Oath of Office

Dovzhenko suddenly found himself extremely tired. “How did you find her, then?”

“As I said, a tip, just like you. We were lucky. I think we should talk to the actual owner next, don’t you?”

“A wise move.” Dovzhenko groaned inside. He had never met Maryam’s friend, but he knew now that he had to find her and warn her. “I need to piss,” he said. “I won’t touch anything.”

“By all means,” Sassani said. “Piss. I don’t care.”

Dovzhenko started to turn for the bathroom but paused at the bedroom door as if he did not know exactly where it was.

Maryam’s jacket lay on the floor where she’d dropped it earlier that evening. He flushed the toilet, using the noise of swirling water to cover the jingle of her keys as he lifted the jacket to his nose, breathing in the smell of her, blinking back tears. He pulled himself together, then found what he was looking for in the pocket, before gently returning the jacket to the floor.

“What is wrong?” Sassani asked when Dovzhenko came out of the bathroom. He was still grinning. “You look as though the weight of the world is on your shoulders, my friend.”

“We are not friends,” Dovzhenko said.

“That,” Sassani said, “is becoming more obvious to me by the minute. But for argument’s sake, why is that not so? Because I killed a whore?”

“Her?” Dovzhenko remembered he was a spy in time to scoff. “She is nothing. This is a nasty business we are in, and sometimes we must both do nasty things. The difference is you enjoy it too much.”

He turned his back on the IRGC men and walked toward the door. There was only one way forward for him now — a way that, if he were honest with himself, he’d been considering for some time. But first he had to find a woman named Ysabel Kashani.

24

Mandy Cruz considered “going blue” and activating the flashing light in the doll-sized outhouse to let the forty-four other watch-standers know she was leaving her desk to use the restroom and they needed to remain on station. Colloquially referred to as Ops, the State Department Operations Center was located just down the hall from the secretary’s office, beyond a set of frosted doors and two armed guards. In the shadowy world where diplomacy and intelligence merged, secrets were compartmentalized behind countless locks, and Ops held one of the biggest keyrings in government. Those on watch were call takers, dispatchers, facilitators, problem solvers — and intrepid detectives who were trained to birddog a task until it was accomplished. If the secretary needed to speak with a specific ambassador who could not be located, someone from Ops found out where he played racquetball, where she golfed, or if he or she enjoyed a long lunch at the hotel with a significant other. More than once there had been heavy breathing on the line when she finally got through. But Cruz didn’t care. People had to live their lives. Her business was to answer when they called, find them when they were needed, and connect them with the boss.

Just fifteen minutes earlier, Cruz had taken the S icon representing the secretary of state on her computer screen and dropped it into a box with the icon for the foreign minister of South Korea, connecting the call. Someone else took notes on the conversation, but, generally speaking, Cruz could figure out the gist of what was going on by the information that passed across her desk. Five minutes after the call with Korea, Secretary Adler’s box had dropped in with an icon representing Foreign Minister Tinubu of Nigeria. Two minutes after that, the group supervisor had set up a special Cameroon Task Force and briefed everyone in Ops. Cruz was pulled from her regular duties to focus on the embassy takeover.

Nine minutes after Task Force Cameroon was up and running, Cruz’s headset chirped. She clicked her computer mouse to answer the call.

“Hello, Ops!” the voice on the other end of the line said, relieved, as if coming up for air. “Special Agent Adin Carr in Yaounde, Cameroon. The ambassador is safe. I’m talking on a stolen cell phone, so we are not, I repeat, not, secure.”

Cruz hit another icon on her screen, notifying her group supervisor that she had a priority caller on the line having to do with Task Force Cameroon.

“Special Agent Carr,” Cruz said, “I’m connecting you with the secretary right now.” She dropped the icons but stayed on the line. The call would be recorded, and in this situation, all involved stayed on to ensure the call wasn’t fumbled or dropped completely.

The secretary came on the line an instant later, asking the question the agent surely wanted to hear. “Adin, this is Scott Adler. What do you need first?”

* * *

The chief of staff, secretaries of defense and state, and the director of national security stood in the middle of the Oval in the closest thing to parade rest they could muster while holding their leather folios.

“They’re moving her,” Adler said. “Carr will get back with us as soon as he can.”

Ryan’s desk line buzzed and Betty’s voice came over the speaker.