Foster sat there thinking about this. “It might work. But how will the collateral damage thing work?’
“We’ve blamed everything else on Bunting, why not this too? It’s natural enough. They’re bitter rivals. Everyone knows that. The evidence of Bunting’s obsession with Quantrell will be easy enough to produce.”
“So we take out Quantrell and frame Bunting for it?”
“Yes.”
“But Kelly Paul said he was long gone.”
“You actually believed everything she told you?”
“Well… I mean.” She stopped, looked embarrassed. “I’m losing a bit of control here, aren’t I?” she said sheepishly.
“You’re under a lot of stress. But you need to push through it, Secretary Foster, if you really want to survive this.”
“Please sit down, James. You look uncomfortable standing there.”
Harkes sat.
“How do we go about doing it?” she asked earnestly.
Harkes said, “Here’s how the playing field shakes out, at least as I see it. Bunting must still be around.”
“Why?”
“He’s not the sort to walk away with his tail between his legs. For all we know he’s actually working with Kelly Paul and her crew.”
“Paul? But why?”
“Bunting met with Sean King. After that I sat him down and threatened him and his family if he did it again. Then he concocts the fake suicide attempt by his wife and does a bunk. If he were going to flee he would’ve taken his family with him. Even you admitted that he really cares about them.”
“I guess that does make sense,” conceded Foster.
“And think about the fact that he’d met with King and then planned this whole subterfuge with his family shortly thereafter.”
“Not a coincidence?” said Foster.
“Not even close. The other salient points line up nicely. King and Maxwell are working to help Edgar Roy. They actually visited Cutter’s Rock with Kelly Paul. They’re obviously in this together. And Bunting is in it with them.”
“And his motivation?”
“Bluntly put, Madame Secretary, he’s innocent. He knows it and he’s probably convinced them that he is, too. And King and Maxwell now likely know that Roy didn’t kill anybody. Bunting has few options left. Paul and probably King and Maxwell must’ve offered him a way out. What that is I don’t know yet.”
“I wish we had confirmation of your theory that they’re all working together.”
“Paul coming to New York was really confirmation of that.”
“What do you mean?” she said sharply.
“She used Mrs. Bunting’s ticket to get into the fund-raiser. We knew Paul and King and Maxwell had teamed up and now we have a direct connect between Paul and Bunting: the ticket.”
“Oh, shit. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
“That’s why you have me,” Harkes said.
She smiled and touched his hand. “Yes, yes it is.”
“If we had some bait to draw them out. Something that they value. It would go a long way to helping me put this together in the right way.” He looked at her expectantly.
“I think I might have just what we need,” she said.
She powered on the electronic tablet in front of her, hit a few keys, and spun the screen around for Harkes to see. It was an image of a room with someone in it.
“My ace in the hole,” she said.
The floors and walls were concrete. There was one bunk bed and a toilet in the corner. The person sat on the bed.
Megan Riley hardly looked herself.
CHAPTER
78
OUTSIDE THE FARMHOUSE the sun had dropped low, throwing shadows through the windows. It would be fully dark soon. Sean put some more wood on the fire and stoked it. When he sat down Roy said, “Kel told you about the E-Program, obviously.”
“Yes,” said Sean.
“How about the Wall?”
“Not really.”
“The Wall is all the data delivered in one fell swoop. I sit in front of a giant screen for twelve hours a day taking it all in.”
“When you say all the data, exactly what does that mean?” asked Michelle.
“It literally means everything collected by US intelligence operations and various allies overseas who share intel with us.”
“Isn’t that a lot of information?” asked Sean.
“More than you can imagine, really.”
“And you look at it and do what?” asked Michelle.
“I analyze it and then put the pertinent pieces together and give my report. They vet my conclusions, and then it becomes part of the action plan of the United States on all relevant fronts. In fact the actions taken are pretty immediate.”
“You have a photographic memory,” Sean said. “An eidetic?”
“Something more than that,” said Roy modestly.
“How can it be more than photographic?” Michelle commented.
“True photographic memories are extremely rare. A lot of people can remember many things they’ve seen but not everything. And even for many eidetics the memory eventually fades as others replace it. I can never forget anything.”
“Never?” Sean said, looking at him skeptically.
“Unfortunately, people don’t realize that a lot of memories are ones you want to forget.”
“I can understand that,” said Michelle, drawing a sympathetic glance from Sean.
Sean said, “Mind if I test you?”
“I’m used to being tested.”
“What was the name of the police officer who arrested you in the barn?”
“Which one? There were five,” replied Roy.
“The first one to speak to you.”
“His nameplate said Gilbert,” replied Roy.
“Badge number?
