A small, tired smile found its way to Kittredge’s lips. A classic Charley non-statement, followed by a classic Charley volley back into my court. “Sure,” he said. “But what were we? When we were busy being us?”
“Why are you using the past-tense? Tell me what’s going on, Peter.”
“What’s going on is this: I learned what’s going on. Your friends are now my friends.” Kittredge lifted his shirt to show Charley the scabs and scar tissue on his back, artifacts of his midnight Agency initiation ceremony.
Charley sighed heavily and shook his head. “I warned them not to harm you. I swore I would kill them.”
“You were indisposed at the time,” Kittredge said. “Which reminds me, why the hell didn’t you tell me you were going to be in DC? We could have avoided this whole thing. I wouldn’t have gone out chasing boys, which got me kidnapped by Quinn and Fredericks, and you wouldn’t have been clubbed in the head.”
Charley shook his head. “There was no avoiding it.”
“So you know who attacked you?”
Charley sighed. “Yes.”
“Then you probably also know that you don’t have to worry about them anymore,” Kittredge said softly.
Charley was quiet, pensive. “They mentioned a successful operation,” he finally said.
“It was my fault.”
Charley let out a little laugh. “That the VSS attacked me?”
Kittredge shook his head. “No. That they murdered all of them.” He fought back tears.
“Don’t you think they deserved it? They were not nice people.”
There it is, Kittredge realized. The infinite gap between us.
“They were people, Charley.”
Kittredge breathed deeply to stem the flow of emotion. In spite of himself, he thought of El Grande, fighting to keep gringo hands from stealing the riches beneath his own feet, and again of Maria, who trained and struggled and fought alongside those men, and shared her dreams and her hauntingly lovely self with them, too. My Maria.
He held his head in his hands and let the tears spill carelessly onto the hard hospital floor. He felt Charley’s hand reach out to him, and felt the familiar comfort as Charley’s fingers combed through his hair. For a moment, it was almost like it used to be.
Almost.
Kittredge wiped his eyes. “I need a safe place to stay.”
Charley nodded, understanding. “Give me a pad of paper,” he said. “I’ll write down a number for you to call.”
Kittredge inhaled the cool air. Fall had suddenly arrived, and the chill had a sense of seriousness, of foreboding.
I have to do something, he reminded himself, trying unsuccessfully to replace fear and sorrow with resolve. People just can’t go around killing other people over politics.
He descended the stairway leading from the street to the subway station. He studied the route map. It wouldn’t take long at all to arrive at his destination.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but at least it was a start.
43
Sam and Brock remained alert and largely silent during their cab ride home. There was much to discuss, but nothing they could say within earshot of the cabbie.
Going home was a terrible option, but they couldn’t think of any better ideas. They needed clothes, protective vests, firearms, cash, and transportation, and the most efficient way to obtain all of those items was to simply go home and grab them.
But doing so entailed significant risk. By now, their pursuers would certainly have learned that she and Brock had survived yet another attempt on their lives, and they’d have had plenty of time to regroup for another assault.
Sam hadn’t memorized Dan’s burner number, and she knew his phone lines had been tapped, so calling him for help was out of the question.
And given the reach and audacity Jarvis had displayed in his spectacular escape, Sam suspected he might have inside help from someone else at Homeland. So calling the emergency response desk was probably a bad idea, too.
She had the cab driver make a slow pass through the neighborhood while she and Brock looked for signs of trouble. Finding none, they directed him to their driveway. They exited the car and made their way slowly and painfully up the driveway to their front porch.
Once there, they discovered a significant problem. Over the past several days, the contractors who were repairing the bomb damage at their house had apparently installed a replacement door.
Neither of them had a key to their own house.
“Ah, hell.” Brock said, pain-induced sweat beading on his brow despite the cool fall afternoon.
Sam shook her head. “We can’t catch a break.”
“I don’t want to smash a window,” Brock said. “The house will be vulnerable after we leave.”
