Deep Cover (The Trigger Man Book 2), page 31
Pierce raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“All this time, I’ve been hunting bigger fish. The CIA had Walsh under investigation for some time, suspecting him of corruption and misappropriation of funds. They placed me on the Trigger Man Task force to find out how corrupt he was, and…”
His hand traced the length of her thigh as her voice trailed away. “Did it come out, what I did before I joined the CIA? Did Walsh ever learn my secrets?”
She laughed again. “No, and that infuriated him. Nobody knows. Your past is locked up tight. You are a man of mystery, Mark.”
“You don’t know?” He’d expected his secret to be common CIA knowledge by now.
She shook her head and smiled.
“Good. That means I still have friends in Langley.”
“You do. Most people think you are an asshole, but some still like you. I was told what you did in your redacted past contradicted the narrative of you stealing nuclear waste.”
He didn’t answer, not sure how he could.
She massaged the back of her neck, working the tension out of her muscles. “I’ll get another migraine if I’m not careful.”
Pierce laughed. “Sounds like a hint for another massage?”
“You are so good.”
“Lie down. On your stomach.”
She grinned and did as he asked. Soon his hands were upon her neck and shoulders, working the muscles with a firm massage. He felt again the rock-like hardness in her body everywhere his fingers worked.
“Wow!” she said, then flinched.
“It hurts?”
“Yes. But in a good way. Where did you learn to massage like that?”
“I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you, Rachel.”
“Very funny!”
“Speaking of which…”
She moaned with joy as his hands worked the muscles around her neck and upper back. “You feel this is an appropriate time to become deep and meaningful with each other, Mark?”
“Why not? You’re naked and completely at my mercy. So if you don’t report to Walsh, who is your boss?”
“Ah, that’s my secret, for now.”
His hands moved down her back and kept massaging. Her muscles loosened. “But it’s more than that, Rachel. Something is driving you. More than the job. More than patriotism. You said so earlier, that you’ve been hurt too.”
“You mean, just like you?”
“How did you get into this business?” Zang’s head turned to the side, and her eyes were closed. “Or is that a secret too?”
He looked at the wall and stared into nothingness. “I made a mistake. When I was a kid. People died, and I wanted retribution. The anger that fuelled me then was the anger I experienced in Kazakhstan, wanting to get back at Walsh and Trager for what they had put me through.”
Her eyes snapped open, drawing his attention back to her, but she didn’t move from where she lay flat on her stomach. “You experienced severe trauma as a kid?”
His hands moved down to the outsides of her thighs. “I made a choice that the adults in my life should have never let me make.”
She nodded. “Now you blame yourself for what happened?”
He looked up and thought about her question for a moment. “Not anymore. After a while, I no longer sought revenge.”
“Why not?”
“Every time I sought revenge, it never brought peace, to me or others. I didn’t see the point anymore. I lost my way for a time while I was Walsh’s prisoner, but I’m back to my old self again.”
“What did you want then? Or what do you want now?”
Once again, her questions probed the core of who he was. He soon felt lost in his own dark thoughts. “Balance.”
“Balance?”
“There are too many people with money and power in this world, whose only aim is to gain more money and power at the expense of others. Often at the cost of the lives of people without money or power.”
She closed her eyes again, smiled as his hands massaged the insides of her thighs. “People like Walsh, Eloko and Ponsonby?”
“Exactly. Restoring balance to the world is the only path I’ve found that brings me contentment. How ticklish are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Roll over.”
She lay on her back, her hipbones and nipples pointed towards the ceiling. He took her left foot in his hands and massaged between her toes. Rachel didn’t flinch, and he enjoyed the sight of her naked body laid out in front of him. “So not ticklish at all?”
“Not with you, it seems.”
As his hands did their work, he noticed again old scars between her recent wounds. A knife wound on her left forearm. An indentation in her right thigh that might have been a bullet or knife wound. Burns on her right shoulder. Her skin told a similar story to his own.
“With me, it’s all about daddy issues.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m intrigued.”
“My father. He’s rich. You know, a penthouse in New York kind of rich. An executive in the petrochemical industry. With my family, I experienced overseas assignments in Russia and Saudi Arabia.”
“Is that how you speak Russian? Time in Russia as a child?”
It was Rachel’s turn to raise her eyebrow. “So, Mark, you have seen my file.”
“Parts of it.”
She frowned, playfully kicked at him with her foot. “I won’t ask how.”
“You know all about me. It seems only fair.”
“I know nothing about what you did before you joined the CIA.”
He nodded and smirked. “I interrupted your story.”
“I spent my entire life fighting with my dad. We didn’t agree on most things, boys, my education, my friends, how I dressed, parties I wanted to go to, that kind of thing. Our failed relationship took a nasty turn while we lived in Riyadh, in one of those compounds where the Saudis like to lock in foreign workers. Our house servants were Filipino. I was friends with their daughter, Juanita. One day, Juanita’s father angered our Saudi clients. Soon afterwards, the family disappeared, including my friend. I begged for my father to help, but he did nothing. I think my dad didn’t care that the family was likely being tortured or killed for whatever crime they supposedly committed. Eventually I realised my father was heartless, cared only for himself, and cared only for others when it suited him. I’m sure it’s why my mother divorced him and why I’ve rebelled against him ever since.”
