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Zoya kept her eyes on the road. “I wish.”
Court looked back in the bag. “Three mags each, looks like Federal 147 grain hollow-points.”
Zoya kept driving. “That’s it?”
“Belly band holsters.” He fished around a little more, pulled out a small box and opened it. “Earpiece mics. Charger. Phone attachments. A pair of Vortex twelve-power binos. That’s all.”
Zoya shrugged. “Well, we don’t really have a mission, so I guess we’re adequately equipped.”
Zoya had been bugged by the fact that Pace had told Court he just wanted him to watch his back while he ran overwatch on Travers’s op.
“We have a mission.”
“Right. Sit there and watch for the Cuban authorities in the center of Havana, which is, I’m pretty sure, just full of Cuban authorities.”
“Jim doesn’t trust me, but he also knows his situation here is a shit sandwich. If his Ground Branch team is deployed, he’s all alone. He wants us close by and armed in case the shit hits the fan and he’s compromised, but he also wants us on standby if he has a hard target he wants us to pursue without Agency comebacks.” He sighed a little. “If a bunch of Cubans need to die, he’ll send us, not Juliet Victor.”
“Who’s Juliet—”
“The paramilitaries here with Pace. There’s only six of them, and Travers is running the team.”
Zoya had worked with Travers before. “Chris is good,” she said.
“So’s Jim,” Court said. “But don’t forget, those guys are looking out for the Agency, not us.” He zipped the bag back up. “We have to look out for ourselves.”
Zoya scoffed at this. “If we were looking out for ourselves, we’d be down in Buenos Aires having drinks on a patio and arguing about which restaurant to pick for dinner.”
“That’s very true,” he said, looking at her. “Is that our plan after this?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m worried you’re not going to want to go quiet again. Worried you’ll link up with Fitzroy, or Hanley or Angela Lacy, or even this Pace guy. Somebody who can get you back into the fight full-time.”
He sighed a little. “I want to be with you. And not with you surrounded by assassins, robots, and the Cuban security services. I want to be with you at a patio in Buenos Aires, arguing about where to go to dinner.”
She smiled a little, but he didn’t know if she believed him.
He didn’t know if he believed himself, either. He wanted all those things, yes, but he wondered if he’d ever be able to just melt away, to sit back while the world kept turning and burning, to watch events take place on television that he might have had some positive impact on if he’d brought his very specific but very well-honed talents to bear.
He wondered if he’d ever be able to stop killing motherfuckers who deserved to die.
To his relief, she smiled at him. “Sounds nice, doesn’t it?”
“Sounds amazing.” He reached over and took her right hand, held it as she drove on in the fading light.
•••
The thunderstorm over Havana all but blackened the sky even though dawn had just broken. The lights of a half-dozen freighters and tankers anchored in the harbor close to the container terminal twinkled through the rain and misty conditions, the vessels waiting their turn to dock at the massive quay for off-loading.
The terminal was well lit but inactive, though that was due to the weather and not the early hour; nobody wanted to be sitting in one of the ten-story metal gantry cranes or standing by a three-story tower of forty-foot steel containers in a thunderstorm.
Jim Pace took in the view by panning his high-power variable optic spotting scope left and right. The equipment had been provided by Havana station, and it was impressive but a little complicated for Pace, who had spent a hell of a lot of time in the past decade looking at spreadsheets and videoconference monitors and a hell of a lot less time looking through state-of-the-art optics while running overwatch for a team of hitters.
He adjusted the handle on the tripod to slew his view a little to the right, and then he pushed the zoom to roughly half of its 100-power magnification. The name on the bow of the massive vessel that had just dropped anchor came into view through the darkness and the rain.
Estelle ETC was a Panamax-sized container ship owned by Expert Transit Cargo of Hong Kong, and Pace knew it had made the journey from Asia, through the Panama Canal, and now here to Havana Harbor in just six days.
The ship was seven hours late, meaning the Juliet Victor boarding would have to go incredibly smoothly for the Ground Branch team to finish their job before the storms passed and the sun illuminated their egress for everyone in the harbor to see.
Pace knew it was his job to facilitate this smooth operation, even though he was six hundred yards or so away from the action.
