Splinter Self

by S L Shelton

  As Mac and BeauLac were thrown to the ground at rifle point, Temple leaned forward, hands in the air. “I’d love to comply,” he said to a young Marine, screaming at him to get out. “But if I lean toward you, I’ll just fall out…I don’t have the use of my legs.”

  “Get out now, sir. Exit the vehicle,” the Marine yelled in an impressive command tone.

  Temple smiled and leaned out the door. “Okay, okay. But if you could, my wheelchair is in the trunk.”

  The Marine didn’t seem to know how to handle that bit of information and looked to one of the suited security men.

  “Help him,” the man said and reached out, taking the Marine’s rifle.

  As the Marine slipped his arm around his waist, Temple leaned on him and whispered, “That big guy is Petty Officer McIntyre…a decorated war hero. And he’s wounded. Do you think you could ask your friends to go easy on him?”

  The Marine craned his neck over the hood of the car and watched as three men pushed Mac to the pavement, two sets of knees pressed to his back. “That swabby is wounded. Go easy,” the Marine said.

  They appeared to ease off of Mac after that, relying on his good behavior rather than brute force to manage him. When they lifted him to his feet, a dark red stain spread out across his white buttoned-down shirt from his belly wound. “We need medical assistance down here,” one of the men called up the consulate stairs.

  Temple relaxed. Everything seemed to be going as he envisioned it. The next step would be the hard part—convincing Consul General Beverly Martin that she needed to lock the consulate down for seventy-two hours without intervening forces breaking that firewall. The attack on BeauLac’s transport just outside of the Consulate should help her make the right decision.

  After the Marine had Temple settled in his wheelchair, they wheeled him to the main entrance while escorting BeauLac and Mac through a side entrance. Mac shot Temple a worried glance, but Temple winked at him, hinting that all would be fine. Mac didn’t appear less worried after the gesture and disappeared through the side door, flanked by two plainclothes security men.

  As the Marine pushed Temple through the grand foyer, Consul General Martin appeared from a side door. “Well, ain't you just Santa Clause in May,” she said in her startling south Texas drawl, grinning broadly and walking toward him, arms wide as if she were about to hug him. She stopped in front of him and instead, put her hands on her hips. “How are ya, John? Ya look like shit.”

  “I feel like shit,” he replied, grinning, and extending his hand.

  She grasped it in both hands and held it gently. “I’m so sorry about Director Burgess. I know you two were close.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Martin.”

  She glanced down at his wheelchair then back to his face, her sympathetic smile suddenly carrying a trace of sadness. “Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

  “You can start by executing a seventy-two-hour lockout protocol,” he said, still smiling but with a practiced, serious glint in his eye. “Someone, somewhere between my phone and the front gate, gave us away.”

  She stood straight and looked out the foyer windows before returning her attention to Temple. “Are you sure they didn’t just come in with you? You’ve been hanging around some unsavory types the past few months.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Temple replied, leaning close and bidding her to do the same with his outstretched hand. “The elderly gentleman with us was with the organization behind the missile attack on the Secretary of State and Director Burgess in February.”

  Beverly’s eyes flashed wide for the briefest of instants then returned to her mask of diplomatic cool. “Was this a sanctioned capture? We’re in the EU, John.”

  John looked around at the armed response unit, still gathered around the pair. “Can we talk somewhere more private?”

  “Of course,” she said soberly. “Let’s go to my office.”

  A security man grasped the handles of Temple’s chair, but Beverly moved around to take it. “I’ve got him. Go ahead and lock us down for now. I’ll let you know the extent of it as soon as I know what we’re facing.”

  The security man nodded and moved off with the others. Beverly rolled Temple to the lobby elevator and waited as the lift came down. “I can only assume you brought this to me because you think I’ll be more gravy than beans for you.”

  Temple chuckled. “I came to you because you were the only one on this side of Europe I’m fairly confident hasn’t been compromised.”

  “Compromised?! That’s a fairly heavy accusation.”

  Temple nodded as the elevator doors slid open. “It gets heavier.”

  She rolled his chair in then hit the third floor button. Temple reached out and hit the kill switch. She looked down at him, confused.

  “The money that Scott Wolfe is accused of stealing was a Justice Department, CIA sanctioned Operation,” Temple said in a quiet voice. “It wasn’t until the witness they captured was rescued by rogue operators within the government that this was classified as a theft, and Wolfe declared a traitor.”

  “I figured there was some serious horse shit goin’ on, but how does a joint DOJ/CIA operation suddenly get flagged as a rogue Op?”

  “Well, it could have something to do with the hundred and ten billion dollars in operational funds that Scott captured.”

  For the second time in as many minutes, her eyes flashed wide for an instant. “A hundred and ten billion dollars?”

  Temple nodded. “And you’ll find as you interview Monsieur BeauLac, that it—”

  “BeauLac?! The billionaire? Adolphe BeauLac?!”

  Temple nodded. “You’ll find that he wasn’t captured by Scott Wolfe, but rescued by him.”

  Beverly looked up, staring blankly at the wall of the elevator, then leaned against the rail. “There’s an international warrant out for Wolfe, claiming he murdered BeauLac when he demolished his estate house.”

