The Exile rk-4

by Andrew Britton

  Now the second police vehicle was temporarily blocking the incoming fire, but it was also blocking their escape route. He backed hard into the vehicle, hitting it broadside, then pushed the accelerator to the floor, driving it sideways. Having created enough room to maneuver, he shifted the truck into drive, pressed down on the accelerator, and swerved to the right. Once they were back in the alley, he immediately slowed to a crawl and shot a glance over his shoulder, ignoring the people running ahead of the vehicle, away from the scene of the massacre.

  “Is everyone okay?” he demanded. “Is anyone hit?”

  Steve Oliphant shakily raised his head, then sat up. He was in a daze, too confused to immediately respond, but looking him over, Kealey didn’t see anything to indicate that he had been injured.

  Pointing at Jacob Zuma’s prostrate form on the floor behind the front seats, Kealey said, “Check him. Make sure he’s okay.”

  As Oliphant complied, Kealey called back to Flores, but there was no response, and he realized that the Honduran couldn’t have come through the last collision uninjured, as he had been closest to the point of impact. He would have been thrown all over the place. If he had not already been unconscious when the crash occurred, he almost certainly was now, and that was the best-case scenario. The worst didn’t bear thinking about.

  Oliphant was saying something, and it took Kealey a second to decipher the words. When he did, his mounting despair was replaced by a surge of relief; Zuma had made it through unscathed. “Okay,” he said. “We’re getting out of here. Get low and stay there until I tell you otherwise.”

  Oliphant nodded and immediately slid to the floor, cramming his body into the narrow space between the seats. Apparently, he was done arguing. Zuma had raised his head to respond to his aide, but now he lowered it once again. Kealey could hear them moving around, though he didn’t see them respond to his order as he hit the gas and fumbled for the Motorola receiver/transmitter he had pulled out of his ear a few minutes earlier. Pushing it back into place, he immediately heard the frantic speech of Jeff Venora, the pilot of the Blackwater helicopter. He cut in without hesitation, and the pilot came back a split second later, his voice laced with anger and barely contained panic.

  “Kealey, goddamn it, where the fuck have you been? I’ve been trying to raise you for-”

  “Just tell me what’s happening,” Kealey snapped. “Save the theatrics.”

  There was a brief pause, and Kealey could sense the other man biting back his instinctive reply. “The vehicle is still intact, but the situation is only getting worse. I don’t know how much longer they can hold out, over.”

  “Any word from Whysall or Stiles?”

  “Negative…Their radio must have been knocked out in the attack, over.”

  “Okay…” Kealey thought for a second as they hit the end of the alley. Swinging the wheel right, he ran through the route in his mind as the SAPS Land Rover shot north on Banket Street, the speedometer nosing up to sixty kilometers per hour. The hospital was now eight blocks away, and from there it was a five-minute run to the courthouse. “Just stay in position, Air One. I’m coming to get them out.”

  “You’re what?” The disbelief in the pilot’s voice was plain. “You must be crazy. They’re surrounded on all sides… You’ll never even reach the vehicle, let alone get them out.”

  “I’m coming to get them,” Kealey repeated. He didn’t bother to acknowledge Venora’s words, even though deep down, he knew the man was probably right. Regardless of the odds stacked against him, he had to try. “Just stay where you are. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  CHAPTER 10

  KHARTOUM

  Seth Holland sat in his dimly lit office, staring at his computer screen in utter dejection. As he used the mouse to scroll slowly down the page, the faces of a unique, secret community blurred before his eyes. Dusk was falling outside his windows, a dark purple haze sinking over the city, but Holland could not take comfort in the end of the workday. He was beyond frustrated, and the late hour had nothing to do with it.

  The answer he sought was just out of reach. He knew it, had known it for hours on end, for that matter, but now it was really starting to get to him. His patience-which was fleeting enough on the best of days-was long past the point of wearing thin.

  The identity of the man with the rucksack had consumed him since that afternoon, when Holland had first spotted him on the front steps of the embassy. It had started as nothing more than vague curiosity, an itch that refused to go away. Hoping to rid himself of it, Holland had gone directly from the lobby to his fourth-floor office, where he’d proceeded to place calls to several different departments on an internal line. He’d assumed that he would have his answer in a matter of minutes, as that was how this kind of thing usually played out. In this case, though, that assumption was wrong. He’d been shut down at every turn, and now, six hours later, what had started as simple curiosity had evolved into a very different sort of beast. And an implacable one at that.

  Now he didn’t just want an answer. Now he needed an answer.

  When he first started looking into it, he had forced himself to do so with an open mind. After all, there was a chance that the whole thing was entirely innocent; that he had seen the man, or someone resembling him, in casual circumstances at some point in the past, and seeing him again had simply triggered that memory. It was a possibility that could not be discounted, but to Holland, it didn’t feel right, and after twenty years in the Central Intelligence Agency, he had learned to trust his gut. Ever since that brief encounter in front of the building, every instinct he owned had been telling him that the recognition was rooted on a far more important level, a professional level, but since he couldn’t be certain, he’d been forced to consider all the angles, even those that didn’t seem likely.

