“Fuck the sanctions,” Parker said, his face reddening with anger. “You know better than most people in this town that the guys in the White House bubble don’t have any idea what the hell is going on in the real world. Kane, Bloom, Falcone, the whole crew. We know because we live and die in that real world. Look what happened to you.”
Morton, like Parker, was a retired officer. His Navy career included command of a nuclear-powered submarine designed to carry SEALs on covert operations under the Special Forces Command. Parker thought of Morton as Jonah, who had also turned down a mission but later distinguished himself.
God had commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh; instead, he headed for Joppa and wound up in the belly of a whale. Morton had refused to land terrorist-hunting SEALs in Somalia because he believed they were not sufficiently backed up and their exit was not well planned.
Morton had stormed into the office of the Secretary of the Navy, who had known no more about what the SEALs were doing than what he knew about the seals in the Washington Zoo. But the secretary did know that Navy officers are not supposed to act the way Morton did, and began the paperwork to have Morton quietly relieved of command.
Morton immediately retired. The mission he had renounced was carried out by another submarine commander, according to rules laid down by the White House, through the National Security Council. The SEALs were captured and all were beheaded. Their next of kin were told they died in a training accident in the sea off Okinawa and their bodies were not recovered.
Morton, like many high-ranking military officers and members of both Houses of Congress, belonged to The Brethren. In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, their counterparts would have been Masons, whose rituals and secret handshakes had united them into a fraternity of power.
The Masons had left their mark on Washington—the massive Masonic temple on Sixteenth Street, the inscribed inner stones of the Washington Monument, the cornerstone of the Capitol, dedicated with Masonic rites. But members of The Brethren had not yet made their mark.
Now had come the mission.
*
“WE’RE going to make history for The Brethren, Jonah,” Parker said. Morton scowled for a moment. It always took Morton a little while to accept Parker’s order that real names not be used during their meetings.
Parker glanced at his digital watch. The meeting was to begin in twelve minutes. As usual, Jonah was the first to arrive. If military men learned anything, they learned that punctuality meant arriving early.
The door chime pealed, and Parker went to the door to admit Malachi. His name in the world beyond The Brethren was Ed Hudson. He had been a Navy SEAL assigned to one of Parker’s Special Forces units. When Parker went after him for the mission, Hudson was in Morgan City, Louisiana, working as a diver for oil rigs and sometimes helping out in salvages of sunken ships.
Over Hudson’s right shoulder Parker could see a low-slung Harley with black, steel-laced wheels. Hudson gave Parker a salute that cut the air between them like a knife, removed his fleece-collared leather jacket, and hung it on a coat rack in the corner of the hall. As usual, Parker noticed, Hudson had not worn a helmet.
Hudson strode to the couch without speaking to Parker or Morton. Parker had learned some time ago that Ed did not talk much and seemed to exist on his own planet of anger. Malachi had been a messenger of Jehovah, who carried the warning of God’s justice.
Ed Hudson is certainly a Malachi, Parker thought. For weeks the general had been going over the identities and skills of his men, weighing the choices he had made, remembering the interviews of dozens of Brethren who had answered his appeal for volunteers to serve under him for a mission he could not describe. None of them knew that Brethren high in the Pentagon had asked contractors for the Defense Intelligence Agency to do covert background investigations of the eight finalists.
Parker had rejected four good men for reasons he could only call intuition. Now, finally, he had his unit, which he called The Five. Under orders from Isaiah, Parker had given code names to himself and the four he commanded. The real names of the candidates and finalists were not on any piece of paper in Parker’s possession.
When Parker passed out the biblical code names, he had not particularly linked the names to the men’s attributes. But it seemed to him that there had been a divine instruction behind the names that Parker had chosen.
Parker looked at his watch again, and at the sound of a car door slamming, walked to a window and pulled back a curtain. A black Mercedes pulled away and a slim man in jeans and a white sweater over a blue shirt walked rapidly up the metal stairs. Parker opened the door before the visitor’s hand reached it.
“As I’ve told you before,” Parker said in his command voice, “I wish you’d drive yourself here. I don’t like extra witnesses. And your driver, I believe, is not a citizen.”
“Well, General, and good evening to you. Akua, as a matter of fact, was born in the failed state of Ghana. For the past four years he has been a United States citizen. I’m surprised your vetters missed that.”
“Good evening, Hosea,” Parker said. He stood aside, and Hosea, known in financial circles as Norman Miller, walked past him. Hosea enthusiastically greeted the others as Al and Ed.
“Names, goddamnit, Hosea,” Parker yelled. Miller ignored him and sat down on the couch. He took his BlackBerry from its holster and flicked through messages.
“And put that goddamn thing away,” Parker shouted. “I’ve told you all before. No cell phones, no electronic gizmos in this house.”
Hosea-Miller stuck the BlackBerry in his pocket and audibly sighed. He was not used to taking orders.
