by Sean Parnell
At last, Eric managed to find his voice again, but it had the shellshocked tone of a soldier who’d just endured heavy combat.
“How long have you known all this, sir?”
Denton Cole considered that for a moment, then said to the window, “Since 1994,” and took another sip of his Black Label.
Steele tried not to let the answer stoke his ire, but he was already starting to feel like a furious teenager whose parents had kept him in the dark about a family scandal for his entire life.
“And the details, sir,” Steele said. “How did you know all those details?”
“NSA intercepts,” Cole said, and then he turned back around from the window, almost as if he’d sunk deeply into some well of dark memories, and emerged again when he realized he had guests. “They picked up a full After Action Review of the incident from the Russian Committee for State Security, had it translated, then someone over there at Fort Meade remembered the White House was interested in anything popping up about a missing operator coded Stalker Twenty-Two. The NSA kids had no idea what that meant, nor anything about the Program, but they thought this capture might be relevant and sent it over to NSC, who relayed it to Cutlass Main.”
“Stalker Twenty-Two,” Steele almost whispered.
“That’s right.” Cole nodded, then his tone became weirdly wistful. “Did you know, Eric, that back in the day, when the Program was first stood up, instead of starting with the bottom of a numerical coding system, they called their first operator Stalker Fifty? That’s why we’re almost down to Stalker One. It’ll all have to reset soon—”
“Darling,” Mrs. Cole interrupted gently, “I don’t think Eric cares very much about that right now. You’ve just told him that his father was an Alpha.”
“Oh, yes. Of course, of course . . .” Cole trailed off, then looked down at his tumbler and swirled the amber liquid around the glass, as if he expected some answers or absolution to appear, like a Magic 8 Ball. “I’m sorry I could never tell you that before, Eric. But that file was slammed shut and everything in it was assigned to an ultra–top secret server. The presidents who followed Clinton, including myself, were all told ‘hands-off.’”
“But, sir,” Steele said, “as president, you had the ultimate classification or declassification authority.” He was trying like hell to keep a respectful tone and not “shoot the messenger,” but his teeth were grinding. Still, he chastised himself in his head.
Dad was an Alpha. Are you going to pretend you never suspected it? You just didn’t want to believe you were working for the same organization he’d worked for, and that the Program might have failed him, or maybe even betrayed him. That’s the goddamn hard-ass truth.
“That’s true, Eric,” Cole admitted. “I did have that authority. But just remember that the JFK assassination files were supposed to be declassified after fifty years as well, and it never happened. No president would touch it. . . .”
“Are you telling me my father’s file was as sensitive as that?”
“No, no, but the motivation for keeping it all locked up superseded your father’s professional reputation, or my sense of responsibility vis-à-vis your mother. . . .”
“Or me,” Eric said, and he could no longer just sit there and listen to Cole bob and weave and try to diminish the impact of something that had driven him to overachieve in every endeavor he’d ever undertaken in his life, and to emulate someone who’d been gone from it forever, and had disappeared when he needed him the most. He slipped away from Mrs. Cole’s grasp, got up, and started pacing like a leopard, back and forth behind the leather couch.
“What else was in that file, sir? If he was captured, what happened to him after that? And why the hell didn’t the Program do everything they could to get him out?”
Steele didn’t want to shout, but if he didn’t get some answers soon he was going to lose it. He didn’t even realize that he’d raised his voice at all until the Secret Service agent in the hallway stuck his head inside and Mrs. Cole waved at him and said, “It’s all right, Peter,” and the agent eyed Steele and ducked back out.
Then Mrs. Cole turned back to her husband and issued a spousal order. “Denton, tell him all of it. You’re not going to live forever.”
Cole nodded, polished off his Scotch, and set the tumbler down on the phony windowsill.
