'Orders,' Battat said. He shook his head. 'I'm sure this whole thing would look real solid in the computer simulations. Or at least plausible. We have state-of-the-art intel simulation in Washington. There are respectable agents working in the field. And there's a relatively modest target. Hell, it sounds almost easy. But there's always the unknown. I was lucky in Azerbaijan. Here, they could dump your body, and you'd be a meal not a crime scene.'
'As if that matters,' Aideen said.
Battat snickered. 'I suppose you're right.' He shook his head. 'You asked me why I was complaining a minute ago. I'll tell you. We don't really have freedom. What we have is a blueprint for scapegoating. What 'freedom' really means here is, 'If you screw up, it's your ass.' '
'Op-Center doesn't work like that,' Aideen said.
'What makes you so certain?' Battat asked. 'You weren't with them very long.'
'Like I said a moment ago, I was there long enough to know that Paul Hood, Mike Rodgers, and the rest of them are not run-of-the-mill bureaucrats,' Aideen told him.
'If you say so,' Battat said dubiously.
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'If they were, I wouldn't be here,' she said. 'I was happy working as a political consultant. And I was safe. No one was shooting at me.' She paused. 'Not with bullets, anyway.'
The woman's voice sounded wistful when she said that. Battat smiled. Finally, they appeared to have something in common.
'You got a lot of sniping in the Washington press?' Battat asked.
'Not just me but my causes,' Aideen said. 'That hurts even more. They were my babies.'
'Unfashionably liberal causes, I'm guessing?' Battat asked.
'Let's just say inconvenient,' Aideen replied. 'Women's rights abroad, mostly.'
'Forgive me, but that doesn't quite jibe with using Maria as Mata Hari,' Battat observed.
'The question is not using sex appeal as a tool,' Aideen said. 'The issue is having the option to do so.'
'It still sounds like a contradiction,' he said. 'You want to hear something ironic?'
'Sure.'
'I got hit by the press because I gave a woman too much freedom,' Battat told her.
'Annabelle Hampton?' Aideen asked.
'That's the gal who was spying for terrorists,' Battat said. 'There were Op-ED pieces suggesting that 'her superiors' be investigated for treason. There were slurs in the conservative press. Always blind items, but everyone knew who they meant. Especially after they found out I was in Moscow at the time.'
'Yet you had the will to come back from that,' Aideen said. 'Pretty impressive.'
'Either the will or the fear,' Battat said. 'I didn't want to leave government service with that on my record.'
'I think it was character,' Aideen said. 'I learned something back in college. I had a twelve-to-two A.M. radio talk show. It was called The Late Aideen. Ironically, I got at least two death threats a week. What I realized was that you have to do your job regardless of what people think, say, or do. It's either that or do something safe, boring. I never want to do that.'
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'Well, it won't be boring here,' Battat said. 'The Spanish and the Brush Vipers won't be using innuendo and mud. They'll be using 9 mm clips.'
'My attitude will be the same,' she said.
Battat hoped so. When he was being fired on in Baku, he felt a lot different than he did when he was spying on the UN from a CIA office in New York. The knowledge that being discovered will cause you to be reassigned is different from knowing that a mistake could be fatal. Some people flourish under fire. Battat did. Others wither. Aideen said she had faced armed enemies before. Obviously, she had held up all right. Otherwise, Mike Rodgers would not have sent her back into the field.
The two sat quietly until eight-thirty. Consulting the cornputer map, Aideen switched on the decode program.
'It's downloading,' she announced.
It took less than a minute for the data to be received from Op-Center. Aideen quickly calculated their new route. It was off-road. Not the kind of journey either of them wanted to take at night. But no mission had ever been designed for the cornfort of the operative.
The Trans-Kalahari Highway took Battat and his partner to the Meratswe River. The wide, seasonally low river was located on the outskirts of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. There, the Wrangler left the modern turnpike for the off-road trails. If they had a chance of intercepting the truck with Maria and the Brush Vipers, they would have to cut through the barren salt pan. A dirt road marked the way. It was difficult to say whether the trail had been pounded out by buses or years of migrating animal herds. Possibly both.
The soft top of the vehicle was down. The only sounds were the well-tuned 1-6 engine, the air rushing by, and an occasional loud bounce when the Wrangler hit a shallow ditch. Fortunately, the vehicle's sophisticated suspension minimized the jolt to the lower spine.
