The Socotra Incident, Page 2

  Just remember, she thought, my name is Natalie...something. What’s my name again? She kept the smile on her face as a dribble of unladylike sweat rolled down her spine.

  The agent glanced back and forth between Natalie’s face and the passport. She flipped through the pages, her eyes lingering on the entry stamps and visas for other countries stapled to the pages.

  The agent put her hand on top of the desk, between a wooden stamp and a call button.

  I’m about to have the shortest career in CIA history. They’ll tell stories about me at the Farm for years, Natalie thought.

  She heard the sound of carry-ons rolling across the linoleum floors and the click of heels; the mass of passengers who’d flown coach were on approach.

  The agent grabbed the entry stamp and slammed it onto Natalie’s passport.

  “Welcome to Austria. Enjoy your stay,” she said.

  The agent slid the passport onto the counter, where it sat untouched, as Natalie looked on in stunned silence. The agent cleared her throat.

  “Merci—no, danke.” Natalie snatched her passport back and made a beeline for the baggage carousels. She passed the duty-free shops selling chocolates emblazoned with Mozart’s face and restaurants touting authentic Wiener schnitzel. The Wiener schnitzel looked more like chicken-fried steak than the hotdogs the similarly named fast-food chain in her native Las Vegas offered. Good, one more cultural faux pas to mark me as an ugly American, she thought.

  She stopped to look over a book kiosk, looking for anyone in her peripheral vision who had made a similar stop. Mirroring a surveillance target was an unconscious act and a dead giveaway that she was being tailed.

  She saw two Austrian police next to an emergency exit, with Steyr AUG assault rifles slung over their chests, shifting from side to side. They looked more bored with their shift than interested in running her down. No one else seemed interested in her.

  Bags from her flight were already on the carousel by the time she reached it. She looked around at the milieu of people, wondering which one was her contact. The code phrase was simple: “New York” for all clear and “Chicago” if she’d picked up a tail or unwanted attention from the local authorities.

  Her suitcase emerged from the center of the carousel and spat out onto the conveyer belt. She picked it up and carried it toward the customs station. As an army officer, she’d carried a duffel bag in each hand and a rucksack on her back as she deployed to and from Iraq. Carrying one suitcase shouldn’t have bothered her, but a woman with a $5,000—assuming it wasn’t fake—purse and $300 shoes simply didn’t carry her own bag, not when the airport offered a luggage trolley for a mere eight euros.

  “Excuse me,” a deep voice said from behind her. A man who was a foot taller than her, with sun-darkened skin and a build that belonged in a strongman competition, smiled at her. His left arm was in a sling; a cast started at his knuckles and disappeared into an uncuffed shirt.

  “Have the time?” the man asked.

  Natalie set down her bag and looked down at her watch. “Sorry, I’m still set on New York.”

  The large man nodded, reached past her with his good arm, and grabbed her bag.

  “Go through the leftmost customs station. Then find the blue BMW waiting for you. Plate ends in three one four,” he said and walked off with her bag.

  Natalie opened her mouth to protest the loss of all her packed clothes but caught herself. This would all make sense soon, she hoped.

  The customs officer she’d been directed to waved her past with a wink. For all her training on penetrating a country’s customs and immigration controls, her experience in Vienna had been underwhelming.

  Once outside, Natalie caught site of the distant Alps; snow still lay on the peaks, even this late in the spring. Taxis and limos jostled for position against the curb as she scanned the area for the BMW.

  A minibus pulled away, and she found her next contact. A whipcord-thin man in a black suit and limo driver’s hat lounged against the open trunk of a blue BMW. The driver noticed her and tipped his hat. He had a V-shaped face and barely any chin under a short beard peppered with gray.

  Natalie walked over, thinking how ridiculous it would be if he expected her to get in the trunk. Such a thing was inevitable, her instructors had promised.

  The driver took her carry-on without a word, tossed it into the trunk, and slammed it shut. He opened the driver’s door, furrowed his brow. Natalie got the hint and let herself into the rear seat.

