The doctor arrived moments later and examined Sam’s stitches. “Who did the work?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” Sam said. “It all happened without my knowledge or consent.”
“Well, you had pretty good luck, in that case,” the doctor said. “The surgeon did a nice job. But it looks like you haven’t quite been a model patient.”
“I haven’t exactly been able to get the kind of rest I would have hoped.”
“I can see that,” the doctor said. “You have two stitches that look like they’ve been pulled out. Honestly, it looks pretty painful.”
“Accurate assessment,” Sam said. “I’ve been gobbling pain pills like an addict.”
“What’ve you been taking?”
“I have no idea,” Sam said. She handed him the pill bottle from her purse. The label was written in Hungarian.
The doctor examined the label and made a face. “Do you always take unknown drugs?” he asked Sam.
“Only in a foreign country,” Sam said. “When in Rome, right?”
“Why not?” the doctor said, a wry smile on his face. “What could possibly go wrong? I’m just going to keep these.” He dropped the pill bottle into his lab coat pocket. “Liability. I have no idea whether these will react with what I’m going to give you. But I’m going to give you something that I know will work.”
The doctor wrote a prescription, tore the sheet, and handed it to Sam. “I must insist that you take a couple of days off,” he said.
“No argument here.”
Sam followed the doctor’s orders. She and Brock spent two days wrapped up in the sheets, wrapped around each other. It was glorious. The kind of thing that made life worth living, in Sam’s estimation.
Truth be told, however, it wasn’t entirely Sam’s idea to take both days off. She had a strong desire to figure out what the hell was going on, and that involved a candid conversation with Tom Davenport, and his boss, Deputy Director Farrar. She was more than mildly curious about why Russian-born Americans had tried to kill her in Budapest, and about how Mark Severn had performed a miracle by waltzing into work three days after his death.
Those were questions that Sam was very eager to answer. She was willing to trade a day off to get those answers, but her bosses would have none of it. “If you won’t look after yourself,” Davenport said, “we will have to do it for you. You’re persona non grata around here until Wednesday.”
So she’d convalesced. And engaged in therapeutic sex.
Then, on Wednesday morning, while Brock stayed at home, still on vacation, Sam went to work. Her first stop was at IT, to get a new Blackberry. Her old one was making bubbles.
Then she walked into Tom Davenport’s office.
“Welcome home, Sam,” Davenport said, arms extended, inviting an embrace.
Sam wasn’t sure their relationship had quite progressed to the point where hugs were appropriate, but she played along, feeling a bit of her residual low-grade angst and consternation dissolve. Just a little bit. Oxytocin, she remembered. Love, labor, and lactation, they said. An involuntary byproduct of human contact. Maybe it was also good for feeling less distrustful of one’s employers.
“So this is the part where you tell me what the hell is going on,” Sam said.
Davenport smiled indulgently. “Actually, this is not that part,” he said. “But it’s close. First, we’re going to march down the hall to Farrar’s office. And then you’ll get to peek under the tent.”
Farrar sat behind a sprawling desk. He rose, shook Sam’s hand, wrapped his other arm around her shoulders, and welcomed her home. Everyone was touchy-feely. Maybe there was something in the water.
“So, what were you supposed to have told me last week?” Sam asked with a pointed smile when the pleasantries had ended.
Farrar smiled, a paternal look on his face. “I’d be happy to tell you what we were not permitted to tell you last week,” he said. “Right after you apologize for being a loose cannon.”
Sam laughed mirthlessly. “Merely responding to operational exigencies,” she said with feigned friendliness. She felt herself getting riled up. “And a strong case can be made that you two threw me to the goddamned wolves. So yes, bureaucratic obedience took a backseat to survival.”
Farrar shook his head. “There were certain realities to the situation that we failed to realize at the time,” he said. “And there was a security barrier. We couldn’t talk about things over an open line.”
