The Socotra Incident (2 page)

One Week Later

Natalie Davis splashed cold water against her face and looked up into the bathroom mirror. The florescent lights made her look like she hadn’t slept in days, which wasn’t that far from the truth. She stuck out her lower lip and exhaled slowly.

“Come on, Natalie. All you have to do is get off the plane and go through customs. Just like any normal person,” she said to herself. Her reflection didn’t look convinced.

Her training had hammered proper border crossings over and over again. Be nonchalant, know your cover story backward and forward, and never, ever, panic. Good spies won’t get caught at border crossings. Trust your backstop. The fake identity and history were put together by the best spies in the business.

The butterflies in her stomach didn’t seem to give a damn about the instructor’s platitudes.

A seat belt sign lit up with a chime. Instructions in German and English urged her back to her seat for the final approach into Vienna International Airport.

Natalie patted her cheeks with her fingers and shook her head from side to side. A trick her mother had taught her to clear her mind.

“Hi, my name is Natalie Garrow. I work for Eisen Meer Logistics,” she said. She repeated the words as a quiet mantra. “Garrow”—that was the name on every piece of identification she carried. She wasn’t First Lieutenant Natalie Davis, US Army, anymore. Now she was a fresh-faced MBA with way too much college debt and a skimpy résumé.

Natalie opened the bathroom door and found a frumpy, apple-shaped woman waiting on her.

“Sorry,” Natalie said with a smile as she slipped past the woman.

“Fräulein.”

The woman handed Natalie’s Prada purse back to her before closing the bathroom door. Natalie’s face flushed. The only thing worse than leaving your ID unattended for foreign intelligence services to peruse was to lose it. Natalie clasped the purse against her chest and slipped back into her seat.

The Austrians will make me persona non grata before I even get off this plane
, she thought.

She started filling out the customs form left in her seat back and corrected herself. She wasn’t traveling as a diplomat with the State Department. There was no diplomatic immunity to hide behind if she screwed up and got caught. She was an NOC, a Nonofficial Cover officer, and if caught, she could bank on a nice prison cell and a “never heard of her” write-off from the US government.

The lush countryside and impeccably maintained highways of Austria gave way to clusters of suburbs as the plane descended into Vienna. Her seatmate snorted and stirred under his blanket. The octogenarian had opted to sleep the entire flight, which suited Natalie just fine.

The plane landed minutes later, and Natalie slipped her customs declaration into the leather case holding her passport and credit cards. The Visa Black Card and American Express Platinum card, made from titanium, stared back at her. High-end credit cards weren’t unusual for a business traveler, but the unlimited line of credit with each card was damn peculiar for a CIA officer.

Screwing up expense reports was the number one reason officers lost their clearance and, by immediate correlation, their jobs. When her handler gave her the cards and her identity documents in the Prada handbag, she’d almost asked for something a little ostentatious. Carrying tens of thousands of dollars in personal liability struck her as a bit cruel and unusual for a shiny, new officer like herself. The handler just laughed at her, which didn’t help her confidence. She’d consoled herself that the purse was probably fake.

Her business class cabin let out, and she gave a polite “Bu-bye now” to the stewardesses at the exit.

She extended the handle on her carry-on and made her way toward customs, her shoulders back, chin up, and tendrils of fear snaking through her chest. She wanted to rehearse her backstory and have all the details of her trip on the tip of her tongue for the customs inspectors, but her mind was full of static.

There’d be a line at screening, she told herself. A chance to center herself.

Her heart skipped a beat as she came around a corner and found empty lines leading to plenty of available customs agents. Business class had a disadvantage her training hadn’t anticipated. She considered ducking into a restroom to buy time, but an agent waved her over. So much for that idea.

Natalie’s throat tightened as she walked up to the slight woman sitting at a desk surrounded by Plexiglas. The agent had a severe face and hair wrapped into a tiny bun behind her head. Natalie slid her passport and customs slip into the aluminum-lined depression beneath the Plexiglas and managed to smile.

Just remember
, she thought,
my name is Natalie...something. What’s my name again?
She kept the smile on her face as a dribble of unladylike sweat rolled down her spine.

The agent glanced back and forth between Natalie’s face and the passport. She flipped through the pages, her eyes lingering on the entry stamps and visas for other countries stapled to the pages.

The agent put her hand on top of the desk, between a wooden stamp and a call button.

I’m about to have the shortest career in CIA history. They’ll tell stories about me at the Farm for years
, Natalie thought.

She heard the sound of carry-ons rolling across the linoleum floors and the click of heels; the mass of passengers who’d flown coach were on approach.

The agent grabbed the entry stamp and slammed it onto Natalie’s passport.

“Welcome to Austria. Enjoy your stay,” she said.

The agent slid the passport onto the counter, where it sat untouched, as Natalie looked on in stunned silence. The agent cleared her throat.

“
Merci
—no,
danke
.” Natalie snatched her passport back and made a beeline for the baggage carousels. She passed the duty-free shops selling chocolates emblazoned with Mozart’s face and restaurants touting authentic Wiener schnitzel. The Wiener schnitzel looked more like chicken-fried steak than the hotdogs the similarly named fast-food chain in her native Las Vegas offered.
Good, one more cultural faux pas to mark me as an ugly American
, she thought.

She stopped to look over a book kiosk, looking for anyone in her peripheral vision who had made a similar stop. Mirroring a surveillance target was an unconscious act and a dead giveaway that she was being tailed.

