1
Evan Ryder hated Washington. Like Hollywood, it was ruled by greed and fear. The frenzied stench of self-perpetuation was a smog that never lifted, even on the most sublime spring day, fouling the air inside the Beltway. Despite that, chances were it was as close to home as she was ever going to get. As someone who had lost the ability to find home or those with whom she had shared it, she supposed DC’s tissue-thin façade of respectability was a tonic she needed to drink from time to time, like medicine, to remind herself of mankind’s essential hypocrisy and the evil that arose from it. It was this evil, this hypocrisy, and her fight against them that gave meaning to her life. As she made her way through the morning throngs on their way to jobs at various self-important bureaus, she was reminded all over again that DC was like Narcissus staring into a mirror, admiring his reflection instead of taking care of the difficult business of governing.
Nevertheless, here she was in Foggy Bottom, bucking a tide of drones—suits with thousand-yard stares, talking on their mobile phones. She moved through them like a wisp, like a ghost. Her thick black hair was tied back in a ponytail and she was clad in black pants, a cashmere sweater that matched her eyes, which were the brindled color of a gray wolf, a waist-length black leather jacket, and steel-tipped ankle boots she had had made for her in Portugal. She had a wide mouth and an athlete’s body, compact, wide at the shoulders, narrow at the hips. At restaurants, sometimes, and if the diners were drunk, she would get mistaken for Emily Blunt, or, if drunker still, Katy Perry. But only sometimes. Mainly, no one paid her the slightest attention.
Benjamin Butler was the reason she was here. Butler was perhaps the only person in DC who could command her immediate attention; his briefs kept her in the field, doing what she wanted to do, what she needed to do. Evan and Butler had worked together as field agents some years ago and they had a complex, intimate history from those days. Now Butler was a director, and Evan’s boss. A dyed-in-the-wool field agent, she was fine with that. Butler was one of the only two people alive whom Evan trusted; the handful of others were all dead.
Butler and Evan worked for the DOD—in a black-ops shop whose yearly budget was appropriated from one of several Pentagon slush funds, without oversight from Congress. Who Butler reported to Evan couldn’t say; she knew only that whoever it was, was very high up in the DOD food chain. For that reason alone, Butler would have been feared throughout the clandestine community. Add to this his fierce personality, indomitable spirit, and uncanny ability to ferret out the bad apples, no matter how deeply embedded, and he should have been feared by everyone in the CI community. The reason he wasn’t was simple: unlike any other of his colleagues, Butler trained and deployed a good number of female field agents, whereas other clandestine agencies deployed none. He was alone in understanding, as his Russian counterparts did, that females could extract intel more often than male agents, and more of it to boot. Females were considered circumspect, and could play off men’s weakness for sex, love, and affection, which, most often, considering their profession, they failed to get from their wives—if they had wives, or ex-wives.
Butler, having moved from his original, inadequate quarters near the NSA, was now installed on the eighth floor of a massive white-brick residential building whose façade was slightly curved to accommodate a semi-circular drive with a porte cochere, which allowed its tenants to delude themselves into believing they were living in a Southern mansion.
True to the neighborhood’s name, tendrils of fog accompanied Evan into the chandeliered lobby. Massive leather chairs and settees were ranged along the walls, below painted scenes of old-school foxhunts. Evan would have found it amusing except for the fact that everyone in the lobby was as grim-faced as gargoyles.
Stepping to the majordomo’s high banc, she showed credentials identifying her as Louise Steadman, Consultant. What she consulted on wasn’t enumerated and wasn’t queried. She asked for Paul Roswell and, after a brief exchange on the house phone, was handed a magnetic card and directed to a bank of elevators across the marble lobby. Waving the card over the reader caused the floor buttons to light up. She pressed eight, and was whisked silently up.
“Paul Roswell” had had the entire eighth floor remade into a vast complex of rooms. The remodeling was so new she could smell the paint and corner sawdust that, here and there, had yet to be vacuumed up. The low staticky hum of electronics filled the air.
Apart from Brenda Myers, her honey-colored hair shorter and straighter than when Evan had last seen her, there were very few people in evidence. Brenda stuck out her hand for Evan to shake briefly. It was cool, dry, and hard.
“You’re looking good, Evan,” Brenda said as they crossed from room to room—there were no doors that Evan could see.
“Thank you. You too. Working for Ben keeps one in shape, doesn’t it?” She smiled.
She liked Brenda, felt badly that they’d never had a chance to go to dinner and let their hair down. But then again, in the shadow world they both inhabited, confiding in anyone was not a good idea. As always Brenda was dressed in a pantsuit that was as stylish as it was practical. It was as if she used her style sense as an antidote to her bland, old-fashioned name. And this dichotomy brought up an echo in Evan’s mind, a slippery sense that there was much more to Brenda than she showed on the surface. People went into intelligence fieldwork for any number of reasons—they were misfits, deeply unhappy, sociopaths—but most often, it was because they were running from something, possibly themselves. This last, she intuited, might be true for Brenda.
