Cold Shot by Mark Henshaw Read Free Book Online Page B

badge against the reader, and the door to 2G31 Old Headquarters Building clicked open.
    She didn’t bother to announce herself. Jon’s door was cracked open and the vault was small enough that he would hear her entrance.
    “The file’s on your desk,” he called out from his office.
    Kyra dropped her satchel by her chair then leaned over the desktop. A manila folder was laid open there, a photograph on top of the papers. She glanced at the picture and regretted it.
    “And this couldn’t wait until after I had lunch?” Kyra asked him, staring at the photo. A burned, bloated carcass of an African male looked back at her. Kyra was not squeamish, but someone had died slow and ugly. She skimmed over the Vicksburg CMO’s description of the remains.
    “Feel free to eat while we work,” he said over her shoulder, missing her point entirely. Kyra looked up, startled. She’d been focused on the gory photo and hadn’t heard him come over.
    “Not a problem now, ” Kyra said. Any semblance of hunger was gone. “I think this guy is a little beyond help.”
    “True, but not the smartest observation you’ve ever had,” Jonathan said. “And not the problem at hand. The starting assumption is that he’s a pirate, tried to take a ship or actually managed it, and somebody dumped him back out into the Gulf of Aden. That’s not usually how pirate raids go down, so she’s wondering whether he didn’t target a ship that someone really cared about.”
    “What if he wasn’t a pirate?”
    “Then this entire mess is somebody else’s problem. But that would make him boring, so let’s ignore that for now.”
    “Boring is good in this business,” Kyra countered.
    “Says the woman who just spent a week shooting automatic rifles. Anyway, it’s the director’s assumption,” he pointed out. “And I like it because it’s not boring. ”
    “All right. No starting point in space or time?” Of course not, she realized. If they had that, any decent analyst could have found the ship. “So we have to deconstruct a scenario that we know nothing about, in reverse, and hope that it might provide some clues to what we should be looking for,” she observed.
    “Correct,” Jonathan replied.
    “And you waited until I got back to do this because . . . ?”
    “I have my own thoughts but I want to hear yours,” he said.
    Kyra stared at Jon, focused on his body language. The fifteen months she’d been in the Red Cell had been more than enough time to learn that Jon didn’t coordinate his analysis with anyone, even people he liked, who were few. A training exercise? Or you need to prove something to someone? “It’s a red team exercise,” Kyra said. “A decision tree. But decisions are subjective evaluations reached through education and cultural influence, which we don’t share with the subjects who made them. So you’re asking me to mirror image.”
    “Mirror imaging isn’t entirely useless if you’re aware that you’re doing it,” Jonathan counseled her. “Strategies often are culturally dependent; tactics, not so much. The more basic your options, the less they care what country you’re from.”
    “Okay,” Kyra conceded. She stared at the picture of the bloated corpse. Funny how quickly you can get used to seeing that. Her mind churned, Jonathan letting her sit in silence, totally comfortable and willing to wait on her. “So assuming he was a pirate engaged in a mission, there are . . . three possibilities for how he ended up in the life raft. First, his own crew did it, in which case the ship is probably still under pirate control and docked at one of the haven ports along the Somali coast. If that’s true, NSA will probably identify the ship from phone calls between the pirates and the ship’s owner. Or if the cargo really is that valuable or interesting, the pirates might offer the ship to any country or intelligence service willing to bid for it.” She shuffled through the other papers in the file.