She saw two Austrian police next to an emergency exit, with Steyr AUG assault rifles slung over their chests, shifting from side to side. They looked more bored with their shift than interested in running her down. No one else seemed interested in her.

Bags from her flight were already on the carousel by the time she reached it. She looked around at the milieu of people, wondering which one was her contact. The code phrase was simple: “New York” for all clear and “Chicago” if she’d picked up a tail or unwanted attention from the local authorities.

Her suitcase emerged from the center of the carousel and spat out onto the conveyer belt. She picked it up and carried it toward the customs station. As an army officer, she’d carried a duffel bag in each hand and a rucksack on her back as she deployed to and from Iraq. Carrying one suitcase shouldn’t have bothered her, but a woman with a $5,000—assuming it wasn’t fake—purse and $300 shoes simply didn’t carry her own bag, not when the airport offered a luggage trolley for a mere eight euros.

“Excuse me,” a deep voice said from behind her. A man who was a foot taller than her, with sun-darkened skin and a build that belonged in a strongman competition, smiled at her. His left arm was in a sling; a cast started at his knuckles and disappeared into an uncuffed shirt.

“Have the time?” the man asked.

Natalie set down her bag and looked down at her watch. “Sorry, I’m still set on New York.”

The large man nodded, reached past her with his good arm, and grabbed her bag.

“Go through the leftmost customs station. Then find the blue BMW waiting for you. Plate ends in three one four,” he said and walked off with her bag.

Natalie opened her mouth to protest the loss of all her packed clothes but caught herself. This would all make sense soon, she hoped.

The customs officer she’d been directed to waved her past with a wink. For all her training on penetrating a country’s customs and immigration controls, her experience in Vienna had been underwhelming.

Once outside, Natalie caught site of the distant Alps; snow still lay on the peaks, even this late in the spring. Taxis and limos jostled for position against the curb as she scanned the area for the BMW.

A minibus pulled away, and she found her next contact. A whipcord-thin man in a black suit and limo driver’s hat lounged against the open trunk of a blue BMW. The driver noticed her and tipped his hat. He had a V-shaped face and barely any chin under a short beard peppered with gray.

Natalie walked over, thinking how ridiculous it would be if he expected her to get in the trunk. Such a thing was inevitable, her instructors had promised.

The driver took her carry-on without a word, tossed it into the trunk, and slammed it shut. He opened the driver’s door, furrowed his brow. Natalie got the hint and let herself into the rear seat.

The driver pulled into traffic and drove them away from the airport.

Natalie let the awkward silence continue for a few minutes. This was as far as her instructions took her. If she’d been compromised at the airport or if her contact hadn’t found her, she was to check into the Vienna Hyatt, act like a tourist for two days, then fly back to New York.

“Excuse me. Where are we going?” Natalie asked.

The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror with eyes the color of glacier ice. He put a gloved finger to his lips.

The car turned off into the business district full of high-rise buildings and cars that were many times more expensive than what she rode in. They drove into a parking garage beneath one of the high-rises. The driver waved a key fob over a sensor at the drop-down arm blocking their way in. An armed guard took a phone call, looked hard at the driver, then raised the boom.

The parking garage was almost empty; a few sports cars were parked far from each other. A stretch limo took up four parking spaces across from an elevator entrance.

The car stopped at the elevator, and the driver held a key card to Natalie.

Natalie took the card, which was bare of markings.

“What am I supposed to do?”

The driver pointed his thumb at the elevator doors. The lock on her door popped open.

Natalie rubbed the card between her thumb and forefinger. Her leaving the army for the CIA, the months of field craft training, evenings spent learning Russian with one-on-one tutors and the promise of making a real difference in the war on terror had all seemed like a brilliant idea up until this moment. Climbing onto the chartered plane that had taken her from Fort Campbell to the war in Iraq had been a great deal easier than getting out of this car.

The lock on her door popped up and down several times, ruining her reverie.

“Sorry,” she said. She got out and straightened her suit.

The elevator was empty; the control panel had three buttons:
open
,
close
, and
emergency
. She slipped the key card into a slot over the buttons and waited. The BMW pulled away as the doors closed, taking her carry-on with it.

The elevator didn’t display floors as it went up or even offer Muzak to calm her nerves.

She felt the elevator come to a stop, and the doors opened to reveal a pentagon-shaped desk protruding into a clear Plexiglas wall. A large frosted logo of a steamship for Eisen Meer Logistics took up most of the wall to her right, over the only door past the wall.

A Teutonic woman with close-cropped blonde hair smiled at her from behind the Plexiglas. A speaker in the wall, like she was a bank teller and not a receptionist for the weirdest company this side of the twilight zone, clicked to life.

“Hello, Ms. Garrow. One moment while I inform Shannon that you’ve arrived,” said the receptionist. There was no hint of any European accent in her voice.

Natalie stepped from the elevator and crossed her hands over her waist. This was the right place, at least.

A man in his mid-twenties arrived seconds later, the bulge of a sidearm under his suit coat. He put his hand on the door and pushed it open as a buzzer sounded. He motioned down the hall with a nod.

Not ones for chitchat
, she thought.

Natalie followed him past offices with glass walls. One office held a mess of computers in various states of disrepair. Another had a huge screen that took up almost the entire wall; dots of light marked all the world’s major shipping lanes. Three men huddled together in another office. One noticed her and clapped his hands twice; the glass wall went opaque in an instant.

She followed her guide around a corner and stopped with him at an oaken door, the antique nature of the door at odds with the ultramodern office.

Her guide opened the door, and Natalie went inside.