37

MISSION THEATER TARGA

LANGLEY

The mission room was eerily quiet. No one said a word. Calibrisi stood silently at the front of the room, arms crossed. Like everyone else, he looked dazed.

On the screen, a live satellite feed showed the chaos in Saint Petersburg in real time, captured by a thermal-imaging camera that was attached to a satellite several miles above the earth’s surface. The images were very grainy and rendered in black, white, and gray. Heat from human beings and cars showed up as white exoskeletons. People looked like ghosts. But after observing hundreds of night operations, everyone inside the command center knew how to parse the video and, for the most part, understood what was happening.

They knew which vehicle the Mercedes was. They knew precisely where Bond and Oliveri were. They watched the collision with the girl, Bond’s movement to her, then her intrusion into the Mercedes. The flash of the assassin’s muzzle inside the vehicle looked like silent fireworks. They all watched as the thermal outlines of Bond and Oliveri went dim.

In less than fifteen minutes, the CIA had suffered its worst one-day casualty loss in the history of the Agency. Yet nobody was thinking about the loss of a group of operators. Rather, it was the human loss that hurt them all. Every person in the room knew the five dead agents.

It was Polk who brought everyone back. He stepped to the rear wall, where a whiteboard, unused in months or perhaps years, sat blank. He took a pen and started writing:

Cut all signals outside this room.

We are contaminated.

A case officer near the front of the room held his thumb up, indicating he understood the order. He typed furiously into his computer, then hit Enter.

“We are now a closed loop,” he announced. “Targa is quarantined. All commo is off-line.”

“Now play the video again,” said Polk. “I want to watch from the moment the limo starts moving again.”

The screen replayed the limo lurching away, fleeing the scene, the bodies of the two assassins white apparitions against the dark street. As the limo barreled down and was about to strike a pedestrian, Polk snapped his fingers.

“Freeze it there,” he said. “Slow-frame it.”

In painstakingly slow motion, the next few moments of the video played frame by frame. A pedestrian about to get run over. Stepping to the side to avoid the limo. Arm extending. The muzzle flash of automatic weapon fire outside the limo. The driver kicked violently to the right. The limo careening out of control and crashing. The gunman charging toward the back of the limo, disappearing underneath it, then reemerging at the passenger door, going inside, and killing the last remaining occupant of the limousine.

“What the hell just happened?” asked Calibrisi.

Polk turned to him.

“I don’t know.”

38

FOUR SEASONS LION PALACE

SAINT PETERSBURG

Dewey entered the lobby of the Four Seasons Lion Palace. His heart was thumping fast. It felt like it was in his throat.

Calm down.

The .45 was inside his jacket, and so was his hand, on the gun’s grip, ready to swing it out at the smallest provocation.

The lobby’s walls shimmered as light from the chandeliers refracted off walls and floors of polished marble. It was crowded: a couple on a sofa at the center of the lobby; three businessmen in suits to the left, talking loudly; a family of four, two adults and two girls, at the front desk checking in. Several uniformed bellmen stood nearby. Straight ahead, a tall woman was waiting behind the front desk. Dewey crossed the black-and-white-checked marble floor and approached her.

He needed time to think, to plan. Everything had backfired and was destroyed, and now he needed time to plan what would be a very ad hoc operation. What just happened?

“Dobro pozhalovat’v Four Seasons—”

“I don’t speak Russian,” Dewey interrupted quietly.

“My apologies,” she said. “Welcome to the Four Seasons. How may I be of service to you?”

Dewey checked his watch. It was 9:45 P.M.

“I need a room,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she said, typing into the computer. “A royal suite overlooking Saint Isaac’s Cathedral? I’m afraid it’s all we have left.”

“That’s fine.”

He handed her an alias credit card tied to his CIA cover before he was taken off the operation. It would set off alarm bells back at Langley, but that didn’t matter now. A moment later, after swiping it, she handed Dewey a small folder with keys.

“Is the restaurant still open?” he asked.

“Of course, Mr. Sullivan,” she said, pointing to a door across the lobby. “The veal is excellent, by the way. Can I let the maître d’ know you’ll be coming?”

“Please,” said Dewey. “A booth. Out of the way.”

Dewey went to the lobby restroom. Looking for the first time at his coat, he saw a patch of blood streaking the sleeve. He wiped it off, washed his hands, then looked in the mirror. Other than a slight blush to his cheeks, he appeared calm, even normal. The area above his eye was healing. The remnant blackness had dissipated, though there was still enough to hint at the violence from which it had come.

Dewey stared into the mirror, trying to collect his thoughts, contemplating his next move. He pictured Dowling, one of the commandos who’d been on Phase Line One, Moscow. Dowling had saved Dewey’s life in Portugal the year before. Now he was dead. Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Cloud just wasn’t at the dacha? Yet somehow Dewey felt a cold chill deep inside. It was in Polk’s voice over commo. It had about it a hint of desperation.

It seemed clear to Dewey. The fact that Cloud knew about Saint Petersburg meant that he probably also knew about Moscow. He’d probably done the exact same thing: lured them in, then murdered them in cold blood.

It was obvious that Cloud had known about Saint Petersburg long before Bond and Oliveri stepped foot in-country. The girls were operatives, most likely government trained. The strike itself had been masterful. Bond and Oliveri had stepped right into a well-choreographed play.

“He ratfucked us,” whispered Dewey, to no one.

How did Cloud know? That was the question. Had he been listening in? Watching? The only other explanation was that someone inside Langley had tipped him off; Dewey dismissed that possibility out of hand.

The hit on Pete and Joe had been architected. Like a play, it had its acts, its stars. If Dewey had an advantage, it was that he’d arrived in Saint Petersburg off the grid. He’d punctured the phase line midstream. The subterfuge with the stumbling girls was planned out, but their deaths were not, and now Dewey was inside, rewriting Cloud’s play. Cloud thought the final curtain had been lowered, but Dewey had slipped beneath it.

Now he needed to act.

If Cloud didn’t already know about the dead women, he would soon enough. When he did, he’d remove Katya from the city. Dewey needed to act quickly. He needed to find Katya and extract her before Cloud himself did it.

Suddenly, the restroom door opened and a tall man stepped in. Dewey turned. He was older, a businessman, and he nodded hello at Dewey. Dewey moved past him, heading for the restaurant.

The restaurant was softly lit, intimate, and warm, its walls a beautiful deep crimson, four crystal chandeliers hanging from a low, louvered ceiling decorated in ornately patterned green-and-white toile paper.

Dewey looked quickly about the room; most of the tables were occupied. A pretty red-haired hostess led him to a booth on the right. A minute later, a waiter approached and handed him a thick leather-bound menu across the table.

“Chto-nibud’ vypit’, ser?” he asked.

“I—”

“Something to drink, sir?”