Pierce noticed that Rachel had not mentioned that her mother was dead. A point he felt not prudent to bring up until she did.
“Hence why you joined the Air Force?”
She frowned again.
“You don’t like my massaging? I can stop.”
She pressed her toes back into his waiting hands. “It’s not the massage that bothers me. You are too good, and I no longer have a migraine. It’s that you know so much about me, and that is bothersome.”
“Not that much, I promise.”
He pressed into the arch and bridge of her foot, which caused her to sink into the sheets.
“I don’t know why I’m talking. I should just enjoy this pampering.”
Pierce switched feet, kneaded the second foot.
After a minute, Rachel Zang spoke again. “My father wanted me to be a lawyer or an accountant. He even wanted me to be an economist of all things. He keeps telling me I could make high six figures by now if I had followed his advice. When I joined the Air Force, I didn’t know he had contacts at the highest levels of the Pentagon. It was Dad who ensured my USAF career stalled.”
“So you quit and applied for the CIA. Even though Dad had acceptances for you lined up at all the Ivy League colleges?”
“Yes, because of the secrecy Langley offered.” She stretched all her slender limbs and yawned. “Dad believes I’m studying economics and working as an economic analyst for the State Department, just as he always hoped. If he knew I was CIA, and a field operative at that, I think it would kill him. But I can make a difference in the world working as a spy. More so, it seems, than I could when I was with the Air Force.”
Pierce nodded. Her past fit in with what Valeriya and Yebin had secured from her CIA files. Her every word seemed truthful, and her every action seemed supportive towards his goals and needs — except for the detail about her dead mother. That one omission he could understand, so why did he feel Zang was keeping a crucial piece of information from him?
Then again, he wasn’t telling her everything on his mind either.
“Mark, I feel I must do a lot of good in this world before I can ever make up for all the bad things Dad has done.” She reached up and pulled Pierce down on top of her, then kissed his mouth hard. “Talking about doing something good, ready to go again?”
66
Moçâmedes, Angola
In the early hours of the morning, Zang led Pierce to the property’s airstrip, where a turboprop Cessna 208 Caravan waited. The aircraft’s metal skim reflected the orange hues of the rising sun and looked fresh off the production line.
After proceeding through a series of pre-flight checks, she turned the craft onto the dirt airstrip and sped up until they lifted into the air. Because of the engine noise and wind rushing past outside, they rarely talked despite their headsets. Pierce sat in the co-pilot’s seat and watched the landscape of savanna, grasslands, mountains and desert pass beneath them. At one point, they spotted a herd of elephants trundling through the desert, which brought a smile to both their faces.
A thousand kilometres later, after a single refuelling stop in Etosha National Park, they reached a third private airfield on the outskirts of Moçâmedes, an Angolan port city near the Namibian border. Zang taxied and parked their Cessna, then paid a hangar fee to store the aircraft, proceeded through customs and immigration, then they caught a taxi into the city centre. Moçâmedes proved to be a dusty metropolis, the houses spread thinly, and the most prominent colour for anything was that of sand. The only moisture seemed to originate from the ocean swells beating their waves against the city harbour.
As the taxi dropped them in the city centre, Zang leaned in and kissed Pierce hard on the lips. “This is where we say goodbye, Mark… or should I say Pierce… for now.”
He reciprocated with equal passion as his arms slipped around the curve of her back and pulled her close.
Then Zang pulled away and locked her unblinking emerald eyes with his. “Last night was fun. I’d like to do that again sometime.”
“A date, then, when all this is behind us.”
Zang grinned, then recited an address for a lock-up garage where the equipment he’d requested awaited. She kissed him on the jaw, turned and walked away without once looking back.
When he was alone again, Pierce rented a Land Rover, then drove to the garage, reaching it by lunchtime. Inside and beyond the gaze of prying eyes, Pierce sifted through the various crates to ensure everything he needed was present. With the dry air and the temperature well over thirty degrees Celsius, he was soon sweating.
The weapons cache was more than he could have hoped for. He’d brought his Glock 19, Beretta APX and Ka-Bar fighting knife from Namibia, but he felt more confident that their mission would succeed when he discovered an M4 carbine, perfect for close-quarter battle, particularly after he fitted it with a suppressor.
Other equipment he gathered included light-intensifier goggles, binoculars, a combat rig and body armour, more magazines for his Glock, a wetsuit and a rebreather, so he wouldn’t give away his position with bubbles breaking the surface, a heated dive vest, because of the frigid Atlantic water, an inflatable Zodiac boat with an outboard motor, a medical kit, flashbangs and fragmentation grenades, a dive watch with GPS locating, buoyancy bags for holding his equipment, several ropes, a REBS magnetic climbing system, and four MILA limpet mines with computer-controlled detonation systems. Every piece of equipment, he noticed, was available for purchase on the private market.