Sam nodded. “And I don’t want to leave any evidence we’ve been back.”
“Let’s do something, even if it’s wrong. I’m sure they have someone watching the place, and I don’t want to die on my own porch.”
Sam agreed. She stepped off the porch and held her hand out for Brock. “Come on,” she said. “Time to violate the golden rule.”
“What rule is that?”
“You know the one.” Trust no one. An old clandestine ops instructor of Sam’s used to pound that deeply misanthropic advice into his charges, and it was counsel that she had heeded better than most over the years. But with no secure way to get in touch with Dan Gable, whom she did actually trust, there were frighteningly few other options.
They ambled over to the neighbor’s house, rang the doorbell, and waited impatiently for the kind old spinster to answer.
“My, aren’t you a sight!” The old lady’s voice was surprisingly strong and clear, especially given her frail, stooped frame.
“Mrs. Manning, I’m terribly sorry to disturb you,” Sam said. “But could we borrow your phone?”
Their neighbor agreed warmly. She showed them inside, fussing over Brock’s black eye and broken foot. She put on a pot of coffee and served a plate of cookies, which Sam and Brock devoured gratefully.
“Pardon my saying so,” the old lady said, “but you kids look positively terrible. Who did this to you?”
Sam shook her head, washing down the last of her cookie with a swig of coffee. “Can’t really say.”
“What a world we live in. And to think, you kids got beat up like that with all those police cars patrolling around here all the time.”
Sam’s ears perked up. “Police cars?”
“Yeah,” Mrs. Manning said, obviously perturbed. “They drive by here, real slow, eyeballing everything. Must have been a dozen times today.”
Sam gave Brock a knowing glance. They didn’t have much time.
Here goes nothing, Sam thought. She took a deep breath, and dialed the number every Homeland agent was required to memorize.
It rang twice, then, “Homeland Emergency Response, please state your name.”
“Special Agent Sam Jameson.”
The operator was silent for a moment. “Please hold, ma’am,” she finally said. “You’re on my special instructions list.”
Shit! Sam’s pulse suddenly pounded, and she felt adrenaline settle uncomfortably in her stomach. Her mind raced. Having special instructions attached to one’s name at the Homeland Emergency Response desk was rarely a good thing. Had Jarvis set up an automatic alarm to have her brought in?
She thought about hanging up, but knew it was futile. Unlike in the movies, call traces were nearly instantaneous these days. If they wanted to know her precise location, they would already know it by now. It was probably best just to wait and see what the operator had to say.
The phone clicked, and a strong baritone greeted her. “Sam! My God, what a week you’ve had!”
It was a familiar voice, but one she couldn’t place. “I’m sorry, who is this?”
“How presumptuous of me. I’m sorry. It’s Vince Cullsworth.”
Holy balls – The Secretary of Homeland Defense!
> “Mr. Secretary? I don’t quite know what to say,” Sam said, shooting a meaningful glance at Brock. His eyes widened.
“I couldn’t be prouder of your ingenuity and courage over the past week,” Cullsworth said. “What a horrific week it’s been for all of us, but for you, especially.”
“I can’t remember worse,” Sam agreed.
“Listen, I’m really relieved you’re okay,” Cullsworth said. “Dan Gable is here in my office right now. Can I ask you to join us?”
Sam felt relief at the mention of Dan’s name. “Sure, sir,” she said. “But I have a bit of a transportation problem.”
“I’d ask you if you’d like a police escort, but under the circumstances, I think that would be in poor taste,” Cullsworth said with a chuckle.
Good - he’s up to speed on the situation.
“And probably a bit unhealthy,” Sam said. “Could you spare Dan for a few minutes to come pick us up? It’d be good to see a familiar face, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure thing. He’s on his way.”
It took an agonizingly long twenty minutes for Dan to arrive, during which time Sam and Brock did their best to make reassuring small talk with their concerned and very talkative neighbor, while peering carefully out the front window to spot any police cars that might happen by.