  Temple nodded. “I know. So how deep do you think that hundred billion was drilling into our government if a sanctioned operation to defund an organization, suddenly vanished from the books and everyone involved in the investigation were suddenly declared traitors or died under mysterious circumstances?”

  “John…do you know what you’re sayin’? There’s no way in hell a backwater Consul General is gonna be able to help you outta this mess.”

  Temple stared at her, still smiling.

  “You’d have been better off stayin’ out in the cold. You’re trapped now,” she said, desperation in her tone. “I can’t do anything without approval from the Secretary of State. I’m under standing orders to hand you all in if you show up on my doorstep. Every embassy, consulate, and mission is.”

  “I think after you’ve talked to BeauLac and have seen the evidence, you’ll be able to convince the Secretary to err on the side of caution…as you should right now. Those guns that showed up on your doorstep didn’t just happen across us in the street,” he said as he painted his case to her with tone and expression. “Someone was listening in who shouldn’t have been able to. We were encrypted.”

  She just stared at him.

  “Unless you mentioned it to someone.”

  And angry crease formed on her brow. “I hope you know me better than that.”

  He nodded. “I do. That’s why I’m here, in an elevator with you instead of on the front steps of the DOJ.”

  She breathed out a long woeful sigh between pursed lips. After a moment, she nodded. “Alright, damn it. I’ll lock us down until we can get the evidence to State.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of pressure to release us to the CIA.”

  She grinned. “They can bring all the pressure they want. This is my briar patch.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say…in fact, bet my life on it.”

  She patted his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re alive, John. I don’t mind you knowin’ I shed a few tears when I heard you were at Langley when it blew.”


  “Thanks, Beverly. Hopefully, I’ll still be around when this is all over and we can catch up.”

  She smiled broadly as she reached over him to restart the elevator. “That’d be nice, John. Somethin’ that doesn’t involve SpecOps and traitors, I hope.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  thirteen

  Friday, May 6th

  2:15 a.m. — The Casey Residence, Great Falls, Virginia

  MICHAEL CASEY woke to a noise out of place. Beside him, his wife slumbered peacefully under the covers. His first thought was that one of his two children had come into the room, so he reached over and turned on the light.

  His sight still blurry from sleep, he panicked upon seeing a man sitting in the chair at the corner of the bedroom. Casey reached for the drawer containing his service weapon, a SIG Sauer P229. His hand closed on empty air.

  He looked at the man, poised on the edge of violence when a flash of recognition hit him. Sitting in his bedroom in the middle of the night, with Casey’s own weapon resting unthreateningly in his lap, was his former martial arts instructor, Garret Kobe.

  “Wh—”

  Kobe lifted his finger to his lips then nodded toward the bedroom door. Without waiting for a reply, he got up and walked out, silent as a shadow.

  More than a little disconcerted, he was nonetheless very curious about the simultaneously threatening and yet passive actions of the hand-to-hand master. Casey grabbed his robe from the end of the bed and shut off the light before quietly leaving the bedroom.

  He walked down the stairs to find Kobe standing in the kitchen, helping himself to a beer from Casey’s refrigerator. Not wanting to feel totally out of control, Casey reached into the false back of the bookcase at the kitchen door for another weapon. Again, he found nothing.

  “It’s on the counter with the other three,” Kobe said, taking a sip of beer, then offering one to Casey with the other hand.

  “Why are you here?”

  “It’s a long story,” Kobe replied, sitting on a barstool at the center island between Casey and his weapons. “But the punch line is the same as the short version…you’ve got some murderin’, treasonous, shit-bags on your presidential protection detail.”

  Casey sat on the stool next to him and took the beer. “That’s a serious allegation. Do you have some evidence that goes along with this conspiracy theory?”

  “I don’t,” Kobe said, then nodded toward the mudroom off the end of the kitchen. “But he does.”

  Casey spun around. Another familiar face—this one not as friendly. “Nick Horiatis…I thought you were dead.”

  “I’ve been getting that a lot recently.” Nick walked to the opposite side of the center island and leaned forward, placing yet another of Casey’s stashed weapons on the counter. “This isn’t a conspiracy theory…it’s an actual conspiracy. And your team has been rolled into it whether you wanted it to be or not.”

  Casey had felt nervous about the DHS additions to his team. Between plainclothes and CAT tactical, over two dozen new faces had been worked into the schedule with no Secret Service screening. “Proof,” he said, anger rising. “I know something is going on, but unless I have proof, I can’t take it to anyone.”

  Nick shook his head. “You can’t take it to anyone regardless. It’s not just the Secret Service that’s been infiltrated.”

  “So, what? I’m supposed to fake my death like you did and go off grid?”

  Nick’s lips tightened and his nose crinkled in suppressed anger at the insult. “I didn’t fake my death, you god d—”

  “Be nice,” Kobe said, pointing a judgmental finger at Nick.

  Nick straightened his posture and took a short sharp breath through his nose. “At least five of the men on your team were present the night that Ned Richards came in, assaulted John Temple, then left him for dead before Langley blew.”