“Hank Steele disobeyed a direct order, Eric. And he was right to do so. It was an illegal order. His instructions were to eliminate as many as he could of the assassins-in-training inside Camp 722. But as I described before, once he entered the compound, he discovered that all of them were kids, some no older than nine or ten.”
The former president then had a spate of coughing, while Steele stood there with his fists in his suit pockets and stared at him until he recovered and wiped his mouth again with his soggy handkerchief. Cole wheezed out a long breath and went on.
“After he was captured at the Lena river, he was imprisoned for a while in Lubyanka in Moscow. The KGB interrogated him for a full six months, but didn’t get much out of him, certainly nothing about the Program. After that, he was sent to a maximum security prison in Siberia, some hellhole they called . . . What was it? Black Dolphin. We knew this because we had some intel on him through CIA, after a GRU officer defected in ’98. We think he escaped after about five years.”
“Five years.” Eric was starting to hyperventilate again and his knuckles were clenching white inside his pockets. He didn’t dare pull them out because he thought he might pound a fist on the furniture. “Sir, why the hell didn’t the Program send in a team to get him out?”
Cole closed his eyes for a moment, drew in another raspy breath, and looked at the floor.
“Because the administration court-martialed him, Eric.”
Steele was so utterly stunned that it took him a full fifteen seconds before he growled, “Excuse me?”
“I’m afraid you heard me right, son. They court-martialed him.”
“For what?”
“For allegedly disobeying his orders.”
“But the mission parameters changed on the objective,” Eric protested, and he couldn’t help himself now and his hands were out and slashing the air. “He found out the killers were still only kids and he had to refuse that order. It was his call to make.”
“No, Eric. His fatal mistake was that he called it in. He had a satellite phone on him and contacted Cutlass. In turn they consulted with the national security advisor, and then they instructed him to carry on. He refused.”
“As he damn well should have.”
“I have to say I agree,” Cole said.
“But, sir, why didn’t he just come home after he escaped?” The pain of an abandoned lonely child was still in Steele’s voice.
“Brace yourself for this one, Eric,” Cole said. “He was tried in absentia, an in-camera hearing at Blair House, across the street from 1600, and convicted. But it was all an arrangement between the administration and Boris Yeltsin’s government. Clinton and Yeltsin were engaged in détente negotiations, and the Russians had just captured an American assassin. They thought he was CIA, and they agreed to keep it all quiet, as long as Camp 722 was never mentioned, and your father was thoroughly punished, by both sides.”
Steele felt dizzy. His head was swooning and he’d broken out in a sweat. He wanted to sit down again but his feet were telling him to get out of there as quickly as possible and find some fresh air.
“But my father escaped. It still doesn’t answer why he didn’t find his way home.”
“Because he knew if he did, he’d wind up in Leavenworth for the rest of his life, and you and your mother would be disgraced and destroyed.”
“But how could he possibly know that, in a prison cell in Siberia? How could he have known about his own court-martial and conviction?”
“He knew it, because his KGB interrogator told him. At the time, that man was a lieutenant colonel in Russian counterintelligence, and probably broke the news to your father w
ith that same arrogant, wolfish expression you always see on his face on TV.”
“Vladimir Putin,” Steele whispered.
“The very same.”
Steele was reeling, nauseated, but then he suddenly remembered the challenge coin. He stalked over to the former president’s food cart and snatched it up again, and he recalled the number set that was the other part of the microdot message “Cole knows.” He looked down at Cole, who’d once again managed to make it back to his bed and was sitting on the edge, slouched and rumpled and now fully wrung out by all the emotional effort of releasing so many demons that had haunted him for years.
“There was more to that microdot message, sir,” Steele said hoarsely. “A number set. Coordinates . . .”
“I have no idea, Eric,” Cole said. “Truly I don’t. I have no more secrets to keep from you, son, nor any reason to do so.” The former president reached across the tray and squeezed Steele’s bicep with a surprisingly powerful grip. “If I had to guess, I’d say they point to a location in Siberia somewhere. But as a man who greatly admired your father . . . and I feel just the same about you . . . I need to caution you with a simple suggestion, since I can no longer issue you a directive. Don’t go there.”
