Operator - 01 (30 page)

Of course, things aren’t going well at the moment. Josh is supposed to be sitting in for a rising star, a young Florida congressman who has cancelled lunch at the last minute. Except that Josh isn’t sitting at all – he’s gotten a phone call and disappeared from the table nearly ten minutes earlier. It is unlike Dunleavy’s assistant of over two decades, the man who has followed Jonathan from his job as chief of staff for the senior Senator from West Virginia to a white-shoe D.C. law firm, through several positions of increasing authority during the Clinton administration, back to a lobbying firm, and finally on to this dream job with the current administration. Josh is punctual to a fault and always attentive to Jonathan’s moods. Right now, Jonathan is getting restless – he doesn’t like sitting alone.

Just as Jonathan is about to signal the waiter for his check, a young man in a tailored suit slips into his booth. This alarms Jonathan for several reasons. For one thing, as Deputy National Security Advisor, Jonathan is one of the most powerful men in Washington. He might carry less weight than a Supreme Court Justice, a Cabinet member, Joint Chief or Senator, but Jonathan certainly outranks any member of the House of Representatives outside of the leadership. The presumption of some staffer to sit down uninvited at Jonathan’s table in his aide’s seat without first asking permission is galling. Then there is the question of personal safety. Jonathan disdains taking a security detail with him on the Hill. But practically speaking he carries more secrets around in his head than 99% of the employees of the U.S. government. So as he eyes this young man, he has to wonder if he is a threat. Jonathan doesn’t think so – more likely an eager West Winger trying to score some points up the food chain. But there’s something about the way the man slides into the booth that has pricked an undeveloped area of Dunleavy’s subconscious, the part that hasn’t seen much use in most humans since we were scurrying to avoid being eaten by saber-tooth tigers.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” the young man asks casually. The nerve of the kid actually intrigues Jonathan. There
is
something familiar about him. The young man is trim and fit but he doesn’t have the steroidal look of a bodybuilder. He is perhaps six feet tall with thick, straight black hair cut short. His eyes are large and their color is darker than brown, almost black. He’s handsome, but not overwhelmingly so. The only odd thing Jonathan notices is that the young man sitting across from him has unusually thick wrists. Ordinary – that’s what you’d have to call him. The good side of ordinary, perhaps, but still ordinary. A nobody in a big sea of somebodies. The face looks vaguely familiar, but Jonathan loathes wasting the mental energy it would take to try and place him. Instead he scans the bar for Josh, who will certainly get rid of this attention-seeker.

“I’m sorry, your assistant won’t be coming back. There’s been a break-in at his house. He should be calling you just about now to tell you.” There is an unseemly level of confidence in the young man’s voice. Jonathan resolves on the spot to end the interloper’s career. Regardless of who he works for, this process will take no more than three phone calls.

Just as he is considering the appropriate words for a brush-off, Jonathan’s Blackberry vibrates in his pocket. He raises it discretely to his ear. A chill runs up his spine as he listens to his aide apologize for disappearing and tell him that his house has been burglarized and his wife badly scared. Jonathan hangs up on Josh in mid-sentence and puts the phone down on the table, staring dumbly at the young man sitting across from him.

“How did you know that?” he asks angrily, recovering after a moment of silence.

“We arranged it.” The young man raises his hand before Jonathan can reply. “Please save the threats – I need just two minutes of your time and then you’ll never see me again.”

“You can’t have two seconds of my time,” Jonathan retorts angrily. He looks around for a waiter.

The young man pulls an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and slides it over to Jonathan. “You’ll want to look at these before you make a scene.”

Dunleavy eyes the envelope. The smartest course of action would be to ignore it. But he is a man who craves secrets when he knows them and despises them when he doesn’t. In five seconds, his curiosity wins out. He slides a manicured finger under the flap of the bond paper and opens the envelope. Inside, a folded, blank piece of stationary is wrapped around a dozen 4x6-inch photographs. Jonathan flips through them with mounting horror. They are shots of him, his face recognizable in some of them, his distinctive red hair with the cowlick near the middle of his widow’s peak visible in the rest. Jonathan feels the blood rush to his face. The photos show him with several different girls. Very young girls. They are recent. He feels a hard knot forming in the depths of his stomach.

