The Athena Project

by Brad Thor

  “Earth to Vicki,” Ben said, waving his wineglass in front of her. “Are we going to toast or what?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, getting control of her thoughts. “Here’s to your promotion.”

  “Here’s to our exposé on what the government is really doing beneath Denver International.”

  They clinked glasses and as she drank, all she could think about was getting out of there and reporting in. She hadn’t seen her handler in weeks. They’d communicated, but he hadn’t wanted to meet in person. He’d said it was too dangerous. But with this development, he’d have to meet with her. At least that’s what she hoped.

  “So, I think we should go out and celebrate tonight. That is, unless you’d rather stay in,” Ben said, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

  There were multiple motivations that could be played upon when recruiting someone to spy—money, sex, ideology, excitement, and coercion were the primaries. If you could hit on one of those when recruiting someone, you were good, but if you could hit on more than one, you were golden, and the subject would do anything you wanted. Vicki Suffolk had recruited Ben Matthews based upon his distrust of his own government and had cemented his loyalty to her through sex.

  She hadn’t been able to figure him out at first. Any other man would have jumped at the chance to sleep with her. Secretly, she had suspected he might be gay. But then she started to worry that perhaps he was playing her. The night the thought had popped into her mind, though, Ben had taken her to bed and he had been eating out of the palm of her hand ever since.

  Vicki set her wineglass on the counter. “Actually, tonight wouldn’t be the best of nights to celebrate, if you know what I mean.”

  “Why? Are you going out with somebody else?”

  Vicki slapped Ben playfully across the shoulder. “Honestly.”

  Ben was not an expert on female anatomy, but Vicki Suffolk had the most erratic menstrual cycle of any woman he’d ever met. “I understand,” he said. “We don’t have to have sex. We can just go out and have a good time. Or we can order in and watch a movie.”

  “One of my professors has evening office hours tonight. I told you about it a couple of days ago. Remember my dissertation?”

  Posing as a grad student at the University of Denver was part of her cover, and the dissertation had been her go-to excuse for everything.

  “Maybe you can come by after?” he said. He sure hoped so. Vicki Suffolk was one of the most sexually adventurous women he had ever been with. Until her, he had considered himself pretty straitlaced, but she had unlocked something wild in him and he couldn’t get enough of her.

  Vicki laughed and kissed him as she stood up. “We’ll see what happens. I’ll text you later.”

  “That’s it?” he complained. “You’re going? You haven’t even finished your wine.”

  Vicki kissed him again.

  “Okay, okay,” said Ben, kissing her back. “I don’t have any plans to go out, so you can text me as late as you want.”

  Vicki was halfway to the door already when she said, “We’ll see, okay?”

  “Right,” he said, a bit dejectedly. “Drive safely.”

  “I will,” she told him as she reached the door.

  “Love you,” Ben said as the door closed. He had no idea whether she had heard him.

  Crossing the living room, he looked out the peephole to make sure the hallway was clear. Stepping away from the door, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number of someone he had very purposefully not told Vicki about.

  “She’s gone,” he said as a voice answered on the other end. “When can we meet?”

  CHAPTER 12

  ADRIATIC SEA

  Where are you going to interrogate Bianchi?” asked Julie Ericsson after they had gathered back up on the bridge.

  Riley had remained below to keep an eye on and assess the prisoner. He was strapped to a backboard and had regained consciousness. He had suffered several broken ribs and probably a concussion from being tossed out his third-floor window into the canal. He was in pain, but he’d live.

  “All I know is that I’m supposed to sail to a town on the other side of the Adriatic called Neum and I’ll get further instructions there,” replied Harvath as he set the yacht on a course of south-southeast.

  Megan Rhodes, Gretchen Casey, and Alex Cooper were sitting there with bottles of water and plates of food. “What do you think is going to happen to him?” asked Cooper.

  “I’ve got no idea,” he responded. “But I can guarantee you our little Q&A isn’t going to be pleasant.”

