Day of Reckoning (13 page)

Respect, and to the extent that such men gave it, their trust. He’d been through enough hell to earn it.

Thomas was on his second Dark and Stormy by the time the DCS got to the point of the meeting. Taking a small HP netbook out of the satchel at his side, he set it on the table and booted it up.

Once he had the thing running, he withdrew a hand from his coat pocket and inserted a USB thumb drive into the side port of the small computer. Another moment, and a file from the thumb drive filled the screen.

“Is that what I think it is?” Tex asked, his dark eyes narrowing into obsidian daggers as he glared across the table at Kranemeyer.

The director’s mouth reshaped itself into a tight-lipped smile.

“I thought about stuffing them down the front of my boxers, but,” he shrugged, “file theft has come a long way since the days of Sandy Berger.”

“Why don’t we start with what this file is and what it’s doing outside Agency walls,” Thomas interjected, licking the last of the rum off his lips. He suddenly wasn’t thirsty.

Kranemeyer sighed. “You probably heard that I received a call from Nichols shortly after he went rogue this morning.”

A nod from both men. “During the call, Nichols used the emergency code
Free fall
.”

Thomas exchanged a look with his partner. “Never heard of it.”

“That’s what Lasker said too,” the DCS nodded. “Before your time.”

He cleared his throat. “It was late November of 2000—things were heating up in the West Bank.” A snort of disgust. “Scratch that—when do things ever cool down over in that godforsaken piece of real estate?”

A cheer went up from the crowd playing darts at one end of the bar and Kranemeyer’s eyes swept the room. No visible threats. “David Lay was in his third year as the Agency’s Station Chief Tel Aviv, which meant Operation RUMBLEWAY was under his operational control. I was still in the military, but wound up attached to Langley’s Operations Directorate for the duration of the mission.”

He gestured to the screen. “These are the mission files for RUMBLEWAY. Nichols met me on the ground at Ben Gurion and briefed me on our way into the embassy. He struck me as little more than a kid, but as it turned out…he already had
nearly a year of black ops experience under his belt. He knew the languages, he knew the culture, and he knew the players in the region. Word in the field was that he was the second coming of Lawrence of Arabia. In the days before 9/11, no one knew the region better than Nichols, and no one had his respect for the people and their faith. Time was, I wondered if he was a Muslim himself. As it turned out, that wasn’t accurate.”

“What was the purpose of RUMBLEWAY?” Tex interrupted quietly.

“It was just after the bombing of the USS
Cole
in Yemen. The NSA had traced a transfer of money from the PLO to the families of the suicide bombers. Nothing unusual there, but they dug deeper—found out that a member of the PLO had run support for the operation, working with bin Laden. An odd marriage that, but that’s terrorism for you.”

An ironic chuckle escaped the lips of the DCS as he leaned back in his chair. “He’d been on Mossad’s radar for nearly twenty years—they’d tried to take him out in ’93, but the Clinton administration got wind of it and pressured Rabin to rescind the kill order. The dirtbag—I’ll call him Yusuf—was Arafat’s cousin.”

8:29 P.M. Central Time

An apartment

Dearborn, Michigan

The rattle of gunfire over the cranked-up TV speakers nearly drowned out the sound of the key in the front door. Nearly, but not quite.

Nasir Khalidi looked up from his videogame controller in time to see his brother push the door open. When he glanced back at the screen, his character was lying dead on the ground, felled by a sniper’s bullet.

Jamal’s face bore an all-too familiar look of righteous disapproval. “The time you waste with that
thing
…”

A chuckle escaped Nasir’s lips as he tapped the
reload
button. “It’s a nice way to wind down after eight hours hanging onto the back of a truck.”

Five seconds
, he thought. Wait for it.

It was more like ten, this time. Then, Jamal’s voice from the kitchenette, in an oft-repeated, “Nice way to wind down? A tool of imperialism, you mean.” His brother popped back out of the kitchenette like a rabbit out of its hole and stood there watching him, his arms folded. “You do know that the American government uses these—these
games
, as you call them, to train their crusaders, to condition them to kill our brothers in the house of Islam.”

