Begin with Chapter 1: “The Beginning”
The Summit operates in secrecy around the world. It has no ties to any government or other organization, and every member, whether an agent or an intelligence officer, denies all knowledge of the organization. That denial is false, but the lack of knowledge about other members of The Summit is true. With few exceptions, agents like Mia Mathis work alone. The prolonged close proximity required for agents to work together is risky and almost always avoided.
However, even though agents avoid working with each other in the field, every agent relies on Polestar, the intelligence arm of The Summit. Polestar maintains files on countless people around the world. Criminals, victims, politicians, soldiers, citizens who live mostly anonymous lives. Polestar gathers copious amounts of information from agents in the field, and then the most talented intelligence operatives in the world assemble that information for distribution back to the agents. The seamless flow of information between the two entities is one of the reasons The Summit operates so effectively, and so secretly.
One of the main weapons that ensures such vital secrecy is the network of safehouses around the world. Referred to as Roosts, these spaces exist everywhere. Whether Mia’s hustling through the streets of a large city, pursuing a suspect through almost-deserted countryside, or blending in with innocent people living normal lives in suburbia, Mia knows a Roost is never far away.
Roosts have two purposes. One is to provide a sanctuary for agents. Their missions are among the most intense, demanding work any human performs, so having a place that’s closed off from the rest of the world, and safe from detection, is invaluable. Perhaps the only thing more valuable is the communication system found inside every Roost. The information passed between agents and intelligence in The Summit is too sensitive to risk transmitting in the outside world. The Summit’s technical team developed a telephone that provides the most secure communication available on earth, using technology unknown to anyone outside The Summit.
Although the technology is advanced, the delivery system is rudimentary. It requires a specially modified landline phone. The Summit has outfitted every Roost with the required technology, which means that any time an agent wants to talk to The Summit she has to go to a Roost.
As soon as LJ posed the question about the president to Mia, she knew she had to get to a Roost. Because Polestar technology could detect bugs in the apartment through the landline phone, each agent always knew that not only was the phone connection secure, but so was their physical location. Mia knew she’d find no other location in Belarus as secure as a Roost. If she wanted to interrogate LJ, she had no choice but to do it in a Roost. She had to find out what he knew. If he knew things that he claimed to know, then taking him to a Roost was worth the risk. And if he didn’t know anything, she could kill him without worrying about witnesses.
But Roosts were sacred. Mia had never heard of anyone but an agent getting into a Roost anywhere in the world. No one within The Summit had ever dared to question the sanctity of a Roost, and bringing someone from outside The Summit into one is a violation of such a basic tenet that Mia could barely believe she even considered it. But she also knew that no other agent had ever been confronted by anything as grave as LJ’s claim. Even though The Summit encouraged its agents to act independently and exercise their own judgment, Mia knew she had to seek advice from Polestar before doing so.
Since she couldn’t bring LJ to a Roost, and she couldn’t just let him go, she had to find a way to subdue him. The dense darkness of the Kurapaty forest gave her an instant idea, and its sordid, inhumane history made it seem apropos. As so often required on missions for The Summit, Mia devised a plan, considered the risks, evaluated the benefits, and began to put it into action in just a few seconds.
“I’m going to give you one more chance here, LJ. I understood your last sentence, but I also need you to understand what will happen to you if that sentence proves untrue. It will be the end for you, LJ. And it won’t be quick like this. I’ll make it hurt, and I’ll make it last. I’m working on something important here, and if I take my eye off of it to chase down whatever you’re saying, it’s going to fall apart. So if you make me lose this without providing what you say you can offer, it’s going to be bad news for you.”
“I don’t speak lightly,” LJ said. “I understand what I’ve claimed, but I know what I know. If you’d like to know what I know, then you need to stop this nonsense. Dead men don’t talk.”
Mia adjusted her arms around LJ’s neck so that her grip went from one of imminent death to one of suspended consciousness. The change was subtle. LJ might not have even noticed it. But Mia knew that the slight shift of her arm position would save LJ’s life, but also buy her some time. “I’m not killing you. I just need you to go to sleep for a little while. If you wake up, don’t panic. I’ll be back. And if I’m not back someone will rescue you in the morning. But don’t try to get out. It won’t work. All it’ll do is piss me off.”
LJ didn’t believe Mia and took a couple of half-hearted swings to her face. Mia tilted her head to one side and then the other, and the punches had no chance of landing.
Mia felt LJ’s body fall limp as he passed out. She threw him over her shoulder, and carried him twenty meters into the woods, and then twenty meters off the path, into a dense stand of fir trees that Mia knew stood long before Stalin and would outlast her by many years. She rested LJ on the ground, and then found a broad limb and began digging. Mia finished the hard work of digging through the clay loam faster than she expected, especially with an improvised shovel. With the hole deep enough and wide enough, she put LJ in, and backfilled. He ended up buried to his neck, his chin resting three inches off the ground. As long as a wild boar refrained from making an evening snack of his face, Mia expected LJ to remain undisturbed and waiting for her when she returned. She’d learned the art of immurement—enclosing a person in a confined space—during her training for The Summit after high school. She didn’t get to use her skills very often, but appreciated the reliability of the technique every time she’d used it.
