He turned to look at her, as if noticing her for the first time despite having run headlong into her only moments before. “Who are you, by the way?”
“Special Agent Sam Jameson, Homeland.” She flashed tin.
Higgs jerked his arm free of her grip.
He ran three paces in the opposite direction, back around the bend, but stopped dead in his tracks as the police searchlight swept across the path in front of him.
Sam was right behind him. “Easy there, Olympian. I think you’ve scarfed a few too many donuts to outrun me.”
The searchlight illuminated them both. Higgs looked down at her hand, now gripped firmly around his elbow, then up into her eyes. She smiled.
He took a deep breath. “I am a bit short on options, it seems.”
“I won’t bite you. Let’s go this way.” She started walking toward the searchlight, her hand still gripping his arm. “It’s best not to run away from cops with searchlights. It triggers their chase instinct.”
He hesitated, eyed the police car, then walked with her.
“I am curious about something, Senator.” Her tone was conversational. “I understand why you ran away from the hospital, but why did you run from the cops just now? I think they’d be my first stop if I wanted people to stop trying to kill me.”
Higgs was silent for several steps.
Sam looked at his face. He looked pensive, she thought, as if he was mulling something over.
“Tough to know who my friends are these days,” he said.
“Ahh. Spoken like a man who needs better friends.”
“I arrived at that conclusion myself just a bit ago.”
“Well, I think I’m the closest thing you have to a friend on this jogging path.” Sam looped her arm through his. “I’m all ears,” she said.
“You’re also a Fed.” Higgs felt a constriction in his chest as he said it. The spotlight in his face did nothing to alleviate the feeling of extreme exposure.
“Technically. That worries you?” Sam waved her badge vigorously to the cop behind the searchlight. The light lowered away from their eyes.
“Not for the reason you might be thinking. The corollary to not knowing who my friends are is that I also don’t really know who my enemies might be, either.”
“It’s your lucky night. I happen to slave away in the counterintelligence investigations branch at DHS.”
Higgs laughed derisively. “It just keeps getting better.”
“I’ll try not to take that personally, Senator.” She gave him an elbow to the ribs in mock indignation. “It probably won’t take you long to figure out that you could be much worse off.”
“I’m not sure how.”
“Well, my friend Big-A could have found you first. He’s still a bit upset about your flexibility with the truth earlier today.”
She jostled him again and watched his face stiffen. She’d hit a nerve.
“Besides,” she said. “I might actually be able to help you. For instance, it’s been my experience that spy friends are friendly, until they aren’t. The trick is to know when to stop inviting them over for drinks.”
“Or when to stop asking for favors.”
“And that. Nobody likes needy friends. You’re not a needy friend, are you, Frank? May I call you Frank? I feel like we should be on a first-name basis, since we’re strolling together at midnight. And since I’m going to put you up for the evening.”
“What?”
She laughed. “Yep. I’ve changed our plans. You’re so charming, I thought we’d spend the night together. Or, maybe I’d just prefer you didn’t get bumped off before I have a chance to ask you about a few things. The Bureau probably isn’t compromised, but I’ll humor you, given the circumstances. Nobody should have known where to find you tonight, yet here we are, cleaning up more blood on your behalf.”
“Really, I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to spend the night with a DHS agent,” Higgs protested.
“You have a better idea in mind?”
Higgs didn’t.
“We’re going to have to invite a couple of friends over to chat about all those dead people in your life recently, but I can exercise a little discretion.”
“I’m not sure you fully appreciate what you’re signing up for.” Higgs’s voice was thin and tired.
Sam ignored him and spoke loudly to the policeman, who was now within earshot. “Special Agent Jameson and Senator Frank Higgs. Can we bug you for a lift?” She held up her badge. Then to Higgs: “Hold up your hands, ninja.”
The policeman trained the spotlight on their faces. “Seriously?” Sam protested to the cop. “You’ve been watching us walk toward you for the last quarter-mile.”
“Sorry, ma’am. It’ll just take a sec,” the young officer said. “Turn around slowly for me please.”
They pirouetted slowly with their hands in the air. Satisfied, the policeman turned off the spotlight.
Sam spoke up. “Officer, I do have a small favor I need to ask of you. It’s not every night that a senator makes the police blotter. Let’s leave him out of the radio chatter, shall we?”
The policeman started to protest, until Sam handed her badge to him. His jaw clenched slightly, but he acquiesced. “Hop in. Where’re we headed?”
“My place. Alexandria. I’ll give you better directions in a sec, but I’ve got to make a couple of phone calls first.” Sam was already dialing as she spoke.
The police car carrying Sam Jameson and Frank Higgs turned south off Glebe Road onto Montrose Ave. As they rounded the corner and crested the small, steep hill, they caught sight of more flashing police lights.
Sam’s heart sank as they approached her house. The street in front of her brownstone was swarming with cop cars.
The car hadn’t stopped rolling when Sam jumped out. She scanned the crowd of police and neighbors, looking for Brock, but didn’t find him. She called his name. No answer.
She tried again in a louder voice.
An officer stepped forward. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to—”
“Where’s Brock James?”
