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Zoya flew in, shut the door quietly, and helped Court pull the now-dead guard to the right towards a supply closet Zack had pointed out on the blueprint.
Once inside, Zoya grabbed a mop and wet it in a sink.
Ten seconds later she was back out in the loading area wiping blood off the concrete floor, and ten seconds after this she was back in the closet with Court and the dead man.
She looked down at him. “I can wear his fatigues. You can’t.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll watch the door while you change.”
She washed the man’s bloody tunic in the sink, then put it on, as well as his camouflaged pants and his ball cap, but she retained her AK and put her own boots back on. She didn’t look much like a Cuban soldier, but any disguise was better than no disguise.
Court moved the body behind a stack of paint buckets and then came back to Zoya by the door.
Zoya said, “What now? We wait?”
“I’d love to go knock out the cameras, but I don’t want to risk exposing the op before the team gets here. So I guess we just sit here. When they arrive, Travers might want to send a fire team to control the security office, but I’ll let him make that call.”
They settled in to a dark corner of the unlit room, across from the dead man in his underwear crumpled up under the mop sink, and they waited for a message from Pace.
•••
Zack had sat alone in his room for over an hour, waiting for the one a.m. shift change to take place so that there would be fewer people out in the halls. He considered calling Court to find out if the raid was happening or not, but he decided not to chance it. He had no way of knowing if Wren or his people had placed bugs in his room, so he decided he would wait until the last possible moment to reveal that he was working with the CIA against Hinton.
He did, however, decide that he would go down to the basement to look for the entrance to the tunnel.
He left his room wearing a black T-shirt and tan cargo pants; he put his pistol and his backup gun on because he always wore them around the facility, and he slipped a knife into his pocket. He left the satellite phone tucked deep into a duffel bag on the floor.
Zack entered the elevator and pressed the button for the lowest level; a camera in the upper-left corner of the car stared down at him, and he did his best not to look at it.
When the door opened into dimly lit U3, he stepped off, then began walking in the direction of the facility armory.
He reached the armory door, tapped in his code, and opened it, but instead of going in he continued up the hall a few feet, then looked again to his right.
There, down yet another hallway, he saw a couple of doors that led to storerooms and the elevator that was supposedly out of commission. Wren had told him that when the Soviets had constructed the facility, they built it as a traction service elevator, with big overhead hoisting machinery that moved the car from this level to the higher levels, but now Zack suspected the shaft might actually also go down to an even lower floor.
There was no camera here, but he knew he still had to hurry, because if anyone watching the cams noticed the door open to the armory, they could scroll back and find that Zack had continued down the hall.
Zack moved quickly to the elevator, slid open the wheeled metal fence, and reached for the wooden panel in front of it.
Just then, a voice called out to him from his left, back in the direction of the hall to the armory and the main elevators. “Thought I might find you down here.”
It was Gareth Wren, and Zack knew he was fucked.
He turned to find the Englishman flanked by a pair of Cubans wearing camouflage, HK MP5s at their shoulders, pointed in his direction.
“Why are these motherfuckers pointing guns at me?”
“Because I told them to.”
“Why did you—”
“You’re looking for the passage to Lourdes, yeah? The Agency has dusted off some very old blueprints, I suppose, because that tunnel was decommissioned until we reopened it last year.”
“So…so you have a tunnel. Who gives a shit?”
Wren laughed now. “We know that the Agency is aware of Cyrus, because the U.S. president just called the Cuban president demanding access to our location so they could find and destroy it. The passageway below us leads directly to Cyrus; I assume your old colleagues sussed that out, and they encouraged you to confirm its location for them.” He shrugged. “Well, there you have it. I just confirmed it.”
It was quiet in the hall for several seconds until Zack said, “Thanks. You cool if I make a quick phone call?”
