by JC Ryan
The borders were still tightly controlled, however. Any attempt to cross them without identity papers would land him in a Pakistani jail. The drive itself would take more than seventeen hours – there was no time to find a forger and obtain passable papers. Taking a southern route to the only other viable border crossing, that is, where roads would get him there, would take only fourteen hours. But the busy city of Lahore would provide more anonymity. The extra three hours was a necessary sacrifice.
Ironically, if Rex hadn’t thought to throw off pursuit by heading southwest from Kabul instead of east, he’d have been in India already by now. Or dead from an IED on the Kabul-Jalalabad highway, or captured by Afghan or even US authorities. It had been the right decision, even though it was costing him an extra day.
Digger had finished his breakfast. When Rex’s watch showed precisely 9:00 a.m., he told the dog to stay, got out of the SUV, and approached the doors of the bank he’d been parked in front of. At the same moment, a bank employee opened the door and smiled in Rex’s direction.
Ten minutes later, Rex had exchanged a one-hundred-dollar bill from one of Usama’s bundles for a little less than twelve-thousand Pakistani rupees. That would be enough to top off his gas tank just before he reached Lahore, ensuring he’d make it to New Delhi, India before he had to fill it again. After that, he’d have no need of Pakistani currency, or even Indian. In India, he knew, dollars were as good as gold and no explanations would be required as to what a poor Middle Eastern man was doing with hundred-dollar bills.
When Rex got back into the SUV, he turned to Digger. “Ready for a road trip, boy?” For some reason, today’s drive felt more like an adventure to him than yesterday’s fleeing for his life had. His mood was considerably improved by the solid eight hours of sleep he’d had the previous night and the reset of his body-clock’s nights and days back to normal.
Over the past few days, Rex had time to think and take stock of his life, and he had to admit that his life hadn’t been normal for over ten years. But then, what would normal look like for a man who had to be dead to stay alive? A thirty-two-year-old male with no family, no girlfriend, no friends, no country, and no identity, which, if things went to plan, would soon become a life-long fake identity. The bouts of introspection led him to the conclusion that ‘normal’ for him was not going to be the same as ‘normal’ for others, and that he would have to make his own version of normal. Parts of these musings were taken up by the idea of making his way to Europe with a new identity, where it would, he hoped, be much less like the Old Man’s description of an agent’s life, endless travel, long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Of the three he would keep only the first — endless travel. He was excited about the prospect to go places and see things. The last two — boredom and terror — he was going to avoid like the plague.
Up until a few days ago, Rex hadn’t thought he’d ever be ready to retire from CRC. Now, it seemed, he was.
He didn’t fool himself. Retiring from any black ops outfit was not as easy as typing out a letter of resignation, signing it and handing to your boss, accompanied with or without gestures such as a middle finger or the words, “Stick your job into a dark place at the bottom of your anatomy.” You either died during a mission or you negotiated a disappearance, which meant you became someone else. There was no middle ground. Not turning up for work one day would mean they would send teams out to find you and kill you. The only way that wouldn’t happen is if you were already dead. And that was, as far as Rex could figure it out, what they would believe about him right now — Rex Dalton was dead.
Would John Brandt have him killed if he knew Rex was alive and trying to walk away? Rex had no way of knowing, but he didn’t plan on doing anything to test the notion.
Rex had no regrets. He’d long since lost touch with teammates in CRC, a side-effect of his known penchant for working alone plus his long deployment in Afghanistan. His family was dead, his girlfriend set aside, and except for one short impersonal letter, never heard from after he enlisted in the Marines. His only friends had been two of the men killed three days ago in that ambush. Had it only been three days? Rex was suddenly weary. It had felt like three years.
Looking backward was clearly not in his best interest. The past can't be changed. It could only inform the future.
Rex gave a brief thought to the money he had in the US. He’d invested the money he inherited from his parents including the proceeds from the sale of the house when he joined the Marines. It was a sizeable chunk by now, a bit more than $350,000, he hadn’t looked at a statement lately. He’d never needed it before. His lifestyle didn’t require him to own a home or the possessions to fill it. His immediate needs had always been supplied by CRC, including anything he needed for daily expenses like food and accommodation. The money would come in handy now, but he couldn’t get to it.
What would happen to it now that I’m ‘dead’?
The major problem, as far as he could see, was that there was no body to prove his death. If DNA samples were collected at the site of the explosion they would be able to identify eight bodies but his would not be among them. Rex didn’t know much about the legal processes involved, but he supposed that dying in another country, and in circumstances such as his, would complicate matters back in America when it came to wind up his estate. He thought he remembered reading somewhere that unclaimed monies went to the government if there was no will. Maybe the government searched for lost relatives. They’d have a difficult search in his case. Both his parents were only children. He had no clue about his grandparents. Maybe his parents had cousins, but if they did, they had never mentioned them.
He wished he’d left a will with John Brandt. Brandt always insisted everyone who passed his rigorous selection and training regimen had one before their first deployment. Rex was a fool for claiming there was no one he could bequeath his estate to.