The officer started to put his hand on her shoulder. She waved her badge and strode past him, ignoring his protests. She broke into a run toward her opened front door.
“Brock!” she shouted.
The crowd turned to look at her, but no one spoke.
As she crossed the threshold into her house, she saw that the front door frame and been splintered. It was a professional grade door and lock. They had obviously used a battering ram to get the door open.
The house was a disaster. Nothing breakable appeared unbroken.
“Brock!” She felt concern turning to panic. She ran to the garage. Brock’s BMW was still in its spot.
“Your alarm service put the 911 call in.” The cop had followed her to the garage. “There was no one in the house when we got here. There’s blood in the upstairs hallway. I’m sorry, ma’am.”
Tears welled in her eyes, and her jaw clenched. “Whose scene is this?”
“Mine, ma’am.”
“Not any more. You’re relieved.”
38
One hour west of Aspen, CO. Saturday, 7:03 a.m. MT.
Protégé awoke to intense sunlight flowing into his room through a giant picture window. At a little over 11,000 feet in elevation, there was very little atmosphere to filter the sun’s intensity, and his eyes protested as they tried to adjust to the bright sunshine.
He was slightly groggy, but he had slept long and well. His first stop was the restroom. He still felt the remnants of his incredible and unexpected tryst with Allison, the flight attendant during the previous night’s flight on the old man’s airplane from the East Coast to Aspen. Protégé smiled and shook his head in disbelief at the pleasant recollection.
He stepped into the living area of the suite to discover a freshly brewed pot of coffee awaiting him. Evidently the coffeemaker was on a timer.
Cup in hand, he made his way
to the sliding glass door that led to a modest balcony.
Protégé opened the door and was taken aback by what he saw. For the first time, he took in the Rocky Mountains in all of their rugged, spectacular beauty.
To his left, toward the sunrise, was a fantastic mountain pass. It was bordered on both north and south by large masses of rock, decorated in equal portions of snow, talus, and pine trees.
To his right, a single, gargantuan mountain rose out of a deep blue lake, which lapped at the mountain’s base at one end and tapered to a stream that meandered through the broad mountain pass on the other.
The view was breathtaking. He wondered again about what might lie in store for the weekend.
He didn’t have to wonder for long. The telephone rang. At the other end of the line was a courteous and professional female voice that informed him of Archive’s desire to see him at breakfast downstairs, as soon as it was convenient.
“Right now is quite convenient, thank you,” he said, smiling, and made his way from his suite with a freshly filled cup of steaming coffee.
He emerged from the spiral staircase of halved, polished pine logs into the large mountain cabin’s spacious foyer, and ambled toward the sound of clinking dishes and laughter-peppered conversation.
He entered a room dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows and a large rough-hewn wooden table. The mountain lodge theme was understated. The giant cabin’s interior designer evidently favored rustic accents woven into a modern, elegant theme.
The table had but a few empty seats remaining, and Protégé somewhat meekly made his way to the first available chair.
Aside from the old man, the limousine driver, and the front desk clerk, he hadn’t seen another soul as he got settled into his room late the previous night, so it was slightly disorienting to be suddenly thrust into a crowd of unfamiliar faces.
“Robert! Good morning, pleasure to see you!” Archive’s unmistakable mirth-tinged tones rose above the sounds of breakfast and conversation, and the other diners turned as one to view the table’s new addition.
“This is the slightly awkward part where I embarrass you in public with a long list of your accomplishments and qualifications, so brace yourself.” A few laughs came from various spots around the table.
“Don’t worry; we’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted with each other this weekend, so I won’t bother to parade the names by you in a blur,” the old man continued. “Everyone, this is Protégé, the addition to our little clique that I’ve been raving about of late. His mother calls him Robert. Despite his obvious youth, many people in the Government Services division of General Electronics call him ‘sir.’ I choose to view that strange fact as testament to his ability, rather than as testament to GE’s poor judgment.” The old man’s mischievous smile widened, and good-natured chortles rippled around the table.
“Remind me never to let you introduce me,” a British accent intoned from the seat on the old man’s right. Laughter tittered.
Protégé took a seat at the table. He looked at the other guests, and had a tough time keeping his jaw from hitting the table.
He recognized the man to Archive’s right immediately. Sir Randolph Bronwin, the dashing and occasionally brash head of an impressive collection of industries. The handsome blonde-maned man owned an airline, a music label, a cruise line, and a number of retail and restaurant chains, and his iconic visage had adorned the cover of countless magazines over the years.
To his left was Bonnie Blake, a national news anchor.
As he looked around, he realized that he recognized almost everyone at the table. They were all accomplished and at least a little bit famous.
“I don’t quite know what to say, other than that I’d have packed better clothes if I had known whose company I’d be keeping this weekend,” Protégé remarked, with a pointed glance toward the old man at the head of the table.
He was pleased that his slightly lame attempt at humor produced good-natured chuckles from around the room.
“Nonsense! You’re in no special company,” Archive said. “It’s all first names, and no stuffiness allowed.”
Archive waved over a waiter. “Robert,” he said, “I employ the best omelet chef in the Rocky Mountain region, so be sure to put your order in.”
