High Treason

by Sean McFate

  Chapter 2

  Halfway around the world, I was finishing my daily run on the white beach of Tel Aviv.

  Maximum effort! I thought, breaking into a mad sprint. One hundred meters to go! Seagulls flew out of my way as I splashed down the sand.

  Warp speed! I commanded, lungs burning. I shot past my personal finish line: a cartoonish nine-foot statue of David Ben-Gurion doing a headstand on the sand. Slowing to a trot, I checked my time. Five miles in thirty-five minutes. Not bad. I walked for another ten minutes, cooling down. Tel Aviv has one of the nicest beaches in the world, if you don’t mind the Apache helicopters buzzing overhead.

  “Shalom,” I said, ambling into Lala Land, my favorite beachside bar. I was a regular, and my tahini-fruit shake awaited me.

  “Shalom, Tom,” said the bartender.

  I had been on the run for a year now, ever since I got sucked into a Saudi palace coup d’état and ten stolen nukes. The coup was foiled, but the nukes were never found. Since then, the Kingdom had placed a million-dollar bounty on me, and no place was safe. Except maybe Israel. Doomed to spend the rest of my life on the run made me angry, and it was all because of one man.

  Brad Winters, I thought, and shivered despite the Mediterranean heat. He was my former mentor at Apollo Outcomes, a powerful private military corporation. Apollo was a covert world power unto itself, and Winters was its sovereign. He betrayed me and left my team for dead, so I returned the courtesy. Last I knew, he was beheaded in Riyadh for his role in the failed coup. I wish I could have been there. He was dead, but somehow I wasn’t free of what he’d done.

  “Can you turn on the news?” I asked the bartender. Everyone spoke English in Tel Aviv. They also spoke Russian, French, Arabic, and, of course, Hebrew. The place made me feel like an underachiever.

  “Sure thing,” he said, and flicked on the TV above the bar. The news was in Hebrew and showed Palestinians throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops, who fired back tear gas and then live ammunition. People died. It looked like a foreign warzone, but it was only forty-five miles away.

  “English, please,” I said, slurping my smoothie, and he found an American cable news channel.

  “Another?” asked the bartender, pointing to my empty mug.

  “Sure,” I said. “Throw in more tahini and mint this time.”

  “Tom!” said a voice behind me. “I thought I’d find you here.”

  “Ari!” I replied.

  “Goldstar, please,” he said, and the bartender slid him a beer.

  Colonel Ari Roth was a gaunt man of average height. Drinking while in uniform was normal in Israel, but Roth’s uniform was not. He wore a standard infantry officer’s insignia with lackluster ribbons. In reality, he was a commando in the Sayeret Matkal, the Israel Defense Forces’ most elite unit. It was comparable to the U.S.’s Delta Force or SEAL Team Six. Like Israel’s nuclear weapons program, Sayeret Matkal didn’t officially exist (hence Ari’s misleading uniform) but everyone knew about it, and called it “the Unit.”

  “You’re off early,” I joked. “What’s the matter? Run out of terrorists to kill in Syria?”

  “I wish,” he said, taking a long swig from the bottle. “It’s shabbat and even we sometimes get time off.” Shabbat was the weekly holy day, or sabbath, and Israel shuts down.

  “If they’re giving you time off, it means they’ve got a nasty suicide mission waiting for you,” I said with a smirk. “Bartender, get this man drunk. He dines in hell tomorrow!”

  Ari waved off the bartender with a smile. “No, seriously. It’s just time off.”

  Members of the Unit don’t get time off, I thought.

  “Yeah, we get time off,” he said, as if reading my mind. “You have a horrible poker face, Locke.”

  “Dammit! Bartender, give me a double scotch, no ice. Enough of the fruit shakes. They’re making me soft.”

  “To time off,” he said, grinning and holding up his beer.

  “To being on the run,” I said, clinking my tumbler.

  “Not the same thing.”

