Double Crossfire

by Anthony J. Tata

  They left the building, jumped in the Panamera, and Mahegan found I-66. Using the emergency lights, he made good time on the interstate, but shut them off once he was off the highway. He navigated to US 234 and US 15, then turned onto Harmony Church Road, eased up the gravel driveway, and pulled up to the guard shack.

  In the moonlight, the large home that doubled as a CIA safe house was visible on the hill. Its white frame and black roof harkened to a previous era, while Mahegan knew that the home was built with reinforced steel, blast-resistant ballistic windows, and full situational-awareness communications throughout. The garage led to a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, in the backyard.

  “Mahegan,” the guard said. He was a muscled man with a shaved head and goatee. He wore a Glock 19 on his hip and had a Semper Fi tattoo on his left forearm. The guard shack smelled of fried food, as if the guard had hit McDonald’s before reporting to duty.

  “Who are you?” Mahegan responded. “And where’s your partner? No solos here.”

  “Secret Service. I’m Martin. Jackson is napping,” the guard said, stone-faced. He turned his jaw toward the back of the guard shack. “What’s your business here?”

  Mahegan knew all of the guards and most of the Secret Service. He didn’t like having a new team on the night that the commander in chief was going to be visiting. “Driving the director here. Just a layman.”

  “I see that. Have at it,” Martin said, waving his hand behind him toward the house on the hill.

  Mahegan paused, almost said something, but felt Biagatti’s hand on his forearm, as if she was saying, They’re fine.

  “We good?” Martin asked.

  “Just fine,” Mahegan said. The tire shredders lowered, the gate lifted, and Mahegan wound his way through the dragon’s-teeth roadblocks. The driveway was nearly a quarter-mile rise framed on either side by fields where cattle grazed. They were visible in the moonlight, motionless, staring at him as he parked the car in the driveway. A single light shone from the study.

  “I know them, Jake. The president always has advance men,” Biagatti said.

  Mahegan said nothing. Something bothered him, but he would deal with that once he unloaded the director.

  As they exited the car, two men closed on them from the dark corners of the house. They wore black pants and shirts with matching black Windbreakers. They were part of Mahegan’s team.

  “Jake,” Patch Owens said. Sean O’Malley came from the opposite direction. Each man carried a pair of night vision goggles on a lanyard around their necks.

  “Roger,” Mahegan replied.

  “Director,” O’Malley said from over Mahegan’s shoulder.

  “Men,” Biagatti said. Then to Mahegan: “Your men are quite efficient, Jake.”

  Mahegan ignored Biagatti’s compliment and asked, “House clear?”

  “Roger. Hobart and Van Dreeves are inside.”

  Mahegan had consolidated his team in Northern Virginia in part to review the Iran operation and in part so that they could all take turns visiting Cassie. The five men had been the core of the effort to retrieve her from the Yazd region.

  Mahegan nodded and said, “Who are those guys in the guard shack?”

  “They came in flashing Secret Service creds. We’re still trying to get a fix on who they are,” Owens said. “What VD and Hobart are doing right now. Running their info in the database.”

  Mahegan looked at the firmament, its blackness pinpricked by a billion stars. Then he looked at the guard shack again.

  “‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt,’ ” Mahegan said.

  “Heard that,” Owens said.

  “Didn’t know you read Hemingway,” O’Malley replied with a grin.

  “That’s Sun Tzu. Think about it,” Mahegan said, and walked inside. The heavy oak door was unlocked. Inside, he took three steps and was met by Van Dreeves and Hobart.

  “Guys,” Mahegan said.

  “Jake.” Van Dreeves turned sideways to let Mahegan and Biagatti through. Hobart stared into the distance, always ready, searching for the enemy. Biagatti shook her head, muttered, “Men,” and then made a beeline for her study, to the left.

  “What do you know about the guards? Sean said you’re checking them out.”