  “And you know this because…”

  “I know this because I was there, covered in the same rubble that fell on top of John Temple and killed all of our analysts.”

  Casey nodded thoughtfully. “While I don’t doubt your word on the matter, I’m afraid your word isn’t going to change anything.”

  Nick slid an iPad to Casey, its screen showing corridor video at Langley the night of the explosion. In that video, he recognized three of his new protection detail. He watched as the men flanked Richards into and then out of John Temple’s office.

  “That’s not all,” Nick said, then reached over and forwarded to the next video.

  In that clip, men unloading computer boxes in a hallway were stopped by CIA Director Burgess. One of the men cracked Burgess over the head before they resumed their stacking, covering Burgess with the boxes. He paused the video as one of the men turned to look down the hall—he recognized that face as being the senior Agent recently added to the presidential protection detail—Rourke Dokken.

  “Those boxes you see, are the source of the explosion,” Nick added.

  “Where did these come from? DOJ said that all internal video storage had been destroyed by the blast.”

  “That’s not the only thing they’ve been lying about.”

  Casey leaned back and stared at the still frame, rubbing one side of his face with his open hand. He shook his head. “We need to go to DOJ with this.”

  Nick leaned forward, grinding his molars while attempting to smile. Suppressing anger was obviously not one of his strong suits. “Were you listening? DOJ made the investigation disappear.”

  “The entire Department of Justice made it disappear?” Casey asked rhetorically. “Because it sounds to me like there are traitors in our midst, and you want me to keep it a secret.”

  “We don’t know who’s been compromised,” Kobe said.

  Casey stabbed his finger angrily into the screen of the iPad. “These guys…these guys have been compromised.”

  Nick nodded. “Yeah. But they didn’t get where they are on their own. We don’t know what offices have traitors, and we don’t know how compromised internal communications are.”

  Casey breathed a long stream through his nose trying to calm down.

  “That’s why we had to come here instead of calling or showing up at the White House,” Nick added.

  Casey’s head jerked up, glaring at Nick. “My house…my family. You couldn’t have thought of something a little less threatening to me?”

  “We aren’t that bright,” Kobe said with a smirk. “It’s the best we could come up with after half a bottle of scotch.”

  “Is this a joke?!” Casey snapped. “You break into my house while my family is here, to show me this shit and then expect me to just roll with it? Keep my mouth shut? Not follow my chain of command?!”

  Nick tipped his head back and forth a few times then nodded. “Yeah. Basically.”

  “You’re lucky you swept up all my weapons,” Casey said through clenched teeth.

  “Hey, man, POTUS is your guy,” Nick said. “I’m dead. I don’t have a president anymore. But if it makes you feel like you have your balls back, then here.” He slid one of Casey’s 229s across the counter. It stopped an inch from Casey’s arm.

  Casey stared at it for a second then snatched it from the counter and yanked the slide back. In the time, it took the round that left the chamber to hit the counter, the barrel was level with Nick’s nose.

  Nick didn’t even flinch.

  “You came into my house,” Casey said.

  Nick nodded. “We sure did. We figured that once you knew there was a massive coup d'état going down, you’d appreciate if the operators in your outfit, didn’t know that you knew about them.” Nick tapped the video of the corridor lined with computers just as they exploded, pausing the fire while there was still video to see. “They have gone after families to get their way before.”

  Casey sat back again and lowered his weapon. Nick rolled the hollow-point round that had been ejected across the counter, absently, not looking Casey in the eye.

  He was wa
iting. Casey guessed he was waiting for capitulation—but he wasn’t going to get it.

  “I have to take it to someone,” Casey said finally.

  Nick shrugged. “Your prerogative. But you might want to take the fam somewhere safe before you do.”

  Casey clenched his jaw. If Kobe weren’t present, Casey would knock Nick’s teeth in for repeatedly bringing his family into the conversation. “So, what? I have to just trust you with the President’s life?”

  Kobe put his hands flat on the counter and stared at them, a slow, deliberate move he’d seen from the master before, taking the heat out of a conversation to offer sage advice.

  “Who’s your boss?” Kobe asked without looking from his fingers.

  “It’s muddy,” Casey replied. “There are a few differen—”

  “No,” Kobe said, looking up and smiling. “Who do you serve?”

  Casey nodded, understanding the direction this was about to take. “The President.”

  “And who in the White House chain of command had you look the other way while these low life, murderous, traitors were put under your command?”

  Casey blinked several times as the puzzle began to take shape. Kobe obviously knew the answer before he asked, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked. “The Chief of Staff.”

  Kobe nodded. “Who gets to see the President without the Chief of Staff knowing about it?”

  “No one.”

  Kobe tipped his head sideways, an ironic grin bending one side of his mouth. “No one?”

  “His family and his protection detail.”

  Kobe smiled. “That’s right. And who is the head of his protecti—”

  “I’m not a child, Kobe. Tell me what you think the solution is.”

  Kobe looked at Nick and lifted an eyebrow, inviting him to jump in.

  Nick pulled the iPad back toward him, closed the video, and pulled up a text document. “When and where would be the most private place you could approach the President and show him what we’ve shown you tonight?”

  “I could do it in the Oval, tomorrow.”