“Hello?” Hood said.
“Paul, it’s Sergei,” Orlov said. Op-Center’s translator was on standby.
It only took her a moment to get on the line.
“General, I need your trust, and I need it fast,” Hood said. His urgent tone left no room for discussion.
“Of course,” Orlov said.
“Our team searching for the Harpooner suffered a catastrophic hit at a hospital in Baku,” Hood informed him.
“It happened a little over an hour ago. Two of our men were killed. The first was taken down by a sniper outside the hospital. The second had his throat cut inside the lobby. The last man is a patient. His name is David Battat, and he is ill with a fever of some kind.” Orlov took a moment to write the name down.
“The police are at the hospital, but we don’t know who the killer is,” Hood said.
“He or she may still be in the hospital.”
“The killer could be a police officer,” Orlov pointed out.
“Exactly,” Hood said.
“General, do you have anyone in Baku?”
“Yes, we do,” Orlov said without hesitation.
“In what room is Mr. Battat located?”
“He’s in one fifty-seven,” Hood said.
“I will send someone at once,” Orlov said.
“Tell no one.” Hood gave him his word. Orlov hung up. The three most powerful Russian intelligence groups had their own personnel. These groups were the MBR; the military’s Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie, or GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate; and the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, or MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Russian Op-Center did not have the financial resources to maintain its own network of intelligence and counterintelligence personnel, so it was necessary to share people with other relatively small Russian agencies. These were administered by the Sisteme Objedinennovo Utschotya Dannych o Protivniki, or SOUD, the Interlinked System for Recognizing Enemies.
SOUD also provided personnel for the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service; the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB, the Federal Security Service; the Federal’naya Sluzhba Kontr-razvedky, or FSK, the Federal Counterintelligence Service; and the Federal’naya Sluzhba Okhrani, or FSO, the Federal Protective Service.
Orlov quickly accessed the SOUD files. He input the highest-priority code. Red Thirteen. This meant that the request was not only coming from a senior official-level thirteen–but involved a case of immediate national emergency: the apprehension of the Harpooner. The Red Thirteen code gave Orlov the names, locations, and telephone numbers of field personnel around the world. Even if the operatives were involved in other situations, he would be authorized to commandeer them. Orlov went to the file for Baku, Azerbaijan. He found what he was looking for. He hesitated. General Orlov was about to ask a deep-cover operative to try to help an American spy. If the Americans were planning an operation in Baku, this would be the quickest way to expose and neutralize Russian intelligence resources. But to believe that, Orlov would have to believe that Paul Hood would betray him. Orlov made the call.
Washington, D.C. Monday, 9:00 p.m.
Paul Hood was angry when he hung up with Orlov. Hood was angry at the system, at the intelligence community, and at himself. The dead men were not his people. The man at risk was not his operative. But they had failed, and the Harpooner had succeeded, partly because of the way spies did business. The Harpooner commanded a team. Most American agents worked as part of a team. Theoretically, that should give the operatives a support system. In practice, it forced them to operate within a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy with rules of conduct and accountability to directors who were nowhere near the battlegrounds. No one could fight a man like the Harpooner with baggage like that. And Hood was guilty of supporting that system. He was as guilty as his counterparts at CIA, NSA, or anywhere else. The irony was that Jack Fenwick had apparently done something off the books. It was Hood’s job to find out what that was. The bureaucrats are checking up on the bureaucrats, Hood thought bitterly. Of course, he probably should not be thinking at all right now. He was tired and frustrated about the situation with Battat. And he had not even called home to see how Harleigh was doing. Rodgers had stayed with Hood between the time he first phoned Orlov and Orlov returned the call. While they waited for Bob Herbert to come back, Rodgers left to grab a soda. Hood decided to call home. It did not improve his mood. He was doing just the thing that Sharon had always hated. Working late. Calling home as an afterthought. He could hear the anger in her throat, in the tightness of her mouth, in the brevity of her answers.