  I had been sleeping on Ari’s couch for the past year. We met as captains in early 1998, when the U.S. Army deployed my Green Beret team to Haifa. Saddam Hussein was threatening to attack Israel with SCUD missiles, and the U.S. secretly sent a Patriot missile unit to blow the SCUDs out of the sky. My mission was to keep the Patriots safe, and so was Ari’s.

  Now I was a mercenary on the lam, and he was a colonel behind a desk. We had both seen finer days. He spent most of his waking hours at Mossad’s headquarters, which was nicknamed the “cinema complex” because it was oddly adjacent to a mega-movie theater in north Tel Aviv. Not exactly a secret location.

  The TV cut to breaking news. A bridge had collapsed in central Washington, DC, and black smoke plumed into the sky. Vehicles lay lifeless on a valley floor, surrounded by dozens of fire trucks. Rescue workers were pulling bodies out of the rubble, and sniffer dogs worked the site.

  “Hey, bartender, can you please turn it up?”

  “. . . bigger than just a terrorist attack. It’s also the most significant political assassination since JFK,” said a TV talking head wearing a bow tie.

  The beach bar went silent and all heads turned to the multiple TV displays. Many Israelis had family in the United States. The news helicopter zoomed in on several black SUVs, burning in the wreckage. The rear end of a black limo stuck out of the debris upright, like a sinking ship frozen in its descent. Firemen were struggling to cut it open but couldn’t because of its armored skin.

  “That’s a presidential motorcade,” I said to Ari.

  “Was,” he corrected me. “That was a presidential motorcade.”

  “. . . it’s the work of radical Islamic terrorists,” said another pundit, who looked too young to shave. The screen showed people chanting “DEATH TO AMERICA!” outside U.S. embassies across the Middle East and Pakistan.

  “Looks like Washington is undergoing its own intifada,” said Ari.

  “Now joining us is our all-star panel of experts,” said the woman news anchor. Three pundits appeared on-screen looking a mixture of despondent and pompous. One was a retired general with a stone face, another a professor wearing a bow tie, and the third was a think tank expert who looked twelve. They began bickering immediately.

  “. . . it seems that the terrorists had been planning this for a long time,” said the bow tie. The news showed more live shots of the destroyed bridge.

  “Terrorists didn’t do that,” I whispered.

  “What?” said Ari.

  “Terrorists didn’t blow that bridge.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Apollo Outcomes. They blew it, and made it look like terrorists did it.”

  “Mercenaries? You must be joking.” He chuckled, then went silent in thought. “A false flag operation. It’s possible, if they are very, very good. Why do you think so?”

  “Because I conducted these same ops for Apollo for years. In other countries, of course. I would recognize their operational signature anywhere. We would blow bridges, crash planes, stage deadly car accidents, and arrange heart attacks. We made it look natural or framed another party, otherwise it wouldn’t be covert.”

  Ari paused, then downed his beer with a shrug. When he was done, he let out a belch. “I’m always shocked how much that stuff is outsourced now.”

  “More than you know.”

  Ari screwed up his face in puzzlement. “I thought Apollo Outcomes was an American company that carried out the U.S. government’s dirty work. I thought it was an exclusive relationship. Why would Apollo assassinate the vice president of the United States?”

  I stared at the bridge carcass and the crushed cars, and was angry. “I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”

  Chapter 3

  Jennifer Lin stared at the TV screen, hand over her gaping mouth, and watched the live news coverage. The daughter of poor Chinese immigrants, she broke her father’s heart when she insisted on joining the FBI i
nstead of going to law school. That was five years ago, and the last time they spoke.

  Lin was not alone. Other FBI special agents crowded around the large-screen TV in the breakroom, coffee breath close. Their collective shock was thick in the air.

  live breaking news, read a glitzy graphic before it swooshed offscreen, replaced by a young, blond anchorwoman.

  “Authorities are calling it the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. At approximately eight o’clock this morning, the vice president’s motorcade was on its way to the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton. As it crossed a bridge, the bridge exploded and the entire motorcade fell to the ravine floor, hundreds of feet below. The vice president was pronounced dead at the scene, as was his wife.”

