The Seventh Floor, page 32
46
LOURMARIN, FRANCE / LACOSTE
Inside a concrete-block building in the shadow of a crumbling winery twenty kilometers south, near Lourmarin, a herd of Russians unpacked surveillance equipment and a collection of weapons smuggled through a roundabout journey originating in eastern Libya before terminating in a cache SVR maintained outside Avignon. The members of the Russian team had traveled to France in alias and on tourist passports—many of them German—by way of complex itineraries that, in the most extreme cases, had required more than a day of constant travel, across no less than two countries and three modes of transport. All had crossed the French border by car or train, and all had paid cash for their tickets. The French security services would have been quite interested in putting questions to more than a few of them—Laskin foremost—if only they’d been aware any were in-country.
Had the team been less unwieldy—comprised, as it was, of Laskin’s trigger-pullers and the legs of the operation, the counter-surveillants who had arrived first—or had the gears of bureaucracy in Moscow cranked at the same speed as Artemis Procter’s shoestring operation, they might have arrived in time to disrupt the breaking and entering work her team had completed that afternoon. Instead, hunched over maps, Laskin and his men marked out the coverage, unaware of the grave threat posed by a tattered van parked in a shady lot several hundred meters down the road from the farmhouse.
Over the next six hours, the Russian surveillance teams fanned out across the area, establishing positions at the main arteries leading to the farmhouse. One team drove south, toward Aix-en-Provence, where they would pick up Dr. B’s tail, trailing the agent to the farmhouse to check for surveillance.
In two rented Renault sedans, Laskin took four of his men north to Bonnieux before elbowing west toward Lacoste. They drove under the watch of imperial cypresses, through vineyards now shed of their grapes and greens, past low stone walls dotted by moss. The cars zigzagged up the rise. They stopped at an overlook. Gathering up the packs, they hopped a stone wall, tramping through the dry, crackling leaves until the vines became pockets of gnarled olive trees and he could make out the house in the stretch of the valley below.
Laskin studied the area with his binoculars for a long while. It was a gray, cold afternoon, and the paths and yards were empty. He did not catch sight of any lights or movement inside the two neighboring homes. He took note of each vehicle within range of the house: two cars parked at each of the neighboring homes, three in the lot of a winery, and a van up the road, outside a café, tucked into a strand of trees.
From the floor of the sprinter van, Procter sat alongside Sam watching the feeds from the house on four computer screens. The BANDITOs were piled behind them. Sam was smacking on some gum. Procter handed him an emptied sandwich wrapper. “Stop that.”
The green dials of Sam’s watch illuminated his face in the darkness of the van. He slid the gum from his mouth and crinkled it across the wrapper. “Everyone’s late,” he said.
Laskin met Colonel Pletkov in the makeshift Command center near Lourmarin. He understood from Zhomov that CIA knew Pletkov as REMORA, and Laskin could not help but find the name amusing, largely because he had considered the man to be a parasite long before the CIA had bestowed the cryptonym on him. Pletkov was seated in a chipped wooden chair, feet bouncing, reviewing his notes. A few of the surveillants were buried in their laptops; one was murmuring something into his encrypted radio. Pletkov had not looked up at Laskin. “Are we in the clear?” the man said. “I really should be going. The window will be short tonight.”
“We have not seen anything,” Laskin replied.
“That doesn’t mean we’re clear.” Pletkov languidly flipped the page. Had Laskin caught the beginnings of a yawn stretching across the man’s face? If Laskin had to maim or kill someone tonight, over and above anyone the Americans might throw at him, he would have chosen Pletkov.
“We have not seen anything,” Laskin repeated.
Soon a blue Renault clipped by the thicket Shrouding the surveillance van, slowed, and pulled into the farmhouse drive. Procter turned to the screens and saw, from the feed in the foyer, the door opening. One man stepped inside the house. Here, in the flesh, was REMORA. He flicked on lights, plunked his satchel bag down on a sofa, then made a pass through each room, taking a mental inventory of the place. REMORA moved through the farmhouse with confidence, like a man who knew what he was doing, inspecting a familiar place to see how it might have changed in the intervening months. Procter caught his eyes darting here and there, neck swiveling, nostrils flaring like a rabbit taking stock of the unseen deep things that signal danger. He appeared wary but not anxious, alert but unbothered. When he’d completed his review, REMORA unloaded from the cabinets a bottle of scotch, two glasses, and a pack of cigarettes, spreading it across the coffee table in the living room.
He lit his cigarette and smoked with carefree luxury: long, deep pulls, clouds billowing into the ceiling before cascading around him. He looked comfortable waiting.
Zhomov, Procter figured, would have scouted for that.
If spying is mostly writing, a good deal of the remainder is waiting. Sam was back into the gum, but Procter no longer had the energy to fight him on it. Elias was picking at some leftover bread; Rami and Yusuf sat stupefied in the glow of the screens. Procter watched the Russian finish his third cigarette and crack open the scotch and she thought: What if we have it wrong? She prayed, in fact, that she was wrong. That in a few hours they’d pack it all up and say big mistake, thank god. We got tangled up. Had it backwards, in the end.
