Hunter rubbed his eyes. “No. Not at the beginning. I knew Althea had been to visit Prince Achileas at Sandhurst. The Prince knew about his family’s deal with Cranston and it clearly pricked his conscience. Althea got him interested in Group 99. I think the idea was that he was going to help them expose
or sabotage the arrangement in some way. But he got cold feet. Anyway, I went to England. To meet him.”
“You met Prince Achileas?” It was the first time Tracy had openly expressed surprise.
Hunter nodded. “Sure. I interviewed him for my piece.”
“Did you meet Bob Daley then too?”
“Nope. Just the prince.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“Not much, as far as fracking was concerned. He was very depressed by then. He hated Sandhurst. The boy was obviously gay, and having a tough time with that. Plus he was estranged from his father. And his commanding officer hated his guts.”
“Frank Dorrien . . .” Tracy murmured under her breath.
“I was sad when I heard Achileas had topped himself,” Hunter said, staring down at the wine dregs in the bottom of his glass. “Sad but not surprised. Bob Daley said the same thing about him, when we met later in the camp in Bratislava. The kid was a tortured soul. They were friends, believe it or not.”
“I know,” said Tracy.
“Anyway, Achileas never did tell me much about that Greek fracking deal. But he did talk to me about Group 99. He was quite fascinating on that subject, as it happened. And he showed me a picture while I was there, of the handler whom he’d met with: Althea. Not the greatest picture as you know. Grainy and her face is half in profile. But it was enough to shock the hell out of me.”
“Because?”
“Because I realized then that I knew her. And that my story was about to get bigger than I’d ever imagined.”
CHAPTER 30
HER REAL NAME IS Katherine Evans.” Hunter looked at Tracy, propping his elbows on the table. “Kate. As soon as I saw Achileas’s picture of her I knew. We were at school together.”
“At school?” Tracy frowned. “But I thought you said she was CIA?”
“She was. But I knew her before that, at Columbia,” Hunter explained. “We were in the same graduating class.”
“So you were friends?”
Hunter took on a nostalgic expression. “More than friends. Kate was probably my first really big love.”
Tracy was fascinated. “What was her background? Was she a radical in college?”
Hunter laughed. “Radical? Hell, no. If you could have picked one girl out of the yearbook least likely to get involved with an organization like Group 99, it would have been her. Kate’s family were from Ohio. Good people, Christian, Republican. And rich. Her dad owned a local newspaper, but he’d made most of his money on Wall Street. Needless to say, he didn’t approve of me one bit.”
Tracy asked the obvious question. “So how does a nice, rich, Midwestern girl end up on the CIA’s Most Wanted list?”
Hunter’s face suddenly darkened. “She loses everything,” he said bitterly. “That’s how. The CIA destroyed Kate’s life, so she figured she’d return the favor.”
Tracy waited for him to explain.
“After Kate and I broke up she started dating a guy called Daniel Herschowitz. About a year later, she married him. I didn’t know the guy well, but everybody said Dan was a great person. Solid, reliable. Everything I wasn’t, basically.” He smiled briefly. “He was also crazy smart, just like Kate. She was brilliant with computers—that’s why they brought her in to track you—and Dan was some kind of math prodigy. They both got recruited into Langley before they even finished grad school.”
The way he told it, it sounded like such a happy story. Gilded, gifted American couple fall in love and dedicate their lives to their country. Yet somehow, somewhere along the road between then and now, it had ended in tragedy. In terror and murder and misery.
Fighting to control her emotions, Tracy asked Hunter, “What happened? What went wrong?”
“I don’t know all the details. But the summary is Dan was in Iraq, embedded on some deep cover mission for the agency. Something went wrong back home—some kind of security leak—and his identity was compromised. He managed to make contact with his handler and arranged to meet at a safe house in Basra. He got there expecting to be smuggled out of the country. Instead he was met by three Al Qaeda operatives, horribly tortured, and eventually beaten to death.”
Tracy put a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God. But how did Al Qaeda know about the safe house?”