Jessie could have used the money.
He’d treated her badly, not because he didn’t love her, but because he’d thought there was no love left in him to give to anyone after that morning in Spain. He’d been stashing her so far away in a corner of his heart, bent on revenge, that he’d hardly ever thought of her for the past few years. When he did, it was with regret for breaking her heart.
Yes, she could have used the money.
There was nothing he could do about it now. He put it firmly out of his mind. He still had to get out of this godforsaken country safely.
Its time to go.
“What do you say, Digger? Do you think we old war dogs can lead a civilian life without becoming bored and keep ourselves out of situations of terror?”
Digger lifted his ears when he heard his name, but he must not have had an opinion, or was not interested in the topic, as he just closed his eyes and either tried or pretended to sleep.
As the hours wore on, Rex grew bored with the denuded vistas and sparse vegetation on both sides of the road. But he knew he had to remain vigilant. The few times he was able to pick up a radio signal as he passed through a town, he searched the dial for a station reporting a manhunt. It seemed impossible he’d gotten away clean from the carnage at Usama’s compound, but perhaps it was only of local interest. Here in the middle of Pakistan, no one was looking for him, and that suited him just fine.
It was almost instantaneous when the desert gave way to verdant fields stretching further and further away from the road. He knew from previous experience the poppy fields of Pakistan were as lucrative for this country as those in Afghanistan were for that.
“Not my problem,” he reminded himself. Digger looked at him and smiled as if to say, “Now that's the way to think about it.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Washington, DC, 9:37 p.m., June 24
BRANDT CALLED HIS pilot and gave him a change of plan. He wouldn’t be flying back to Arizona tonight after all.
John Brandt had been a CIA field operative in the Cold War years. He’d come through th
e ranks, eventually retiring and starting CRC at the behest of like-minded spooks in the Company, as they liked to refer to the CIA. He was too old for fieldwork now, technically what they would call a desk-jockey, but his roots were firmly planted in good, old-fashioned spycraft.
Back then, there’d been little electronic surveillance, and that much less sophisticated than today’s operations. No CCTV and the late entry of what later became the internet meant there was little SIGINT, comparatively. Banking was less integrated. Follow the money meant locating duplicate accounting books and studying them individually. FININT on a global scale wasn’t even conceived of.
In Brandt’s day, HUMINT was king, and operatives were trained in the nuances of body language, facial tics, and what the eyes revealed. The science may have been fuzzy, but taken together, the readings an experienced agent could get from it all was as good as a lie detector.
Brandt would have called Carson on his obvious lies, but he didn’t want Carson to know he’d read them. He needed more evidence, much more, before he could move against the most powerful bureaucrat in the CIA. And to get more evidence would be a delicate and tricky operation.
The DCIA would be extremely well protected from electronic surveillance. Even if he didn’t understand how it worked, he’d be one of the best-protected targets, second only to the President of the United States and possibly the Director of National Intelligence, to whom Carson reported. Even Brandt’s resources wouldn’t be able to crack that.
What he needed was something Carson would never see coming. That good, old-fashioned spycraft at which Brandt and certain old friends and colleagues were masters. Before he returned to his headquarters in Arizona, Brandt intended to activate an old network.
Among his many friends and contacts, ranging from poor busboys he’d met and cultivated as informants in his days in Russia and France, to highly-placed power-brokers, public and private, Brandt had kept up with four colleagues from his CIA days. They were among the group who’d conceived of CRC, angered by what the Company had become and, like Brandt, fiercely patriotic. They were also among the most talented field agents Brandt had ever had the pleasure of working with.
They now had the advantage also of being among the invisible ranks of the late middle-aged to elderly. No one paid attention to an old woman knitting a sweater on a park bench. Or a pair of old men engaged in a chess match at a picnic table. Or a single old man feeding the pigeons. An elderly woman waiting for a bus or staring mindlessly at the passing crowds wouldn’t excite a moment’s curiosity. It was a devastating indictment of the callousness of modern society, but it played nicely into Brandt’s plans.
What made his friends even more exceptionally suited for the task he had in mind were that they were lifelong students, now masters, of the science of human behavior. Any one of them, had they been so inclined, could have written and defended a PhD dissertation on the subject worthy of a Nobel prize. As it was, they preferred to keep their secrets. Their particular talent was that they could follow a target for ten to twenty minutes and then predict the target’s next or even final destination and be there in advance.
Following a subject who had a highly-trained security detail was dicey. It was so amusing to know that the target was taking extreme precautions, long and circuitous routes, and other countermeasures to avoid being followed, only to arrive where they were expected and their ‘tails’ waiting there for them. These wily old spies could do it without the target’s knowledge and get it right ninety percent of the time.
