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  “Dina was one thing,” Sevara said softly, and he could tell from her tone that she was still thinking, albeit aloud. “My father could accept that. But removing Ruslan . . . that would be much harder.”

  “Not that much harder.”

  “No?”

  “Not if the extremists set off another bomb in the marketplace.”

  “Something to consider.”

  “I can arrange it.”

  She shook her head. “No, not yet.”

  “Sevya,” Zahidov said, using the diminutive of her name, “if Ruslan gains the support of the White House, we will not be able to oppose him.”

  “But he can’t have it yet, and he has nothing to offer them but his good word. And the Americans no longer support rulers on the basis of the promises they make, alone. If Ruslan wants their support, it will take time to arrange it.”

  “And while he is arranging his support?”

  “We arrange ours.” She paused. “You deal with the Embassy, the CIA. Talk to your contact, make sure he knows how well I can fill my father’s shoes. Make it clear that we are the other option, that Ruslan is only one choice.”

  “And if, having done that, the Americans decide they prefer your brother?”

  Sevara shrugged, then pushed up on her toes, to brush Zahidov’s cheek with her lips.

  “Then you can have your bomb,” she said, and returned to her meeting.

  CHAPTER 8

  London—Holborn, 22 High Holborn,

  the Cittie of Yorke

  15 February, 1553 Hours GMT

  It turned out that Crocker wasn’t a total bastard, in that, aside from the documents and the account at HSBC, he’d also been kind enough to kick-start the op by providing Chace with the name of a pilot, one Geoffrey Porter, and contact information for the same. The background on Porter that he’d included in the envelope had been terse but serviceable, and Chace supposed it was Crocker’s way of trying to prove himself to her, this token offering, as if he was saying, Yes, I screwed you once, but this time, you see, I’m giving you an escape route up front.

  Getting into Uzbekistan, into Tashkent, wasn’t going to be the hard part. There were regular commercial flights, and if Tracy Carlisle couldn’t get Chace that far, then the identity was absolutely of no use whatsoever. Getting in, then, that wasn’t the problem.

  Getting out again, with a grieving widower and his two-year-old son and God only knew who in hot pursuit, that was the trick. Chace had known the moment—the absolute moment—that Crocker had presented her with the op that the exfil would be the hardest part. It was some comfort that he’d anticipated it himself, and offered Geoffrey Porter as the solution.

  They’d stayed in Newchurch for most of the afternoon, in the churchyard for another hour, then walking the narrow, steep streets of the little village, talking it over. Crocker had stressed—repeatedly—that Chace was to stay below the radar until she had Ruslan and son back in England. As to the method of extraction, he was leaving that to her discretion.

  “Quiet?” Chace asked him. “Noisy? Do you even care?”

  “If you can do it quiet, that’s always preferable. But I doubt you’ll have the luxury.”

  They returned to the Volvo just after four, as it began to rain, and he dropped her back in Barlick, two blocks from the house, at ten of five, telling her that he’d expect contact at completion of the op, once she was back in-country. Otherwise, there was to be no communication between them at all.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “There’s a room in hell waiting for you, you know that, don’t you?”

  “It’s a flat, actually,” Crocker said. “The one below yours, I believe.”

  The Volvo pulled away, leaving Chace standing in the rain and the dark and the cold at the edge of the town square. She watched his taillights disappear around the bend, then turned and walked the three minutes to Val’s house, letting herself in the back, through the kitchen, expecting to hear Tamsin screaming and Val trying to soothe the baby.

  Instead, the house was quiet, Val sitting in the front room, looking out the window that overlooked her now-fallow garden. She had a cup of tea in her hand, and Chace could see the steam rising from it. She wondered how many Val had gone through already, how long she’d been waiting.

  “Tam’s sleeping,” Val said without prompting.

  “A minor miracle.”

  “She squawked for a bit after you left, then settled.” Valerie Wallace turned her head, rather than her body. There was a single lamp burning in the corner past her shoulder, and the light gave the older woman’s skin a warm glow, turned the silver in her hair to bronze, and made the lines of worry on her face seem more like canyons than valleys.

