Day of Reckoning (Shadow Warriors)

by Stephen England

  Michael Shapiro.

  “Any problems on the way in, sir?” Kranemeyer asked as he moved in close, yelling to make himself heard over the noise of helicopter engines. Despite his personal dislike for Shapiro, the man was in command now, and they had a crisis to deal with.

  “No, no,” the Deputy Director responded with an effort. His face had taken on a slightly greenish cast. “I hate flying. All those evasive maneuvers…”

  Kranemeyer ignored the comment as the men moved toward the utility door. “My team has contingency plans drawn up and on your desk. They will need your approval for implementation.”

  “Contingency plans?” Shapiro wheezed, still getting his breath.

  “A list of operations that need to be shut down ASAP. Assets in need of extraction. It’ll take a lot of resources to get them all out, but we owe these people.”

  Shapiro stopped short and stared at the DCS with a look of bewilderment. “Whatever are you talking about?”

  “As calloused as it sounds,” Kranemeyer responded, a hard look in his eyes as he returned the stare, “it would be a lot better for all of us if we knew that Lay was dead.”

  “What?”

  The DCS held up a hand. “As long as he’s alive out there, potentially in the hands of terrorists, we have to assume that every operation, every asset of which he had detailed knowledge, is compromised. For sale to the highest bidder. It’s a list longer than my arm.”

  “My God, you don’t think he would betray us, do you? You don’t know David…”

  “All due respect, sir,” Kranemeyer growled, moving in close enough to Shapiro that his bodyguards reacted, “but you’ve never been in the field. Any man can be broken, given enough time and resources. And that’s the assumption we have to act on.”

  7:41 A.M.

  NCS Operations Center

  To say that the CIA dossier on Korsakov was incomplete would have been an understatement of epic proportions. There were massive holes in their knowledge, gaps in the file. No one seemed to know what he had been doing in the interval between his discharge from the Russian army in 2000 and the assassination of Mayor Anton Suvorov in 2002.

  One thing seemed certain. During those two years, Korsakov had become a trusted member of the mafiya.

  An annoying beep alerted Harry to an incoming e-mail and he scrolled through the windows, expecting to see an update from Tex or Carter. Unfortunately, ignoring messages wasn’t an option on this morning.

  It was his private e-mail, he noted with a growing sense of disquiet. Not too many people had that one, and still fewer used it.

  The subject line read, “CRITIC”…and the sender’s address, well, it was a jumble of letters—the provider itself a free e-mail service originating from somewhere in the Czech Republic.

  The body of the e-mail was as terse as the header, his eyes narrowing as he scanned over the text. Parking garage, sub-level. Fifth column. Freefall.

  It was the last word that caught his attention. Freefall. Not one word, not really. Two. A codephrase from long ago.

  And he knew in that moment who the sender was, knew all that the message portended.

  They had been betrayed—again…

  7:49 A.M.

  CIA Headquarters Complex

  The name on his identification badge read Alex Hall. The employee of one of the dozens of private contractors brought in by the CIA to perform maintenance, he had spent the last five days rewiring lights in the parking garage beneath the headquarters building.

  He allowed a tight smile to creep onto his face as he neared the final checkpoint. Like so much of security all over the world, they weren’t nearly as concerned with the people leaving as the people trying to get in. Beyond a physical search of his person and vehicle—as of all the outside contractors—he had experienced no trouble.

  “Leaving early?” the guard asked as he handed over his identification. No personal interest there, no smile. Just a cold, searching question.

  Hall nodded, taking a hand off the steering wheel to cover a weary yawn. “Spent a long night replacing circuitry. Soon the lights in the underground garage will actually come on when you want them to.”

  The guard nodded and handed back his badge, motioning for the gate to be raised.

  He tapped the gas and the car accelerated gently down the access road, heading out toward the main highway. Home free.

  The cell phone in his pocket buzzed and he reached for it with one hand. “Hello.”

  “Aleksandr,” a familiar voice began, “is the package in place in the garage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Spasiba bolshoi,” the voice responded. Thank you very much. “I will see you shortly, tovarisch.”

  The call ended as Aleksandr turned out onto the main highway and he rolled down the driver’s side window, carefully throwing the prepaid cellphone out onto the asphalt.

  Within seconds, it was crushed by the wheel of a passing car.

  7:53 A.M.

  The underground parking garage

  CIA Headquarters

  Betrayed. And once more, it had claimed the life of a friend. Harry glanced up into the ever-watchful eye of the security camera as the elevator doors opened, revealing darkness beyond. Contractors, all of them carefully vetted by the FBI, had been at work rewiring the lights for weeks. Apparently their work wasn’t done, just yet. At least not on this level.

  The underground parking garage was one of the Agency’s better-kept secrets, constructed under the New Headquarters Building in the years following 9/11. They weren’t the only ones with spy sats—not anymore.

  Fifth column. A pair of words loaded with double entendre. Moving among the cars, he made his way forward…silently counting off the concrete support columns as he moved.

  Three…four. And then column five—a dark corner maybe ten feet from the nearest light—well away from the closest security camera, the concrete damp with moisture beneath his fingers as he dropped down on one knee.

