The Terminal List

by Carr, Jack

  Hard lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan had taught Reece that going after the head of the snake could be counterproductive. Killing or capturing a senior Al-Qaeda leader always led to another one taking his place, now smarter, having learned from his senior’s mistakes. After some amount of studying and bringing in civilian anthropologists and counterinsurgency experts from academia, some commanders began to use crosscut targeting as a way to more effectively take out the heir apparent before working both up and down the enemy chain of command across multiple networks. Reece understood the methodology. Agnon was his version of crosscut targeting. Reece was not going to allow this network to evolve. He was going to destroy it. He was going to kill them all.

  CHAPTER 43

  Palm Springs, California

  SAUL AGNON WASN’T THE TYPE to do much socializing. His work for Steve Horn and Capstone monopolized both his time and his energy. Though he didn’t technically practice law, Agnon was proud of his attorney status, and maintaining his license required mandatory hours of continuing legal education. Each year he attended the Los Angeles Bar Association’s Fall Retreat in Palm Springs, which not only satisfied his annual CLE requirement but was also a much-awaited chance to interact with other attorneys.

  Agnon sat next to a redheaded litigator from a big L.A. firm at dinner but, despite his best efforts, couldn’t convince her to join him for a nightcap in his casita. He hung around the late-night cocktail reception for a while but by 11:00 p.m. he was ready for bed. He had another long day of seminars to attend the next morning and, unlike most of the attendees, he actually enjoyed the material being presented. He wasn’t much of a drinker and felt a bit tipsy from the three glasses of chardonnay that he’d consumed during dinner and the margarita that he’d enjoyed at the reception. He always got turned around at this resort, with its winding paths and dozens of identically designed guesthouses. It took him a full ten-minute walk in the clear desert night to reach his casita and another clumsy thirty seconds to fish his room key out of his blazer pocket and get it into the electronic lock the right way before he could open the door.

  He closed the door behind him and was delighted to hear that the maid had turned on some classical music while performing the turndown service, though he did think it to be a bit loud. He removed his blue blazer and opened the armoire before reaching for a hanger, fumbling and dropping it on the stone floor. Damn. Bending over to retrieve it, he was suddenly pulled backward by strong arms that locked around his neck, legs scissoring around his torso while being pulled onto the floor. He was essentially lying on his back on the man’s chest, being squeezed like he was in the clutches of an anaconda. He struggled to turn his head but when he did so, the assailant’s arm moved tighter around his throat. He tried to scream but no sound escaped. With the blood supply cut off to his brain, he passed out in seconds.

  • • •

  Saul awoke after what must have been only a few moments: naked, bound, gagged, and blindfolded. The sound of Beethoven’s Fifth blasted in his ears over the sound system in his room; even if he could scream, no one would hear him. His hands were restrained behind his back and his feet were somehow shackled. He tried to bring himself to his knees but was immediately shoved back down to the cold stone floor. Whoever had attacked him was still there and was watching his every move. His brain was foggy from the alcohol, but it took him only a few seconds to figure it out: James Reece had found him. The reality of what was happening hit Agnon in the form of complete, overwhelming terror. He felt the searing acid of vomit rise through his throat and retched as his dinner surged into his mouth. The cloth gag gave the sick liquid nowhere to go, backing it into his esophagus and filling his airway. Seconds after regaining consciousness from the rear naked choke, Agnon was drowning in his own vomit. The sense of panic was overwhelming. He gagged, snorted, and gagged again, all the while burning the precious oxygen for which his brain was beginning to starve.

  Reece saw the man convulse and watched vomit shoot from his nostrils. He began flopping around like a fish on the deck of a boat, craving oxygen and choking on his own sickness. As much as he would have liked, Reece didn’t come all this way to watch the man whom Holder’s emails identified as a key contributor to the killing of Reece’s family and SEAL troop drown in his own puke. He reached down to remove the cloth that he’d tied around Agnon’s mouth, pulling it off over his head and removing the blindfold in the process. The man continued to writhe in agony as his head turned a deep purple color, the veins in his neck standing out like cables.