But Steele had already pulled away, kissed Mrs. Cole on the cheek, and was heading back to the surface of the earth.
Chapter 23
No Acknowledged Location
EYES ONLY
SAP (Alphas/Duty Stations/Support-FLASH)
From: Cutlass Main II
To: All OCONUS PAX
Subj: Ops Lockout
Source: Staff Ops/Duty Officer
Confidence: Level III
IMMEDIATE, all OCONUS Duty Stations, emphasis EUROPRO, AFRIPRO, SLAVPRO, SAPRO: Cease all activities ops PAX and support PAX; Recall all Alpha PAX Main II; Freeze and secure all SH locations; Blackout comms traffic. Emphasis, Do Not Relay to Bleacher PAX.
STATUS: No change pending Main II lowers DEFCON Status Red to Amber.
Operational window: Immediate Execute
Alpha response—URGENT/ACKNOWLEDGE
Additional WARNO, see Subnet incoming on [transmission terminated/transmission terminated/transmission terminated/transmission terminated/transmission terminated/transmission terminated/transmission]
Chapter 24
Cutlass Main II, Washington, D.C.
Mike Pitts’s flash warning to all worldwide Program Alphas, duty stations, safehouses, and support personnel squeaked under the wire just before the lights went out.
Pitts had already recalled all the remaining Alphas and keepers from their various locations outside the continental United States, some of whom had attended Collins Austin’s funeral. But one of those still at large, Stalker Five, was thirty fathoms below the surface of the North Sea in a U.S. Navy Virginia-class submarine and preparing to lock out, infil a small island, and kill an ISIS bomb maker. It would take a while to cancel Five’s mission, and Pitts had to decide whether to just let him carry on. In the end, he’d decided against it, because this female assassin thing had him on edge, and he couldn’t be sure that Five wasn’t swimming into a trap.
The idea of losing another Alpha had cracked Pitts’s usual cool, so he’d decided to freeze all OCONUS—Outside the Continental United States—activities everywhere, until they figured out what the hell was going on. It turned out his instincts were spot on.
The first thing that happened at the new location on Q Street was that the underground garage doors slammed shut. That was highly unusual, because they were NASA blast doors recessed into the concrete walls on either side of the vehicle entrance/exit, and were never used. The underground garage looked “normal,” with the usual ticket dispenser and gate poles, and the Program’s “parking attendant” kept a lot full sign outside at all times, which the outfit’s personnel ignored. The doors were for emergencies only, like an assault by Russian Spetsnaz commandos (highly unlikely) or Antifa protestors (slightly more likely).
When the doors suddenly whined and slammed closed—nearly decapitating a Program geek riding a Vespa—the friendly attendant with the Bermuda British accent was annoyed but not alarmed, and he called Merry at the desk of Graceland Import Exports. Merry, in turn, called upstairs to Ferris Copeland, a former navy nuclear aircraft carrier tech who ran maintenance for the Program. Copeland went down to the garage and tried to use his keys in the door overrides, without success, and then changed all the fuses in the circuit breakers. Nothing. He went back up to the second floor, scratching his head, and suggested to Pitts’s adjutant, Betsy Roth, that she might want to warn the personnel that they’d all be taking Ubers home.
That was when the main flat screen in the TOC started to flicker.
By this time—a month since the Program had relocated from the White House—everything was looking pretty slick at Cutlass Main II (or Mini-Main, as Ralphy Persko had been calling it in his impersonation of Dr. Evil). The indoor-outdoor carpets were down, the cables buried out of sight, and the dozen workstation VariDesks popping up and down like prairie dogs on the plain. The isolated tanks on either side of the TOC had also been furnitured up, and the electronic locks on their steel doors tested and linked to Internal Security’s mainframe.
