High Treason by Sean McFate

Author:Sean McFate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 33

Lin waited until nightfall before driving to the mystery safe house in McLean, Virginia. Dan’s counterintelligence team monitored Russian agents from this house and saw them meeting with Apollo Outcomes teams covertly. No one knew why. When his boss ran it up the chain, he was ordered to shut down his operation. When he refused, he was exiled to Omaha and his team dispersed with prejudice.

Someone high up is protecting this safe house, and I want to know why, thought Lin as she drove a little too fast. Even if she wasn’t fired by the FBI, she would always choose her own car, a zippy Mini Cooper, over the FBI’s joke of an unmarked car, the conspicuous Ford Crown Vic. Twenty minutes later, she found Dan’s mystery safe house in a cul-de-sac of McMansions deep in suburban Virginia, ironically not far from CIA headquarters.

“There you are,” she whispered as she cut the engine. Parking well up the street, she observed the surreptitious safe house. Nothing stood out. Trees surrounded the property and swayed in the winter gusts. Lights were on but she saw no movement. Nearby homes were equally quiet, but she saw people inside.

It’s go time, Lin thought as she zipped up her black jacket and pulled her wool cap low. Casually, she walked down Rockland Terrace, as if she were there visiting relatives. The houses were spaced well apart, marking it as an affluent suburb, and no one looked out their windows at this late hour. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

Lin’s heart beat faster as she approached the McMansion. Its front double doors were framed by a two-story colonnade and unpruned shrubbery. Sheer curtains hung in the windows, obscuring the house’s interior. However, she could see the outline of a humongous but cheap chandelier hanging in the atrium; several of its bulbs were dead. Up close, the place looked inert and run down. Then she saw silhouettes in a second-story window.

Someone’s definitely home, she thought, and unconsciously felt her Glock beneath her coat. Lin moved into the tree line, and the frozen snow crunched beneath her sneakers. The driveway was shoveled and salted, another clue that people lived here. She crept to the backyard and found a wooden deck and rusty barbeque. The backyard was even more unkept than the front.

An outside light flicked on. Crap! she thought, then realized it was a motion sensor light, the kind you can get at any hardware store. She froze, blending into the night’s shadows. Seconds later, the light turned off and she moved.

Calm. Be calm, she told herself, gliding furtively up the deck stairs. Kneeling in front of the back door, she pulled out a screwdriver and a ring of bump keys, each with a small O-ring around its base. Working rapidly, she tried each key until she found one that fit the lock. She turned it slightly to the right and tapped on the back of the key with the screwdriver’s handle. Two taps later, the lock turned, and she was inside.

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