140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  He could feel Reilly’s presence now, not only in his mind but also in his gut. Maybe they felt it too.

  The agent would be coming. And Sandman would be ready.

  Deutsch was in turmoil as she watched the cops pull back from their positions, but it wasn’t so much the sight of them that was causing it as it was Reilly’s words.

  She knew he was going to make a move on his own and felt wracked by frustration about it. She had to do something, couldn’t let him deal with the situation on his own. She thought of calling it in, saying something, anything, to get the SWAT op reinstated, and pulled out her radio—and hesitated.

  Reilly was probably already making his way into the target apartment. Calling in the troops might jeopardize whatever crazy plan he’d concocted. If he didn’t know SWAT was moving in again, her call might put him—and his friends—at risk. Furthermore, he was still a wanted man. She didn’t want him to end up in custody because of her, even if the move could save his life.

  She struggled with the decision, torn by savage tugs from both directions—then she muttered a sharp curse and hurried up the sidewalk towards the target building.

  She found its door busted open and pulled out her handgun as she stepped inside. She gave the lobby a quick scan. She saw the elevator and a couple of doors to one side of it. The elevator was on the sixth floor. She hit the call button, then thought better of it and opened one of the doors to find the stairs.

  She headed up.

  The noise speared Sandman’s attention.

  It was barely audible; the faintest of disturbances skirting the edge of his consciousness, but it was definitely there.

  He froze.

  He concentrated his listening and identified the source: the low rumble of the elevator, announcing it was in motion.

  He moved stealthily across to the apartment’s front door, giving the suppressor on his handgun a quick tug to make sure it was firmly in place.

  He crept closer to the door, listened for a moment, then leaned across it to look through the peephole. He barely caught a glimpse of what looked like a SWAT guy swinging a battering ram before the door blew in and slammed against him.

  56

  I flung the battering ram aside as the door burst inward and following it right in with the Remington in both hands.

  It was dark inside, but in the light coming in from the outside hallway, I caught sight of my shooter regaining his footing from being hit by the door. I spun around and swung the shotgun towards him, but he was already charging at me and grabbed its barrel before I fired, using my turning momentum to fling me around and slam me into the wall just as I pulled the trigger.

  The explosion was deafening, but the shot was wasted. My shooter was clear of it and all it did was blast a framed art print and the wall around it into confetti. I held onto the shotgun as I hit the wall sideways, hard, barely having time to recover before he flicked it up ferociously, its stock connecting with my jaw like an expertly placed uppercut. I yelped as he then drove a boot into my shin, an instant before his right hand reigned several quick blows into my ribcage, sending me recoiling back, though not far enough to feel the full brunt of his left landing a hammer blow to the side of my head. I somehow managed to keep hold of the shotgun throughout this onslaught, but it was impossible to take aim. I tried twisting my entire body and stepping back, swinging the shotgun around toward his head, but he grabbed my wrist with his left hand and sent my aim down at the floor before slamming my hand against the wall and sending the shotgun to the ground.

  He shoved me off to one side and dived for it, but I launched myself back and stomped on his hand just as it reached it, kicking the shotgun away and sending it skittering off to some far corner of the room at the same time as I heard some snapping tendons and his sharp grunt. He span around and sent a hammer of a punch with his left hand at my kidneys, winding me and causing me to go light-headed for an instant—enough for him to move in with his injured hand, aiming it right at my throat.

  I saw it in time and ducked it, grabbing his arm and flinging him past me and spinning him around so I had him from behind, my arms now tight against him, one around his chest, the other around his neck—and I tightened my grip. He couldn’t move. I had my legs planted firmly and out of range and I could feel the momentum had shifted—I was choking the life out of him and he was waning. He was strong, though, and it was still taking everything I had to keep him locked in. He tried kicks, elbows, and punches, but nothing connected, and each one was getting less potent than the last.

  I had him—at least, I thought so—his right arm stopped trying to pull me off his neck or pound me off him, and weirdly, his hand went down and he seemed to be doing a frenzied rummage through his pocket, and before I realized what was happening, I felt it: a stab, deep and sharp, like a bite—the bite of an injection, some kind of pressurized delivery, deep into my thigh.

  My senses went haywire—I instantly knew what he’d done to me.

  I was already dead.

  Every neuron in my body went into hyperdrive, acutely aware to the poison that I knew was coursing through my veins, winding and weaving its way from my thigh across my torso and all the way up to my heart, where it would soon wreak havoc and cause some catastrophic failure that would kill me right there and then, in Gigi’s loft, in mid-fight, with my own killer in my hands.

  I could feel odd sensations happening all over me—my arms going a bit numb, a tightening in my chest, a heaviness in my head, though I couldn’t tell if they were real or if I was imagining them. Either way, I knew I didn’t have much time left.

  I had to end it here, right now.

  I couldn’t let him walk away. Not after he’d killed me.

  I wouldn’t be able to save myself, but at least Kurt and Gigi would walk away from this. Maybe.