Nasir shrugged, taking another sip from his Mountain Dew. “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

“If that’s the way I want to look at it!”

“Relax,” Nasir replied, hitting the POWER button to shut off both the TV and the video game console. It was going to be one of those nights. “You’ve lost your sense of humor, my brother. What’s happened to you?”

He saw his brother pause, as if there was an answer there on his lips. An answer he would not speak.

At length, Jamal walked back to the couch, standing behind him hesitantly. “Forgive me, brother…family should not argue like this. What’s happened to me? I have found a faith that I once thought I’d lost,” he whispered, a reverent intensity in his voice, along with a shadow of the brother he once had been. “And it has given me purpose in this life of ours. That’s all I want for you.”

He reached down, squeezing Nasir’s shoulder. “That’s all our father would have wanted.”

And then he was gone, leaving Nasir sitting alone in the cramped, now-darkened living room of the small apartment.

Family
. That meant everything—their only lifeline back to the world they had once known. No matter their differences, he couldn’t betray that…which was why Jamal’s name had never appeared in the reports he left in weekly dead drops in exchange for his freedom.

And yet he knew, much as he had tried to deny it—had tried to lie to himself.

It has given me purpose
…

His brother was involved.

9:32 P.M. Eastern Time

The Black Rooster

Washington, D.C.

“…we knew we couldn’t go after Yusuf without the Israelis’ help, and the last thing Bill Clinton wanted to do was offend Arafat in the very twilight of his presidency.” Kranemeyer snorted. “For all I know, he might have even thought of pardoning the dirtbag, but someone convinced him that we could make the snatch. Grab him in the West Bank, throw a bag over his head and fly him out to Egypt. Let Mubarak’s boys give him a going over.”

“Extraordinary rendition,” Tex remarked quietly. It seemed strange to refer to Mubarak now, years after his fall from power, but he had once been the face of Egypt.

A nod from the DCS. “Exactly, but things didn’t go as planned.”

“Does it ever?” Thomas asked, a caustic edge to his voice. He glanced down at the glass of brandy in his hand, his third drink of the night. The liquor was starting to affect him, he knew that—but hang it all, what a day!

“On the day of the operation, Nichols went into Ramallah before dawn, carrying a Kalashnikov and dressed as a Palestinian
fellah
. We didn’t hear from him for hours. I suited up with Avi ben Shoham and an assault team from the Sayeret Matkal. We were going to head into Ramallah in the back of a pick-up truck, black balaclavas over our heads and flying the green flag of Hamas. Any luck, the PLO and Hamas would blame each other, not us.”

The DCS paused to take a sip of his drink. “With twenty minutes to go, Nichols made contact.
Free fall
. That particular emergency code had been designated as the signal for mission abort. Turns out we’d been walking straight into a trap. At first we thought our informant had sold us down the river, but five days later, the man’s body was dropped off in front of the embassy gates in Tel Aviv, his genitals cut off and stuffed in his mouth.”

That was the Middle East for you, Thomas thought, glancing around the bar in hopes of catching the eye of a waitress to refill his drink. They played hardball. “What happened to Yusuf?”

“Six weeks after the abort of RUMBLEWAY, Yusuf stepped into his car and it blew up, killing him, his bodyguard, and his fourteen-year-old son. Our best intel was that it was a Mossad hit.” The DCS shook his head. “Moral of the story? Don’t mess with the Jews.”

Tex cleared his throat. “What’s all that got to do with today?”

Thomas smiled to himself, turning his glass between his fingers. Right to the point, as always. No beating around the bush. That was Tex.

“Just to be honest with you, I don’t know,” Kranemeyer replied. “But it was the only operation that Lay, Nichols, and I were all involved in—before I became DCS.”

“A signal?” Thomas asked.

The older man nodded. “Ten minutes after the attack on Lay’s SUV, a call was placed from an encrypted satellite phone in the area. From what Fort Meade has been able to decrypt, the caller used the phrase
Eaglefire
. That was also a RUMBLEWAY code.” He leaned across the table. The music was changing in the bar, a hard beat replacing the slower vibe of happy hour. The voice of Bruce Springsteen belting out “Born in the U.S.A” served to further obscure Kranemeyer’s words.