  The driver pulled into traffic and drove them away from the airport.

  Natalie let the awkward silence continue for a few minutes. This was as far as her instructions took her. If she’d been compromised at the airport or if her contact hadn’t found her, she was to check into the Vienna Hyatt, act like a tourist for two days, then fly back to New York.

  “Excuse me. Where are we going?” Natalie asked.

  The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror with eyes the color of glacier ice. He put a gloved finger to his lips.

  The car turned off into the business district full of high-rise buildings and cars that were many times more expensive than what she rode in. They drove into a parking garage beneath one of the high-rises. The driver waved a key fob over a sensor at the drop-down arm blocking their way in. An armed guard took a phone call, looked hard at the driver, then raised the boom.

  The parking garage was almost empty; a few sports cars were parked far from each other. A stretch limo took up four parking spaces across from an elevator entrance.

  The car stopped at the elevator, and the driver held a key card to Natalie.

  Natalie took the card, which was bare of markings.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  The driver pointed his thumb at the elevator doors. The lock on her door popped open.

  Natalie rubbed the card between her thumb and forefinger. Her leaving the army for the CIA, the months of field craft training, evenings spent learning Russian with one-on-one tutors and the promise of making a real difference in the war on terror had all seemed like a brilliant idea up until this moment. Climbing onto the chartered plane that had taken her from Fort Campbell to the war in Iraq had been a great deal easier than getting out of this car.

  The lock on her door popped up and down several times, ruining her reverie.

  “Sorry,” she said. She got out and straightened her suit.

  The elevator was empty; the control panel had three buttons: open, close, and emergency. She slipped the key card into a slot over the buttons and waited. The BMW pulled away as the doors closed, taking her carry-on with it.

  The elevator didn’t display floors as it went up or even offer Muzak to calm her nerves.

  She felt the elevator come to a stop, and the doors opened to reveal a pentagon-shaped desk protruding into a clear Plexiglas wall. A large frosted logo of a steamship for Eisen Meer Logistics took up most of the wall to her right, over the only door past the wall.

  A Teutonic woman with close-cropped blonde hair smiled at her from behind the Plexiglas. A speaker in the wall, like she was a bank teller and not a receptionist for the weirdest company this side of the twilight zone, clicked to life.

  “Hello, Ms. Garrow. One moment while I inform Shannon that you’ve arrived,” said the receptionist. There was no hint of any European accent in her voice.

  Natalie stepped from the elevator and crossed her hands over her waist. This was the right place, at least.

  A man in his mid-twenties arrived seconds later, the bulge of a sidearm under his suit coat. He put his hand on the door and pushed it open as a buzzer sounded. He motioned down the hall with a nod.

  Not ones for chitchat, she thought.

  Natalie followed him past offices with glass walls. One office held a mess of computers in various states of disrepair. Another had a huge screen that took up almost the entire wall; dots of light marked all the world’s major shipping lanes. Three men huddled together in another office. One noticed her an
d clapped his hands twice; the glass wall went opaque in an instant.

  She followed her guide around a corner and stopped with him at an oaken door, the antique nature of the door at odds with the ultramodern office.

  Her guide opened the door, and Natalie went inside.

  The office had deep carpets; a Persian rug of exquisite detail lay under a massive desk that barely allowed passage around it. Computer screens glowed behind a high-backed ostrich-skin swivel chair. The occupant was turned away from Natalie; a phone line ran from a receiver around the chair.

  “I swear to God, Marco, if you don’t have that shipment in Naples by this time tomorrow, I will pop your nuts in a vice and use your falsetto voice as my new ringtone!” said a woman’s voice from the chair. “Oh, you can have it delivered on time? That’s what I thought. Don’t make me call you back.”

  The chair swung around. The woman’s features told of mixed Asian and Caucasian heritage; a few strands of gray hair ran from her brow into long black hair with subtle waves. She wore a white blouse and had a gold-and-diamond necklace that must have cost more than Natalie had ever made during her entire four years in the army.

