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  ‘Did he tell you this?’

  ‘He got a brief message out but the signals in the area are being interrupted, my guess is by Moscow. Putting pressure on the groups opposed to separation includes blocking telecommunications and internet traffic to disrupt appeals to the outside world. Nobody’s heard from him since he was lifted, but a Swedish diplomat saw him thirty-six hours ago. He said he looked OK but seemed to be having a rough time.’

  ‘So he has to come out.’

  ‘That’s our advice. The situation is deteriorating and there’s a risk he’ll simply disappear. Foreign media personnel are being given a hard time entering the country and some road trips are restricted by troop movements. The problem is our hands are tied; we’ve been instructed that sending in a team to lift him out would amount to a declaration of force.’

  A team. In CIA parlance that meant a group of their own specialists with expertise in escape and evasion.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’

  ‘Our best chance – his best chance – is to simply walk out of the hotel. The level of security seems pretty haphazard and the people holding him won’t be expecting him to move. The problem is he has nowhere to go. But with low-profile help he could be clear and away before they can organize themselves.’

  It wasn’t a bad plan; if Travis wasn’t under lock and key, and guarded by guys who weren’t professionals, the only thing keeping him inside was the threat of being shot. So walking out was probably the last thing they’d expect him to do.

  ‘You have somebody local?’

  ‘Yes. If we can get him to walk, the plan is for you to pick up his trail and shadow him to safety through a series of cut-outs across the border to Moldova. It’s no good trying to fly him out of Ukraine – they’d be on the lookout for him.’ He shrugged as if he was short on choices. ‘It’s a long way but Moldova is really the best bet.’

  Cut-outs are a means of passing information or material from one ‘cell’ to another, often in isolation so that one cut-out won’t know – and therefore can’t blow – the identity of another. ‘Who are these people?’

  ‘Local assets we’ve used for some time, on and off. They’re reliable but non-operational. Civilians. The most we can expect of them is transportation and guidance, not heroics.’

  In my opinion such people – assets as they’re known in the business – are heroic enough, living a double life. It doesn’t make them all traitors or spies, depending on which side of the fence you’re on. Some do what they do out of political or religious conviction; some because they enjoy the buzz. Others do it for money.

  ‘Will Travis know I’m there?’

  ‘Not if we don’t tell him. If he did he might take risks and go places he shouldn’t. We don’t want that; we’re not looking for a hero’s return. We want him out of the hotel and on his way home. That’s it.’

  ‘Why not get the embassy involved?’

  ‘It’s too risky. Our personnel there have been under observation ever since the whole Crimea and Ukraine thing blew up. If any one of them was seen heading east, we’d be accused of fomenting trouble and internal unrest, even though they undoubtedly know Travis is already there and why. The situation for them is getting worse as world attention focusses on the unrest. One way or another Moscow is steering this and waiting to use any situation it can to divert attention away from their own increasing involvement. We want you to get Travis away before that happens.’

  ‘Who else is in on this?’ I like to know if an operation is general knowledge. If it is, I’m out.

  He looked slightly conflicted at that and I could guess why: bringing in an outsider doesn’t always go down well among some CIA die-hards, who regard their own people as the only solution to a problem. The fact is, Langley uses sub-contractors all the time where they need bodies on the ground to intimidate or deter, or where the government insists on the deniability option in case things go bad. But a single individual with specialized skills causes internal doubt, as if it’s a sneaky move, somehow, or an insult to their own special brand of integrity. ‘There’s a restricted list of people in the know on this operation and I want to keep it that way. It includes a couple of people in the State Department, of course, along with my operational support team and senior people. But that’s pretty much it.’

  ‘I report to you?’

  ‘When you can, when it’s safe. But you’re accustomed to operating in the dark, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ In the dark, at long distance and often beyond reach. It sounds insane but it’s the way I like it.

  ‘Good. Your primary support contact twenty-four-seven will be drafted in from our trainee program. He or she will be your voice and ears during this assignment, with minimal interruption. You need anything, you tell them and they’ll see it gets done.’

  ‘A trainee?’

  ‘Don’t worry – they will be selected from the top three per cent. We’re a little short on the ground at the present time, but they will already have some operational experience and will be embedded throughout your time in the field, so you won’t have to deal with any informational gaps.’

  Informational gaps. That was a term I hadn’t heard before. But I knew what it meant; whoever my contact was, they wouldn’t leave the building – presumably a darkened room somewhere in the bowels of Langley – until this job was done.

  I hoped whoever they selected had balls of steel and didn’t need a lot of sleep.

  FIVE

  CIA Operations Centre – Langley, Virginia

  Lindsay Citera was nervous. After being pulled out of a training session on firearms and tactics and told to report to an office on the second floor, she was wondering what she could have done wrong. She’d felt the eyes of her course colleagues following her out of the room and knew what was going through their minds: that she had somehow screwed up and was being dropped … or she’d struck lucky and was being given an early assignment.

