by Joshua Hood
The moment his face cleared the surface, Hayes opened his mouth and tried to take a deep breath, only to find he didn’t have the strength to keep his head above the waves.
Exhaustion had set in and his leaden muscles were useless.
Hayes felt the panic rise up from his guts, the hollow helpless feeling that he was about to die and there was nothing he could do about it.
Despite the fact that he’d spent most of his adult life sending his enemies to the afterlife, Hayes never took the time to ponder his own mortality. He’d grown up in the South and had his fair share of church, and while he had a general idea of what was supposed to happen, the only thought that came to his mind was Is this it? No bright light, no tunnel? This is bullshit.
At that moment, he remembered the water-survival course that he’d taken in the Army. Hayes took a breath of air and let himself sink. Underwater, he unbuckled his belt and stripped off his pants. He tied the pant legs together with a square knot and by sheer force of will surfaced for a second time.
Hayes arced the pants over his head, filling the legs with air before slapping them back into the water. With a final surge of strength, he slipped the knot over his head and collapsed into his makeshift float.
He lay there panting, muscles aching from the frigid water. The bullet wound to his shoulder ached like someone was hammering nails through his skin.
Hayes had been here before, wounded, alone, and on the run. Wanting to quit, but unable to, thanks to the mind job the Treadstone docs had done on him. Survival: It was the only thing that mattered.
And revenge, the voice reminded him.
11
THE PENTAGON
Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon’s subbasement, Levi Shaw sat at his desk, his ear hot against the phone’s receiver. He’d been on the phone, trying to get the secure Internet connection turned back on since arriving at the office, but despite being transferred to five separate departments, Shaw was no closer to fixing the problem.
He was about to hang up when a voice finally came back on the line.
“Sir, are you still there?” the IT tech asked.
“Yes, I’m here,” Shaw replied, switching the phone to the other ear.
“The good news is that we have located the issue.”
“Great,” Shaw said, feeling a spark of hope. “Can you fix it?”
“Well, that’s the bad news. The work order to terminate your connection originated outside of our system.”
“Who issued the work order?”
“Hold on one second,” the tech said.
Shaw closed his eyes and listened to the clatter of the tech’s fingers over the keyboard. He felt a headache building and rubbed the bridge of his nose, wishing nothing more than to get off the phone.
“Looks like the issuing authority was A. Wallace.”
The mention of the name was enough to tell Shaw that any additional investigation was a fool’s errand. Instead, he thanked the man for his help and slammed the phone on the cradle. “Fucking Wallace,” he swore, opening the middle drawer of his desk and pulling out a half empty bottle of aspirin.
Shaw popped some pills into his mouth and was heading for the water cooler when the phone rang. “Yes?” he answered, wondering who in the hell even had this number.
“Mr. Shaw?” a faraway voice asked.
“Yeah?” he asked, trying to hear over the loud whine in the background. “Who is this? I can barely hear you.”
“Sir, this is Captain Jeffries. Deputy Director Carpenter sent me to pick you up.”
“For what?”
“I’m not sure, but he’s expecting you in twenty minutes. If you wouldn’t mind coming out to the north lot, I’ll pick you up.”
“On my way,” Shaw said, slamming the phone on the hook. Twenty minutes. What the hell?
He grabbed his coat and hat and rushed up the stairs. Three minutes later he stepped outside the doors and was looking around for the driver when a UH-60 Black Hawk thundered in over the trees and settled in the parking lot.
If there was one thing he’d learned during his twenty years in the intelligence field, it was that nothing good ever came from the deputy director of operations sending a helicopter to pick you up.
“Mr. Shaw?” the crew chief asked, as he ducked beneath the rotors.
He nodded and climbed through the troop door, took a seat on the nylon bench, and pulled the bulky headset over his ears.
His first thought was that he was being called to Langley, which meant a visit to the seventh floor, where the director had his office. But when the pilot lifted off and turned the helo east, Shaw realized where they were going.
Well, this day just keeps getting better and better.
Buried deep in the countryside of Charles County, Maryland, Naval Support Facility Indian Head was a hard place to find—even if you knew where to look. It was a “blink-and-you-missed-it” post made up of a runway, a line of aluminum hangars, and a handful of brick buildings for service and support.
The reason for Indian Head’s isolation could be traced to the interconnected web of dirt mounds that covered the rest of the 3,500-acre base, giving it the appearance of a massive prairie dog colony. Since its establishment in 1890, the base’s sole purpose had been the manufacture, storage, and testing of energetics: the high-explosive powders and munitions used by the United States Navy.
It was the perfect cover to hide one of Langley’s best-kept secrets: the CIA’s offsite annex. A place simply referred to as Site D.
The helicopter touched down next to the hangar and Shaw grabbed his leather attaché case and waited for the crew chief to open the hatch before climbing down. He stooped under the spinning rotors and walked toward the man in a dark suit standing next to a dark blue Chevy Tahoe.
“Mr. Shaw,” the man said, opening the back door.
