Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  Sam said nothing.

  “Now,” he continued, “the question of Michael O’Neill is something else to consider.”

  Sam said, “Oh?”

  “I can’t condone what Michael has done.”

  “You idiot,” O’Neill exploded. “Mudak. Zalupa.”53

  Sam cast a quick glance at O’Neill. The lawyer’s Russian was pretty good for someone who wasn’t supposed to speak any.

  “Michael O’Neill asked me to have you killed,” Rand Arthur continued. “The contents of that safe-deposit box belong to Michael, not to me. I swear it.”

  “Oh, Senator!” Ginny’s voice was so loud she startled herself. She looked at Forbes. “It’s not true, John.”

  “Not to worry, Ginny.” Forbes looked down at Rand Arthur. “So we won’t find your fingerprints on the money, Senator, or the inside of the lid?”

  The expression on Rand Arthur’s face told Sam the senator hadn’t thought of that particular detail.

  Forbes continued: “Or on the agreement form signed by the cop outside.”

  “That was Michael’s idea, too,” Rand Arthur said, his eyes imploring. “He panicked after Moscow—told me you were a double. Said everything was compromised and you had to be eliminated.”

  Sam looked contemptuously at Rand Arthur. “Tell me the truth, Senator. Give me something I can believe.”

  “You have to understand, Sam. I was telling the truth when I said I never gave them anything more than cocktail-party gossip. That’s all they asked for.”

  “How did they hook you, Senator?”

  Rand Arthur’s tone grew desperate. “I was never hooked, Sam.”

  Sam’s fingers rapped the metal box. “So you received what’s in here for being a nice guy.”

  Rand Arthur’s eyes swept from Sam to Forbes. “There was one thing and one thing only they ever asked me for.”

  “Which was?”

  “When I became chairman of SSCI—”

  Vacario said, “When you became chairman?”

  “I always knew, Ginny. I always knew I’d get the chairmanship if the elections went right.” Rand Arthur looked in her direction. “And even if I was only ranking member, I was still to put pressure on the White House to get rid of Nick Becker.”

  He swiveled toward Sam. “With justification, Sam. Believe me, I have been doing CIA oversight for six years now and the Agency is completely dysfunctional. Just look at everything that’s happened on Nick’s watch. CIA gave NATO the wrong coordinates, so we bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Until after we invaded Afghanistan, we had no unilateral assets there. We still have no unilateral assets in Iraq, either, Sam—not a one. They all belong to the Brits, the French, or to Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The station chief in Riyadh doesn’t even speak Arabic. The Moscow Station chief has two-level Russian—which means he speaks it like a four-year-old. I had no problem with that request, believe me, Sam. Nick Becker is an utter disaster.”

  “That was all?”

  “Everything.”

  It didn’t make sense. Sam hooked his head in Rand Arthur’s direction. “Senator,” he began, “the night back in 1993 you met Primakov. Did anyone from the Russian delegation speak to you?”

  “Just Primakov—on the receiving line.” Rand turned to Michael O’Neill. “Isn’t that right, Michael?” The senator swiveled back to face Sam. “Michael was with me that night.”

  Which is when the ten-thousand-watt flashbulb went off in Sam’s head. Rand Arthur wasn’t SCARAB. Rand was another in the long list of disposables. An agent of influence. A stooge. A puppet. Michael O’Neill was SCARAB. The degree of loathing and rage Sam felt at that instant could not be quantified. And then, like the pins falling into place when he’d picked the lock on Hart 211, Sam’s brain turned the plug and rolled the figurative dead bolt open. “Senator, whom would you have pushed to replace Nick Becker as DCI?”

  Rand Arthur blinked. “Why, Michael, of course. For years Michael has told me he wants the job. He would have gotten it, too.”

  That was Klimov’s goal. Charlotte had called it correctly. Everything had begun in Paris, when the Russians spotted, assessed, and recruited Michael O’Neill. Klimov’s long-term operation to put Moscow’s man on the seventh floor of Langley. Moscow’s man. Michael O’Neill. Sam’s protégé.