  Nothing. For a moment, he thought he had misinterpreted the message—that perhaps it was another column, another level of the garage. Or perhaps not a real column at all. If he had been wrong…they were running out of time.

  Free Fall.

  And then his groping fingers closed around a small waterproof pouch, pulling it toward him. The pouch contained a small cellphone, prepaid, most likely—and he leaned back against the wheel of the nearest car as he held it up, powering it on. It was his means of contact. Had to be.

  Nothing was saved in the contacts. No numbers to be redialed under “missed calls”, no way to get a signal underground if there had been. The phone seemed to be perfectly clean—a burner, clearly. But for what? Lay had been dead for almost an hour. If he didn’t move quickly.

  And there it was, under a data folder…a small .mp3 file of recorded audio. Selecting the file brought up a password screen and he tapped Free Fall into the box, watching as it opened. He glanced around the garage once more, marking the position of the nearest camera as he raised the phone to his ear.

  “Harry,” a man’s voice began. So familiar. David Lay. “If you’re listening to this, I’m most likely dead—my enemies have made their move. And I’ve lost the battle. I’ve known it was coming, just always thought I could stay ahead. Foolish, maybe, but I have no regrets. It was the only way—for the sake of the country. A couple years back, none of this would have mattered, and I never would’ve dreamed of bringing you into this. That was before Carol walked back into my life.”

  A pause and the iron voice faltered, trembling ever so slightly. “She’s all I have left, and I swore to never fail her again. They will try to reach her as well—there is no way for them to be sure of what she knows. The Agency will move to protect her after I’m gone, but none of that will matter. There’s evil in high places at Langley, and no one is safe. Take her, Harry, take her and run—far and fast. Go dark. Trust no one. Remember the Moscow Rules, Harry. Anyone could be under the control of the enemy.”
/>
  Anyone. Elevator doors began to open in the distance, back from where he had come. A threat?

  “As for what has brought me to this place…that needs to end here. With me. With knowledge comes dangers.”

  It was a bureaucrat, one of the hundreds of drones that populated the headquarters building—a briefcase in his hand as he moved toward his car. Harry held his breath, sheltering the phone’s speaker with his hand as the man passed. “I can trust you to do this, Harry. I know you. I know what you’ll do. Vaya con Dios.”

  Go with God.

  And then there was silence. Harry closed the phone, cold, hard resolution coming over his face.

  He had his orders. That they came from a dead man made not one wit of difference.

  It was time to carry them out…

  7:55 A.M.

  “I know, I know—put Michelle on it,” Carter instructed, slipping a thumb drive into the side of Daniel Lasker’s terminal. “I need you running comm for the extraction.”

  At twenty-eight, the short, fair-haired Lasker looked more like an office temp than the head of CLANDOPS communications, but such was his title at Langley. And he was one of the best. “We ever tried to pull off an operation on this scale, Ron?”

  Carter responded with a shake of the head. “Twelve assets. Nine countries. And it’s only the beginning.”

  He felt a presence at his elbow and turned to find Harry standing there. “How are things coming along?”

  “We’re positioning teams across the Middle East,” Carter responded. “Try to pull our people out before they can be snapped up.”

  “You could drive a car through the hole that’s gonna leave in our HUMINT network,” Harry observed, a grim edge to his voice. Human intelligence, the community’s ace of spades.

  “I know. But until we find the Director…we have no other choice.” The analyst shrugged. “Was there something you needed?”

  “Matter of fact, yes. I need to speak with Carol.”

  Ron frowned. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea. Why?”

  “She didn’t finish running the profiles on Korsakov. I just need to talk with her a couple minutes, figure out where she was headed, particularly on any possible U.S. connections. Where is she?”

  “Down in Interrogation Room A-13,” Carter responded after a long pause. He reached for the phone on Lasker’s desk. “I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

  6:03 A.M. Mountain Time

  Airport

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Parting with his brother had not been one of the highlights of the trip for Richards, but that was nothing new. Relations had been strained ever since he had left the family ranch in Texas to join the Marine Corps at the age of nineteen.

  They had been a man short that summer with him gone, a bad summer of drought—disease among the cattle. Not much he could have done to stop it, even if he had stayed, but there were elements of his family that viewed his departure as something akin to desertion.

  Five years later, the ranch had gone under and his family had moved back to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico. End of story.

  He sighed, watching as the Gulfstream IV taxied in from the west, an unusual sight on the small runway. He only had one bag, traveling light as he had for the past fifteen years of his life.

  A chill December breeze rippled across the small airfield, his jacket flapping back to expose the holstered Glock on his hip. He was ready. It was time to go…

  8:05 A.M. Eastern Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  The NCS ready room was deserted, just as Harry had expected it to be. He left the lights off and moved quickly to his equipment locker, on the far side of the room.

  Swiping his CIA identification badge unlocked the door and he reached inside, withdrawing his Colt 1911 and another pistol-sized weapon.

