“I can’t imagine the long hours would be all that tolerable if you didn’t believe in what you were doing,” Kittredge observed.
“Quite so,” Cullsworth agreed. “And speaking of my terrible schedule, I’m afraid I must leave you and go back to work.”
“Duty calls?” Sam asked.
Cullsworth nodded. “Testimony at a closed session of the Senate tomorrow. Rather a futile thing, but something I have strong convictions about.”
“Do you mind if we ask about the subject?” Dan asked.
“There’s a piece of legislation that was enacted several years ago with lingering provisions that are up for a renewal vote in the Senate,” Cullsworth said. “The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. I happen to think a few of those provisions shouldn’t be renewed.”
“Which ones?” Sam asked.
“Wish I could say,” Cullsworth said. “Security, and all that. Suffice it to say that the measures went a long way beyond way too far.”
He showed a helluva lot of leg, Sam thought. That kind of candor was unheard of inside the beltway, particularly from the head of a huge department like Homeland.
“When is the vote?” Brock asked.
“Tomorrow, after the kangaroo court,” Cullsworth said. “Like I say, it’s a fool’s errand. The ayes have it by two very staunch votes. It’s more about my conscience than anything else. Anyway, if you’ll accept my apologies for rushing off. . .”
Cullsworth set his silverware atop his dinner plate and left the room with a smile and a wave.
Then he reappeared, ducking his head back into the dining room to add an afterthought. “You have my full support with your investigation, Sam. Anything at all. I just ask that you keep me informed.”
“I will, sir,” she said.
They didn’t waste any time getting to work after dinner.
Secretary Cullsworth’s home was one of three residences on US soil that contained a SCIF, or Special Compartmentalized Information Facility. It was a specially-sealed and protected room, authorized to hold the nation’s most highly classified papers and discussions. The Director of National Intelligence and the President of the United States were the other two earthlings who enjoyed similar access. While Brock and Kittredge had a drink and watched television, Dan and Sam disappeared inside the highly-classified room.
They worked quickly to trace the telephone number Kittredge had given them. They didn’t have high hopes that they’d discover anything profoundly useful, but Sam firmly believed that due diligence always paid off.
“This is an Agency number, so they’ll have a watch on the information surrounding it,” Dan said.
“So we’ll IP mask?” Sam asked.
“It’s a ‘best practice,’ as the business school kids say. But we’ll take it a step further, and IP hop.” Dan outlined the arcane and esoteric steps necessary to remain as anonymous as possible while searching for information online.
“Will it be enough?” Sam asked.
“Definitely not, but it’ll take them a couple of days to piece things together.” Dan’s hands moved across the computer keyboard with practiced speed and efficiency. Various windows opened on both monitors.
“Let’s hope it’s enough time,” Sam said.
“Here goes nothing.” Dan entered the telephone number into a database query application. Its simple interface hid an exceptionally powerful spy tool.
“This kind of shit is probably what has Cullsworth’s panties in a wad,” Sam observed.
“I’m sure it does,” Dan said. “Remember all those speeches about civil liberties and Constitutional discipline when he first took over the job?”
“How could I forget?” Sam groaned.
“Here we go. The number’s registered to Sally Jane Haynes. It’s been hers for twenty years.”
“DC address,” Sam said. Dan pasted it into a browser window and brought up a Google Earth map of the location associated with the telephone number Charley Arlinghaus gave to Peter Kittredge.
Dan laughed. “Those smug bastards.” He zoomed in. “They’re not even trying. The address is a vacant lot.”
Sam shook her head. “What now?”
“Soft-ping, baby.” Dan clicked on the icon for a program called Dominion, and a spartan-looking interface appeared.
“I’m lost,” Sam said.
“Simple, really. The Agency undoubtedly has a permanent trace on this number,” Dan explained. “Whenever anyone calls or texts, the tracing software notifies a human somewhere. Dominion can tell us which humans get notified.”
“Handy.”
“But nothing’s free. They’ll know someone in the US government was trying to look up their skirt.”
Sam thought for a moment. “Do it,” she said. “I don’t see much down side.”
Dan continued, clicking on the button to start the search.
It took less than a second. The output showed three email addresses. “So these addresses receive a message when someone calls that phone number?” Sam asked.
“Correct. But they all look like organizational email boxes, so they’re probably checked by a low-level CIA admin and passed on to the appropriate case officer.”
Sam squinted. “Which basically tells us nothing,” she said.
“That’s my professional diagnosis. Let’s try another toy, though,” Dan said. He opened a program called Tracer.
“And this fine slice of geekery does what?” Sam asked.
“Nothing much. Just tells us the location of the telephone that would ring if we dialed its particular number.”
“You don’t have to actually call the number to do that?”
“Nope,” Dan said. “It’s pure magic.”
“This stuff never fails to freak me out.”
Dan smiled. “Glad I’m on the good guys’ team.”
“Glad you know the difference,” Sam said. Dan rolled his eyes.
They waited impatiently while the computer did its work. Just under a minute later, it spit out another telephone number and a set of coordinates.
“Uh huh,” Dan said. “Just like I thought. Sneaky bastards.”