  “Got some calls into the White House. The deputy over there said they’re legit. I don’t trust it, though, so we’re running our own background. Should be done in fifteen.”

  “Get a sniper rifle aimed at that place,” Mahegan said.

  “Jake, you can’t be serious. I know those men,” Biagatti said from behind her desk twenty feet away.

  “Let me do my job, Director, so that you can do yours. You’ve got an update to the president in less than two hours. Call Wise and get me the intel, then pretend we’re not here.”

  “How can I do that, Jake? You’ve got Hobart there, aiming a sniper rifle at two Secret Service guys who are here to do their jobs.”

  “The Resistance has penetrated everywhere. You said so yourself. Wise has elevated everything to red, whatever that means to him. Could be that he’s just covering his ass. The gate guards might be legit, but there’s a chance they’re not.”

  “There’s a chance you’re not,” Biagatti countered.

  “No, actually, there’s not a chance of that,” Mahegan said. He turned away from the study and peered through the bay window.

  “Mission first, Jake,” Biagatti said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. No one needed to tell Mahegan about placing mission first. He had placed the mission as primary in everything he’d done, including his recent combat action in Iran with Cassie. Placing the mission first had been both his hallmark and his cross to bear. Finding balance between his primary professional duty and his newfound love had not been easy, especially because he blamed himself for what had happened to Cassie in Iran. Her injured ankle, the captive that got free, the withering fire that prevented the pilots from turning around, the crew chief who had Snap-Linked him into the helicopter when he tried to jump from one hundred feet. His fault. Not his fault. It didn’t matter.

  “The president and vice president are coming here tonight in less than two hours, now. We’re keeping a low footprint intentionally. Okay, you’re right. With the Resistance in full operational mode, I can’t trust any of my security guys. We busted two of them a month of ago using insider threat software. That’s why you’re here, Jake. Plus, this place isn’t necessarily outfitted for presidential security. It’s a safe house, not the White House. So I need you in charge of your team, plus whomever the president brings. Should be plenty to save the Alamo, if it ever comes to that.”

  “Any word from Wise?” Mahegan asked.

  “None. The president is flying from Camp David straight to here, in a Task Force 160 MH-47, while Marine One is doing a head fake back to the White House. The vice president is riding out here in his car, with just a single chase car. Low footprint.”

  “A lot of risk right there,” Mahegan said. “Where’s the meeting?”

  “The only place we can discuss the things we need to talk about is the SCIF.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Biagatti stared at him for a long minute. She removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes, and ran a hand through her silver hair. Mahegan stepped into the study.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” Mahegan asked.

  “I’m concerned about Syd Wise. He’s husbanding the information,” she said.

  “Explain.”

  “The Resistance has been communicating. Our intelligence shows us they’ve got a plan called Operation Critical Mass. Senator Hite’s murder was phase one. That’s what I wanted Wise to confirm for me, but anytime you involve the FBI, you’re taking a big risk. Now they’re acting like this is their deal and I still can’t get anything on Hite from three months ago. All I’ve got is two blond hairs at the murder scene, which they’re running DNA on right now.”

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sp; “Murder? Word is that was an autoerotic jerk-off,” Mahegan said.

  Biagatti walked to her large mahogany desk and retrieved a picture. Behind her were bookshelves that rivaled the local library stacks. Whether the books were real or not, that was anyone’s guess. Behind them might lie an assortment of weapons.

  “Surely, you don’t believe in coincidences like this, do you, Jake?”

  She handed him a photo of an attractive woman with long black hair and dark eyes. High cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Plump lips. She was dressed in a black dress, with four-inch Louboutin stilettos, showing sharp-edged calf muscles. Someone had taken the photo with a professional camera from a distance, using a zoom lens.

  “Taken two days ago. She’s standing on the deck of Senator Jamie Carter’s home. Where Cassie supposedly is. We had a photographer in a boat on the Neuse River snap these pictures.”

