Support and Defend (34 page)

T
HE SMELL OF RADIATOR
fluid mixed with the earthy sent of the jungle. Dominic felt a sticky wetness on his face from his hairline all the way down to his neck. There was next to no light here in the cab of the truck; they’d come to rest upright, somewhere off the road in the rainforest. The hood of the truck was smashed and up in the windshield, and there was broken glass all around.

Before he checked on what he assumed was a gaping wound to his head, he looked to his right to see if Adara was okay. But he couldn’t see her. A fat and lush ficus tree had crashed through the windshield, and now all Dom could see next to him were leaves and broken branches. He reached out through the greenery and felt for Adara. He grasped her left shoulder and was glad to feel movement; she was in the process of unbuckling her seat belt.

“You okay?” he asked. As he spoke, he reached to his face and he was relieved to find the source of the dampness there. A large wet palm frond covered the entire left side of his head. He pulled it off and then unsnapped his own belt.

Adara didn’t answer. Dom grabbed the small HK MP7 Personal Defense Weapon he’d jammed between his seat and the door, and turned to find Sherman. In the low light and thick wreckage of foliage he had a hard time pushing his way toward her, but before he could even call out to her again, she shouted at the top of her lungs.

“Contact right!” Sherman opened fire with her M16 through the passenger-side window.

Dom didn’t hesitate. He opened his door and climbed out, then stood on his seat. Looking over the roof, he scanned the impossibly thick jungle on Sherman’s side of the truck. He didn’t see anything at first, but then muzzle flashes erupted in the thick undergrowth forty feet away.

Dom snapped the fire selector switch to fully automatic, and he began spraying bursts at the sources of fire. Between bursts he shouted. “Bail out! My side!”

He’d fired more half a magazine in six three-round bursts before he felt Adara move past his feet and then drop out of the truck and onto the jungle floor. He turned and leapt off behind her, and as he did so he saw her yank her rifle off the ground and point it toward the rear of the flatbed truck. In the wasted space of torn trees, flattened undergrowth, and uprooted plants, Dom saw a man spin around the back of the truck with a weapon high at his shoulder.

Adara Sherman shot the man before Dom got his gun up. Blood blasted from the man’s skull and splattered on the greenery all around, and he dropped facedown into the brush.

Dom grabbed Sherman by the shoulder and pulled her with him, and they moved away from the vehicle, deeper into the jungle, in the opposite direction of any surviving Russians. As they retreated they fired a few rounds in the general direction of the threats, covering their withdrawal.

Within moments they backed up into a rusty corrugated shack. It looked like it must have been some sort of storage shed, maybe a farm had been here before the rainforest reclaimed the area. Dom and Adara moved around to the back of the shed, doing their best to find cover from any Russians remaining in the jungle around them.

They both took a knee, Dom covering one side of the shed and Adara the other. Back-to-back, Sherman said, “You okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Good enough. There could still be a couple—”

Dom reached back and squeezed her arm, silencing her immediately. He heard movement in the jungle around his side of the shed, still several feet away but approaching quickly.

He unseated the magazine in the grip of his MP7 and checked. He had only three rounds remaining. He replaced it and whispered to Adara. “Ammo?”

He heard her drop her mag, check it, and then click it back into place. “Two.”

Dom pulled the Beretta from his pants and handed it back to her. She took it without looking. He said, “Count to ten and empty the Beretta into the trees.”

“Roger.”

Dom rose, moved to the edge of the shed and peered around carefully. He saw nothing but thick jungle ahead, so he moved around the corner, then up to the southeastern corner. He stopped here, readied his weapon on his shoulder, and waited.

Soon he heard Sherman open fire with the handgun. He hoped this would flush out anyone in the trees near the crashed vehicles, get them to return fire. With luck he would see the muzzle flashes and engage them by surprise.

But as he spun around the corner of the little shed he was surprised to see a pair of men, themselves using the shed for concealment. As Sherman fired on the other side of the dilapidated building, one man lifted his weapon to fire through the rusty tin walls. The second man peered around the corner toward the source of fire, not fifteen feet away.

Dom knew Sherman was a sitting duck. She had no idea these guys were here on the opposite side of the shack. He shot the first man just as he fired through the tin. The Russian wore body armor, and he absorbed the hit and spun toward Caruso, just feet away. Dom shot him twice more, the third round taking him in the jaw and killing him instantly, but Dom knew he was out of ammunition.

As the last remaining Russian spun his MP7 around to Caruso, he leapt back around the corner of the tin shack, landing hard on his back in the overgrowth.

