Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
Hanley wasn’t worried about the power outage at home. He didn’t have much food in his refrigerator, and he doubted he’d be back to his house for at least another sixteen hours or so, plus he had much bigger fish to fry, so he dismissed the texts.
The flight was already forty minutes old, and the interrogation of the woman on board who’d found herself at the center of the action tonight had not yet begun.
Hanley had been on the phone while Jill Mori sat next to him, completely engrossed with her laptop, and the two had not spoken once during the flight, so focused were they on their own jobs.
Court Gentry and Zack Hightower sat with Irene Ortega on a sofa in the rear of the spacious cabin.
A sheet had been rigged to the ceiling of the cabin that blocked off Irene’s view of the others, and though Zack and Court were back with her, they wore neck gaiters that hid their faces, so she was pretty much in the dark as to what was going on apart from the fact that she’d been rescued from an assassination by men who themselves appeared rather terrifying.
She’d tried to talk to them a couple of times, but both times Court had told her she needed to wait for a debriefing, and it would come soon enough, and for now she needed to just be glad she wasn’t lying dead in her bathtub.
Behind Hanley and Jill, Arnold Reyes sat in the center of the cabin next to Chris Travers, whose seatback had been lowered flat.
Travers was sedated and he slept soundly, his neck freshly bandaged and stitched.
The doctor Hanley had taken him to in the middle of the night had done the job at his kitchen table, then handed over a supply of painkillers and antibiotics.
As Jill and Arnold helped take Chris back out to their vehicle, the doctor whispered to Hanley that the bullet had been within an inch of severing the asset’s carotid artery, and a severed carotid was a guaranteed one-way ticket to dead.
Hanley knew he needed to get started with the debriefing of Ortega, but he was trying to get as much information as possible about what had happened first, and to that end Lacy had already been very helpful.
She’d confirmed that all five men killed at street level had been Gauntlet operatives, and Gauntlet had said this particular team was running a previously scheduled security sweep in the area, and must have just happened to come upon a team of killers.
Both Lacy and Hanley agreed it sounded like bullshit.
Hanley had also learned that the assassin found on the bathroom floor of the condo with four more holes in him than God intended had been identified as forty-three-year-old Alexi Kravchuk, known as Deep Space by the Americans.
He had been performing lethal operations exclusively for Russia for the past three years under the alias Spiral, so the inference already running around the intelligence community was that Deep Space was after Ortega on Russia’s orders.
This also lent credence to the fact that Russia had been involved in all the other killings of intelligence community personnel tonight, but Hanley had been around long enough to know it was too early to make such inferences.
Lacy was skeptical herself, mainly because Ortega’s work at DNI wasn’t specifically involved with Russia.
Killing Ortega might provide some benefit to some bad actor, but there were a lot of people who did what she did, so both Hanley and Lacy suspected that Irene Ortega was targeted for something specific that she knew, and not solely because of her job title.
Hanley climbed from his cabin chair, then made his way back past Arnold and Travers to a seat just this side of the fabric partition in the cabin. Calling out through the bedsheet hanging there, Hanley said, “Irene, let me start by saying we are very happy you are alive.”
There was a pause, and then he heard the woman speak. “That makes two of us. But I don’t understand why I can’t see your faces.”
“We need to understand what side of this you are on.”
“I don’t even know what this is.”
“You know something. Why do you think those men were trying to kill you tonight?”
“Who are you guys?” she asked again, flatly.
Any shock or terror she’d felt earlier in the evening had evaporated.
It was as if she were genuinely terrified of the assassination attempt, but the men and woman who’d rescued her and put her on a private jet did not elicit the same amount of concern out of her.
With menace in his voice, Court Gentry said, “Answer the question, lady.”
“I don’t even know who they were.”
“I think you do,” Court said.
When she did not respond, Matt said, “You see the predicament you’re in, Irene? We saved you tonight; you might not trust us, but you have to ask yourself, Who else can I trust?”
“I’ll just keep my mouth shut. You can kill me, or you can release me. Your choice.”
