The Asset

by Shane Kuhn

  Trudeau held a pair of rusty wire cutters in front of the boss’s face.

  “It would be very time-consuming, scissoring into your tender scrotum with this blunt pruning tool—which I would have to superheat in your fireplace in order to cauterize the wound while I cut. All the while you would be completely powerless to do anything. You wouldn’t even be able to scream. So, tell me, are we going to be friends?”

  The boss tried desperately to nod his head but only ended up rolling his eyes wildly, like a mental patient.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Friends share secrets and I know you have a big one you need to get off your chest. In thirty seconds or so, you’ll be able to speak. It will only be a whisper, but I’ll get very close to you, like a friend, to listen. And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know, yes?”

  “Y-yes,” the boss whispered.

  “Good,” Trudeau said.

  The Russian CIA asset brought over the boss’s laptop.

  “I know you don’t keep transactions on your laptop. So, I’d like you to share with us the log-in information for your Dark Net accounts. No doubt what we need is there.”

  The boss shook his head as much as he could. Clearly, there was a lot more at stake in giving Trudeau that kind of access.

  “Are you saying no?”

  “Can’t do that,” the boss whispered.

  “Too bad. And I thought we were friends.”

  Trudeau clipped off the end of the boss’s pinky finger. Blood spurted out. The Russian agent wrapped the wound tightly with the boss’s satin robe sash to slow the bleeding. The boss looked like he was going to have an aneurism. He was trying to scream, but only a breathy whisper sound was coming out. His eyes were twitching and his tongue rolling. Trudeau threw champagne in his face to snap him out of it.

  “You seem like a man who refuses to believe in the inevitability of a foregone conclusion.”

  Trudeau held up the bloody wire cutters.

  “Is this conclusive enough for you?”

  The boss nodded and gave over his Dark Net password. Trudeau logged in and simultaneously sent the access information to Langley. Things were far worse than he had ever imagined. The Russians had recently sold twenty-­five Cold War–era Russian RA-115s—miniaturized tactical nuclear weapons called “suitcase nukes” because they weighed fifty to sixty pounds and could easily be transported in a suitcase or backpack. Each of them had the firepower of roughly ten kilotons of TNT. The “Little Boy” atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a fifteen-kiloton blast yield.

  There was an old CIA bedtime story about how the Soviets developed the Little Boys to be deployed by a network of KGB sleeper spies embedded in different cities in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s. Based on the transaction dates and the number of weapons, it appeared Lentz might be about to make that nightmare come true.

  Alia had anticipated that Trudeau might discover nukes, and that kind of intel came with strict protocols. She had reminded him that whatever he found was for her eyes only—she’d then be required to report it to the director, who would have to brief the president. After that, Alia would be given her marching orders and the fate of Red Carpet would be decided. Trudeau figured the Department of Defense would take over at that point, and the whole thing would be handed over to military intelligence.

  The problem was, Trudeau didn’t trust people like Alia and he certainly wasn’t going to allow the fate of the world to rest in her hands. He had been a part of the team of weapons experts who helped to debunk the WMD claims by the Bush administration that had been the impetus for the Iraq war. He learned from that, and from many other painful experiences like it, that the suits who made the decisions at Langley might as well be lobbyists, for all the politicking they did. They were beholden to committees run by elected officials who only cared about getting reelected. And those men and women hated how difficult it was to manipulate the complex information gathered by the CIA and distill it into a message that could sound-byte the American people into agreeing to catastrophic global actions.

  So Trudeau sent the intel to Juarez and Kennedy as well, letting them know he’d broken protocol to do so. If Alia was going to start tap-dancing around the truth, Juarez was the one person with the balls and authority to do what needed to be done. And if something happened to him and Juarez, which was a strong possibility, considering the danger they were going to be in after pulling the Norilsk job, at least Kennedy would have the intel. Trudeau thought that making Kennedy an asset and team leader was idiotic, but he could tell the man was an idealist, someone who cared more for the safety of total strangers than he did for himself. If everything went sideways, he felt sure that Kennedy would put his neck on the block to stop Lentz.

  After all of the Dark Net files were uploaded to Langley, the Russian agent gave the boss a lethal dose of fentanyl. Next, the two of them assembled an explosive device consisting of several “romantic aids” she’d brought to the party and easily slipped past the lascivious guards. The sex toys were made of enough Semtex plastic explosive to annihilate a city block and had built-in detonators the agent controlled with her wireless phone. She activated the connection between the phone and bombs and the two of them slipped out of the compound unnoticed.

  As they sped away in a mining truck the Russian agent had stolen for a cover vehicle, she detonated the charges in the boss’s boudoir. The blast set off a chain reaction and the heavy ordnance at the compound exploded as well, shaking the city like a small earthquake. The subsequent fire burned the entire compound to the ground.

  The Russian agent dropped Trudeau back at Alykel Airport at dawn with a duffel bag and drove the stolen truck to a vacant lot, where she torched it. In the airport terminal, Trudeau locked himself in a bathroom stall and pulled fresh clothes, a new passport, credit cards, cash, a white plastic jug, and a large, rough sponge from the duffel bag. Trudeau stripped, soaked the sponge in the liquid from the jug, and scrubbed himself with it for half an hour. It was a solvent that neutralized any of the Semtex molecules that might still be on his body. The last thing he needed, after one of the biggest “chemical explosions” in the history of Norilsk, was to fail a random test for explosive materials at the screening checkpoint.