As he stared at all the equipment laid out on the wooden bench before him, Pierce reflected that powerful individuals inside the CIA had gone to great efforts to equip him. Failure was not an option here, and the CIA wanted him to know it.
After eating an MRE, or meal ready to eat, and drinking a litre of water, Pierce changed into a tan shirt, cotton pants, desert boots, sunglasses, a cap and a scarf tied across his nose and mouth. From this point forward, he would operate as if USAF drones and Pentagon satellites were recording his every move. Zang and he might work together tonight to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome, but that didn’t mean she trusted him, or that he trusted her. While he might not prevent recordings of his upcoming actions, his disguise would prevent the CIA from conclusively linking him to today’s extreme action should the powers in Langley again turn against him at some future time and use the recorded footage as leverage.
With the equipment stored, Pierce drove out past the large container port with its many Panamax ships and overhead stacker cranes, then turned south towards the nearby Namibian border along the coast, separating the frigid Atlantic Ocean from the scorching Namib Desert.
Once Pierce neared the GPS coordinates Zang had provided as his staging point, he followed a trail down to the empty beach and drove along the sand for several kilometres, and past a rusted trawler wreckage home to thousands of seabirds, pounded day and night by breaking waves. So far, he acted as Zang had instructed and parked his Land Rover behind a dune. Then he inflated his Zodiac, prepped his equipment, and dressed in his wetsuit. With the cap, sunglasses and scarf obscuring his face, Pierce took his binoculars and scanned the ocean.
He spotted the Cancri two kilometres out.
Magnified, the diamond mining vessel resembled an oil drilling rig riding on the back of a container ship. Pierce knew the Cancri was a smaller version of the diamond mining vessels De Beers and the Namibian government operated further south for their own oceanic diamond extraction processes. Cancri had been a prototype that failed to live up to its design expectations, but that hadn’t stopped Rupert Ponsonby from purchasing it at a discounted price and spending years refurbishing and redesigning it until it produced the diamond quantities he desired. Production rates weren’t comparable to De Beers, but effective enough to be profitable.
As Pierce waited for the sun to set, he ate protein bars and chocolate and hydrated. He would need his energy reserves to swim the great distances expected of him this night in the chilled ocean currents.
With his meal finished, now was the moment he would break with the script and confuse the eyes in the sky.
He called Mackenzie Summerfield on the secure number only he knew.
She answered immediately, and they both cycled through a series of identification and duress codes. Langley would now try to hack into his satellite phone to listen to this conversation, because the directors on the seventh floor never liked it when field operators didn’t play by their rules. He felt confident the encryption software Valeriya and Yebin had provided prevented the CIA from doing so, because the two hackers had never failed him before.
“How are you holding up?” Pierce asked as his eyes scanned the waves breaking on the beach. A pair of seals flitted through the surf, catching fish in their jaws and eating them just as fast. Heavy clouds formed on the horizon, and the breeze lifted, suggesting that a storm loomed.
“Better. The arm’s healing nicely.”
Mackenzie sounded tired, but this didn’t surprise him, as her body would drain her of energy to heal her gunshot wound.
“Mackenzie, have the CIA contacted you now that they know you and I are innocent in all this?”
“No, but I must admit, I’ve made it difficult for them to find me…”
He waited for her to finish her sentence. When she didn’t, he said, “What’s up? I hear it in your voice that something troubles you?”
He heard her swallow. “Actually, there is a surveillance team watching me. They don’t know that I know, but that could change. I’m thinking I need to go dark… I mean really disappear for a while.” She spoke her words as a statement, but he could hear the question she wanted him to answer.
“I agree.”
“You do? Why? Who do you think they are?”
“I can’t know for sure, but I suspect they are our people, the CIA.”
“What makes you say that? And why would they be watching me? And why should I run again?”
He described his last few days. Recounted the CIA flight from the Central African Republic to Namibia and now to Angola, and how Rachel Zang remained his only point of contact with their former employer. “Mackenzie, they’re keeping me at a distance. I’m about to secure myself on board Ponsonby’s mining ship, the Cancri, on their behalf. My mission objective is to find the final missing radioactive canisters, terminate Ponsonby and Walsh, and then destroy the Cancri.”
“Interesting…”
Pierce frowned. “What’s interesting, Mackenzie?”
“I’ve long maintained operational back-door hacks into the CIA servers. Langley has not been sitting around idly since your escape from the CAR, so they’ve already recovered the two missing canisters. Did so days ago. Found them in the diamond mines in South Africa and Botswana you mentioned last time we talked, so Zang lied to you.”
Pierce shuddered as his fists tightened and his teeth clenched. This was the secret Zang had hidden from him, but why? With all the radioactive waste accounted for, there was no reason to send Pierce to the Cancri because an airstrike would be more effective at sinking the vessel than the single-man sabotage mission he had agreed to.
But perhaps this was no longer about Walsh and Ponsonby. Was this about Mark Pierce himself?
He said through clenched teeth, “Or she didn’t know.”
“They’re setting you up, Mark. If you destroy the Cancri, you’re committing an act of terrorism. That leaves you out in the cold and forces you to go on the run again.”
