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I pause.
“We’re going to cut off his goddamn head and put it on a pike.”
Chapter36
IN HISperfectly clean and ordered office in Langley, Ernest Hollister’s assistant comes in and takes a chair, holding two sheets of paper in his hand.
“Update?” Ernest asks.
Tyler Pope says, “The smoke order has been dispatched. Amy Cornwall has attempted to check in via the normal channel and at the embassy in Paris. Neither attempt was successful.”
“Good,” he says.
“Her husband has also tried to reach out.”
“Remind me again who is he, what he does?”
“Tom Cornwall,” Tyler says, crossing his legs. “Journalist now working with Criterion News Services out of Manhattan. Covers national security issues. Contacted our night desks twice this morning, looking for information about his wife. The first number he tried had already been disconnected after Amy was smoked. He got through the second time, but no joy, of course.”
Ernest nods with satisfaction. “Happy to see a reporter getting stonewalled for a change. Just for safety’s sake, I want eyes and ears on Tom Cornwall soonest. I want to know what this poor man is hearing from his wife.”
“Poor man?” Tyler asks.
He says, “Any man unfortunate to be married to Amy has to be poor. Tell me, where is she now?”
“Sir, she’s still with Jeremy Windsor. The MI6 operative. They were going to London, but now they’re heading to Paris.”
Now he’s not satisfied. “Paris? Why in hell are they going to Paris?”
Tyler pauses. “It seems Windsor is chasing after BROKER. Our asset who’s in Paris. And Cornwall is at his side.”
Ernest feels a cold, deep anger rise inside him. Damn woman. Damn that woman…if she had just followed orders, had done her job, this complication, this horrible complication would not have arisen.
And now it was still on him, even if she had been smoked, had gone rogue.
Amy Cornwall was still his.
Ernest says, “How many snatch teams do we have in Western Europe?”
“Two,” Tyler says. “One in Sicily. The other in London.”
Snatch teams are civilian contractors working for the Agency and other friendly intelligence services around the world, grabbing terrorist suspects and supporters and transporting them to black sites for interrogation—although, officially and legally, black sites were no longer authorized.
Which is true.
There is not a single memo or slip of paper in all of Langley that indicatesthat black sites are still open.
Ernest says, “Give them the whole rundown on Amy Cornwall. I want her snatched and dumped into a black site in the next twelve hours.”
“Yes, sir,” Tyler says.
Chapter37
TOM CORNWALLis in his office at One World Trade Center when his boss comes in without bothering to knock. Tom always keeps his door open, but knows from experience that courtesy is a rarely used word in Dylan Roper’s vocabulary.
Dressed in his Upper West Side–style seersucker suit, Roper thrusts a sheet of paper out and says, “You write this?”
Tom fights off a yawn, knowing any sign of fatigue would ratchet up Roper’s pissed-off meter a few more degrees, and says, “If it has my name on it, I’m sure I did.”
