Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

‘Do it.’

I untuck my shirt and lift it up, exposing the cut Zara made this morning.

‘Turn around,’ she says.

I do, letting her pat me down, checking for weapons or listening devices.

‘That first night,’ I say, ‘you knew more or less where your handler would be. You were desperate to warn him that he’d been spotted. But Samson found him first. He cut the bag off his shoulder. Suddenly Samson had the dossier about Donnie, not you.’

As I’m talking, I’m picturing her expression when she found the bag empty. Was this his? And it was empty? Shit. And the look on Samson’s face. You see which way the guy went? I want to talk to him.

‘And he’d opened it,’ I continue. ‘He wouldn’t have had time to read it, but he saw the pictures. Proof that someone in the house was a spy. And he didn’t know who.’

Zara finishes searching me. Steps back.

I turn around again. ‘He was acting weird that night, and he didn’t come out of his room the next morning. So when we all went out to search for the mystery man, you came back. You shot Samson in the head and put one of the guns from the armoury in his hand to make it look like a suicide. You took his phone and laptop, so you could figure out if he had told anyone else what he knew. You threw the dossier into the fireplace, just in case someone searched your room—you could maybe explain away the phone or the laptop, but not that. But then you realised Fred was getting suspicious. He had asked me to investigate, and I was getting closer. There was one more piece of evidence which could sink you—the bullet.’

‘Wow. You really are with the FBI,’ Zara says, looking amused.

‘You dug up Samson’s corpse,’ I say. ‘You used tweezers to—’

‘I’ll stop you there.’ Zara sits down on her bed, suddenly relaxed. ‘You’re way off, Mr Blake. I didn’t kill Samson.’

This isn’t the kind of denial I expected, nor the point at which I expected one. ‘Why should I believe you?’

‘Why would I lie?’ She spreads her arms wide. For the first time, the gun isn’t pointed at me. I could pounce, try to get it off her. I don’t. With her training at Camp Peary, her hand-to-hand skills would greatly outclass mine—and anyway, we’re supposed to be allies.

‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘Don’t play dumb. We can help each other.’

I can see her deciding how much to tell me. At last she says, ‘The CIA doesn’t kill people.’

‘No?’

‘No. We recruit assets.’

We. An admission, finally.

‘Patrice Lumumba might disagree,’ I say.

Zara ignores this. ‘I’m here to gather intelligence. If my cover was blown, I would have left. I wouldn’t have killed Samson, staged a suicide and then stayed for the fallout.’

She’s talking like a normal person now. The breathy, sex-kitten voice is gone. It’s a relief.

I keep pushing. ‘If Samson read the file—’

‘That dossier wasn’t just about Donnie. It was an update on the operation as a whole—and it included a fake file on me, so I wouldn’t be compromised if it fell into the wrong hands. Which it did, because of you.’

‘Me?’

‘Fred’s not the only one with cameras,’ Zara says. ‘The station clocked you turning into the drive on that first night.’

I remember the camera I saw near the mouth of the driveway. Better hidden. More powerful.

‘Within minutes they matched your face to the FBI database,’ Zara continues. ‘My handler brought the dossier ahead of schedule, so he could tell me in person that some bumbling FBI guy had turned up. But I hadn’t had a chance to warn him that the cameras had been moved.’ She adjusts her hair and leans back on the bed. ‘So, yes, this is all your fault.’

‘What are you even doing here?’ I ask. ‘The CIA isn’t supposed to operate on US soil.’

‘The FBI isn’t supposed to recruit cannibals, either.’

A chill crawls up my spine. She knows.

‘Cannibals?’ I echo.

A twitch of her lips. ‘Now who’s playing dumb?’

When her handler came back the following night, he must have brought a second dossier—this time with a section about me. The CIA unearthed my terrible secret less than thirty-six hours after taking my picture.

Either that, or they had a file on me already.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say. If she confronts me with more evidence, maybe I can identify her source.

But she’s not so easily manipulated. ‘What do you want from me, Mr Blake?’

‘I want you to help me get the prisoners out.’

‘Why would I do that?’

I frown. ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ I know Zara gets off on hurting people—I don’t think that’s just part of her cover—but it’s also her job to protect US citizens.

Zara toys with her gun, saying nothing.

‘You’ve been here for months,’ I add. ‘Your people should have moved on this place ages ago.’

‘Like you said, the CIA isn’t supposed to operate on US soil.’

‘You could notify one of the other agencies.’

‘We’re not going to do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Counter-offer,’ Zara says. ‘I help you get out of here. The prisoners stay.’

It takes me a second to think my way into the head of a CIA agent, but I get there. ‘You don’t care about the Guards,’ I say. ‘You care about their international customers. If you find out that a Chinese delivery driver likes torture porn, you can blackmail him into transporting packages for you. If you find out that the vice-president of Turkey is a subscriber, you can force him to go through his boss’s filing cabinets. This place is an intelligence goldmine.’

‘Are you going to take the deal or not?’ Zara says.

The scope of this is alarming, even for me. The CIA is