Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel

by William S. Cohen

  “Let’s go back to the communications issue,” he said. “First a little history. When our Sputnik was going around the planet like a little moon, some people didn’t believe what the communists had done. But people could see it—and people could hear that beep, beep, beep, and—”

  “Beep?” Mei asked.

  “Like the sound of a bird, a little bird. Beep, beep,” Shvernik said to Mei, sounding like a baritone bird. “But electronic.”

  “Yes. Thank you,” Mei said, nodding.

  “Sputnik carried two battery-powered transmitters that produced the beeps on twenty and forty megahertz. Amateur radio operators in many places heard it. It was propaganda, to prove to ‘backward peasants’—as an American commentator called us then—that communists could put a satellite into orbit. Hamilton had the same idea for Asteroid USA. People all over the Earth would hear USA in Morse Code. I thought maybe that if we listened harder, we would hear that because it’s so—”

  “Specific?” Mei asked.

  “Yes. Specific. So I asked my people to do a search for certain transmissions.”

  “Didn’t they want to know why?” Taylor asked, fearing Shvernik’s request for a test would reveal their mission.

  “No. Many Russian people are not … curious.”

  “Did they come up with anything?” Taylor asked.

  “I, of course, am aware, Ben, NASA is, what, do I say, ‘civilian’? And not ‘military.’ But NASA sometimes does little missions for the boys in the Pentagon.”

  “I know of no such thing,” Taylor said, bristling.

  “Technician does hear something,” Shvernik went on. “She works hard to find exact. She checks our register of American military signals. It is that. She checks to find where. Signals—military signals—were coming from what NASA says is ‘space junk,’ a dead communications satellite. It is a spy satellite, Ben. A spy in a junk mask. I get thanks from security officer,” Shvernik said, laughing. “He thinks you told me about it.”

  “And did he tell you that two weeks ago Russia sent up a rocket that was supposed to carry three civilian communications satellites?”

  Not waiting for Shvernik to answer, Taylor continued, “Your people did not mention a fourth object in the cargo. America calls the object ‘military’ and keeps it under surveillance.”

  “I believe,” Liang Mei said quietly, “that we should discuss what we know about moving Asteroid USA. I would like to remind you of a solar sail’s characteristics.”

  “I agree!” the men said, speaking almost in unison.

  Taylor realized from Shvernik’s quick response that he, too, had felt the chill of distrust. Liang Mei was right to intervene. “Thanks, Mei, for bringing us down to Earth,” Taylor said, expecting smiles. Then he realized they didn’t get his joke.

  Both Taylor and Shvernik had doubts about solar sails, an idea that went back to Jules Verne. He realized that when photons—particles of light—strike a shiny surface, they carry energy that can act like wind pushing a ship’s sail. NASA had developed a small solar sail that had spent months in low-Earth orbit. Working with data from that experiment and from her own experience, Liang Mei calculated that a solar sail could be used to move an asteroid. But the sail would have to be enormous—miles wide and miles long. And it would be difficult to control.

  Mei was also looking at the possibility that a solar-sail reconnaissance craft could aid in assessing Asteroid USA once it was found. “I can see it in my mind,” she said. “It could be—what is the word—a scout?”

  “Right,” Taylor said.

  “A scout,” Mei said enthusiastically. “It could get close to an asteroid and get data we aren’t able to get from telescopes. Perhaps the scout would not be able to push an asteroid, but we could give it sensors and we would get a spin rate, mass, and perhaps what the asteroid is made of.”

  “The solar sail can’t be ruled out, Mei,” Taylor said. “Time is on our side. Earth has twenty years to mount a defense.” Twenty years is a long time, Taylor thought. But when will the politicians get started on defense of the Earth?

  19

  Back in his office after Taylor’s briefing, Carlton sat at his desk and stared at Frederic Remington’s painting of a U.S. Cavalry trooper at the gallop on a wild-eyed horse. Sometimes he felt a kinship with this soldier, dashing to a place unknown, dispatched to his fate by duty and chance. Carlton had once been a fighter pilot, drawn to speed and sky. Then had come the desks, the Special Operations in Afghanistan, and the general stars, one by one.