Sam recognized Dan’s battered minivan instantly as it pulled into the driveway. They thanked Mrs. Manning and piled into the van.
“You both look a helluva lot better than the last time I saw you,” Dan said.
“I don’t know if the doctors told you,” Brock said, “but Dan did CPR on you for ten minutes before the ambulance arrived.”
Sam shuddered, recalling the hellish nightmare of the day before. “I remember way too much from yesterday, but I don’t remember that part.”
“It’s tough to form new memories while you’re dead,” Dan quipped. He smiled a warm, gentle smile, and grabbed Sam’s hand. “Seriously, boss, I’m really thankful you’re sitting here right now.”
She noticed the moisture in his eyes. “Thank you, Dan. It’s good to be alive.”
Brock shivered. “Watching you die like that…” he said, shaking his head, struggling to keep control of his own emotions.
She clasped his face in her hands and kissed him, wiping his tears away with her thumbs.
“It was no picnic on my end, either,” she said. They shared a tearful laugh, then made their way in contented silence toward downtown DC.
Vince Cullsworth, Secretary of Homeland Defense, was a tall, grandfatherly man with a kind face and a ready smile. He’d run the Defense Department at one point in the nineties, in between the Iraq wars, and the rumor mill held that he was asked to come out of retirement to replace the Vlad-the-Impaler-type guy who was the Homeland secretary under the previous, markedly more conservative administration.
“We’ve had our eye on Jarvis for just a little while,” he said, his deep, mellifluous voice filling the posh corner office with a million-dollar view. “But I really wasn’t aware of how deeply involved he apparently was.”
“Bolero?” Sam asked.
Cullsworth nodded. “But it really wasn’t pointing at him too directly, from what we could tell.”
“Probably just a matter of time, though,” Dan offered. “He was pretty sloppy, and it took just a little cyber savvy to figure out that he was eyeballs deep.”
“That was terrific work on your part, Dan,” Cullsworth said. “And a great computer security lesson for an old dinosaur like me.”
“Computers are yesterday’s wave of the future,” Sam said, smiling.
Cullsworth gave her a good-natured chuckle. “Different world than the one I grew up in, that’s for sure. Anyway, there’s another interesting angle here.”
“Let me guess: Metro Internal Affairs is compromised,” Sam ventured.
“Clever girl,” Cullsworth said. “How’d you figure it out?”
“It’s fairly obvious by the way they still haven’t rounded up their internal gang. There’s a mountain of evidence IA could’ve used to arrest them all, yet the thugs are still out patrolling my neighborhood.”
Cullsworth nodded. “I’m a former prosecutor,” he said. “I’ve seen much more movement on much less evidence, that’s for sure. Their story was that they wanted to make sure they caught everyone involved, but it didn’t wash with me.”
“Suppose we had been killed,” Sam said. “Could the commissioner have stood the heat? It’s one thing to gather more evidence, but when there’s a clear and present danger…”
“Precisely the point I made,” Cullsworth said. “I even considered declaring it to be a federal matter, and having Homeland roll them up.”
“I’d have appreciated it,” Brock said.
Cullsworth smiled. “It certainly was a very difficult decision. At the end of the day, I concluded that doing something like that would have had troubling Constitutional ramifications.”
Something bothered Sam. “Surely, IA wasn’t considering not arresting the gang of VSS moonlighters, were they?”
Cullsworth shook his head. “I don’t know. But that would have been blatantly, patently idiotic, and heads would eventually have rolled.”
“No doubt about it,” Sam said. “But stalling those arrests was a huge risk to take, especially with all the blood and gore going on. They had to have a reason for taking such an outrageous risk.”
Cullsworth’s eyes twinkled. “You’re exceptionally sharp for a woman who’s only recently been dead. Dan and I were mulling that very thing when you called a while ago. We reached no conclusions.”
