Conspiracy db-6

by Stephen Coonts

  The state police and the local prosecuting attorney had made it clear that, as far as they were concerned, the agent had killed himself. But Frey had ordered the Ser vice to conduct its own investigation.

  “There are some interesting loose ends,” said Frey. “Before he died, Jerry received some e-mails that we’d like traced to the source.”

  Frey reached into his jacket pocket and took out two pieces of white paper, which had printouts of the e-mails. Both e-mails had a Yahoo return address, and there was standard header information.

  “The e-mail address has been falsified,” said Frey. “It originated somewhere overseas. It says Vietnam, but we think that’s false. We’d like to know from where, of course.” Rubens took the paper. Among the Secret Service’s lesser-known duties was the investigation of identity theft, and the agency had its own array of computer experts. If they couldn’t trace it, Rubens thought, the message must be suspicious.

  “We don’t have the e-mails that Forester sent,” added Frey. “I’m afraid we don’t know whether that is significant or not. He worked on the road a lot, and routinely would have ‘shredded’ sensitive information on his laptop. The e-mail would have been erased.”

  Rubens looked at the first e-mail.

  Sir:

  The business was a long time ago. All information long gone.

  The second e-mail was much the same:

  Sir:

  I cannot be of assistance. Please.

  “The business?” asked Rubens.

  “I have no idea what it means. The e-mails seem to have come as he was investigating the threat made against Senator McSweeney. That e-mail was tracked to a library just outside Baltimore, where someone used a public-access computer.

  But we couldn’t find a connection. Forester looked at constituents and other people who may have had a beef with the senator.

  Doesn’t look like he found a link. He was still checking into it — he was going back to the area where McSweeney first served as assemblyman when he died.”

  Rubens folded the e-mails and placed them into his pocket.

  “Did you know the agent very well?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I broke him in. He was a good man.”

  Before Rubens could find a way to tactfully suggest that Frey’s opinion might be clouding his judgment, the Secret Service director’s phone buzzed.

  He answered it, and immediately his face turned grim.

  “I’m on my way,” he told his caller after listening for a few moments.

  He snapped off the phone and turned to Rubens.

  “We’ve just had a report of shots fired at Senator McSweeney. I’ll need to get to my car.”

  9

  The target moved at the very last moment, complicating the shot, but the shooter stayed on mission, pulling his finger steadily and smoothly against the trigger. The roar of the gun in the closed room was greater than he’d expected, but the recoil curiously less. The bullet sailed true, a perfect shot.

  He had no time to think about these things, however; the entire enterprise had been carefully timed, and to make his getaway cleanly he had to leave immediately.

  In the stairs on the way down, his heart double-pumped.

  It was a brief clutch, nothing more than a hiccup — a reminder of his age, nothing more. Rather than slowing down, he doubled his pace: he was too old to fail now. The chance to succeed would not come again.

  The door slapped behind him as he made it to the street. He heard sirens the next block over. Quickly, the shooter slipped the steamer trunk with the rifle into the side door of the minivan, then slammed the door shut. The motor, started by remote control as he came down the steps, was already humming.

  He fought against the instinct to press his foot too firmly on the accelerator. When he reached the corner, he stopped, signaled, then carefully pulled out into traffic.

  Ten minutes later, he was on the Beltway. Only then did he give in and press the button for the radio.

  The first report made his heart double-pump again.

  “Senator McSweeney has been shot in Washington, D.C., just outside the Capitol Building!” said the announcer breathlessly.

  The fact that the reporter had gotten the location wrong should have tipped the shooter off, but for the next few miles he drove in a kind of fugue state, believing that everything had gone wrong.

  And then a different reporter came on, one who was actually at the scene.

  “The senator appeared to be unhurt,” said the reporter.

  “He was immediately taken into Brown’s Hotel, where he was to be the guest of honor at a campaign fund-raiser. I was just arriving myself. Let me repeat, Senator McSweeney appears to be OK.”

  Thank God, thought the shooter. Thank God.

  10

  McSweeney resisted until he realized that his bodyguard was trying to drag him into the hotel, away from the chaos and commotion on the street.

  “I can do it myself,” he muttered, struggling to get to his feet.

  McSweeney tripped over the carpet as he came through the door and flew into the lobby, crashing against one of the hotel workers before regaining his balance. People were ducking or cowering or simply standing in dazed silence, unsure what was going on.

  “Down, we’re going down, through this door,” said the Secret Service agent next to him. “Steps. Watch the steps.” McSweeney’s lungs were gasping for air by the time he and the agent reached the bottom landing. They turned left, entered another hallway, then went into a room at the right.

  The Secret Service agent, face beet red, stood by the door, pistol out.

  “Why are we here?” McSweeney asked the Secret Service agent.

  “Please, Senator, until the situation is secure.”

  “Why are we in this room?”

  “It’ll just be a moment. It’s under control.” McSweeney reached into his pocket for his phone.

  “Sir, please — no communications until we’re sure everything is copasetic,” said the agent. “Just to be safe.”

