“Have I got your attention now, Agent Winters?” Remington asked in a brusque voice.
“Yes.” Realizing his mistake almost at once, Winters threw a quick, fearful glance at Hardin. “Yes, sir.”
Standing at parade rest, rocking back and forth on his heels so he would be read as a constant threat on Winters’s personal radar—able to strike without warning at any given instant—Hardin smiled slightly and gave a brief nod.
“Good,” Remington responded. A kind word reinforced the reward system that usually balanced a punishment situation. The Ranger captain stood squared up, officious, exuding command. He was also a walking poster child for freedom and power to the CIA agent at the moment, a reminder of all that had been stripped from him. “Special Agent Cody is in pursuit of a covert agent here in this city?”
Winters hesitated. The brief indiscretion earned him a quick slap from Hardin. Winters cursed, and Hardin started to strike him again, causing the man to flinch.
“Wait,” Remington said.
Hardin halted.
Remington fixed Winters with his gaze. “The next time I won’t stop him, and he won’t stop with just slapping you. Understood?”
“Yes … yes, sir.”
Satisfied that the reward/punishment coda was properly installed, Remington repeated his question.
“Yes, sir,” Winters said. “Agent Cody is here to intercept a rogue agent.”
“A rogue CIA agent?”
“Yes, sir.”
“By whose authority?”
“Sir, I don’t know.”
“Or is he working to clean up his own mess?”
“I couldn’t tell you that, sir. We, my team and I, we take our orders from Agent Cody. We take those orders directly, sir. It minimizes the probability of our exposure, and we’re usually never in a situation that our government can own our actions or us. Sir.”
Remington paced in a measured cadence, his brain working quickly to assess the information he was getting. “You stated that Cody was here to intercept the rogue agent. Where is that agent bound?”
“I don’t know, sir.” Winters glanced fearfully at Hardin.
Remington hesitated just long enough that Hardin executed a vicious slap, knocking Winters from the chair again. Winters fell with a thud and groaned. Blood dripped from a new cut beside his eye.
“Wait,” Remington said. “I believe him.”
“Sorry, Captain,” Hardin said. “I thought he was shining you on.”
The corporal’s response was a carefully orchestrated one they’d used before. If Remington let a lull happen in the conversation after a negative answer, Hardin dealt out punishment.
“We’ll go with my feelings, Corporal.” The statement made it clear that Remington could serve as the CIA agent’s savior as well as punisher. “Of course, sir.” Hardin reached for Winters and hauled him to his feet and the chair again. “I’ll await your orders, Captain.”
“You said intercept,” Remington reminded.
“Intercept is the term Special Agent Cody is using.” Winters turned his head and wiped his bloody mouth on his shoulder.
“But you don’t know whom, or what, Icarus is on his way to.”
“No, sir.”
“Do you know what Icarus’s last mission was?”
Winters flexed his puffy lips as if trying to get used to their new size. “He infiltrated a group of terrorists. Sir. The PKK. They’re Kurdish terrorists.”
“I know that, Agent Winters.” Remington restored the man’s rank to inspire confidence. The address was subtle but rarely went unnoticed in tense situations where an interrogation subject examined the smallest word, the tiniest movement for hope that he or she would survive. “Icarus succeeded in penetrating one of the cells that were assigned to assassinate Chaim Rosenzweig.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Icarus helped foil that effort and was in turn discovered as an enemy agent.”
An uneasy look flickered across Winters’s face. “Agent Cody thinks that didn’t happen exactly that way. Sir.”
Remington stopped pacing and stared at Winters.
Shrugging, looking totally pathetic and helpless, Winters licked his bloody lips and said, “Agent Cody thinks Icarus was compromised.”
“By the terrorists?”
“By the Syrians, sir.”
Interest flared white-hot inside Remington. If such a thing had happened, it offered a possibility he might exploit. “Explain.”
“Icarus called in the hit on Rosenzweig late, sir,” Winters replied. “Almost too late. The assassins had the Israeli in their sights when covert ops took them down.” He hesitated, causing Hardin to shift toward him again, then ducked his head, burying his face in his shoulder in an effort to protect it. “Don’t hit me again! Please, don’t hit me again!”
Remington held up a hand to stop Hardin and kept it up long enough that Winters saw it when he peeked up to see why the corporal hadn’t hit him.
“If you don’t know,” Remington suggested, “tell me what you think.”
“I think that Icarus is a double agent,” Winters said in a rush. Blood flew from his lips as he spoke. “A week or two before the assassination attempt, while Icarus was still in deep and we had no plans of retrieving him, some of our operatives caught wind of an alliance between the terrorist groups in the Middle East. The PKK, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda. Some of Hussein’s bullyboys and warlords that got missed during the second Iraq war.”
“They’ve been networking for years,” Remington said. “That’s nothing new.”
“Networking,” Winters repeated. “Yes, sir, they have. But the word we were getting was that they’d lined up with Syria in a big way. Supposed to be an operation like no one had ever seen before. And something else was in the wind.”
“What?”
Cautiously, Winters shook his head. Hardin started forward, giving Remington plenty of time to raise his hand to stay the blow.
“What?” Remington asked. “What was in the wind?”
“Don’t know, sir,” Winters said, then rushed on. “My guess is that it was the Syrian attack. Maybe it was supposed to set off a wave of attacks throughout the Middle East. Maybe it still is.”
“Why would they risk that?”
“I can’t confirm this, sir.”
Remington nodded.
“The terrorist groups had heard that President Fitzhugh had made a deal with the Israeli government.”
“What kind of deal?”
“For the fertilizer, sir. The fertilizer that Rosenzweig created. Heard he was going to use it to turn the western states into a Garden of Eden. Increase the U.S.’s capability