“You’re trying to blackmail me?” he hisses.

“No, I am not. Not at all. But I need you to understand that I’m serious. As I said, I just need two minutes of your time.” Dunleavy thinks that the young man sounds entirely too reasonable and with a start he realizes that this interloper is speaking a little slowly to him, as if he is addressing an idiot.

“Two minutes, then,” Jonathan says briskly, folding the blank stationary back over the photos and stuffing the envelope into his suit jacket.

“You thought you were in the clear, didn’t you? After Constantine Drubich was killed?” The name brings Jonathan’s gaze up from the table sharply; the men lock eyes for a moment before the intensity of the young man’s gaze forces Jonathan to look away. He is now straining to remember how he knows this man – anything that will give him an advantage in this awful conversation.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Jonathan scoffs.

“My offer is simple. Tell me the truth and these photos will never be released. Lie to me again and I guarantee you that every politician in this town will have a set by dinnertime.” The young man’s voice has a band of iron at its center.

Jonathan considers this for a moment.

Whatever he wants, the young man already has him dead to rights with the photos. Dunleavy’s career will be over in a heartbeat and he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison if the photos become public. He suddenly feels weary, completely exhausted. “What do you want to know?”

“You thought you were in the clear because the FBI closed the investigation into the Tambov Gang’s activities outside of New York State, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you applied the political pressure that got the FBI to stop looking?”

Jonathan nods.

As Jonathan Dunleavy stares at the young man, his name, his whole identity comes to him in a flash: Michael Herne. The one who caused all of the trouble in the first place. A dead chill runs up Jonathan’s neck and his chest begins to pound as he remembers reading the man’s file. The real file, that is, the codeword-compartmented one that Dunleavy had to threaten the Army Chief of Staff to get read in on. The kid in the expensive suit sitting across from him was one of the deadliest men in the army. His classified file is laced with superlatives, many of them from men in the special ops community who rarely write about other soldiers in these terms. Herne had a string of spectacular successes in Afghanistan in the first few years of the war. Then there was that disaster, the CIA fuck-up that had almost gotten him killed, what was that? Jonathan struggles to remember the details. He starts to sweat. The kid sitting across from him should be dead by all rights. Several times over. Instead, he single-handedly took out two of the Russian Federation’s top assassination teams. Dunleavy decides he will cooperate.

“There’s one thing that didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t figure out why the SVR acted so aggressively to shut down the Tambov ring. Why did they kill Sheriff Peterson and Constantine Drubich? Acting on U.S. soil was a huge risk and it backfired on them. The consequences were far worse than they would have been if they’d left things alone and just taken the hit for their part in setting up the child sex ring. They surely knew the risks.”

Jonathan stays silent. He’s been a lawyer for too many years to speak in the absence of a direct question.

“I’m guessing that when you first heard the story about the redheaded man, you put pressure on the FBI to focus on Conestoga and nothing else. Which is why I found myself in a Suburban with two B-list special agents from the Albany field office tailing the top Russian spy in America. Is that right?”

“I couldn’t interfere with the FBI directly, obviously,” he said, pointing to his red hair. “But yes, I pressured the right people to ensure that the focus of the investigation was confined to the New York operation, and eventually I was able to get the investigation closed. But I couldn’t influence your boss.”

“Former boss,” Herne corrects.

Jonathan raises an eyebrow that says,
so what are you doing here now, then?
“How did you find me?” he asks.

“I couldn’t let it go. I just couldn’t understand why the SVR would risk two of its top Spetznaz teams in operations on U.S. soil just to cover up a little honey trap. If they hadn’t tried, we might have stopped looking for you. I doubt that Veronica would have recognized your face from a scrapbook of two hundred redheaded men. That’s how many redheads there are in positions of responsibility in the U.S. government, by the way. Once we eliminated the three redheaded men who’d served on the U.S. mission to the U.N., we realized you must have been visiting New York for some reason and just happened to attend that party. It made the going tough – there were just too many suspects. Then the FBI dropped the investigation entirely. Only my old boss and me thought you must still be out there somewhere.

