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One and a half seconds later and nearly eleven thousand miles away, the images recorded were broadcast on a large wall monitor in an auditorium-style room on the top floor of Building Five, a glass-and-steel structure at the Singapore Science Park in Queenstown, Singapore.
It was past two thirty a.m. here, but looking at the image in the office were a team of nineteen men and women, assembled from around the world, most sitting at computer workstations and all with their eyes locked on the wall monitor and another large screen next to it.
This office had been designated Tactical Operations Center Gama; it had been acquired just six days earlier, and five days ago the team occupying the desks in the dark room had met, everyone’s first day on this job.
An instant after the image of the older man in the linen suit seated in the courtyard froze on the screen, a red bounding box superimposed around his face, and the deputy operations chief read information off the monitor in front of her.
With excitement in her voice, the middle-aged American said, “ID confirmed. Borislava Genrich.”
Clapping and cheering commenced in the auditorium.
The director of the operations center was a thirty-six-year-old Norwegian, and he kept his eyes on the image as he rose from his chair. Instead of celebrating with the others, he spoke over them. “Who’s the woman?”
The American quickly looked down at her monitor. “Scan is running now.” Two seconds later she answered his question. “ID coming in. Zakharova, Zoya F. Russian national. Thirty-four years old. Former officer in SVR. Spetsnaz trained. Currently wanted by the Russian government.”
“Wanted for what?”
“No information other than that there is a Russian national intelligence directive to capture or kill. Odessa code, their highest-level sanction.” She paused, then said, “The Kremlin really wants this chick.”
The director cocked his head. “So, Genrich flew to this little town in Guatemala last night to meet with a wanted Russian fugitive.”
“Why would he do that?” a Moroccan asked from his desk high at the rear of the room.
The Norwegian director shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care. We’ll just wait on instructions from Cyrus.”
“Bet Cyrus has us call in hitters,” chimed in a young South African man near the front.
In the back row, a French woman said, “I bet Cyrus tasks Lancer. He’s in the air now, just leaving California, headed to Mexico City. If they reroute him, he could be in Panajachel by late afternoon.”
The director said, “Everyone stop speculating. Cyrus will make the determination.” He turned to a German woman in the back row of the auditorium. “Fourteen, contact the on-scene wrangler in Panajachel, make sure he has another platform overhead so we can trail them both if they split up.”
She replied quickly. “Yes, sir.”
A forty-year-old male analyst from Holland called out now. “Sir. Recon 29 passed over this restaurant thirty-two minutes ago on its AI pattern, well before Genrich arrived. I went back over its data and…and Zakharova was already there, having lunch with a Caucasian male.”
“Did the bot run an iden check on him?”
“It got nothing. I just manually input his image through the system to make sure. Still nothing. We’re designating him Unsub One.”
The director’s eyebrows furrowed. “Low-quality image or an invisible man?”
“The pic looks sharp enough, sir.”
After a moment, he waved a hand at the analyst. “Forget the unsub. If he links back up with these Russians, then we’ll give him some attention. If he doesn’t, then he’s not important to us.”
“Understood. The woman?”
“We stay on her.”
Fourteen spoke up again from the back row, her German accent strong, but her English flawless. “I’ll have Wrangler Zero One assign RC20 to the woman. It’s on a full charge.”
“Good.” The man from Norway running the OC in Singapore, staffed by men and women from around the world, looked at the wall monitor a second more. Softly to himself and inaudibly to the others in the room, he said, “What the hell are we even doing?”
They were going to be ordered to kill the Russian man and, quite possibly, the Russian woman. He was certain of that much, because they’d been killing people around the world for the last eight hours.
But the operations director in the office at Singapore Science Park had not the faintest clue as to why.
He cleared his head of his uncertainty; he was in charge here. “Okay, the rest of you, concentrate on Israel. We might not have movement till tomorrow morning there, but if our target flushes in the night, we’ll take him then.”
