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Prologue
Fifteen years ago, she was a young recruit recently out of college, years ahead of the other students and always on a fast track.
Mark Javits, temporary head of the CIA’s reorganized National Clandestine Service, gave her specific orders to pick up information from the agency’s most trusted contact in Turkey. Serge was an informant, sworn and paid handsomely to report to no other international agency. Any information he dropped would be considered gospel.
She would pick up the dossier left by Serge and report back to the Directorate. That was all. It was a drop, and she was not to react to the information. Her analytics and IT skills were off the charts (in addition to two black belts, she was a hacker). She was important, and Javits wanted her back. She must take no action.
She remembered Javits’s words: “If you go beyond my charge, your employment will be terminated. I am not sending a college recruit with no experience on an intercept. This is a pickup. Do you understand?” She agreed since she could think of nothing better than to get out from behind the walls of the damn headquarters building in Langley and finally get into the field.
But the next night in her hotel room, after the pickup, she unsealed the packet and read the contents. The encoded document indicated that the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister of Britain would be dead within three days. An unnamed terrorist affiliate within Iran would spend a great deal of money and dispatch three assassins, led by Garrett Caden, codename Cabal.
There was no hope. Garrett Caden had never been stopped. Even Serge indicated it was too late to secure their safety without corroborating information. But he insisted that all possible steps be taken to ensure a successful transition of government powers.
It was over for Britain. Tomorrow or the next would be the last day their lackadaisical system of succession would stand. The terrorism that struck the United States on 9/11 would now strike the United Kingdom in a different way.
She loved the Brits. She had dated one during her undergraduate years. He was kind and loving, and he taught her the power of untiring grit. Resiliency. Never say die. Never give up. This was their nation, their people.
But the people of this great nation were about to come face-to-face with the most gruesome individual and skilled assassin who ever lived. And he would win.
Tears welled in her eyes as she lifted the document from the desk in her Istanbul hotel that evening. She walked to her window which overlooked the embassy of Bulgaria, Turkey’s northern neighbor.
And then she remembered. Bulgaria is where Cabal purportedly lived, on the Black Sea not far from Istanbul. One officer had spent almost an entire class on Cabal. She had convinced the instructor to meet her in private to discuss Garrett Caden in detail. She learned as much about him as the agency had available. She was captivated, almost enthralled, sexually, with his story.
Javits will never let me go in. He’ll terminate me on the spot. But the attack is imminent and I’m the only person who knows.
She drew the curtains aside and stared at the building that housed the consular office of Bulgaria. They know where he is.
“If I am ever to look at my face in the mirror again . . .” she muttered.
So she made her decision. This young operations officer, on her very first mission, a mere pickup, would go rogue.
This Sounds like a great story. I'm sold!
She entered the Bulgarian mission with a phony ID. After she was sneered at and disregarded by several staff members, she was taken to the third floor where she waited. A tall man in military fatigues, apparently of mission security, let himself into the room and sat at a table with her. He was not laughing. He clasped his hands and stared at her.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I want information.”
“I don’t care what you want.” He hesitated briefly, then looked up. A staff member, tall and thin with a day-old beard, who had passed her on the staircase stepped into the room and handed a paper to the security officer. He shook his head side to side then handed the paper to her.
“We believe these are his coordinates. He has no address and there are no public roads in or out,” he explained. “But you must understand, once you leave this building, your safety is of no concern to us. I suggest you wait here until next morning, take transportation to the airport, and leave this place. You have been asking dangerous questions.”
She gave a single nod, up and down, the Bulgarian answer for no, then rose. He ushered her down a long corridor and directed her to a staircase at the end.
The young CIA officer, who just last weekend was sipping martinis with friends from college, laughing about the grammatical obsessions of their microeconomics teacher, now walked down a dark hallway with questions any young trainee might ask:
Not a Bulgarian lev to my name; how do I eat?
When and where do I pee and poop?
How do I get water?
What the hell am I doing?
As she walked outside into an alleyway, she thought, too easy, much too easy.
At that moment, the same security man who provided her Caden’s coordinates collared her from behind.
“Do not move,” he demanded. “You should have listened to me.”
As the knife pressed against the flesh of her neck, she said to her assailant, “Please, I don’t want this, not now.”
“You don’t want to die?”
“No, not exactly. I don’t want to kill.”
He laughed. As his muscles tensed, almost without thinking, she moved. She pulled his knife-wielding arm straight down, rotated, then pushed, forcing the knife into his side. In seconds, he was lying on the pavement with a broken arm and crushed windpipe. In two minutes, he would be dead. She stood over the body. She shivered from fright and shook her head. She bent down and placed her index and middle fingers on his neck lightly against his trachea.
No pulse.
She stared at the man: her first kill. Her back arched as she bent lower still, until her nostrils almost touched his neck. She smelled him; her senses were raging. A sweet smell seemed to emanate from his body. It was something like vanilla, unsettling yet stimulating. Then his body began the shut-down process.
He urinated. She stood up, took a step then tripped and fell backward landing on her backside with her legs splayed and her hands at the side supporting her torso.
Her eyes widened as she looked at the corpse with open eyes staring back at her.
Oh my God, my God! What have I done? Her eyes looked to the night sky as she felt a wave of nausea. I must compose . . . must compose. She breathed back and forth trying to catch her breath; trying to calm herself.
Just then, an automobile turned into the alleyway, perhaps the hearse intended for her.
“No time, no time,” she muttered quietly to herself.
She didn’t know about safe houses here or agency contacts or anything else that might help. She darted through a courtyard to the street in search of a Bulgarian driver who would accept Euros. As she reached the street, she paused to catch her breath and calm herself. She cupped her hands about her face, running them over her temples and down her cheeks. A single thought came to her as her thumbs rested on her chin and her hands clasped above her lips:
Javits will shit his pants.
So who is she and what happened?
Did she find and engage Cabal?
Did she save the Prime Minister?
I need to know.
or
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