She returned to the road, got in the car with which LJ had tried to run her off the road, and sped away. With her car and the three victims down the steep embankment, Mia knew they wouldn’t be found until morning. As long as she didn’t run into any difficulties getting to the Roost and back she’d make it well before sunrise.
In a city as large as Minsk, The Summit made sure to have more than one Roost. Mia had never been to a Roost in the city before, but by calling a designated phone number at Polestar, providing her location, and her particular nonsense passcode – unicorn sovereignty – without saying another word, the voice on the other end of the line gave her the address.
Near the center of the city, just a block away from Amerikanka, the KGB prison, an apartment building that pre-dated the Soviet Union stood sentry at a T-shaped intersection. Yellow paint capped the top three floors of the building, whose first ten floors were painted in bright white paint that chipped to show Soviet red beneath. A two-story archway in the middle of the symmetrical building provided access to a lobby on either side. Mia had been to enough Roosts to know that she wouldn’t find an entry point in either of the lobbies. She walked past the lobby entrances, to the back of the building, and the alley that passed behind it. To the right she saw a brick wall that extended five feet perpendicularly from the back of the building. The Roost. She walked to the other side of the wall and found the familiar steel door. After looking around to make sure no one watched her, she fell to one knee, reached under the gap in the door, curled her fingers upward, and lifted the steel bar that acted as both a key and a handle from the two pegs on which it rested. She inserted the bar into the hole in the steel door, rotated it, and pulled the door open. Inside, she closed the door behind her. It locked by itself, and she returned the bar to the pegs.
Inside, the Roost looked like every other Roost she’d ever seen, right down to the fresh flowers that somehow always appeared. She picked up the phone, dialed Polestar and heard a voice on the other end before she even heard the phone ring.
“Name and mission,” the voice on the other end said.
For an organization as tightly run as The Summit, Mia marveled at the array of experiences she had talking to Polestar. Sometimes they knew her name when she called. Sometimes only her location. Other times it seemed like they had to be reminded that she was an agent. She’d stopped trying to find a pattern in the way Polestar agents communicated long ago.
“Mia Mathis. I’m in Minsk, Belarus. My mission is to disrupt the Tallinn trafficking ring, but I’m calling about something else.”
“Go ahead,” said the voice on the other end of the line after Mia paused and waited for a response.
“While in pursuit of suspects related to the mission, my car was forced off the road by their accomplices. I crashed the car, and ended up eliminating three of the men in the car that ran me off the road. As I prepared to eliminate the fourth man, he told me he could provide very valuable information regarding the President of the United States.”
“What kind of information?” the Polestar agent asked.
“That’s unclear. I haven’t interrogated him yet. But he said he could answer the question of how a traitor came to be president.”
“He told you this?”
“Yes.”
“When you were about to eliminate him?”
“Yes.”
“And you believe him? Why? If I knew someone was about to kill me, I’d make some crazy claims, too. How did this person come across this information?”
“I don’t know. I believe him though. He had an urgency in his voice. Not the sort of urgency of someone pleading for his life, but rather the urgency of someone who has something to say and is worried he’ll never get to say it. I gave him an opportunity to rescind his claim, but he refused. I’ve made clear to him that if his story doesn’t checkout that I’ll have no choice but to eliminate him.”
“I’ll leave the question of this guy’s veracity to you. That’s part of your training, so we’ll assume you know what you’re doing, and we’ll trust your judgment. Why are you calling?”
“This is obviously a sensitive situation. I think it best if I interrogate him here.”
“Where? Minsk? That makes sense. Taking him elsewhere is too problematic.”
“No, not just in Minsk,” Mia said. “A Roost.”
“You want to interrogate a suspect in a Roost? Perhaps I should reconsider whether to trust your judgment. Why would you bring a suspect to a Roost? Doesn’t your training tell you that only agents of The Summit can enter a Roost?”
“That’s right,” Mia said. “That’s what I’ve known since I started. Which tells you how important I think this is. This interrogation could turn out to be the most important interrogation I’ve ever done. Maybe the most important interrogation that anyone with The Summit has ever done. I don’t have to tell you that Belarus is a police state. They know everything that happens here, and they report to Moscow on most of it. We need anonymity, secrecy. We all know that there is no more secure place in Minsk than a Roost.”
“Take him to the middle of a field. Belarus is a rural country in parts. Find the middle of nowhere and talk to him there.”
“That’s not good enough,” Mia said. “I need to communicate with Polestar. He may give me information that I need you to have right away.”
“Where is he now?”
“Immured in the ground in the Kurapaty forest. Unconscious as far as I know. If he’s awake I can’t imagine the sort of spooky spiritual hell he’s enduring right now.”
“You can get him to the Roost without him knowing its location?”
“Affirmative.”
“And when you’re done with him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we eliminate him. Maybe we just make it clear that he’s never going to talk.”
“Elimination is the better idea.”
“I don’t know,” Mia said. “Dead men tell no tales.”
“At least they don’t lie,” the Polestar agent said. “I suspect that’s more than we can say about your guy.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Mia pleaded.
She heard nothing on the other end of the line for half a minute.
“Go ahead.”
Check back Monday, March 25 for the next chapter of Kompromised.
Brett Baker is the author of The Death Market, and the first two books in the Mia Mathis series, Must Come Down and For the Trees. You can purchase all three here.