  That was how his search had begun: with all the angles. And with the basics. The vast majority of people who came to the embassy were there on routine business: registering births, replacing passports, seeking visas, or notarizing documents. For this reason, Holland’s first move was to call the consular duty officer. It took him thirty seconds to explain what he wanted, and the fax came through a few minutes later. It was a list of every male who had appeared in the ground-floor office that day, along with any relevant personal information.

  Holland was able to subtract five names right off the bat, simply because they had come in after the unknown subject had already left the building, and another nineteen because the men in question were either too old or young to fit the unsub’s description. Another four could go because they were not Caucasian, leaving Holland with a grand total of sixty-three names. These he ran through the database at Langley, which he was able to access remotely via his desktop computer. Fifteen minutes after submitting the query, he received the reply. None of the names were flagged, at least in the Agency’s records, which made it unlikely that he had encountered those people on the job. In other words, the list was useless, a dead end.

  Undaunted by this temporary setback, Holland next placed a call to the public affairs officer, the man in charge of the Public Diplomacy Office. This was another long shot, since the man had only five full-time employees, but Holland wanted to be thorough. As expected, the answer came back in the negative. The PAO had not received any visitors that afternoon, and neither had any member of his staff. Subsequent calls to the Political/Economic Section and the Information Resources Center also failed to pan out. By this time Holland was starting to wonder if he had missed something, and he could no longer deny his rising consternation.

  After two hours of trawling, he decided to take a break in the hope that a short rest would jar his memory. After asking his secretary to hold his calls, he kicked off his shoes, lay down on the couch in his office, closed his eyes, and let his mind drift back to the encounter. He allowed the images to unreel of their own accord, trying to focus on what he had seen. And exactly what had he seen? There was nothing to distinguish the man from a thous
and others. A million others, maybe. A tall, lean, dark-haired man in his mid- to late thirties, wearing steel-framed spectacles, a navy sport coat, gray slacks, and carrying a rucksack of the army surplus variety. There was nothing unusual about that picture…

  Holland’s eyes abruptly sprang open. No, nothing wrong with the picture…except for that rucksack. Because that doesn’t fit at all, does it?

  He tossed his legs over the side of the couch, then jumped up like a jack-in-the-box as the realization grabbed hold of him. That sack damned well was unusual. The more he thought about it, the greater his certainty. Why would a man dressed in business casual attire be lugging a military-style pack? It didn’t jibe. Which led Holland to wonder…If he hadn’t been carrying it all along, where would he get it?

  The answer was obvious. The embassy was filled with marines, all of whom had ready access to that kind of equipment.

  But why would one of them hand over his pack? And more importantly, what had been inside when he did?

  With these questions blowing through his mind, Holland picked up his phone and called Post One on the ground floor. He asked for the detachment commander but was informed that he had just gone off duty. Holland left a message with the corporal in charge, asking the commander to get back to him ASAP. That had been two hours earlier, and he had not heard a word since.

  Rubbing his eyes wearily, Holland stood and walked over to one of his windows. He stood there for a moment and studied the view. The sky was a rich, deep shade of magenta, the color fading quickly to coal black, and dusk had thrown long shadows over the inner walls of the courtyard. Below his window, he could make out a dark figure huddled against the rapidly encroaching cold. There was the flare of a match as the figure lit a cigarette. Then a second figure approached. Another flare, another cigarette. Coworkers, Holland assumed, sharing some watercooler gossip at the end of their shift. He envied them that camaraderie, the kind that could only exist between equals. Holland had no direct equal in the embassy, and since his work was not for public dissemination, there was no one he felt comfortable conversing with. It made for a very lonely posting. To make matters worse, he still had eight months to go in his current assignment.

  It would have been much easier to bear if his wife had accompanied him, but she had flatly refused. Her decision to stay in Miami had stung him deeply, and he had unwisely lashed out at the time, calling her selfish and stubborn, as well as a few other things that did not bear repeating. Those accusations had let to a bitter argument that he deeply regretted. Like any job that involved long deployments and time apart, intelligence work was hard on families. The divorce rates in the ranks of the CIA were incredibly high, somewhere in the region of six to seven percent in the Operations Directorate alone, and Holland had no desire to add to those depressing statistics. Besides, he could see now that she had been right all along. North Africa-and Sudan in particular-was no place for Western women and children. What had happened to Lily Durant in Camp Hadith was proof enough of that.

  Aside from Jake, their five-year-old son, Jen was the one good, stable thing in his life, and he had no intention of letting her slip away. He had made that promise to himself on the flight over, and he had not forgotten it. He only hoped that she knew how sorry he was. He’d apologized several times over the phone, and she had seemed accepting enough, but it was always hard to tell with her. Her birthday was coming up, though, and if she was harboring any lingering resentment, Holland figured the right gift would get rid of it once and for all. He’d seen a solid gold necklace on his last trip into the city center, and that had potential, assuming it was the genuine article…

  He stopped himself and nearly laughed aloud at his own naivete. In the backstabbing, greed-driven souqs of Khartoum, that would be quite an assumption, and buying into it could only end one way: with one very happy shopkeeper and one very pissed-off wife.