In the fading lilac light of the overlook, the Major, one of Laskin’s men, worried he’d flooded the Vespa’s engine. He turned the key to a stutter and wheeze. Another attempt coaxed a sadder wheeze and a mechanical cough. He waited for a moment. From behind came the tick of an engine. Soon headlamps were spread across the road and a silver Peugeot sedan sped past, winding down into the valley. He recognized the make, model, and the license number from the surveillance reports earlier that day. The major had no idea who was in the car, other than that its occupant was an asset of the SVR. And a hugely valuable one at that, to merit such manpower for a simple meeting in southern France.
He tried again, and this time the engine coughed to life. The major zigzagged down the hillside until he reached the straight track of the road that halved the valley floor. He clipped past an unlit home, then the farmhouse.
Nearing the shuttered café, he nudged the headlamp slightly left, drifting the scooter briefly into the left lane. He glimpsed wheel-furrowed gravel tracking directly back to the van’s parking spot in the trees. He had not noticed the tracks earlier in the day, when the team had initially canvassed the area. He radioed Laskin with the news.
“We will have a look, then,” Laskin said. “A casual one. Come back here and a few of us will go.” The radio crackled off.
The major had not participated in the Singapore operation, but he had heard rumors of what had been done to protect Zhomov’s prized source. Laskin didn’t care if the van’s occupants were just gypsies in need of a nap, or star-crossed farmworkers in need of privacy and a flat surface. It would not end well for them.
47
LACOSTE
In the passenger seat of one of the Renault sedans, Laskin checked and rechecked his Beretta M12. They’d cleaned and prepped every weapon in Lourmarin, but the thing had been stuffed in a warehouse outside Avignon for several years and, before that, had seen service in the Libyan civil war. Who knew what the damn Libyans had done to it? Finally satisfied, he slid the gun to the floor. Darkened vineyards passed by the window as the four Russians went down, down, down into the valley.
“Let’s practice your French again,” Laskin said to the major. “Tell me how you’ll introduce yourself to the people in the van.”
48
LACOSTE
The car arrived from the direction of bonnieux. a silver Peugeot, running at a sensibly fast clip. When it turned into the drive, Procter felt her lung catch on a rib. No matter how many times she tried, tying and untying the band holding a flop of her curly hair did squat to calm her wrecked nerves. Had she made a wrong turn along the way? Was she now as lost as she’d been from the start, perhaps even more so? Then arrived the sudden, almost irrepressible urge to sleep, to find oblivion through the gentle ministrations of all the drinks, to wreck each piece of equipment in the van in a violent rage. Each thought she entertained, however briefly, before succumbing to utter paralysis and, in the end, sitting in a slack-jawed stupor to watch, praying something might happen, something that—and she still had hope for this—would convince her, fully, that she had it all wrong.
49
LACOSTE
Through the screen of the laptop Procter watched REMORA ease up from the couch at the sight of headlamps in the drive. The video resolution was so clear she could see the scotch jostling in his glass as he shuffled to the door. REMORA’s face was impassive; he might have been responding to a gentle knock from the mailman.
Her friend walked inside, shut the door. Embraced REMORA.
And Procter still clung to the delusion that she had it all wrong.
REMORA offered the opening catechism, as if it were his meeting: “How much time do you have?”
“An hour until company arrives.”
And still. Later, even here, Procter would remember savoring the thought: This proves nothing.
“Scotch?” REMORA asked.
“A double,” Mac said. Then: “Your people missed her.”
“The bastard,” Sam whispered, then made a noise that might have been words, she did not know.
Procter swung open the van’s back panel doors. Cold air rushed in. The moment was stuffed so full she could absorb only useless details: the moonlit sheen of the graffiti on the café, the reflections of the screens playing across the walls of the van. Her afternoon coffee barreled up into her throat. She swallowed, took a few long slow breaths, and let the air fill her lungs. She jammed one of the pistols in the waistband of her jeans. Sam did the same. They jumped out of the van and ran across the lot. Sprinting through the cover of the trees and thickets bordering the road, Procter and Sam set out for the house.
50
LACOSTE
The run to the farmhouse was a blur, an awful dream broken by the occasional jab of branches and the crunch of leaves and the huff of Sam’s heavy breaths. For all the twists of the past month, Procter’s instinct was now frighteningly simple: she was running through the Provençal woods on the compulsion that Mac had to feel pain, and that she and Sam had to be the ones to make him feel it. For a few glorious moments, before the Feebs commandeered the investigation, Procter and Sam would break things: his nose, jaw, fingers, ribs. The point wasn’t to gloat over winning, and it sure as shit wasn’t to ask any more questions. The point was that Mac should suffer. Traitors are eventually seen as pathetic, laundered into a brand of white-collar criminal, but here was a brief moment to deal with Mac as she now saw him: a monster. Procter tripped over a rock and stumbled into the leaves. Standing, she saw streaks of blood across her hands. The branches had cut her up pretty badly. She ran on.