  “When do you leave?” Val asked.

  Chace hesitated. “First thing in the morning.”

  “Is it what you did before? What you and my Tom did, is that it?”

  Chace shook her head.

  “I’m not asking for particulars. I know it’s government work—I know that, I’m not daft—and I know it’s secret as well. I’m asking if it’s the same work, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “I can’t say, Val.”

  Val made a soft clucking noise and turned back to look out at her dead garden, raising her cup of tea.

  “I shouldn’t be gone too long. One week, maybe two, at the most.”

  “Was this the plan, then, Tara?” Val asked without looking at her. “You’d come to me and have the baby, and when the time was right and all of that, you’d just go back and leave me to care for my granddaughter? Was this the plan all along?”

  “God, no, Val! Never, not at all.” Chace crouched, dropping onto her haunches, extending one hand, first to touch Val’s own, and then, thinking better of it, feeling guilty, settling for the chair’s armrest. “Please don’t think that. Please don’t.”

  “I don’t know what to think, Tara.”

  “It’s something I have to do, that’s all it is. Then I’ll return.”

  “Is it the same work, Tara?”

  She needed a second before answering. “Yes, it’s the same work.”

  “Then you can’t really promise that you’ll be coming back, can you, dear?” Val turned then and looked down at her, and the canyons had eroded, smoothed, and her expression now was the same open, understanding look she’d worn almost two years before, when she’d found Chace tongue-tied and terrified on her front doorstep. “I mean, really, you can’t promise that at all, I know that much. Let’s be honest about that, at least.”

  Chace tried to find something to say, some way to answer that wasn’t a lie, wasn’t more of a lie than the ones she’d already made, but couldn’t. In the old house, listening to the rainfall outside, the creak of the radiator in the hall, in the warmth and the darkness, there was only the truth of what Val was saying, and the guilt that came with it. That, and the emotion of the day, the impotent anger and the regret and the hurt, and again, the guilt, all of it now swelling in her chest like some cancer.

  She started to cry.

  After a moment, Valerie Wallace put her hand in Chace’s hair, and Chace rested her face against the older woman’s leg, and she sobbed and she sobbed, and upstairs, in her crib, Tamsin, too, began to cry.

  She’d called Geoffrey Porter from the train station in Leeds the next morning, and after two rings the phone was answered by a woman with an American accent, somewhere from the South.

  “I’m trying to reach Geoffrey Porter,” Chace said.

  “Just a moment,” the woman said, and then Chace heard her muffled shout, and there was more rustling, and then Porter came on the line.

  “Can I help you?”

  “My name’s Carlisle,” Chace said. “You’ve been recommended to me for a charter.”

  “Recommended? By whom?”

  “Someone who knew you in Sandline.”

  She heard Porter’s hesitation over the line at the mention of the company. “Sandline folded.”

&
nbsp; “Yes, I am aware of that.”

  “What kind of charter are we talking about?”

  “I’d rather not give particulars over the phone. Would it be possible to meet? This afternoon, perhaps?”

  “Could do, I suppose. You know the Cittie of Yorke? It’s a pub, on High Holborn.”

  “I can find it.”

  “I’ll be in the main room at sixteen hundred, the one with all the wine butts on the scaffolding, the bloody things look like they’re going to tumble down on you. I’ll be at the back.”

  “How will I recognize you?”

  “Ask your friend from Sandline,” Porter said, and hung up.

  There’d been a pub of one sort or another at 22 High Holborn since 1430, though it had obviously seen several changes over the centuries. One of its later incarnations had been as a coffee shop in the late 1690s, and a partial demolition and renovation in the late 1890s had somehow managed to preserve elements of the original façade. Within, the main room was more evocative of a church than a pub, with high ceilings and an oddly shaped stove positioned in the center of the floor to provide heating, something it apparently managed to do without the aid of any obvious chimney. A long bar ran along the left-hand side upon entry, and above it, positioned on scaffolding, were several wine butts, each of them easily capable of holding up to one thousand gallons at a time.

