After that night, they’d gotten together every few days, their liaison lasting a few weeks before they’d been called before Sanders to respond to the accusations leveled at them. Both had vigorously denied the charges, but Sanders had been nothing if not thorough. The polygraph had been easy to fool, as they’d already been trained on defeating it. Forcing them to take it had been Sanders’s way of showing how seriously he took the matter.
They’d decided that night—or rather, Driscoll had insisted and Huff had reluctantly agreed—that they would stop seeing each other until training was over. He’d assured her that he could wait a few more weeks, but by the time the course had ended, something in her had changed. After the graduation ceremony—attended only by Sanders, the instructors, and the three students who had made the grade—Driscoll had turned down his offer to join him for dinner and drinks. She’d made an excuse about her brother being in town for a couple of days and promised to catch up later.
That was the last time Huff had seen her.
Driscoll’s disappearance hadn’t been a complete surprise. Looking back, their relationship had been mostly physical: two people with strong sex drives, satisfying their mutual pleasures. They’d never spoken of love or commitment, only had sex with a raw intensity he hadn’t known the likes of before or since.
Another update appeared on his screen. The car was only five miles away, still on the same road.
Not long now.
He’d provided Sanders with regular updates over the last couple of days, the most recent only an hour earlier. Anton West was another matter. The calls and text messages demanding to know Huff’s whereabouts and plans had been nearly constant. Huff had answered in broad terms, saying that he was checking out some possibilities, to which West had demanded details.
He didn’t get them.
When his phone rang again, Huff knew who was calling before he even checked the screen.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me you had her plate number?” West screamed through the phone. “Don’t try to deny it. I knew you were holding out on me, so I had my guys check your account activity. You knew her location two days ago!”
West’s tendency to turn apoplectic was one of the reasons Huff had no time for him. Managing a team wasn’t about barking orders and ruling through fear—a fact lost on West.
“How many men do you have under your command?”
“What? Why is that relevant?”
“How many?” Huff asked again.
“Including here, twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two men, and they’ve managed to lose her at least twice. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Your people are inept. Give them a weapon and a stationary target and they’re probably world-beaters, but they’re definitely not thinkers. If you want to catch Driscoll, you need brains, not brawn.”
“You arrogant little shit. While you’re under my command, you’ll do as I say. Otherwise I’ll assume you’re out to derail my mission and help Driscoll, and that’ll make you a viable target.”
Huff almost laughed at the threat. He had more to fear from the Keystone Cops.
“We’re on the same team,” he said calmly. “I just don’t need your amateurs getting in the way.”
“Well, my amateurs are en route to intercept them as we speak. If you hang around, I’ll show you how we take down a target.”
The call ended and, seconds later, Huff’s laptop beeped. He checked the screen and saw the login prompt for the Agency’s network.
That was strange. It had never timed out before.
He entered his password and was rewarded with a message he hadn’t seen before.
Access Denied.
West was clearly flexing his muscles, but denying Huff access to the network was simply childish and ultimately futile. Driscoll would be passing by within moments, and he would engage her before West’s men got within a hundred miles.
CHAPTER 29
“I’ve got it!” Farooq declared, making Colback jump.
“Got what?”
“The reason they’re after you.”
Colback switched off the television and went to stand behind Farooq so he could see the screen of the laptop. Farooq seemed to be reading a blog post.
“What did you find?”
Farooq stood and offered Colback the wooden chair. “Read that.”
Colback took a seat and scrolled to the top of the page. On the right-hand side was a photograph of the blogger Adrian Holmes. The title of the piece was “CIA Rakes in Billions from Afghan Opium.” Colback absorbed the first couple of paragraphs, which reiterated what Farooq had told him when they’d first met: that the CIA had been in the heroin business for decades, and Afghanistan had provided the vast majority of the Agency’s income over the last ten years. As he scrolled to the third paragraph, things got interesting.
He instantly recognized the photo to the left of the text. It showed his team relaxing at the base in Kandahar.
Corporal Ron Elphick of the Green Berets didn’t simply witness the drug trade in Afghanistan, he was actually tasked with protecting the crop until it was ready for harvest.
Colback remembered that assignment well. The team had been based in a village for six weeks, and one of their tasks had been to provide protection for the crop. The Taliban was fiercely opposed to the cultivation of poppies for opium and had destroyed many harvests over the years, killing the farmers in the process.
Until now, that mission had been memorable only for its tedium. But it seemed that his superiors had either been duped themselves or hadn’t been entirely honest with Colback and his men. They’d been told that the harvest was for one of the major pharmaceutical companies in the US, which would use the opium to produce morphine. Some of it would be earmarked for the US Armed Forces medical services, with the rest benefiting patients back home.
Reading on, Colback realized that it had all been a lie. Holmes’s reporting had uncovered the true source of medical-grade opium.
It wasn’t Afghanistan.