Brandt and his cronies called themselves the Old Timers. He, in his sixties, and his friends, ranging from his age into their mid-seventies, had a date that night. Far from the common understanding that they’d be in bed by 9:00 p.m., they’d be waiting for him in the hotel lounge at that very moment. Once he had given his pilot his new travel plans, he’d meet them there and they’d reminisce about old times.
Maybe the youngsters who’d be dancing would give them an indulgent glance and whisper about how cute it was that the old people were out for a night on the town. Little would they know that these old people were among the deadliest they’d have ever encountered.
John and his friends kept up the pretense of a night out among old friends until past eleven, and then one by one the four he’d brought together made their excuses and left the alcove where they’d sat pretending to drink more than they were drinking. They would each follow a pre-arranged set of moves and eventually, by 1:00 a.m., end up in Brandt’s second hotel suite for their real meeting. It was a dance they’d followed several times a year since CRC’s birth. Not every meeting had an undercover purpose. They were designed to be random and establish John’s social interactions for anyone that might be watching him.
Back in the day, these five and the others who’d conceived of CRC had understood that they needed not only a paramilitary outfit that could act outside the boundaries that politics had placed on the CIA. It was clear they also needed a watchdog group on their former employer itself. There was a dozen or so of the old guard left now, and a couple of those were unable to carry out their duties. Soon it would be necessary to recruit replacements as the original members died off, but John didn’t need all of them.
The meetings always started with a call from John to each invited individual. A prearranged code word summoned them to the hotel where the publicly visible ‘reunion’ took place, and then they each made their way to the location of the private meeting. That location changed each time, and they learned the address through the conversation that took place, one bit at a time, the street number and street inserted into specific sentences that John worked into the conversation. Unless one of them betrayed the others, no one observing or listening could have known the subtext of the party.
In this way, John could be confident that even if the CIA had him followed, they couldn’t know that this gathering of old friends had any purpose other than staying in touch.
Once the elaborate ruse had played out, and John was alone in a private suite with his four colleagues, he explained what had happened in the past few days along with his suspicions that Carson had been involved.
“What can we do?” asked one of the women.
“I need some leverage on him. I’d like you four to get it for me, the sooner the better. Find out his secrets, anything I can exploit to trap him. My objective is to understand what he did, and on whose orders, to get my man and his team killed. Once I have the intel, I’ll handle the next step on my own.”
He knew they’d get his drift. If he learned his suspicions were correct, Carson would live only long enough to finger whoever was pulling his strings. His old friends would know that, but he trusted them to turn their backs while he did what he had to do. If any of them had misgivings about the operation, they’d bow out now, but they wouldn’t interfere.
After he’d explained his plan, one of the men asked why he wouldn’t use his CRC agents for the mission.
“Simple,” Brandt said. “As good as they are, they weren’t trained the way you were. I tried to train them in the old ways at first. It just didn’t take. Kids these days rely too much on electronics. The one I lost the other day was the exception, he was as good as any of you. But I don’t have anyone else who can do the job like you’ll do it.”
“I’m in,” said the first woman. She’d been half in love with Brandt for half of her life, and she’d do anything for him. They’d never had an affair. Both were married to their calling, and it wouldn’t have worked out. But the sixty-eight-year-old still kept a corner of her heart open for Brandt after all these years.
One by one, the other three affirmed their cooperation. By 3:00 a.m., they each knew their role. They’d change their appearances to fool Carson’s security team. Sometimes they’d walk with the gait of the aged or arthritic, sometimes they’d stride along in apparent defiance of their age. The women would sport gray or blonde or purple hair in varying styles. All would use glasses or not, dress in different styles, an
d show up in different locations. They assured Brandt that they’d have a complete picture of Carson and any private vices he indulged in within the week, unless Carson put himself into solitary confinement.
Brandt and his former colleagues knew that even men in the highest levels of power could not resist practicing their secret vices. Former President Bill Clinton had proved that in spectacular fashion in the late years of the previous century. The public might have wondered how anyone who was surrounded by security around the clock could have carried on a sordid affair under their noses. In fact, a previous Director of the CIA had been the latest to have his career cut short by scandal, and one of his protective detail had provided the answer.
Once someone was vetted by the VIP’s staff, private time with that person was just that. The protective detail understood that some privacy was necessary in the course of their subject’s official duties. Furthermore, the security agents were capable of separating their personal beliefs from their own duties. Clinton’s Secret Service agents might have suspected that Ms. Lewinsky’s hours with her boss weren’t always in the pursuit of her duties as an intern, but it was none of their business. And like the line Las Vegas had made famous — what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas — what happens in private, stays private.
Brandt suspected that some of Carson’s detail might have thought he was a weasel. Nevertheless, it would be far easier to find out through his Old Timers what vices Carson practiced than to recruit one of Carson’s detail to provide the dirt. He was certain there was dirt. He didn’t know what it was, but Carson’s demeanor wasn’t that of a saint. Brandt would know what it was soon enough, and then he’d launch a secret weapon against him.
Chapter Thirty
Pakistan-India Border, 3:14 a.m., June 26
