Conspiracy

by Stephen Coonts

  McSweeney’s phone began to buzz. He checked the caller ID window on the phone and saw that it was Jimmy Fingers. McSweeney flipped it open despite the bodyguard’s frown.

  “I’m OK, Jimmy,” he told his aide. “The fucker missed me.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, thank God! Do you know the radio just said you were dead?”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “We’ll want to get a statement out right away.”

  “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated,” said McSweeney, echoing Mark Twain’s famous comment.

  “No, something more serious,” said Jimmy Fingers, always thinking of the political ramifications. “A potential slogan. ‘My work won’t be stopped by a madman.’ If you were in the lead, then you could joke. No, it has to be just right. We’ll work it out when I get there. I’m a few minutes away.”

  McSweeney felt a twinge of resentment at Jimmy Fingers’ tone, even as he knew from experience that Fingers’ advice would prove correct.

  “I’m glad you’re OK, Senator,” added the aide. “This will help us. You’ll see.”

  “Help us?”

  “No one tries to assassinate a loser.”

  11

  THERE WAS A knock on the office door. Rubens reached for the silver security blanket and covered the desktop. It didn’t matter that the desk was bare at the moment. Even that might mean something.

  “Come in, Mr. Gallo,” said Rubens.

  “Johnny Bib sent me up,” said Robert Gallo. One of the computer experts assigned to Desk Three’s Analysis and Research section, Gallo defied the normal definition of “geek.” He stood just over six feet and, while no muscle builder, certainly looked as if he could hold his own in a fight. “It’s, uh, that Secret Service stuff.”

  “Have a seat, Robert. Tell me.”

  “Well, like, OK, the thing is, these e-mails really were sent from Vietnam,” said Gallo, handing paper copies of the e-mails to Rubens. “That wasn’t an alias or some sort of spoof like the Secret Service guys thought. I mean like, duh.”

  One of the unfortunate downsides of choosing the best people in the business, thought Rubens, was that they tended to know that they were the best, and thus came across as a little too arrogant for their own good. He liked Gallo; he would have to talk to him about this.

  “See, everybody was probably thinking, Fake-oh, because when you look at the port information—”

  “If you could move ahead to the point.”

  “So, OK, like, I check the phone records to see who like called. I hack into the Vietnamese phone company—”

  “What exactly did you find?” asked Rubens.

  “See, there were three people who had connections around the time the messages were sent. The e-mails are a couple of days apart. But I have three people. So I checked them, like, and—”

  Clearly, thought Rubens, Gallo was being influenced far too much by his boss, John “Johnny Bib” Bibleria, who always followed the most circuitous route to the point.

  “The thing is, all of them are on one of the CIA watch lists, right?” said Gallo. “What are the odds, huh?”

  Actually, they would be very good, since only a limited number of people in Vietnam were allowed computer access, and for a variety of reasons—the fact that they were government officials, possibly dissident students, et cetera—the CIA would be interested in them. But Rubens didn’t interrupt.

  “So I figure let me go and check that, and I find out, like by accident, that the server, OK? We’ve been watching the server and, you know, traffic on it, files stored, everything, because of some CIA request three or four years ago.”

  Mildly interesting, thought Rubens. “What was the request about?”

  “That’s just it.” Gallo held out his hands. That was definitely a Johnny Bib gesture; surely the young man had to be saved somehow. “I’m like, my clearance isn’t high enough to get the info. And neither was Johnny Bib’s.”

  Finally, the point.

  “Johnny’s clearance was not high enough?” asked Rubens.

  “Yeah. Blew me away, too.”

  Rubens picked up the phone. “What was the name of the program?”

  “Infinite Burn.”

  THE NAME DIDN’T register with the CIA’s deputy director of operations.

  “It’s not current,” Debra Collins told Rubens.

  “It may be three or four years old,” said Rubens.

  “Hang on then.”

  It took Collins so long to get back to Rubens that he thought he had lost the connection.