  The strangest thing about the woman was that Natalie instantly recognized her.

  “Italians. It’s always ‘demani demani’ but tomorrow never comes with these people.” The seated woman said.

  “I-I know you. You’re from USAID. Genevieve? Genevieve Delacriox?” Natalie asked.

  The woman rolled her eyes. “You don’t even bat an eye at Carlos who you’d seen in Iraq and was the man that picked up your bag. Or Mike, your diver, who snatched a detainee right from under your nose at a detention center in Iraq. But me you recognize right away. Call me Shannon from now on.”

  Natalie stared at Shannon/Genevieve, and suddenly a series of events from her deployment to Iraq made sense. The CIA had been lurking around her unit from the time two Soldiers were kidnapped by al Qaeda to the moment Eric Ritter had vanished from the face of the earth.

  “Please”—Shannon motioned to a chair across from her—“before you fall down.”

  Natalie accepted the invitation. The leather of the chair was supple and thick beneath her touch.

  “Camel leather, latest craze among Gulf Arabs. They found another use for those stink beasts besides racing and milk. You like it?”

  Natalie just kept staring at her, still dumbfounded.

  Shannon folded her hands on the desk.

  “Let’s get a few things out of the way. Yes, I used USAID as cover while I was in Iraq. I went with you to that little army base in the middle of Iraq terrorist country to check up on Eric Ritter, who was working with us to recover the two Soldiers kidnapped by al-Qaeda. You caught our eye, and we approached you after your deployment. You did very well in training, and now you’re here for evaluation.”

  Natalie managed to nod while her mind raced. She knew Ritter had gone well beyond the limits of what an officer in the US Army could do to find the two missing Soldiers. Natalie had accepted those means only because they had led to that patch of desert where the Soldiers were buried.

  Were Shannon and this organization still playing by those rules? Were murder, torture, and deceit the rules of Shannon’s game?

  “So what do you think we do here?” Shannon asked.

  Natalie worked her jaw from side to side, a horrible clue alerting anyone paying attention that she was nervous.

  “If we’d met like this in Iraq, I would have said counterterrorism. But now…I doubt there are many al-Qaeda cells in Vienna,” Natalie said.

  “We still have a counterterrorism mission, just at a higher level than what you glimpsed in Iraq. What does any terrorist need to function?”

  “Money…and a populace to hide in,” Natalie answered.

  “Very good. As gratifying as it is to shoot a Hellfire missile into some jihadi’s face, that won’t win the long war. We’re here for their money and, by immediate extension, their weapons.”

  “How does a shipping company”—Natalie looked around—“do that?”

  Shannon smiled and leaned back in her chair, a predatory smile on her face. “Now you’re asking the right questions. Russians, my dear, Russians. The best retirement plan for a Russian officer is to ‘lose’ a shipment of rifles, explosives, IED components. There are other players in the arms black market, but our focus is on Soviet-era surplus.

  “A shipping company is good cover for interacting with the sellers and the buyers. We have operations on the buy side of the equation, but that doesn’t concern you just yet.”

  “That’s why I had to spend five hours a day, six days a week, learning Russian on top of my field training?” Natalie asked.

  “Yes. Your instructor rates your Russian is passable,” Shannon said. “With enough practice we’ll get you to a near native level.”

  Natalie swallowed hard. Passable? She could keep up a half hour long conversation over the finer points of Lermontov’s fiction and her instructor rated her as “passable?” She’d display her mastery of Moscow slang and insults the next time she saw the bloated potato-headed bore of a man that taught her the language of the Czars.

  She choked down her anger and focused on the task at hand. Might as well get her other concerns out of the way before she went too far down the rabbit hole to turn back.

  “How do we…do this? The schoolhouse beat us over the head with plenty of what we can’t do. Things that Ritter and, I guess, you, did in Iraq.”

  “We do what we must, Natalie. If it comes to morality or saving lives, we choose to save lives. If something makes you uncomfortable, say the word, and you can leave.”