  Sam started to hyperventilate. He was so enraged he couldn’t bring himself to look at the … creature who’d betrayed him. Who’d lied every step of the way. Who’d blown the church mailbox op in Moscow on purpose. Who’d had Pavel Baranov murdered. And Edward Lee Howard. And Irina. And Alexei Semonov, and who knew how many others. “Senator—”

  Rand Arthur cut Sam off. “Isn’t that right, Michael?” The senator looked over to the desk where O’Neill had parked himself. “Michael has always said—oh, my God!”

  Sam jerked around. O’Neill was holding Sam’s suppressed Browning Hi-Power on his right thigh. The mouth of the briefcase at O’Neill’s feet was open.

  Sam’s eyes flashed toward John Forbes, whose expression instructed Sam not to do anything rash.

  “I told you never to talk about our secret handshake, Rand.” As the lawyer slid off the desk he brought the pistol up in a two-handed grip. He took two steps, bringing him six feet from Rand Arthur’s chair. The gun bucked in his hand as he shot the senator twice in the side of the head.

  Vacario screamed.

  Rand Arthur, already dead, twitched half a dozen times and then folded onto the floor.

  Sam started toward the lawyer, but O’Neill had already backed around behind Virginia Vacario. He put the fat suppressor muzzle up against her head. “Don’t screw with me, anybody.”

  He looked at John Forbes. “Take your pistol out, John, throw it on the couch, and step away to the fireplace.”

  Forbes did as instructed.

  “Now you, Sam.”

  “I don’t have a gun, Michael.” Sam had returned the backup pistol, as well as the bogus FBI ID and shield to Forbes as soon as they’d left the Idaho Avenue apartment.

  “Show me.”

  Sam opened his suit coat, spread the jacket wide, and turned all the way around.

  “Okay—stand with him.” O’Neill watched as Sam joined John Forbes by the fireplace. “Counselor, you walk with me to the door.” With O’Neill holding her by her upper arm, pistol muzzle to her head, the two of them started across the room.

  Action was useless of course. Sam had taken enough self-defense classes to understand that in the split second it would take to pull the Hi-Power’s single-action trigger, Ginny would be dead before he’d gotten five feet closer to O’Neill.

  The lawyer punched the cipher combination into the lock, opened the door, and backed out, pulling Vacario with him.

  Sam didn’t waste a millisecond. He dashed for the door, Forbes followed, picking up his pistol on the way and shoving it into its holster.

  The damn door opened inward. There was no way to kick it off its frame.

  Forbes said, “We knock the hinge pins out.” Then he looked at the hinges and saw the pins were enclosed.

  Sam said, “O’Neill won’t be taking the Mercedes very far, John. He has an escape plan—got to. That’s the tradecraft.”

  The G-man cocked his head. “How do you know?”

  “Edward Lee Howard. He disappeared from this room. Had a car stashed somewhere—probably in the same general area O’Neill has one stashed.”

  “How did Howard get away?”

  Sam pointed toward the window behind Rand Arthur’s desk. “He pried the lock.”

  The two men ran to the window. The cheap lock had been replaced with a heavy, double dead-bolt arrangement.

  Forbes said, “Jeezus, Elbridge.” He sprinted to the fireplace and grabbed the big brass poker from its rack. “Goddammit, Sam—time to rake and break.”

  Then he snatched one of the arm protectors off the big padded arm of the couch, vaulted onto the heavy credenza behind the desk, wrapped his left h
and with the arm protector, held the poker in a two-handed bayonet grip, thrust its tip through the upper-right-hand corner of the window, and using the wooden stile as a guide, raked the heavy shaft down the glass, across the bottom, then up the opposite stile and across the top rail, shattering the pane and splintering the wooden sash bars.

  “Follow me.” Forbes lunged over the glass through the empty frame. Sam was two steps behind, and like Forbes, plunged headfirst into the ornamental hedge of thornbushes planted outside.

  “Oh, goddammit to hell.” Sam brought his arm up to cover his eyes as he rolled onto the ground, found his footing, scrambled to his feet, and got his bearings. He looked left, then right, then pointed toward the side of the mansion leading to the front drive. “This way.”

  Forbes had his pistol drawn as they came around the corner. O’Neill still had Vacario by the arm. They were heading for the Mercedes. Just beyond them, he saw Desmond Reese.

