MOREAUwas talking to Grim via the Trinity System. They floated over the airport in Errouville, watching as Hansen and his team rushed off toward Villerupt.

"The tail I placed on Stingray just reported in," said Moreau. "Guess where Stingray's headed?"

"Villerupt," said Grim. "And since I haven't issued my next report to Kovac yet, we have confirmation."

"Let me say it out loud so we're both clear on this: Stingray is a cutout for someone on our team. Someone on Delta Sly is a mole working for Kovac." Moreau took a deep breath. "That's the only way Kovac would've known I'm in France and the only way Stingray would know where the team is headed. Someone on the team is feeding the information back to him."

"So all our efforts to bypass him--meeting here, everything--have been for nothing."

"Don't pop the Prozac yet," sang Moreau. "This just makes the game more fun. First question: Do we notify the team?"

"No, we don't. That'll heighten the paranoia, interfere with the mission, and tip off Kovac that we're on to him. We've already got Noboru's mercs to deal with. We need to handle the mole problem from our end."

"All right. How about this: If we can identify the mole, then we feed that information to Fisher. He'll need to remove the problem and the team can be left out of it."

"Excellent. I could pass this on to Fisher's cutout, though I'm not sure when they'll be able to link up again. I'll have to risk contacting him to see."

"Any thoughts on who the mole might be?"

"I'd love to rule out Hansen, but there's no ruling out anyone at this point. He could've been working for Kovac before I recruited him. And I confided in him, even picked him for the mission to Russia. That could've been a grave error."

"What about Ames? I hate that little bastard."

"Who doesn't? That's why I like him. He's a thorn in everyone's side--including our enemies. And you've read his fitness report. He's scored higher than anyone else on the team, across the board. Fisher told me he doesn't have the temperament for this line of work, and I agree, but temperament isn't everything. I think he's too loud, too noisy, too obvious to be our mole."

"Or he's overplaying it so he becomes too obvious."

"Maybe."

Moreau squinted into a thought. "What about one of the women?"

"I don't know. I'll do some more probing. Noboru could be our man. Maybe Kovac promised him something we couldn't."

"Maybe I'm the mole," said Moreau.

"Don't even go there, Marty."

"You know if I am the mole, the entire NSA had better watch out, because I'm so wired into the intelligence community that it wouldn't take long to bring the walls tumbling down."

"But instead we got Kovac, who wants to line his pockets and arm our enemies."

"I'm sure he thinks he's saving America. As long as our enemies are armed and dangerous, we're all gainfully employed. No war on terror, no threats, and the NSA downsizes us onto the streets. They'll say, Let the CIA do the field work. We're here to cut government spending and lower taxes!So Kovac's boosting the American economy by making sure the bad guys remain very, very bad."

Grim smirked. "Our enemies don't need hishelp."

21

SIXT RENTAL-CAR OFFICE VILLERUPT, FRANCE

VALENTINAdrove while Noboru rode shotgun, and it took the team a good forty minutes to get from the airstrip at Errouville to the Sixt rental-car office on place Jeanne d'Arc in Villerupt. Valentina ran inside and cried out breathlessly to the man at the counter, "My father was here earlier and rented a car." She showed him a picture of Fisher. "He had on a red shirt."

"Yes, that man was here. Is something wrong?"

"He told me he was going to pick me up, but I can't find him. He was telling me what color the car was, but the signal dropped on the phone, and now he's not picking up."

"I think he took one of our Aveos. A yellow one."

"Really? Thank you! I'll go see if he's waiting for me!" She ran back outside, where Hansen confirmed that the car he'd seen leaving the airport was light colored, probably yellow, though it had been pretty far off.

"I don't get it. Why would he rent a car, and then come back to the airport just before we arrived?" asked Valentina.

Hansen's tone darkened. "The target has gone asymmetrical on us, and so have our superiors."

"Now what?"

Hansen flipped on his OPSAT, pulled up the map, and scrolled around. Valentina read the map over his shoulder.

"He could be anywhere now. He could've gone west to Sainte-Claire or south down to Cantebonne. Or maybe he just went straight out to Audun-le-Tiche, right here." Hansen tapped his finger on the screen. "I'll be surprised if he's not heading to Luxembourg."

"So has he stopped dropping bread crumbs?" Valentina asked.

Hansen shrugged. "I'm calling Moreau. We need eyes in the sky to find that car."

Valentina raised her brows. "Why don't you let me talk to him?"

"You?"

"Yeah, I've been dying to give him a piece of my mind."

He grinned. "Be my guest."

She activated her OPSAT and called Moreau on one of the secure tactical channels. He answered after a four-second delay. "What is it, Maya?"

"We're done here."

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me. We're done playing. Fisher shows up at our airport. Now you got us running around. You already know where Fisher is. Maybe you want us to eventually bring him in, but maybe you want us to do that at a certain time or at a certain place, so just tell us; otherwise I'm done."

"Young lady, you're not anything until I say so."

"Adios, Moreau. I just can't do this anymore. I won't let myself be used by you people. This operation is a joke. I thought I was being hired and trained as a professional operative. I'm not an actor."

"The hell you're not."

"You know what I mean."

"You walk away, you'll regret it."

"No, I won't." She smiled at Hansen. "Nice working with you, Ben. Maybe one day you'll wise up, too. They'll probably get you all killed--because of their pathetic little games." She turned, strutted down the sidewalk.

All right, so she was calling Moreau's bluff and was waiting for him to chime in. But the bastard kept silent.

Thank God for Hansen, who came running after her and said, "Maya, don't be like this. You know we're part of something bigger. If they told us everything, they could compromise whatever else they have planned."

"I guess I'm more of a straight-up fighter. I'm really sick of this."

Hansen suddenly looked away, and Valentina realized he was being contacted through his own subdermal. He turned back, eyes wide.

"What?" she asked.

"Car accident at a McDonald's on rue du Luxembourg in Audun-le-Tiche. Yellow Aveo. It's just a couple of minutes away!" He went storming back toward the SUVs.

Valentina fell in behind him. She really wasgetting tired of all the lies. If there was a certain artifice to their chase, then Grim and Moreau should come clean about it. But maybe they couldn't, and maybe whatever Fisher was up to was so important that, as Hansen has implied, they needed to engage valuable human resources like themselves in order to get the job done. That was an eloquent way of kidding herself and continuing to live in denial about what she really was: a Barbie doll on a fake spy mission.