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“You can tell me about what happened.”
“Tell you about it…in what capacity?”
“Just two old colleagues chatting.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Your sense of the opposition. Their mission, their command and control, their skill.”
Zack nodded slowly, his eyes back out on the street. “Somebody could have called. Why does an ops officer out of the embassy have to find me and come question me?”
“I’m an ops officer, but I’m not at the embassy here. I’m at HQ. Special Tasks. Proliferations desk.”
Hightower peeled at the label on his beer bottle. “Well then, I’m doubly confused. You’re a long way from Virginia.”
“Deputy Director Watkins tasked me with the Agency’s investigations on the AI assassinations. I’m interviewing victims’ families, coworkers, boring stuff like that.”
Zack took another drink. He was on guard; he’d worked at CIA long enough to know they could make problems between him and Anton Hinton, and since CIA wasn’t the one signing his paychecks anymore, his loyalty leaned towards the oddball billionaire sequestered away in the old Soviet bunker.
He looked to the two bartenders, to the dozen or so other patrons of the bar, to the several dozen dining at the tables. Any one of these people could tell Wren, Hinton, anyone in Hinton’s organization, that Zack had held a meeting with a suited-up gringo in Old Havana.
“I seriously hope you find out all you need to know about what’s going on, but I’ve got a solid gig I’m trying to protect.”
“I’d say your job security is in good shape, considering how you saved your boss’s life yesterday. You’ll probably get employee of the month.
“Look. I’m not asking you anything a local cop wouldn’t ask.”
Zack sighed, then gave in. He spent a couple minutes going over the details of the attack, but only giving out information that was publicly available.
Pace followed up with, “The perps. Jamaican Spangler Posse. Any good?”
“They knew how to aim and shoot, more or less. They didn’t know how to set up an ambush.”
“But you said they killed two of your guys, some soldiers, and your principal took a round.”
“Yeah,” Zack allowed, not hiding his confusion about that. “Weird. Million-to-one luck, I guess.”
Pace nodded. “No chance Hinton might know more about who’s behind this than he’s saying?”
Hightower sipped his beer. “What do you mean?”
“Two attempts on his life. Both failed. You haven’t been looking into the other hits like I have, so if you don’t know, I’ll tell you. Every single one of the other killings was professionally accomplished. Why do you think your guy drew the long straw and had cannon fodder come after him when nobody else did?”
Zack knew little about the first attack on Hinton, but as to the second, he’d been thinking the same thing that Pace was now saying.
The skill of the attackers did not match the defenses of the target in any way.
Still, Zack didn’t think Hinton was sideways. “I’m around him day and night, and I haven’t seen him plotting world domination. Seems like that would be apparent.”
Pace took a drink and nodded, looking off down the bar. “Granted, the complexity of all this makes one assume there would be some indicators.” His chest heaved. “I don’t know, though. There’s something weird about him. He won’t talk to us, his name comes up a lot, the two failed attempts, and, by the way, he lives in a bunker in fucking Cuba.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t strange. I said he wasn’t assassinating over a dozen tech experts across the globe.”
“How is your boss feeling about all this?” Pace asked.
“Blaming himself, mostly. Doubt he’ll stick his head out of his secure compound until this is all over.”
“What goes on at Lourdes?”