“Are you going mad yet?” Evan asked.
“Huh! Not yet. Not quite.”
“Won’t be long now, I imagine,” Evan said. “Unless he gets you back out in the field.”
“Any day now.”
Brenda left her without another word at the threshold to Butler’s office. Evan stepped into a large room that might once have been one of the eighth-floor apartments’ master bedroom suites. It was saturated with light, but of a curious blue-green hue, as if she and Butler were submerged in a fish tank. She glanced at the window glass: bulletproof, spidery with anti-eavesdropping networks. Even though this location was well-hidden, Evan saw that he was taking no chances. She approved; but then she pretty much approved of everything Butler did.
He rose the instant she entered, coming around from behind his desk to meet her halfway across the room. He wore a dark-blue suit, a cream-colored shirt, a regimental striped tie. He was tall and stately. The year and a half since they had seen one another seemed not to have touched him at all. He still had the smooth pale skin and coffee-colored eyes of his Jewish mother, who, in her day, had been a ravishing beauty. Of his WASP lawyer father there seemed little, save for the wavy hair and the pronounced widow’s peak.
When Butler smiled the sun broke out. “How was your flight, Evan?”
“I’m alive, as you can see.”
Butler laughed softly. They shook hands.
“And how is Zoe?” she asked.
“Seven going on thirteen.”
She nodded. “Then everything is in order.”
Butler laughed again, gesturing for her to take a seat on one of the chairs in front of his desk. He folded himself into the one opposite, crossed one leg over the other.
Evan took another look around. “Like the new digs. Do we have an actual name yet?”
“Just the alphanumeric one, M171473-HG,” he said.
“So still MI7.” A joke of sorts. A play on the British MI6.
“Sure, but right at the moment it doesn’t seem so funny.”
Evan paused for a moment.
“Thank you for agreeing to come back to DC,” he said.
“You know my current brief is at a critical junction.”
“This takes precedence,” Butler said firmly.
“Five months I’ve been working this brief.”
Butler waved a hand. “I know. Turkey is complicated, and you’ve done incredible work. I’m grateful, as always. And I know there are a lot of bad memories for you here. But believe me, Evan, it was necessary that I bring you back.”
There was no use in digging in her heels. All that spadework down the drain. Well, it’s not the first time, she thought, and it won’t be the last. It was the nature of the game. “The credentials you sent me made it easy,” she said, giving in, but only somewhat.
He cocked his head, his thick black hair brilliant in the light. “You know what I mean.”
Indeed, she did. “Your summons was urgent,” she said now. “What’s up?”
Reaching over to his desk, Butler slid a sheet of paper off it, offered it to her.
Evan made no move, eyed the paper as if it were a coiled cobra.
Butler held the sheet faceup so she could see it. “You see? No official stamps. No circulation sign-offs. This is strictly ours. One hundred percent.” His forefinger ran down the list. “Six names, four agents who disappeared over the last ten months, one who came back in very bad shape, and the sixth is completely unknown to us.”
“Where did you get these names?”
“The agent who returned had the original list on him. It’s been scrutinized by forensics. They found nothing, not even a partial fingerprint.”
“Not even our agent’s?”
“That’s right.”
“So he didn’t compile it. He never even saw it.”
Butler nodded. “It’s a message, a taunt. Just like the agent’s return. That’s my belief, anyway.” He produced photos—grainy headshots from what appeared to be surveillance operations—to go with the names. “Three are ours, two MI6.”
“What links them?”
Butler sighed. “As I’m sure you know, the special relationship enjoyed by us and our British cousins has been sorely tested of late. The hard truth is they no longer trust us, so getting anything out of them is like pulling teeth. But so far as I can make out, the MI6 agents were looking for the same thing ours were—a person, or organization, known only as Nemesis.”
“What has Nemesis done to deserve all this scrutiny?”
“It controls an enormous network of Twitter bots that spew out the most egregious racial and gender epithets aimed at Democrats, women, Hispanics, immigrants, Muslims, and Jews.”
“Surely you have IT people who can—”
“The Nemesis net is like the Hydra. Cut off a cluster of ISPs and seven others take their place. I mean, we don’t even know whether Nemesis is a single person, a cadre, or a worldwide cabal. But because of our recent failures I determined that we’ve been going after Nemesis from the wrong direction. Hence the deployments of field agents.”
