[b]Jakarta
14:55 Local Time[/b]


Smiley kept his head down as the chauffeured car sped through the streets towards the city outskirts. In his lap were files on Brent Jackson, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, and Michael Stevenson. On the long flight from the States, Smiley had poured over every page in the three thick files. He had to know if Brent Jackson's treasonous behavior had spread to his teammates. The small station in Jakarta had been together for a number of years and appeared on the surface to be very close-knit. Behavior like Jackson's ran the risk of spreading like a cancer. The lure of revenge against superiors and easy money served as powerful incentives for even the most moral beacons.

Fontaine's file contained the most surprises. She was from an aristocratic Italian family. That reminded Smiley of the old days of spying, back when the blue bloods on both sides of the pond were the driving force behind espionage. Fontaine fluently spoke four languages, and could speak and additional four conversationally. Intelligence levels were off the chart. So why was she in a backwater like Jakarta? Smiley answered his own question a few hours later when he read of an incident shortly before her stationing in Jakarta. In Vienna, Fontaine was the bait in a honeytrap plot against a Russian oligarch. The op got blown and made the papers and created a scandal for SHIELD. She was quietly shuffled off to Jakarta with a junior agent, Brent Jackson, who served a minor role in the plan.

By comparison, Stevenson was a ghost. He was a ten-year veteran of SHIELD, and nearly every bit of his file was off-limits to Smiley and his deputy director security clearance. Stevenson's recruitment tests were just as impressive as Fontaine's. The big man was smart, excelled at tradecraft, and was a physical specimen. Smiley was still learning SHIELD's structure, but if the man was in the Circus he would have been marked as scalphunter material from day one. Whoever did the nasty work for the Americans, there was no doubt Stevenson was part of their crowd. He made his way to Jakarta a year after Fontaine and Jackson arrived. Three talented individuals, one now a known double agent, in close quarters and with potential axes to grind with the powers that be. Smiley knew from personal experience that friends of traitors were not always wittingly accomplices of those traitors.

Smiley also had a record of every operation the Jakarta Station carried out, or were even tangentially involved in, since Fontaine and Jackson's arrival. Overall, the wins outweighed the losses. That was until a year ago. Smiley noticed that was the time that Tiger Shark started to first appear in SHIELD reports. Jakarta Station's primary task from then on out was finding the pirate. After that, every attempt to find Tiger Shark or anyone in his organization met with failure. Potential informers went missing, raids always ended up just one step behind the man. Cables between Jakarta and Washington contained frustration between both sides.

He looked up as the city faded away to the Indonesia countryside, a flat and broad plain that stretched out for miles. They passed over a muddy brown river where farmers pulled horse drawn carts across the bridge. His driver, an American working out of the embassy, honked his horn as he drove past the carts. Smiley tucked the files into his briefcase as the car approached a squat, two-story concrete building two miles from the river. The site served SHIELD as a safehouse. Under his orders, Barnes kept the three SHIELD agents under guard and awaiting his arrival. The car pulled up to the building. Smiley informed the driver to turn off the engine and wait there.

The warm climate hit Smiley hard when he got out the car. The humid air created a film of sweat between his back and shirt that made it stick to his shoulder blades. He wiped beads of sweat from his forehead and pressed the buzzer beside the safehouse door. He knew a camera from above watched him as he calmly waited for Barnes to recognize him and open up the steel reinforced door that kept people is as well as it kept people out.