Dom screamed. “Sherman! Hit the deck!”

The Russian opened fire on the shack, spraying copperjacketed lead into it to kill the two threats around opposite corners.

Dom felt bullets snapping just over his head, and from the sounds of cracking branches around him he could tell the man was sweeping his fire back and forth, trying to gun down Adara as well.

For an instant Dom had no idea what to do, but then he remembered the diving knife. He reached to his right ankle, pulled the titanium blade from its sheath there, and, when the Russian stopped firing to reload his automatic weapon, Dom leapt to his feet. All around him leaves fell from the trees and bushes, all victims of the heavy gunfire the jungle had just endured.

Dom raced around the corner of the tin wall, now pocked like Swiss cheese, and he caught the Russian just as he’d chambered his weapon with a fresh round from a fresh magazine. Dom dove for the man, who spun toward the movement, but Dom collided with him before he could get his gun up, and both men crashed into the brush. The Russian fought back for a short moment, but Dom drove the knife hilt deep into the man’s stomach below his body armor, and the fight stopped. When the last Russian lay dead under him, Dom shouted for Sherman between pants. “Adara? Adara? You okay?”

He fought his way up to his knees, pushed off the tin shack to hurry around to check on his partner. “Coming around! Don’t shoot!”

Dom saw Adara rolling on the ground, her arms and legs flailing. He assumed she’d been hit, but at least she was moving.

“Adara!” he knelt down to her. “Lie still! Where are you hit?”

She kept flailing. “I’m not hit. You told me to get down, so I dove for the deck. Landed on a damn anthill.” She reached under her black parka. “Little bastards got inside my jacket.”

A wave of relief washed over Caruso, and he couldn’t help laughing.

T
HE BLACK FORD EXPEDITION
drove off the dirt road and right down the middle of an empty sandy beach at the southern tip of Bastimentos Island. Before Ethan or Gianna could ask what he was doing, Mohammed skidded to a violent stop at the water’s edge.

He said, “Everyone out. Quickly, please.”

Ethan looked out to sea. There, in the calm waters just fifty yards from the shoreline, a blue and white single engine de Havilland Beaver floatplane approached slowly, its propeller spinning just fast enough to give it some forward motion in the water.

Mohammed said, “Please. We must hurry to the plane.”

“Who’s plane is that?” Ethan asked. When no one answered, he looked to Bertoli, and quickly he recognized she didn’t have a clue where the hell the young hacker Mohammed managed to score an airplane, either. But he climbed out of the Expedition, followed Mohammed into the water, and now he counted three men with the aircraft. One sat in the pilot’s left seat. Another climbed out of the cabin and stood on the float closest to the beach, and a third jumped out of the other side, into the kneedeep water, and he began wading behind the floatplane, avoiding the propeller on his way to the shore.

The two men outside the aircraft were tough-looking and olive-skinned, with short haircuts and khaki shirts and pants. Ethan looked to see if the men were carrying guns—at any other time a gun would have uneased him, but right now he would have been happy to see the people here to rescue him had some way to fight off the Americans who still might be only minutes behind them.

He saw no weapons on them, but wondered if they had something concealed. They certainly looked like some sort of security force.

Despite a list of misgivings a mile long, Ross took off his backpack and held it over his head. Then he followed Bertoli and Mohammed and crashed through the water on the way to the plane. He took the hand of one of the olive-complexioned men, who pulled him up and ushered him into the back of the cramped cabin without a word.

Within seconds the Beaver’s engine roared, the interior of the aircraft rattled and shook as if it could fall to pieces, but the machine picked up speed and lifted off into the cool dawn.

M
OHAMMED
M
EHDI
M
OBASHERI PLACED
a headset over his ears and brought the microphone to his mouth. The leader of the Quds Force men with him, Shiraz, did the same next to him right, behind the pilot’s seat.

Mohammed was careful to speak in Arabic, in case Ethan Ross could hear any of his words. He knew Ross didn’t speak the language, even though the Middle East was his specialty at NSC.

Mohammed said, “Good work.”

“Thank you. We will have a jet waiting for us in San Salvador. We can be in Tehran in less than twenty hours.”

Mohammed shook his head. “There is nowhere I would rather go, but we’re not finished yet. We’ll go to El Salvador, and then the woman will tell us where to go from there.”

Shiraz stared back in disbelief. “Why are you letting her make the decisions?”

