know.

  “That’s right—we found them. Did you really think we wouldn’t?”

  Thayer’s eyes rose to meet his. His expression never changed, but there was a deadly coldness at the backs of his eyes that would have had Hanes grabbing for his weapon if Thayer had been less thoroughly restrained.

  “We had an agreement. A guarantee of safety for my wife and daughter in exchange for King Priam’s treasure. Which was delivered as promised.”

  “We weren’t party to that agreement. That was your arrangement with the Germans. Your agreement with us was that you would deliver Nomad 44.”

  “I’ve given her to you twice. Physically handed over her incapacitated body in Berlin. Told you where to find her in the US.” If possible, the quiet calm of Thayer’s tone was even more frightening than his eyes.

  “She got away from our kill team last night.”

  “Not my fault if the people you sent are incompetent.”

  “She got away the first time you handed her over to us, too.”

  “Again, not my fault.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Hanes stepped over to a button on the wall, smiled at Thayer and pressed it.

  Gushers of icy water shot out of the ceiling and wall to target the man on the bench. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time that day. Thayer had had a chance to get thoroughly dry, which Hanes hoped made the experience just that much more unpleasant.

  Other than closing his eyes against the onslaught, Thayer didn’t react. When Hanes was satisfied that he was soaked to the skin, he turned the water off.

  Thayer opened his eyes, blinked once and was still. Water sluiced down his face, down his body, ran toward the drain in the center of the floor. His hair was plastered to his skull. A faint blue tinge to his skin bore silent testimony to how very cold he was, but there was no shivering, no teeth chattering, no reaction whatsoever.

  The man’s i
ron endurance made Hanes itch to see what real torture could do.

  “I want to make myself very clear,” Hanes said. “Your wife and daughter are in our hands. Right now they are together and being well treated. We can change that at any time. We can file charges against your wife for aiding and abetting a fugitive, receiving stolen property, money laundering, any number of crimes. Enough to put her in prison for decades, which would, of course, separate her from your daughter. Or we can kill the pair of them, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. Thayer’s expression didn’t change, but the glint in his eyes made Hanes want to step back a pace. He didn’t, but he recognized the instinct that had kicked in as the primordial need to survive. “I don’t want to have to do either of those things. I don’t want to have to hurt a woman and child. But what happens to them depends on you. You have the power to get them released, to give them their lives back. You can even go home to them, and the three of you can live happily ever after.”

  “What do you want?” Thayer asked.

  “I want you to find and kill Nomad 44.”

  13

  Sunday, December 15th

  In Paris on a Sunday just about everything was closed. The shops, the supermarkets, even many of the restaurants went dark for the legally mandated day of rest. The wide boulevards with their imposing buildings of finely cut ashlar were thin of traffic as the residents of the City of Light settled in around their tables for the traditional dejeuner dominical. Tourists, of whom there were many so close to Christmas, flocked to the seven areas that were officially permitted to be open: the chain-store shopping strip Rue de Rivoli; historic Place des Voges; the Champs-Elysees, home of the Arc de Triomphe, with its theaters, cafés and luxury shops; Montmartre with its galleries and bookshops; and the Boulevard St. Germain, home to high-fashion boutiques.

  Others, tourists and locals, traveled beyond the Peripherique, the ring road that circled Paris, to what was said to be the world’s largest flea market, the Marche Clignancourt in Saint-Ouen.

  It was just after 2:00 p.m., and Bianca had done just that. She stepped off line four of the metro, which ran south to north through the city, passing through Montparnasse, Notre Dame, Hotel De Ville and Gare du Nord, and glanced around.

  No threat as far as she could tell. Didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Colin swore that the CIA kill team had been called off. His assessment of the situation was that they had approximately another twenty-four hours before the theft and the scope of it could be confirmed, Lynette Holbrook’s culpability established (it was the weekend, after all; the red flag of Lynette not reporting to work wouldn’t happen until Monday, and even spooks, especially high-level ones, tended to take weekends off), and the appropriate persons or teams dispatched to deal with the problem, i.e., her. Bianca really hoped he was right. Because if he wasn’t, well, the phrase dead wrong came to mind.

  Along with several dozen others, she climbed the steps to street level and joined the crowds walking past the Occo Chicken and the KFC, the flimsy sidewalk stalls with their tourist trap displays of tiny metal Eiffel Towers and Mona Lisa postcards and cheap imported T-shirts, the fruit and flower stands. As always when on a mission, she stayed on high alert, watching her flank through reflections in store windows, flicking glances at windows and rooftops that might provide a vantage point for a sniper, checking out passing vehicles, suspicious pedestrians, anything that might pose a threat. Not that she really expected to encounter trouble at this point: she herself hadn’t found out where she was going until just a few hours before she stepped onto the metro, so she doubted a killer was already there before her, lying in wait. But over the years taking precautions had become second nature, and in a situation like this she did so as automatically as she breathed.