  At seven minutes to four in the afternoon, the pub was experiencing the calm before the storm. In just over an hour, solicitors and attorneys and their clients would pour from the nearby Criminal Courts, to fill the pub and wash down the remains of the day with Samuel Smith’s selection of beers. But for now, as Chace entered, it was quiet and warm, and she thought it was the kind of pub she’d probably have wanted to spend a lot of time in, once upon a time.

  Chace stopped at the bar, ordered a lager, and adjusted the strap on her shoulder bag as she looked around the room, waiting for her drink to arrive. She counted a baker’s dozen of patrons, nine of them men, and seated at one of the cloisterlike tables, she saw a man who was most likely named Geoffrey Porter, nursing a pint of his own. He was slight, and shorter than she’d imagined, though it was difficult to be certain with him seated. His hair was straight, brown, receding slightly, and he sported a neatly trimmed beard and mustache, wearing a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt. He caught her looking, met her stare for a fraction, then went back to peering into his drink. Chace didn’t mind that he’d made her, because his reaction confirmed it. She’d found her pilot.

  She paid for her lager, took the pint, and settled at the table opposite him, shrugging the bag off her shoulder onto the bench beside her.

  “Mr. Porter?” she asked. “Tracy Carlisle.”

  “Suppose if I didn’t want you to find me, I’d have worn a suit, hmm?”

  “It would have been a start, yes.”

  Porter nodded slowly, looking her over. A pack of cigarettes rested on the table beside an enormous ashtray, and Porter’s fingers idly traced a line around it.

  “You know me from Sandline?”

  “I know you through a man who knows you through Sandline,” Chace said. “Though I understand you’re running your own service now, International Charter Express?”

  “ICE, yes. Not the same work.”

  “No. Fortunately, I’m not looking for a mercenary.”

  Porter didn’t try to hide his scowl. “We weren’t mercs. We weren’t one of those ‘civilian contractor’ fly-by-nights, nor a bunch of washouts who got their kicks fondling SA-80s and playing at soldier, Ms. Carlisle. Sandline was a private military company. We were the real thing.”

  “I meant no offense,” Chace said, as sincerely as she could manage, even though the slight had been intended, to gauge his reaction.

  So far, she liked what she was seeing.

  Porter ran his finger around the packet of cigarettes again, slower, looking at her, thoughtful. “So tell me about this charter.”

  “It’s in Uzbekistan.”

  Porter nodded, his expression remaining neutral. “How many passengers?”

  “Three, exfil only.”

  “Hot or cold?”

  “Most likely hot.”

  “How hot? MANPAD hot?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, but it’s a possibility.”

  “How much of a possibility?”

  Chace shook her head, not so much refusing to answer as to indicate she was unwilling to hazard a guess. “You’ve flown under fire before.”

  “Iraq, Bosnia, Sierra Leone.” Porter stopped playing with the pack long enough to free a cigarette and light it. “But if you know me through a man who knows me through Sandline, you know that, too.”

  Chace smiled.

  “Where in Uzbekistan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to need some details. Tashkent?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “Am I picking up at an airport, what?”

  “No, it won’t be an airport, of that I’m certain.”

  “So a helicopter.”

  “At the start, though I doubt one will get us back to England.”

  Porter shook his head, annoyed. “Perhaps you better just lay this out for me straight, and I’ll tell you what we’ll need. Unless you’re a pilot yourself and have already worked out the particulars?”

  “I’ve worked out some of them.” Chace hefted her shoulder bag onto her lap, opening it. She removed a small pager, molded black plastic, and set it on the table between the cigarettes and the oversized and much-used ashtray. “It’s a satellite pager. You flip down the faceplate, you’ll find a little keyboard, it’ll send messages as well as receive them. Today is the fifteenth. You turn it on as of the eighteenth, and it stays on until the twenty-fifth. That’s the operational window. When I’m ready, I will page you with the GPS coordinates for the pickup, somewhere in Uzbekistan. You make the RV, take on myself and two other passengers, and bring us back to England.”