“We want the intelligence on the drive, and we can torture the American to give us his passwords. My first choice would be to throw her out of the plane now and make him decrypt the files. But Bertoli’s organization is helpful to us. We will go back with her to Switzerland and spend the next few days working with her on Ross, we will persuade him to give us the information so we can categorize it or redact critical information so we can publish a portion.”

“I don’t know, boss,” said Shiraz. “I like your first idea better. The woman complicates things.”

Mohammed nodded. “Agreed. They have the tendency to do that. If she becomes too much trouble, forcibly removing Ross from the protection of the ITP will be the easiest part of this entire operation.”

Shiraz nodded. “I’ll await that order.”

A
DARA
S
HERMAN
and Dominic Caruso made their way back onto the dirt road a few minutes after engaging the Russians. They were a hundred yards away from where the firefight had taken place. They’d seen no evidence the Russians were still alive or still in the fight, but they didn’t know how many had been in the Expedition in the first place, so they couldn’t be certain. As they began walking south on the road, both of them stopped to watch a floatplane fly overhead, ascending into the early morning.

Dom had pulled an MP7 from one of the dead men, and now he pointed it at the aircraft, placing its holographic red dot sight on the single engine.

But he did not fire.

Instead, he just muttered, “If I shoot it down, it won’t be Ross. It will be a group of nuns down here on a mission trip. But since I didn’t shoot it down . . . I’d bet money we just watched Ethan Ross slip away.”

The plane disappeared to the north.

Adara started walking again. She was still picking ants out of her clothing. “Do you think those were Venezuelans?”

Dom said, “Don’t know. At least it wasn’t the Russians.”

“Might have been another group,” said Adara.

“This shit is getting complicated. We kept Ross out of the hands of the Russians, but for all we know, whoever has him now is even worse.”

“What do we do now?”

Dom sighed. “We go home.”

S
PECIAL
A
GENT
D
ARREN
A
LBRIGHT
returned empty-handed from Panama late in the afternoon. His FBI jet landed at Regan National, and the rest of his team, mostly Hostage Rescue Team members, left for their homes around the D.C. area, mostly in Maryland and Virginia.

Albright, however, climbed in his FBI-issued Yukon and drove into the District. He parked in a loading zone in front of a residential building near Logan Circle, tossed his FBI parking decal on the dashboard, and took the elevator to a condo on the fifth floor.

Dominic Caruso opened the door to his place. If he was surprised to see Albright, he didn’t show it. “You made it back fast. Come on in.”

Albright followed Caruso to his messy living room, then sat in the leather chair while Caruso plopped down on the sofa.

Albright said, “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

“Sorry about that. Lost my sat phone this morning.”

“You made it back quickly yourself.”

“Just got home. First plane out of Bocas. First plane out of Panama City.”

“You hurt?”

“’Bout a hundred fifty bug bites. Does that count?”

“Considering what went down? Not really.” Albright added, “I saw you tried to call me before the Russians hit the safe house.”

Dom nodded. “They dropped out of the damn sky.”

“We heard. Panamanian police interviewed witnesses. Sounds like there was quite a show this morning. I’d love for you to tell me what you saw.”

“When did you guys get there?”

“We were ninety minutes out when the shooting started. We arrived on scene after the Panamanian police. Didn’t go in. We found out through embassy channels that there were no Americans present. We had concerns Ross might have left his stolen documents behind but—”

“He didn’t.”

Albright cocked his head. “You know this how?”

“He had the scrape with him right before he left the house.” Albright raised an eyebrow, so Dom answered the next question before it was posed. “He told me.”

“Wait. You
talked
to Ross?”

“Briefly. I almost had him in hand.”

“But?”

“Shit happens. He got away.”

“No idea where he went?”

“Didn’t see the tail number of the floatplane. Don’t imagine they filed a flight plan. Did you learn anything from the Panamanians about the aircraft?”

Albright just shook his head. To Dom, the FBI senior special agent looked like a man at the end of his rope. He’d probably not slept three hours in a row since getting the case more than a week earlier, and now it looked like he’d hit a dead end. “Nothing.”

“So what happens next?”

“I keep hunting for him. I’ve got a criminal complaint with his name on it. Violation of U.S. Code Title Eighteen. Section 798. Theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorized person. He’s wanted for questioning in four murders as well. He’d go on the Ten Most Wanted List, but I am sure CIA will lobby to keep this somewhat quiet. The Bureau will push back because of Nolan and Beale, our two SSG guys. Interdepartmental bullshit aside, anyway you slice it, Ethan Ross is now America’s most wanted.”