  “This can’t be happening,” muttered someone.

  “Because it was rush hour, the bridge was crowded,” continued the anchorwoman. “Other victims include multiple commuter cars, two crowded buses, and families with children on their way to school.”

  “Radical Islamic terrorists,” said an agent behind Lin, almost spitting. “Gotta be.”

  “So far, there are around one hundred estimated casualties,” continued the news anchor, “but authorities expect the death toll to rise into the hundreds. Let’s go live to the bridge.”

  The screen faded to an aerial view of the carnage, taken from a news helicopter.

  “That’s the Duke Ellington Bridge over Rock Creek,” exclaimed one of the agents. “I took it to work this morning,” he added, but no one was listening.

  The scene was grisly. Below the chopper lay the remnants of a massive neoclassical bridge, a sickening gap between its two ends. Fire billowed from its ruins, and flashing lights of emergency vehicles lit up the bridge carcass, its graceful aqueduct-like arches broken on the valley floor below. Dozens of cars lay entwined with the bridge wreckage. Trucks were flattened under armored Secret Service SUVs, themselves crushed by massive slabs of concrete and limestone. A DC street bus was shorn in half as rescue workers searched for survivors, carrying the “jaws of life” rescue tool. Worse, the 750-foot bridge collapsed atop another crowded commuter road on the ravine floor below, pulverizing twenty more cars. Then there were the bodies shrouded in plastic sheets.

  The news switched to a reporter on the ground, who was sneaking around the fire trucks and moving toward the bridge. The camera jiggled as it followed him. Sirens wailed in the background. He was clearly not supposed to be there.

  “Police have cordoned off all traffic around the area, so I am going to try to approach on foot,” wheezed the TV reporter, probably thinking of an Emmy Award. Three survivors sat on the ground, wrapped in Red Cross blankets. One woman gently swayed back and forth, holding herself while crying. Perhaps she had lost a loved one. Maybe a child.

  “Hello, we’re from News Channel Eight,” said the journalist while the bright camera light shone in the woman’s face. “Could you tell us what you’re feeling right now?”

  The camera zoomed in. Her eyes were red, and her anguish turned into bafflement, then rage, as the reporter violated her grief.

  “Hey you! You’re not supposed to be here. Get outta here!” someone yelled offscreen. The camera pivoted to show a policeman moving toward the lens. His meaty hand reached out and violently jerked the camera down. The pavement and the cameraman’s foot were the last image shown before the picture went black. The TV control room quickly switched back to the anchorwoman, who looked shaken.

  “Now joining us is our all-star panel of experts,” she said after a moment, turning to the pundits: a young think tank expert, a professor wearing a bow tie, and a retired general. All were men.

  What bullshit, Lin thought. In her five years as an FBI agent, including a year working on an interagency task force, she had learned one thing: national security was a man’s game, all the way around.

  Last summer she blew a big case in Brooklyn by “accidentally” pummeling a Russian mob boss who had groped her during a sting operation. To be fair, she was posing as a high-end escort, and she had the body for it. But he didn’t have permission to touch her. So she broke his arm, a tooth, and two ribs, then put him in an anaconda chokehold before the FBI assault team crashed through the hotel room door and pulled her off. However, they never caught the mobster committing crimes on tape, and they blamed Lin for screwing up the operation. Now she was exiled to a desk job in Washington.

  “This is bigger than just a terrorist attack. It’s also the most significant political assassination since JFK,” said the academic, leaping in before the news anchor could even ask a question.

  “Who’s behind it?” asked the news anchor.

  “Clearly it’s the work of radical Islamic terrorists,” said the young think tanker, then rattled off a list of possible terrorist groups that few had ever heard of.

  “Concur,” interrupted the retired general, gruffly. “We’ve been picking up chatter for the last few years about plans for a big attack on U.S. soil. ISIS and cousin groups have expressed a desire for a 9/11-type attack to rally the extremist world. This was it.”

