“Itisour honeymoon, just a bit late. We decided to do a little side trip, that’s all. Remember Harden, my old OC from the CIA?”
Hawk recalled that Rick Harden was the operations chief of a CIA task force Steve had been sent to infiltrate a while back. He was the one who had almost had Marlena killed. “Yeah. He causing you trouble again?”
“No, he’s actually turned out to be a hero of sorts back in D.C. Admiral Madison likes him.” Steve shifted and pointed south, toward where Hawk and Amber had been heading earlier. His expression sobered. “We’re here on a side mission for ourselves and Harden. Cam and Patty have been missing for a few months now, and after looking through all the possible avenues, we’ve concluded that they or their bodies were dumped out of the planes.”
Hawk frowned. “Cam? It’s that mouthy dude in your task force, right?” Steve and Marlena nodded. “Why would he and his girl be dumped out of a plane in Macedonia?”
“Long story. They were tracing hidden illegal air shipments and weapon dropoffs by certain elements in the CIA that were supposed to be relief aid. There were multiple shipments going out when they disappeared, so the difficult part was trying to pinpoint which was legit. Harden and I traced one of the moles who disappeared and managed to find her background connecting to the old German system and the KLA. She was the connecting piece to all the moles, giving orders on what went where. Some sort of double-agent handler.” Steve looked at his surroundings. “Hard to believe old Greta would be walking around in this place, running weapons. Anyway, Lena and I are only concerned about Cam and Patty, so that’s why we’re doing this on our own. Needle in a haystack, but we’re close.”
There was one thing that caught Hawk’s attention. “Greta?” he mouthed quietly.
Amber turned to him. “She has to be the same Greta.”
“What, you’ve seen her? Where?”
“About this tall, brown hair, stylish. She’s supposedly a relative of Dilaver’s,” Hawk said.
Steve frowned. “Don’t think we’re talking about the same person. The Greta I’m talking about was Harden’s secretary, and had been working as one for over a decade. And she had white hair. Kind of old-ladyish in the way she talked and walked.”
“Darling, appearances can be deceptive,” Marlena chipped in, canting an eyebrow.
“I saw her in and out of that office for a year and never thought of her as more than a secretary,” Steve said.
“And it’s positive that she’s a double agent?” Hawk asked.
“A handler,” Steve corrected.
“What’s the difference?” Amber asked.
“A double agent is an asset. A handler makes sure an asset remains one,” Marlena explained.
“Thank God I’m in the contracting business, then,” Amber said with a wry expression.
“Oh, me, too,” Marlena said. “What do you do?”
“I collect info and sell it for money,” Amber replied sweetly. “And you?”
Marlena cocked her head. “I cancel people. Sometimes for money.”
“And other times?”
“Other times I do it when they’re straddling something that doesn’t belong to them.” Her blue eyes were challenging.
Hawk cleared his throat. He didn’t have to be standing where Steve was to know that Amber’s eyes would have that dangerous sparkle in them that meant she was thinking of some form of revenge. He could tell Marlena was in her GEM operative mode, testing Amber, and he didn’t particularly want to have to explain about her agency and its ways to Amber right now.
“It’s a high probability that it’s the same Greta,” he said, smoothly segueing into using GEM’s love for percentages. “Dilaver’s always talking about drop shipments from D.C. that are disguised as relief aid. Then there’s an Aunt Greta who’s a handler who knows about these shipments, or at least some things in them. She seems to be waiting for someone else to show up, though, because she doesn’t know what the weapon I’m looking for looks like.”
“I bet it’s the missing CIA director from the Directorate of Administration. Remember, Lena? Harden told us the director from Administration had disappeared along with Greta,” Steve said, then turned to Hawk and explained, “Administration is a department at the Agency that distributed weaponry among its many functions.”
Hawk nodded thoughtfully. “Makes sense to have a mole in that department, then, distributing weapons under the guise of relief aid. No one would check too closely if the director was also involved. I have a bunch of coordinates of each hidden cache for the KLA and there’s one around here, between Tirana and Elbasan. Amber’s very knowledgeable about this area, but the concern is we’ll get to the cache too late.”
“We know where it is,” Marlena said, affecting a yawn. “If I’d known you were after something in there, I’d have taken care of it while we were looking for Cam and Patty.”
“You know the location?” Hawk asked. He looked at Steve. “Why didn’t you contact the admiral? Or GEM?”
“Like we said, we’re officially on our honeymoon. Except for Harden, nobody knows we’re here,” Steve said, a corner of his mouth lifting. “Nobody told us you guys were after weapons caches. We didn’t even know what was in the crates. Most of them had ‘U.S. Relief Aid’ in bright blue and red on them. We planned on reporting this, but we found things that we think belonged to Cam and Patty and we’re heading off to Tirana for more clues.”
“Then they’re alive,” Hawk said.