  “Bill, are you still there?” she asked when she finally got back on the line.

  “Yes.”

  “Infinite Burn had to do with Vietnam.”

  “Interesting,” said Rubens, though of course he already knew this. “One of my staff on Desk Three came across it earlier. He would like access to the files and it’s rather urgent. It has to do with a Secret Service agent who was looking into a death threat against Senator McSweeney.”

  “The senator who was shot at today?”

  “Yes.”

  Collins didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “Look, I have to go into a meeting,” she told him finally, “but could you and I meet later to discuss this? In person?”

  “Is it really necessary?”

  “Infinite Burn was our code name for a plot by the Vietnamese to assassinate American leaders in revenge for the war.”

  12

  CHARLIE DEAN TOOK a slow breath, pushing the air through his teeth as quietly as possible. He scanned both sides of the stream, then moved his eyes slowly across the canyon in front of them, looking for their prey.

  “Tracks are less than an hour old,” said his guide, Red Sleeth. Red pointed at the outer rim of the impression, still moist. “Dogs are real close now. You hear how they bark? It’ll pick up even louder and faster as they close in. Ready?”

  Dean nodded.

  Sleeth rose and started following along the double track of footprints left by his two hounds. They’d been tracking this mountain lion through the Montana wilderness since early morning, after discovering a three-or four-day-old kill hidden in the brush below.

  Sleeth splashed through the water to the other side of the creek, moving up the embankment into a copse of juniper. Dean followed, pushing through the calf-high grass and scrub to a small rock outcropping. A trail cut across the terrain to his left, intersecting the gray and green side of the canyon. It would be dark soon; they didn’t have much time left to catch the lion today.

  “This way,” said Sleeth, pointing to a cut that angled downward to the left.

  Dean followed, picking his way through the rocks as the guide crossed back to the north. The ground leveled out, then angled upward sharply. Dean slung his rifle over his shoulder, snugging the strap as he began climbing. He couldn’t see the dogs, but from their barks it seemed that they were moving to the northeast.

  “You kept up pretty well for an old guy,” said Sleeth when they reached the rim of the canyon.

  “You think I’m old?”

  “Didn’t mean to insult you.” Sleeth gave him a yellow-toothed smile and pointed across the ridge. “The dogs are running that way. I think if we can swing straight across the side of that ridge, we may cut him off.”

  Ten minutes later, the dogs’ barks sounded even farther away, though Sleeth claimed they were closer.

  “Snow up here just last week,” said the guide as he and Dean edged downward. “Now it’s all gone or we’d have an easier time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Warm today.”

  “You figure forty degrees is warm?”

  “Depends on your point of reference.”

  “True enough.”

  “Stop. Listen.” Sleeth held up his hand, pointing to the sky. “The dogs.”

  The dogs were barking, loudly, in short, quick yaps.

  “They’ve treed him,” explained Sleeth. “Come on!”

  Dean fol
lowed the guide down into a thin copse of trees. The dogs’ excited barks bounced off the two sharp horizontal walls that bookended the canyon about a quarter mile away.

  Dean started to think about the shot. A treed lion was not particularly difficult to hit, and Dean began to feel a little guilty, as if the dogs and the guide had given him an unfair advantage. Like any hunt, the tracking and chase were the critical elements; the finish was just the finish—necessary for success, yet vaguely unsatisfying, especially for someone like Dean, who had hunted humans before turning to animals.

  Sleeth stopped suddenly. “Something’s wrong,” he told Dean, and in the next moment he started to bring his gun up.

  By then Dean had already spun to his right and dropped to his knee. Ten yards away, the brush parted, revealing the face and teeth of an angry lion. The big cat pressed its weight onto its front paws and sprang forward, teeth bared.

  Dean fired toward the lion’s head.

  And missed.

  He threw himself left as the animal lunged, its paw clawing his leg. Rolling on the ground, Dean bashed the butt of the rifle into the animal’s side. The mountain lion’s snarl filled his ears as he tried to scramble away. He felt as if he were underground, swimming in a pit of sand.