Evan frowned, shook her head as she stood up. “Okay, but you have plenty of other agents to handle this kind of routine—”
“Nemesis is anything but routine. Evan, if you’re worried that I’m going to be asking you to stay in DC and do work others could do—well, believe me I’m not.” He took a breath, as if preparing himself for what was coming next. “Jules and Albert?”
“Two of our best.”
“Were. Their throats were ripped out as if by a wild dog or a wolf or a cannibalistic madman.”
“How do you know that?”
“Traces of tooth marks at the ragged edges of the wounds. We can’t get any more specific than that. Forensics in this area is notoriously inaccurate.”
He handed over a sheaf of photos taken by his forensics team. Evan went through them carefully, a frown deepening the line between her eyes.
“Ligature marks on their wrists and ankles.”
“Yes,” Butler affirmed. “They were bound.”
Evan looked up at him. “I don’t see any sign of blood. None at all.”
“The coroner we sent out there told me that the mutilations were done elsewhere, then the bodies were drained of blood.”
Evan stared at him. “After they were mutilated.”
“Yes.”
“So it’s possible that their throats were torn out while they were still alive.”
“That’s the coroner’s guarded opinion. And here’s the kicker. The coroner found blood in their feet, mouths, and, in Jules’s case, hair.”
“Which means they were strung up by their ankles, like pigs.” Evan studied the photos again. “Some form of ritual then.”
“Ritual is my prime suspicion.”
Evan shook her head. She was fully on board now. “Where?” she said softly. “Where were they found?”
“You’ll love this. It’s why I sent for you.” He took back the photos. “The Caucasus Mountains, the ancient dividing line between Europe and Asia. Georgia. To be exact, inside a national park with the longest name in the world: Racha-Lechkhumi-Kvemo Svaneti Planned National Park.” He gave Evan a hard stare. “The Russian Federation is virtually your backyard.”
He shuffled the photos. “This is bad, Evan. As bad as it gets. These were highly skilled field agents, not a bunch of friends out for a picnic in the park. Racha, their end point, will be your starting point.”
“Did you send them out together?”
“A month apart.”
“But they were dumped in the same place.”
“That’s right,” Butler said.
“And our third, the one who came back. Patrick Wilson—the Toad, as we used to call him.”
Butler gave a grimace. “Seems an unfortunate nickname now. Save for being thinner and suffering from dehydration and exposure, he came back unharmed … physically. On the surface, at least.”
“How is that?”
“Unknown. He won’t see a psychologist or even a PTSD doctor, but something major is clearly wrong. Maybe you can … You should visit him before you head off to Georgia. He knows you. I think it would be instructive.”
“And?” She rose and stepped toward the doorway. “With you there’s always an ‘and.’”
The ghost of a smile played across Butler’s lips. “Take Brenda with you.”
“You know I work better alone.”
“You and Brenda have history, an excellent rapport. I’m not sending another lone agent out on this.”
Butler rose as well, crossed to where she stood, still holding the paper. “The two names below our people are the MI6 agents.”
Dropping her eyes, Evan looked at the list. “Have they been found?”
“Not as of today. No word from them. Nothing.”
“And the sixth name?” She stared past the page to Butler’s expression. “Charles Isaacs?”
“As I said, there’s no info on him. None at all. He’s a blank slate, a tabula rasa.” His gaze turned searching. “Charles Isaacs is a legend. A manufactured identity. Must be. He’s a complete enigma.” He put the list aside. “One thing I have been able to determine absolutely is he’s not one of ours. And I’ve checked with our cousins across the pond. As I said, we’re not so friendly these days, but I have a few personal friends, and we still trust one another. He’s not one of theirs, either. And, of course, they’re intensely interested as to what happened to their two MIA agents.”
“Isaacs belongs to an agency that Nemesis is out to eliminate,” Evan said. “Which could mean Isaacs is an ally of ours.”
“Possibly, but he could also be Russian, Interpol, or anything else, for that matter.” Butler was looking more and more troubled. “As yet, we don’t know Nemesis’s goal, which is why we need to be extremely vigilant.”
“You’re sending us out on a fact-finding mission?”
“That’s a Nemesis kill list, Evan, one that’s destroyed the lives of three of our agents, and maybe two of theirs.” He waved the sheet of paper. “This is not simply another group of netbot trolls. It’s not just another terrorist organization. Nemesis is targeting Western clandestine agents. My intuition told me that you were the right one for the job. The only one.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Evan noted Brenda standing in the doorway, silent as a shadow. How much had she heard? How much did she know?
“Go see Patrick Wilson, Evan.” Butler stepped closer, gripped her arm briefly. “See if you can find out what the hell has happened to him.” He nodded in Brenda’s direction. “She’s ready, Evan. Are you?”
Copyright © 2020 by Eric Van Lustbader