  “Do we know who else was involved in the Rome attack?” asked Rhodes.

  Harvath shook his head. “Bianchi may have provided the C4 for the bombing, but he didn’t order the attack. Somebody else did. That’s why I want to interrogate him myself. I think whatever those terrorist attacks were, they were only the beginning. That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out.”

  “You and Riley?” asked Casey. “Together?”

  “Yeah. The powers that be thought I’d draw less attention if we traveled as a couple.”

  “Where were you before Venice?”

  “Sorrento and Sicily.”

  “Sounds romantic,” said Casey.

  “Not really,” he said, changing the subject. “How’s Nikki?”

  Nikki Rodriguez was an Athena Team member whose life Harvath had saved on a recent assignment.

  “She’s doing much better,” Casey replied. “The doctors say she’ll be back at work sooner than they originally expected.”

  Harvath smiled. Nikki was a remarkable operative. “Tell her I said hello,” he started to say, but he was interrupted by the ringing of his encrypted satellite phone. “That’s going to be Hutton,” he remarked as he tossed the phone to Casey.

  Knowing that sat transmissions worked best via line of sight, she stepped from the bridge and outside onto the deck.

  The night air was warm and humid, the seas calm. What little chop there was, the powerful yacht cut right through.

  Lieutenant Colonel Rob Hutton’s voice was so clear, it sounded as if he were standing right next to her, rather than thousands of miles away back at Fort Bragg. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “We had to improvise a little bit,” replied Casey, “but it was a success. We got him.”

  “We’re already hearing that there was a lot of shooting.”

  “Not our fault.”

  “How’s the team?” asked Hutton. “Everyone okay?”

  “Everyone’s fine.”

  There was a pause. “How about you?” he asked.

  Casey looked up into the sky and wondered if one of the stars she saw was the satellite beaming Rob Hutton’s voice into her ear. “I’m fine, Rob.”

  “You’re sure?”

  There was no way he was in the Joint Special Operations Command center talking to her like that. He had to be standing outside somewhere, alone.

  She closed her eyes and allowed herself to pretend for a moment that he was right there. She pictured his blond hair and blue eyes. His shoulders. His smile. Then she pictured his wedding ring and the moment was gone.

  If Hutton couldn’t be strong enough for himself and his wife, she’d have to be strong enough for all of them.

  It was over a year ago that it had happened, but it still felt so fresh, so recent. It had been only a kiss, but it was the most dangerous kiss of her career. They had allowed their attraction to each other to override everything else, and they had stepped over the line.

  No sooner had the kiss begun than Gretchen had broken it off. She sensed afterward that, if she hadn’t, he would have. Hutton loved his wife and Casey knew that. She also knew that he loved her, too. Regardless of what her feelings for him might have been, though, she swore she’d never let it happen again. It was one of the hardest resolutions she’d ever made.

  “I’m fine,” she replied. “Bianchi’s a bit beat up, though.”

  “Who did it? Rhodes? Coop
er? I’ll bet it was Ericsson again, wasn’t it? Damn it, Gretchen. You need to keep your operatives on a much tighter—”

  “Rob,” Casey interrupted, “relax. Nobody physically beat him up.”

  There was silence for a minute before Hutton said, “Oh. I’m sorry. It’s just that I thought—”

  “I kicked him in the chest and knocked him out a third-story window.”

  “You what?” he shouted. “Damn it, Gretchen. You could have killed him.”

  “He’ll be fine.”

  Hutton and Casey had been down this road before. “So once again the ends justify the means?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Defenestration was the safest and most expedient option at the time. I exercised what I believed to be sound operational judgment.”

  “Save it,” said Hutton. “You’re not on the record.”