  “My wife is going to be worried.”

  “It shouldn’t take very long.”

  McSweeney put the phone back reluctantly. “Who shot at us?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said the agent. He put up his hand, then held it over his ear, obviously listening to something on his radio.

  McSweeney’s phone began to buzz. He checked the caller ID window on the phone and saw that it was Jimmy Fingers. McSweeney flipped it open despite the bodyguard’s frown.

  “I’m OK, Jimmy,” he told his aide. “The fucker missed me.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, thank God! Do you know the radio just said you were dead?”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “We’ll want to get a statement out right away.”

  “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated,” said McSweeney, echoing Mark Twain’s famous comment.

  “No, something more serious,” said Jimmy Fingers, always thinking of the political ramifications. “A potential slogan. ‘My work won’t be stopped by a madman.’ If you were in the lead, then you could joke. No, it has to be just right.

  We’ll work it out when I get there. I’m a few minutes away.” McSweeney felt a twinge of resentment at Jimmy Fingers’

  tone, even as he knew from experience that Fingers’ advice would prove correct.

  “I’m glad you’re OK, Senator,” added the aide. “This will help us. You’ll see.”

  “Help us?”

  “No one tries to assassinate a loser.”

  11

  There was a knock on the office door. Rubens reached for the silver security blanket and covered the desktop. It didn’t matter that the desk was bare at the moment. Even that might mean something.

  “Come in, Mr. Gallo,” said Rubens.

  “Johnny Bib sent me up,” said Robert Gallo. One of the computer experts assigned to Desk Three’s Analysis and Research section, Gallo defied the normal definition of “geek.”
He stood just over six feet and, while no muscle builder, certainly looked as if he could hold his own in a fight. “It’s, uh, that Secret Service stuff.”

  “Have a seat, Robert. Tell me.”

  “Well, like, OK, the thing is, these e-mails really were sent from Vietnam,” said Gallo, handing paper copies of the e-mails to Rubens. “That wasn’t an alias or some sort of spoof like the Secret Service guys thought. I mean like, duh.” One of the unfortunate downsides of choosing the best people in the business, thought Rubens, was that they tended to know that they were the best, and thus came across as a little too arrogant for their own good. He liked Gallo; he would have to talk to him about this.

  “See, everybody was probably thinking, Fake-oh, because when you look at the port information—”

  “If you could move ahead to the point.”

  “So, OK, like, I check the phone records to see who like called. I hack into the Vietnamese phone company—”

  “What exactly did you find?” asked Rubens.

  “See, there were three people who had connections around the time the messages were sent. The e-mails are a couple of days apart. But I have three people. So I checked them, like, and—”

  Clearly, thought Rubens, Gallo was being influenced far too much by his boss, John “Johnny Bib” Bibleria, who always followed the most circuitous route to the point.

  “The thing is, all of them are on one of the CIA watch lists, right?” said Gallo. “What are the odds, huh?” Actually, they would be very good, since only a limited number of people in Vietnam were allowed computer access, and for a variety of reasons — the fact that they were government officials, possibly dissident students, et cetera — the CIA would be interested in them. But Rubens didn’t interrupt.

  “So I figure let me go and check that, and I find out, like by accident, that the server, OK? We’ve been watching the server and, you know, traffic on it, files stored, everything, because of some CIA request three or four years ago.” Mildly interesting, thought Rubens. “What was the request about?”

  “That’s just it.” Gallo held out his hands. That was definitely a Johnny Bib gesture; surely the young man had to be saved somehow. “I’m like, my clearance isn’t high enough to get the info. And neither was Johnny Bib’s.” Finally, the point.

  “Johnny’s clearance was not high enough?” asked Rubens.

  “Yeah. Blew me away, too.”

  Rubens picked up the phone. “What was the name of the program?”

  “Infinite Burn.”

  * * *

  The name didn’t register with the CIA’s deputy director of operations.

  “It’s not current,” Debra Collins told Rubens.

  “It may be three or four years old,” said Rubens.

  “Hang on then.”

  It took Collins so long to get back to Rubens that he thought he had lost the connection.

  “Bill, are you still there?” she asked when she finally got back on the line.

  “Yes.”

  “Infinite Burn had to do with Vietnam.”

  “Interesting,” said Rubens, though of course he already knew this. “One of my staff on Desk Three came across it earlier. He would like access to the files and it’s rather urgent. It has to do with a Secret Service agent who was looking into a death threat against Senator McSweeney.”

  “The senator who was shot at today?”

  “Yes.”

  Collins didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “Look, I have to go into a meeting,” she told him finally, “but could you and I meet later to discuss this? In person?”

  “Is it really necessary?”

  “Infinite Burn was our code name for a plot by the Vietnamese to assassinate American leaders in revenge for the war.”

  12

  Charlie Dean took a slow breath, pushing the air through his teeth as quietly as possible. He scanned both sides of the stream, then moved his eyes slowly across the canyon in front of them, looking for their prey.