“It was tricky to find you because we spent a lot of time looking for people who had a connection to upstate New York. Then we realized that wasn’t it at all. The Tambov ring in Conestoga didn’t turn you. That was just a pilot project, a proof of concept for the really high-stakes games the SVR wanted to play in New York and D.C. Constantine wanted to run the test because he couldn’t afford to make any mistakes when he was trying to snag you and turn you. So after the Conestoga operation started to operate smoothly, he copied it in Maryland. You were the target. You know what gave you away?”

Jonathan shakes his head automatically, drawn in by the narrative.

“I realized that our redheaded man had to have been sitting in on the National Security Council meetings that took place after the Tambov sex ring in Conestoga was exposed. Someone who’d just seen the top-level intel reports wouldn’t have known about the connection between Veronica and Constantine Drubich and would never have wanted her to be killed. But a traitor on the NSC would have known the FBI would be hungry to discover whether the Tambov operation had other tentacles. Once we figured that out, we found you immediately. You’re the only principal on the NSC with red hair and there are only two redheaded staffers.” Herne pauses for a moment to let this sink in. “Do you want to know the most ironic part?”

Jonathan nods reluctantly.

“If you’d just laid off abusing children for six months, we’d never have nailed you. I mean, we would have had our suspicions, but without hard proof we never could have touched you. But you couldn’t stop, could you?”

“So what happens now?” Jonathan asks impatiently, ignoring the insult. He is nothing if not practical. He knows that the administration will want to avoid embarrassment. They certainly will not want this kind of scandal breaking while they are still reeling from the after effects of the Great Recession and trying to get through an election. The scandal could cost them control of the White House. They’ll have to offer him a way out, Jonathan realizes. Maybe the revelation of a previously undiagnosed melanoma will be enough. Jonathan relaxes a little. He still has some leverage.

Herne fixes him with a look, a stare that makes him feel colder. Jonathan is starting to have trouble breathing. The weight on his chest is increasing.
Calm your nerves, it’s almost over
, he tells himself.

“There’s no place in the legal system for you, I’m sure you know that.”

Jonathan is impatient to be rid of this man and this uncomfortable topic. He has plenty of money stashed away. Retirement isn’t such a bad option. He doesn’t understand why Herne doesn’t just tell him how it’s going to go down.

“So what are you offering me?” Dunleavy asks, his annoyance showing.

Herne slides from the booth and rises smoothly to his feet. Jonathan watches, transfixed by this deadly man’s movement even as his own discomfort increases. Herne leans over him and before he can react, plucks the envelope with the photos from Jonathan’s jacket pocket. As Dunleavy starts to protest, Herne lays a hand on his shoulder. It looks like a friendly gesture, but suddenly Jonathan’s voice doesn’t work. His vocal cords are stilled. His heart slams in his chest and the weight crushing down on him doubles. Jonathan realizes in a final moment of clarity that he is having a heart attack. As Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Dunleavy stares at Herne, the younger man whispers a single word into his ear.

“Justice.”

<<<<>>>> 

Sources

Bits and pieces of this novel come from my own experience, but for the rest I’ve relied on copious research and the wisdom of others.

Thanks to Douglas Burdett of Artillery Marketing for his wisdom on deer hunting and Army life and his many contacts.

Many thanks go to Mike Noell, Terry Naughton, Tom O’Sullivan and the rest of the guys at Blackhawk (now ATK) in Norfolk, VA. They introduced me to the real world of operators and nearly killed me on the Naval Special Warfare obstacle course.

Thanks also to my former Army classmates at Fletcher who can’t have known that they were contributing to a mosaic that would take so long to develop.

The description of Michael Herne’s Silver Star action is roughly based on the actual experience of Silver Star recipient Master Sergeant Anthony S. Prior with the 5
^th
Special Forces Group.