  He had just retired when a new President, looking beyond the CIA for a new face, had made him Director of National Intelligence, and then National Security Adviser. Now comes this mission, not as an adviser but as steward to the sovereign, hiding behind the drapes, arranging an unlawful deed.

  What President Oxley had just asked for, in words unsaid, was deniability for himself and for Carlton—but not for Quinlan. If the Hamilton abduction leaked and Congress decided it was a White House operation, it would be Quinlan who would be tagged. A rogue Chief of Staff acting on his own. Oxley would take a big political hit, but it would be Quinlan who would be hauled before a congressional committee or maybe into a federal court. Oxley could be ruthless when he judged that he needed to be.

  When Carlton was Director of National Intelligence, he had one customer, the President. And Carlton had lived by one maxim: It’s not for me to reason why. His title had changed, but the customer and the maxim were unchanged. He decided that handing the Hamilton account to Quinlan was not enough. The account could not be managed out of the White House.

  Carlton had no doubt about who should be the manager: a private citizen with a personal motive. And that would be Sean Falcone. If the operation became known, Carlton would leak a CIA report to one of his media contacts that Falcone had been obsessed by the belief that Hamilton was behind the law-firm shootings. As a private citizen, he had followed the example of Ross Perot, who in 1978 had recruited a commando team to rescue two executives from an Iranian prison.

  When Carlton was Director of National Intelligence, his principal aide was a longtime CIA analyst who, as a rookie, had been asked to give her opinion about the likelihood that a KGB officer’s defection was real. After poring through all that was known about the would-be defector, she had to say true or false. She had said true, and she turned out to be right: The KGB walk-in really was a defector, and he became a valuable CIA asset.

  While congratulating himself for thinking of Falcone, Carlton remembered what that analyst had told him. “Luck’s almost always involved in making the right call,” she had said. “But make sure you’re making the call for the right reasons. If you’re wrong, bad luck is no excuse. But ‘the right reasons’ is always a good defense for a bad call.”

  Carlton spent an hour thinking of the steps he had to take. Usually he would have covered several sheets of a yellow pad with scrawls that evolved into an outline and timeline. For this op, there would be nothing on paper.

  Carlton decided that he would have to claim “for the right reasons” if this operation exploded into what the media would unfailingly label “Moscowgate.” He would obey the President and hand Quinlan the Hamilton account. But he would go beyond the presidential order for the right reason—trying to protect the President.

  He picked up the phone and hit the button labeled DCI.

  20

  Because Frank Carlton had been the director of National Intelligence, he was one of the few people in the seventeen agencies that formed the U.S. intelligence community who knew where the DNI ended and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency began. He knew, for instance, that the DCI button on his console was inaccurate. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in December 2004, created the DNI and abolished the position of DCI, ending the fifty-seven-year reign of the director of Central Intelligence as the nation’s chief intelligence officer. (The official initial abbreviation was
supposed to be D/CIA, meaning director only of the Central Intelligence Agency.)

  In the handover briefing that Falcone had given Carlton, Falcone had told him that when he needed solid information and a dependable partner, he should turn to Sam Stone, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Falcone had said that Stone had been his most valuable resource in the resolving of an unprecedented crisis. After a nuclear bomb had all but destroyed Savannah, powerful Washington foes of President Oxley blamed Iran and demanded war. Stone, undaunted by pseudo-facts, had rightfully insisted that Iran had not detonated the bomb. He had helped Falcone prove that the bombers were members of The Brethren, a fanatical American religious group seeking a way to bring about Armageddon.

  While Carlton was DNI, he had trod carefully around Stone, even more the lone wolf after the suicide of his wife while he was in Afghanistan; childless, he had nothing in his life but the CIA. Dealing with what Oxley called “soft power” in various crises, Carlton had no need to call on Stone for special not-soft needs.