51
LACOSTE
The gunfire began with a few tentative cracks before exploding into the low, sustained growl of a snare drum. It came from behind, in the direction of the van. Procter stopped, ducked, hustled back into the undergrowth. Another long burst crackled through the crisp air. When it was done, she heard a lone desperate cry, then the report of a single gunshot, a handgun, tore through the night. She heard two subsequent shots, and those might well have ripped through her soul, because she did not hear the volley that followed. She did not hear the van doors slam shut. She did not hear its engine kick to life. She just ran.
But now she ran the other way.
Sprinting through the trees, back toward the darkened lot and the van, Sam on her heels, shoving aside branches, stumbling over unseen rocks and roots, her guts in her throat. A few more sticks punctured the skin of her hands and face, but she was feeling too much else to let pain into the mix. With each stride the black vine stretched deeper inside her, and by the time she’d reached the edge of the gravel lot, it had knotted into the dreadful knowledge that yet more blood had been spilled. That more friends had been hurt. That it was her fault. That she’d been outfoxed. A frenzy of fresh tire tracks scarred the gravel. The van was gone.
52
LACOSTE / LUMIÉRES
Procter stopped twice to dry-heave on the forty-five-minute run back to the safe house. She hadn’t slept in four days. She’d barely eaten in two. One of her dear friends had twice tried to have her killed and three other friends had instead punched their ticket to the afterlife. All she could feel was the red-raw friction, the pain from scraping the last drops out of her body and mind and spirit. She tripped once and slid into the dirt, and if it hadn’t been for Sam she’d have just lain there until someone found her and took her away.
Procter and Sam went into the safe house they had shared with the BANDITOs half wondering if Russians might jump out to bag them or shoot them, and she was a bit disappointed they did not, because at present a bullet in the neck would be inked in the ledger as a mercy. She didn’t tell Jaggers any of this. They were so tweaked they’d said almost nothing since the van had disappeared. Get off the X—that was all this was. Get away. Regroup. They grabbed the bags and reviewed the maps to see how they might shake loose of the Luberon without running into whatever team had killed the BANDITOs. They checked flight schedules. Her nose was running; she wiped and plugged it with toilet paper but it would not stop.
“I’ll drive to Marseille,” Procter said, running her sleeve across her face. “First flight to London. Then Dulles.”
“I’ll do Nice to Paris,” Sam said. “Then Dulles. The Kassabs are dead, aren’t they?” He was scratching his nose as if he wanted to feed the cartilage to his nails.
“I heard a bunch of gunshots,” Procter said.
“We’ve got nothing, Chief,” Sam said, tossing a bag into the trunk of his rental. “It was all in that van.”
“We’ve got Mac’s name and our word,” Procter said.
“His against ours.”
“You see another way?”
He just scratched his nose.
“I’ll meet you outside customs at Dulles.” She tossed her duffel into her rental and slammed shut the trunk. “The nightmare rolls on.”
PART V
THE CHIEF
53
LANGLEY
Procter and Sam landed separately at Dulles the next afternoon. They met at baggage claim and she drove them straight to Langley. Lacking badges, they waited for an hour at the front gate until the Security Protective Officers, the SPOs, finally got through to Debs’s office, and relayed that the DDO wanted to know what the fuck Procter was doing here and where she’d crawled after fleeing the Farm, and other such pleasantries, though of course it was all delivered by the SPO with a cold civility, and in far less hostile language.
“You tell her it’s about REMORA,” Procter replied. “You tell her I was there, in France, I was watching the fucking meeting, and I have something very fucking important to say. You tell her that word for word, and whatever she says back, whatever bullshit excuse she offers for why she cannot talk to me right now, well, you tell her to think about why on earth I would be here unless I brought with me end-of-the-world-is-nigh kind of shit. The DDO hates my guts and I hate hers and I wouldn’t be here unless it was critical. This is the last place I want to be, matter of fact. I’d find a recreational lobotomy preferable to a meeting with Deborah fucking Sweet right now.” The SPO took a half step away from the car and stooped down for a look at Sam, in the passenger seat, who said, “What she said.” Two more SPOs had gathered around the vehicle; they had brought out a dog to sniff the undercarriage of her RAV4. One of the officers looked pretty keen to shoot them.
“Have you been drinking, Ms. Procter?”
“Surprisingly, no. You tell the DDO that, too, when you talk to her. You mention that.”
An hour later, and Sam and Procter had red ESCORT REQUIRED visitor badges clipped to their lapels. They sat in the Director’s bustling anteroom with a babysitter support officer, Rudy, an old man with a face like a catcher’s mitt and a voice that seemed ripe for a tracheotomy. As she had requested, Gus and Theo appeared, standing beside them to wait because there were no more chairs. Sam, seated on the couch, tapped his foot with such force it was whipping up a tide in Rudy’s water glass. Each man’s face creased in confusion at Sam, who hadn’t even looked up to acknowledge their presence. In the span of a few seconds a dozen or more questions seemed to briefly flash through their eyes before disappearing like falling stars, but Theo whispered only one: “What the fuck is going on, Artemis?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re in there. I . . . Hey, Sam, stop it.” She put a hand on his knee. “You gotta work out some wiggles, go out there and walk down the hall. Rudy, maybe you take him for a stroll?”
“I’m good,” Sam said. “All good.”
“Mac’s not here right now,” Gus offered.