  The phone on his desk chirped, snapping him back to the present. Turning away from the window, he crossed the room in three quick strides and snatched it up. “Holland.”

  “Mr. Holland? This is Sergeant Sadowski. I was told you wanted to speak.”

  Holland closed his eyes and clenched a victorious fist in front of his chest. “Yes, Sergeant, that’s right. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, and I’m sorry to interrupt your downtime… I know you don’t get much of it.”

  “Not a problem, sir. What can I do for you?”

  The CIA officer took note of the man’s voice. It was calm, cool, and slightly curious, which presented him with a problem. Clearly, Sadowski had no idea who he really was, and judging by his clipped tone, he wasn’t eager to do any favors for a mid-level budget manager.

  Technically, the man’s ignorance was good news. This was how it was supposed to be. The identity of the CIA’s station chief was a closely held secret in any embassy. Normally, it would have come as a relief to know that his cover had withstood intense scrutiny from within, but the secrecy wouldn’t help him here. He needed answers, but he had almost no leverage with which to extract them. Holland instinctively knew that he might have to make a professional sacrifice to get them, and if that was the case, he might be getting back to Jen and Jake much sooner than he had anticipated.

  And that, he silently acknowledged, would not be a bad thing at all. “Sergeant Sadowski, I understand that you were on duty in Post One this afternoon. From zero six hundred to fourteen hundred hours. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

  Holland noted the wariness in the other man’s voice. “Between, let’s say, twelve hundred hours and the end of your shift, did you have any visitors? Anyone outside your chain of command?”

  There was a tense pause, and the station chief knew he had pushed it too far. “Mr. Holland, I’m afraid I can’t divulge that information. And frankly, I don’t see how it concerns you.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Sergeant-”

  “Sir, I can’t-”

  “No, just listen,” Holland said quickly. “According to your information, I am the budget manager for DISAM here in Khartoum. That is what you’ve been told, right?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, and Holland knew he had gotten it right. “Well, I’m telling you right now, that is not the reality. I do not work for that organization.”

  There was a brief, speculative pause. “So who do you work for, Mr. Holland?”

  “I heard you were a smart man, Sergeant. I’ll let you figure it out for yourself.”

  Another long silence ensued. Holland, listening to the sound of the other man breathing over the line, could almost sense the moment that Sadowski caught on. By his rough count, it took less than thirty seconds.

  “I’m going to need some proof of what you’re saying, sir, before I tell you anything. And that’s assuming I even can.”

  “Look…” Holland didn’t want to get into it over the phone. “Do you know where I’m located?”

  “Yes,” Sadowski replied. “Fourth floor, room four-oh-two.”

  Holland wasn’t surprised to hear that the man already knew where his office was. At least once a month, the Marine Security Guards conducted a series of drills known as “Reacts”-which was short for Reaction. Each React started with a simulated emergency, such as a fire, a bomb threat, or a riot outside the embassy. From there, the MSG gathered in the designated React Room, a storage area for weapons, communications equipment, and other essential gear, where they received their orders directly from the detachment commander. As the man in charge of those drills, it was only natural that Sadowski would know the embassy’s layout like the back of his hand.

  “I’m up here now,” Holland continued. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind stopping by for a few minutes. I promise you, it won’t be a waste of your time.”

  There was a brief pause as the other man considered, and the station chief found himself holding his breath. Finally, Sadowski said, “I’ll see you in five minutes.”

  Holland exhaled
slowly in relief. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  The line went dead, and Holland hung up the phone. As he stood there in the dark, he couldn’t help but wonder if he had just made a serious error in judgment. Essentially, he had told the marine sergeant the truth: that he was the ranking CIA officer at the embassy. Not in so many words, of course, but the implication was clear, and a man with Sadowski’s experience wasn’t likely to miss the underlying message. Now he knew what only five other men at the embassy knew, including the four case officers who reported directly to Holland. It was the kind of information that hundreds, if not thousands, of Arab fundamentalists across the country would gladly kill for.

  Holland shook off the lingering doubt. He had just committed an unforgivable sin in the eyes of his employers, but somehow, he knew that he’d done the right thing. He couldn’t explain how he knew, but the identity of the man on the steps was worth the professional sacrifice. He was sure of it. And if it turned out that he was wrong, so be it. He’d made a calculated wager. Staff Sergeant Daniel Sadowski was a U.S. Marine who had served his country with distinction for years on end, not a gossiping secretary or some shifty, back-alley merchant in the city bazaar. Holland’s true position at the embassy was as safe with him as it was with anyone else, including Holland’s own subordinates.

  Turning on his desktop lamp, he crossed to a large Gardall safe in the corner of the room. Crouching before it, he punched in a ten-digit code. The LED light to the right of the keypad turned green. He turned the handle and pulled open the heavy steel door. Inside there were two shelves. The bottom shelf held nothing but files, each of which was labeled with the appropriate security classification. The two objects he needed were on the top shelf. He had not touched either since he had arrived in Sudan eight months earlier. Grabbing them both, Holland closed the safe and locked it once more.