War Shadows (Tier One Thrillers Book 2)

by Jeffrey Wilson

“I’m sorry to hear you feel that way,” Jarvis said, tapping a file on his desk. “Because you work for me now, so consider it officially reopened.”

  “Trust me, sir, you don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. The Suren Circle is a myth. I wasted six years of my life chasing false rumors and ghosts. Take it from a guy who staked his career on it and lost: the Suren Circle doesn’t exist.”

  “I think it does, and I need you to break it wide open.” Jarvis leaned forward. “And I need you to do it in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Then hundreds of Americans are going to die on our watch.”

  Silence hung in the air between them. Jarvis saw the consternation on the other man’s face and knew Adamo was in the midst of a mental civil war. He was familiar with the story of Simon Adamo’s crusade inside the CIA to prove the existence of an Iranian illegals program—a program run by VEVAK and implemented on a scale and scope rivaling the Russian Rezidentura program. After the unmasking of Anna Chapman, along with nine other SVR illegals in 2010, Adamo’s theory gained traction inside the agency. He was given funding, a small team, and marching orders to identify and penetrate the Iranian illegals network in America. But his group was eventually shut down due to lack of proof and progress; the failure rebranded Simon Adamo from one of the company’s rising stars into a real-life Fox Mulder, chasing a fringe espionage theory of his own design.

  “What does the Suren Circle have to do with stopping al-Mahajer?” Adamo said finally. “I don’t care what Grimes and Dempsey think; I’m not convinced that guy in Poland was VEVAK. All we know with certainty is that al-Mahajer is working with Hezbollah.”

  Jarvis inclined his head. “We have signals intelligence that Tehran has been in the communication mix in the recent past.”

  Adamo pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Encrypted signals data does not a conspiracy make.”

  Jarvis tamped down his rising irritation. “Before you came here, I presume Director Philips read you in to the events of Operation Crusader and the United Nations terror attack five months ago? Then you know that Amir Modiri, Director of Foreign Operations for VEVAK, has been actively planning, funding, and coordinating acts of false-flag terrorism against the United States and her allies. Al-Mahajer and ISIS could not have pulled off the border crossing without Hezbollah’s assistance, but I don’t believe for a second that Hezbollah would have agreed to render aid to the Islamic State without incentive from VEVAK.”

  Adamo nodded slowly. “Let’s say you’re right and VEVAK is involved, and let’s say I was right and the Suren Circle actually exists. Why would Modiri risk exposing such a valuable covert asset to aid a half-dozen ISIS jihadists? Strategically speaking, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “A fair point,” Jarvis said, “but you’re not putting yourself in Modiri’s shoes. Your older brother wasn’t shot and killed by Americans. Your religious beliefs don’t maintain that the United States and our Judeo-Christian Western society is the root of all evil. And lastly, you are not driven by a burning desire for revenge. To assess the risk-reward proposition, you must first view the decision through our enemy’s lens.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, I’ll try.”

  “Excellent. Where do we start?”

  “California. I had a CI there who I always believed knew more than he was letting on. Only before, I was constrained,” Adamo said, smiling wanly. “As a member of Ember now, I can really put the screws to him . . . that’s the modus operandi around here if I’m not mistaken.”

  “The modus operandi at Ember is this,” Jarvis said, pointing to the simple plaque hanging on the wall behind his desk. “We do what others can’t, what others won’t, and what others are incapable of doing to safeguard innocent American lives. It’s counterterrorism, Simon, not rocket science.”

  “I understand,” Adamo said, and stood up from his chair. “Is there anything else, Director Jarvis?”

  “Actually, yes there is,” Jarvis said, picking up his coffee mug. “And folks around here aren’t going to like it.” He took a sip, letting the cold, bitter brew linger on his palate before swallowing it down. “For the next twenty-four hours, Adamo, you’re in charge.”

  CHAPTER 29

  5209 Brigstock Court

  Williamsburg, Virginia

  1630 Local Time

  “To Mendez, the only fucking Marine I’ve ever known who smiled more than he scowled,” Dempsey said, raising his beer bottle.