*
MILLER was the only person Parker did not initially recruit. Shortly after the others had been selected, Parker received a call from the man he only knew as Isaiah. “You are progressing nicely,” Isaiah said after Parker’s terse report. “You will need one more man, a man who can handle the quiet transfer of money from, shall we say, here to there? There are payments you will be making, and they can only be paid by someone who knows the ways of handling invisible dollars. You will soon meet him. He will be known as Hosea.”
To Parker, Miller was an enigma, a withdrawn, secretive man who was also a well known public figure and the subject of a bestselling biography, Man of Many Paths. The book told of the rise of Miller, the son of observant Jews who began a wholesale clothing business in Brooklyn. He had reached the pinnacle of the financial world, but, famous as he was, he had an inner life that neither his biographer nor Parker ever penetrated.
As a young boy, Miller attended yeshiva, distinguishing himself for his brilliant mathematical mind. He graduated from Yale and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he studied comparative religions and philosophy. He then pursued an MBA at the Wharton School of Finance. During the 1980s, he was a boy wonder in the Treasury Department.
His wonder days were stimulating but financially unrewarding, so he decided to form a partnership with three of his friends who had served in the Office of Management and Budget and the Council of Economic Advisors. They established a private equity firm, True North, which became an overnight financial success.
Miller began to enjoy all the trappings of fabulous wealth: A 30,000-square-foot mansion in Potomac, Maryland. Closets containing dozens of Brioni suits, Patek Philippe and Cartier signature watches. A Gulfstream jet to take him to any one of his five homes around the world. A stable of race horses in Kentucky and an annex to his Florida home that housed a score of vintage cars, including a rare 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic, valued at $30 million.
Parker never paid much attention to supermarket gossip magazines. So Parker knew little about Miller’s past private life when they met at the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual Washington ritual that has been attended by every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. The breakfast, in the ballroom of a deluxe Washington hotel, draws about 3,500 people, including members of Congress and the cabinet, diplomats, religious
leaders, diplomats from many countries, and a who’s who of lobbyists, politicians, and other people who come not so much for the prayers as for a chance to show the kind of influential company they keep.
Although Brethren members were well represented, they did not sit as a bloc. Miller sought out Parker at the breakfast. As Parker remembered the meeting, Miller had walked up to him just before the grace, introduced himself, and said, “There is someone you know whom I also know. A person whose name we do not know.” Their assigned seats supposedly just happened to be next to each other.
Afterward, they met at the Four Seasons Hotel for coffee, where Miller guardedly mentioned that he was about to become “the treasurer of Operation Cyrus.” Miller’s use of the code word stunned Parker, who asked him if he knew who Isaiah was. Miller said he did not.
For a moment, Parker wondered if Miller was telling the truth. But Parker had been in many black ops for which he had possessed only need-to-know facts. And often that included not knowing the real names behind the cover names. To Parker, an op was like what Ecclesiastes said of life itself: it “comes without meaning, it departs in darkness, and in darkness its name is shrouded.”
A bit of discreet checking by Parker revealed that Miller had been investigated by the SEC but had been allowed to continue to run True North. And, though born and raised as a Jew, he had converted to Christianity and had become a member of The Brethren.
*
THE last to arrive was a balding, overweight, panting man wearing a long, black, oily Australian duster, whose collar bloomed into a cape. He seemed more tangled in the coat than wearing it. “Expected rain,” Dr. Michael Schiller said as he tried to hang up the duster, almost knocking over the coat rack in the entrance hall.
When Parker was passing out code names, Schiller had asked for Micah, quoting from the Book of Micah: “And the mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire.…”
Schiller is a strange one, Parker thought as the last of The Five dropped himself onto the couch.
Parker knew less about Schiller than any of the others. Schiller was in his mid-sixties and was about to end his career at the Department of Energy to become a vice president at a trade organization called Nuclear Renaissance, devoted to lobbying for more nuclear power plants.
Schiller’s wife, who had once worked on Senator Stanfield’s staff, had brought Schiller into The Brethren. She was one of the “Helpmates,” women who, unable to become members of The Brethren, served members by cooking meals for Brethren meetings and maintaining Brethren houses. Schiller’s convictions about The Brethren, it had seemed to Parker, were like those of a non-Catholic husband who agreed to convert to Catholicism just to please his wife. Still, Schiller was following orders and doing what he had promised to do.
Parker, in the process of picking men for his mission, had drawn on his training and experience in interrogation. He believed that he had a divinely bestowed talent not only for detecting deception but also for finding places where motives and excuses hid. He had gone to one of those places while questioning Schiller about his commitment to The Brethren. Now, looking at him on the couch, Parker recalled what Schiller had said.
*
THEY had been sitting in this room. Schiller’s wife, Margaret, was in the kitchen with another Brethren woman, preparing lunch.
“I can understand your doubts, General,” Schiller had said. “I am a physicist, and you think that makes me somehow automatically an atheist. On the very contrary, I do believe in God. I have been slightly, modestly involved in what is the biggest physics experiment in history—the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Not to go into the technical details, we are looking for an elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. But do you know what some of us call it? The God Particle.
“Some physicists—and I am certainly one of them—believe that if we can find and analyze the Higgs boson we might be able to find proof that the universe was created, that it came from nowhere, and that the nowhere is God.”