“I’m not going to ask either of you if you know where Nichols went,” the DCS began. Neither of them looked at each other.
“But I know how these things go. Everyone in this business has a fall-back plan. We did back in my Delta Force days, I still do. The FBI catches up with Harry, they’re going to toss him in a cell and throw away the key. And if my suspicions are correct, if he’s acting on orders from David Lay, we need to talk to him first.”

“And you want us to find him for you?” Tex asked, his eyes a dark void as he stared across at their boss.

“Officially,” Kranemeyer replied, closing the netbook and returning it to the satchel at his side, “no. Everyone knows the CIA can’t operate on U.S. soil.”

His eyes hardened, a look of determination passing over his features. “Unofficially…don’t come back without him.” Kranemeyer rose, pulling on his overcoat. “And if it turns out he
is
part of the problem, well, you know what to do. Good huntin’, boys.”

And he was gone…

4:00 A.M., December 14
th

The foreclosed house

New Market, Virginia

She could feel him, there in the darkness. Could feel his eyes, watching her. What time was it?

A hand pressed gently down on her shoulder. “Time to leave.”

Harry’s voice. Carol rolled onto her back, stretching wearily as she looked up at him. She could barely make out his face against the darkness.

“Get any sleep?”

Her only reply was a shake of the head. She unzipped the sleeping bag and swung her legs out over the side of the bed. “You?”

“Not so’s you’d notice it.” A mirthless chuckle punctuated his words. “Got six inches of snow last night, still coming down.”

His voice had changed, she noticed. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“Could be,” he responded, looking at her as he rolled up the sleeping bag. “Might be a blessing—the snow is going to ground their choppers, but they’ll fling out a wider dragnet today all the same.”

She reached for the Kahr and slipped it inside her jacket, close to her body. “Do you have a plan?”

“Might call it that.”

4:23 A.M.

The Virginia-West Virginia Border

Near Orkney

The morning was cold—cold and dark, falling snow highlighted against blue and red flashing lights. The metal barrel of the Mossberg 500 in the hands of Sheriff’s Deputy Ricardo Sanchez was colder still.

Murmuring an oath under his breath, the twenty-seven-year-old Sanchez laid the shotgun across the hood of the Shenandoah County Sheriff’s car and reached for a thermos of coffee.

Four hours. Three to go. Man, it was raw. The form of his partner materialized from the other side of the two-car roadblock on the Virginia side of the mountain bridge.

“What’s the news?” Sanchez asked, spotting the cellphone.

“Nada, Rick,” Deputy Matthew Wilkes responded, slinging his department-issued AR-15 over his shoulder. “That was the wife. Wondering when I’d be back. She’s cold.”

Sanchez laughed at that. He just had to. “Married three months, right? How’d she stay warm before she ran into the likes of you?”

“Never asked,” Wilkes responded with a wry chuckle. “Not sure I want to know.”

“Smart man. It’s what, ten minutes till check-in?”

“Five. They upped the frequency—this Nichols fellow has somebody’s shorts in a bind for some reason.”

“You see the info dump on FOX News at eleven?” Sanchez asked, shooting a look of disbelief over at his partner. “Afghanistan, Iraq—this guy’s been everywhere, and that’s just the stuff they’re willing to talk about.”

“So?”

Sanchez shook his head. Wilkes had always been one to talk tough—usually he could back it up. But tonight? “So…we’re dealing with Jason Bourne and you’d better be taking it seriously,
compadre
.”

4:31 A.M.

The safehouse

Culpeper, Virginia

“Listen, I’m sorry, fellas.” It was probably the sixth time those words had come from Steve McNab’s lips in five hours, the words of a man who didn’t know what else to say

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Thomas responded, looking over his shoulder at the retired F-16 pilot who’d been the safehouse’s caretaker. “You followed protocol. Protocol said if the chalk was up, you were to stay away. So you stayed away until you got our call.”