  Mahegan thought about the phone number he had traced to a landline in New Bern. There was the connection. Carter was either using a place there or had bought something. But why relocate from Virginia to North Carolina? Just to become a senator again? She wouldn’t have been able to predict Hite’s murder. Mahegan didn’t know enough about Jamie Carter to speculate one way or the other. He decided to not say anything to Biagatti just yet. He had more dots to connect, but something was taking shape.

  “Why did you have pictures taken? Isn’t that the FBI’s job? Wise and his yahoos?”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “So the CIA spies on other Americans, too?”

  “Spying is such a draconian word, Jake. I would say that’s a flattering photo. She may want it for a scrapbook one day.

  “Who is it?” Mahegan asked.

  “Zara Perro. She’s a lobbyist and a doctor. She has her MD in psychiatry. Close with Carter and has been seen at the Valley Trauma Center, where Carter had Cassie moved. Perro was the insider for Carter’s campaign, three to four years ago. You don’t remember?”

  “I was up to my ass in Taliban alligators four years ago,” Mahegan said. The fact was that he paid little attention to domestic politics other than the impact that policy decisions were having on national security. He believed in sticking with what he was good at, which was killing people that wanted to harm the nation or those he cared about.

  “Carter moved Cassie?” He did his best to ask the right questions as he was piecing everything together. Chief among his curiosities was, why was the CIA so heavily involved in a domestic action?

  “That’s what the Walter Reed doctor said. Carter is Cassie’s next of kin, now that her parents are dead.”

  Mahegan thought about their combat deployment. They had returned from the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they had stopped a nuclear device from detonating, and were relaxing on Bald Head Island. No time to update her will or next of kin documents. Owens and O’Malley snatched them off the beach and they were on the way to combat in less than a few hours. Now, wounded and recovering, Cassie and her strings were being pulled by Senator Carter. Mahegan shook his head.

  Biagatti’s computer chimed with another incoming e-mail from Wise. She opened it and a classified narrative filled about two-thirds of a Word document surrounded by the words Top Secret and SPECAT.

  They both read the document that had been delivered from Wise’s e-mail account. It outlined a plan to be executed in the next forty-eight hours to assassinate the line of succession so that the secretary of state, the fourth in line, would take control.

  “Where’s he getting this? Their plan is to kill the president, vice president, Speaker of the House, and pro tem all at once so that the secretary of state can be president? It doesn’t make sense,” Mahegan said.

  “The secretary of state is out of the country in Vietnam at the moment,” she said.

  Mahegan processed what he had just read. What if this was about Carter becoming president?

  “Could this be about Carter? She didn’t win the election, so she kills her way to the top?” Mahegan asked. “Three months ago, someone assassinates Senator Hite, Carter wins a special election, and her peers hold an emergency caucus to establish her as the pro tem, not the majority leader. Now we have a plot to kill the line of succession?”

  Biagatti shrugged. “I think from her party’s point of view, there are so many critical votes coming up on health care, budget, and so on that one vote will make the difference. I think it’s a smart move within her party.”

  “And if she is part of this, whatever is unfolding will be over. Done. She’ll be president. So, it’s important to figure out the source of the intelligence and the origin of the plot. If it’s the secretary of state, which makes no sense, then that’s an entirely different investigation path than, say, the much more logical choice of Jamie Carter.”

  “I don’t disagree, Jake. Why would Wise tell us this if it’s not their intel?”

  “Two reasons. The intel could be bad and his analysts did their best, or he could be in on it and angling to be the next FBI director.”

  Biagatti turned from the computer display and looked at Mahegan.

  “That would be a hell of a Machiavellian move,” she said. “Regardless, let’s say it is Carter. All of this would have to go down simultaneously for it to work.”

  “Like John Wilkes Booth planned with Lincoln and Seward,” Mahegan said.

  “Yes, like that. And what was the fallacy in their plan?”

  “The others chickened out,” Mahegan said. “Booth relied upon everyone being as crazy as he was. Turned out they were crazy, but not as psycho.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “If this is Carter, who does she have executing her plan?”