Farrar’s gaze hardened. “But if you had returned home as you were ordered to do, rather than chasing after a foreign agent like a dog after a passing car, you might not have added to your collection of permanent scars.”
Sam shook her head. “It wasn’t possible,” she said. “They knew everywhere I was going before I even started. If I hadn’t shaken things up, they’d have had me stuffed in a footlocker at the bottom of the river by now.”
“Highly debatable,” Farrar said.
“I’m happy to play armchair quarterback with you,” Sam said. “But the bottom line is it wasn’t your ass on the line. It was mine.”
Farrar’s jaw clenched. “Field discipline is indispensable and non-negotiable.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Sam said. “Luckily, I exercised exceptionally good judgment and field discipline. That’s why I’m here right now, and why you’re not organizing a funeral. But you’re not talking about trade craft. You’re talking about obedience to a guy sitting in an armchair five thousand miles away from the nearest sign of danger. Those are not even remotely the same things.”
Sam sat back in her chair.
Farrar’s face flushed.
Davenport filled the awkward silence. “Either way, you’re here, and only a little worse for wear,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “So now, it’s all open-kimono. We’re going to tell you what we know.”
They knew a lot, it turned out. They knew Sam was in danger, and they knew it almost from the moment she landed in Budapest. Because a decidedly non-dead Mark Severn had told them so.
They also knew that once she caught a whiff of anything remotely untoward in Budapest, nothing would stop her from flipping rocks to see what crawled out from beneath. So they told her to come home.
And they knew that the odds of her coming home were less than good, so they had taken precautions on her behalf, to save her from herself.
They had called the Israelis.
Tom Davenport had cut his teeth as a young intelligence officer over in the Middle East. Anything happening in that region of the globe usually came to the attention of the Israelis, and Davenport had made acquaintances, both Mossad and Shin Bet. He called in a favor. He asked an old friend for help looking after Sam, and the home office reached out to the Budapest Shin Bet chapter.
The Homeland system tracked every agent’s phone, all the time, a bit of privacy invasion that had undoubtedly saved Sam’s life, because Davenport gave the Shin Bet agents the coordinates in Sam’s phone. It was the reason they had arrived so quickly after her stabbing.
“Why the hell couldn’t you just tell me that he wasn’t dead?” Sam demanded. “It would have saved me a ton of trouble.”
“Because I wasn’t home yet,” a voice said from behind her.
Sam turned to look. Mark Severn. Tall, athletic, attractive.
Alive.
Sam gave him a hug. “What kind of asshole fakes his own death?” she said.
Severn laughed. “A very scared asshole. It got a bit dicey.”
Sam nodded. “I understand completely. I really wish I had known you weren’t dead, though.”
“They couldn’t risk telling you over an unsecured phone line,” he said, “because it would have jeopardized my egress.”
“Aha,” Sam said. “So you were on your way home while I was on my way to view your body?”
“That’s about the size of it. I’m really sorry for all the trouble, but I was in deep shit.”
Sam smiled. “Yeah, they seemed l
ike serious people. How’d you figure out they were onto you?”
“It wasn’t hard. Finesse doesn’t seem to be their thing.”
Sam laughed. “Not by a mile.”
His face darkened. “They slaughtered a woman in my hotel room.”
“Jesus.”
“A woman I was… fond of.”
Sam recalled the lunch receipt she had found in Severn’s belongings. Two beers, two entrees.
“I assumed they were looking for me,” Severn said. “So I ran.”
“I’m sorry, Mark,” she said.
“I am too. She didn’t deserve that.”
“How the hell did you pretend to be dead?”
Severn shrugged. “Wasn’t hard. The traffic accident was easy enough to stage. After they took me to the hospital, it was just a matter of throwing around enough cash to make it work.”
“You bribed your way dead?” Sam asked.
“Pretty much. A dollar still goes a long way that far east. I had plenty left over to pay for my passage home.”
“Incredible,” Sam said. “How’d you get home?”
