Keeping an eye on the scene outside his apartment, Garin punched Katy’s number on his cell and waited. After four rings it went to voice mail. He disconnected and redialed. Same thing. And just like that, his anxiety spiked. He had to go to Ohio to check on Katy and her family. He couldn’t fly; security cameras and credit cards would reveal his whereabouts, so that left driving.
Garin put the Jeep in gear and, as Emilio watched, put a finger to his lips again in reminder. Coconspirators executing a classified mission. Emilio kept his hands at his sides and gave a slight, surreptitious nod of acknowledgment.
Garin turned the Jeep around. There was little doubt that whoever had tried to kill him this afternoon would try again. But he was going to make sure his sister and her family were safe. And then he was going to kill every single person responsible for today’s slaughter.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JULY 13 • 6:00 P.M. EDT
The Red Top cab dropped Olivia in front of Brandt’s modest yet stately redbrick colonial near the Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Many high-level political appointees, upon first arriving in the capital, take months to find a suitable residence in the D.C. area, some remaining in hotels or sharing apartments with friends until they do. Not James Brandt. With his typical Teutonic efficiency, he had located this gem in less than a week after his appointment as NSA.
Olivia proceeded up the winding walkway, lined with a rainbow of tulips, to the front door. A small security camera connected to a facial recognition system locked on her as she pressed the intercom button on the right side of the doorframe.
After a few moments the door buzzed open and Olivia stepped inside. She was greeted affably by Arlo, Brandt’s mammoth black-and-tan German shepherd. The dog raised his muzzle to be petted by Olivia. The two were fast friends, having spent long hours together while Olivia worked on her dissertation with Brandt back at Stanford.
Brandt’s voice floated from somewhere down the hall, informing her that he was in the library. Arlo led Olivia down the Persian rug–covered passageway past a sunroom and into a large study lined from floor to ceiling with hundreds of books, a few of which had been authored by Brandt. He was seated next to a small fireplace in a plush, high-backed leather chair in a pensive pose well familiar to Olivia. His brow was furrowed and his chin tilted slightly upward, resembling an artist’s rendering of an ancient philosopher contemplating a profound dilemma.
The Oracle. The title was first applied to Brandt when he was a young White House aide more than two decades earlier, shortly after he had written a white paper predicting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This, at a time when the State Department, CIA analysts, and prominent political science professors were all claiming both that the Soviet economy was strong and that the Kremlin’s hold over the Eastern Bloc was unbreakable. Not much later, the whiz kid wrote a widely derided op-ed for The Wall Street Journal warning that militant, radical Islam had supplanted communism as the greatest threat to the West. In particular, he noted the destabilizing influence in the Middle East of a little-known despot by the name of Saddam Hussein, and his probable interest in Kuwaiti as well as Saudi oil fields. At the time, Hussein, regarded as a potential if distasteful ally, was at war with Iran. A short time later, Iraq invaded Kuwait.
And on it went. Brandt’s prescience drew the envy of rivals and the admiration of nearly everyone else. It was believed that he was first given the title of Oracle not by an admirer but derisively by a jealous colleague in Brandt’s own department at Stanford. Now in his mid-fifties, Brandt radiated confidence. Some of that had to do with his appearance: Tall, with an aristocratic face, thick eyebrows, and a rather large head topped by perfectly trimmed white hair, he had deep-set arctic-blue eyes that conveyed the unflappable bearing of someone who’s used to almost always being the smartest person in the room.
“Olivia, it is my fervent hope that I’ve angered some young man by summoning you here on a weekend.” Brandt held his pose, a look of mischief passing across his face. Olivia smiled, an act that had an electric effect on nearly every man she encountered. She sat opposite Brandt in an identical chair. An antique coffee table separated the two.
“You’re the only man in my life, Professor.”
“And that, darling Olivia, is precisely what I’m afraid of. I may take up more of your time than I should, but that’s no excuse. You really need to get out. Have fun, and I don’t mean writing an analysis of the Chinese navy’s blue-water fleet or some such thing. There are a lot of fine men here in Washington, smart, successful. You can’t just focus on work as if you’re back at school. You need to live your life.”
Brandt’s tone was playful, but there was an element of fatherly admonition to it. Olivia’s own father had died when she was seven. He had been one of the first black players to integrate Bear Bryant’s football team at the University of Alabama. He had met Olivia’s mother, a native of New Delhi, while on a church mission in India. They returned to the United States and, after attaining their respective degrees, got married and taught high school mathematics in Chicago. When Olivia, their only child, was born, they moved to Minneapolis, where Olivia grew up—raised by her mother in a sheltered environment after her father died in a car accident.
A math prodigy, Olivia attended Stanford and had been a physics major until taking an elective course in international strategy taught by Brandt. Brandt instantly recognized her intelligence and plucked her from the physics department, setting her on the path of geopolitics. Blind from birth, he had remained unaware of her stunning looks for years, until the accumulated weight of appreciative remarks by envious colleagues made it plain that his assistant’s brains were rivaled by her beauty.
