Elada, a medium-sized town in Eritrea, about an hour and a half away. He bought a counterfeit Rolex, some AK-47s, an old Colt service automatic, ammo, and two pair of khaki uniforms for a hundred American dollars; he could have shaved at least another ten off the deal if he’d had exact change.
Finding a decent vehicle was a different story. Pickup trucks, even those in poor condition, were valuable and rare. Nuri wanted either two trucks, or a truck and Land Rover; he’d stick a few of the Whiplash people in the back of the pickup as bodyguards. But he couldn’t find anyone willing to sell. The best he could do was work a trade for a battered Mercedes sedan — his motorcycle, a thousand American in cash, and three stolen credit cards.
The credit cards were Agency cards, disabled by MY-PID two minutes after the transaction. It would undoubtedly be at least a full day before the buyer found out: Elada didn’t have any ATMs, nor were there any in the rest of the country.
The car ran decently, and came with three-quarters of a tank worth of diesel. Which was enough — Nuri drove it about five miles south to a field where the Osprey was waiting. Danny had decided to speed things up by flying it across to Sudan.
“I have uniforms for two bodyguards,” Nuri told Danny as the Osprey took off with the car chained beneath its belly. “How about Flash and Boston?”
“Boston can go, but Flash is going to stay with the aircraft in case we need backup,” said Danny. “I want to come.”
Boston was imposing physically, but his real asset was an angry, craggy face that would scare even a close friend into thinking he was just waiting for an excuse to kill. Flash, though white, had the lean, undernourished look of a down-on-his-luck white mercenary who very likely was nursing sociopathic tendencies.
Danny was big physically, and Nuri knew from experience that he was in excellent shape and was a great shot. But he had a quieter, almost benign face — too relaxed, too in control. The ideal bodyguard out here was just this side of criminally insane.
“You think you can do it?” Nuri asked.
“I’ve gone undercover here before.”
“This is different. You’ll have to be completely silent. If they hear your accent up here, we’re dead.”
“I’m not worried,” said Danny.
Nuri picked up one of the uniforms. “Here you go, then. I hope it fits.”
Chapter 4
Breanna spotted Jonathon Reid’s gray Taurus parked with its running lights and engine on near the edge of the tarmac as the C-20 turned off the access ramp from the runway. She unbuckled her seat belt and went to the door, waiting while the aircraft taxied over.
“Pilots say the plane should be refueled inside an hour, ma’am,” said the sergeant who was working as the crewman. “If you’d like, I can try and hunt up something to eat.”
“A bagel?” she asked. “With butter?”
“I’ll give it a shot, ma’am.”
Breanna waited impatiently for the aircraft to halt. It seemed to take forever to travel the last twenty or thirty yards. Finally it eased to a stop. The crewman dropped the fold-down stairs, and Breanna trotted down them into a light rain. She walked over to the car and got in on the passenger side.
Reid handed her a cup of coffee.
“The news is that bad?” she asked.
Reid had an extremely droll sense of humor, but he didn’t laugh now.
“I’m guessing what’s going on here,” he told her. “I’m guessing there’s an unauthorized assassination program involved. There are no official records or minutes anywhere. No NSC notes. And I did check, through the back channel.”
“OK.” Breanna had suspected as much when he said he wanted to talk about it in person.
“But it’s the weapon that worries me,” said Reid. “Raven doesn’t refer to the UAV. It was a program to develop software that could seek out and destroy whoever it was targeted against. It could control a variety of platforms. In fact, it could go, on its own, from one to the other. That was its goal.”
“Is that possible?”
“I don’t know.” Reid took a sip from his coffee. “After seeing everything Dr. Rubeo has come up with, I’d say anything is possible.”
“Hmmm.”
“This weapon would be able to take over programs of other countries,” continued Reid. “There was a white paper, very restricted access, that talks about guarding against these things.”
“You should really talk to Ray about it.”
“I’d like to. But I don’t know how much to trust him.”
“I trust Ray implicitly.”
“Would he feel obliged, morally, to discuss it with anyone else?”
“What do you mean?”
“If the Agency has created a weapon that can’t be controlled, and accidentally set it loose, who would he feel he had to tell?”
“What do you mean, it can’t be controlled?”
Reid sipped his coffee, momentarily turning his gaze to the drops of rain landing on the windshield.
“The implication of the white paper was that this software would be like a virus, released into the wild,” he said, still looking at the rain. “Once out there, it would just run relentless until its target was found.”
“You think the Agency would test that without any safety protocols?” said Breanna. “That would be insane.”
“I don’t know what they’re doing. I would assume they would have
“But?”
“But they’re definitely going after someone in the Sudan, they’re definitely using a UAV no one else has known about, and they’re definitely being extremely secretive. And the person the Whiplash team rendezvoused with in Africa joined the Agency as a software scientist before transferring about a year ago to covert ops.”
“We have to ask Edmund what’s going on,” said Breanna.
“I have. He won’t say. I have a few favors to call in,” added Reid. “And I’ll talk to Dr. Rubeo.”
“Then what?”
“I’m not sure.” Reid put his coffee cup back in the holder. “I have to ask you not to share this with the senator.”
“Zen?”
“I don’t— This could be a real political football in Congress. And…” He paused. “I’m not sure the President knows. In fact, I’d almost bet she doesn’t. Just from Edmund’s reactions.”
“You think they’d run an assassination program without telling the President?”
“Without a doubt,” said Reid.
By the time she reboarded the C-20, Breanna felt drained. Recovering the UAV — they had located it and were planning to go in as soon as it was dark — was exactly the sort of mission Whiplash had been created for. The political implications of Raven, even if it were “just” an illegal assassination mission, were something else again.
She hadn’t even been thinking of Zen until Reid mentioned that he couldn’t be told.
They both had jobs where it was necessary to keep a certain amount of separation between work and home, and therefore to keep certain state and political secrets from one another as well. But if Breanna knew that the CIA was breaking the law, and being extremely irresponsible as well — could she in good conscience
