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From the beginning it had felt strange to have security watching the operations center as it worked, and it seemed to Martina like the people in charge here wanted it to be known by all that they were under constant scrutiny.
And it was just that scrutiny that was on her mind right now.
Shift change for the guards would take place in a minute or two, Martina knew from studying their rotations for a day and a half, and this security officer would be replaced by another man. Normally the two of them stood in the open doorway or out in the hall and chatted for a few minutes before the switchover; Martina couldn’t hear what they said, but she’d noticed the habit since she’d been focusing on them, and now she nervously waited for the new man to arrive.
Her hands hovered over her keyboard; she felt sweat on her brow and an electrical charge of nervousness running down her back. She looked at the clock on her monitor, and then she nonchalantly turned her head to her right.
The door opened behind the officer; the officer turned around and greeted the new sentry, and then the pair stepped out into the hall to talk. The man who’d just performed an eight-hour shift kept the door open with a foot as he talked, but neither he nor the new guy could see Martina, so the German woman got to work.
Furiously she typed an encrypted direct message, relaying her concerns about her actions here, the danger she felt each and every passing hour as she was watched like a prisoner while she facilitated in the deaths of so many people around the world.
She spent no more than twenty-five seconds on the message, and then she typed a memorized string of numbers in the address bar—the secure Signal number of Jack Tudor, the man who’d helped her get this job. She’d known Jack for years, since she was a low-ranking intel analyst in the German army and he was a midlevel British intelligence officer assigned to Berlin on a counterintelligence operation for their domestic service.
They’d dated briefly, they’d stayed in touch after that, and Tudor had tried to headhunt her after she lost her job in Berlin the year before. Martina at first refused his offers because Tudor had a reputation of unscrupulous contracts with bad organizations around the world. He’d done work for the Saudis and the mafia and others, this Martina knew, and she didn’t want to be tied to any of that.
At first, anyway.
But when he’d reached out to her a few weeks ago about this opportunity in Singapore, he’d found her in a state of utter desperation and she’d taken the job, but now that she was here, she had regained enough of her sense of honor to ask, to demand, from her handler that she be pulled out from this situation forthwith.
She just wanted to go back home to Bonn, find work in a factory or a bakery or a coffee shop, and get as far away from this madness as possible.
Moments after sending the message to Tudor, and after another glance to the nearest sentry station to see the two men still standing in the hall with the door propped open, she received a response.
Jack Tudor expressed concern, told her he absolutely would contact Cyrus and tell him that she had a family emergency at home, and he would get her out of there. After that, he said, he would report this all to British intelligence.
A second message popped up moments later. He said he needed more information from her about who Cyrus was, where she was located in Singapore, who the security people were surrounding her, and anything she could find on the backgrounds of the other employees there in the OC.
Martina protested in her response; she wrote that she felt she was in danger, but Tudor countered back immediately that, if her concerns were valid, he would need this leverage to ensure that she was safely returned to her family.
Reluctantly she relented, told him she would send him more information as soon as she could acquire it, and closed out of her window just as the new security officer shut the door behind him and took up his post.
She breathed a slow sigh of relief, but she knew she now had to put herself at even more risk. She’d start by chatting up people in the cafeteria. No one was supposed to talk about themselves, but there had been some polite conversation in the previous days that gave her confidence she could get a few nuggets of information off some of the more loquacious of her colleagues. She also knew she could probably get intelligence on the drone pilot she managed; all she had to do was ask the right questions to elicit the right information.
She was nervous, but she was hopeful that soon she’d be on her way back to Germany, and this terrible ordeal would be behind her.
As Martina Sommer went back to her duties at her desk, she had no way of knowing that, in addition to the sentries in the auditorium, the security department had installed pinhole cameras all along the back wall, high near the ceiling and out of view, and each camera was zoomed and focused on each workstation, including that of the director. Every keystroke could be read the instant it happened, and Cyrus would know it all.
Just as she reached to call Wrangler Zero One for a status report, her phone rang. Looking down, she saw it was the director calling, and she fought a fresh wave of panic.
•••
Carlos Contreras sat in a Guatemala City hotel room, his laptop open in front of him and eight of his twelve drones flying over the city in a low-probability hunt for target Gama 18, Zoya Zakharova, as well as Contreras’s newest official target, Gama 19, the American named Courtland Gentry.
He looked away from his machine to light a cigarette, and as he did so, his earpiece beeped.
“Yes?”
The German woman spoke in an urgent tone. “This is Control. I am notifying you to expect a phone call from the leader of this operation.”
“The same man who told me to fly my aircraft in a storm the night before last?”
“No. That was the director of the operations center. I am speaking of the leader of the operation. Code name is Cyrus.”
“Understood,” he said. “What’s this about?”
“I do not know, but I do know you will be relocating effective immediately, so you can recall your drones.”
“Okay, recalling.” He disconnected the call with the German, then went to work ordering his eight quadcopters to return to him.