The driver followed the asphalt past the gate guard before turning east on Bronson Road. Two miles down the road, he turned onto a gravel path, passing the sign that announced DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED BEYOND THIS POINT.
The road had been cut through a thick strand of pines, and the trees formed an impenetrable canyon of green that blocked out the light. In the back, Shaw found himself overcome with a sudden wave of claustrophobia. He reached for the window control. I need some air.
He was still fighting the urge when the road doglegged back to the north and the trees opened up. The Tahoe pulled into the clearing, and the open space alleviated the panic growing in Shaw’s chest. He took a breath, feeling his heart rate return to normal as the driver slowed before the silver guard shack surrounded by a ten-foot fence topped with razor wire.
A man in olive-drab BDUs stepped out of the shack, right hand resting on the pistol grip of the H&K 416 assault rifle slung over his plate carrier, left hand motioning for the Tahoe to come to a halt.
Shaw passed his identification card to the driver, who scanned the ID while a second guard appeared with a telescoping mirror, which he used to check the Tahoe’s undercarriage. The guard handed Shaw’s and the driver’s IDs back, and when his partner finished his sweep, said, “You’re good to go.”
The driver handed Shaw his identification card, but instead of pulling forward, kept the Tahoe in park. Levi’s eyes drifted knowingly to the glowing red light mounted to the gate and remembered the first time he’d been called out to Site D.
* * *
—
It was in mid-November, the peak of the rut in Maryland, and he was running late to a last-minute meeting. Shaw was a stickler for punctuality, and as a rule arrived ten minutes early to every meeting he attended. He remembered sitting in the back of the truck, foot tapping against the floorboard, trying to bleed off some of the anxiety coursing through his body.
Why aren’t we moving?
He was about to ask the driver, when the man’s eyes t
icked to the rearview. Sensing the question on his passenger’s mind, the man pointed to the red light.
“I don’t—”
Before the words were out of his mouth, an eight-point buck came crashing out of the wood line directly in front of the vehicle. Its hooves had barely touched the ground when a finger of yellow flame erupted from the opposite tree line and the buck evaporated in a crimson mist.
“Holy shit,” Shaw said. “What was that?”
“Sentry guns. Radar-guided Vulcans.” The driver smiled. “Fourth buck of the week,” he said, grinning. “As long as that light’s on, I stay right here.”
Shaw had seen a GAU-17’s Vulcan cannon in action once before and knew the six-barreled cannons were capable of firing 6,000 7.62x51-millimeter rounds a minute.
I don’t think I mind being late this once.
* * *
—
Back in the now, the light switched to green and the driver shifted into gear and followed the gravel path for another two hundred yards until the road ended.
From the air, Site D was just another Indian Head magazine, a needle hidden among a stack of needles. But that façade disappeared at the bottom of the ramp. The driver eased the Tahoe into the white rectangle spray-painted on the ground, stopping short of the three metal pylons blocking the reinforced blast door.
To the left, a second set of guards sat safely ensconced inside the lead-shielded cubicle, waiting for the X-ray machine buried beneath the white rectangle to scan the vehicle and its occupants. The sign that everything checked out was the blare of the warning horn that reverberated off the concrete confines of the ramp and the rumble of the motor beneath the Tahoe, followed by the pylons retracting into the ground and the clang of the 3,000-pound blast door cracking open.
The doors yawned open and the driver eased the Tahoe into the well-lit garage and stopped next to a single stainless-steel elevator.
His driver shifted into park and Shaw was about to get out when the elevator swished open and a man wearing a shiny suit and burnished leather shoes stepped out.
“Fucking Wallace,” Shaw grunted. “Any chance you can give me a lift back to the helo?”
“Wish I could,” the driver said and smiled.
Great.
Shaw climbed out of the truck, adjusted his suit coat, and took his time walking over. Savoring the change in Archie’s expression from bored to annoyed.
“Levi,” the man said, extending his hand.
“Just washed my hands,” Shaw said, stepping past him and into the elevator.
“Have it your way.” Wallace glared.
Like any bureaucracy, the power at the CIA lay not with the operatives who put their lives on the line or the techs who mined the shadows for the next threat, but with the managers and bureaucrats who controlled the flow of information in and out of Langley.
Men like Archie Wallace.
Wallace had started out in the Intelligence Analytical group, where he ran a team of analysts who collected data to establish models for predicting future attacks. As a project manager, he came to the attention of Mike Carpenter, and the deputy director of operations chose him as his chief of staff.
More than anyone else at the CIA, Wallace was responsible for the shift from human intelligence to the reliance on signal intelligence. It was his view that programs like Treadstone were old tech. His favorite argument was “Why send a man when we can send a drone?”
“So how is basement life?” Wallace asked, his sneer reflected in the elevator’s door.
“Keeps me away from the assholes.” Shaw smiled, his ears popping as the car descended into the bowels of the earth.
The elevator settled with a bump and Shaw stepped out into a hallway overlooking the pit—the unofficial name for the operations floor.
