Chapter 1
Chapter One
United States Consulate
Frankfurt, Germany
Sophia’s fate was sealed.
Hal was going to make sure of that. He strode across the NCS surveillance room, stealing a quick sip of his takeout coffee and burning his tongue.
‘Mother of pearl,’ he cursed.
He caught the attention of the room’s coordinator, a young American named Lauren. She was Fifth Column—everyone here was—but they used the CIA’s hacking outpost in the Frankfurt Consulate as if it were their own.
‘Sir,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
He wasn’t sure he could say the same.
Dozens of operators hunched over their own twin displays, sifting through activity logs, satellite imagery, CCTV footage and news reports. Hal caught sight of another report about a soldier getting abducted and beheaded; that made fourteen this month. As the video played, he recognized the concrete platform to the right of the frame, and the scrawled chalk writing on its side. He’d shot scenes there himself. It was a good location.
Lauren adjusted the elastic on her ponytail and returned her focus to the trio of giant screens mounted on the front wall. The room temperature was a few degrees cooler than Hal cared for, and the blue-light glare of fifty screens made him wince.
This is going to be a long night—and probably morning.
‘There’s something you need to see,’ Lauren said. ‘High frequency of facial matches in this cluster. Vilnius, Lithuania.’
Hal looked past her, at the three giant screens. The center screen showed a satellite view of central Vilnius at midnight, threads of light over dark forest.
Hal gripped his coffee, perhaps too tightly. He hadn’t slept properly in a week, and his nightmares had worsened. ‘Sophia covers her tracks.’
‘No one’s that good,’ Lauren said. ‘It’s a matter of time, and hers is running out.’
Hal resisted the urge to smile. ‘What makes you so certain?’
She walked to the giant screen on the left, and he followed. The screen featured a closer look at a neighborhood, this time in the infrared wavelength. Lauren gazed at it, unblinking. Hal wondered how many hours of overtime she was running up right now.
‘I wouldn’t have called you in here if I didn’t think we had a solid fix,’ she said.
‘You’ll need to forgive my skepticism,’ Hal said. ‘Tell me about your solid fix.’
‘While Sophia’s team was in Wrocław during the Purity rally shooting, we tagged a small number of vacant properties in Vilnius. Then we tracked which ones became occupied approximately nine to twelve hours later.’ Her bloodshot eyes focused on his. ‘It takes nine hours to drive from Wrocław to Vilnius. If you allow additional time for exfiltration and vehicle change—’
Denton whispered in Hal’s ear. ‘Mommy’s home.’
Anyone else might have crushed their coffee, but Hal held the paper cup steady and didn’t flinch. When he blinked, Denton was gone and Lauren was staring at him, puzzled. Hal realized he was still half-asleep.
I’m going to need a mite more coffee, he thought.
Lauren marched to the right-hand display and zoomed in on a single property. It was a large house roughly fifteen clicks north of central Vilnius. The property backed onto a forest. ‘This is archival footage. We can’t zoom in at this resolution unless it was recorded that way, but what we can do is face-recog them when daylight hits.’
Hal set his coffee down on a nearby desk. ‘This property is where I gave you authorization to dispatch my team, correct?’
‘Correct. And they’re almost in place.’ Lauren turned to the first row of operators. ‘Elizabeth, show us the solar panels.’
Elizabeth, an operator with wiry brown hair and a rigid posture, ran her long fingers across the keyboard, commandeering a satellite. The image on one of the giant screens shifted as the satellite lens focused on the forest. Between the property and the forest was a sizeable open area with no cover. Open, dead ground. Elizabeth zoomed in on the treeline and Hal caught sight of something glinting, perhaps under moonlight. He stepped closer to the screen.
‘Solar panel,’ he said. ‘Small, easily missed.’
‘It looks like there’s an arrangement of them in a horseshoe shape,’ Lauren said. ‘Do you think they’re powering motion sensors?’
‘Either way, it’s a mansion,’ Hal said. ‘This is the last place Sophia would hole up.’
‘But it’s old and run down; plenty of open ground between it and the forest,’ Lauren said. ‘It’s leased out by the owner, an elderly local woman who lives on the other side of Vilnius. All off the books. Not to mention there’s minimal internet and cellular usage which doesn’t match up to the number of occupants. You can’t tell me this doesn’t seem suspicious to you.’
‘That would depend,’ Hal said. ‘How long have they been there?’
‘We can’t know for sure, but five days at least.’
‘That’s too long.’
She gestured to one of her operators. ‘Headset.’
The operator passed one to Hal, and he slipped it over his ears.
‘It’s not that long when you have a place this good,’ Lauren continued as she held an eyedropper over one of her eyes and squeezed. The liquid hit her eye and she blinked. ‘They might’ve stayed a little longer.’
‘We need to find out,’ Hal said. ‘Can you bring up my team’s body-cams?’
Before Lauren could pass on the order, one of the operators switched the left and right screens so they showed the body-cams from two of his operatives. Both visuals were infrared. One revealed a small glimmer of body heat in the distance, from one of the mansion’s rooms on the second floor.
Through the headset, Hal heard one of his team members—an operative with her own genetic infrared vision—report what she’d seen through her binoculars. One of the mansion’s occupants had just drawn the blinds over a window. But not before they could catch a glimpse at the person’s face.
‘Face-recog running now,’ said Elizabeth, the operator next to him. ‘And … we have a lock.’
Hal checked her display and recognized the face immediately. ‘Her name is Ieva. Abducted by Sophia three months ago.’
Lauren’s red eyes focused on Hal. ‘The room’s yours. What’s our next move?’
‘I want Sophia alive.’ Hal leaned over the desk to collect his coffee. ‘And I want the others dead.’
