Tower tucked his hands into his trouser pockets, straightening up to his full height, grinning, as if they were sharing some private joke. It made Riess nervous, and suddenly he found himself wondering if they’d crossed paths by accident, if Tower wasn’t already aware of what the Ambassador was planning.
It was an open secret at the Embassy—and at the NSS, and probably in downtown Tashkent, and possibly as far south as Kabul—that Aaron Tower was the Uzbek COS, Chief of Station, for the CIA, though there was no official confirmation of that fact, nor was there likely ever to be. On paper, Tower was listed as the Mission’s Special Adviser to the Ambassador on Matters of Counterterrorism, a title that defied easy abbreviation or acronymizing, and consequently was never used, except by the handful of personnel who hadn’t actually figured out what Tower really did.
What he really did was run CIA operations in Uzbekistan. Which meant he had what the Company liked to refer to as “assets” inside the military and the NSS and the Oliy Majlis and God only knew where else. Sometimes Riess wondered why they were called “assets,” as opposed to, say, sources, or even contacts. He supposed it was a holdover from the Cold War, when Communism versus Capitalism had defined the ideological battle, rather than Communism versus Democracy.
So Tower had assets, and he also had agents, some undetermined number of officers in play throughout the country. They took their orders from him, brought their findings to him. Who they were, where they were, what they were doing at any given time, Riess didn’t know. He never asked. He wasn’t supposed to.
But it occurred to him then that Tower most certainly had either an asset or an officer in both of the hotels Garret had told him to check for Carlisle, and that however he was going to proceed come nightfall, he’d better do it carefully.
“You’re the Deputy Pol Chief, Chuck,” Tower said. “What’s your guess?”
“I’m sorry, for what?”
“Malikov’s successor.”
“You mean until they hold an election?”
Tower’s grin expanded. “Yeah, before that.”
“Ganiev.”
“You mean Sevara.”
“Right, that’s what I meant.” Riess laughed. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ve got to get back to my desk.”
“Ah, yeah, McColl. Tightass. You make sure he remembers who we’re working for, okay?”
“I’ll make sure he knows the Ambassador’s in charge.”
“Not the Amb, Chuck. The President. We work for the President.” Tower’s grin dropped a fraction. “Don’t ever forget that.”
“I won’t.”
“Good man,” Tower said, and he flashed the grin one last time, then moved out of the way, and Riess continued on, past the Marines and the locked doors, to the relative safety of his desk.
Where he sat and wondered if Aaron Tower didn’t already know about a British agent named Carlisle, and why she was coming to Uzbekistan.
CHAPTER 11
Uzbekistan—Tashkent—Hotel InterContinental
16 February, 1924 Hours (GMT+5:00)
It was a nice room, recently renovated, with new carpet and modern furnishings and a sleigh-backed king-size bed, and it reeked of a scent that Chace was certain came advertised as smelling like “Spring” or “Flowers” or some other nonsense printed on the bottle. She locked the door after her, threw the deadbolt, fixed the security bar in place, then dumped her duffel on the bed and pulled back the curtains, looking out at Tashkent at night. Lights glittered off a body of water in the near distance, some artificial lake in the nearby park, and she watched as headlights drifted along the road to the south—Husniddin Asomov, she remembered—and winked in the windows of the nearby apartments.
She was tired and sore, and it made her feel acutely aware of how long she’d been out of the game. She’d been unable to sleep on the flight, despite her best efforts, and that bothered her, too. In the past, she’d always managed to steal sleep on the way to a job, with the knowledge that once things started rolling on the ground, rest would be hard to come by. This time, as often as she had closed her eyes and repositioned herself in the too- narrow-and-not-enough-legroom seat on the plane, sleep evaded her.
She watched the lights flicker on the lake, and wondered what Tamsin was doing. She wondered just what she was doing.
She closed the drapes, and brought out the guidebook and map she had purchased at the airport after she’d cleared Customs. The guidebook was rife with typos and misspellings, badly translated from Uzbek, and full of useless advice about the sort of things she absolutely
She tossed the book into a corner, then unfolded the map, and was heartened to see that it, at least, looked to be more useful. After studying it for several minutes, orienting herself in the city, Chace refolded it and placed the map aside on the desk. Then she opened her duffel, digging out first a GPS unit she’d bought in London, then the satellite phone she had purchased when she’d bought the pager she’d given to Porter, and finally, its charger.
The GPS unit was nothing out of the ordinary, and Chace switched it on, making certain the battery was still charged and that it still functioned as it should. The LCD lit up, and she moved to the window, canting the device to capture an uninterrupted signal. She took a reading, read the numbers, then cleared the screen and took a second reading, seeing that the figures matched the first set. Satisfied, she switched the GPS off and replaced it in the duffel, then picked up the satellite phone.
At first blush, it looked like nothing more than a slightly out-of-date mobile, and could be easily mistaken for such, until one extended the antenna. Stowed against the back of the unit, it swung out and away from the phone, a thick, black baton. Chace deployed the antenna, switched the power to on, then punched in her access code. For several seconds, there was nothing on the display but the luminous green glow, and she’d just begun to think something had gone wrong with the device when it beeped in her hand, and the word “Iridium” appeared on the screen. The bars marking signal strength expanded, then settled, and Chase released the breath she’d been holding, relieved. If the phone failed, the exfil would go all to hell—she’d have to find a way to procure another, and in Tashkent, she doubted that would be easy.
But the phone was working, and that, at least, meant that she had a way to get home.
Chace switched the phone off, collapsed the antenna, then plugged the charger into the outlet by the desk, grateful that the hotel sockets didn’t require an adapter. She hooked the phone to the charger, waited until she was certain it was drawing power, then turned once more to the bed.