  “That’s a big leap to think that it is Carter, Jake, but for the sake of your line of thinking, she would have her pick of crazy loyalists. In this case, the executors may be crazier than the leader.”

  “The Globalist Resistance Force,” Mahegan said. “It’s all over the Internet, but the media basically attempts to portray it as a right-wing conspiracy theory.”

  “Which, of course, makes them complicit, in a way,” Biagatti said.

  Changing the line of discussion to the present and his task, which was to secure the compound, he said, “Wouldn’t having the president and vice president in the same spot, at the same time, with that type of threat being discussed, or even planned, be an . . . unwise move?”

  “Perhaps. The president will be headed back to Camp David, most likely. The vice president is relocating to West Virginia, where we have a continuity-of-operations center established. So he’s passing by here anyway. We tried to talk the president into taking this remotely, but you know how he is.”

  “Actually, I don’t, but I’m assuming he wanted to talk to you in person.”

  “Right. He’s not a video-conferencing kind of guy. Neither of them are, actually. Anyway, our precautions are sufficient, especially seeing how we’re only beginning to pick up on the chatter. And we’re more concerned about members of the Resistance inside the administration, working in the White House. We’re never sure when we walk into the situation room if there’s not some genius who’s fully vetted, but suddenly turns into a psycho suicide bomber, who has been sneaking bomb parts into a desk drawer, one nail at a time. Even you have suspicions about Syd Wise, and you’ve never met him.”

  That was true. Mahegan visualized what Biagatti was saying. Someone could be playing the long game. A day at a time, over nearly three years, would be a possible strategy. Easy to bring in a roll of tape one day, a couple of nails the next day, the right chemicals, little by little, and suddenly you had a suicide vest or bomb that could kill at least two, if not all three, of the chain of command at once.

  “I see you understand,” Biagatti said.

  “Why not keep the vice president here? With us?”

  “That has been discussed. We’ll leave it up to him to decide. You and your team may deploy with him to West Virginia if he feels like he needs the extra security.” />
  “Why are we special?” Mahegan asked, referring to himself and his four teammates.

  Biagatti shrugged, then chinned toward the door. “You guys just saved the world. I think your stock is pretty high.”

  Mahegan said nothing for a moment, processing. He and his team were here, no one else except Biagatti and the two guards at the front gate, a quarter mile away from the compound.

  Last year, terrorists had targeted General Savage, Mahegan, Owens, and O’Malley—the Tribe as they had come to be known—because of their ability to operate in the shadows. Were they all together because of their teamwork and capabilities, or had someone planned for them to be here for some unstated, perhaps nefarious, purpose? A well-planned raid could potentially eliminate multiple high-value targets at once.

  Van Dreeves and Hobart were new additions to the Tribe, Mahegan’s loose-knit consultancy to General Savage.

  “Don’t think too hard about this, Jake. Your mission is to protect me and this compound until the president and vice president get here,” Biagatti said. “Then, with the Secret Service’s help, you protect them.”

  “When does everyone arrive?”

  “They’re preparing to leave. Hit time is one hour,” she said. She spun a computer monitor toward him. The screen showed the road network of Virginia and Maryland. The vice president’s nondescript motorcade was at the Naval Observatory, while the president’s MH-47 helicopter was preparing at Camp David.

  “Who is with the president?”

  “Limited team. His Secret Service guy, a couple of aides, and his doctor,” Biagatti said.

  “His doctor?”

  “Evidently, he was getting his annual physical at Camp David.”

  Mahegan said nothing, but he was glad to see that his recommendation that the doctor be present was well received. The Plan’s riskiest point in time was the next two hours. Everything hinged on the premise of a low-footprint, clandestine operation involving the president and vice president. If he showed up with a bunch of Secret Service agents, some of which might not be vetted against the Resistance data base, the operation could go tragically wrong.

  “You okay?” Biagatti asked.