First Strike

by Ben Coes

  “Hard work,” he said.

  “That’s important,” she agreed, “but there’s something even more important.”

  “Staying in school,” said Rex.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s very important,” said Daisy as she took a step back and held the football, preparing to throw it. “But it’s not the most important thing.”

  “Don’t do drugs,” said Anthony.

  Daisy shook her head.

  “That’s incredibly important. But it’s not what I’m thinking of.”

  Daisy took a few more steps back, then nodded to Anthony, indicating she wanted him to go out for a pass.

  “I give up,” Anthony said.

  “Man, I’m really surprised,” she said as Anthony continued back until he was down the block a ways. “The most important thing—”

  Daisy leaned back, brought her arm behind her head, and prepared to throw.

  “… is being the best female quarterback in the United States of America and most likely the world.”

  Daisy’s arm whipped smoothly forward. A clean spiral lofted through the warm morning air. The ball arced high, then dropped in a perfect slope into Anthony’s arms.

  “You’re telling me Joe Flacco can throw like that?” she asked.

  Rex laughed, while Anthony shook his head.

  After a few minutes of catch, Daisy climbed the steps to the front door. Tacked to the door was a light blue pennant emblazoned with the words COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

  She knocked. After a moment, a thin gray-haired woman with glasses opened the door. Her face melted into a smile.

  “Hi, Miss Betty,” said Daisy.

  “Well, God bless you, dear,” said the woman, who threw open the door and wrapped her arms around Daisy. “She is so excited to see you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In her room. Now stand back, let me look at you.”

  The woman scanned Daisy from head to toe, shaking her head.

  “You get more beautiful every day, child, I swear.”

  “You’re pretty cute yourself, Miss Betty.”

  The woman erupted into a loud, enthusiastic laugh.

  Daisy walked through the apartment, through the kitchen, then down a hallway. She arrived at the last door, which was open. Several cardboard boxes were stacked near the door, along with a few duffel bags.

  Seated on the bed was a girl. She wore glasses, a white T-shirt, and khakis. She was thin. If there was anything unusual about her, it was her hair, which arose in an unruly, beautiful Afro. She said nothing as she took in Daisy.

  “Hey, Little Sister,” said Daisy.

  “Hey, Big Sister,” said the girl, whose name was Andromeda, though everyone called her Andy.

  “So, you ready to become a big-time, hotshot, fancy-pants Ivy Leaguer?” asked Daisy, entering the room and sitting on the bed.

  Andy looked at her but said nothing. She had a morose expression on her face.

  Daisy put her hand softly on her shoulder.

  “You forgot to pack your fancy pants, didn’t you?” she asked, shaking her playfully.

  Andy said nothing. She stared at the floor.

  Daisy knew her well. After eleven years, of course she knew her, like the way an older sister knows a younger sister, or a mother a daughter. Andy wasn’t crying, but Daisy could see the light salty white of dried tears on her cheeks.

  “I’m scared,” whispered Andy.

  “Every freshman at every college is nervous before they get there,” said Daisy, wrapping her arm around Andy’s neck and pulling her closer. “I almost threw up.”

  “I’ve never been away from Baltimore.”

  “So coming to my house doesn’t count? What am I, chopped liver?”

  Andy smiled. “I mean living away.”

  “You’re a brilliant, beautiful, one-in-a-million girl,” said Daisy. “You are going to blossom at Columbia. I think I’m more excited than you are.”

  “I’m not good enough to be in the Ivy League.”

  Daisy stood up. She stepped to one of the boxes and put her hands beneath it. She turned around and caught Andy’s eyes.

  “Andy, you’re in the Ivy League. Present tense. Whether you like it or not, your name—Andromeda Anne Robinson—is on a great big list at one of the greatest universities in the world, and no one can ever change that. You are an Ivy Leaguer. It’s already happened. It’s done. Now, we can certainly debate as to whether or not Columbia is as good as UVA, but that’s missing the point.”

  Daisy flashed Andy a devilish grin, then hoisted the box.

