February 4, 2011 · Encrypted Link, NSC Field Support · 06:00 hrs
The secure connection ran through three proxy servers before it resolved into a signal, and the signal took another forty seconds to authenticate at both ends before the video feed opened. Alen had timed this in previous encrypted communications and had found that forty seconds was approximately the threshold at which most people began to fidget, and that the people who didn't fidget were the people worth talking to.
The woman on the screen did not fidget.
She was perhaps thirty-five, with dark hair pulled back with the practical efficiency of someone who had decided that hair was not a priority during operational hours, and glasses that she adjusted once as the feed stabilized with the automatic gesture of someone who had been adjusting the same pair of glasses in the same way for years. She sat in a room lit by multiple monitors, each one running a different data stream that she was evidently tracking simultaneously and with the calm focus of someone for whom information overload was simply the baseline working condition. She looked tired in the specific way of field support operators who had been on rotation for too long — not impaired, but carrying the particular weight of someone who had been responsible for other people's lives in dangerous places without being in the dangerous places herself, which was its own kind of toll.
"Agent Kiniaev," she said. Her voice was professional in the way of someone who had learned to use professionalism as a container for things that were genuinely difficult. Clear, direct, carrying the authority of someone who was accustomed to being listened to by people in very high-stress situations. "I'm Ingrid Hunnigan. NSC Field Support. For the duration of Operation Winter Ghost, I'm your eyes, your ears, and your institutional memory when you're in an environment that doesn't allow for reference material."
Alen studied her. He had a file on her — Section Q maintained files on every operational handler their assets might interface with, and Hunnigan's file was one of the thicker ones. She had guided a DSO operative through the Salazar castle and the military island in Spain. She had managed communications during the Harvardville airport incident. Her operational record was the record of someone who remained functional and precise under conditions that caused most support personnel to deteriorate, and who had a specific quality of loyalty to her field operators that the file noted as exceptional and the file did not know how to quantify.
He thought, briefly, about the fact that she had been on comms during Harvardville. That she had been in the same encrypted operational space as the Winter Harvest operation, separated from his world by the thickness of two different classification trees. Two people in the same building made of secrets, neither knowing the other was there.
"A pleasure, Hunnigan," he said. He kept his tone at the operational neutral he used for initial contacts — not cold, but not warm, the register of someone who was reserving judgment in the way that field operators reserve judgment about the people responsible for keeping them alive from a distance. "I've read your record."
"And I've read yours," Hunnigan replied. She glanced at something off-screen, her eyes moving with the practiced speed of someone reading data under time pressure. "Or rather, I've read what exists of it, which is considerably less than would normally be generated by five years of active operations. Someone in the classification architecture has been very thorough." She looked back at the camera. "Your physiology scans are flagged in the medical file. Resting heart rate of thirty-eight. Stress marker recovery in the range of seconds rather than hours. The cellular regeneration data alone—" She stopped herself. "Whoever built your file decided that information lives above my clearance level. I'm noting it only so you know that I've noted it."
Alen said nothing for a moment. He found that he appreciated the precision of this — the acknowledgment that she had seen the flag without pressing on it, the professional courtesy of naming the boundary without making it an obstacle.
"What's the current situation in Dveri?" he asked.
Hunnigan turned to a monitor to her left and pulled up a topographic map. The overlay showed Dveri in relation to Holigrad — the capital twelve kilometres to the northeast, the village sitting in the declivity of a low valley that the exclusion zone's administrative boundary had drawn a clean line around.
"Dveri has been formally abandoned since government shelling cleared it fourteen months ago," Hunnigan said. "The rebel movement — the independence forces — have been avoiding it. I've been picking up communications intercepts from their units operating in the surrounding area. They're calling it a dead place. They say the sounds from underground carry through the frozen ground at night." She paused. "I want you to take that seriously, Alen. Not as superstition. As field intelligence."
"The thermal signatures?"
"Consistent with active biological containment systems and server infrastructure. The energy draw is significant — whoever is running this facility has tapped directly into a regional power grid, which is either arrogance or confidence that nobody is in a position to investigate." She pulled up the thermal imaging. "The primary concentration is under the church at the village center. I'm reading a subterranean structure at two levels of depth. But Alen—" Her voice shifted in register slightly, a fraction toward the personal. "The energy readings have been unstable for the past seventy-two hours. There is an escalation pattern that I cannot fully explain from external data. Something is being activated or stressed below that church that wasn't being activated or stressed a week ago."
"Something is about to happen," Alen said.
"Or something already has and we're reading the aftereffects." She looked at the camera directly. "The rebel forces are also moving on Holigrad right now. Alexander Kozachenko — their field commander, the one the intercepts call Buddy — is pressing a major assault on the presidential compound. Belikova is going to be occupied. If there was ever a window in which the underground facility in Dveri is understaffed and under-monitored, the next twenty-four hours is it."
Alen looked at the topographic map on the shared screen. He was running three calculations simultaneously: the approach route from the border drop to Dveri, the operational window implied by the Kozachenko assault timeline, and the question of what the energy escalation pattern in the thermal data meant for what he was going to find when he went underground.
"Your gear is at the drop point," Hunnigan said. "I've added a body camera to the standard kit. I want to see what you see in real time wherever the signal holds." She adjusted her glasses again — the habitual gesture, the one that meant she was transitioning between information streams. "One more thing. Leon Kennedy is in-country. He went rogue when the extraction order came down. He's operating in Holigrad, which is twelve kilometres from where you'll be, but in an active civil war, distances compress. If your operational footprint intersects with his—"
"It won't," Alen said.
"I know." A brief pause, in which he had the sense she was choosing words with some care. "I manage Leon's comms when he's operational. I know how he moves. You move differently. I just need you to know that if he asks me about Winter Ghost, I have no answers for him."
"He won't ask," Alen said. "He won't know there's a question."
Hunnigan studied him through the screen for a moment with the particular quality of someone performing a professional assessment and arriving at a conclusion they are in the process of deciding what to do with.
"Good hunting, Foma," she said. "Going dark."
The screen went to black.
Alen sat in the safe house for another moment. Outside, Vienna's Second District was beginning its morning, utterly indifferent to the conversation that had just taken place in its basement. He thought about the voice in his ear — the quality of it, the specific combination of precision and care. He had worked with handlers who were precise without care and careful without precision and he had learned that neither combination was sufficient for the kind of operations he ran. This was something else.
He filed the observation. He picked up his camera bag. He went to catch a train.
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