  Casey shook her head. She knew why he was upset. They weren’t fighting about who left the cap off the toothpaste. She colored outside the lines a lot. That’s what made her and the team successful. No, this wasn’t because of what she’d done to Bianchi or any of her unorthodox behavior on countless other operations. It was because as much as she wanted to, she refused to let Hutton get that close to her again.

  “I haven’t looked in the bags below deck, but I assume everything we need to get home is in there,” she said, changing the subject. “Clothes, money, passports, the usual?”

  Hutton wasn’t in the mood to fight her. It wouldn’t get him anywhere. “It’s all in there,” he said, his tone softening. “But we’re going to arrange to get more.”

  Casey didn’t like the sound of that. “More for what?”

  “I just heard from the Pentagon. There’s something they need you to do before you fly back.”

  CHAPTER 13

  CZECH REPUBLIC

  SATURDAY

  With a top speed of over forty knots, they traversed the Gulf of Venice in under two hours. Harvath and Riley dropped the team in the Slovenian coastal town of Koper. The idea had been to get them out of Italy as quickly as possible.

  It was dark when they arrived and found the car with German plates that had been left for them. After throwing their bags in the trunk and climbing in, Ericsson slid behind the wheel and drove them inland toward the A1. Rhodes acted as copilot as Casey and Cooper slept in back.

  It was a boring, pitch-black, nine-hour drive that cut across Austria to Salzburg, skirted Munich, and went up through Germany before crossing into the Czech Republic.

  Despite the coffee and energy drinks they’d purchased while gassing up the car and stretching their legs, everyone was exhausted. Even if they hadn’t had to drive nine hours, they still would have been wiped out. The Bianchi assignment had required absolute, laserlike focus from all of them. Each had performed at her physical and mental peak. What the women needed now were hot showers, a week of doing nothing, and probably more than a couple glasses of wine. What they had been given, though, was another assignment.

  They had stopped in Munich for breakfast, and by the time they pulled into the Czech town of Zbiroh, it was late morning.

  Sixty kilometers from Prague, Zbiroh was in the southeast of the country and the landscape looked very much the same as it had in Germany before they crossed the border; rolling green foothills, forests, and farmland. After they left the somewhat industrial city of Pilsen, there was nothing but small villages, cows, and Eastern Orthodox–inspired churches.

  “Okay, who’s up for shopping?” joked Rhodes as they took a drive through the rather austere couple of blocks that passed for Zbiroh’s center.

  “First guy we see with a full set of teeth is all mine,” said Ericsson.

  “If you can pry him off his sister,” added Cooper.

  Casey shook her head. “What a bunch of big-city snobs.”

  “Wait a second,” countered Rhodes. “I grew up in the Chicago suburbs.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Don’t bother arguing with her,” said Ericsson. “As far as Gretch is concerned, she’s got all of us beat in the small-town-girl thing.”

  Casey laughed. “If the Choo fits.”

  “You’re unbelievable,” replied Rhodes, unwilling to let it go. “My dad was a cop. Julie’s dad was a fisherman, and her mom taught school. Alex’s mom was an immigrant and her parents saved all they had to open a restaurant. You can’t get any more red, white, and blue than that.”

  Ericsson threw up her hands. “You’ve done it now, sweetheart.”

  “What? Why do you guys just roll over for her?”

  “Because they know,” said Casey.

  Rhodes let her mouth hang open as if she was heavily medicated and slurred, “That East Texas is the best place in the whole world.”

  Casey ticked the points off on her fingers as she spoke, “One gas station and only one gas station. It’s where you get your gas, get your car repaired, and fill up the air in your bicycle tires or the inner tube you’re taking swimming.

  “There’s only one store for groceries and if they don’t have it, you don’t need it. If you don’t dress and prepare your own game, the store’s butcher will do it for you. He’ll meet you in back, unload whatever you’ve got in your truck, and call you when he’s got your steaks, burgers, sausages, and jerky ready to be picked up.

  “The town has one doctor. He delivered my mother and he delivered me. He’s eighty-eight years old and he still makes house calls.