  Natalie said nothing.

  Shannon leaned forward in her chair to make her eyes level with Natalie’s.

  “This is important: We do not exist, as far as Washington knows. No Congressional oversight, no inquisition from an inspector general’s office demanding to see our receipts for coffee creamer. We’re expected to deliver results, not good feelings.”

  “That’s not how I was trained,” Natalie said, her voice meek. She’s learned her fair share of dirty tricks, and her instructors had soothed her concerns by specifying how everything she’d be asked to do was legal under the laws of the United States. Other countries, not so much.

  “It’s quite liberating once you get used to it. So, ready to get to work?”

  “What do I do first?”

  “Lunch. You and I have a business lunch two days from now. In the meantime, a car will take you to your apartment. Get over your jet lag and buy some suitably expensive clothes. Our concierge has your appointment at the Kohlmarkt department store set up; they’ll pick you up at ten.” Shannon stood up and leaned over her desk to look at Natalie’s feet.

  “See Mario for shoes. He’s incredible.”

  “Wait. I thought I’d get fired for overbilling a cup of coffee. How the hell does Uncle Sam afford”—she held her genuine purse—“this?”

  “There you go, asking the right questions again.” Shannon winked at her. “Go. I have to threaten to castrate a Greek over a cargo of wheat rotting on a pier in Alexandria.”

  Natalie stood up and turned away. She stopped a step away from the door and looked over her shoulder.

  “Where’s Ritter? Is he here?” Natalie felt like some lovesick school girl asking the questions and immediately regretted them.

  “I’ve got him out of town, running an errand.”

  Aden.

  Ritter hated the Yemeni city. He hated the sketchy border town atmosphere, borne from centuries as a nexus for shipping, piracy, and smuggling on the eponymous gulf. He hated the air, which was fat with humidity in the 100-degree temperature. Hated the memories the city held.

  He’d been here on the day a terrorist attack hit the USS Cole. A college trip to appreciate the old city, built into the depression of an extinct volcano, had taken a bitter turn when the snap of five hundred pounds of high explosives rolled over the city that early October m
orning.

  What he hated most about Aden was the way the city had cheered after the attack. He’d never wanted to return to the sweltering cesspit of a city. His target, an al-Qaeda courier, was here, and Ritter’s choice of travel destinations was moot.

  He sat at a café, sipping what passed for coffee in this part of the Arab world: a light-colored roast that smelled of cinnamon and cardamom, and tasted of the sesame seeds coating the bottom of the cup. As much as he disliked the city, at least the coffee was drinkable. He shuffled his newspaper and stared over the top of the page at the Internet café across the street.

  The courier was the cousin—and therefore a trusted agent—of a Saudi prince the CIA suspected was funding al-Qaeda with money skimmed from charities and the prince’s construction interests in Oman. The Saudis had a good reputation for arranging sudden and fatal accidents for any royals linked to al-Qaeda, but they demanded solid proof before acting.

  “Nothing from the rear exit,” a voice crackled from a tiny earpiece. “You still have the eye.”

  Ritter clicked his tongue twice to acknowledge the message. The other operative, who went by John for this mission, was on loan from the CIA station in the capitol city of Sana’a, had done a decent job of keeping a low profile and swapping out the “eye,” the designation for whoever had active sight on their target. John had had the eye until the courier went into the Internet café; then Ritter had picked it up so John could transition to watch the back.

  The conversation in the café turned to swapping dirty jokes about the Huthis, Shia Muslims who lived on the border of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Ritter smiled and laughed along, not caring for the crass humor, but one had to maintain appearances. He wore a white thawb, a calf-length tunic his Soldiers in Iraq had dubbed a “man dress,” and a dark-blue vest. With his deep tan, three-day beard, and gold-rimmed sunglasses, he almost fit in. His Arabic had a Saudi accent, which matched his cover story of working for a Saudi import/export, a subsidiary of Eisen Meer Logistics.