“You Cold Warriors are all the same,” Wallace began, “a bunch of dinosaurs who refuse to understand that the days of sending a man with a gun to take out a target are over. Treadstone is done. Old tech. This,” he said, looking down at the pit, “is the future.”
“Whatever you say, Wallace.”
“I’m serious, that Summit supercomputer,” he said, pointing at the black box the size of a tractor trailer, “can crunch data at two hundred petaflops. Hooked up to the ESnet, I can stream data at one hundred gigabytes per second.”
“Then why am I here?” Shaw asked.
“Fuck you, Levi,” he said, turning to his right and following the hall to a large office at the end.
Deputy Director Mike Carpenter’s office was large and fitting of America’s chief spy, with slate-gray carpet and a pair of matching black faux-leather chairs. At the head of the room, Carpenter sat at his desk, the wall behind him covered in plaques, awards, and pictures that showed the director shaking hands with various dignitaries, including the president.
“This shit is getting out of hand,” he said, nodding to the television on the far wall.
Shaw turned his attention to the screen, where a black-haired reporter stood on a balcony, addressing the camera.
“Tensions are growing as protesters in northern Caracas take to the street, demanding President Díaz resign as president of Venezuela,” she began.
Shaw thought she looked tired, frazzled, despite the liberal application of makeup, and the moment the camera panned over her shoulder, down to the Calle Cotiza, he knew why.
Three stories below, the street was alive with bandana-wearing protesters hurling rocks at the soldiers knotted around the pair of armored personnel carriers blocking the road, their angry chants echoing off the walls.
What are they saying?
Muerte a Díaz. Death to Díaz.
“The violence in the capital city is reminiscent of the terror attacks that rocked Caracas in 2009. Attacks that led to the military coup which brought then-General Díaz into power.”
“Here are some forensic results we got from a murder scene in Venezuela. What do you know about this?” Carpenter asked, rounding the table with a plain sheet of white paper in his hand.
Shaw scanned the heading, but it wasn’t until he’d read halfway down the memo that his heart jumped into his throat.
TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY
Subject: DNA Match
Results of tissue sample taken from remains recovered in AO Apure:
Positive Match: Database
Name: Ford, Nicholas
Ford? What the hell were you doing down there?
“He’s one of yours?” Carpenter demanded.
“Yes, but—” Shaw began.
“This is the shit I’ve been telling you!” Wallace exclaimed. “Levi Shaw, running black ops down in South America like it’s fucking 1985 and not bothering to tell anyone what he’s doing.”
“Is that true?” Carpenter demanded.
“Absolutely not,” Shaw said, glaring at Wallace. “Treadstone hasn’t had an active mission in four years. Your lapdog has my budget so wrapped up in appropriations that I have to submit a memo to Congress just to buy a roll of toilet paper.”
“Bullshit, Levi,” Wallace snapped.
“Go fuck yourself, Archie.”
“Enough!” Carpenter barked, rounding on Levi. “If I find out that you are lying . . .”
“You won’t. Ask Senator Mendez. As the head of the Senate Actions Committee, he has to sign off on every operation.”
“Just where in the hell do you think this memo came from?” Wallace hissed.
Shaw had survived in the game this long because he lived by a simple rule when faced with a situation with an unknown outcome: Lie, deny, and make counteraccusations. The only problem was, this time he was telling the truth.
He had no idea what was going on.
“This is a frame job. Someone is trying to railroad me.”
> “Well, you have three days to figure it out, because I just received a second memo from the senator’s office. Mendez is calling an emergency meeting of the Senate Actions Committee in three days, and he is looking for a head to put on a pike, and I can promise you that it isn’t going to be mine.”
12
SKAGIT BAY, WASHINGTON
The current was strong and carried Hayes across the bay, toward the pine-clad shores of Whidbey Island. He was exhausted, the cold water sucking the heat from his body, leaving his extremities numb.
Think about something else, the voice in his head ordered. Hayes complied, turning his attention back to the call that had started the day.
Fear. That’s what he’d heard in Sally Colvin’s voice. Why she’d sounded strange on the phone.
“Adam, it’s Sally Colvin . . . I need you to call me . . .”
It wasn’t hard for him to imagine how the call had gone down. The shooters breaking into her house, rough hands yanking Sally out of bed, the press of the pistol to her head or the blade against her skin a warning of what would happen if she didn’t sell the call.
How did they find me?
It was the first question that came to his mind. He’d done everything he could to separate himself from his past. Gone so far as to move way the hell out to Washington, hoping the change in scenery would give him a fresh perspective. Before dropping off the grid, he spent six months combing the public domain, destroying any thread that could connect Adam Hayes the private citizen to his former life as a government assassin. By the time he settled in Washington, everything that Hayes owned—the house, the phone, even the Suburban—had been bought and registered through intermediaries.
But he knew that no matter how many threads he cut or how far he moved, there would always be one set of records that he couldn’t touch: his file in the Treadstone archives.
It is the only way they could have found me. But who has that kind of access?