  “Not in a helo I won’t.”

  “I’m not the pilot,” Chace said. “I’ll leave the particulars to you. Can you do it?”

  Porter pulled again from his cigarette, then followed it with a pull from his pint, and Chace saw the sequence for what it was, buying time to think. He needn’t have bothered; if he was the sort to agree to the job without considering the angles, he was the wrong sort for the job to begin with.

  “If I don’t hear from you by the twenty-fifth?”

  “If you don’t hear from me by the twenty-fifth, the job’s off, and you can head home.” Chace leaned forward slightly. “But I reserve the right to extend the window if necessary.”

  “And you’ll contact me if that’s the case.”

  “Of course.”

  Porter frowned, still thinking it over, looking past Chace at the rest of the pub. “What if I need to contact you?”

  “You won’t be able to.”

  “If it goes bad on my end?”

  “I’m optimistic that it won’t,” Chace said. “You get the aircraft on station, you wait. I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve done this kind of job, Mr. Porter.”

  “These passengers,” Porter said, “I mean, aside from yourself. They’re coming willingly?”

  “I’m not certain how that’s relevant.”

  “It’s relevant to my fee.”

  “Give me a quote.”

  “Seventy-five thousand.”

  “We’re talking pounds?”

  “Do I look American to you?”

  “Fifty.”

  “I have to cover expenses—most of it will go to the aircraft, Ms. Carlisle. I’ll need a helicopter for the RV and the exfil. I’ll need to have it maintained, ready, and fueled. I’ll need to then fly you and your . . . guests to another location, where we’ll need to switch to a private plane. I’ll need that plane fueled, permitted, and ready as well, and I won’t be able to sit on it if I’m at a make-ready station waiting for a go signal from you. It gets expensive. Can’t d
o it for less than seventy.”

  “Sixty.”

  “We’re not in a bloody suq, Ms. Carlisle. Seventy or you find another pilot.”

  Chace made a show of wrestling with the number, furrowing her brow. “Seventy, then. Half up front, half on completion.”

  “No, three-quarters up front, the rest on completion, and that’s not counting my incidentals.”

  “For seventy, you can cover your own incidentals, Mr. Porter.”

  He crushed out his cigarette, drained the rest of the beer from his glass. “Deal.”

  “Give me the account information and I’ll have the funds wired to you first thing tomorrow. How long will it take you to get to the theater, set up a staging position?”

  “I can be in place and ready by the eighteenth, don’t worry about that.” Porter scooped up the package of cigarettes, dropped them into an inside pocket of his jacket, then produced a pen from the same pocket. He moved his empty glass, then flipped over the cardboard coaster it had been resting upon, and scribbled down a sequence of letters and numbers. Finished, he slid it across to Chace, taking hold of the pager on the return trip.

  “I don’t move until I confirm the funds have been deposited,” he said, pocketing the pager.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to do otherwise.”

  Porter nodded curtly, then got to his feet, offering his hand. Chace rose, and confirmed that he was, in fact, smaller than she’d expected, no more than five foot eight. His handshake was firm and businesslike, and she liked that he didn’t muscle the grip, nor did he soften it because he was dealing with a woman.

  “See you in Uzbekistan, then,” Geoffrey Porter said.

  CHAPTER 9

  London—Vauxhall Cross, Office of D-Ops

  15 February, 1611 Hours GMT

  When he’d left for Barnoldswick early the previous morning, the only person who knew where Crocker was going was Kate Cooke. He’d told her for two reasons, the first being that, should all hell break loose, she would know where to contact him; the second was that, as far as Crocker was concerned, Kate was almost as facile a liar as he was, and he needed her to cover for him. She wasn’t as experienced at it as he was, but she played the part of a dutiful servant well, and if push came to shove, Crocker had great faith in her ability to look C in the eye, smile prettily, and say, “I honestly don’t know, sir.”