  I summoned every ounce of strength I could muster and went for the kill—I tightened my grip around his neck, then I quickly brought up my other arm, took his head in a vice-like hold and twisted it as brutally as I could. One move, the most unflinchingly savage and rage-filled act of my life. I just wanted him dead. I knew how hard it was to pull off, but I also knew enough about the body to know which vertebrae I needed to break in order to sever the spinal cord so as to kill him almost instantly and not just cause him slow respiratory failure or some kind of survivable paralysis. I haven’t killed that many people—my career is about locking people up, not playing judge and jury—and those I did kill, usually in self-defense, I’d dispatched with the help of some kind of weapon. I’d never killed anyone with my bare hands, though right now I could think of nothing I wanted more.

  I saw Deutsch appear in the doorway, saw her aiming her gun at us in a two-handed stance as her mouth formed the words “Stop! Hands in the air,” but I was oblivious to her presence and her voice; all I could feel were the muscles, bones and tendons between my hands as I heard the telltale crack and felt his body twitch before it went limp in my arms.

  I let go of him and he dropped to the ground like a rag doll, lifeless—just as I soon would be.

  I spun around for a three-sixty, my eyes not really registering anything, unsure about whether Kurt or Gigi were still alive, unable to see much in the darkness and through the haze shrouding my senses, then my eyes settled again on Deutsch, and I staggered towards her.

  Her face was locked in shock as I told her, “He hit me with a . . . Alami. Get me to Alami, fast.”

  Then I hit the ground and all sight and sound faded to nothingness.

  FRIDAY

  57

  New York - Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan

  Much later, when we’d talk about it, I’d often get asked if I saw the “white light” or some kind of tunnel. To everybody’s disappointment and contrary to what Alami had told me many of his patients had experienced in those hours and days when they were technically—in the traditional, loose sense of the word—dead, I could only say I didn’t see anything like that. No lighted tunnel, no ange
l to guide me, no heaven either. It was simply the deepest sleep I’d ever had. Twenty-seven hours of it, I was told.

  I didn’t hear the panicked shouts between Deutsch, Kurt and Gigi at the apartment after I lost consciousness. I didn’t remember or feel the ten minutes of relentless chest compressions Deutsch gave me or any of the six defibrillator shocks the paramedics hit me with before resuming the CPR as they rushed me to NewYork-Presbyterian. I have no memory of everything Alami and his team did to me during those long hours: shoving the hose down my throat to intubate me, cutting into my veins to siphon out my blood, cool it down and re-oxygenate it, hitting me with more shocks, injecting me with all kinds of intravenous drugs and plugging various monitors into me to bring me back to life. But they did. Those brilliant, dedicated human beings—my real-life angels, I guess—all of them brought me back, and I’ll forever be grateful and humbled by their actions.

  The first thing I became aware of was the blurred face of Tess hovering over me. Deutsch had driven up and escorted her out of the house, past the FBI and local cops who were watching it, saying she needed to ask her some things down at Federal Plaza. Tess later told me my fingers had twitched unexpectedly and she’d jumped out of her seat by the bed and looked down on my face, willing me to wake up. Within seconds, other familiar faces came into focus: Kurt and Gigi, someone I eventually remembered to be Alami, and some other people I didn’t know but who I’d soon realize were doctors and nurses. They all had faces intensely contorted by worry and relief, which confused me. It would take me a while to understand what was going on. I couldn’t remember what happened, I didn’t even know what I was doing in the hospital. I couldn’t speak because of the tube down my throat, and when I tried writing out a question, I was shocked to see my penmanship looking far more like that of a toddler than my own.

  I spent most of that second night asleep again. The next morning, Tess wasn’t around. It was too risky to have her come down here on her own or to have Deutsch bring her over again. Instead, Deutsch had promised to keep her appraised using Viber VOIP calls to Kim’s laptop, which wouldn’t be picked up by any taps on Tess or Kim’s phones. Still, one thing helped make up for her absence: they took out the tracheal tube they’d shoved down my throat. I could speak again—more of a croak, really, but still. It was a huge relief.

  Deutsch came by early, long before going into work. She, Kurt, and Gigi filled me in on what had happened, starting with Deutsch’s surprise at seeing the couple shouting to her from deeper inside the loft space and finding a guy dressed entirely in green leather and a striking-looking but bruised redhead struggling to work their way free of flex-cuffs.

  In the heat of the moment, Deutsch had made a couple of quick decisions to keep me off the radar. She’d asked Gigi to call in the emergency services and say Kurt had had a heart attack. When a couple of cops who’d been part of the aborted SWAT raid had taken an interest as they wheeled me into the ambulance, she’d used her FBI creds to defuse their interest and say it was an unrelated matter, some random guy in the building who’d had one hamburger too many. At the hospital, she’d also used her shield to register me under a false name, saying it was a matter of national security, two words that wield huge power these days.