  Reece wrenched the man’s head back by his hair with one hand and stuck a gloved finger down his throat with the other to trigger the gag reflex. Vomit shot forward across the floor and Agnon’s body convulsed as it cleared itself of the fluid. The rotten stench of stomach acid, food, and alcohol was overwhelming. Even with the surgical mask over his face, Reece had to turn away to keep from gagging. Puking on the floor was not a great way to keep one’s DNA out of a murder scene.

  An animal moan escaped from Agnon’s throat, sounding like the death bellow of a large bovine. The good news was that he could breathe again. He didn’t say a word as he lay naked on his side, panting for air with tears streaming down his face. What had been a normal human being ten minutes earlier was now a quivering mess, which was exactly what Reece wanted.

  “Can you breathe now?” Reece asked in a voice devoid of sympathy. Saul nodded repeatedly without saying a word or even opening his eyes. Reece hoped that the guy’s heart wouldn’t fail.

  When it looked like Agnon’s respiration had returned to a normal range, Reece tied the vomit-soaked rag that had served as a gag around Saul’s eyes and began dragging his limp body toward the bathroom of the resort cottage. He’d already prepared the area by folding two large bath towels over the side of the tub to prevent bruising the man’s back.

  Saul’s compliance as Reece dragged him into position suggested that this process wouldn’t take very long. Reece wrapped Saul’s head with plastic wrap, covering his mouth but not his nose. He then pulled the attorney’s body over the lip of the bathtub so that his head and shoulders were held below his waist and his feet stayed outside the tub, just off the tile floor. He straddled the smaller man and grabbed him by the throat with his left hand to get the angle correct while turning on the faucet with his right. The fixture had one of those handheld shower heads on a flexible hose, which Reece now held over Agnon’s face. The stream from the massaging head flooded Saul’s eyes and nostrils with water, which followed gravity downward and flowed into his sinuses, mouth, and throat. The angle of his head prevented the water from entering his lungs, thus he would not actually drown, though everything in the man’s brain suggested otherwise.

  Every fiber in Saul’s body screamed for air, and it took all of Reece’s strength to maintain his grip on the violently thrashing figure below him. Agnon coughed spastically to clear the water from his throat but the plastic wrap acted as a one-way valve, letting the air from his lungs escape while keeping the water in his mouth. Though he didn’t realize it, all his coughing accomplished was to speed up the process. The plastic wrap trick was something that Reece had learned from the CIA interrogators way back in the Wild West days just after 9/11, when Americans still had the will to win. Reece continued to spray water into Saul’s nostrils as unimaginable sounds echoed in the confines of the bathroom. Good thing the casita was freestanding and the walls were thick.

  After a count of twenty, Reece removed the stream of water from Agnon’s face and pulled the man’s body upright into a seated position on the urine-soaked bathroom floor. He pulled the plastic wrap down from Agnon’s face so that it hung loosely around his neck.

  “You know who I am, don’t you, Saul?” Reece asked in an almost kind voice.

  “I do, I do . . .” gasped Saul between hyperventilating breaths.

  “Then you know why I’m here.”

  Saul shook his head violently. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t do anything . . .
I just work for Horn. . . .”

  “See? You’re already bullshitting me. I can’t have you doing that, Saul.” Reece swiftly and violently wrenched Agnon back into the waterboarding position and resumed the spray of water. Without the plastic it was a bit messier, but the net effect was the same. He was able to move the man from zero to ten on the punishment scale within a few seconds. Agnon’s brain was quickly learning that doing anything other than complying meant instant and unimaginable torture. After Saul had spent another twenty seconds under the hose, Reece dragged him back out of the tub.

  Reece had himself been waterboarded during SERE School after an escape attempt that the instructors deemed worthy of the treatment. He knew that as bad as the process of enduring the simulated drowning was, the threat of going through it again was the real motivator, or demotivator depending on your position.

