by James Phelan
“You—you are a . . .” she said, lost for a moment as she took in the scene of decimation before her, “murderer.”
Walker looked down, then pointed at the dead big guy.
“He was going to kill me,” Walker said slowly, clearly, “and after me he would have killed you.”
“I can take care of myself,” Clara replied coldly as she looked from the carnage on the floor—one dead, one unconscious, one writhing in pain—to Walker.
Walker moved close to her, said, “These guys killed Felix. They’re a clean-up crew. They killed Felix, and they came back in here to make sure the place stayed clean.”
She looked away from Walker for just a second and in that time he snatched the Beretta from her hands. He checked the safety and unscrewed the suppressor.
“And you . . .” Clara said, lost in the scene. “You did this to them.”
“They started it. I finished it.” He stowed the suppressor in the pocket of his jeans and tucked the pistol into the back of his waistband, pulling his shirt down to conceal the weapon.
“But, why—why like this?”
“I had no choice.”
Police sirens chimed outside, their distinctive Italian duotone sounding that they were nearing, fast.
“You called the cops?” Walker said.
Clara looked defiant.
Walker said, “You’re coming with me.”
•
“This guy was the best,” Bellamy said to Senator Jack Anderson from Oklahoma. “Did you think he’d just lie down and die, with no repercussions?”
“I thought he died when he looked around a corner of his bedroom doorway and our SEALs put a round through his brain,” Senator Anderson replied.
“And then another couple in his chest,” the senator’s national-security aide added. “And you’re telling us what, Dan? That bin Laden’s ghost is coming back to haunt us? It sounds to me like you’re trying to get your little company more funding.”
Bellamy nodded. Anderson was Majority Leader, as well as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—the guys who held the purse strings to the intelligence budget; a good friend to have. Fifteen years ago Bellamy had started out in Washington as the senator’s aide; now it was unclear who was aiding whom.
“What I’m telling you,” Bellamy said, looking directly at the senator, to show that no one else in the room mattered, “is that he’s reaching out from the grave.”
“With what?”
“We’re working on that.”
“How serious a threat?” the senator asked.
“Very. We’ve checked this a million times. So has the Agency. Something big is coming.”
“Define ‘big,’” the aide said.
“Catastrophic. Nine-eleven big. Maybe bigger.”
The senator leaned back in his chair. “I need more than that.”
Bellamy paused, then said, “I can give you the codename they’re using, that’s all. Anything else is conjecture.”
“A codename? For what?”
“Their attacks.”
“Attacks—plural?”
Bellamy nodded. “It’s a staged attack. In steps.”
“Steps?”
“Several acts of terrorism. A chain reaction.”
“How many attacks?”
“We think a trigger event—significant in its own right—will set in motion twelve high-value terror strikes around the world.”
“Jesus . . .”
The aide asked, “What’s the trigger event?”
Bellamy said, “I’m working on that.”
“Dan . . .” Anderson said, “you gotta give us something.”
“I can’t show you the raw intelligence just yet, just like the Agency won’t show theirs,” Bellamy said. “But I’ll be ready to brief you fully. Soon.”
The aide asked, “When?”
“Couple days.”
“New York,” the senator said. “It’s gotta be by New York.”
“That’s what I’m working toward,” Bellamy replied.
“A win will really help your IPO,” the aide said, a smug look on his face.
“Win or lose, terrorism is what makes my business,” Bellamy replied.
Anderson looked with a middle-distance stare across his office, at nothing in particular, but it was clear his mind was racing. He asked his aide to leave the room, then, after the door clicked closed, said to Bellamy, “Remember what you told me the first time we talked business? After the Iraqi handover? When you first came into this office and told me about your program?”
“Yes. I told you that we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Bellamy replied. “We put them out of business.”
“How’s that going?”
“Business is good. It could be a lot better.”
“What do you need?”
Bellamy smiled. “Leverage.”
The senator nodded. “Okay. I’ll work on that. Tell me, what are they calling it? This plot?”
Bellamy replied, “Zodiac.”
7
“Where are you taking me?” Clara said as he guided her onto the street.
“I’m making sure you get out of here safely.”
“I can—”
“Take care of yourself, I know.” Walker’s left hand was clamped on her arm, his right hanging free in case he had to draw the Beretta. “Do you have a car?”
“Yes,” Clara replied, her voice shaky.
The sirens were closing. Seconds away. Italian cops. Armed. Unpredictable.
Across the road the van roared off. A modern Ford with a diesel engine, relatively empty of weight. Walker clocked the driver.
Four guys, not three.
Damn.
“Your car?” Walker said, squeezing Clara’s arm.
“There,” she said, pointing to a white VW Polo GTI hatchback.
“Get in,” Walker said.
She unlocked the car and looked at him blankly, unsure what he expected her to do next. He took the keys from her and pushed her into the driver’s seat and then across to the passenger seat. He climbed in behind the wheel and stopped, confused.