“That’s mighty heady for me, Doctor,” Parker said. “It’s a long way from The Brethren’s core belief in the power of Jesus Christ and his Covenant.”
“Oh, but it is easy for me to make that leap of faith, General. I see God as the source of all power. I believe in Jesus as I believe in the universes, the galaxies. Oh yes, General, I believe in power. Imagine a God who created atoms and gave them such power. Certainly if God could bring forth existence—existence itself!—then surely he could bring forth a son who would personify God’s power. Yes. Yes. I believe in Jesus, and I believe, in some strange way, he has brought me here—brought Margaret and me—to The Brethren to do his will.”
Ever since he heard those words Parker had trusted Michael Schiller. He, like Norman Miller, had not been a member of the great fraternity of those who had served in the armed forces. Although he was a total civilian and a strange one at that, Parker believed that he would be dedicated to the mission.
“Good evening, Amos,” Schiller said softly. And, Parker thought, he knows how to take orders.
Parker had chosen Amos for his own name because, when he first began planning the mission he had found these words in the Book of Amos: “… though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them.…”
As usual, Amos began the meeting by bowing his head and reciting the Twenty-seventh Psalm: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident. Amen.”
Parker looked up and said, “We are about to follow the light of the Lord. We will now go upstairs.” His cold eyes scanned the room. “Do not speak until we enter the skiff,” he ordered, using the acronym-derived word for a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. The others followed him up the stairs to the second floor.
Two rooms opened off the landing. Parker unlocked the door to the room on the left. The wooden door opened outward, revealing a metal door. There was a numeric keypad where a doorknob would ordinarily be. Parker tapped in six numbers, pushed open the heavy door, and touched a switch. The door quietly closed behind him and the others. Two tracks of ceiling lights went on, as did an unseen air-conditioning unit.
They entered what seemed to be a huge metal box. The floor and unadorned walls all dully reflected the overhead lights. In the center of the room was a metal table, its legs solid aluminum bars and its top a solid aluminum slab. It was designed to prevent the kind of taps that could be slipped into the recesses of conventional furniture. The six chairs around the table were similarly designed. On a metal table in a corner was a bulky computer whose emanations were also shielded.
When all had taken seats around the table, Parker, in his deep voice of command, recited the last words of the Twenty-seventh Psalm. “Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait I say, on the Lord.”
A ragged series of “Amen” responded.
Then Parker spoke in that same stern voice. “This will be the last time we will be together for some time,” he said. “We will discuss the operation here. I will give you your assignments. And then each of you will go his own way. If you have any need to communicate with me—and such a communication, I warn you, must be vital—use the code system I am providing you tonight. The code word for the operation has changed to Godspeed.”
18
FALCONE RELUCTANTLY left his penthouse terrace and walked into his bedroom to pack a suitcase. He picked up the remote and flicked on GNN’s ten o’clock news. He was listening but not watching the small screen on the TV near his bed when Stanfield’s voice suddenly boomed. Falcone instinctively looked up. Stanfield stood before rows of veterans wearing blue-and-gold overseas c
aps. No cap for Stanfield, Falcone thought. The son of a bitch is just a veteran of deferments.
Falcone picked up the remote, spun around, aimed it like a gun, and killed the commercial.
A couple of minutes after he finished packing, a member of his security detail buzzed the apartment. Falcone, carrying his suitcase and a briefcase, went to the foyer and pressed the button to the private penthouse elevator. He entered the elevator, and a camera in the ceiling moved slightly to record his departure. When the elevator door opened, Falcone was met by a man in a dark suit with a wire coiling out of his left ear.
“Good news from Andrews, sir,” the agent said. “Clear skies all the way.”
“‘Clear skies,’” Falcone said. “That has a nice sound, Sam.” The agent, knowing he could not touch the briefcase, took the suitcase, and they descended. Purring outside was the SUV that would take him to Andrews. Behind the SUV was a similar security vehicle as backup.
When Falcone reached Andrews, an Air Force colonel met the SUV and ushered Falcone and his security men into the VIP lounge, where coffee and sandwiches were laid out. The colonel, looking at his watch, quickly excused himself. “Rehearsal time,” he said.
“Weisman?” Falcone asked.
The colonel nodded. “Comes in Thursday. We’ve got five days to check off a list that’s a mile long—State Department protocol rules, Israeli Embassy rules, Secret Service, Israeli security, Mossad, the works.”
“Give Weisman my regards,” Falcone said, smiling. “I’m going to miss his arrival.”
Falcone was on his way to Delhi to meet with Atal Mishra, the national security advisor to the Indian prime minister. There had been another attack by the Pakistani Islamist group that had given itself the name Lashkar-e-Taiba, “Army of the Pure.” This time the targets were airliners landing at the Mumbai airport.
The terrorists not only failed to bring down any aircraft, but during a fierce firefight they lost more than a dozen men. India’s forces had been alerted by India’s highly dependable Defence Intelligence Agency, whose agents had learned of the attack a short time before the terrorists struck.
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