He was acknowledged, but before he could step away, a buzzing rose from his pack. He fished out his satellite phone and answered.
“Tucker, I’m glad I could reach you.” The tension in Harper’s voice was obvious.
“What’s wrong?”
“Where were you?”
“Down a hole. At De Klerk’s coordinates. We found it. We found the—”
“Who’s with you?”
“Everyone.”
“How close?” she pressed.
“Fifty feet.” Tucker withdrew farther from the others, sensing the need for privacy. He put a boulder between him and the others. “Now sixty feet. What’s the matter?”
“We deconstructed that photo you sent—the one of you sitting at the computer in the Internet café in Dimitrovgrad. It was shopped. It’s a fake. Don’t ask me to explain the technicalities, but there were pixel defects in the image—something called integration artifacts.”
“Go on.”
“Integration artifacts are created when you extract part of one image and overlay it onto another. You follow?”
“Like replacing a horse’s ass with your boss’s face. I get it. Out with it.”
“The photo of you at the Internet café was created by merging two different images. An interior shot of the café. And a photo of you taken elsewhere. Someone shopped them together. Faked it.”
“What the hell?”
“Our techs were able to separate out the original photo of you, and through extrapolation and pixel capture, they were able to rebuild some of the old details that were erased, mostly details around your hands. In the faked photo, your hands are hovering over a computer keyboard. But when the techs were done, they showed your hands were really originally holding a steering wheel.”
“So the picture of me that was Photoshopped was actually taken while I was driving.”
“Exactly. It appears to have been taken by a cell-phone camera. It was a side profile of you, as if someone in the passenger seat shot it.”
It took several pained seconds for Tucker’s brain to register what Harper was telling him. He squeezed his eyes shut, her last words echoing in his mind.
. . . a side profile of you, as if someone in the passenger seat shot it . . .
“What was I wearing in the photo? I can’t remember.”
“Uh . . . a military winter suit.”
That was the jacket he wore when he pulled Anya out of the Kazan Kremlin. After that, they fled the city. He pictured that ride.
Bukolov and Utkin had been sitting in the back.
Anya had been up front with him—in the passenger seat.
Tucker whispered, “It’s Anya.”
He closed his eyes, despairing. She must have covertly taken the photo with her cell phone as he drove them out of Kazan, then e-mailed it away before he ditched everyone’s electronics.
He had to recalibrate his entire worldview of events—and brace a hand against the boulder to keep his legs steady.
She had lied about just getting tea in Dimitrovgrad. While loose, she must have made contact with Kharzin’s people, told them where to arrange the Spetsnaz ambush. She must have also covertly followed Tucker, noted he had used that Internet café. Kharzin’s people took advantage of that information to create the doctored photo. It was insurance, a red herring. It had been planted on the Spetsnaz people in case their ambush failed. In that worst-case scenario, Tucker was meant to find the photo, so he would believe the attackers had been tailing them or tracking them all along, so as to throw off suspicion from Anya.
But that was not the worst of it.
Utkin.
He suddenly found it hard to breathe. He felt sucker punched in the gut. He pictured the man bleeding to death on the beach, sacrificing himself to save them, the same people who had falsely accused and condemned him.
Still, you saved us.
And it had never been Utkin. Anya had set him up. The signal generator was hers. The empty pack of cards in Utkin’s bag was hers. She knew Utkin would have a set of cards. It was easy enough to plant that evidence in his duffel.
Harper’s voice blared in his ear, drawing him back to his own skin. “Tucker!”
“I’m here.” He took a deep breath. “It’s Anya. She’s the one working with Kharzin. I should have seen it.”
“There’s no way you could have.”
“Either way, we have to assume she’s been in contact with Kharzin’s people since we touched down in Africa. She was with me when I found Grietje’s Well. She knew the GPS coordinates to this spot. Which means Kharzin has them, too.”
“Then that means you’re likely to have company soon,” Harper said. “What’re you going to do?”
“We’ve found the cave, but not the specimens of LUCA.”
“That doesn’t leave you many options.”
“Just one. Get Bukolov into the cave and let him go to work. While he’s doing that, I’ll get ready for a siege and rig the cave with C-4. If we can’t hold off Felice and her team, I’ll blow it all to hell.”
There was a long silence on her end. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” she finally said. “What about Anya? What are you going to do with her?”
“In the short term, I haven’t decided yet.”
“And the long term?”
He pictured Utkin’s face. “I don’t see her having a long term.”
5:38 P.M.
Tucker knelt by his pack out of sight of the others, slicing two six-foot sections of rope.
He considered how smoothly Anya had duped him. Then again, she had done the same with her superiors at the SVR. All along she’d been a GRU mole planted there or groomed there by Kharzin. It was for that reason she’d been falsifying reports to the SVR—not to protect Bukolov, but to help Kharzin. Even her admission to Tucker that she was an SVR agent was clever: confess to a damning lie, throw yourself on your sword, and claim remorse. Then be a team player, struggling and suffering with everyone else. And then finally, when Utkin’s treachery is revealed, come to his defense with sympathy and rationalization.
My God, Tucker thought.
He stood, stuffed the rope sections into his back pockets, and picked up his AR-15 rifle. He stalked back over to the group, all still gathered at the pond’s edge.
Christopher greeted him with a wave. “I thought you were going back to the Rover to get more supplies.”
Kane trotted over, his tail high, but he must have immediately sensed the black pall around his partner. The flagging tail drooped down. His entire body stiffened up, readying for action.