New Zealand and Australia produced more than enough opiate alkaloid for both the medical and military industries combined. Together, the two countries were considered the most efficient and cost-effective opiate-producing states in the world, which made it strange that the CIA would source it from the cottage industry setup in Afghanistan. He’d been there when the crop had been refined. It had taken place in a windowless building on wooden benches, not in a sanitized laboratory.
“So they lied about what the drugs would be used for,” he said. “That doesn’t sound like a good enough reason to kill us all.”
“Read on,” said Farooq.
Colback did and learned something new. In the time he’d spent in the village, the team had been visited three times by a pharmaceutical company representative. He’d given the name Lance Cook, but Holmes claimed that the man was in fact Hank Monroe.
“I still don’t get it,” Colback said.
“Click on the other tab in the browser,” Farooq told him.
When Colback clicked on it, Monroe’s face filled half of the screen.
“He worked for the CIA before becoming governor of Nebraska,” Farooq said. “This is a press release announcing his candidature for the next presidential election. According to the pundits, he’s the party’s preferred candidate by a country mile.”
Colback’s interest in politics was minimal. As far as he was concerned, left wing and right wing were both parts of the same bird. “You’re telling me that even politicians have skeletons in their closets?”
Farooq sighed. “Do you at least remember the election a couple of years ago?”
“Vaguely. I remember Ryan Appleton was leading in the polls until they did that exposé on him, and the other guy won.”
“That’s right. Appleton was a shoo-in, a party guy who’d do what he was told. When he lost, it was a huge blow to the 0.1 percent.”
“You mean the one percent? The big corporate people?”
“No, th
ey’re paupers compared to the 0.1 percent. We’re talking about a group of individuals who effectively run the civilized world.”
“The ESO,” Colback muttered.
Farooq was taken aback. “You know about them?”
“Eva told me.”
“Oh. Okay. Then, yes, the ESO. The current president’s policies are hurting them financially, and I’m talking hundreds of billions. That’s personal wealth, not corporate losses.”
“You’re kidding.”
Farooq shook his head. “With that much money involved, people will do anything to stem the flow. Don’t get me wrong—they’ve adapted and are diversifying and investing wisely—but it still doesn’t fit their long-term strategy.”
“Which is?”
“World domination,” Farooq told him with a straight face. “They control all of the world banks, with few exceptions. North Korea was next on their list until they lost the election. If Appleton had won, our warships would be parked off Pyongyang and they’d use one of Kim Jong-un’s missile tests as a reason to go to war. This time around, they won’t make the same mistake, which is why they’re removing all negative references to Hank Monroe from the Internet and killing anyone who knows about his past indiscretions.”
Colback was still confused. “Then why is this article by Adrian Holmes still available online?”
“It isn’t. I found that on the Dark Web version of Web Archive. It’s a site that caches all other websites so that pages are still available for viewing years after the original website disappears. So far, at least, the ESO’s reach doesn’t extend to the Dark Web. It’s the lair of anarchists, activists, and the less morally guided, and takedown requests don’t work in the underworld. Even if the ESO could get access, they couldn’t do anything about the content.”
“But why take the chance that someone might take that content back to the real Internet?” Colback asked. “Why not just choose a different candidate, one that’s squeaky clean?”
“Time, money, commitment to the cause—take your pick. Whatever the reason, Hank Monroe’s their man, and god help anyone who gets in the way.”
He should have been relieved to finally know the truth, but Colback felt nothing but anger. Three of his friends were dead, two of them murdered, just so that trillionaires could add a few more billions to the bank balance. Jeff and Danny had spent their adult lives serving their country valiantly, and for that they had been sent to an early grave.
“How do we let Eva know?”
“We wait until she returns.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
Farooq pointed to the image of Hank Monroe on the screen. “Then you need to do something about him.”
Carl Huff had his car positioned near the exit of the truck stop, ready to pull out the moment Driscoll passed by. He could see half a mile down the road, and with his phone’s camera on maximum zoom he would be able to identify her vehicle before she got close enough to recognize him.
When the Chevy Impala came into view, Huff immediately sensed something amiss. He could see a male and female in the front seats but both appeared to be African-American. As the vehicle drew closer, he could tell that neither was Driscoll. This was confirmed when the driver hit the turn signal, pulled up to the diner, and both people left the car. The male passenger wasn’t even a close match for Colback.
Huff wasn’t overly surprised. He’d considered the likelihood that Driscoll might have switched cars but with nothing else to go on, he’d had no choice but to follow the Chevy. Now he had no leads and his access to the network had been terminated.
Sanders wasn’t going to like it, but he had to call it in.
“Your account access will be reinstated in a few minutes,” Sanders promised after Huff had updated him on the situation. “From now on, you might want to throw West the occasional bone to keep him happy. That aside, what do you think she’s really up to?”
Second-guessing Driscoll was proving to be difficult, but Huff already knew what he would do in her position. Whether she would do the same was open to debate.
“If it were me, I’d eliminate the threat,” he told Sanders.