“I am living my life. This is precisely the life I choose to live,” Olivia replied. “Besides, it’s not as if I don’t see any men.”
“Olivia, seeing them as they pass you getting off the Metro doesn’t count. I mean going out to dinner, maybe a Nats game.” Brandt turned a palm up, a gesture that prompted Arlo to rest his head on his master’s knee and nuzzle his leg.
“Professor, look, I’ve been here for less than two months. Give it some time.”
“Whatever came of that introduction Carole Tunney made to that TV anchor, the one that makes every story sound like the first moon landing?”
“They’re all like that.”
“Well?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but he’s an idiot.”
Brandt decided to drop the subject. Forming relationships had never been easy for Olivia. Some men were too intimidated by Olivia’s looks to even talk to her. That, combined with Olivia’s painful shyness, resulted in a social life that consisted primarily of the receptions following speaking engagements at colleges and think tanks. “Anyway, thanks for dropping by on short notice. I just want to go over a couple of things that I need addressed rather quickly.” Brandt placed a slippered foot on Arlo’s back and slid it back and forth.
“How’s the president doing?” Olivia inquired.
“Checked into Walter Reed after I met with him. No jokes, please. He’s a bit fatigued, as you might imagine.”
Olivia was new to Washington, but she wasn’t naïve. The president of the United States didn’t just check into Walter Reed on a Saturday afternoon because he was a little tired. He must be suffering, at bare minimum, from fairly pronounced exhaustion. She did not, however, press Brandt for details, but rather moved on to the draft UN resolution.
“Where do you want to begin with the resolution?”
“Let’s put that aside for a moment,” Brandt said. “It’s going to pass, not as a formal resolution that we could veto but probably as something else, and there’s nothing we can do about it. His strategic options are limited. None of them painless.”
“It might still be helpful if I give you my observatio
ns on the players behind the draft resolution.”
Brandt nodded. If his protégé thought something worth mentioning, it usually was. “Go ahead, Liv.”
“Well, the usual factions developed; France made a show of being reasonable and unbiased before throwing Israel overboard; Muslim nations were intransigent; African nations moved as a bloc. But in the last few days a pattern began to develop. Any tweaks to the condemnation language were the joint work of Russia and Iran. Not Iran and Syria, or Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but Russia and Iran.”
Brandt shrugged. “We’ve seen that on some other matters.”
“True, but not to this degree. The Iranians haven’t made a move all week without the Russians. Their envoys were joined at the hip the last two days.”
Brandt tilted his head slightly. “So what do you make of it?”
“Perhaps nothing. But I get the strong sense that the Russians have dual objectives here.”
“You’ve worked with me long enough to know I suspect the Russians always have dual objectives, if not triple or quadruple objectives. The trick is figuring out the one that’s most important to them. Any theories?”
Olivia shook her head. “Inchoate. I was hoping you might have some.”
Brandt took his foot off Arlo’s head and thought for several seconds. “Right now all I’ve got is gut instinct and bits of seemingly unrelated information. They may, in fact, remain unrelated. But there’s one piece that seems odd. It may be wholly unconnected to anything going on in the Middle East or UN. In fact, it probably is. But the timing’s curious.”
Olivia wasn’t used to Brandt being so opaque. “Timing of what?”
“Late this afternoon, just before you called me at the White House, we—the president and I—were informed that at least seven American special operators have been assassinated in the last twenty-four hours, all in the D.C. metro area. That in itself is, to put it mildly, alarming. Apparently, these men were extremely good at what they do. Getting to one or two of them would be difficult. Killing seven in one day would be nearly impossible.”
“What is it exactly, that they do?”
“That’s part of what I asked you here for. I wasn’t even aware of this team prior to today. Apparently, the information about the team and its mission is ‘compartmentalized,’ and I wasn’t in the compartment, at least not yet.” Brandt tilted his head as if contemplating an absurdity. “I suppose it’s partially a function of my being on the job for only seven weeks.”
“You don’t know anything about the team’s purpose?”
“Nothing beyond what the president told me this afternoon after he got the news from DCI Scanlon. From what I understand, this is a select unit charged with preventing the proliferation of WMD.”
“I take it they don’t do it by means of diplomacy,” Olivia said.
Brandt placed a foot atop Arlo’s head again. “Correct. They do it by direct action.”
“Isn’t there some overlap? DEVGRU is trained to deal with loose nukes. Delta also has a WMD disposal element.”
Arlo groaned contentedly as Brandt rubbed the dog’s head. “Not really. Any overlap is strictly around the edges. This team’s sole mission is to act as a counter-WMD task force. A strike force. Some of them were SEALs or Delta. Possibly SAD. They were handpicked to serve in the unit because they had unique capabilities and, to be trite, they were identified as the best of the best.”
“Then who could’ve possibly taken them out?”
“Indeed. Even the KGB in its heyday probably couldn’t have pulled this off, at least not without significant logistical support that would be very difficult to conceal. And the KGB scrupulously avoided killing Americans on American soil. Even the vaunted Mossad couldn’t kill all of the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre in a single day.”