  “UVA?” said Andy, standing up and lifting another box. She smiled, then laughed. “Is that even a college? Everyone knows Columbia is better.”

  “Maybe at fencing,” offered Daisy, moving toward the door with the box.

  “Fencing?”

  “You know, with swords.”

  “It’s called épée.”

  “Épée, schmépée,” said Daisy, stepping into the hall.

  “Columbia has produced like a kajillion Nobel Prize winners,” said Andy.

  “Good point. Nerds. Columbia definitely is better at producing nerds.”

  “They’re called geniuses,” said Andy.

  “Didn’t some Columbia student steal uranium from the science building last year?” asked Daisy, her laughter filling the hallway.

  “Oh, man,” said Andy, giggling. She followed Daisy through the door and down the hallway. “This is going to be a long ride.”

  28

  ST. REGIS HOTEL

  MEXICO CITY

  Raditz was reclined on the king-size bed. He stared up at the coffered ceiling. A drinking glass filled with minibar champagne rested on his bare chest, his left hand around it, holding it steady. His right hand was beneath his head. He was deep in thought.

  He would spend two, possibly three days in Mexico City, then move on. He would buy a car with cash, and drive. First Central America, then South America, where he would ultimately disappear.

  The money would last him the rest of his life. In fact, he would likely die long before he spent all of it. A dark thought—which he tried to push away—came to him.

  You won’t spend any of it. They’re coming …

  “No,” he said, tipping the glass to his lips, taking another gulp, spilling a little on his chin, which proceeded to dribble down his neck.

  He would get to Brazil. Land of the Lost. A retired agent told him that. He would disappear. In Rio or a smaller city. He would buy a house. Or perhaps a farm somewhere in the country on the way to Chile, maybe even in Chile. Or Argentina. He would disappear.

  He thought of his daughter, the day he’d said goodbye. Raditz had taken everything he had from his Fidelity account and handed her the check: $353,402.90.

  “Take care of your mom.”

  What they did to her. What they did to her!

  What you did to her.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered, as guilt washed over him. The sight of her on the concrete of the garage that night.

  What have you done?

  Raditz imagined a thick envelope being handed to his daughter one day. She is thirty, thirty-five. A child or two is near her as she opens the door. Her husband is a kind man. He doesn’t know any of it. Or he does, and he understands that mistakes are made by good people. That his wife’s father is a good person. She opens the envelope and there is more money than she has ever seen. A million dollars. Two million.

  Raditz was weeping now as he thought of the life he had once had, the life he worked so hard for, the life he destroyed. He sobbed for several minutes. He walked into the bathroom and turned on the cold water, splashing his face several times, trying to wash away the tears, the feelings of guilt.

  In the morning, he would leave. He didn’t want to. He was a good man. He made an intellectual mistake. An honest mistake on behalf of his country. But he knew how the system worked. Any chance he had of forgiveness and clemency had long ago been destroyed by not telling any
one about what he’d done. Framing out Harry Black. Hiding it all. Now he would be called a traitor.

  Go downstairs and have a drink. Tomorrow, you can disappear.

  The worst was over. He could learn to live with the guilt. It would pass. Raditz would put it all behind him.

  * * *

  Allawi put down the phone. A sadistic smirk spread across his lips.

  Unleash the dogs? Don’t worry, Tristan, I will unleash the dogs.

  It didn’t take long for Allawi to home in on the St. Regis. He used the iPad to guide him, continuing down the side street, cutting left: At the next corner, he saw the building ST. REGIS HOTEL MEXICO CITY.

  Allawi passed the front entrance and parked in the employee lot behind the building, in a space close to the entrance, between two cars, under the bright lights of the garage. He knew the best way to hide was to blend in, and the best way to blend in was to act like you belonged. The cars in far corners were, ironically, the ones that stood out the most. Nobody paid attention to the closest ones.

  Allawi reached for his duffel from the backseat. He pulled out a KBP GSh-18 9×19mm pistol, then threaded a custom-made suppressor into the muzzle. He strapped on a shoulder holster and tucked in the gun. He pulled on a leather jacket. He opened up the app on his iPhone so that he didn’t have to lug around the iPad.