“Sometimes protocol bites you in the butt,” came Tex’s succinct comment. He was kneeling at the door of the open gun safe, a notepad in his hands.

“Give us a few, Steve,” Thomas asked, motioning for the pilot to leave the room. He waited until McNab had disappeared behind the closing door and opened the screen of his laptop. “Harry’s driving a 2004 Ford Excursion, NY plates, license number Alpha Delta niner Romeo two seven. The vehicle is registered under the name Robert L. Stephenson, so that’s likely his alias.”

Tex looked up from his notes. “Any credit cards under that name?”

“Likely—I’m looking into it now.”

“Harry always preferred American Express, if that helps any.”

“Figures,” Thomas said, clicking rapidly through the on-screen database. “Don’t leave home without it. Got it—expiration date 2/18, registered in the name of Robert Lewis Stephenson. Well, he’s not lost his sense of humor.”

“Gonna be able to do anything with it?”

Thomas’s eyes narrowed as he scrolled down to the bottom of the screen. “Think so. The trouble is going to be doing it without Langley’s firepower. There’s a backdoor into the AmEx network—Carol showed me how to get in during the Caracas op two years ago.”

“Caracas?” Tex asked, getting up and coming over to the laptop. “That was right after she came to Langley—how’d she have the clearance to know about a backdoor like that?”

An amused smile crossed Thomas’s face. “The way I understood the story, it’s
her
backdoor. Nobody asked too many questions. If I can get in, the minute Harry makes a purchase—we’ve got him.”

“That might be awhile.”

Thomas looked up at Tex, his friend’s face shifting in and out of focus. He blinked, fighting against fatigue and the alcohol still coursing through his bloodstream. “Why?”

“He cleared out all his cash.”

“Great,” Thomas whispered, burying his head in his hands. He should have realized…

“How much?”

“Judging by the size of the security box—by the likely denomination—I’d say 10k. Minimum. He’s not going to get within ten klicks of an airport, and that’s about the only place he’d use plastic.”

Time to go to Plan B. The only question: what was
that
?

5:02 A.M.

The SUV

“So, what are we doing?”

Brushing her hair back out of her eyes, Carol looked up from the maps she had been studying under the glow of the dome light. “We’re near Orkney Springs. Another ten miles and we’ll be in West Virginia.” She looked out at the darkness surrounding the vehicle and switched the light off. “When were you going to tell me the plan?”

When?
He shifted the Excursion into gear and got back on the road.

“I believe I mentioned Samuel Han.”

“You did.”

Harry cleared his throat, focusing briefly on the task at hand. The back roads hadn’t been treated—the state of Virginia, like just about every state in the union, had been running short of money for years. Anymore, it took a blizzard to get any salt spread on the highways before Christmas.

Back roads? Forget about it.

“Sammy was one of the best operators I ever worked with,” he said after a moment. “Rock-solid. He’d married a girl by the name of Sherri from Virginia Beach, had a couple kids—twin boys. They’d gotten married when he was still at Little Creek, so she knew the score. Or thought she did.”

He could feel her eyes on him as he paused. “He was different…well, to be blunt—no one wears their wedding band on an op. A lot of guys use that as an excuse to sleep around when they’re overseas. Not Sammy—theirs was a love story. American dream.”

“Was?” Harry could feel the pain in her question. A survivor’s pain.

“Yeah. There’s always a
was
. Sherri was used to him going off in the middle of the night—but she never got used to the accelerated op tempo of the Special Activities Division. Sammy was gone more than he was home. A lot of women would have turned around and left right then, but she stuck it out.”

The Excursion’s tires fishtailed slightly in wet, slushy snow and Harry turned his attention back to the road. “We’re coming up to a fork—right or left?”

“Left,” she responded, consulting the map in her hand.

“Sammy was deployed when it happened,” Harry continued, swinging the SUV onto the left fork of the road. “His son Lee was playing ball in the street near their house in Norfolk when he was struck by a car. Turned out to be an old fellow in his mid-eighties, got confused—hit the gas instead of the brakes. We were in the Yemeni desert when I got the call. Had to make the choice of whether to tell him.”

