Collateral (Tier One #6)

Unregistered Domestic Detention Center

Tampa, Florida

September 15

1715 Local Time

The buzzer sounded, the lock clicked, and the man Amanda Allen knew simply as Doug opened the door for her.

“Thanks, Doug,” Amanda said. “How are the kids?”

“Doing great,” he said, his serious expression mismatched with the amiability in his voice. “Mark just started band, and the triplets joined the swim team. Coach said too bad we didn’t pop out one more girl, ’cause then we could have our own relay team.”

This answer surprised her and she chuckled.

The exchange was a little running joke between them that had developed organically over the past month. She doubted he had kids. Hell, she wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t married. Each time, he gave her a different answer with different kids’ names, sexes, ages, and activities. Doug was a glorified jail keeper, guarding one of Russia’s most highly trained covert operatives—a Russian Zeta named Sylvie Bessonov. Under no circumstances did Doug want his charge to learn anything personal or of consequence that could be used to manipulate him. But Amanda suspected he was also bored out of his mind and this was the only novelty in his daily routine.

“I thought Jasper was taking skydiving lessons?” she said, pausing at the threshold.

“Who’s Jasper?” he asked, his expression deadpan.

She flashed him a conspiratorial smile and headed inside. He shut the door behind her with a thud and she heard the lock mechanism engage.

Amanda worked for Task Force Ember.

In a strange turnabout, she’d been recruited by the same people who’d rescued her from terrorists less than a year ago. Her abduction had been a false flag operation, devised by Arkady Zhukov and executed by a Zeta operative, Valerian Kobak, who had functioned under the legend Anzor Malik. The same Russians were responsible for the murder of Ember Director Shane Smith, Operations Officer Simon Adamo, and SAD operator June Latif during the attack on Ember’s previous headquarters in Newport News, Virginia. Dempsey had made sure Malik paid the ultimate price.

But Zhukov, the mastermind behind the attack, was still at large.

Since that fateful day, life at Ember had been a roller coaster ride.

No, not a roller coaster, she thought. More like post-hurricane disaster recovery.

Sure, they’d all rolled up their sleeves and put on brave faces, but if she was being honest with herself, all was not well with America’s premier covert black ops task force. The stability, purposeful leadership, and tactical clarity that Smith and Adamo had brought to the organization were missing. The vacuum left in their absence was tangible. Signals Chief Baldwin was functioning as Acting Director and Munn had stepped into Adamo’s old role as Ops O. The thing was, neither man wanted his respective “promotion,” and it showed.

Baldwin, while knowledgeable and undeniably the most intellectually gifted member of the organization, lacked the operational experience and leadership skills to effectively lead and manage an organization as complex and dynamic as Ember. Munn, on the other hand, had the operational experience and a doctor’s sensibility for reading and relating to people, but did not have the calculated, methodical disposition that had made Adamo so successful as Ops O. From the stories she’d heard about Munn, she knew he had the capacity to be cool and analytical under pressure, but that was not his default state. The man wore his heart on his sleeve, tended to be reactive rather than proactive, and wanted nothing more than to be back out in the field as Dempsey’s wingman. The “lumberjack” wanted his old job back and wasn’t shy about letting everyone know it.

We all just need a little more time, Amanda told herself. Just a little more time and everything will sort itself out.

She stepped into what was essentially an efficiency apartment where Sylvie Bessonov was incarcerated. Instead of being dumped into a dark hole at some black site overseas, the DNI had agreed to keep Bessonov close and accessible. The whack-a-mole operation they were presently running—finding and assassinating embedded Zeta field operators around the globe—was only possible because of the intelligence Bessonov had given up. The operation to break the Russian woman had been a psychological mind fuck of epic proportions, one in which Amanda had played a critical and unwitting role. In the days and weeks since, Amanda had taken over as Bessonov’s interrogator and, dare she say, handler. During that time, she had successfully extracted the names of five Zetas and their assigned cities of operation, an accomplishment she was feeling pretty proud of, especially since she had achieved it without resorting to any enhanced interrogation techniques.

“Hello, Sylvie,” Amanda said to the back of the Russian girl’s head. Bessonov was sitting on a sofa watching television with the sound turned off. She had not turned around to look when Amanda entered, nor did she say anything now.

Amanda walked around the sofa, giving the Russian a wide berth. The Zeta had never shown any aggression. Still, Amanda’s ordeal at the hands of Malik had permanently rewired her psyche. She knew what human beings were capable of—the scheming, the hate, the violence. Bessonov could snap at any time, and the Russian’s past interactions and behavior could not be relied upon as a predictor for this or any future engagement between them.

It was imperative to be careful.

She sat in the lone chair beside the sofa and looked at her charge. Bessonov was slumped in her seat, feet up on the coffee table, legs apart, fingers knitted together and resting on her stomach. Her unblinking eyes were fixed on the TV, which was playing what looked like an episode of Survivor.

“Why do you watch with the sound turned off?” Amanda asked.

“Because it doesn’t matter what they say,” Bessonov said in Russian-accented English. “I can discern the hierarchy and lies from their body language and expressions alone. The words are a distraction from the truth.”

“Interesting,” Amanda said and flashed the Russian her it’s all good smile—an expression that lived halfway between a flight attendant’s I’m paid to smile at you and a coworker’s let’s grab a beer and catch up grin. In her experience, smiles were the transactional currency that powered business, politics, friendship, romance, and even interrogations. How she smiled, when she smiled, if she smiled . . . these were the variables that Sylvie cued off of. How, when, and if Sylvie smiled was equally insightful.