“Eight-six-nine-three-four. His weapon was a Sig Sauer 9mm with a twelve-round mag. He had an ingrown nail on his right pinky. I can give you the other officers’ names and badge numbers if you want. And since this is a memory test, over the last two hundred and six miles of the trip we passed one hundred and sixty-eight vehicles. Would you like their license plate numbers starting from first to last? There were nineteen from New York, eleven from Tennessee, six from Kentucky, three from Ohio, seventeen from West Virginia, one each from Georgia, South Carolina, D.C., Maryland, Illinois, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, two from Florida, and the rest from Virginia. I can also tell you the number and descriptions of the occupants of each vehicle. I can break it down by state if you want.”
Michelle gaped and said, “I can’t even remember what I was doing last week. How do you keep all that in your head?”
“I can see it in my head. I just have to dial it up.”
“Like index cards in your mind?”
“No, more like a DVD. I can see everything flowing. Then I can hit stop, pause, fast-forward, or reverse.”
Sean still looked skeptical. “Okay, describe the outside of this house, the barn, and the land around it.”
Roy swiftly did so, finishing with “There are one thousand six hundred and fourteen shingles on the east side of the barn’s roof. The fourth shingle over in the second row from the top is missing, as is the sixteenth one on the ninth row counting from the front. And the hinge on the left front door of the barn is new. There are forty-one trees in the field on the east side of the house. Six are dead and four more are dying; the largest of those is a Southern magnolia. My sister obviously is not into landscape maintenance.”
“Last four presidents of Uzbekistan?”
“A trick question, obviously. There has only been one since the office was established in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. Islam Karimov is the current officeholder.” He gazed at Sean with a knowing look. “You picked Uzbekistan because it was the most obscure one you could think of at the moment?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Roy said, “But it’s not just about memorizing data. You have to do
something with it.”
“Give us an example,” said Michelle.
“After analyzing the data on the Wall, I told our government to help the Afghans increase poppy production.”
“Why would you do that? It’s used to make opium, which is the main ingredient in heroin,” said Sean.
“Afghanistan had a blight when I first came on board at the E-Program. It knocked poppy production down thirty percent.”
“But isn’t that a good thing?” asked Michelle.
“Not really. When you have a shortage of something, what happens?”
“The price of the commodity goes up,” answered Sean.
“Right. The Taliban derive ninety-two percent of their revenue from the opium poppy sales. Because of the blight their income went up nearly sixty percent. It gave them a lot more resources to hurt us. It was speculated in the media that NATO had intentionally introduced the blight in an effort to destroy the poppy production. I conjectured that it was the Taliban that actually did so to cause the prices to skyrocket.”
“Why did you think that?” asked Sean.
“On the Wall was an article published in an obscure agricultural journal. It mentioned a scientist whom I recognized as a sympathizer for the Taliban. The article stated that this scientist had traveled to India where it’s believed the blight originated about six months before it appeared in Helmand and Kandahar. He brought the source of the blight back and the Taliban caused the blight to jack up prices. So it was my recommendation for the US to stop the blight from happening again and to allow more land for poppy production. Now the Taliban’s income is projected to fall by half next year. But I also have a little surprise planned for them.”
“Which is?”
“We’ve introduced a hybrid seed into the poppy plant production in Afghanistan. The poppies turn out just fine. However, when you try to use those poppies to make heroin you end up with something far closer to aspirin. So the poppy becomes what it always was supposed to be, a pretty plant.”
“And you proposed that?” asked Michelle. “How?”
“The Wall provides me with everything, but I supplement it with things that I learn on my own. The hybrid at first glance didn’t seem to be anything special when I read about it. It wasn’t even being discussed in the context of poppy production and certainly not in the effort against the Taliban. But when I learned of it and saw that it could be extended to such an effort I proposed it as a tactical maneuver with potentially strategic implications.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sean.
Roy readjusted his glasses. He looked like the absentminded professor addressing a class. “Because now it goes far beyond mere supply and demand and price points. If the criminal element knows it can’t rely on the integrity of Afghan poppy production it won’t buy from them under any circumstances. It also has the added benefit of the drug cartels being very angry with the Taliban for ruining a year’s worth of heroin production. That’s billions of dollars. The cartel will take its revenge with the result that many of the Taliban’s higher-ups will end up dead. With poppy production out of play other crop possibilities become viable, none of which will yield nearly the same amount of money to terrorists fighting us. Farmers will still be able to make a decent living, and the cartel will have to search for another source of heroin ingredients. Win-win for us.”
“Pretty impressive,” said Michelle.
“I can see the forest and every tree in it. It’s an ecosystem of sorts where everything impacts everything else. I can see how things connect to one another, no matter how unconnected they might seem.”
Michelle sat back. “You would absolutely rock on Jeopardy.”
Roy looked alarmed at the thought. “No, I’d be too nervous. I’d get tongue-tied.”
“Nervous?” exclaimed Sean. “That’s just a game show. You’re deciding policy for the United States of America.”
“But I’m not competing with anyone. It’s just me. It’s not the same.”
“If you say so,” replied Sean, who looked thoroughly unconvinced of this.