  Now Carlton took Falcone’s advice and called Sam Stone. “We need to meet, Sam,” Carlton began. “Just you and me, no staff.”

  “Okay. Seven o’clock at my place,” Stone said in his peculiar half-growl. “I’ll grill a couple of steaks.” After a moment’s silence he added: “A driver will pick you up at the Old Ebbitt Grill at six thirty.” Before Carlton could respond, Stone hung up.

  Stone’s abrupt style was well known among the relatively few people who directly dealt with him. He preferred to run the agency as if he were the foreman on a series of jobs rather than as a manager or a distant CEO. He had spent most of his career on the dark side, when the CIA’s undercover missions were run by the deeply silent Directorate of Operations.

  Stone was one of the first CIA officers into Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, the spearhead of the U.S. war on Al Qaeda and the search for Osama bin Laden. That small CIA team launched America’s war against Islamic terrorists. But the daring episode was also the requiem of the Directorate of Operations, which was disbanded on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission and replaced by the National Clandestine Service. The new unit’s main purpose was to coordinate the CIA with the FBI and the other sixteen members of the intelligence community.

  Largely because of the backstage work of Sam Stone and his closest associates, the dark side was retained in the form of SAD, the Special Activities Division. Sam essentially left the running of the CIA to various aides while he ran SAD. He knew that a call directly to him from Carlton was in reality a call from one veteran covert operator to another. As Stone well remembered, Carlton, then a two-star general in Air Force Special Operations, had gotten Stone and his team what they needed in the early days of what became the Afghanistan War.

  * * *

  The Old Ebbitt Grill called itself Washington’s oldest saloon. Presidents from Andrew Johnson to Warren G. Harding had bellied up to the Ebbitt’s long bar. And the jutting heads over the bar belonged to animals that reputedly had been slain by Teddy Roosevelt. The Old Ebbitt, a block from the White House and across from the Treasury building, was still a place where government workers met.

  Carlton, followed by a lone Secret Service agent, left the White House grounds via an Eisenhower Executive Office Building gate and walked the length of the plaza in front of the Treasury building. They crossed Fifteenth Street to the Old Ebbitt Grill and passed through the revolving door. The antique clock over the door showed ten minutes after six. At the jammed and noisy main bar, Carlton ordered a Jameson for himself and a Coke for the agent. He rejected the offer and took up a watch near the door.

  Fifteen minutes later, a man in a dark suit entered. He spotted Carlton and nodded to the Secret Service agent. Carlton gulped down the last of his drink, left money on the bar, and walked out behind his new guardian. The car entered traffic and made its way to the Fourteenth Street Bridge across the Potomac to the George Washington Memorial Parkway, then north to McLean, Virginia.

  * * *

  On a wall of the CIA’s Visitor Control Center at the Agency’s main entrance, there is a drawing of a small wooden building identified as a Union Army “Guard House Near Langley”—a reminder that Langley was the original name of this area and is still used as an insider’s name for the CIA. Today Langley is an unincorporated community within McLean, Virginia, but Sam Stone says he and the CIA live in Langley. His small ranch-style home, inherited from his father, is surrounded by the mansions of McLean, the Washington area’s richest community.

  Sam Stone was at the door—balding, hard-eyed, fireplug physique, white shirt, sleeves rolled, tie gone, dark-blue slacks, black loafers, holding a glass—when the car swung up the driveway, deposited Carlton, reversed down the driveway, and drove off. The two men walked in silence to the kitchen, where steaks sizzled on a countertop gas grill.

  “Perfect timing. Join me,” Stone said, holding up his glass. “Jameson, right?”

  Stone gestured to the kitchen table, where Carlton sat while Stone, glass in hand, flipped the steaks and judged them done. He put down his glass at the plate opposite Carlton’s and in a series of quick motions, forked the steaks from the grill, two potatoes from the oven, and two wooden salad bowls and a bottle of ranch dressing from the refrigerator. He sat down, picked up his glass, and said, “What’s on your mind?”

  Carlton curbed his PowerPoint urge and simply answered, “Off the shelf.”

