probably send a rendition team at this point. Whatever. SEBIN will roll up the next batch of CIA, just like you got rolled.” He grinned even more broadly now; his confidence seemed genuine to the American in front of him. “Matthew Hanley can keep trying, but he will never drag me home in chains.”
The prisoner cocked his head. Play dumb, stay dumb. “Who’s Matthew Hanley?”
Clark Drummond rolled his eyes as his smile faded. “You’re a bit of a bore, aren’t you? Hanley runs CIA ops and . . . obviously . . . Hanley runs you. Or he did anyway. You won’t be running anywhere any time soon.”
Clark Drummond stood, then started for the door, but turned back. “He didn’t tell you what I have, did he?”
The prisoner did not respond.
“He didn’t tell you I left the U.S. last year with tools that made me all but rendition proof. When you showed up on cameras in my neighborhood, I saw you myself, and SEBIN was alerted. They were on your ass within hours.”
The prisoner hid his anger well. He hadn’t been told that the man he’d been sent to find was in possession of the means to easily identify him. That would have been useful information, to be sure, and he would have conducted his surveillance differently had he known.
But still, he said nothing, because nothing he could say would matter. He was destined for a dank and nasty Venezuelan prison cell; the rest was just noise.
Drummond continued to the exit, but he stopped in the doorway and again turned back around to the shackled American. “Hanley fucked you, Hightower. You never stood a chance.”
The steel door slammed shut a moment later, and Zack Hightower’s shoulders and head slumped forward. He was a beaten man. He had no idea how it had happened, but he was a beaten man.
ONE
Templeton 3 Annex is almost impossible to find if you don’t already know about it. Nestled deep in a sterile office park in an unincorporated stretch of Prince George’s County, Maryland, just a few minutes south of Joint Base Andrews, the front door simply reads: Palmer Holdings, LLC.
But there was no Palmer, there were no holdings, and the office space behind the door housed no limited liability company.
Templeton 3 Annex is the bland code name for a clandestine medical facility run for personnel of CIA black operations, those deemed too covert for regular medical care, and not only was Templeton 3 physically hard to find, even deep within CIA operations, only a very few knew about it at all.
No one had ever come through the door to Palmer Holdings accidentally, but if someone had they would have been turned away by the pair of men in nondescript security guard uniforms sitting behind the desk. A well-trained eye might be curious as to why men so obviously young and fit would be working the security D-list here in an out-of-the-way office park, but a visitor would get no farther into the building without passing the pair—and the Heckler & Koch MP7 Personal Defense Weapons they kept out of sight but within reach.
But at four fifty a.m. on a rainy Tuesday in August, someone with the right credentials did come through the door, and he stepped up in front of the two guards. Though surprised by both the time of the visit and the identity of the visitor himself, they disengaged the electronic lock to a door, which the large man in the dripping raincoat passed through. Here he encountered another pair of guards sitting in a snack room guarding yet a third door. After an okay radioed by the lobby crew, the lunchroom team asked the visitor to put a hand on a scanner, and then, when the locks popped open, the men escorted the visitor down a wide staircase and into the basement of the four-story building.
A short hallway led to more security, and the men here didn’t bother to hide their weapons. Submachine guns dangled from their necks as they stood up from the table by door number four and again examined the visitor’s credentials, even though, after two other checks, it was simply pro forma.
The fourth door opened, and the early-morning visitor finally stepped inside the heart of Templeton 3.
Visitors from Langley were not a particularly uncommon occurrence, but a visitor at four fifty in the morning was, so the doctor working the graveyard shift here was startled to his feet. Eugene Cathey stood at his desk, computer monitors all