“I’m doing laundry,” Sharon said.
“Harleigh is in the den playing solitaire on the computer. Alexander is in his room doing homework and studying for a history test.”
“How does Harleigh seem today?” Hood asked.
“How do you think?” Sharon said.
“Your own psychologist said it’s going to be a while before we see any kind of change. If we see any kind of change,” Sharon added.
“But don’t worry, Paul. I’ll handle whatever comes up.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Sharon,” Hood said.
“I want to help.”
“I’m glad. Do you want me to get Alexander?” she asked.
“Not if he’s studying,” Hood said.
“Just tell him I called.”
“Sure.”
“Good night,” Hood said. He could feel Sharon hesitate. It was only a moment, but it felt much, much longer. ”
“Night, Paul,” she said, then hung up. Hood sat there holding the phone for several moments. Now he was a bastard and a bureaucrat. He lay the phone in its cradle, folded his hands, and waited for Rodgers. As he sat there, something began to tick inside him. It wasn’t a clock or a bomb. It was like a cam and rocker arm. And with each click of the arm, a spring grew tighter inside him. A desire to do something–and not just debate or call the Russians for help. Hood wanted to act.
Something was not right, and he needed to know what it was. Rodgers and Herbert arrived together. They found Hood staring at the back wall of his office where plaques and framed photographs once hung, the mementos of his years in government. Pictures with world leaders, with constituents. Photographs of Hood laying cornerstones or working in a Thanksgiving soup kitchen. His life as a bloody goddamn bureaucrat. As part of the problem, not the solution.
“Are you all right?” Herbert asked.
“Fine,” Hood said.
“Did you get news?” Herbert pressed.
“No,” Hood said.
“But I want to make some.”
“You know where I stand on that,” Herbert said.
“What were you thinking of?”
“Battat,” Hood said. That was not entirely true. He was thinking that he never should have withdrawn his resignation. He should have left Op-Center and never looked back. He wondered if resigning had actually been for him and not to spend more time with his family, as he had believed. But he was back, and he was not going to run away. Battat was the next stop in his thought process.
“This man was sent to the hospital with some kind of sickness where a pair of assassins were waiting,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Herbert agreed.
“My brain trust and I have been looking into that.” Herbert’s brain trust consisted of four deputy intelligence directors who had been brought to Op-Center from military intelligence, the NSA, and the CIA.
They were three men and one woman who ranged in age from twenty-nine to fifty-seven. With input from Darrell McCaskey, who liaised with the FBI and Interpol, Op Center had the best per capita intelligence team in Washington.
“Here’s what we’ve been thinking,” Herbert said.
“The CIA is ninety-nine percent certain the Harpooner passed through Moscow and went to Baku. A DOS agent thinks he saw him on a flight to Moscow, but that may have been intentional.”
“Why?” Rodgers asked.
“It wouldn’t be unprecedented for a terrorist to let himself be seen,” Herbert said.
“Back in 1959, the Soviet spy Igor Slavosk allowed himself to be seen at Grand Central Station in New York so he could draw police attention and bring FBI personnel to his apartment. When they got to the place down on Jane Street, it blew up. Slavosk came back, collected badges and IDS, and had perfect fakes made. He used them to get into FBI headquarters in Washington. So, yes, it’s possible the Harpooner allowed his presence to be known through channels.”
“Go on,” Hood said quietly. He was getting impatient. Not at Bob Herbert; the intelligence chief was simply a convenient target. Hood wanted Orlov to call him back. He wanted to hear that everything was all right at the hospital. He wanted some good news for a change.
“Sorry,” Herbert said.
“So the Harpooner somehow lets it be known that he’s going to Baku. He has some kind of operation planned. He knows there are CIA personnel attached to the embassy. He also knows that the CIA might not want to expose those people since police from the Azerbaijani Ministry of Internal Security are probably keeping an eye on embassy personnel, watching for foreign intelligence operations. So the CIA brings someone in from Moscow.”