He pointed to an exquisitely apportioned buffet. “And our staff has put together quite a spread, so please don’t leave hungry. The chateaubriand could start a revolution.”
People laughed. It must have been some sort of inside joke. Protégé wore a puzzled look.
Sir Randolph leaned in. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll let you in on our little put-on soon enough.”
39
Alexandria, VA. Saturday, 8:48 a.m. ET.
Sam was bleary-eyed and exhausted when the last of the uniformed policemen left her ransacked house mid-morning.
They had taken photos, dusted for prints, filled out forms, and generally milled about. She didn’t hustle them out, but she was happy when they finished.
She was ready to begin the real investigation.
Big-A had taken the senator to a safe house several hours earlier. She knew that if Higgs’s pursuers had federal ties of any sort, he would be dead by noon, but she wasn’t in a position to be of much assistance at the moment.
Brock was gone, and there was a decent amount of blood on the floor and wall in the hallway outside their bedroom. She fought panic, and bordered on tears.
Sam was a counterintelligence agent. There was one golden rule that came along with the job: trust no one. Not your boss, not your subordinates, and certainly not anyone from a rival bureaucracy.
She had seen enough double agents rolled up over the years—usually in a memorably grisly way—not to be surprised at who turned out to be crooked. Or more crooked than average, really. There was a great deal of truth to the maxim that it took a criminal to catch a criminal, and it took a spy to catch a spy.
Don’t trust, always verify, and do it yourself if it needed to be done right. That was how she ran things. Because almost everyone else was an idiot, was on the take, or both.
There were rare exceptions, of course, like her exceptionally capable and loyal deputy, Dan Gable. But the exceptions just proved the rule. She wasn’t angry or cynical about it. It was just how life was.
That was why she had lied to the police investigators when they had asked whether she had a surveillance system installed. She didn’t need them screwing things up.
When she bought her house five years earlier using windfall cash earned by shorting the housing bubble, she had installed an Israeli-built video surveillance system. It had taken some doing to find the right industry connections, but she was persistent. She knew firsthand of NSA tentacles built into the surveillance systems sold in the US, and her security clearance made her a prime candidate for additional government snooping. So she went out of her way to get the Israeli stuff.
Big Brother paid her salary every month, but that didn’t mean she trusted her employer. As she had told Higgs earlier, friends were friendly, until they weren’t. A girl had to look out for herself.
Every room in her house had high-definition cameras installed in inconspicuous places. Shielded wiring ran adjacent to the power cables behind the drywall. The cables fed a digital recorder in a hardened eighteen-by-fifteen concrete room she had built behind a false wall in her basement.
Stocked with food, passports, weapons, ammunition, cash, gold and silver bullion, a sanitized Internet connection, and working plumbing, the room was designed to let Sam survive nearly any temporary catastrophe, including a break-in attempt by a sophisticated adversary.
Not telling the police about her surveillance system had been a tough decision. Waiting for them to leave had cost her precious hours that she could have been using to look for clues in the video record of the break-in. But she couldn’t take the risk of giving evidence to a crooked insider with connections to the muscle that had remodeled her house and absconded with
her man.
As the last investigator drove away, Sam headed downstairs to figure out what really happened to Brock.
40
One hour west of Aspen, CO. Saturday, 8:05 a.m. MT.
Protégé left the brunch table uncomfortably full, and followed the crowd of impressive international figures to the large gathering room adjacent to the dining area.
The curtains were drawn, and elegant lamps placed on tables along the side of the room provided a soft, warm glow, a stark contrast to the unadulterated mountain sunlight that lit the dining room next door. A dozen posh leather chairs were arranged in a semicircle around a projection screen, and a small podium stood at an angle to the side.
“This better not be another one of Randolph’s sales pitches,” a voice growled in mock indignation. For all of their accomplishments and unmistakable pedigree, it was a jovial crowd. They were certainly not “normal” people, despite what the old man had said, but they also didn’t take themselves too seriously.
It was a charming effect, and Protégé felt quite at home, though his list of personal accomplishments obviously fell far short of the others’.
Archive stood behind the podium and began to speak in a conversational tone. “For some,” he began, looking at Protégé, “our purpose here this weekend is not yet perfectly clear. And for all of us, I think, updating the context of our ongoing efforts is a helpful exercise. So if you’ll indulge me for just a short minute, I’ll give you my version of what we’re about. Of course, it will only be my version, and I won’t presume to speak for anyone but myself.”
An attendant made the rounds with a silver coffee pot, refilling the cups atop each of the small tables between the leather chairs.
“First, though,” the old man continued, “let me address an issue on which I can speak authoritatively, which is the short list of fairly firm but not terribly oppressive rules that govern our little gathering. We have among us captains of industry, a knight of the British Empire, an heir to the throne of a rather large kingdom, and all manner of oligarchs and barons, as it were, but everyone calls everyone else exclusively by their first names. No false modesty or undue deference is tolerated. Stand up and own your own miraculous humanity, and never bow before your equals. It’s quite unbecoming, and so boringly common.” Protégé saw smiles and nods from the august audience.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 125