  Sam shouted, “Michael—”

  Just as O’Neill brought the pistol up and fired half a dozen quick shots at the Capitol police officer. Sam could hear the suppressed shots popping as the rounds missed and ricocheted off the gravel. Reese rolled to his right and ducked behind the willow in the center of the circular driveway.

  Sam shouted, “Ginny—get down. Hit the deck!”

  Vacario twisted out of O’Neill’s grasp and fell prone. The lawyer tried to grab her arm and stand her up but she was deadweight now and not moving. He left her lying where she was and scrambled for his car.

  Forbes screamed at the top of his lungs, “Reese, Reese—O’Neill shot the senator. Stop him!” He dragged Sam to cover behind a tree. “Reese?” He dropped to one knee. “Christ, I think he was hit.”

  Sam snuck a look. O’Neill was crouched at the rear of the Mercedes, his left hand working under the bumper, the right still clutching the pistol. “Michael’s looking for a spare key.”

  That was when Reese emerged from behind the willow tree, his pistol in a two-handed combat grip. O’Neill looked up. But it was too late. The cop advanced, firing again and again until he’d emptied his gun into the lawyer. He stood above O’Neill’s corpse, dropped the magazine from his weapon, loaded a new one, released the slide to chamber a fresh round, then holstered the Glock. He rolled O’Neill over with his foot, knelt, roughly pinioned the dead man’s arms behind his back, and handcuffed the wrists together.

  Forbes and Sam emerged from behind cover. “I’ll deal with the police stuff, Elbridge,” Forbes rasped. “This has just become one bodaciously humongous crime scene. You go grab the lady.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “And take off all the spy crap.”

  “Wilco.” Sam the prosthetic, removed the mustache, hairpiece, and gloves, and jammed them into his pocket as he ran to where Vacario lay. Sam knelt, slipped an arm under her, rolled her onto her side, then sat her up on the gravel.

  “I think I turned my ankle.”

  He brought her close. “Lean on me.”

  “I’d like that, Sam.” She turned to him. She had tears in her eyes. “I’d like that very much.”

  Sam held her close and kissed her gently on the forehead. Then he brought her to her feet.

  He glanced toward O’Neill’s corpse. Sam was torn. Part of him was glad the son of a bitch was dead. But the intelligence professional in Sam wanted O’Neill alive so he could be debriefed. Sucked dry. Left desiccated. He shifted his attention to Vacario, holding her tightly as the two of them made their way across the gravel.

  “It’s over,” she said.

  Sam knew better. He looked back at O’Neill then at her. “It’s never over, Ginny.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sam’s head jerked toward the traitor’s body. “SCARAB’s dead.”

  “Precisely. So it’s over.”

  “No. SCEPTRE’S still out there.”

  “Christ almighty, isn’t it time to let someone else worry about SCEPTRE? If there really is a SCEPTRE.” She stopped in her tracks, turned to face him, clasped his hand between her palms, and brought her hands and his to eye level. “It’s time to let go, Sam. You’re retired.”

  He looked at her face and all that it promised. “Maybe,” he said. “But then again … maybe not. You heard what they say at Moscow Center, Ginny. They say retirement’s just another form of cover.”

  DIRECT ACTION

  A Covert War Thriller

  by John Weisman

  Available in hardcover

  An off-the-books black ops team must locate and eliminate a group of terrorists in this compulsive page-turner based on true life CIA casework and military intelligence…. “Nobody writes better about the dark, dirty, and dangerous world of the CIA and black ops. John Weisman’s knowledge and research are phenomenal.”—Joseph Wambaugh

  In Direct Action, the celebrated author of Jack in the Box and SOAR takes readers deep into the world of highly secret CIA and DOD paramilitary operations, shadow warfare waged by special “civilian contract personnel”—former SWAT cops, SEALs, Delta operators, Rangers, and Recon Marines—against terrorists across the Middle East and southeast Asia.

  Moving between Israel, Jordan, Paris, London, and Washington, these lethal specialists must target and destroy a Western-educated Islamist and a notorious Palestinian crime family with access to WMD in the West Bank and Gaza—and double agents within their own ranks….

  ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1995, at 11:47 AM, five senior officers from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations—the CIA’s clandestine service—quietly gathered in Room 4D-627A, one of the sensitive compartmentalized information facilities colloquially known as bubble rooms, on the fourth floor of the headquarters building at Langley, Virginia. The Agency was still reeling from the February 1994 arrest of Aldrich Hazen Ames. Ames, an alcoholic, money-hungry wreck of a career case officer, had betrayed dozens of America’s most valuable Russian agents to the KGB, resulting in their arrests and executions. He had also handed over many of CIA’s technical tradecraft secrets and the identities of American undercover operatives.

  Two of the clandestine officers at the meeting had been tasked with writing a Top Secret/Codeword damage assessment of the Ames debacle, a preliminary draft of which, at their peril, they were now sharing with three of their most trusted colleagues.

  The assessment was grim. One had, it said, to assume that CIA had been completely penetrated because of Ames’s trea son. The Agency, therefore, was now transparent. Not only to the opposition, which still included Moscow, but to all of Moscow’s current clients, including Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Iraq and—equally if not more critical—to the transnational terrorist organizations supported by those states. Transparency meant that the entire structure of the Directorate of Operations had to be considered as compromised; that every operation, every agent, every case officer was now known to the opposition and its allies.

  The only way to ensure that the clandestine service could survive in the coming years, the seniormost of the report writers suggested to his colleagues, would be to build a whole new and totally sterile spy organization inside CIA—a covert clandestine service within the overt clandestine service. But such a Utopian solution, all five knew, would be impossible to achieve. The current Director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch, would never allow it. Deutch, a tall, bumbling, angular, bookish MIT professor of chemistry who served as undersecretary of defense, had been sent over from the Pentagon the previous May to clean CIA’s post-Ames house. Instead of selecting savvy advisors to help ease his way into Langley’s unique culture, the new director—himself a neophyte in matters of spycraft—brought with him as his closest aides two individuals neither of whom had any operational intelligence experience.

  Deutch’s Executive Director was Nora Slatkin, a presidential appointee assistant secretary of the Navy. His deputy and right arm was George John Tenet, an NSC staffer who’d toiled on Capitol Hill for Senator David Boren among others. It didn’t take more than a few
weeks for the great majority of seasoned intelligence professionals of CIA’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations or DO, to detest all three. The situation was made even worse when Deutch appointed David Cohen, a DI (Directorate of Intelligence) reports officer, to head the DO. Cohen, the corridor gossip went, absolutely detested spying and those who did it.

  So no one was surprised that it took only a few months for Deutch and his associates to promulgate a series of orders that, in effect, prevented CIA’s clandestine service from … spying. Under the new rules of engagement, every agent who had a criminal record, or was suspected of human rights violations, or who might be involved in any kind of criminal or terrorist activity was to be jettisoned. Dumped. Ditched. Discarded. Their agent networks were to be disassembled.

  By the September 21 meeting, more than half of CIA’s foreign agents had been struck from the rolls and their names erased from BigPond, CIA’s computer database run by Nora Slatkin’s Administrative Division. More than 50 productive agent networks in Europe, the Middle East, South America, and Asia were summarily disbanded. Unable to recruit the sorts of unsavory but productive individuals it had targeted in the past, American intelligence quickly found itself going deaf, dumb and blind. After the BigPond debacle the old hands started referring to Slatkin as “Tora-Tora” Nora.

  And voting with their feet. By summer’s end of 1995, more than 240 experienced case officers—forty percent of those with more than 15 years field experience—had resigned or taken early retirement. The Agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) had been eviscerated, with many of its physical and technical assets either eliminated altogether, or handed over to other agencies including CIA’s detested rival, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. CTC operations at Rhine-Main airport, Frankfurt, where its European crisis-management “crash team” was forward-deployed, was shut down completely.

  It wasn’t long before it was proudly announced during a closed-door session of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), that the new CLA leadership was saving more than three point six billion dollars annually by closing nine CIA stations in sub-Saharan Africa, and CIA’s bases1 in half a dozen Western European cities. The rationale was that with the Cold War over, America didn’t need to keep tabs on Soviet agents anymore and the Agency outposts in such places as Düsseldorf, Barcelona, Marseille, and Milan were superfluous.