  Sympathy and envy; they went hand-in-hand where competition for success was intense and positions were eagerly sought. And nobody wanted to be a trainee for ever.

  She hoped it was an assignment. She’d been pulling high marks in pretty much every module on the training program so there was little chance that she’d messed up unless it was something she hadn’t been prepared for. Like her age. Or her family.

  At thirty-four she was older than most of her intake colleagues. She had a law degree but no previous law enforcement or military experience, and had wondered if the lack of experience would count against her, especially after being comprehensively whipped on the brutal physical exercises by people ten years her junior. She hadn’t actually come in last, though; that honour had gone to a guy who’d tried to take a stockade-style fence in one go and missed. But neither had she broken any finishing tapes on the endurance runs.

  Her biggest concern was her family background. She’d answered all the questions about family honestly, aware that applying to join the CIA would open them all to an intensive round of vetting. She doubted her parents separating would count against her, but having a brother, Tommy, currently in a military garrison accused of bringing in drugs from a tour in Afghanistan might limit her scope for advancement, as could a younger sister, Karen, deeply in debt and running with a crowd of delinquents that had already seen her pick up some DUI misdemeanours and a couple of warnings.

  While waiting in what looked like an unused second-floor office, she’d checked herself over for presentation. Smart but not too stand-out, clean and tidy with no obvious marks from the pistol range, although a faint smell of burned powder residue hung around her shoulders; hair short and neat, nails just the right side of acceptably long. Make-up light.

  The door opened and she jumped to her feet. A tall, slim man entered and sat down across from her. He was carrying a plain folder. When he flipped back the cover, she saw her name printed on the inside flap.

  ‘Brian Callahan,’ he said by way of introduction, and motioned for her to sit. ‘Lindsay Cite
ra. Soft “C”, right?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Like the guy from Chicago. The rock group, not the musical.’ She clamped her mouth shut and felt herself colour up. Jesus, where did that come from? Hell of a way to start an interview.

  Callahan gave a ghost of a smile. ‘I know who you mean. It says here that you’re single, with no current attachments or dependants, that you live alone. Is that still correct?’

  ‘That’s correct, sir.’

  ‘Good.’ He sat back. ‘I could go through your file and tell you what you already know – that you’re top of your grades on all fronts where it matters. But that would be wasting both our time and we don’t have a lot to spare. I’m a staff operations officer; you know what that means?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I do.’ She felt a buzz of real excitement and remembered to close her mouth. He hadn’t mentioned family background, which was surely good, wasn’t it? Callahan’s tone was urgent, and she wondered if that was how it always was around here. SOOs, as they were known, were the main links with intelligence gathering and operations personnel. They were the mostly unseen officers who refined and translated proposals and planning into action, and guided the people at the sharp end: the men and women in the field. The spies, although nobody referred to them that way. Spies worked for the other side.

  ‘Good. Saves me having to explain. I need a comms support officer, Lindsay, who won’t mind ducking out of the light for a while. I don’t know how long, but it shouldn’t be more than a week, ten days. You interested?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir. When do I start?’

  ‘You already have. You’ve been signed off all ongoing training schedules until further notice, but any summary I write of your work will count towards your overall training program assessment. You OK with that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘No animals to worry about? No family members or significant others on the horizon to distract you?’ He looked at her without blinking and she wondered if he was waiting for her to mention Tommy or Karen. They were distractions sure enough, she being the big sister, but only when it suited them. She hadn’t spoken to Tommy in a couple of months and Karen only called when she was in need of money and desperate enough to play the emotional blackmail card. Well, she’d have to suck it up and do without for a while. Big sister was dropping off the radar.

  She opened her mouth to reply, but found her throat had gone dry. My God, she wondered, does he mean I’m going undercover? ‘Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. I’m fine with that. No animals, no family or anything to worry about.’ Certainly no boyfriend, she thought; not since she’d joined the program. There had been a few cautious approaches from colleagues, and a couple of the more obvious chat-up lines from guys in the administration area. But she’d steered clear of all of them. It was no secret that romantic entanglements, while not forbidden, could prove a serious hindrance on the trainee program. Not that she’d sworn herself into holy orders or anything like that; but she wanted to succeed in the job she’d always wanted to do since she was in high school and wasn’t going to stuff it up for a quick roll in the hay.

  ‘Good. You’ll stay in the operations centre for as long as it takes. I’ll arrange for meals to be brought to you from the cafeteria, and if you need a break we can assign one of the other trainees on assignment down here to take over. But keep it short. If we have to, we can stand you down for a few hours but you should regard this as a twenty-four-seven assignment until further notice.’

  ‘Doing what, sir?’