  The cat rolled off to the side and Dean pushed himself to his feet. He had a round chambered. The gun was up, aimed. He fired, point-blank, this time taking the cat through the head.

  A dank musk surged around him as if it were air rushing into a vacuum chamber: death’s scent.

  The animal shook violently, its feet vibrating.

  Sleeth ran over, .357 drawn. He administered the coup de grâce to the lion, then looked over at Dean.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Dean.

  Everything had happened so fast, he couldn’t decipher it. Had he shot once or twice?

  Twice—he’d missed the first time.

  How, from that range?

  It didn’t make sense, but he had missed.

  The dogs were howling. Dean looked toward the sound.

  “The other lion is out of the tree,” said Sleeth, his voice a monotone. “One of the dogs is hurt.”

  Dean started in that direction.

  “Wait,” said Sleeth, catching up. “We can’t shoot the other lion. Your license only allows one kill.”

  “OK,” said Dean, lowering his gun.

  13

  “OLD WARRIORS. ANCIENT grudges,” declared Simon Dauber solemnly, summarizing the brief in the CIA secure conference room. Though most of his experience was in China, Dauber had been on the Southeast Asia desk long enough for Rubens to know and respect him. Those two things did not usually go hand in hand where the CIA was concerned.

  “Old warriors can be quite potent,” remarked Hernes Jackson. “They shouldn’t be discounted.”

  Rubens had taken Jackson and Gallo along for the briefing. Unleashing Johnny Bib on the CIA would have been considered cruel and unusual punishment.

  While Jackson’s point was valid, there was a lot to back up Dauber’s assessment of Infinite Burn. The CIA had developed information about the assassination plot from an agent code-named Red Diamond three years before. Diamond was a smuggler with ties to the government, a borderline undesirable whose status, naturally, made him a very interesting “catch.” He had given the CIA a number of tidbits over the two years that he had been on the payroll.

  Most of the information had to do with drugs that were being transported, probably by rivals, in and out of Thailand and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. That information had been extremely reliable. He’d also given up details about different military matters. In those cases, his track record wasn’t quite so impeccable. He had a tendency to exaggerate, even when reporting on things like purchases of spare parts for aircraft.

  Nor did the information about Infinite Burn fit in with what might be termed his usual reporting patterns. Even the CIA officer who had been running Red Diamond at the time felt it came out of left field. The officer had tried to sniff around among other sources, without finding anything.

  Yet here they were, three years later, with an assassination attempt on a prominent U.S. senator—exactly as Red Diamond had predicted.

  “So let’s say they have all these guys go deep undercover into America, right?” said Robert Gallo, repeating one of Dauber’s hypotheses. “How do they communicate with them?”

  Dauber shook his head. “Don’t know.”

  “How do they pick targets?”

  “You have to remember, we didn’t find much evidence beyond Red Diamond’s original information. And he died a short time later. Or disappeared.”

  Red Diamond had fallen from a boat in Saigon Harbor and was never heard from again. The case officer believed Red Diamond had probably been shot before falling, but that was not part of the police report.

  “Your source implicated Thieu Gao,” said Jackson. “He’s now their ambassador to the U.S.”

  “It’s important to note that we didn’t develop anything more tangible at the time than rumors,” interrupted Debra Collins, who had said very little during the entire session. “We developed no other information from the government. And a program like this—one would assume it had to have approval at the very highest levels to proceed.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Jackson. “It could be simply, as Mr. Dauber said, old soldiers working together on their own.”

  “That would not be the Vietnamese way,” said Jack Li, another Vietnam/Asian expert.

  “But it is possible.”

  “Whatever the assessment at the time,” said Rubens, “clearly this needs to be pursued.”

  “I agree,” said Collins.

  A HALF HOUR later, Rubens and Collins sat across from each other in her office, waiting for a call back from the President’s National Security Advisor, Donna Bing. Rubens didn’t particularly relish talking to Bing and he sensed that Collins didn’t, either.