He added, “I guess your uncle the President could just drone kill the son of a bitch, but we’d still have to find him first.” Dom dreaded the answer he might get, but he asked the next question anyway. “Why don’t you guys just offer him immunity for the breach if he returns the scrape and comes back to deal with the murder investigation?”

“I imagine the offer will be made if we can prove he hasn’t leaked the scrape to a foreign power.”

“Obviously he
did
leak it. You told me Venezuela is arresting agents en masse.”

“That’s small ball considering what’s in his possession.” Dom asked, “Do you really think they might extend immunity to him for giving it all back?”

“I’m a law and order guy, as you’ve mentioned before. I’d like to try him, convict him, and give him the needle for killing Nolan and Beale. Still, decisions like that are far above my pay grade. The CIA might press for immunity, depending on what he has.”

Caruso told himself that if Ross received immunity by the Justice Department, he’d find him and kill him himself. It was easy to say, but harder to do. The guy could be anywhere in the world right now.

Minutes after Albright left, Gerry Hendley called. Dom had been expecting a call all evening, because he knew Sherman would call Hendley as soon as she headed back to her place. Dom wasn’t bothered by this. Adara had kicked ass in Panama, and if his only price for all her help was that she was keeping their employer apprised of his mental state, then so be it.

And to Hendley’s credit, he did nothing to hide the fact that Sherman was his surrogate eyes and ears. “I spoke with Adara. She gave me a pretty detailed after-action report on your exploits in Panama.”

“I figured she would. I guess she told you I let Ross slip away.”

“She didn’t characterize it like that. She says the deck was stacked against you, and you did your best.”

“I am sick and tired of doing my best. It doesn’t matter. Ross is still out there somewhere.”

“I’ve been reaching out to my contacts in the intelligence community to find out just what level of threat his information poses.”

Dom asked, “How big is this? Has the CIA given you specifics yet?”

Hendley said, “It’s potentially ruinous. Over one hundred twenty gigs’ worth of docs. Most top-secret. Local agent information vacuumed from case officer reports. Front companies listed by name. Affiliate and liaison intelligence services.”

“Names of agents?”

“No, but plenty in there to ID them. If these files make it into the wrong hands, The entire U.S. intelligence community will take a devastating hit.”

Gerry continued. “We can’t say this is the biggest intelligence leak in U.S. history. That was a couple years back when the Chinese took forty terabytes of DoD files. But this is the intelligence leak that will get more people killed in the intelligence community than anything we’ve faced.
Ever.
Think about it. Virtually every agent on CIA’s payroll. That doesn’t just expose thousands of foreigners around the world. Anyone who has access to this intel can dig into those foreign agents and find out who they met with, and that will lead them to larger networks. It will also lead them back to their American case officers.”

Gerry exhaled into the phone. “If Ross’s leak makes it into the hands of a foreign power, the ramifications will reverberate for decades. The agency will have to bring in a new generation of case officers and recruit a new generation of foreign assets. That has never happened.

“The United States will suffer greatly in these down years. It will be devastating.”

Caruso rubbed his eyes. “We have to plug the leak. There is no other alternative.”

“The FBI, State, and the U.S. intelligence community are doing everything they can. Your uncle has made it the priority it needs to be to get attention.”

Dom said, “I’m not doing everything I can. I need to get back out there, Gerry.”

“You want to continue your involvement in this matter, don’t you?”

“Damn right I do. I want to see this all the way to the end.”

“There’s probably some speech I could give you about not making this personal.”

Dom half rolled his eyes. “Yeah. If it will make you feel better, I’ll sit here while you give me that speech.”

“No need. But I do need to let you know the rest of The Campus is operational again.”

This surprised Caruso. “They are working on getting the data back?”

“Negative. It’s another situation. Potentially a flashpoint overseas. They are on their way to Asia right now.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No. You are deployed on your own operation. When you are ready to rejoin your team, I’ll read you into their op.”

“But—”

“Dominic, at this point you don’t have a need to know. You are running solo. Stay that way until you are ready to integrate back into The Campus fully.”

Dom grumbled out a “Yes, sir,” and the call ended a moment later.

Dom was both angry and frustrated, but he had the presence of mind to realize he did retain some control. If he could somehow affect the outcome of the Ross investigation, he could move on and rejoin his unit. To that end, he went back to his laptop and opened up his IBM i2 Analyst Notebook software. He began wading through the data findings of all the intel he recorded from Ethan Ross’s home. He’d loaded it in his computer days earlier, but the data points hadn’t led to any real pattern analysis conclusion. To find anything in the treasure trove he knew would need to add some more context, otherwise he would have to run down every lead, every name off every phone number, or every connection between all the disparate data points. That wasn’t a job for a man alone on his couch, that was a job for the FBI.