“Who had operational authority over the team?”
“I can’t be sure. They were formed as a unit under the Joint Special Operations Command and, I think, occasionally detailed to the CIA. But I bet you won’t find them in the CIA’s budget, or the DIA’s, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m not even sure the team has—had—a name.”
Olivia was mystified as to what, if anything, this had to do with the draft resolution. The assassination of an elite team of special operators—no matter how astonishing—had no bearing on what would happen in New York at the beginning of the week.
“I assume you’ll tell me in your own time how the UN resolution and the assassinations are related.” It was a declaration, not a question. “In the meantime, what do you need me to do?”
For his part, Brandt sometimes understood Olivia better than she understood herself. He suspected that without being fully conscious of it yet, she already was beginning to sense the direction in which he was going, and might even get there before him.
“The leader of the team hasn’t been accounted for. Everyone else is dead. Naturally, he’s now the prime suspect,” Brandt said.
“One man killed all seven? Just a moment ago you said that even the KGB and Mossad would’ve had a hard time duplicating what happened. I’m sorry, Professor, that doesn’t make any sense,” Olivia said, shaking her head.
“Under most circumstances, I’d agree. But I’m told this man is something of a remarkable fellow.”
Olivia cocked her head, dubious. “He would have to be more than remarkable to pull off an operation like that. Who told you?”
“Who told me he’s remarkable?”
“Yes.”
“The president.”
“The president? No disrespect, Professor, but I find it difficult to believe the president of the United States is even remotely aware of the identity of a lone member of the vast special operations intelligence community, no matter how remarkable. What did he tell you about this man?”
“Just that he’s talented and his name is Michael Garin,” Brandt replied. “Oh yes. And that Scanlon says there’s some evidence of Garin’s culpability. It appears two bodies were found shot dead in an apartment in Dale City, leased to a Thomas Lofton.” Brandt raised his hand to fend off the obvious question. “Lofton is a pseudonym Garin sometimes uses. The FBI says the placement of the shots indicates the shooter was likely a pro.”
“So I take it the bodies belonged to two members of the WMD team,” Olivia said flatly.
“Actually, no. As yet, they’re unidentified. And Garin is nowhere to be found.”
“I can see why his disappearance doesn’t look good.” Olivia’s eyes narrowed. “But did anyone consider that the two bodies are those of the assassins? I mean, isn’t it more likely that Garin killed two unknown attackers in self-defense, as opposed to seven elite operators? What would be his motive for killing his teammates?”
“Liv, that’s precisely what I want you to find out.”
“You’ve lost me,” Olivia said, a distinct note of exasperation in her voice. She was used to Brandt making seemingly unrealistic demands, but detective work wasn’t part of her portfolio.
“I’d like you to gather as much information about Garin and his team as you can. Someone had a reason for killing that WMD team. The more we know about Garin, the more likely we’ll discover the reason. And that reason might have some bearing on the crisis in the Middle East.”
Brandt, four moves ahead again.
“The FBI’s main objective is to find and apprehend Thomas Lofton,” Brandt continued. “They don’t yet know Lofton is Garin. That’s a call for Scanlon to make.”
Olivia studied the designs on the rug under her feet as she pondered Brandt’s statement. “Care to give me a hint of what you think I might find?”
“I’m not sure even I know, because right now, all I have is suspicious timing.”
“What’s so suspicious about the timing? The Middle East is always in crisis. Using that logic, any event that occurs at any time would be s
uspicious because it would always coincide with a Middle East crisis.”
“Liv.” Brandt smiled. “Don’t be coy. I learned about the assassinations of the WMD team a few hours ago. You learned about them five minutes ago. But if I know you—and you know I do—you’re already starting to draw some of the same conclusions I have.”
Olivia had to admit to herself that as Brandt and she spoke, the chessboard was becoming clearer: tensions in the Middle East that could erupt into a major conflict, the threat of the use of WMD always hanging in the air. And now a WMD task force virtually wiped out. Brandt was right. Getting as much information about the last surviving member of that force might yield some clues.
Olivia nodded. “I’ll do my best. Any recommendations on where I should start?”
Brandt shook his head. “You always know what to do. I’ll leave it to you.”
Olivia, sensing from experience that the meeting was at a close, rose to leave. Arlo got up to escort her out.
“And, Liv?”
“Yes?”
“Try to get as much information as quickly as you can. Garin doesn’t sound like the kind of man who leaves any loose ends. I have a feeling that a lot more bodies are going to start dropping soon. And a lot of information will drop with them.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DALE CITY, VIRGINIA
JULY 13 • 6:45 P.M. EDT
Garin drove to the rear of the U-Store-It facility off of Dale Boulevard and parked the Jeep out of sight of both street traffic and the security camera hanging under the western eave of the building. He picked up a discarded newspaper and approached the camera perpendicularly so he could remain out of its range.
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