“Translation, please,” Sam said.
“It’s a dummy number,” Dan said. “The call is automatically re-routed to another phone.”
“So what?”
Dan typed the coordinates into Google Earth. They resolved to a familiar spot on the map: Caracas, Venezuela.
Sam frowned, thinking. “I don’t know if that tells us much,” she said after a while. “I mean, we already know the Agency has assets in Caracas. We already know that Charley Arlinghaus was one of them. It makes sense that he’d give Kittredge a phone number for an Agency asset he was familiar with.”
“Could also be VSS,” Dan observed.
“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “Pretty sure the VSS was behind Charley Arlinghaus’ skull-cracking. I don’t think they would suddenly be friendly with one another.”
“So basically, we’ve learned that a CIA agent probably gave Kittredge the number for another CIA agent.”
“Yep. Looks like another dead end.”
“Unless the CIA is actually behind this whole mess,” Dan said.
Sam looked thoughtful, then shook her head. “I’ve toyed with that idea about a hundred times,” she said. “And each time, I end up concluding that it makes no sense. Why fake violent resistance to your own foreign overtures?”
Dan nodded. “Probably right.”
“I think it’s all about the VSS.”
“Which is another way of saying that we’ve got nothing,” Dan observed grimly.
47
Tom Jarvis sat in a dark room, enjoying a cigarette. He’d quit years ago, but suddenly felt the urge, and he saw no reason to deprive himself. Probably won’t be lucky enough to die of cancer, he thought with a gallows chuckle.
It had been a messy few days. He’d argued against the necessity of it, the explosions and bloodshed, but the boss had been adamant.
/> And the boss paid very, very well.
And it’s the last time, ever, Jarvis thought. He had burned every bridge. It was a conscious choice, designed to remove the possibility of ever finding himself in another situation such as this one. He was tired of ideologues controlling his destiny.
Zealots weren’t without their virtues, to be sure. For one thing, they were absurdly committed, at least in a financial sense, to their adored misconceptions. They paid outrageous sums for tasks that required just a little bit of skill, and a willingness to set aside a little moral compunction.
That was the beauty of his own innate nihilism, Jarvis thought. It allowed him to profit handsomely from the misguided ideologues, and to put up with them at the same time.
He returned his focus to the task at hand. He had suddenly found himself back in the tactical game, an unfortunate consequence of the slaughter in Caracas, and something he hadn’t done for over a decade. The operation was still moving forward, of course, but the Agency had mowed down all of the intermediate assets. So Jarvis was left to further dirty his own hands.
He dialed a phone number. A funny-sounding guy answered. “Airborne Ads, our flying banners get you airborne, this is Mike, may I help you?”
“Hi Mike. Please go ahead, like we discussed. You’ll be there by halftime?”
“Guaranteed.”
El Jerga sat in silence, peering out the car window at the football stadium in Landover, Maryland. He needed to sleep, to prepare for what lay ahead, but an assassin’s life was rarely about what was comfortable. It was mostly about what was necessary.
The events of the past few days played over and over again in his mind. His emotions traveled between raw arousal as he recalled the exquisite, animal pleasure he’d experienced at the redhead’s expense, and the red-faced shame he felt as a result of failing to kill her.
But his redemption would be swift. At least, he hoped his chance to make amends for his failure would arrive swiftly. It all depended on the contents of the message he was awaiting.
It was a big opportunity, involving important gringos, he was told, and he had no reason to doubt the source.
He heard it before he saw it, a loud, low-flying propeller-driven airplane. He craned his neck to see if it was the right airplane, the one he was looking for.
El Jerga wasn’t disappointed. He saw a bright yellow crop-duster aircraft, towing a long, billowing banner behind it, flying toward the football stadium just a mile away. “Cutting Edge Optics, 1-800-PRECISE,” the banner declared in large, black letters.
El Jerga smiled. The message contained his activation word, cutting. He saw the choice of that particular word as a nod to his unique proclivities, and maybe even as a vote of confidence in his personal abilities.
The word had more immediate pragmatic impact, as well. It was his signal to unleash the demons once again.
48
Sam and Brock lay together beneath the covers in Secretary Cullsworth’s cavernous guest suite, their battered and broken bodies tender to the touch. Alone for the first time since Sam’s brief death, their caresses were tender, almost awe-filled. Their kisses and whispers were soft and reverent.
“I watched you die,” Brock said, touching her neck with his lips. “It’s hard to express how intense that makes everything feel now.”
She smiled. “Nothing like a little death to help you appreciate life.”
“That was a lot more death than I care to see again, ever. I’m positive that I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life.”
“You’ll be in good company,” Sam said with a shudder. “It was horrible. There was something seriously wrong with that guy.”
“I just wish we could send out a task force to find him,” Brock said. “But I don’t know who we’d send after him, given how few law enforcement agencies we can trust at the moment.”
Sam nodded, a sigh escaping her lips. “It makes me tired just thinking about it, but I think we’re on our own. Even with Cullsworth on our side, we’d still be at the mercy of whoever he put in charge of the investigation, or whoever showed up on the scene.” She shook her head. “Makes you realize how fragile everything is.”