  The Colt was loaded, as it always was. He racked the slide and chambered a round, carefully putting the safety on before slipping the big pistol into the paddle holster on his hip. Cocked and locked.

  Moving across the room, he laid the second weapon, a Taser X3, on the table. The stun gun, which looked for all the world like an artist’s conception of a laser pistol gone bad, had been developed in 2009 as a response to the law enforcement community’s main critique of the original X26: its limited, single-shot capability.

  The new and improved Taser aimed to address that problem, utilizing a neuro-muscular impulse rotating across the firing bays to engage multiple targets. It was capable of three shots, one right after the other. And then it was empty, but that didn’t bother Harry in the least. From the surveillance footage of the interrogation room, he only had three targets.

  Finishing the weapons check, he slipped the Taser into an inner pocket of his leather jacket, in a cross-draw position. Eight minutes past eight o’clock. He had fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before someone realized he had looped the security footage down in the interrogation rooms.

  It would be time enough…

  7:12 A.M. Central Time

  An apartment

  Dearborn, Michigan

  “How many died?”

  Nasir al-Khalidi looked up from the breakfast dishes to see his brother Jamal standing in the kitchen doorway of the small apartment they shared.

  “The Americans aren’t saying,” he responded, gesturing with his head toward the TV in the corner. “Looks like a car bomb to me.”

  He would have known. Both young men had spent their childhood in Lebanon, dodging the bullets and car bombs of a bloody civil war.

  “Maybe it was one of ours. Insh’allah.”

  If God wills it.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that,” Nasir began, glancing back at his brother. “If the wrong people heard you…”

  His older brother snorted, picking up his jacket. “Pick up a case of Mountain Dew at the store when you go, will you? We’re almost out.”

  Ignored. At the very least, it was better than one of Jamal’s typical rants.

  “What time should I expect you home?”

  “Classes until mid-afternoon, then I’ll be at the mosque. I don’t know, really.”

  “I should be off the garbage run by five,” Nasir nodded, pulling the last saucer from the water and placing it on the rack to dry. He spent his days riding on the back of a garbage truck, a constant reminder that he, unlike his brother, wasn’t in the U.S. legally.

  If he’d been able to get a student visa…things would have been much different. A lot of things.

  He heard the outer door close behind Jamal and sighed. Something was going on at the mosque—had been the last couple months. And his brother was changing, this country had done something to him.

  These United States.

  Nasir snarled something profane under his breath and washed his hands, grabbing his jacket as he headed for the door himself. It was turning into a cold December in Michigan.

  8:13 A.M. Eastern Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  As he passed from one section of the building to the other, Harry displayed his security pass to the guard at the entrance and was waved through without so much as a second glance. Even on this day.

  It wasn’t to be wondered at. He had spent the last fifteen years of his life working from the building.

  Turning the corner, he quickened his pace, footsteps like handclaps against the tile as he hurried down the whitewashed corridors. A death march.

  Just another few yards. Despite the slight chill in the building, his hands were damp with perspiration. In all those years, he had never attempted anything like this.

  No illusions. He knew how his actions would be perceived. At the door of A-13 he spoke to the security guard standing watch, a man named Kauffman.

  “Everything clear?”

  Just a nod by way of reply. “Ron told me you were on the way.” A tall, muscular man in his late forties, his blond hair now streaked with gray, he’d
been a part of Langley’s security force for as long as Harry could remember. Ex-military, and no one to be trifled with.

  The guard’s face softened as he turned to swipe his passcard at the door. “Don’t take too long, Harry. She’s been through hell this morning.”

  “I understand,” Harry replied with a grim smile of acknowledgement, reaching for the handle of the door.

  One thing was certain. When he reemerged, he would be a fugitive…

  Gone. It seemed almost impossible to comprehend. That after so long, he could be lost to her once more. A childhood spent longing for his presence, an adolescence feeling the pull of an absent parent. The bittersweet pain of their reunion.

  All gone now. All for nothing.

  An electronic beep signaled the opening of the door and Carol passed a hand over her eyes, angrily wiping away the tears. Her hand came away streaked with mascara, dissolving in the evidence of her grief.

  She no longer cared.

  The soundproofed door closed behind Harry with an ominous click. He turned, forcing all emotion aside. Calm. Become the eye of the storm.

  His gaze swept the room, a threat assessment. Two guards were with Carol, both of them armed. Lopez and Hendricks, he realized, recognizing them both.

  “Morning,” he greeted, a nod to the guards as he crossed the room, moving past them.

  Hendricks gave him a tight smile. “Morning, Harry.”

  “Ron says you need intel on Korsakov,” Carol managed, looking up as the NCS team leader moved toward the table where she sat, reaching inside his jacket. “Is he responsible?”

  He seemed to hesitate, something unusual there in his eyes. He glanced from her to Lopez, the ranking security officer. “This discussion is well above your clearance, I’m afraid. Can we have the room?”

  Lopez inclined his head toward the window covering one wall of the interrogation room. “We’ll be on the other side of the glass.”

  It wasn’t the way he had planned it—but plans had to adjust to compensate for a situation that might best be described as “fluid”.

  “Make sure the mikes are off.”