“You didn’t, did you?” she asked when he hesitated.

“A distracted operator is a dead operator,” Harry replied calmly. “We’d been deep black for three weeks—I had two choices: tell Sammy and abort the mission—or see it through.”

“Three,” Carol interjected, an icy chill to her voice.

“What?”

“You had a third option—tell Han and
trust
him to keep his mind on the mission.”

Harry looked out the SUV’s window, white snow drifting down against the darkness of the Appalachian night. Pine trees heavy with snow flashed past in the glare of the headlights.

“That wasn’t on the table,” he said finally. “People speak of trust as if were some sort of virtue. It’s not—it’s probably the greatest—the most seductive, of all vices. Trust kills.”

5:17 A.M.

The West Virginia border

Boredom.
That was the worst part of the job. Deputy Sanchez hefted the twelve-gauge shotgun in his hand and moved to the front of the patrol car.

He’d joined the Shenandoah County Sheriff’s Department three years before, on a whim. At the time, he’d been laid off from his construction job—and the government was about the only entity hiring. It had to be more exciting than driving a bulldozer.

Cradling the Mossberg under the crook of his arm, he blew steam on his hands and chuckled to himself. Exciting.

Yeah, right. He’d fired his department-issued Glock in the line of duty twice in three years. Didn’t even take it to the range that much anymore.

A vehicle materialized out of the snowy night without warning, the lights of a big Ford Excursion spotlighting the deputy.

The fourth vehicle of a largely uneventful night. Sanchez walked out into the middle of the night, Wilkes moving into position behind him as he waved the SUV to a halt.

The driver’s side window rolled down as Sanchez approached.

“Deputy Sanchez, Shenandoah County Sheriffs’ Department. License and registration, sir,” the deputy requested, addressing the only occupant of the Excursion, a man who looked to be in his mid-forties.

The profile of his face
…Sanchez looked down at the crumpled print-out in his hand. The picture of Nichols hadn’t been that good to begin with, but now the falling snow had blurred the photocopy. They weren’t allowed to print in color anymore, not with the budget cuts.

“Sure thing,” the SUV’s driver responded, reaching slowly into the glove compartment. “Out looking for the spy?”

Sanchez stiffened. “Why?”

The driver chuckled, handing out his paperwork through the window. “Else this is one heavily armed sobriety checkpoint. I watched the whole thing on CNN last night, some crazy stuff goin’ on, right?”

“Sure is,” the deputy responded, looking carefully at the photo on the driver’s license.
Robert Stephenson
.

“You’re from New York?”

“At the moment,” Harry replied, looking the Hispanic deputy in the eye. “My wife moved down for her work a month back—I’ll be here as soon as I can find a job.”

The deputy handed back his license and papers with a snort. “This is a bad time to be finding one of those. What’s your wife do?”

It seemed like a casual question, but Harry could see the glint there. Not bad. “She’s a private nurse. Her patient—used to be a big shot with Apple—was recommended to get out of the city—smog, pollution, all that. So he moved down here.”

A nod. “And what brings you out on the roads at this time of night, Mr. Stephenson?”

“Haven’t seen her in twenty-eight days, bro,” Harry spread his hands. “No sense stopping for the night when she’s right over the mountain. I’ve been lonely.”

“And frustrated,” came the deputy’s comment, along with a sideways grin.

Harry laughed. “Yeah, that too.”

The grin vanished as quickly as it had come. “I’d like you to step out of the vehicle, Mr. Stephenson. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

There was no time to wonder what had triggered the command. Harry reached low and unbuckled his seat belt, pushing open the door of the Excursion. It was a two-man roadblock, the second deputy hustling toward them now, an AR-15 clutched in his gloved hands.

The way he held the carbine told Harry everything he needed to know. The deputy didn’t know how to use it. Might be good, might be bad.

“Keep him covered, Wilkes.”

His gaze swept south, taking in his surroundings in a single glance just before the first deputy turned him around against the hood of the SUV and began frisking him.

There were lights there to the south, the lights of a house shining through the snow. Probably not a hundred yards off the road. Close enough to hear if shots were fired.