The vast, six-panel flat screen adorning the northern wall was functioning so well that sometimes when it broke into a hexagonal split-screen displaying multiple images, Pitts had to remind everyone to get back to work and stop watching the damn thing like a soap opera. The SCIF was complete, the HVAC systems were maintaining a computer-friendly environment, and all the appliances in the kitchen off to the right were working well enough to keep morale steady.
All in all, the roughly forty personnel ensconced at Cutlass Main II seemed settled in and adjusting to their new digs, despite having been banished from 1600 Pennsylvania. The only thing that still bothered Ralphy Persko about it—a lot—was that such a physical move meant that the firewalls he’d developed and implemented to protect the Program were compromised by switching over to new landlines, routers, and wireless networks. Ralphy knew from experience that you just couldn’t tell how well things were going to work until you were actually attacked, which hadn’t happened yet.
No one told Ralphy that the garage doors had just malfunctioned. But the weirdness on the main TOC display was obvious.
The six-panel, 124-inch display had been showing the internals from six different safehouses in Paris, Madrid, Rome, Cairo, Rabat, and Addis Ababa. There wasn’t much to see, but Pitts wanted to make sure that his flash instructions were executed, which meant that sweepers would soon appear on those screens to secure any compromising materials and lock down the facilities.
At first, the panels started to flicker, as if from transmission interference. A minute later, all six panels turned a different, solid, primary color, which caused a number of personnel to raise their heads from their workstations, including Ralphy, who slowly rose from his chair, though he continued chewing his tuna hero. A minute after that, all six panels turned into digital three-dimensional boxes and started rotating, so the whole thing resembled a gigantic Rubik’s Cube.
“What happened to my feed, Persko?” Pitts asked Ralphy through his headset, so he didn’t have to shout.
“No idea, sir.” Ralphy popped his VariDesk up, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to sit still for this one, and started pecking away at his keyboard in an effort to troubleshoot the transmissions.
Betsy Roth walked out of the kitchen, over to Ralphy’s desk, and stood there, staring at the weird cubic phenomenon. She was in her mid-thirties, had long, straight blond hair, chic Warby Parker glasses, and dressed like a prim State Department spokesperson. But she’d been an instructor at CIA’s Camp Peary and had a mouth like a submariner.
“What the fuck, Ralphy?” she whispered. “Are we gonna get a freaking Halloween mask now and a message from Anonymous?”
“I don’t know, Betsy,” Ralphy sputtered. “I switched all the incoming satellite comms f
rom the main wireless config to a backup, but that cube thing just followed me over, and now I’m trying to just shut down the display but it’s not responding to remotes. . . .”
“Mr. Persko, I’m beginning to get a bit concerned over here.” Mike Pitts was no longer using his headset, and he’d pushed the slim boom mic away from his lips and was calling out to Ralphy over his shoulder.
“I’m trying, sir,” Ralphy called back across the room.
“Wow, never seen that before, except in the movies.” Ferris Copeland had arrived at the other side of Ralphy’s workstation, after returning from another failed attempt to fix the garage doors. He was tall with salt-and-pepper hair and looked every bit the ex-sailor. “Want me to go home and get the remote for my Sanyo?”
“Very funny, Ferris,” Ralphy muttered. “Take the day off.”
Suddenly the huge flat screen went blank. Ralphy’s shoulders sagged with relief.
Then all the electronic door locks on the four flanking isolation tanks fired, at the same time, sounding like gunshots in a walk-in freezer. Those doors had no windows in them, and within seconds the occupants trapped within started shaking the doorknobs and pounding. Miles Turner, an ex–Special Forces ODA captain and chief of Program Internal Security, came flying out of the men’s room, still hiking his pants up, which was made all the more awkward by the holstered Sig Sauer strapped to his belt.
“Mr. Turner,” Mike Pitts called over to him. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I strongly suggest you arm your personnel.”