“How do you start this thing?”
Clara pressed a button on the dash that was labeled START.
Two police cars skidded around the corner ahead.
Walker put the car in gear and took off with an unintentional wheel-spin. In the VW’s rearview mirror he saw the two small blue Fiat hatchbacks with flashing lights undertake sharp U-turns in the crowded street and start in pursuit.
Shit.
“Where are you taking me?” Clara demanded.
“I was planning to get out of town and then be on my way.” He downshifted through a corner, then hit the gas, the turbo engine revving quickly through the gears.
“Was?”
“Now I want to see where that van goes.”
Clara looked over her shoulder to the carabinieri cars behind them. “They will not let you get away.” She watched Walker. “But you know that . . .”
Walker focused on what was ahead: the Ford van with city-gas logos ran through the red light at an intersection. Walker changed up gears as the VW’s engine whined and redlined.
A delivery truck flashed by in front of their eyes, millimeters from impact.
“You are going to get us killed!” Clara yelled, her hands bracing the dash. “Slow down!”
“Tell that to the rest of Rome,” Walker said, applying the handbrake at the bottom of the hill and sliding through the bend in the road, veering right onto the insanely busy Via Sicilia. Walker weaved their vehicle in and out of the oncoming lane, mirroring the van’s moves ahead.
“This van,” Clara said. “You sure this is one of the men who killed Felix?”
“Yes,” Walker said. “And I’m sure he saw us leave the apartment.”
“Then let the police catch him.”
The two Fiats made the turn behind him; one took the corner too quickly and spun out in a 180-degree turn as a bus cl
ipped its bumper.
“They’re chasing us, not him,” Walker said, taking a quick look behind to see the police in pursuit. “And besides everything else, the guy in that van saw me, and he saw you.”
Clara hesitated, then said, “So what? You have something to hide from the police? Perhaps that murder back there?”
Walker didn’t reply, just hit the brakes as the traffic came to a standstill.
The van was five vehicles ahead. The cop car lingered somewhere in the chaos behind, the incessant siren sounding.
“We’re getting out,” Walker said, dragging Clara out his door and then down the road toward the van. The driver climbed out and looked back.
He saw Walker, and ran.
Walker started in pursuit.
The van driver kept running, flat out. He turned around for a brief moment—
KLAPBOOM!
The force of the blast from the exploding van blew Walker off his feet. He smashed back-first against a parked car, leaving a Walker-sized dint in the door. His grip on Clara held but the .45 clattered under the vehicle behind him.
Debris rained down by the time the fireball reached its zenith. The car ahead of the blast was on fire; the one behind had its bonnet blown off and its driver sat, hands gripped with white knuckles on the steering wheel, stunned. Walker didn’t stop.
He dragged Clara behind him as he ran in pursuit of the van driver.
Behind them the police car had come to a stop at the end of the traffic, and the two officers were out and running toward the scene. The other police car was further down the road, and took a side street.
Walker and Clara ran against a crowd of onlookers. The van driver was getting further away—he was small and fast. He took a left and disappeared around a corner.
“Ah!” Clara said, stumbling.
“Quick!” Walker said, steadying her as a whistle blew behind them—one of the carabinieri was closing in.
They made the corner onto Via Veneto.
Walker stopped. He had been on this street before. He had seen the building before him, at number 119a: large, imposing Palladian design, four stories, shuttered windows, tall iron fence, reinforced concrete bollards designed to stop tanks, a squat guard box by the driveway and a blue police car parked sentry out the front.
The driver of the van showed his passport at the main gate and was ushered through, into the US embassy.
8
Walker watched as the van driver joined the small line of US citizens entering the building on the gated compound. In seconds the Italian policeman pursuing them would round the corner. Walker had a US passport on him, but going into the embassy was not an option.
“Where to now?” Clara asked. “Or is this over?”
Walker thought for a few seconds and then made his decision. “It’s over, for you,” he said, letting go of Clara’s arm. He crossed the footpath to the pole-mounted CCTV camera that faced the embassy. He looked up at it, made sure that it tracked him, and then returned to the footpath and sat down at an outdoor table of the nearest cafe.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Clara looked around, astounded that he’d just sit and wait.
“Sorry.”
“Sorry?” Clara said. “That’s it, and you’re sorry?”
“If it’s vengeance you want for the death of Felix, leave that up to me.”
Walker ordered a macchiato. Long. And a Scotch. Double.
Clara watched him silently as she rubbed her arm from where he had clutched it. She then sat at the table, opposite Walker, looking determined.
“You’d better go,” Walker said.
“I want answers.”
“Walk south two blocks, then head back to your car. Go home. When the cops come knocking, tell them I kidnapped you.”
“And what? You just sit here and drink coffee?”
“And Scotch.”
The drinks came. He drained the Scotch.
“What are you waiting here for?” Clara asked.
Walker remained silent.
“What was your interest in Felix? And that man . . .” She looked across to the US embassy. “He just gets away? If he and the others back there were Felix’s killers—you do nothing about that?”