  The tracking technology was accurate to within six inches. He wouldn’t need to get a room. He would find him, wait for the right opportunity, and kill him. He would do it carefully, but it wouldn’t take long. According to Nazir, Raditz was fat, an office worker, a politician. He would kill Raditz quickly but with discretion. This was why Nazir had sent him.

  Allawi didn’t view himself as a terrorist. He was an assassin. An intelligence agent. When ISIS was a country, he would help build its intelligence service. He wanted to go home. He was willing to sacrifice himself—but now was not the time. It wasn’t necessary.

  The hunger for the kill made him walk quickly to the elevators. As he climbed into one of the elevator cars, the red tracker light moved closer to the center of the phone screen. He hit the top floor and the elevator started to climb. At seven, the red light reached the midpoint of the screen and Allawi shot his hand out. The elevator stopped and the doors opened.

  He went left as, with his fingers, he increased the magnification of the screen. He moved down the hallway, watching as he came closer and closer to the room. Then the light hit the very center of the screen. His eyes moved slowly to the door: SUITE 712.

  Allawi put the cell in his coat pocket and reached his right hand inside his coat, grabbing the butt of the gun. He removed it from the holster but kept it inside the coat, flicking the safety off. He knocked on the door, then placed his left thumb over the eyehole as his right index finger found the trigger.

  * * *

  Franco walked behind the private terminal and found a dark sedan parked near the back of the lot. He drove into Mexico City and pulled up to the front entrance of the St. Regis just as the early evening sky was edging toward a hypnotic brownish-red.

  He climbed from the sedan, dressed in a blue T-shirt, jeans, and Puma tennis sneakers. He pulled on a blue nylon jacket. Three weapons were concealed on his person: the knife, the Ruger, and the Kimber .45.

  Franco approached every project slightly differently depending on the mood he was in. This one was no exception. He knew agents were supposed to develop successful patterns and adhere to the ones that worked, but Franco believed the unpredictability of his approach to mission work gave him an advantage. It made him more alert, spontaneous, and creative. It gave him a nervous edge. It also prevented him from developing lazy habits.

  Walking to the entrance of the St. Regis, he turned on one of the disposable cells and dialed a four-digit number. When he heard a high-pitched beeping noise, he typed in a ten-digit code, then hung up. Half a dozen seconds later, a text made the phone vibrate.

  V C X g W S S a I P b C W

  NSA pinpointed Raditz; he was in room 712.

  “What a fucking idiot,” he whispered as he entered the hotel.

  Franco was seldom surprised by the stupidity and arrogance of people.

  If Raditz was running, he obviously understood the risk. He should’ve been several days into a decades’-long parallax in remote country, getting accustomed to constant movement, in gritty, underpopulated places where the arrival of an intelligence officer would stand out. The St. Regis Mexico City was the kind of hotel a man on the run would stay in if he believed he would never be caught, or else believed getting caught was inevitable. It was a devil-may-care attitude—the kind of attitude that Franco was very familiar with, because it was his own.

  Of course, he could afford that kind of arrogance. He didn’t do things that might make the U.S. government want him dead. As to those various scumbags, foreign officials, and angry husbands who did want him dead, unlike Raditz, Franco had the skills to back up the checks his devil-may-care attitude was writing.

  As the elevator climbed, Franco reached to his belt and felt for the gun’s safety, turning it off. He put his hand in the pocket of his windbreaker, making sure the loaded syringe was ready. He placed his thumb on the end of the plunger—inside the pocket—and gripped the plastic cartridge. He stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor and went left.

  He passed an older couple, stepping aside, nodding hello, then rounded the corner, practically knocking over a man coming in the opposite direction. Franco’s eyes shot to the man, scanning the face, cheekbones, eyes. He was young, clean-cut, and he smiled bashfully to apologize for walking too close to the wrong side of the hallway. Franco wasn’t fooled by the man’s innocent smile.