“We have satellites positioned all around the globe. Much of what I see on the Wall are real-time video of events in every country.” He paused. “It’s a little like being God peering down at his creations, seeing what they’re up to, and then flinging down fire and brimstone to those who most deserve it. I don’t really care for that part of it.”
Michelle stared into the fire. “I bet. And it creeps me out that there are people watching everything you do from hundreds of miles up.”
Sean said, “They’re not watching everybody and everything, Michelle. With over six billion people on the planet that would be impossible.”
She looked at Sean. “Oh yeah? Well, they can keep eyes on whoever they want to. Remember when we went out to Edgar’s house? No one followed us. No one could have seen us from the ground. But those goons still showed up. They knew we were there somehow. I bet they have eyes in the sky on Edgar’s home.”
Roy looked at her and said, “Eyes in the sky on my house?”
She said, “Yep. As far as I can see it’s the only way it could have worked.”
In the firelight Roy’s eyes seemed magnified behind the glasses. “Do you think the satellite was watching my house 24/7?”
Sean glanced at Michelle. He said, “Twenty-four/seven? I don’t know. Why?”
Roy just kept staring at the fire and didn’t say anything.
Finally what he was getting at dawned on Sean. He said, “Hold on. If that’s the case, how did the satellite not see the people planting the bodies in your barn?”
Roy stirred and turned to him. “There can only be one answer to that, of course. Someone ordered the satellite to look away at the precise time it was being done.”
“That would leave a paper trail. And that would take some pretty heavy authorization,” said Sean.
“Like the secretary of DHS,” said Roy.
CHAPTER
79
“GIVE ME THE status. Bad?”
Mason Quantrell sat in a deep leather seat of his luxurious private jet that was actually a Boeing 787 Dreamliner customized for its fortunate owner. It had a painting of the fleet-footed Mercury on its tail representing the symbol of Quantrell’s company. The jet was far larger and more costly than Peter Bunting’s Gulfstream G550. Yet as a billionaire Mason Quantrell could easily afford the most expensive toys on the market. And in truth Uncle Sam had footed a large part of its cost.
“Pretty bad,” replied the only other person in the passenger cabin.
James Harkes sat back and sipped a glass of water while Quantrell was already working on his second bourbon and water. The CEO looked haggard, with quarter-moon bags under his eyes.
“She’s going to come at you hard, Mr. Quantrell.”
Quantrell spread his hands helplessly. “But after our last meeting things seemed fine. And then I got the call from Bunting. Right in my office, no less. The ballsy prick. He dared us to trace him.”
“And you couldn’t?”
“No,” Quantrell said glumly. “The bastard was always good at the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Did you know I recruited him out of the PhD program at Stanford?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“He was in Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship before that. He did college in less than three years. Was already on people’s radars for some white papers he’d published on the rising threat of global terrorism and how best to deal with it. The work was very specific. He very nearly predicted 9/11 twenty years before it happened.”
“So he came to work for you?”
Quantrell nodded as the plane banked left and began its initial descent. “For three years. He did a great job, really turned things around for us. Hell, I was grooming him back then to run the whole damn company. But he had other ideas.”
“The E-Program? Seems like you would have jumped on that.”
“I would have but he never gave me the chance. He left, start
ed his own business, and quickly moved up the pecking order of contractors. I have to admit his stuff was good. No, it was better than good. And then he took it up to a whole other level with the E-Program.”
“Ecclesiastes,” said Harkes. “The E-Program?”
“What? Oh, right. Didn’t know the man had a biblical side to him.” Quantrell downed the rest of his drink. “And then he sold the concept to the folks that mattered in D.C. Now the rest of us have been eating his dust for years.”
“Ever think of suing?”
“No grounds. He developed the stuff after he left me and he never violated the noncompete we had. Way too smart for that. No, I hate him because I don’t like to lose. And with him around I’ve been losing. A lot.” He put his empty glass down and buckled his seat belt as the plane hit some turbulence. “But Ellen Foster can hurt me a lot more. And I’m not talking just dollars and cents.”
“Yes she can,” agreed Harkes.
“President gave her carte blanche.”
“Yes he did.”
“Collateral damage? Meaning me?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“But she has to tie it into Bunting and the others. How does she plan to get to them?”
“She has an ace in the hole,” noted Harkes.
“Who?”
“Megan Riley.”
Quantrell sat forward, looking astonished. “The lawyer? She’s one of Ellen’s people?”
“No. She was kidnapped from Maine. Foster is holding her somewhere.”
Quantrell rubbed his chin. “This really is extraordinary.”
“Yes it is,” agreed Harkes.
“She kept me out of the loop on that.”
“Me too, until now.”
“And Foster is planning to use her to get to Bunting and the others? How?”
“Playing on their guilt. And their conscience. Riley is an innocent victim in all this. If it’s played right, we can use her to draw them out.”
“And Foster wants to survive all this with her reputation and Cabinet position in place?”
“Yes she does. I told her it would be hard but not impossible.”
“Does she require my termination as part of the plan?”
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