Sanders grunted his assent.
“So,” said Huff, “I need to know who issued the kill order so I can head her off.”
“I think we both know where it came from, and it would take an army to get to the persons in question. Driscoll wouldn’t risk it.”
“Why not? What does she have to lose? Their reach is global. She’s got nowhere to hide.”
The phone went silent for a few moments, giving Huff time to contemplate the task facing Driscoll. He was aware of the ESO, as were a few hundred others, but few on the planet knew who made up their number or what they really did. Discovering who they were would be a monumental task on its own; getting to them would be damned near impossible.
“I’ll pass that observation along,” Sanders said after a moment. “In the meantime, if she’s actually planning a strike, she’ll need help. I’ll send you a list of all private security firms. That’s her best chance of finding the right personnel. I’d start with those in the eastern United States. Something tells me she’s still out here somewhere.”
Huff thought it highly unlikely that Driscoll would expose herself by making such an obvious move, and he couldn’t afford to waste days making hundreds or thousands of phone calls simply to see if Sanders’s hunch panned out.
“It’d be more efficient if you could send out an alert to all of them. Tell them to report all new contracts over the last few days, plus any that come in. Send all responses to me and I’ll filter them myself, but you’ll get more cooperation if your name’s on the request.”
“Okay, I’ll work that up, but we need to start seeing results.”
The call ended, and Huff started the car. Like Sanders, he believed Driscoll had remained back east, all the closer to the ESO’s seat of power.
Time to book a ticket to Washington, D.C.
The phone rang, and he smiled as he hit the Connect button.
“It seems someone mistakenly cut off your network access,” West said without apology. “It’s now been restored.”
“Thanks.”
Huff considered letting West continue his wild goose chase, but now that he knew how petty the man was, he decided against it. The last thing he wanted was another accidental network malfunction at a critical moment.
He logged back into the network. “I’m uploading a video of the car’s occupants,” he told West. “They’re not our targets. Driscoll must have switched vehicles at some point. You might as well call your men off.”
The short recording was sent, and Huff gave him a couple of minutes to verify the contents.
“Okay, they’re standing down. What’s your next move?”
“I’m heading back to D.C.,” Huff said truthfully. “I’ll be in touch.”
CHAPTER 30
Anton West poured his sixth coffee of the day and noticed a slight tremor in his hand as he picked up the mug. It wasn’t a result of his caffeine intake. His superiors were not happy, and West was the focus of their ire. His only surprise was that he was still in charge of the mission, but for how much longer was anyone’s guess.
For four days, Driscoll had given him the runaround, and now the best lead they had—the car she’d used to pick up Naser—had turned out to be yet another misdirection. Driscoll was good. Better than he’d expected. She was also human, and that meant she would eventually slip up. Perhaps not a mistake, as such, but after her recent gains, she would begin to underestimate him.
West needed it to happen sooner rather than later. Few in his position retired or went on to better things unless they were successful.
Failure came with the ultimate price tag.
Pearson suddenly dashed through the doorway of the small kitchen, causing West to spill his coffee. “Sir, we’ve found them!”
West abandoned his cup and followed Pearson back to the control room. “Where are they
?”
“Louisville. A tech over at CIA found one of Naser’s back doors and traced the data packages. He’s using a cell as a Wi-Fi hotspot.”
“Get the tech on the phone immediately,” West ordered.
A few moments later he was patched through to the head of the CIA’s cyber division.
“Can Naser detect your traces?” West asked.
“Negative.”
“You’re sure?”
“One hundred percent. Naser is good—very good—but I’m better.”
West prayed the woman’s confidence was well placed. “What’s his exact location?”
“A hotel on 7th Street Road. The Beechwood. That’s not all. Naser’s been monitoring your communications. I found a worm that converts speech to text and he’s been opening the file every ten minutes. He knows every move you’re going to make.”
Sneaky bastard. Well, two could play at that game.
“Give me the number of Naser’s cell and keep looking. If he planted one worm, there may be more.”
Once he had Naser’s cell number, West passed it to Pearson. “Run a trace on that.” He then dialed Eckman’s cell phone. “From now on, you’ll accept all commands via cell,” he said. “They’ve managed to compromise our comms network, so we’re going to use it against them. You can use closed comms to communicate with each other in the field, but I want you to ignore any commands I send over the net, do you understand?”
“All orders will come by phone. Understood.”
“Good. Now haul ass to Louisville. They’re staying at a hotel. I’ll have the details sent to your tablet.”
West turned to Pearson. “Bring up the locations of all teams and pinpoint Naser’s phone.”
The tech worked his magic and the main screen showed eight pulsing green dots and one static red marker in Kentucky. “The closest unit is two hundred and fifty miles away. They should be there in three hours if the local cops don’t get in the way.”
“Run the usual interference,” West ordered.
In situations that required a high-speed response, his men would report any police tailing them, and Pearson would contact the local sheriff and order the squad cars to back off.
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