“Private jet,” Severn said. “I don’t care how many TSA employees we have standing around at airline terminals picking their noses. If you want to sneak into the US, just charter a jet and fly to a small airport. Easy as hell.”
Sam pondered, imagining Severn’s escape. “How did you know who to trust in the Hungarian charter business?”
“I didn’t. I needed a lucky break, and I got one. Plus, I promised to double the rate if I arrived safely. I think that went a long way toward making things go smoothly.”
Sam nodded. “Who says you can’t buy morality?”
“Certainly not me,” Severn said. “I’m now a believer.”
Sam smiled. “So, now for the obvious question,” she said. “What the hell were you working on that got people so pissed off?”
Severn looked at Davenport, who looked at Farrar. Farrar nodded, as if giving permission.
“Do you remember anyone named Janice Everman?” Severn asked.
Sam shook her head. “Name’s vaguely familiar,” she said, “but I really couldn’t pick her out of a lineup.”
“Nobody could,” Severn said, “until she died a year ago.”
“Violent death?” Sam asked.
“Not at first,” Severn said. “I mean, it just looked like a rare food-borne illness. She was in her mid-forties, single, a hard-charging career type at the Department of Justice. She went out to dinner by herself after work, ate a salad, and was dead by noon the next day. Her cleaning lady found her, curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor.”
“Holy smokes,” Sam said. “Rotten lettuce?”
“That’s what everyone assumed,” Severn said. “People thought it was a tragedy, but nothing else.”
“I assume it wasn’t?”
“Well, that’s the thing. They performed an autopsy. The official report said she died of food poisoning. She didn’t have much family to speak of. Otherwise, I’m sure there would have been a lawsuit. It was in the newspapers. The reporter didn’t mention the restaurant by name to avoid getting sued, and the thing just died away after a while.”
Sam narrowed her eyes. “Until?”
“Until a month ago. We hired a new lead guitarist for the band. The guy wails. He’s freaking awesome. He isn’t much to look at, but he can play circles around the last guy we had.”
“Relevant because?” Sam prodded.
“Right. Relevant because in his day job, the guy works in the coroner’s office. He helps with autopsies.”
“He worked on Janice Everman’s autopsy,” Sam guessed.
Severn nodded. “And it wasn’t kosher. Janice Everman had barfed her guts out all night. Because they thought she had died of food poisoning, they took a close look at her stomach contents.”
“Was there anything left to look at?” Sam asked.
“Not much. But there was something very interesting. Glass.”
“Glass?”
“Glass powder, to be precise. They didn’t find any big chunks of glass, but they found trace amounts of it, wedged into her stomach lining.”
“How did they figure that out?”
“They got lucky, really,” Severn said. “They cut out a piece of her stomach lining for analysis, and there was glass powder in the sample.”
“What’s the theory?”
“Her symptoms were inconsistent with any known acute-onset food-borne pathogens in regular human circulation,” Severn said. “But they were very consistent with a rarer one.”
“Ebola?” Sam ventured.
“No, but almost as fun. Botulism. Botulism on steroids, really.”
“On steroids? An accelerated onset rate, you mean.”
“Exactly,” Severn said.
“Why did your guitar player talk to you about this particular autopsy, over a year later?”
“Because the shards of glass and the botulism diagnosis never made it into the report.”
“And your guy has angst over that?”
“You could say so, yes,” Severn said.
“Any chance his findings are wrong, and the official report is correct?”
Severn shrugged. “Who the hell knows, really,” he said. “He just came to me because he found out I work at Homeland. Janice Everman worked in the Security and Public Policy Branch at Justice. My guy thought there might be a connection.”
Sam nodded, a pensive frown on her brow. “So what took you to Budapest?”
“The money trail.”
“Of course.” It was always the money trail.