  Stone sliced off a piece of steak and said, “Okay.”

  Carlton, wondering if Stone’s okay meant the steak or Carlton’s words, continued. “I need plausible deniability and some good people.”

  “By good people, I assume you mean people as good as mine. But not mine.”

  “Right.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Carlton plunged into a six-minute Hamilton briefing, starting with SpaceMine’s silent partner Basayev, his order to murder four Americans, Hamilton’s possible complicity, and Basayev’s violent end aboard the Aglaya. He decided not to mention the 2037 asteroid arrival or the Lebed-Komov transcript about Ivan’s Hammer.

  Stone poured them a second drink and said, “So you want an unauthorized snatch for an American mucky-muck who you think was involved in a murder case? Pretty small fish for such a high-risk operation. You telling me everything, Frank?”

  “Everything I can, Sam,” Carlton said, his voice soft with acknowledged regret.

  “I thought we were on the same team. Wasn’t it you who used to say, ‘One team, one fight’?”

  “We’re one team, Sam. But there are a lot of moving parts to this.”

  Stone thought for nearly a full minute. “Okay. I’ll instruct our Moscow station chief to find out exactly where Hamilton is. And then—”

  “I know where he is. Hotel Baltschug Kempinski.”

  Stone smiled the kind of smile that was supposed to mask anger and said, “Fucking NSA Special Collection Service. We’re supposed to coordinate with those guys when they move into our space. They’re like leeches, bringing their magic machines into our embassies, putting their antennas on the roof, getting diplo cover, operating all on their own. They pull down cellular signals, bug offices. And they risk our assets.”

  “We get good stuff sometimes from those special collectors,” Carlton said defensively.

  “I know. I know. And they claim they’ve got Lebed bugged. But everything we get from them is sanitized. Paraphrases instead of transcripts. They treat us like we’re Chinese spies.”

  “Well, let’s leave it at this: I’ve got the name of the hotel.”

  “Okay. That helps. It so happens … coincidentally … that we’ve got a small line on Hamilton.”

  “Nobody in this business believes in coincidences,” Carlton said, smiling.

  “Like you said, Frank. ‘Lots of moving parts.’”

  “Stove pipes inside of stove pipes, nothing has changed.… What have your boys got?”

  “An Orthodox bishop—he hates Lebed—is one
of our Moscow assets. He’s spent a little time with Hamilton, who turns out to be an enthusiast of The End Time.”

  “I’ve heard that about him,” Carlton said, tempted to add more about Hamilton’s asteroid. He resisted the temptation.

  “Our bishop also told his case officer that Hamilton had evil eyes.”

  “Sounds like my awful brother-in-law,” Carlton said.

  “No, really. The officer put it in her report. Evil eyes. The bishop said he had seen eyes like that only once before, when he was a young priest and he walked a serial killer to his execution.”

  “I wonder how many other American billionaires are psychopaths,” Carlton remarked. “Well, I guess it’s better to have him in our hands.”

  “I agree,” Stone said. “But my instinct is to keep my station chief in Moscow out of this. So we also would get the deniability you’re setting up. And I’ve got to tell you. Snatches never go off as planned. Never.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Global Special Services,” Stone replied.

  “There’s no need my telling you what you already know,” Carlton said. “Ever since I succeeded Sean Falcone, I’ve used them a couple of times. But Sean didn’t like going into the dark world.”

  “I know that about Sean. He’s a damn good man. Trustworthy. Smart. But he was sometimes too much the lawyer,” Stone said.

  “I could have gone to GSS myself,” Carlton said. “But I thought I’d touch base with you to make sure you think they’re still okay.”

  “GSS is still very quiet, very dark. Some powerful money behind them. And we slip enough dough to them to help keep them solvent. They’ll give you deniability. I’ll make a very careful call to General Drexler. From what I know, I can attest that he’s clean and okay for use. Unless I hear otherwise from you, I’ll get him working on it. Give it a couple of days. Drexler’s outfit can move a helluva lot faster than our so-called intelligence community.”