Death Echo

21

DAY THREE

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

8:05 A.M.

Timothy Harrow ignored the inbox marked Urgent on his desk. Pragmatically speaking, it was a low designation of priority. Everything that came across his desk was urgent. The only question was of degree.

At the moment, he was frowning over an email that was a good deal more than urgent. Somebody’s ass was going to get burned. His job was to make sure it didn’t belong to the Deputy Director of Operations, his immediate boss. Hopefully he could save his boss by putting the fire out. If that didn’t work, some serious finger-pointing was going down.

And if the op blew up…

Don’t think about it. Just make sure it doesn’t happen.

At the highest levels, politics was a blood sport.

Harrow hit the intercom button. “Duke? Got a minute?”

“Make it fast. I have to brief the DO over the mess in Caracas in five and then brief his boss on the uncivil war heating up between the narcos and elected Mexican politicians. You have anything that’s going to make my life easier?”

Harrow sincerely doubted it. “You told me to keep you current on anything coming out of Rosario, Washington, state of.”

“What’s up?”

“An Indian on the rez bought it, execution style. Half his head blown off and his trailer burned down around his dead ears.”

“So?”

“Weapon was an SR-1 Vektor. Silenced, from the condition of the bullets. Less deformation that way. Either the victim or the killer-or both-had ties to the item we discussed Sunday.”

“Sometimes I wish that Berlin still had a wall,” Duke said. “I’m told this job was a hell of a lot easier back then. How good is your source?”

“FBI. They get called in on major rez crimes.”

“You trust an FBI agent?”

Cooperation between the two agencies was a minefield filled with back-stabbing, misdirection, and agent eat officer.

Politics as usual.

“The agent owed me a favor,” Harrow said. “Even if he didn’t, he’s reliable.”

“Stay on top of it,” the DDO said. “If it moves off the rez to Canada, somebody will stick us with the ticket.”

“Then I’m praying it doesn’t.”

“No shit.”

Neither one of them wanted to testify before the kind of political investigation committees that would be formed if the op that wasn’t quite the CIA’s went south.