Walker checked his watch. Waiting here like this he knew: his life would soon change.
“I really think you should go,” Walker said. He sipped the coffee. Sighed, settled himself, knowing what was to come. “You don’t want to get involved in what happens next.”
•
“Ma’am,” the tech officer in the CIA Rome station said, “we have a Trapwire hit on a high-level Agency target.”
“Where?”
“Outside the building.”
“Outside which building?”
“This building. Like, right outside. Across the road, the cafe.”
She looked at the image on the iPad. “Who is he?”
“Sealed file.”
She saw the notation, said, “By the Director NCS?”
“Yes.”
“Get someone out there—”
“Whoa . . .” he said, seeing the image on his screen go blank.
“Tech problem?”
“No,” he said, tapping through screens. “I’m still in the system—but so’s someone else: the image was just wiped, from Langley. Everything outside has gone dark.”
“Get them on the phone.”
Her desk phone rang. Line one, from Langley.
“Beverly Johnson,” she said. She listened, then hung up and turned to her tech aide and spoke as she moved to the door. “They’ve just ordered full rendition protocols against that guy, using an outside crew.”
“Where are you going, ma’am?”
“I want to see this.”
•
Clara sat opposite Walker, silent, watching him.
Walker sat, also silent, not watching, but waiting.
The waiter brought water. Walker ordered another Scotch; better to take the edge off what was coming.
“You are some kind of cop,” she said quietly.
“No.”
“Interpol or Europol or something.”
“No.”
Clara watched him.
Walker said, “You need to go.”
“No.”
“Forget you saw me.”
“How?”
“Forget about Felix.”
“I can’t.”
“Fine.” Walker stood, put fifty euros on the table, drained his next Scotch.
Clara stood, said, “Where are you—”
Tires screeched as a van pulled up to the curb in front of them. Different to the assailants’ van, this was a big, blacked-out Mercedes people mover. The side door slid open and four men in black ski masks emerged.
Walker dropped the first one with an uppercut, then kicked the next in the groin—then his world became one of rolling, unbearable pain as he was tasered. Twelve thousand volts running at .2 amps coursed through his body at 19 pulses per second, creating neuromuscular incapacitation by interrupting the ability of the brain to control the muscles in the body. Not a good feeling.
The hooded men loaded a semiconscious Walker and a capitulating Clara into the van and were gone before the Italian cops arrived on the scene.
Seventy-nine hours to deadline.
9
London
Bill McCorkell was a veteran national-security expert with more than three decades’ experience, including stints serving as the National Security Advisor to no less than three American presidents. He now headed the United Nations Special Investigations Unit. Supporting the UN Security Council, McCorkell and his team worked from an office space off Cabot Square in Canary Wharf, in a glass-and-concrete building otherwise full of bankers and financial planners.
“Knock-knock.”
“Yep?” McCorkell looked up.
“We just intercepted a phone message to your person of interest in DC,” Andrew Hutch
inson said, entering McCorkell’s office. On secondment from the FBI, Hutchinson served as McCorkell’s counter-intelligence specialist. In his early forties and with a swag of successes in his back pocket, McCorkell had nothing but respect that the Bureau guy chose to fight the good fight alongside him.
“Which person of interest in DC would that be?” McCorkell said.
“Your INTFOR guy,” Hutchinson replied, taking a seat opposite. The office chair creaked under his weight.
“Dan Bellamy?”
“Yep.”
“Well, you’ve got my attention. What was it?”
“Police are reporting a van explosion on a street in Rome,” Hutchinson said. “Right near the US embassy. It happened as part of a vehicle pursuit, where a hatchback with a male and female occupant seemed to be pursuing the van, and the cops in turn were pursuing them. CCTV of the scene shows that the van driver made his way on foot into the embassy, where once inside he called INTFOR’s DC number. Their operations department. Left a message for Bellamy to get him out of there.”
McCorkell thought for a moment, then said, “Sounds like an op went to shit.”
“Yep.”
“Does this van driver have a name?”
“Better. He has a file.”
Hutchinson handed it over. McCorkell flicked through the printout, then said, “I’m seeing a tired old military jacket. Army, 101st, non-com, never made sergeant for a whole bunch of reasons. This all?”
“He’s been a cleanskin since.”
“Too clean?” asked McCorkell.
“Yep.”
“So, he’s a spook.”
“But not for any US agency. His last known employment was NSA two years ago. Security stuff. Discharged for disciplinary reasons.”
“He’s gone private since?”
“Yep.”
“He’s working for Bellamy?”
“All signs point to yes,” said Hutchinson. “That kind of jacket is his recruitment’s MO of paramilitary types.”
“Those we reject . . .”
Hutchinson nodded.
McCorkell said, “Tell me more about his phone call.”
“He used an embassy line to call INTFOR’s Berlin office. The call went from Berlin via an encrypted network to DC.”