“There was a flurry of activity in a Slovenian and Russian gang out of Boston,” Severn said. “And a retired assassin who leads a completely sedentary and solitary life suddenly came out of cloister around the same time. The funds flowed through a bank in Budapest.”
“Coincidence?”
“Before Budapest,” Severn said, “I would have said so. And a weak coincidence at that. So I thought I’d do the job right, go to Budapest, check things out, and put it to rest.”
“But it got interesting in Budapest,” Sam said.
“You could say that,” Severn said. “Maybe I was paranoid, but it seemed like there were agents everywhere.”
“I don’t think you were paranoid. I think they had quite a team on the ground over there. Did you go back after your backpack?”
Severn shook his head. “It was full of bogus case notes.”
“Nice,” Sam said. “Throw them off the scent a bit.”
“That was the idea.”
“So you paid off the police and the hospital personnel to get out alive.”
“That’s right. It was much easier than I thought it was going to be. Took less than two hours to orchestrate.”
Sam looked at Davenport and Farrar. “You knew about this?”
“Not nearly as quickly as we should have,” Davenport said with a pointed glance at Severn.
“So Mark kicked over the hornet’s nest, and I walked right into the swarm,” Sam said.
Severn nodded, a sheepish look on his face. “I’m very sorry about that, Sam. I didn’t realize they’d send someone over so quickly to tie up loose ends.”
Sam shook her head. She shrugged. “Shit happens. And it’s a tough business. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.”
She turned to look at Farrar. “So what now?” she asked.
“I went to school in Boston,” Farrar said. “Early fall is pretty nice there. I think you’ll enjoy it.”
25
David Swaringen went to work with a new sense of purpose following his discussion with Clark Barter. Gone was his vague sense of ethical disquiet, and in its place was a kind of moral equity, a quid pro quo, something more like the code Hammurabi espoused. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.
He quieted any qualms he might have felt about watching other people die on screen at the hands of men with guns and helicopters. He had t
o, because the men with guns and helicopters were often following his commands. He wrapped it all in a rational cloak of prevention and service of the greater good, a doctrine of saving hundreds or thousands of lives, sometimes by taking a handful of them.
Conventional wisdom in the intelligence community was that some people just needed to die. Swaringen didn’t know for sure, but he felt the sentiment was probably right. Some people were undoubtedly incorrigible. No amount of negotiation, education, or incarceration was going to change their minds. They were going to kill Americans at the earliest opportunity and in as grand and spectacular a fashion as possible, no matter what else happened.
In his more sanguine moments, Swaringen understood that the United States had provided plenty of hate fodder for the opposition. You didn’t have to mow down too many neighborhoods for the remainder of the city to turn against you. Showing up in foreign lands with tanks, mortars, and Kevlar was a great way to influence people. But rarely was the influence entirely in the desired direction. People had a way of rising up against that kind of intervention. Hate and anger galvanized around ideology, and soon you had an insurrection on your hands. Like the insurrections the United States was currently bungling.
Hence the need for Penumbra, Swaringen figured.
Swaringen also paid greater attention to the litany of ID criteria that the technicians went through by rote during every situation response in the command center. This felt extremely important to Swaringen. He wanted to make sure they were using lethal force only against the right people, and never against the wrong people. Ensuring the IDs were correct obliged his innate sense of justice, of fair play. The gloves were off, but only against a certain crowd. Everyone else should be able to live in peace and tranquility, he reasoned.
It became evident as Swaringen paid closer attention to the ID criteria that there was some sort of a computerized system in use to help recognize people’s faces at a distance. Swaringen wasn’t quite certain what this technology entailed, but it was pretty impressive. The after-action reports that he had seen, where the individual’s real face was compared to the database’s parameterized representation, showed a remarkable degree of accuracy. “Advanced Adaptive Learning Algorithm,” one of the technicians explained. “It runs in the background continuously. There are millions of video cameras all over the United States, and I think by now we’re tapped into all of them. So there’s plenty of video for the computer to chew on.”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 71