  When his skin was raw and burning, he put on his new clothes and headed back into the terminal to check in for his flight, but the woman working the ticket counter told him it was canceled due to weather. Trudeau’s heart sank. In most places, a winter storm is no big deal. You get a few inches of snow; flights are held up for a few hours, one day max. In Norilsk, a winter storm pummels the city with several feet of snow, hurricane-­force winds, and temperatures plunging south of negative fifty, making it possible for flights to be canceled for several days.

  Trudeau was in a very dangerous position. The longer he stayed there, the more likely the Russian military would connect him to the massacred arms dealers. Even though Trudeau’s travel cover as a Norwegian oil and gas exec had flawlessly gotten him through Russian customs, it wouldn’t be that difficult for them to analyze recent passenger manifests from the handful of flights that had come in and treat him as a person of interest. Additionally, the Russian mob would be looking for someone to skin for destroying millions of dollars’ worth of black market military stock. The airport was not safe. Going to a hotel was out of the question, as hotels meant passports, credit cards, and security cameras, all of which created a trail of digital bread crumbs. Trudeau checked to see if he could catch any of the last flights heading anywhere before the airport shut down, but there was nothing.

  He had no choice but to contact Juarez for an extraction. This was also a dangerous option due to the conspicuous nature of private aircraft, but at least he would have Juarez and a support team if they had to shoot their way out. Trudeau found a quiet place and dialed Juarez on his satellite phone. It didn’t even ring. Then he heard the worst thing imaginable: “
Satellite signal temporarily interrupted.”

  Ach, putain de merde.

  He kept his cool—until he saw two Russian soldiers with a dog patrolling the airport, randomly checking passports. He had to get out of there, so he went outside into the mind-numbing cold. He broke protocol and texted his support agent, hoping against hope that she could come back and get him the fuck out of there. The weather was going from bad to worse. Buses were nonexistent, but he could see the lights of a few taxicabs clustered in a parking lot on the outskirts of the airport. His only choice was to hoof it out there and hope one of them would take him to a cash-only flophouse in town to hole up until his sat service came back. Even then it could take as long as eighteen hours for Juarez to get to him once he made contact. The subzero wind reminded him he’d better find something soon or Juarez would be extracting what was left of him in the spring thaw.

  MINNEAPOLIS–SAINT PAUL INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  Day 43

  We’re going to get shot,” Love said.

  It was 7:00 A.M. at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul Airport, and she, Kennedy, and Best were in a rent-by-the-hour conference room in the United Club lounge, gearing up to give Kennedy’s new airport-bugging scheme a test run. Love was wearing a fake explosives vest made up of composite material meant to emulate the look and density of real plastic explosives vests confiscated from Al Qaeda agents. Best had two composite pistols strapped to his legs.

  They had a lot of ground to cover to finish the final airports that had been left hanging due to the Tad Monty incident—Minneapolis, O’Hare, Midway, Detroit, LaGuardia, Newark, and Boston—and very little time to do it. Alia wanted it finished in three to five days if possible, an aggressive proposition considering the distance between most of the airports and the worsening weather in the Midwest and East Coast.

  But Kennedy was having a hard time focusing. The intel Trudeau had sent from Russia had changed the nature of the threat completely. The fact that Lentz had nuclear weapons in large quantities was bad enough. What made it worse was the tone of Trudeau’s communication and the fact that he had asked Kennedy to keep his knowledge secret from Alia and the rest of the team. He understood Trudeau’s reasoning, and was glad that he’d been entrusted with the information, but the duplicitous nature of the exchange made him uneasy. What if he found something himself that was related to the intel? How the hell was he going to communicate that to Alia so they could take action?

  And the whole notion that politics might come into play at the highest levels of government made his blood run cold. That was exactly how 9/11 had happened. Politics intervened and practically rolled out a red carpet for Osama bin Laden.

  “Earth to Kennedy,” Love said. “You with us?”

  “You’re not going to get shot,” Kennedy reassured her. “I’ll step in before things get out of hand. Besides, they’re never going to catch you anyway.”

  “I can’t believe this is going to make it past their scanning gear,” Best said.

  “Not only is it going to get past the scanner, but also the explosives swab. Love’s vest has bomb-making residue on it, but not from materials they can detect in their outdated system.”

  “This just keeps getting better and better,” Love said.

  “Won’t they see the items on the scanner?” Best asked.

  “The vest is shaped like Love’s body, so it won’t register as a foreign object. The position of the guns will make it very hard for even the best screener to see. These scanners are dialed way down to protect peoples’ vanity, so they miss a lot.”

  Kennedy’s new technique for getting the upgrades done was a sort of soft blackmail job on the TSA chiefs. Instead of telling them he was coming, giving them the chance to alert others and question the visit, he was going to emulate the weapons-smuggling tactics Homeland Red Teams recently used to get 95 percent of their phony contraband past TSA screening checkpoints.