  He nodded at the folder. ‘It’s all in there. Read it now and leave it here when you go. The short version is you’ve been assigned to support an operative in the field in Eastern Europe. He’s not one of ours but he is to be given the same degree of focus and attention that you would give a full-time serving CIA officer. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Callahan leaned forward. ‘I know this is stuff you’ll have been told but hear me out – it’s important. Over the course of the next few days, you will learn things that never leave this facility. The operative’s code name is Watchman. He’s highly experienced and you could go many hours, even whole days when you don’t hear from him. But when you do, you go into overdrive and give him every second of your attention because he will need it. Doesn’t matter what time of day or night it is; to Watchman, just like any other clandestine officer, you’re there to make sure he has whatever backup he asks for. That could be anything from map coordinates to travel schedules, down to the route to the nearest hospital or the name of a friendly doctor. Get me?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ She reached across and picked up the folder. It felt as if she was making a momentous move, like she’d just taken a major step forward in her career.

  Callahan’s face softened as if he understood. ‘I don’t mean it to sound harder than it is, and I’ll be here to guide you. But it’s vitally important you understand how critical your role is to Watchman. This is going to require all of your focus, understood?’

  ‘Understood, sir. Am I allowed to ask why he’s from outside?’

  ‘You might have heard talk about the differences between Langley personnel and outsiders – what are often called private contractors. Don’t listen to it. This man’s job is to keep another person alive in the field, and to get him out in one piece. It’s what he’s good at and is why he was selected. The fact that he’s not CIA is not an issue to me; it’s what he can do that matters. That makes him vitally important to us and the country. It makes you an important part of it, too. I know it’s a huge thing we’re asking of you this early in your career, but I wouldn’t be speaking to you now if I hadn’t been assured that you were more than capable of doing this.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Lindsay’s throat was dry with nerves. ‘Will I be talking to this other person?’

  ‘No. He has a limited line of reporting. If he runs into trouble, it’s up to Watchman to get him out. Watchman is your focus.’

  ‘I understand. I won’t let you down.’

  Callahan smiled, for the first time without apparent reservation. ‘I know that, Lindsay. Just make sure Watchman knows it, too. Yours could be the only friendly voice he hears over the next few days, remember that.’

  As soon as Callahan had gone, Lindsay opened the folder and read the briefing notes three times, a habit ingrained into her by her dad, a pharmacist. Read three times, he’d always told her, and you’ll know it forever. It had worked pretty well so far and got her through law school, so she wasn’t complaining.

  Ukraine. It had been all over the news for a long time now, yet she knew ridiculously little about it. Maybe now was the time to update her education.

  As part of her training she had already sat in on selected ‘live’ operations, listening to real-time and recorded audio feed from officers in the field and watching visuals via drones over Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot zones. Sitting in a darkened bubble with a bunch of other trainees, however, had made some of it seem a little unreal, and she and others had suspected they were simulations to help weed out the romantics, fantasists and the uncommitted.

  But this was different; this was about a man she was shortly going to be joined to more closely than to most of her friends. She could put down the phone on them, and they her, and they’d still be friends in the morning, hangovers and fights notwithstanding. But not the man code-named Watchman. And that made everything seem frighteningly real.

  His very life might depend on everything she heard, did or said.

  SIX

  ‘Help is on the way. Travis will move as soon as he receives the green light.’

  Brian Callahan suppressed a shiver as he sat down after making the announcement. He was in an annexe to the Operations Suite in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Langley HQ. The air was clean and pure, with the slight chill and dead feel peculiar to sub-level rooms, where the walls were bombproof and the fabric sowed with auditory disruption networks. But it wasn’t the atmosphere that made him nervous; he was used to that.
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br />   It was the presence of one of the three men already seated at the boardroom-style table.

  ‘Remind us of the situation for the benefit of Senator Benson, will you?’ The first speaker was senior CIA Assistant Director, Jason Sewell. He had the genial smile and manner of a happy golfer, but the watchfulness in his eyes was a dead giveaway; here was a man experienced in the field of espionage and high-risk operations who knew what was involved. Like Callahan, he also knew the risks of not having all his ducks in a row for the man sitting at the far end of the table.

  ‘That would be very useful.’ Senator Howard J. Benson was probably the most influential – and potentially dangerous – man the CIA could have ever admitted through its blast-proof doors. A former politician from Virginia, he was a long-time fixture around Washington, and a member of the ultra-powerful Intelligence Community, an umbrella organization for all US intelligence agencies set up to coordinate and support, among other things, special activities connected with US foreign policy objectives overseas. But what made him a person for Sewell and Callahan to be wary of was his Congressional oversight role regarding CIA operations and activities. Outwardly a supporter of the Agency, it was generally known that Benson was a CIA sceptic and would not hesitate to drag it kicking and screaming before an investigative committee if given half a chance.

  ‘Senator. As you may know the State Department recently sent a negotiator named Edwin Travis to Ukraine tasked with holding fact-finding talks with the various groups involved in the troubles over there; that’s both separatist pro-Moscow, and Ukrainian nationalists opposed to the split. Sending a government representative openly would have caused problems with Moscow, so we advised them to place him on a ticket from the Centre for International Coordination and Collaboration, based in Geneva. CICC for short. They would still know who he worked for, but would give them a face saver if it got out.’