  “When our sheriff sees a ten-year-old boy walking down the road with a rifle he doesn’t call a SWAT team, he asks the boy how the hunting is.

  “We have one church and that church still puts on socials year round and picnics in the summertime.

  “We have front-porch swings because we like to see our neighbors pass by and we like to ask them how they’re doing. We know everyone’s names and they know ours. And yes, just about every single house flies the American flag.

  “So with all due respect to Honolulu, Atlanta, and Chicago, I think I’ve got all of you beat.”

  “We had a Williams-Sonoma,” snarked Rhodes.

  Casey smiled. “You didn’t have Mayberry. I had Mayberry.”

  “But if you wanted your ears or anything else pierced in Mayberry, you had to see the vet, right?”

  Casey shook her head. “Someday, when you finally come down to visit, you’ll see for yourself.”

  “Let me know when the Victoria’s Secret opens,” said Rhodes, “and I’ll be on the first covered wagon down there.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” said Cooper, who was now taking her turn driving, “but do we all have a feel for the layout of this place?”

  “I haven’t seen the public pillory yet,” offered Ericsson.

  “Or where they burn the witches,” chimed in Rhodes.

  Casey ignored them. “I think we’re good, Alex. Let’s head for the hotel.”

  Cooper nodded and made a left turn. She followed a narrow, winding road up to the top of the forested hill overlooking the town. There they were greeted by the statues of two enormous lions flanking the entrance of the majestic Zbiroh castle.

  “Wow,” said Ericsson. “I’m not surprised the Nazis commandeered this place during the war.”

  “As monstrous as they were, the SS seemed to appreciate the finer things in life, but that’s not why they picked this castle,” said Casey, who had been filled in, to a certain degree, by Hutton. “It is sitting on top of one of the largest quartz deposits in Europe. This hill functioned as a huge radio wave amplifier, and the SS used it as an electronic listening post.”

  “But what’s that got to do with the abandoned bunker we’re supposed to check out?” asked Cooper as she steered the car toward the south wing of the castle where the Château Hotel Zbiroh was housed.

  “Apparently, radio wave intercepts weren’t the only things the quartz helped amplify.”

  When Casey didn’t elaborate, Rhodes asked, “So are we supposed to guess what else t
he Nazis were working on here, Gretch?”

  In the parking area, several fit, serious-looking men with short, military-style haircuts, wearing plain clothes with tan tactical boots, had just taken up positions around a black Range Rover and distracted her. “I’m sorry,” said Casey. “A Czech-speaking SS Obergruppenführer named Hans Kammler had been sent into Czechoslovakia after the Nazis invaded to take over one of its largest industrial-engineering companies, called Škoda.

  “Kammler wasn’t a soldier, he was an engineer and a scientist. Some say he was Hitler’s most brilliant. He set up his offices in the city of Pilsen, which we passed about twenty miles back, but he lived here at the castle.

  “He was in charge of the Third Reich’s most avant-garde, cutting-edge scientific programs. He claimed that in addition to the quartz found throughout this region, he had discovered other ‘miraculous minerals,’ as he put it, that unlocked doors to things never before seen in science.

  “With the assistance of the Škoda staff, he began building bunkers and cave complexes throughout the region where he could protect his research, not only from aerial bombardment by the Allies, but also from the prying eyes of Allied spies, who very much wanted to get their hands on anything and everything that Kammler was working on.

  “One of the bunkers he had created was on the grounds here at the castle.”

  “But what specifically was he working on?” asked Cooper.

  “Hutton said that information was on a need-to-know basis.”

  “And we don’t need to know.”

  “Exactly,” replied Casey. “What I did manage to get out of him was that it had something to do with bending or absorbing radar waves. That was it.”

  Rhodes looked at Casey. “The Soviets took Czechoslovakia from the Nazis over sixty years ago. Why is there this sudden interest in Kammler and Zbiroh now?”