  “You ready to talk and tell me the truth?”

  “Yes, yes . . . I am,” Agnon gasped.

  Reece stood and walked over to the bathroom counter, retrieving a small tape recorder and placing it on the closed lid of the toilet before pressing RECORD. He then let the man catch his breath for a few moments before he started asking questions. He began with an easy one.

  “Who is Josh Holder?”

  “He’s a DOD agent. He’s a D.C. guy, but he’s out here for this project.”

  “Why him? Why is DOD involved?”

  “He’s the Hartleys’ guy. He does work for them, double-dipping with DOD and J. D. Hartley’s consulting firm. He was a liaison when Hartley was in Congress and has been a confidant of theirs ever since.”

  Reece took the conversation in a different direction. “Tell me about RD4895.”

  How does this guy know so much? Agnon thought.

  “It’s an experimental drug. A big company stumbled on it a few years back and saw its potential to prevent PTSD, some sort of neuron blocker. It seemed to work, but they couldn’t get the safety profile worked out; the test animals kept getting tumors. They put it on the auction block, and Capstone bought it dirt cheap.”

  Reece looked at the nude, blindfolded form before him and knew that he’d broken him. The terror of the last few minutes combined with the looming threat of a repeat performance had taken away whatever spine Agnon had in the first place. Grabbing him by the arm, Reece hoisted Agnon to a standing position and led him back into the living area of the casita. The restraints around Agnon’s ankles made the pace painfully slow. He unstrapped one side of the hospital restraints from Agnon’s wrist and moved the man’s arms to the front of his body. He then retied the restraints with Agnon’s hands in the front and pushed him backward into a chair. Opening the door to the minibar, he removed two airplane-size bottles of Jim Beam and poured both into a glass that he then placed on the small end table next to Agnon.

  He retrieved the tape recorder from the bathroom and put it on the table as well. Turning the classical music down, Reece removed the waterlogged and vomit-stained rag from Agnon’s face and watched his eyes blink, slowly adjusting to the light. Wearing white Tyvek coveralls with a hood, a surgical mask, clear shooting glasses, and disposable paper booties over his shoes, Reece looked more like a lab technician than a commando. Agnon knew instantly that he wasn’t going to survive this night and he resigned himself to his fate. Whatever will to fight he’d possessed had been broken down by those few oxygen-starved moments.

  Reece motioned to the glass of bourbon on the table. Agnon suddenly realized how thirsty he was and reached hungrily with both manacled hands to pick up the glass. The brown liquid burned as it washed down his throat but it helped bring a calm over his body and broken spirit.

  “So you were telling me about buying the drug. Why did Capstone buy it if the side effects were so bad? How did it have any value?”

  “My boss is a risk taker. He doesn’t go for the easy play, but he’s also good at stacking the deck in his favor. He paid next to nothing for the compound. The United States is in a war with no end in sight, and if they could get the tumor stuff sorted out, the drug would be worth a fortune. In the meantime, the entire project was flooded with DOD funding, so the financial gamble was minimal.”

  “What do you mean, DOD funding?”

  “We’re playing with the house’s money. This whole thing is being subsidized by the DOD. For the past two years, there’s been one hundred million dollars in the Defense Appropriations Act for PTSD research, and all of that money goes to our fund, except for the ten percent we pay to Hartley.”

  “The SECDEF gets a ten-million-dollar kickback?” Reece said incredulously.

  “Not directly. We pay her husband ten percent to be our consultant. Technically, contingency lobbying is illegal, but we pay him ten million for his services out of last year’s appropriation to give everything the appearance of being aboveboard. It’s obviously a sham, but nobody’s looking too hard. People think that politicians are on the take and they’re right, but it’s not in the way that everyone thinks. Nobody takes bags of cash these days. If you did, you’d end up in federal prison. It’s all done with undisclosed conflicts of interest. You show me a member of Congress who’s part of the appropriations process and I’ll show you a wife, child, or brother-in-law with a company that benefits from federal dollars. Everybody does it. The Hartleys are just playing on a different level.”