  From the moment she’d made up her mind to do this, she’d been careful. She’d let Evie know that she would be gone for a while, not by phone or email, which could be monitored, but by having a box of Evie’s favorite candy delivered to her at the party with a note that read: “What can I say? He swept me off my feet. See you in a few days. Make my apologies to everybody.” She hadn’t even needed to sign it: Evie would know who it was from, would know that by he she was referring to the mysterious Mr. Tower, and would be thrilled and excited that her friend had at last fallen prey to torrid romance. To let Doc know she was alive, she’d shot him an email under the fail-safe as they’d agreed. The Jeep was registered to another false identity, so she didn’t fear having it traced back to her. The items she’d left inside it were a different story, but given the weight of the Jeep, which should have taken it straight to the bottom, the fact that its doors were open and the swiftness of the current, she figured that by the time anyone could hoist it out of the river everything inside it would be long gone. She debated notifying the police that she, in her fake identity as the Jeep’s owner, had survived the crash, but since she really, truly wanted the CIA kill team to think she was dead (fat chance, but hope springs eternal) she decided to hold off on that. She assuaged her conscience about the time and trouble that any search effort would involve by vowing to donate a generous sum to the search and rescue squad if she survived long enough to return to Savannah and do so.

  Arriving in Paris as Lynette shortly after 10:00 p.m. the previous night, she’d taken an airport shuttle bus to a hotel she wasn’t staying in. From that hotel she’d snagged a taxi to a metro station and ridden the metro to a street a few blocks from the hotel in which she meant to register. At that point she took another taxi to that hotel before registering, going upstairs, changing clothes and leaving again, walking the twelve blocks to the small apartment where she had actually spent the night. All of this with Colin trailing discreetly behind as they pretended not to be together, not to know each other, not to so much as be aware of the other’s existence on the same planet. Rinse, wash, repeat with minor variations this morning before she’d finally boarded the metro to the flea market.

  Bottom line, being Jane Bond was exhausting.

  The sun had broken through the morning’s rain showers so that the day looked bright and sparkly despite the puddles that still lay on the sidewalks and the sporadically dripping eaves. The temperature hovered around a chilly 42 degrees. Picking up the pace while still making sure to stay with the bulk of the tourists heading in the same direction, she walked briskly past a row of parked white vans abutting the flea market area because, just as a general rule, parked vans made her nervous.

  Assassins, kidnappers, robbers, CIA agents—a lot of bad actors did a lot of staging out of parked vans. She’d developed what amounted to an allergy to them.

  “Slow down, beautiful. I’m going to the dogs here.” Colin’s voice spoke in her ear courtesy of a specially designed earring that featured spirals of silver metal dotted with small faux garnets, the largest one of which was an earwig.

  “Try to keep up.” The transmitter was in a silver-and-garnet ring. Pretending to cough, she brought her hand close to her mouth to reply. At the same time, she sought and found a shop window to check out what was happening with him. The reflection showed her a tall, lean man in a peaked cap sporting a jaw full of stubble, small clear spectacles and a black peacoat over jeans. He’d been on the metro, too, although she’d caught only a glimpse of him, and she gave him full marks for trailing her almost invisibly. He fancied himself her bodyguard, which she thought was hilarious although she hadn’t (yet) told him so, but she suspected that he was also sticking close to keep an eye on her.

  Just in case she decided to go rogue.

  Right at that moment, the leashes of a small white poodle and a stocky pug were wrapped around his legs. Bianca listened through the earwig as a stoop-backed elderly woman scolded volubly in French as she worked to untangle Colin from her pets.

  She couldn’t help it. She smiled.

  “Idiot,” she said into the ring.

  And kept walking. Because waiting around for a man who supposedly wasn’t with you to catch up was bad tradecraft. Also becau
se messing with him was fun.

  The market was set up more like a blocks-long collection of side-by-side antiques shops than the open table displays and meandering aisles of a traditional flea market, and the goods, which included furniture and art, were on the expensive rather than the cheap side.

  Squinting through a replica of Lynette Holbrook’s black-framed glasses, transformed into Lynette in every outward aspect from the boxy toast-colored coat she wore with black pants and flats to the mousy brown wig and the prosthesis that filled out her cheeks, Bianca wandered through the booths, keeping her black faux leather shoulder bag pressed tight against her side to safeguard it against pickpockets and thieves, which followed tourists like a dog follows meat and thus were everywhere at Marche Clignancourt. Given her body language as Lynette—head down, shoulders slightly slumped, taking up as little visual space as possible—she might actually be a target, which as herself she never was, so she stayed on guard. All around her, her fellow patrons conversed in French. Her familiarity with the language clicked in, and she realized that she was no longer actively translating what she heard but following various random bits of conversation automatically. She didn’t see Colin, but she was confident that he’d extricated himself from his difficulties. Given the absence of shop windows, looking for him had the potential of attracting too much attention, so she didn’t.

  Her target was Park Il-hyeok. According to the intelligence reports she’d pored over, he visited the flea market nearly every Sunday. Park was an avid collector of antique Chinese ceramics with an emphasis on the Ming Dynasty, and regularly browsed the flea market in hopes that a piece would turn up that he could add to his collection.

  This interest of Park’s was to be her way in.