Amanda shifted her gaze from Bessonov to the television and watched in silence for thirty seconds or so before asking, “Do you have reality shows like this in Russia?”

“I like to watch these idiots,” Bessonov said, ignoring the question. “Walking around in their underwear, arguing all the time. It’s quite funny . . . Take away our jobs, our technology, and our houses, and this is what humanity becomes—a troupe of monkeys, fighting for table scraps and sexual hierarchy.”

Amanda looked from the TV back to Bessonov. She tried to think of something to say, but her mind was stuck on the monkey metaphor. She remembered what it had felt like when Malik had reduced her to her primal state—stripping her naked, withholding food and water, and controlling her most basic and fundamental biological liberties. She’d been caged and dehumanized, and so in one respect that made her and her charge kindred spirits. She empathized with the Russian girl and wondered if that was why Baldwin had tapped her to manage Ember’s MVP detainee.

“You seem quite melancholy today,” Amanda settled on. “Is everything all right?”

“What a ridiculous thing to ask me,” Bessonov fired back, making eye contact for the first time. “You’ve taken everything from me. My profession, my colleagues, my country, my dignity—”

“Not your dignity,” Amanda snapped. “We’ve never taken that. And trust me, I’m someone who can speak with authority on such matters. The decision to abandon your dignity is yours and yours alone.”

“How can there be dignity without purpose? You’ve made me a traitor. You come here asking for names and I give them to you so you can murder my countrymen. There is no dignity in that. No dignity in betrayal and weakness. No dignity in self-preservation when you sacrifice all your principles in the process . . . I should have kept quiet. I should have let you torture me until I was dead.”

Amanda laughed. She didn’t mean to. It wasn’t scripted or deliberate—it just came out.

“So you’re laughing at me now,” Bessonov said, her voice a serpent’s hiss. “I’m a joke to you?”

“No,” Amanda said, shaking her head. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the stupid irony of it all. We’re both here because of him—our lives forever maligned and spinning, like two billiard balls sent careening off course.”

Bessonov just shook her head at this.

“Your old life may be over, but your future is unwritten. I made you a promise, that when this was over, you would be given a new identity and the resources to start a new life. Yes, Sylvie Bessonov may be dead, but you are young and have a second act in you. There is nothing stopping you from pursuing a new career, finding love, becoming a mother . . . the possibilities are limitless. There’s more to life than espionage and cold wars.”

“Fuck you,” the Russian girl murmured under her breath.

“Excuse me?” Amanda bristled.

Bessonov exhaled loudly through her nose. “Dimitri Godunov. Last I knew, he was working as a professor in Berlin, under the alias Erich Habicht.” Her gaze was fixed back on the television, her voice flat and lifeless.

“What is his mission?”

“The same as every Zeta—to do his job so well no one suspects he’s a Russian spy.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, but it was a stupid question, so you got a stupid answer.”

“Am I to take that to mean you haven’t run any ops with him?”

“That’s correct. He’s been embedded for a long time. Not one of the more active Zetas. He’s not been running any significant operations.”

“Then what is he doing in Berlin? He must be there for some reason?”

“I don’t know all the details. I’ve told you, the structure in Zeta is very compartmentalized.”

Amanda pursed her lips in irritation at the other woman. “Then speculate.”

“Fine,” Bessonov said through a sigh. “Supposedly, his father was a brilliant theoretical physicist who worked for decades at the Lebedev Institute. The hope was that Dimitri was as gifted as his father, but he wanted nothing to do with academics and pursued a career in soldiering. But Arkady misses nothing and snatched him up—enchanting Dimitri with 007 dreams of spy craft and glorious covert operations. But the reality was, Arkady needed someone smart enough to understand and steal cutting-edge research and intellectual property in the fields of theoretical and applied physics. So, the old man put Dimitri in Berlin because the Germans are very good at this sort of thing.”

“Is Dimitri married?” Amanda asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Dimitri’s German NOC is Erich Habicht?” she said, confirming the name. The room was under twenty-four-hour surveillance and all their conversations were recorded, but maintaining pretenses and authentic conversational rhythms was important. “Habicht spelled H-A-B-I-C-H-T?”

“That’s right,” Bessonov said. “Now run along, little sister. Come back when he’s dead and I’ll give you another name.”

Amanda stared at her for a long moment, then pressed to her feet. “Is there anything I can get you?”

“A Makarov would be nice, but any gun will do . . . I just need one bullet.”

“Good night, Sylvie,” she said with a sad smile, and walked to the door. Doug let her out.

After the door was shut and locked behind her, he said, “How’s she doing?”

Amanda paused, surprised by the question, as the big man had never once inquired about his charge. “It’s a PF Chang’s night,” she said, running her fingers through her dirty blond hair. “Mongolian beef.”

Once, in a moment of sororal weakness, Sylvie had confessed that Mongolian beef from the popular Asian fusion chain was her favorite. Ordering it for her on the days she gave up a name had become something of a tradition between them.

“Roger that,” he said. “See ya next time.”

“Back at ya,” she echoed with a nod and headed to her car. Once she was seated inside with the engine running and doors locked, she called Ember.

“Munn,” a familiar gruff voice said, picking up the secure line.

“I got a name. Erich Habicht,” she said, with a bittersweet undertone that she didn’t try to hide. “He’s in Berlin.”

“Nice work, Amanda,” Munn said. “Head on home, and we’ll get to work putting together a package.”