Page 93 of Out of Control

Aziz had been a US asset? Well, crap on a cracker.

Drago thought fast. Those cameras must have been transmitting live to Langley. He texted Charles,Who received the film footage?

I don’t know.

FIND OUT.

No need to shout. I’ll get on it and let you know.

We believe Jabril Hamza has a mole inside the CIA, and he’s the person who received that video of me. And yes, I know the official agency stance is that Hamza is dead. But Spencer agrees with me. Kurbaj IS Hamza.

I always believed Kurbaj was Hamza.

Hurry on the video thing. That rendition’s gonna be upgraded to a kill order any minute.

Charles didn’t answer. But then, he knew Drago was not wrong.

He turned to Spencer and smiled, but the expression felt almost as hollow as his stomach.

Spencer stepped forward and wrapped him in a quick, hard hug. Given that there were probably cameras rolling around them, Drago was shocked at the display of affection. But he wasn’t complaining about the support. He was more freaked out than he wanted to admit that Langley had film of last night and that he looked guilty in it.

“Okay,” Spencer said briskly. “Let’s get this party set up and invite everybody to come.”

Drago nodded and passed half the burner phones to Spencer. They spent the next few minutes calling all the stored contacts on each phone, and for good measure every outbound number that didn’t match a stored contact, and left messages in Arabic, indicating that they had the second Fayez Khoury laptop, the important one, and wanted to make a handoff in return for a meeting with Kurbaj. They gave the address of the country house a banker contact of Drago’s had agreed to let them use for the week.

They grabbed their original gear bags, picked up the keys to the van he normally let the building supervisor use for free, and they headed out. They’d been in his apartment a grand total of ten minutes. Not long enough for a hit squad to move into place, but hopefully long enough to let the mole know where the two of them were going.

He prayed they made a tempting enough target to draw out Hamza’s mole inside the CIA.

SPENCER WHISTLEDas the country home came into view around a wooded bend. It was more like a country castle. “I’m gonna hate to have to shoot up this place if it comes to a firefight.”

Drago grunted. “We’ll set up in the woods. I would hate to shoot up this place too. Wait till you get a load of the inside. Looks like a mini Versailles. The lord of the manor back in the 1700s paid off the French revolutionaries and let them use this place as a headquarters, so they left it alone. A few decades after the revolution, the guy’s children came back and claimed it. The chateau has been in the family ever since.”

They climbed out of the van and offloaded their gear before taking a quick tour of the house. Though not huge, it was more opulent than anything Spencer had ever seen. They grabbed a quick bite to eat in the kitchen and then headed outside to scout the woods.

Drago commented, “I figure we’ll set up out here for the meet. When the time gets close, we can text GPS coordinates to the burner phones. The property’s nearly a thousand acres, so we can take the fight well away from the house.”

They spent the remainder of the afternoon hiking the area, getting to know the lay of the land. They found some sort of gamekeeper’s hut near dusk, way out at the back corner of the property, in thick woods. It even had its own overgrown driveway leading to a nearby road.

“This is the spot,” Spencer announced.

Drago nodded in agreement. “René was kind enough to throw in a block of C-4 and some det cord when I told him you were a SEAL. What do you think of wiring this place to blow?”

“Love it. Pass me the C-4.” He went to work quickly, shaping charges out of the gray putty and placing them strategically at the doors and key spots on the foundation. He attached det cord to the charges, wired it all to a remote detonator, and then went back and covered everything with leaves and dirt. He backed out of the area, carefully rearranging leaves and detritus until the area looked undisturbed.

“Dude, you’re good at that,” Drago teased.

“Gee. Maybe I should do it for a living someday.”

“You might even make it into the military if you try hard.”

Spencer punched him lightly in the arm, and Drago responded by dragging him close for a hot, tongue-filled kiss. Spencer emerged from it, breathing hard. “You don’t fight fair.”

“Never said I did, Spence.”

In the fading daylight, they set up shooter’s nests close in around the decrepit hut, took distance measurements from the hut to each shooting position, and discussed ingress/egress routes and field-of-fire control.

They retraced their steps to the main house, hid the van in the garage, and went inside. Drago went to the kitchen to find them something to eat, and that was when Spencer’s cell phone vibrated with an incoming message.

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