  Once he successfully smuggled the weapons in, and the embarrassed TSA chief was finished soiling himself, Kennedy would then generously offer to install the upgrade at no charge, thereby keeping it off the radar screen of Homeland and allowing the TSA chief to avoid getting shit from guys like Tad Monty. Alia thought the plan was brilliant.

  “All set,” Best said.

  Kennedy inspected their work. Both setups were flawless and there were no wires or metal for the body scanner to pick up and give the agents an argument for accuracy.

  MSP was one of the safer airports for him to test-market his idea. The TSA chief, a chain-smoking bureaucrat named Ralph Lee, was a friendly. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he and Kennedy played golf once in a while, and he pretty much took whatever Kennedy said as gospel. His assistant was the one Kennedy was worried about. Janet was an insufferable busybody, constantly haranguing Kennedy about paperwork, protocols, and administrative red tape. Kennedy knew how to handle her but was not in the mood.

  Best and Love queued up in the checkpoint line while Kennedy watched from the Starbucks on the other side. Love handled herself well. Having been onstage hundreds of times, she knew how to deal with nerves. She made it up to the checkpoint and looked at Kennedy. He nodded with a confident smile and she went through without incident. When she joined him at Starbucks, she looked impressed.

  “I guess you are pretty good at this shit, aren’t you, you big lug?”

  “Let’s see how Best does before we start high-fiving,” Kennedy said.

  Best made it past the checkpoint with flying colors as well and sat down next to them.

  “I don’t know if I should be happy or violently ill,” he said.

  “Welcome to my world,” Kennedy said and called Ralph Lee.

  When Ralph arrived at the Starbucks, he was his usual completely distracted self, dying to get curbside for a cigarette. Kennedy introduced Best and Love and said they’d be happy to join him. Ralph took them through a pass-code door to a loading bay outside the terminal, his unofficial smoking lounge. When Kennedy showed him the hardware Love and Best had just gotten through the checkpoint, he lit the filter end of his cigarette.

  “You fucking kidding me?”

  “Sorry, man,” Kennedy said.

  “Shit!” Ralph practically screamed. “Did Zombieland Security send you?”

  “Relax,” Kennedy said. “We’re all friends here. They wanted me to run the Red Team test and install a prototype for a new upgrade. I’ll tell them you passed.”

  “You’re my hero, man. I’ve been in the penalty box since that news report came out. Do whatever you need to do. How long will it take?”

  “Fifteen minutes on the outside,” Kennedy said.

  “Go now. Before that witch Janet gets back from her third lunch.”

  * * *

  Best worked quickly, adding the upgrade in less than ten minutes, but not fast enough to avoid Janet. She shot across the terminal in her block-heeled army shoes, making a beeline for the checkpoint. Kennedy moved away from it in case she had not yet seen Best, but it was too late.

  “Who’s that monster?” Love asked.

  “The fabled Janet.”

  “Shit.”

  “Be a dear and disappear,” Kennedy said.

  “Roger that,” Love said, taking off.

  “Well well well,” Janet snarked as she walked up. “Tad Monty’s bitch. You come here for another murder-suicide or just passing through?”

  “Janet . . . Always a pleasure.”

  She eyeballed Best, who was reinstalling the access panel on the scanner.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “You’ve read the recent threat reports I assume?”

  “I wiped my ass with them, yes.”

  “Arresting image. As usual, I’m the only one taking them seriously, so I’m testing a body cavity detection prototype in the millimeter wave scanners.”

  She imm
ediately dialed Ralph on her mobile phone and tried to narc on Kennedy, to no avail. She hung up, obviously angry at Ralph’s response.

  “Janet, it’s not going to—”

  She got in his face. “Not going to what? Slow us down all day and create an angry mob of passengers we have to deal with after you’re long gone?”

  Her breath stank of sour white wine. Kennedy knew the bartender at Chili’s To-Go, Janet’s favorite lunch spot. Earlier that morning, he’d called Andy and told him to give Janet a two-for-one airport employee’s special if she came in, which she almost always did. Janet was a notorious lush, and she had predictably taken the bait. From the smell of it, Kennedy estimated she was about four glasses in.

  “I’m doing this to increase safety, which should be your concern as well, Janet.”

  “Get off your high horse—”

  Kennedy theatrically sniffed the air between them. “Whoa. How many glasses, Janet?”

  She glared at him. “Excuse me?”

  He got closer to her and spoke quietly.

  “How many glasses of wine did you have at lunch?”

  “It’s my friend’s birthday,” she lied.

  “How many?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Maybe so, but I’m sure Ralph would consider it his business.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “If Ralph realizes you’re intoxicated, he is required by law to fire you. There are no second chances with TSA. Are you going to keep running your mouth so he can smell the birthday party or shag your sorry ass out of here and let me do my job?”

  Kennedy had never so much as looked at her wrong in the past, and hearing him say those things shocked her into submission. She stared with her mouth open for a long, uncomfortable moment, her lips twitching to form a retort that never came.

  “Tell him your kid is sick and you got called to school to pick him up.”