  Ironically, Bing’s appointment had drawn Collins and Rubens closer together, encouraged to ally in the face of a common enemy. Briefly lovers, they had become rivals after the creation of the NSA’s Desk Three—also known as Deep Black—because as a covert action unit it encroached on the CIA’s traditional bailiwick. They’d also both been considered for Bing’s job—Rubens, in fact, had turned it down, a decision he now deeply regretted.

  Rubens hated Bing for several reasons. It wasn’t just that she had cut off his access to the President, or that she tended to question everything Rubens proposed. It wasn’t just that she presumed she knew the background of every possible international situation and had considered nuances no one else had, or even the fact that her assessments of the international situation tended to be about ten years out-of-date.

  The thing that most annoyed Rubens was the tone of her voice, a nasal singsong tottering on the edge of becoming a sneer.

  The voice greeted them with a perfunctory, “What is it?”

  “Donna, Bill Rubens and his people have developed some information concerning Vietnam that we thought important to bring to the President’s attention,” said Collins. “There is an intersection with intelligence we developed about three years ago. Bill is here now.”

  Rubens detailed what they had found. To his great surprise, Bing’s voice seemed bright, even cheery, when he finished.

  “Good work. We must pursue this.”

  “That’s why Ms. Collins and I are calling,” said Rubens.

  “This is a Deep Black project?”

  “We hadn’t quite gotten that far,” said Rubens. “I don’t know that there is a role for Desk Three.”

  “What you’re talking about here is a covert attack on the American government,” said Bing. “I want the best involved.”

  Rubens glanced over at Collins, whose agency had just been indirectly insulted.

  “Take the lead,” added Bing. “I’ll inform the President.”

  And then she clicked off.

  “You rea
lly should have taken the job, Bill,” said Collins. “You made a big mistake. For all of us.”

  14

  THE LION HAD used the commotion to jump from the tree, wrestling briefly with one of the hounds before making its escape. The dog had two long, deep cuts in his flank but was actually very lucky. He hadn’t lost much blood and could easily have had his neck snapped in the confrontation.

  Sleeth worked on the dog’s wounds carefully, cleaning and dressing them, all the while nuzzling the animal to comfort him. The hound had belonged to Sleeth’s father, who’d retired as a guide just the year before.

  “Good lion hound’s worth a fortune,” said Sleeth, but Dean sensed that his concern for the animal had nothing to do with money. “I don’t think I have to put him down. I’d hate to.”

  “We can make a sling and carry him out,” suggested Dean.

  “Be heavy carrying the lion, too.”

  “We can do it. If we can’t, the dog’s more important.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Sleeth. “I really appreciate that.”

  His other dog circled as they rigged a stretcher. They took the animal up the hill to the dead lion. Sleeth had a collection of metal poles that he used to sling the dead animal for carrying. The poles were thin and Dean didn’t think they’d hold the weight of the cat, which topped a hundred pounds. But the pole hardly bent at all, even when they tied the dog as well.

  “If it’s too heavy, let me know,” said Sleeth, starting out.

  Dean grunted. It was heavy, and the truth was, he didn’t really care that much about having a trophy. But leaving the lion felt like admitting defeat—or, worse, like an admission that he was old, as Sleeth had commented earlier.

  He was old. But still strong. And stubborn.

  More the latter, maybe.

  He could still see the lion charging at him. It was almost as if it had happened twice—once he made the shot; once he didn’t. And there was a fork in reality: in one version he’d been mauled; in the other he’d emerged victorious, barely scratched.

  But it had all happened together. There had been no turning point, no choice, just reaction. Everything scrunched together.

  And how the hell had he missed that shot?

  The sun was edging below the horizon, leaving the mountains in deep shadow. Sleeth aimed toward a dried streambed about two and a half miles away, where his wife could meet them with her pickup truck. They walked in silence, avoiding the roughest terrain, neither man admitting how heavy the double burden was.