'Are you all right?' Herbert asked.
'Fine,' Hood said.
'Did you get news?' Herbert pressed.
'No,' Hood said.
'But I want to make some.'
'You know where I stand on that,' Herbert said.
'What were you thinking of?'
'Battat,' Hood said. That was not entirely true. He was thinking that he never should have withdrawn his resignation. He should have left Op-Center and never looked back. He wondered if resigning had actually been for him and not to spend more time with his family, as he had believed. But he was back, and he was not going to run away. Battat was the next stop in his thought process.
'This man was sent to the hospital with some kind of sickness where a pair of assassins were waiting,' he said.
'That doesn't sound like a coincidence.'
'No, it doesn't,' Herbert agreed.
'My brain trust and I have been looking into that.' Herbert's brain trust consisted of four deputy intelligence directors who had been brought to Op-Center from military intelligence, the NSA, and the CIA. They were three men and one woman who ranged in age from twenty-nine to fifty-seven. With input from Darrell McCaskey, who liaised with the FBI and Interpol, Op Center had the best per capita intelligence team in Washington.
'Here's what we've been thinking,' Herbert said.
'The CIA is ninety-nine percent certain the Harpooner passed through Moscow and went to Baku. A DOS agent thinks he saw him on a flight to Moscow, but that may have been intentional.'
'Why?' Rodgers asked.
'It wouldn't be unprecedented for a terrorist to let himself be seen,' Herbert said.
'Back in 1959, the Soviet spy Igor Slavosk allowed himself to be seen at Grand Central Station in New York so he could draw police attention and bring FBI personnel to his apartment. When they got to the place down on Jane Street, it blew up. Slavosk came back, collected badges and IDS, and had perfect fakes made. He used them to get into FBI headquarters in Washington. So, yes, it's possible the Harpooner allowed his presence to be known through channels.'
'Go on,' Hood said quietly. He was getting impatient. Not at Bob Herbert; the intelligence chief was simply a convenient target. Hood wanted Orlov to call him back. He wanted to hear that everything was all right at the hospital. He wanted some good news for a change.
'Sorry,' Herbert said.
'So the Harpooner somehow lets it be known that he's going to Baku. He has some kind of operation planned. He knows there are CIA personnel attached to the embassy. He also knows that the CIA might not want to expose those people since police from the Azerbaijani Ministry of Internal Security are probably keeping an eye on embassy personnel, watching for foreign intelligence operations. So the CIA brings someone in from Moscow.'
'Battat,' said Hood.
'Yes,' Herbert said. He seemed a little uneasy.
'David Battat was the head of the CIA's New York City field office. He was the man who hired Annabelle Hampton.'
'The junior officer we busted during the UN siege?' Rodgers said. Herbert nodded.
'Battat was in Moscow at the time. We checked him. He's clean. One of our CIA contacts told me he was sent to Baku to do penance for the New York screw up.' Hood nodded.
'All right. You've got Battat in Baku.'
'Battat goes out to a target area to watch for the Harpooner and gets taken down,' Herbert said.
'Not taken out, which the Harpooner could have done with no problem. Battat was apparently infected with a virus or chemical designed to drop him at a specific time. Something serious enough so that he'd be taken to the hospital.'
'Under guard from his fellow CIA operatives,' Hood said.
'Exactly,' Herbert replied.
'Pretty maids all in a row.'
'Which leaves the Harpooner free of CIA interference to do whatever he's planning,' Hood said.
'That's what it looks like,' Herbert said.
'No one but the United States, Russia, and probably Iran has any kind of intelligence presence in Baku.'
'Because of the Caspian oil?' Rodgers asked. Herbert nodded.
'If the Harpooner also hit operatives from Moscow and Teheran, we haven't heard about it.' Hood thought about that.
'Iran,' he said softly.
'Excuse me?' Herbert said.