  The downside of her decisions was that my shooter’s body had remained in Gigi’s apartment and Deutsch couldn’t call it in, get the body taken to the coroner’s lab and trigger an investigation into finding out who he was. It wasn’t a great loss, in that I didn’t think he would show up on any of our databanks. I imagined he was part of that same invisible group of spooks that officially didn’t exist. It was a problem for Gigi and Kurt, though, because it wouldn’t be long before the busted door to the lobby would attract attention, as would the one to Gigi’s apartment. Deutsch had made Kurt drag the shooter’s body away from its highly visible position and hide him in the bedroom to avoid letting the paramedics spot him. The people who sent him—Corrigan and his CIA ally or allies—had to know where he was when he went missing, and if they hadn’t done it already, they’d soon have someone there to find out why he’d gone dark. Deutsch didn’t know if that had happened already, since she wasn’t about to go asking and they weren’t about to announce it. Either way, Gigi and Kurt would be the obvious candidates to finger for his death, if his body ever made it into the system, but so far Deutsch had seen no sign of it. Perhaps they’d make his body disappear and that would be the end of it. Deutsch was still struggling to figure out what she could do to defuse things for them if things got heated, without landing behind bars herself.

  For the time being, though, what was clear was that Gigi’s apartment was off limits. She had checked herself and Kurt into a small hotel close to the hospital using a fake ID. Gigi had planned for the day she’d need to hit the eject button and get out of there quickly, and while the paramedics were busy working on me, she’d hit the kill switch she’d built into her systems and purged them. Anything of importance, though, was still contained in a four terabyte hard drive the size of a paperback novel and accessible by her beefy laptop, both of which were still in her possession.

  Which was critical to me because the next day, a message would land on her laptop, a message that would finally break down the walls of secrecy that I’d been bashing my head against for months.

  Someone responded to the anonymous posting Gigi and Kurt had uploaded onto Daland’s darknet site.

  And we were game on again.

  58

  CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Edward Tomblin had been through major crises before. He’d been shot, even tortured, and he’d had field ops go bad on him. The worst were two occasions when he and Roos had been undercover on foreign soil and had contacts sell them out, one for material gain while they were in Sudan, and the other under torture in Nicaragua. Both times, they’d had to exfiltrate themselves out of hostile territory with only the thinnest of margins separating them from extreme unpleasantness.

  Tomblin was never fazed by crisis. Like his old partner Roos, he had the reputation as one of the calmest tacticians in the business, a man who could face down calamities with a sang-froid that bordered on unsettling.

  He wasn’t calm now. Not after one of his inner circle of trusted OSINT geeks had informed him that portraits of him and someone else—who Tomblin knew to be Roos, even before the Open-Source Intelligence analyst had messaged him a copy of the drawings—had popped up on an underground darknet marketplace, offering a reward for anyone who could identify them.

  Tomblin hadn’t been out in the field for years. As the current head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, physical danger wasn’t on his radar, not any more. He’d done his time, and he now left the dirty business up to others. Sure, he still had to negotiate tricky political situations himself and maneuver to keep certain secrets from threatening his career. But physical threats? A thing of the past—until now.

  This was different.

  This was a left-field attack from an unhinged, obsessed man who possessed a highly dangerous skill set and seemed like he’d never give up. And for the first time since the crisis started, Tomblin wasn’t only worried about the possibility of exposure and prison time. He was worried about his life.

  “So what are you waiting for?” Tomblin asked the analyst. “Take them down. Take them down or just kill the whole damn site.”

  “We can’t,” the analyst replied. “That’s not how this thing works.”

  “What do you mean, we can’t? It’s running on Tor, isn’t it? We own the damn thing.”

  Which was, in some ways, true.

  As an anonymity online network, Tor—the name came out of its initial incarnation as The Onion Router—was Shakespearean in its origin. It was a privacy tool, free software that was supposed to shield Internet users from being spied on by the US government’s intelligence agencies—a somewhat unrealistic expectation, given that they were the very people who had created it.

  Not that most Tor users we
re aware of that.

  It was developed, funded and built by the US government—specifically, the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—to allow its agents to work online undercover without leaving a trace of government IP addresses that could unmask them. It was then released as free software and today, millions of people used it. Using “onion routing,” which consisted of bouncing traffic randomly through a parallel peer-to-peer network that was wrapped in layers of encryption to confuse and disconnect its origin and destination, dissidents and activists in countries with restricted Internet reach could use Tor to publish out of their governments’ reach. At the same time, illegal child porn and drug marketplaces could also thrive in its supposedly untraceable cloud.

  What most of its users didn’t know, however—not until Edward Snowden’s leaks, that is—was that Tor actually provided the very opposite of anonymity. It helped red-flag targets for NSA and law enforcement surveillance and gave the watchers access to all of those users’ online activity.

  “Not in this case,” the analyst said. “It’s not a pure Tor play. Whoever built Erebus knew we had our claws all over Tor, so they built it to use Tor in a way we didn’t foresee. A couple of our guys at Fort Meade and me have been working on it since I spotted the post with your face on it, but we can't find a way into its core. We can see the sketches, but we can't take them down.”

  Tomblin was standing by the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of this office on the northwest corner of the sixth floor of the New Headquarters Building, facing the courtyard and the white triple vault that housed the dining rooms beyond it.

  “Of course you can,” he said as his eyes roamed across the Kryptos sculpture that sat alone and undisturbed in a quiet corner of the courtyard. A ten-foot tall, curving verdigris scroll that contained an 865-character coded message, it seemed to flow out from a petrified tree near a water-filled basin that was bordered by a stone garden.