Brock agreed. “Weird how trust holds everything together. Nothing really works without it.”
“Speaking of nothing really working,” Sam said, reaching for the television remote. “I wonder if the Bureau’s having much luck chasing Jarvis down.”
She tuned to the 10 p.m. local news, surmising that the regional talking heads would likely devote more air time to the DC manhunt than anything else.
Instead, a breaking story dominated the broadcast: Senator Tom Wharton, a Texas Republican, staunch pro-military and pro-intelligence advocate, and a longstanding member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was found dead of apparently self-inflicted knife wounds.
Flashing emergency lights visible behind him, the on-scene reporter spoke in grave tones about the length and depth of the slashes on the senator’s wrists, of the brief hour between when his wife last saw him, alive and in good spirits, and when she made the horrific discovery of his bloody body in the bathtub.
There was no note, the reporter said, but while the Metro police department hadn’t yet ruled out foul play, they had preliminarily classified the case as a suicide.
The reporter wrapped up the piece with a brief homage to the senator’s lifetime of public service in regional and national politics, then signed off.
Self-inflicted knife wounds, Sam thought to herself as the newscast shifted to footage of a starlet behaving badly in a DC nightclub. I wonder how self-inflicted they really were. Sam recalled the scene of Abrams’ death, nine extremely long days earlier. There was no way it was a suicide. They’d held Abrams down and slit his wrists, then subdued him while he bled out.
She couldn’t help but wonder whether Wharton’s death might have occurred under similar circumstances. One could never trust a newscast for accuracy – every news story that she’d ever been personally involved in was reported with a number of irresponsible and sensational-sounding inaccuracies – but it was interesting that the on-scene reporter made a point of talking about the severity of the wounds in the senator’s wrists, as if to convey the depth of the man’s despair or his absolute commitment to ending his own life.
Coincidence? Probably. Most things like this had random happenstance as their root cause.
But sometimes not.
Her focus returned to the squawking newscast as the topic finally changed to the Jarvis case. Despite extensive Metro PD and FBI cooperation in what had become the largest manhunt since the terrifying sniper case, the so-called “beltway bomber” was still on the loose.
The police were looking for a single individual – they showed an artist’s rendering of someone who vaguely resembled Tom Jarvis, Sam thought, but only if you closed your eyes and thought very hard about Tom Jarvis. Authorities believed that a group of extremists might have been behind the attack. “We haven’t ruled out terrorist activity,” a Metro PD spokesman said. “There has been a rise in militant Islamic jihadist activities in the district,” he intoned, a grave look on his face, “and we are working very closely with our FBI counterparts to bring this matter to a swift resolution. Rest assured that these individuals will be brought to justice.”
If anyone noticed any suspicious activity, they were to call a toll-free number listed at the bottom of the screen, the news anchor concluded.
“Looks like they have their best people on it,” Brock said sarcastically.
Sam agreed. “I wonder how far up the Metro chain of command the VSS infiltration goes.”
“They’ll pretend to look hard for Jarvis, and never find him,” Brock said. “But won’t the Bureau have jurisdiction?”
“Sure,” Sam said. “But that won’t be much help if a few crooked Metro cops are hiding him. They have resources of their own.”
“So you’re telling me there’s a chance…”
She smiled at the stupid movie reference, kissed Brock, switched off the light, and laid her head on his chest. Sleep overtook them in just a few minutes.
Sam had no idea how long she’d been asleep before she awoke in a cold sweat. In her dream, she’d been trying to get away from the short, stocky man with the black eyes and the crazy scar on his neck, but she was unable to move her limbs, and each time she squirmed, he hurt her more deeply.
She felt Brock’s touch on her shoulders. “Shhh. It’s okay,” he was saying. “I’ve got you.” She had evidently been thrashing.
Slowly, she relaxed, and her heart rate returned to normal. She was alive. She had survived. Brock’s arms were wrapped around her. The devil of a man had hurt her deeply, repeatedly, and in a disturbingly personal way, and he had even killed her. But she was awake, alive, drawing breath, experiencing life.
And she was scared. He was still out there. He’d almost killed her for a third time in the hospital. Tom Jarvis was still on the loose, too, probably bearing down on her and Brock, hoping to finish what he’d started.
She breathed deeply, willing her body to settle down, willing her mind to relax, centering herself. There is no crisis at this moment, she reminded herself. Just breathe.
She nuzzled closer to Brock. Soon his breathing turned heavy and rhythmic, punctuated by the beginnings of a snore, but Sam couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t turn off her mind. Snapshots from the previous week full of death, danger, and insanity kept replaying themselves, and she struggled to combine them in a way that made sense.
Suddenly, in a flash, it fit together.
Of course!
She had figured it out.
At least, she thought she had. It was the newscast, combined with the dinner conversation. Together, they formed the right lens, and as Sam peered through it at the week’s events, she thought she understood what would happen next.
She looked at the clock. Just before eleven p.m. It might already be too late.
But she had to try. If her hunch was correct, there would be more bloodshed. She had to stop it.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 51