  “To Mendez,” echoed Smith, Grimes, Chunk, and the three loaner SEALs. Adamo had stayed behind at Ember—no surprise there. Dempsey clinked his bottle against the others, much harder than he meant to, sending little puffs of suds up into the air.

  As he chugged what was only his second beer, he realized he was already feeling a buzz. Must be the lack of sleep, lack of food, and dehydration, he thought, taking inventory of the abuses he’d subjected his body to over the past forty-eight hours. Abuses he’d best soon remedy if he meant to remain functional.

  “To Riley and Colt,” Grimes said with a heavy voice.

  “To Riley and Colt,” they answered in unison, and Dempsey realized that he had not known the names of the dead SEAL and the DEA operator until that moment. But Grimes had known their names. Of course she knew their names . . .

  “And to Gyro getting out of the hospital and back in the suck with the rest of us,” Dempsey added.

  “Hooyah,” the SEALs said in solemn unison, their minds still fixed on the brother they’d lost.

  Dempsey took a long swig of beer and then looked at the bottle in his hand. The red, white, and blue Budweiser label was wet and slimy from sitting in the ice bath–filled cooler. He peeled it off easily with his thumb and index finger. He swirled the beer around inside the now-unadorned glass and watched it fizz. Without the label, the beer could be anything. Slap a different label on the bottle and 99 percent of the people who tasted it would not doubt the brand, which raised the question: Without the label, was it still a Budweiser? He shook his head as the metaphor hit home. Who was Salvador Mendez? The real Mendez—the stuff inside the bottle—not the label Ember had slapped on him. They should be toasting that. They should be memorializing the man, not his fucking NOC. His mind flashed back to the conversation he’d had with Grimes just hours earlier.

  Elizabeth Grimes is just a character . . . an actor playing a part in Kelso Jarvis’s grand film noir. But someday, the director is going to yell “cut,” and when that day comes, Elizabeth Grimes is no more.

  What if he’d been the one blown to pieces by the suicide bomber in that warehouse? Would they be toasting John Dempsey and his make-believe life right now? Only Jarvis knew him from before. Smith had made his acquaintance before Yemen, but only Jarvis knew him when the label on the bottle said Jack Kemper. To everyone else in this room he was John Dempsey, and to everyone outside of it, he was already dead. Kate and Jacob would never know John Dempsey. When it was his time to go for real, only his Ember teammates would mourn his loss. He looked down at the slimy paper label stuck to his finger and flicked it into the nearby trash can with disgust.

  Then, he chugged the rest of his beer.

  “I’m gonna get something to eat,” he announced, suddenly remembering he needed to get food in his stomach before the buzz kicked in and took control. “Who needs something?”

  “I’m starving. What do you have?” Chunk asked.

  “Nothing good,” he said, walking to the kitchen. “I haven’t been here in weeks.” He swung open the pantry door and stared at the barren shelves. “How about I order a bunch of pizzas?” he called out.

  “Yes,” Chunk called back. “Definitely.”

  “On me,” he heard Smith say.

  “Damn right,” he mumbled and opened a drawer beside the fridge, fumbling through the half-dozen delivery menus. He pulled out the menu for Zpizza and dialed the number on his cell phone. Before the call connected, he felt hi
s phone disappear from his hand and turned to face Smith raising the swiped phone to his ear, holding up a credit card in his other hand.

  “I got this,” Smith said.

  “Get the spicy Hawaiian,” Dempsey grumbled.

  Smith shook his head. “Spicy Hawaiian? Dude, now I’m really starting to worry about you,” he said, then turned his attention to the call. “I’d like to place an order for delivery . . . uh huh, that’s the address . . . yeah, I’ll take two large Z-carnivores . . .”

  While Smith finished the order, Dempsey walked back to join the others. He was surprised to find Grimes entertaining Chunk and the SEALs with a story about Mendez. As he listened, he quickly realized that he didn’t know this particular story. Musta happened when I was in Iraq, he thought. When she reached the punch line, Chunk and the boys howled with laughter, and he found himself laughing, too, despite his sour mood. He looked at her, and her tear-rimmed baby blues met his gaze. She looked so vibrant, so strong, and so—

  “JD,” Smith called from the kitchen.

