“At the ambush, we managed to get two of the Russians. The third squirted. We were ordered home immediately, but I had an idea about where the survivor was heading. I sent my team home with the body of my number three, and I found the Russian eight hours later near the Algerian border.”
It was quiet in the conference room till Zack sat forward suddenly, grabbed a jelly donut, and brought it to his mouth. Just before he took a bite, he said, “And you smoked that motherfucker on your own, without special sanction.”
Chris Travers nodded solemnly. “I did.”
“You got shitcanned from the Agency for that?” Court asked.
“Affirmative,” Travers said. “It was payback, what I did. Not operationally necessary, or so they said.”
Court examined the man a moment, then asked, “Are you having trouble with your decision?”
“No trouble at all.That’swhat’s giving me trouble.”
“First thought, best thought,” Hightower said, nonchalantly. He washalfway finished with his donut already. “I trust you, man. If it felt right at the time, you did the right thing.”
“Anyway,” Hanley said, “I snatched him up to work with us. He understands the gist of what we’ll be doing.”
Changing the subject, Hanley then said, “So that was Tunis. In Ethiopia another operation was compromised. Local ISIS took out several of our indigenous assets. Not a cell of locals, I mean, but men and women walled off from one another. The only way ISIS could have known about them all was a breach from the U.S.”
He added, perhaps unnecessarily, “The call definitely came from inside the house.”
Hanley looked to Court. “After these disasters in Africa, plus word from other agencies that they were having the same problem, Trey Watkins came to me personally, wanting me to send Six to do an in extremis job down in Central America. The thinking was, it would minimize the number of people at CIA who knew about the op if they contracted it out. Six would go down alone, and since he’s not an Agency employee, he might have better luck.”
Court corrected him. “Actually, I was sent because they didn’t want to lose another Agency employee.” He turned to Travers and Hightower across from him. “It was an extraction of an asset in Nicaragua. The fact that I wasn’t Agency, the fact that the locals didn’t get the information on the location of the extraction till the last minute…none of that mattered.” He sighed. “We were most definitely compromised on our end, and we lost four FORNAT agents. I got the asset out, but in the process, I wasted a couple of Chinese MSS officers. The Agency has kept a lid on that, so far at least.”
“Someone in the U.S. government gave intelligence to the Nicaraguans?” Travers asked.
Hanley shook his head. “Or Chinese intelligence passed the intel on to the Nicas. Either way, it has to be a leak in America.”
Travers said, “So what do we know for sure?”
Hightower said, “Sounds like we know that we’re going to have to depend on one another, and no one else.”
Hanley said, “Jim Pace, who you all know is at CIA, is looking into these breaches. He got put on the assignment yesterday, and today he alreadyhas a target. His orders are to pass what he learns to Angela Lacy, who many of you know. Lacy knows about Ghost Town. She passed the intel to Jill.” Hanley turned to her.
“Gumdrop? Fill them in.”
“Pace says there is a woman at ODNI named Irene Ortega, who he finds suspicious.”
“How so?” Court asked.
“First, she had access to the information about the op in Nicaragua the night before last. But Jim found out that her credentials were used to pull up data on virtually all the affected operations after they happened. He thinks it’s strange that after Nicaragua she accessed information about the breaches across the intel community.”
Travers cocked his head. “Sounds to me like someone just conducting an investigation on what’s going on.”
“But that’s not her job. She’s a mission integration specialist.”
“The hell is that?” Hightower asked.
Jill said, “It’s her job to evaluate resources to ensure an efficient cross-discipline environment through all the INT regions, specifically when dealing with technological assets.”
“The hell is that?” Hightower asked again in the same tone.
The Asian woman furrowed her eyebrows, looking at the much older man like she couldn’t imagine how he did not understand what she was saying.
But Erin Childers answered for her. “Ortega is midlevel; she is tasked with making sure each intelligence agency has the data they need from the other agencies.” Childers shrugged now. “She shouldn’t be investigating anything.”
Hanley added, “Pace thinks it’s possible Ortega is looking into the past operations to see if she’s successfully covered her tracks. She knows all the agencies are conducting investigations into this, so maybe she wants to know what can be found out in the files.”