Hanley said, “We didn’t go to all this trouble to save you just so we could then kill you.
We will, most definitely, release you, but you might want to think about the ramifications of that.
The man who came after you tonight was a contract killer known to the CIA as Deep Space.
The other men—some of them, at least—were contractors from Gauntlet. ”
There was a long pause. Then she said, “How do you know that?”
Hightower answered this question. “We ran tags on one of the vehicles, plus people in both vehicles admitted it. Why is Gauntlet after you?”
“I wouldn’t have any idea.”
Hanley didn’t think this was going anywhere, so he yanked down the sheet between himself and the woman.
Zack and Court just looked at him in surprise, but neither of them lowered their gaiters.
He said, “Listen very carefully, Irene. We have been surveilling you because we thought you were involved in the intelligence leaks—your log-in was used to obtain intelligence about Nicaragua that was used by the enemy—but we quickly realized there was another group watching you, as well. When they sent a known killer after you tonight, we took it on faith that you weren’t the real problem, and whoever is causing the compromises in the IC knows you are a threat to them, and they want you taken off the playing field. ”
Court spoke to the woman, who now seemed fixated on Hanley. “We’re just trying to get an idea about who or what is behind—”
The woman’s eyes narrowed as she looked at the older man in the cabin chair in front of her. Finally, she interrupted Court. “Mr…. Mr. Hanley?”
Matt saw both Court and Hightower lean back now, sharing a frustrated look with each other.
But Hanley said, “Do I know you?”
“No, sir. But I’ve seen you speak a few times. You came to ODNI for some luncheons, talked about the work of the Special Activities Division—Center, I mean. I still call it Division.”
“I still call it that, too,” Hanley said. “That would have been several years ago.”
“Yes. But then when you became deputy director of the CIA, I saw another speech you made, this one at Langley.”
“How were my speeches?”
She faltered a moment. Looked down, then back up at him. “Frankly, you seemed like you’d rather have been somewhere else.”
Zack sniffed out a laugh.
Hanley laughed, too. “You’re a talented analyst.”
Irene looked around at the plane, at Jill and Arnold, at Court and Zack; Travers’s stocking feet were just in view where he lay.
“How is he?”
“Took a zinger in the neck. A close call, but he’ll be back one hundred percent in no time. More than I can say for the five Gauntlet men and the assassin someone sent to your condo.”
She eyed Hanley with incredulity. “You used to be the DDO. Are you on some kind of a…a field team now?” She said it with a mixture of shock and derision, as if the idea of being in the field and not behind a desk was a fate worse than death.
“Hell of a demotion to be working with these degenerates,” Hanley said, and Irene smiled for the first time. He added, “We are working outside the official infrastructure of the intelligence community. I’ll just leave it there.”
Her eyes cleared a little and she nodded. “That’s a good idea. And it sounds like you already have your answer, sir. The people at the heart of this are from Gauntlet Group.”
“Why did you follow Lewis Shaw to the Hirshhorn Museum today?”
“I didn’t follow him there. I knew he had a meeting. I went to see who the meeting was with.”
“And what did you find out?”
“Nothing at all. The person he met with was wearing some kind of a face mask. It looked like a real person, it really did, but it wasn’t.”
“We saw that. Why were you interested in Shaw in the first place?”
“I realized someone had accessed some files using my credentials, files regarding communications between the CIA station in Managua, Nicaragua, and Langley. Lewis was the only one who had the administrator access to have done it without leaving a record that I could easily find.
“I confronted him, told him I had proof. I was bluffing, I had nothing tangible. He denied everything, of course, but there was something in the way he denied it.”
“What do you mean?”
“A threat. An insinuation that he had connections in the building. That I should shut up and not mention anything about the access of those files again. He acted like he was doing me a favor by warning me to be quiet.
“So I thought Lewis was involved, but I didn’t think it was just him. Yeah, he could have been pulling the files with his administrator access, but why? Who was he doing it for? He’s just some computer geek. I didn’t know what to do, but then it happened.”
“What happened?” Zack prompted.