  Dempsey looked over his shoulder and saw Smith holding out his mobile phone with one hand and waving him back to the kitchen with the other. “The boss,” Smith said, simply.

  “Yes, sir?” Dempsey said, putting the phone to his ear. “Do we have something?”

  “Not yet,” Jarvis said, but the confidence in his voice conveying that a reversal of fortune was inevitable. “But we’re pursuing a new direction. Time to break up the wake and get everyone into the rack. Tell the team—including the SEALs—that I want everyone at the TOC at 0600 ready to go. I need you here sooner—0400 hours.”

  “I can come in right now.”

  “No, I need you rested. Take an Ambien if you have to, but get a solid eight down. You need to be ready to go full throttle tomorrow. We’ll talk at 0400. Check?”

  “Check,” he said. Then the line went dead.

  Smith was staring at him. “What’s up?”

  Dempsey shrugged. “Not sure. He says we’re going in a new direction, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. He wants me there at 0400 and the rest of the team reports at 0600 for weapons check, gear loadout, and a brief. Maybe Baldwin is on to something?”

  “Maybe,” Smith said, without conviction. “We’ll feed everybody and then wind down. I’ll have Grimes pick up the SEALs on her way in. Cool?” His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and checked the screen. “Looks like the Skipper wants to talk to me.”

  “If it’s important, I want to know, Smith. Don’t leave me hanging until 0400.”

  “Trust me, if it’s important, you’ll be the first to know. But until then, get some sleep, dude.”

  Dempsey nodded. He felt childish for being irritated that Smith was getting read into Jarvis’s plan tonight, while he’d have to wait until morning. Then a disturbing thought occurred to him: Adamo was still at the hangar. Adamo had stayed behind, which meant he had Jarvis’s undivided attention. He wondered what that CIA bastard had managed to talk the boss into now. Whatever the “new direction” was, Dempsey had a sinking feeling it was Adamo’s doing.

  “What’s wrong?” Smith said, eyeing him with the same expression the headshrinkers loved to use.

  “Rafiq al-Mahajer is what’s wrong. I just want to catch this motherfucker,” he said. “And it’s not just about revenge for Romeo and Mendez . . . it’s our job, Shane. It’s our job to protect and serve the homeland, and right now, we’re failing. An attack is coming, and we don’t know when, where, or how.”

  “We’ll stop him,” Smith said. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t stay dark.”

  “Hope is not a strategy,” Dempsey said, eyeing his friend.

  “I know, but right now, that’s all we got.”

  CHAPTER 30

  University of California, Berkeley

  Berkeley, California

  November 1, 1155 Local Time

  Dempsey sat beneath the blue umbrella at a picnic table waiting for his mark and wondering if Jarvis had lost his mind. When the Skipper called him in before dawn to “talk,” the conversation had been entirely one-sided. Jarvis hadn’t called it a demotion, but that’s effectively what it was. He’d given Adamo operational authority, and in doing so, Dempsey’s worst fear had come true—Ember SAD was now working for the CIA.

  Wonderful, here I am back to the beginning . . . full fucking circle.

  He took a deep breath and forced himself to stop brooding and look at the book laid open before him—Cecil’s Textbook of Medicine. If he didn’t actually study the material, he knew that an experienced countersurveillance operator would easily spot him “pretending” to read, thus raising suspicion. As he read, he periodically looked up to scan the quad south of the Genetics and Plant Biology Building for graduate student Adar Farhad.

  In his peripheral vision, Dempsey saw a tall, lanky male—not Farhad—approaching from the left. The young man was midtwenties, sported green sunglasses and a tie-dye shirt, and had his hair pulled up in a man-bun on top of his head.

  “You the TA for Genetics 520?” the kid asked.

  “Nah, bro,” Dempsey said. “I’m at the med school. Meeting my internal medicine study partner here.”

  “Oh, I think I’m, like, in the wrong quad,” the kid said and shuffled off in his Nike slide sandals with black socks, swinging a large pink backpack over his shoulder.

  “That’s the future,” came Smith’s voice in Dempsey’s earpiece—as clear as if Smith were sitting beside him. “America’s intellectual elite.”