  Franco let go of the syringe and moved his right hand to his belt in the same instant he lurched with his left elbow, meeting the steel of Allawi’s weapon as Allawi swung it across the air, and knocking it sideways as the killer fired. The gun made a high-pitched spit as the bullet ripped just inches from Franco’s ear, then another. In a sinuous parry, Franco ducked left as his right hand drew the Kimber and fired point-blank at Allawi before he could recover from Franco’s small but effective elbow. Slugs ripped into Allawi’s chest and neck, spraying blood on the wall behind him as he was pummeled backward. He let out an angry groan. As he fell, Allawi held up his pistol at Franco, but Franco saw it coming and caught Allawi’s arm with his left hand just as Allawi completed his fall to the green-and-tan carpet.

  Allawi was riddled with lead, though still alive. Franco was crouched over him, left hand clutching Allawi’s wrist, right hand moving the Kimber to Allawi’s lips and then slamming it into his mouth as he stared at the Syrian’s dark bloodshot eyes. He pushed the suppressor as hard as he could into the terrorist’s throat, waited a moment, then fired twice.

  The chime of the elevator startled him and he looked over his shoulder. He stood quickly, leaving the gun on the ground, and walked, pulling out his cell from his left pocket and pretending to talk as his right hand went back to the syringe.

  “My dear, I will be right there. Of course I love you! Yes, yes…”

  He rounded the corner slowly, oblivious of everything around him, like someone on his honeymoon. Raditz was coming toward him, staring suspiciously.

  “I am getting on the elevator. Please, sir”—he held the cell out to Raditz, smiling—“will you tell my beautiful wife I am getting on the elevator and I will be there in a minute?”

  Raditz seemed to lose his reserve; a smile creased his lips as he held up his hand, saying no thank you but laughing at the moment. Franco slashed the syringe into Raditz’s neck as he passed, watching as Raditz’s mouth went agape, then catching him as he fell to the ground.

  Franco ran to Allawi and took his gun. He returned to Raditz and picked him up, tossing him over his shoulder.

  “Fuck, you’re a load,” he muttered.

  He took the elevator to the second floor, twice telling people who tried to get on it was a medical emergency. At the second floor,
he walked to the stairs, lugging Raditz the entire time. He took the stairs to the basement, cut through the basement to the service loading dock, and dropped Raditz behind a bush. He went and got his car and came back and lifted Raditz into the trunk.

  Forty-five minutes later, Franco carried Raditz up the stairs of the GV, whose engines were already firing and ready to rip. He tossed Raditz onto a sofa, hit the hydraulic button that closed the stairs, then leaned into the cockpit.

  “Wheels up.”

  29

  MONCRIEF COUNTY ROAD

  CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

  The farmhouse sat in a clearing at the end of a mile-long, winding gravel driveway off a seldom-traveled winding country road in a part of Virginia where old-line horse country wealth started its slide into Appalachia.

  It was a pretty if modest brick house, built in 1950, with black shutters, a slate roof, and neatly trimmed hedges surrounding it, and a lawn that spread out for a few hundred yards, transitioning into fields that rolled off to the horizon. The house sat on eight hundred acres of land. There were no other houses for miles.

  At the end of the driveway, a steel gate was locked tight. A few hundred feet inside the gate, out of view of anyone who happened to drive by, was a black Chevy Suburban, inside of which sat two men, both employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  A mile on, at the end of the driveway, sat two more vehicles: a shiny black van and a dark sedan.

  Standing in the middle of the driveway were two additional men. Both had on khakis, short-sleeve polo shirts, sunglasses, and flak jackets. Both clutched submachine guns tipped with suppressors, which they kept trained at the dirt.

  The sound of insects, of the occasional birdsong, of wind rustling the leaves, was interrupted by a low grumble from up the driveway. The two men stiffened slightly. A few moments later, another black sedan came into view, its tires kicking up dust as it charged into the parking area and stopped in front of them.

  Calibrisi climbed from the back of the sedan, nodded at the two operators from CIA paramilitary, then walked to the house. He went through the front door, took a left, walked down a corridor, then opened a door and took a staircase down into the basement.