Safe House Echo — Vienna, Second District | December 26, 2010 | 02:00
OPERATION WINTER GHOST | CLEARANCE: COSMIC // EYES ONLY
The safe house was a basement apartment that smelled of other people's cigarettes and coffee that had gone cold sometime during the previous government's tenure.
Alen sat at the metal table with his coat on. His breath misted slightly in the damp. The radiator at the far wall was technically functional, which meant it produced enough warmth to resent its own inadequacy. He had been in worse places. He had been in most kinds of places by now.
Across the table sat two people he had met before and trusted to the degree that the word trust applied in this context, which was the degree that their organizational interests and his operational usefulness remained aligned.
Agent Carl Miller from the CIA's Special Activities Center occupied the left chair. He was in his mid-fifties and wore the specific tiredness of someone who had spent three decades managing the gap between what American foreign policy said and what American intelligence did. He had a file on the table that he had not looked at since placing it there, which meant he had already memorized it, which was how you could tell the difference between the people who worked for Langley and the people who were Langley.
On the right: Dame Elena Sterling, MI6 Senior Controller. She wore pearl earrings and a suit that had been fitted by someone who understood that the difference between a well-dressed woman and a dangerous one was precision of tailoring. She had authorized operations that had never appeared in any House Intelligence Committee briefing. She was, in Alen's assessment, the more useful of the two, and she knew this, and it was the closest they had come to mutual respect.
Miller slid a folder across the table. Alen picked it up.
"Welcome back to the cold, Phantom," Miller said. "We're going to need you to be someone else for the next seventy-two hours."
Inside the folder: a passport. Foma Kiniaev. Freelance Journalist. Born Minsk, Belarus, 1974. The photo was a version of Alen's face that had been aged and roughened by the Section Q photography team, given the specific look of someone who had been filing stories from places with inadequate heating for most of their adult life. The identity had a three-year operational history — it had been used twice by contractors in Eastern European assignments and had never been flagged.
Alen turned through the document. He noted the entry stamps, the journalist accreditation, the satellite phone registered to a Belarusian press outlet that technically existed as a shell. It was thorough work. It was the kind of thoroughness that preceded operations where incomplete cover was not a recoverable situation.
"The Eastern Slav Republic," he said.
"The second civil war," Sterling confirmed. "Belikova's government broke the armistice in November when oil was discovered in rebel-controlled territory. She declared it a counter-terrorism operation and received international support on that basis." She paused. "What she has not declared — and what our intelligence strongly suggests she is doing — is running a biological weapons program out of a facility somewhere in the Holigrad region. Not as a defensive capability. As a tool for eliminating the rebel leadership and manufacturing a public narrative in which the rebels are bioterrorists and the government is the party enforcing international norms."
Miller: "The Plaga. Las Plagas — same parasite family that surfaced in Spain in 2004. Belikova's people sourced the variants through Tricell. Modified them. Gave the rebels a dominant strain that's designed to cause progressive loss of self-control — they think they've got a weapon, they don't know it's compromised. Meanwhile her government forces are running Lickers controlled via subordinate Plaga. The rebels' BOWs are turning on them. The narrative writes itself: rebel bioterrorists lose control of their weapons, the government moves in to restore order."
Tricell. The word had been sitting in Alen's operational file since the WilPharma postscript in 2005. He had flagged it then. It had appeared in three subsequent intelligence summaries, each time at the periphery of a larger event, each time as the entity that moved in after the dust settled and acquired what was worth acquiring. Five years of accumulation had produced a picture that was not complete but was legible: Tricell was not an opportunist. Tricell was a successor organization operating from a philosophy it had inherited.
He noted this. He asked: "What is the specific objective?"
"There's a village," Miller said. "Dveri, in the Holigrad exclusion zone. Marked as abandoned after government shelling. Thermal scans show industrial heat signatures underground — consistent with active laboratory operations. We want confirmation, sample acquisition, and the research data." He looked at Alen directly. "The reason this is you, specifically, is the biological environment. The Plaga infection rate in the region is significant. We cannot insert a standard operative into Dveri without full biohazard protocol, which is incompatible with covert movement in an active conflict zone."
Sterling: "Your physiology has been confirmed for hot-zone operation without standard protective requirements. You are the only asset currently available who can move through an active Plaga environment without infection risk."
"Intel on the variant?" Alen asked.
"Las Plagas — subordinate strain, spread through physical contact with infected hosts, also via spore release from host at advanced stage," Miller said. "The dominant strain gives the host control over BOWs carrying the subordinate strain. The government forces have been using this to run Licker squads. The rebels think they have the same capability through the dominant strain they were given — they don't know yet that theirs is compromised." He closed his folder. "You'll have a handler on this one. Field Support — the best we have access to right now. She usually runs support for AUPIT operations, but with the organizational transition coming in the new year, Langley has authorized her assignment to Grayweather for this operation."
"Who?" Alen asked.
"Ingrid Hunnigan," Sterling said. "If you've followed AUPIT's operational record, you know the name."
He did. She had guided Leon Kennedy through Spain. She had been his eyes during the Harvardville operation in 2005, which Alen had run in parallel without her awareness of his presence — he had listened to the intercepts afterward, the professional quality of her support, the way she managed Kennedy's tendency toward door-kicking with the specific patience of someone who understood both the impulse and its risks.
He had thought, at the time, that she was exceptionally good at her job.
"Gear is staged at the border drop," Miller said. "She'll brief you on the ground situation. You go in as Kiniaev. What happens in Dveri stays off every record that matters." He pushed back from the table. "Good hunting, Phantom."
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Chapter Twenty-Six follows...