  Dempsey smiled and shook his head.

  “Heads up,” came Adamo’s voice, all business. “He should be coming out of Koshland Hall any minute.”

  “I have him,” said Smith. “Coming toward you, Grimes.”

  Dempsey had positioned himself facing west toward the Li Ka Shing Biomedical and Health Sciences building. He looked up from his textbook and made a show of looking exhausted and rubbing his face. He immediately spied Farhad, walking south on the sidewalk between a row of picnic tables and the building.

  “Got him,” he said softly, arching his back in a stretch.

  The face was a match in profile, but the young, muscular Persian confidently striding across the quad did not match the pictures of the drug-addicted kid Adamo had shown them. Evidently, Farhad had cleaned himself up.

  Dempsey watched Farhad pull his mobile phone from his jeans pocket. “Phone’s out.”

  “I have him,” Grimes said.

  Dempsey forced himself not to look south where Grimes was walking on an intercept course from the corner of the Geospatial Innovation Facility and Environmental Sciences building. Instead he looked at his watch, sighed, and started to pack his book and three different-colored highlighters he had been using into his Surf Pro backpack. He stood just as Farhad walked past and pretended to hunt through the pockets of his backpack for his keys. He had the perfect angle to see the planned collision.

  Grimes was walking with her head down, mobile phone in hand, sending a fictional text when she slammed into Farhad, nearly knocking him down. She bounced off him and stumbled to the ground.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she said looking up at him from her hands and bare knees.

  She quickly scurried over the pavement, picking up Farhad’s phone and her own. The handsome Persian extended a hand to her and helped pull her to her feet. Dempsey caught him peeking down Grimes’s tank top at her breasts, jostling unrestrained beneath the thin cotton fabric.

  “Thanks,” she said standing up, both phones gripped together in her left hand.

  Back in the van, Richard Wang—Ember’s tech genius—was back on the SAD team and was dialed into Grimes’s phone, waiting for this exact moment to infiltrate Farhad’s mobile.

  “Not a problem,” Farhad said with a big smile. “I should have been watching where I was going.”

  “A few more seconds,” came Wang’s voice over the comms channel, asking her to stall.

  “No, it was me. I was wal
king and texting. Stupid, asshole boyfriend.” She looked at Farhad and flashed him a coy smile. “I mean ex-boyfriend,” she corrected, looking him up and down and smiling with a blush. She ran the fingers of her free hand through her long auburn hair and laughed. “Sorry. That sounded slutty.” She stuck out her right hand, the two phones still pressed together in her left. “I’m Adeline.”

  “Adar,” he said, smiling back at her. “Are you sure you’re okay? I think your knee is bleeding.”

  She looked down at her right knee, the same knee Dempsey had noticed her dragging across the cement moments earlier.

  “Oh,” she said, looking down at the scuff. “Just a little scrape. I’ll be all right.”

  “Got it,” Wang said over the comms circuit.

  “I hope I can say the same about your phone.” She made a show of inspecting it before handing it back to him. “There’s a little scratch on the corner but the screen’s not broken or anything.”

  “It looks fine,” he said, giving it a quick perusal. “Is yours okay?”

  She flipped her mobile over in her hands. “Yep, fine.”

  “Well,” he said smiling at her, “it was nice running into you, Adeline.”

  “Yeah, literally,” she said with a flirtatious laugh. She started to walk away, then abruptly stopped and turned back. “Hey, listen. I was just on my way to grab a coffee. Do you want to join me? My treat for scratching up your phone.” She put her hands behind her back and slipped her phone into the back pocket of her supertight white jeans and rocked her hips back and forth.

  Farhad checked the time on his phone and then said, “Sure, why not. I don’t have a class until two.”

  “There’s a Starbucks just a few blocks from here,” she said.

  “I know it well. I live nearby.”

  “Cool.”

  Dempsey slung the heavy backpack up onto his shoulder as Grimes and their mark began the stroll south. He followed at a distance, periodically losing visual contact as they passed between buildings and rounded corners. As he walked, he couldn’t help but smile at Grimes’s performance—babbling on and on like a nervous, flirtatious twentysomething already thinking about the one-night stand ahead.