His mind knew he had to do this, but his hand did not move to the phone.
He began to rethink things.
That phone number was untraceable. Maybe he was okay. Just maybe.
It might be possible that he need not contact the president. What he needed was to first ensure that the op had not been compromised. And if it hadn’t been he needed to get his team up to speed and into the field so they could execute the op.
They would not get a second chance.
He made a few more calls, setting in motion this process.
Right now he didn’t care if Robie and Reel survived or not. He was not overwhelmed by a sense of injustice that demanded they be punished.
He simply wanted to survive this. The risk had been huge. Too big, he now lamented, but it was clearly too late for such thinking.
He hurried off to a meeting and sat through a presentation that he neither listened to nor cared about. He rushed through a full day of such events, stopping only to eat a cup of soup that felt like acid dropping into his belly.
He was driven home and walked into the house. Ordering his aides to remain behind, he sidestepped his wife, who was coming out of the living room to greet him, and fled to the back of the house where his home office was. He engaged the room’s SCIF features and checked his emails and voice messages.
Nothing yet. That might be good or that might be bad.
He called Marks at the Burner Box and told her to speed up the process. It would be Robie and Reel, he told her. And they would potentially be deployed very soon. He didn’t wait for her to ask questions but simply hung up.
He poured himself a drink of something far stronger than water and then had another. His nerves were wound so tight the alcohol had no effect at all. It was like he was drinking a soda.
He slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes.
He opened them when an alert went off on his computer.
That was a very special alert that he had set up. And it demanded immediate attention.
His mouth dry and his heart pounding in his chest, Tucker opened the email, which contained the very highest encryption features. The message was brief, but each word was like a bullet fired directly into his skull.
He could only stare in disbelief, because whatever hope he had held just a few moments before was now gone.
Irreversibly gone. In fact, this surpassed the worst scenario he could have imagined after he’d been informed of Carson’s murder. Lloyd Carson was the go-between, the linchpin to this whole thing. And he had been uncovered and targeted. And he had gone down.
Well, now they were all going down. But it was even worse than that. This, in fact, changed everything.
He picked up his phone and punched in a number.
APNSA Potter answered on the second ring.
Tucker said, “We’re dead. And we’re dead beyond belief.”
Chapter
24
TICK-TICK-TICK.
The old-fashioned wall clock’s second hand made its way around the timepiece’s face.
The office Chung-Cha sat in was utilitarian, badly maintained, and depressing. Well, it would have been depressing for most people. It had no effect on her. She sat there impassively waiting her turn.
As she stared at the clerk in military uniform who sat at the metal desk next to the door she would at some point pass through, Chung-Cha let her mind wander back, far back, but not that far really, to Yodok, where part of her would always be imprisoned, no matter how far away from it she got.
There were teachers there who taught the children basic grammar, a few numbers, and that was about it. As one got older the instruction became all about the life of labor to come. Chung-Cha had commenced work in the mines at age ten, clawing rock from other rock and being beaten for not making her quotas.
Every student in the class was encouraged to snitch on every other student, and Chung-Cha was no exception to this. The rewards were meager, though back then they seemed like a mountain of gold: fewer beatings, a bit more cabbage and salt, fewer self-censure meetings where students were forced to confess to imaginary sins that they would be beaten for. Chung-Cha had gotten to the point where she came to class every day with invented sins to present to the teacher, because if you had none, the thrashings were twice as painful. It seemed to delight the teachers when students spoke of their weaknesses and the things that made them small, insignificant, less than human. In the camps the teacher was also your guard. But the only things they taught were cruelty, deceit, and pain.
There had been a girl a little older than Chung-Cha who had been accused by her parents of stealing a portion of their food. The parents had turned her in, after beating her.
Chung-Cha had come forward because she had seen that it was the parents who had taken food from their child and then blamed her for the crime.
Chung-Cha’s reward for that was to be led into the prison located underneath the camp and hung upside down in a cage where guards continually poked her hour after hour with sword tips heated by a fire. She could smell her skin burning, yet she did not bleed much because the hot metal cauterized the wounds.