I got back in my car and gave it fifteen miles at a steady clip before I considered pulling over. So far I hadn’t seen any signs of being followed, but that didn’t mean I was alone. I’d seen a handful of vehicles coming the other way, but they were mostly small family-size sedans along with a couple of ancient pick-up trucks and three motorbikes each carrying a single elderly male rider with a variety of bundles on the rear panniers. Farmers or traders going about their business. Life going on as normal. A couple of them waved but that was local good manners. I waved back and kept going.
I stopped in the shelter of a large sandstone formation and killed the engine, then got out and took a walk. The fight had been brutal and I felt a wave of dizziness sweep through me as various pains in my body began coming awake. A bruising fight is nothing like they portray on film. For one, you don’t automatically get up again if someone hits you, and while the shock of hard contact might be delayed, it soon catches up with you.
My breathing had slowed down and I could feel the adrenalin rush leaving me, but it would be some time yet before I could draw a straight line on paper or take a drink from a wine glass without spilling it. When I felt better I got back in the car and dropped the window so I could hear if anybody happened along. It was time to report in.
My current assignment was on behalf of the CIA and Brian Callahan – the same Callahan I’d first met in New York. I’d worked for him a few times now and trusted him implicitly, which is rare in this business. When you work undercover in hostile situations long enough, even your own handlers can fall into the bracket of those not to be fully trusted until proven otherwise. Most of that suspicion is internal, a natural blow-back of seeing everyone out there as a potential enemy until proven otherwise.
Callahan had explained in his briefing that this Lebanese mission had been on the cards for a couple of months, but had been placed on hold waiting for various factors to be in place. One of those factors – the main one as it turned out – was for a US Defence Intelligence Agency source – an official in Lebanese security – to load some information on a memory stick and get it away from watchers at the Office for State Security so he could pass it to his DIA handler. His position didn’t allow for transmission of data other than strictly on an in-house network share, otherwise he’d have been able to send it by email and I could have saved myself a job.
The trip, according to Callahan, was well worth the effort to get hold of the memory stick, which was believed to include internal reports containing the identity of agents in the military suspected of selling information to, among others, the CIA and DIA. Sister agencies aren’t always keen on sharing agendas until they’re forced to, but in this case the DIA handler on the ground had fallen ill and been evacuated out of the country. That had left his bosses in the embarrassing situation of having to ask CIA Langley for help.
I could only hazard a guess at how that had gone down; there would have been considerable embarrassment on one side and some quiet jubilation on the other. But whatever the feelings in each camp, it was rated as an intelligence coup worth going for, especially if it saved the lives of other assets working on our behalf. Whether Hezbollah or the government, if the names on the memory stick got out, their lives would be forfeit. And if there’s one thing guaranteed to attract good and reliable assets it’s the knowledge that they will be looked after if their position becomes compromised.
The volatile nature of the region and the strength of the security apparatus locally didn’t allow for a team to come in, but with none of their own Special Activities Centre or Global Response Staff available at short notice, Langley had hired me to meet up with Tango and make the pick-up. The last-minute nature of things had left me with no time to set up anything more sophisticated, but that’s often the way. Unfortunately, it now looked like the meeting wasn’t going to happen after all. It was a harsh conclusion to draw but when the collector of information – in this case me – finds himself on the wrong end of a sniper’s gun, it has to be recognized that the game is over.
I texted Callahan a skeleton report along with snapshots of the dead shooters and the photo I’d found on them. I suggested he get the CIA’s research bodies to check the databases to see if they could identify the men from known Russian personnel. It was a long shot but worth a try. Find out who they were and we might get to know who’d sent them after me.
A reply came surprisingly quickly. It was short and