  “Tracks are less than an hour old,” said his guide, Red Sleeth. Red pointed at the outer rim of the impression, still moist. “Dogs are real close now. You hear how they bark?

  It’ll pick up even louder and faster as they close in. Ready?” Dean nodded.

  Sleeth rose and started following along the double track of footprints left by his two hounds. They’d been tracking this mountain lion through the Montana wilderness since early morning, after discovering a three-or four-day-old kill hidden in the brush below.

  Sleeth splashed through the water to the other side of the creek, moving up the embankment into a copse of juniper.

  Dean followed, pushing through the calf-high grass and scrub to a small rock outcropping. A trail cut across the terrain to his left, intersecting the gray and green side of the canyon. It would be dark soon; they didn’t have much time left to catch the lion today.

  “This way,” said Sleeth, pointing to a cut that angled downward to the left.

  Dean followed, picking his way through the rocks as the guide crossed back to the north. The ground leveled out, then angled upward sharply. Dean slung his rifle over his shoulder, snugging the strap as he began climbing. He couldn’t see the dogs, but from their barks it seemed that they were moving to the northeast.

  “You kept up pretty well for an old guy,” said Sleeth when they reached the rim of the canyon.

  “You think I’m old?”

  “Didn’t mean to insult you.” Sleeth gave him a yellow-toothed smile and pointed across the ridge. “The dogs are running that way. I think if we can swing straight across the side of that ridge, we may cut him off.” Ten minutes later, the dogs’ barks sounded even farther away, though Sleeth claimed they were closer.

  “Snow up here just last week,” said the guide as he and Dean edged downward. “Now it’s all gone or we’d have an easier time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Warm today.”

  “You figure forty degrees is warm?”

  “Depends on your point of reference.”

  “True enough.”

  “Stop. Listen.” Sleeth held up his hand, pointing to the sky. “The dogs.”

  The dogs were barking, loudly, in short, quick yaps.

  “They’ve treed him,” explained Sleeth. “Come on!” Dean followed the guide down into a thin copse of trees.

  The dogs’ excited barks bounced off the two sharp horizon-tal walls that bookended the canyon about a quarter mile away.

  Dean started to think about the shot. A treed lion was not particularly difficult to hit, and Dean began to feel a little guilty, as if the dogs and the guide had given him an unfair advantage. Like any hunt, the tracking and chase were the critical elements; the finish was just the finish — necessary for success, yet vaguely unsatisfying, especially for someone like Dean, who had hunted humans before turning to animals.

  Sleeth stopped suddenly. “Something’s wrong,” he told Dean, and in the next moment he started to bring his gun up.

  By then Dean had already spun to his right and dropped to his knee. Ten yards away, the brush parted, revealing the face and teeth of an angry lion. The big cat pressed its weight onto its front paws and sprang forward, teeth bared.

  Dean fired toward the lion’s head.

  And missed.

  He threw himself left as the animal lunged, its paw claw-ing his leg. Rolling on the ground, Dean bashed the butt of the rifle into the animal’s side. The mountain lion’s snarl filled his ears as he tried to scramble away. He felt as if he were underground, swimming in a pit of sand.

  The cat rolled off to the side and Dean pushed himself to his feet. He had a round chambered. The gun was up, aimed.

  He fired, point-blank, this time taking the cat through the head.

  A dank musk surged around him as if it were air rushing into a vacuum chamber: death’s scent.

  The animal shook violently, its feet vibrating.

  Sleeth ran over, 357 drawn. He administered the co
up de grâce to the lion, then looked over at Dean.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Dean.

  Everything had happened so fast, he couldn’t decipher it.

  Had he shot once or twice?

  Twice — he’d missed the first time.

  How, from that range?

  It didn’t make sense, but he had missed.

  The dogs were howling. Dean looked toward the sound.

  “The other lion is out of the tree,” said Sleeth, his voice a monotone. “One of the dogs is hurt.” Dean started in that direction.

  “Wait,” said Sleeth, catching up. “We can’t shoot the

  other lion. Your license only allows one kill.”

  “OK,” said Dean, lowering his gun.

  13

  “Old warriors. Ancient grudges,” declared Simon Dauber solemnly, summarizing the brief in the CIA secure conference room. Though most of his experience was in China, Dauber had been on the Southeast Asia desk long enough for Rubens to know and respect him. Those two things did not usually go hand in hand where the CIA was concerned.

  “Old warriors can be quite potent,” remarked Hernes Jackson. “They shouldn’t be discounted.” Rubens had taken Jackson and Gallo along for the briefing. Unleashing Johnny Bib on the CIA would have been considered cruel and unusual punishment.

  While Jackson’s point was valid, there was a lot to back up Dauber’s assessment of Infinite Burn. The CIA had developed information about the assassination plot from an agent code-named Red Diamond three years before. Diamond was a smuggler with ties to the government, a border-line undesirable whose status, naturally, made him a very interesting “catch.” He had given the CIA a number of tidbits over the two years that he had been on the payroll.