  Jesus.

  “You guys don’t have your own scientists, though.”

  “No, no. We contract with a lab in India. They pay pennies over there so you can hire PhDs for next to nothing. Boykin handled the science and the analytics. He’s some sort of doctor turned accountant and financial analyst specializing in the health-care sector. He hatched the idea, and Mr. Horn gave the lab in India a timeline and a budget to rework the compound. They thought they had it worked out.”

  “How did it get tested on my guys?”

  “With potential for this much money, you’d be surprised what people will do. I’m talking about tens of billions of dollars, which is a lot of money to spread around to make friends, not to mention the tens of millions that we’re getting from Congress; that just gave everyone a taste. Mr. Horn put the offer out to a few of his close confidants, including Mike Tedesco. You get Tedesco and you get the Hartleys.”

  “You’re telling me that the SECDEF arranged to test an experimental drug on a random SEAL troop? You bullshitting me again, Saul?”

  “No, I wouldn’t bullshit you, Mr. Reece. You know what a politician Admiral Pilsner is. He worked directly for Secretary Hartley at the Pentagon, and they became close. She has him on track to be the chief of naval operations and probably chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He’s totally loyal to her. Of course, he was promised an enormous sum of money as well. She let him choose who to use, through Tedesco and Holder of course.”

  “You mean the admiral personally chose my troop to test out this drug?” Reece asked, his eyes narrowing.

  “That’s how it happened, Mr. Reece. I swear.”

  Interesting. Reece paused before continuing.

  “How did you ever hope to get something like this approved? The FDA isn’t going to accept results from some drug that you tested on people without their consent. I’m no expert, but I know there are all kinds of standards that have to be met. Phase One, Phase Two, all of that.”

  “That would be true normally, but when the president names the head of the FDA and they want a drug approved during wartime to help every man and woman in uniform, no one is going to ask a lot of tough questions.”

  “So now you’re telling me that the president is involved? Is the freaking queen of England also part of this conspiracy?”

  “No, not this president, the next president—Secretary Hartley.”

  No way! Reece thought. How in the hell did I get mixed up in this shit show?

  “How did you get us to take it? I didn’t take any pills or anything on this deployment.”

  “Remember the Tactical Performance Study that your team participated in?”<
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  “Yeah, they took our VO2 max and ran a bunch of cognitive tests on us.”

  “That was a cover for this. The vitamin B12 shots you were given in the second half of that study were actually RD4895. We did a baseline physical and psychological assessment. We assumed that everything was going well until the blood work came back from the last battery of tests before your troop deployed. White blood cell counts for a bunch of your men were off the charts and there were various other abnormalities that indicated that the compound hadn’t been fixed.”

  “And that’s when Boykin made the call to pull the plug and have us all killed?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t, Mr. Reece,” Saul managed to get out through his tears. “How do you know so much about Marcus?”

  “I found out about him a few days before I put a bullet through his brain in Wyoming.”

  Oh my God. This is real. He’s really going to kill us all. Though Saul said nothing, his expression betrayed it all.

  “How do you arrange a Taliban ambush halfway across the globe? You guys cut haji in on the billions?”

  “We left it up to Pilsner on how to clean things up, all through Tedesco and Horn. They got to know each other through all those high-end fundraisers they throw for you guys, for the foundations and charities. That stuff is big business.”

  “So, Pilsner sets us up for an ambush and gets a bunch of Rangers and Army aircrew killed for good measure. How the hell did he manage that?”

  “I don’t know exactly, Mr. Reece. I just know that’s how it went down.” Saul took another long gulp of the bourbon.

  “And Boozer and I survive.”

  “Yes, so Josh Holder makes your man’s death look like a suicide, leaving only you remaining.”

  “What about Chinatown? How did you find me?”

  “The SECDEF. She allocated a UAV to track you.”

  “What? She diverted a national drone asset to help kill me?”

  “I swear it’s true, Mr. Reece, I swear.”