“What about Jarvis?” Brock asked. “Didn’t he go Unabomber?”
Dan nodded. He recapped the details of Jarvis’ spectacular escape. “It was a helluva diversion, and one of the most outrageous escapes anybody’s ever heard of,” he finished. “No one has the slightest idea of his whereabouts.”
Cullsworth sighed heavily when Dan finished. “I don’t know what to make of all that, either.”
Sam nodded. From the sound of it, Jarvis didn’t just escape. He had made a series of statements in the process. The deadly trap at his vacation home sounded like viciously premeditated murder, and the bomb in the parking lot garbage can was senseless destruction of human life. There were hundreds of other ways to create a diversion, but Jarvis hadn’t chosen any of them.
And if a person seriously wanted to disappear, it would be fatally stupid to murder three FBI agents, and then murder a young mother and her child. The Bureau would hunt him down to the ends of the earth.
So the question was, was Jarvis just a pissed off, demented individual with the means and motivation to cause serious harm on his way to an inevitably bad death, or was there a method behind his apparent madness?
He’s either rubbing our noses in it, or there’s something else brewing, Sam decided.
And where does that leave us? If the events of the past hour were any indication, she and Brock were still very high on the VSS’ interest list. They were collateral damage, caught in the VSS blowback caused by the CIA’s clamorous and heavy-handed effort to get American wells drilled on Venezuelan turf.
But it was odd that the hit man hadn’t bothered asking any questions of them. He hadn’t been interested in any information whatsoever. Perhaps Dan’s arrival had occurred before he’d gotten around to asking his questions, but Sam doubted it. He’d already had them on the rack for a long, long time by the time Dan showed up. She couldn’t vouch for Brock’s state of mind, but she would probably have told the sick little bastard anything at all he wanted to know, just to get him to stop inflicting such horrors on her.
They were making another statement, she realized. The VSS thought they’d captured two more CIA agents – byproduct of Brock’s random carpool journeys with Arturo Dibiaso, aka Avery Martinson – and they wanted to send a message to any and all Agency assets involved in the Venezuelan operation that the VSS meant business.
Still,
one would think they’d be interested in learning a few operational details, but they hadn’t bothered. Perhaps they’d learned through past experience that it was difficult to get straight answers from CIA agents. That probably wasn’t because Agency assets withstood interrogations any better than other well-trained operatives. It was more likely because nobody did as good a job of compartmentalizing its information as the Agency did. Most agents simply didn’t know enough about any particular operation to be all that useful.
“What do you think, Sam?” Cullsworth’s question brought her back into the conversation.
“I think it’s our job to assume there’s an operation in the works,” she said. “It was way too risky for the Metro IA guys to postpone arresting a group of violent rogue cops to have done so without a good reason.”
Cullsworth nodded his assent, and Sam went on. “Also, it’s possible that Jarvis went completely off his rocker and turned into a murderous psychopath, but I don’t think that’s what happened. My experience with him is that he’s reserved and calculating. In that light, my opinion is that his bombing spree also supports our idea that there’s something big brewing.”
“I like your assessment, Sam,” Cullsworth said. “I agree that it’s the conservative approach. Let’s think about who we want to assign to work the case.”
Sam blinked. She hadn’t considered for a second that anyone else would run point on the investigation. It was her case. She was heavily invested in its outcome. After all, this particular case had killed her twice already.
“All due respect, sir, but I think I need to stay on this,” she said. “Dan and I know this landscape better than anyone else, and I think we’re close.”
Dan nodded his assent.
“Besides,” Sam continued, “it’s not like I can just go home and watch TV. They’re driving by my house every hour.”
Cullsworth shook his head. “We’ve already asked way too much of you. I can’t subject you to any further danger, Sam. I would never forgive myself.”
Sam frowned. “How would you protect us? We know for a fact that Homeland and Metro PD are both compromised, so where would we go that’s out of their reach? Every Homeland safe house is out of the question.”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 49