The only problem with this was the fact Dom knew Albright would throw him in jail if he somehow managed to produce hundreds of pieces of intel from Ross’s house. The FBI would have access to the same information that Dom now had, so he didn’t feel too bad about keeping it to himself.

As he looked through the data, more than eight thousand items in all, he focused on the handwritten addresses and phone numbers. He began highlighting numbers searching on a graph for any link analysis or trends with that number. He didn’t have the ability to trace any phones other than simple Internet searches, but this ruled out the vast majority of all numbers. Still, there several phone numbers that had no known relation to any other bits of data. They weren’t restaurants, NSC, or White House employees, or known friends or relatives of Ethan Ross.

Dom wondered if answers were staring him in the face, but all this information was more overwhelming than it was elucidating.

He decided to change his strategy. He pulled up the photographs of the three pill bottles he’d found in Ross’s kitchen. He enlarged the images, then enlarged them again, and soon he was on the Internet looking at PillID.com. He typed in the shape, color, and markings of each tablet, and within five minutes he had identified all three drugs.

Clonazepam, glycopyrrolate, and sertraline. He wasn’t familiar with any of the medications, but as soon as he started researching them, he realized these were the meds the polygraph examiner Finn had suspected Ross of taking.

If Ethan did not have a prescription of his own for these meds himself, it was reasonable to conclude someone had given them to him, and not beyond the realm of possibilities that person was aware of his need to defeat the FBI polygraph.

Dom realized he needed to find the doctor who had prescribed all three meds, somewhere in the forty-eight or so hours between Ross learning he would be polygraphed, and the actual exam.

These weren’t ironclad times, of course. Ethan could have had these pills for months or years, they could have been sitting around since his last routine poly, but Dom knew the fortyeight-hour parameter was the most likely.

Dom had no way to find the doctor on his own. He knew he could either contact Albright, and quite possibly get tossed in jail for breaking and entering, or reach out to David at the Mossad. The Israeli had shown his organization had the ability to get answers. Dom didn’t know how they were doing it, although he suspected they were getting help from key members of the U.S. intelligence community.

He decided on David, although he didn’t know if the Mossad man would be much help. The two men had not spoken since Dom went radio silent in Panama.

David answered his phone after several rings, and his greeting told Dom that all would not be forgiven easily. “You have demonstrated to me that you do not contact me to provide me with help, so I can only assume you need something.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“I thought we had an agreement about Panama.”

“Facts on the ground changed quickly.”

“We know about the digital breach Mr. Ross made.”

Dom assumed he would have heard about the scrape. He said, “I hope you understand that I wasn’t in a position to discuss that with you at the time.”

“That’s fair. But you handled the situation poorly. I am disinclined to help you now.”

Dom said, “I have a piece of evidence that might lead us to Ethan Ross.”

David chuckled, but there was coldness to it. “
Us
, Mr. Caruso?”

“Well . . . me. Look, I want to help U.S. intelligence get the files back. I’m not sure what you know about the scope of the breach, but I’m sure your organization can see that’s in Israel’s best interests as well.”

“Go on.”

“If I find Ross, I would love to kill him myself, but killing him won’t get the data back. I’ll bring in the FBI. I have no choice. I know you want vengeance—”

“We both want vengeance. But vengeance can wait. We agree with your assessment. Getting the data back is paramount. How can we help you?”

Dom told David about the pills, and his theory they were prescribed between and Wednesday of the previous week. David said he’d see what he could find.

The return call came in only thirty-five minutes. Dom was astonished how fast it had been. He answered with, “You have got to be kidding.”

He could hear David smiling when he talked. “Whoever obtained these medicines was very clever. They did not use the same doctor for all three.”

“How can we know the meds are related to Ross if they didn’t come from the same doctor?”

“The clonazepam and sertraline are very common antianxiety drugs, and they are often prescribed together. But in a one-hundred-mile radius of Washington, D.C., only three doctors prescribed glycopyrrolate between Monday and Wednesday of last week. It’s not a common medication.”

“Okay. Give me the three names. I’ll check them out.”

“No need. Two of the doctors are dermatologists. It is a medicine for excessive sweating, so that is quite understandable. The third doctor, however, is a heart surgeon in downtown D.C.”

“A heart surgeon? That sounds fishy.”