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“Does that help you?”
“Does it help me understand my place in this world? No. I already know my place. It does help me understand the rest of the world. How they are led. How they are manipulated.”
Zack didn’t know what to say.
Anton continued. “A bold and secure future for all. That’s our motto, you know, and that means everything to me. Technology can help us build the society that religion always promised but never delivered.”
“No offense, but that sounds a little Big Brother.”
“None taken. I get what you’re saying, I really do. But I’ve read Orwell, too. His Big Brother was a despot. An iron fist. The work we do here is all about benevolence. Peace. Compassion.”
“Right.” Zack wasn’t a religious man himself, but he found himself skeptical of anyone who presumed to know more than the rest of the world.
They shook hands, and Anton held his eye contact. “You coming to me tonight to tell me about your meeting. That brought you into the circle of trust. Gareth vouched for you, but as you know, I have some reservations about your government.”
“I gathered.”
“Thanks for telling me.” He looked off into the distance a moment. “Thanks for making me wear the vest last night. I’d be dead without it. Thanks for everything.”
“Sure, Anton. See you in the morning.”
Zack headed back to his quarters, glad he’d made the decision to tell his boss what happened but somehow uneasy with the conversation.
FORTY-FOUR
Jim Pace clutched his cell phone in his hand and a fat accordion file under his arm as he stepped through a door held open for him by a guard on the third floor of the U.S. embassy at 55 Calzada Street in northern Havana. He left Travers and Hash in the hall behind him, and he left his phone on a shelf in a small office inside, since neither the men nor the tech were allowed where Pace was going.
He showed his credentials to the attendant seated at a desk. The woman politely but professionally instructed him to e-sign his name on a tablet computer, and then he was sent over to a keypad on the far wall by a door.
He tapped a code, and the access control system responded with a loud click that told him a dead bolt had opened; he pulled open the thick door and stepped inside the U.S. embassy’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. This SCIF looked similar to the couple dozen others he’d been in around the world at U.S. government outposts while working at CIA. The room was ten feet deep and thirty feet wide, larger than some; there were two small conference tables, each topped by audiovisual equipment, and several file cabinets in a corner. The walls were pale blue, air ducts were covered with wire mesh and metal bars, and cameras and motion sensors hung high in the corners.
He knew the SCIF was soundproof and encased in material that made electronic eavesdropping impossible, and the room would be hardened against forced entry with steel and concrete.
An attendant locked the door behind him, then stepped over to the file cabinets, where he stood at parade rest, though he wore a suit and tie and not a uniform.
A second attendant, a female CIA communications specialist Pace had met the afternoon before, sat down at a small desk and worked a keyboard, and soon one of the monitors on the nearest conference table came to life.
Jim Pace sat down in front of it, and he recognized the image before him. It was the smallest of the seventh-floor conference rooms at CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and the room was empty.
Pace looked down to his watch, and then he opened up the accordion file he’d entered with and arranged several stacks of paper on the desk.
A minute later the room at HQ began to fill. Operations officer Angela Lacy, assistant to the DDO Naveen Gopal, and operations executive Chip Nance stepped in and sat down, their eyes on a monitor on the wall just below Pace’s viewpoint. The man sitting alone in Cuba knew that his image was being sent from the camera in the top of the monitor here on his desk, and they were all looking at him in real time.
A moment later, Deputy Director for Operations Trey Watkins shuffled into the room and sat at the head of the table, and the director of the Special Activities Center, Steve Hernandez, entered and sat down next to him.
The meeting began when Watkins spoke. “What’cha got, Jim?”
“Thank you for the meeting today, sir. There have been some critical developments.” Pace knew not to waste anyone’s time in that room in Virginia. “To begin, the personality we’ve been looking for in relation to this, Martina Sommer, is in Singapore. She arrived two weeks ago, used a credit card at an airport shop after clearing customs, and then…nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No activity. No sightings. Hasn’t shown up on any cams the Five Eyes has access to, which isn’t a lot, but we do have visibility at major choke points. Unless she somehow got out of the country without going through immigration, then she is still there.
“We’re working under the assumption she’s still on the job for the opposition at their ops center.”
Gopal said, “Chinese intelligence runs ops out of Singapore. Could be the Chin—”
Watkins cut him off. “We run ops out of Singapore. We can’t draw conclusions about the culprit solely from the location of the enemy operations center.” To Pace he said, “What are we doing to find her?”