  “Told ya,” said one FBI agent. Others nodded. A few had done tours in the Middle East, where the FBI had offices in U.S. embassies.

  “Do you think there will be more attacks?” asked the news anchor.

  “We must assume so,” replied the general.

  The pundits sat in silence for a second, as did the break room, absorbing the gravity of the statement. All knew it to be true, but somehow hearing it aloud made it real.

  “What is scarier,” said the academic pundit, hijacking the conversation again, “is this was an attempted presidential assassination. The president was scheduled to speak at today’s prayer breakfast, not the vice president. The only reason it failed was because the president canceled at the last minute, sending his VP instead.”

  “Indeed,” said the think tanker, as if it was his idea. “Think of the propaganda victory it would have been for the terrorists, if they had actually assassinated the president.”

  The news anchor kept trying to get a word in but was edged out by the dueling pundits.

  “In the nation’s capital! It would have been a rallying cry for every terrorist organization in the world. It shows the world that we are vulnerable,” said the academic.

  “It already is a rally cry,” concluded the think tanker, a little smug. “We should expect more attacks.”

  “I would not jump to any conclusions. Nothing followed the 9/11 attacks. Plus, our law enforcement has been training for this moment for years and is on high alert. If there is another planned attack, I have high confidence our law enforcement will foil it.”

  The think tanker frowned, checkmated by the academic. He disagreed but didn’t want to declare U.S. law enforcement incapable on national news during a moment of crisis. Few would welcome such a line, and, like all pundits, he lived for applause.

  “General, this seemed like a fairly sophisticated attack,” said the anchorwoman, finally breaking into the conversation. “Are terrorists really capable of such things? Could it not be a foreign power like Russia, China, or Iran?”

  “Certainly, those powers could have done so, but I doubt it,” answered the retired general.

  “Why is that?” asked the anchorwoman.

  “Because they know we’d eventually figure it out and there would be reprisals. But terrorists don’t care about such things,” said the retired general.

  “Yes, but—” interrupted the bow tie.

  “That may be—” added the think tanker, leaning in. Both were ignored.

  “Still, are terrorists really capable of this level of attack?” the anchorwoman asked. “It’s far more sophisticated than anything we have seen before, at least in this country.”

  “Yes, it is possible and even likely,” said the general, also ignoring the academic and think tanker. “Terrorist groups have been growing in sophistication ever since 9/11. They no longer need to weaponize commercia
l airliners, as their capabilities and organizations mature despite our best efforts. For every leader we kill or network we disrupt, three more pop up to replace them. We can’t kill our way out of the problem.”

  “It’s definitely al Qaeda or one of their franchise groups,” said one of the FBI agents. Others nodded in agreement, but Jen Lin knew better. While her colleagues spent most of their careers chasing terrorists, she had spent her time hunting other things in the complicated shadows. Bad things.

  “Wrong. Terrorists didn’t do this,” she said. “Russia did.”

  Two men laughed under their breath while another scoffed, “That’s crazy, Lin. Russia would never do it because it would be an act of war. Even they’re not that stupid. Besides, it profiles as terrorism.”

  Lin stood her ground. “Don’t be so sure. Strategic deception is the Russian way of war. They even have a name for it: maskirovka.”

  The man chuckled as the group dissipated, leaving her alone in the room. Idiots, she thought.

  Chapter 4

  National Security Advisor George Jackson sat at the head of the table, hands clasped together under his nose, concealing a frown. Jackson was a gaunt man of average height, with wisps of white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked more like a history professor than a history maker, and he dressed the part, too, eschewing power suits in favor of tweed sport coats with elbow patches and a bow tie. Jackson could think in whole paragraphs, and he spoke with a slight Boston Brahmin accent that revealed an Ivy League pedigree. Yet he was tough, and those who mistook his genteel mannerisms for weakness were soon checkmated. White House staff nicknamed him Yoda.