The Asset (25 page)

“We'll drop you at the Jetway door. Mary is probably expecting you to come back through her office before you leave. I'll pick you up in another vehicle at Arrivals door seven in ten minutes. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

Best shined a UV light on Kennedy's clothes.

“What's that?”

“Looking for blood.”

He found a couple of spots on Kennedy's pants and sprayed them with an aerosol. They dried quickly to a crumbly powder and Best brushed them off. He looked at Kennedy's face.

“Snap out of it,” Best said. “You can't go back in there with the thousand-­yard stare, okay? Here, take this.”

Best handed him a blue tablet.

“What is it?”

“Xanax. It'll even you out.”

Kennedy swallowed the pill.

“Stop here,” Best said to the driver.

They pulled up to the Jetway door Kennedy had used to access the ramps. He got out and walked up the stairs. The Xanax started kicking in and he felt like he could breathe again. The fog lifted in his head. He walked back into the terminal and looked at his watch. He'd been out there a little over an hour, not long enough for Mary to get suspicious. When he got back to her office, the place was empty. His workbag and her coat and purse were still next to her desk. Kennedy slipped the security cards she'd given him out of his pocket, wiped them for prints, and put them back in her purse.

He didn't want to leave without saying good-bye, so he called her cell. It rang in a nearby room—a loud pop music ringtone—typical Mary choice. When it went to voice mail, he called it again and followed the sound. It was coming from a room at the end of the hallway with
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
on the door.

“Mary?” he called out. “You in there?”

No reply. The door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open.

“I know I don't have clearance for this room but—”

When he opened the door, he saw it was a storage closet. He turned on the light. Mary was sitting on the floor with her back up against some storage shelves.

“Mary?”

She didn't answer. Kennedy moved closer and crouched down next to her. Her lips were blue. Her eyes were wide and staring.

She was dead.

Lentz was closing in. It was almost as if he were staring at Kennedy through Mary's lifeless eyes, telling him he hadn't seen anything yet.

BOSTON

Day 49

T
he plane transporting Juarez and
Trudeau disappeared from radar two hours ago and crashed in the Ural mountains.”

It was nearly 5:00
A.M.
at the Boston safe house in Beacon Hill and Alia was briefing Kennedy, Love, Nuri, and Best on their grim operational status. The sky outside was a mottled slate color, threatening any number of frigid, wet attacks. She informed them that she had just finished cleaning up the mess at Logan Airport. Her scrub crew had managed to retrieve the body of Mary, the TSA chief, before the police could find it. Now Mary was in her car at the bottom of the Charles River, just off Memorial Drive. With her blood alcohol level and a prior DUI, accidental death wouldn't be a tough sell to the local cops.

But that was the least of their concerns. An hour after Mary was wrapped up, Alia had received a call from Langley about Juarez and Trudeau, followed by satellite images of an airplane crash site, which she was showing the team as they sat around a conference table, stunned and speechless. She zoomed in on the wreckage. It was strewn across a quarter mile of rugged, snow-covered mountains.

“It fell from its cruising altitude of eighteen thousand feet in two pieces,” she explained, “suggesting a midair explosion. Even if, by some miracle, they survived, temperatures are well below freezing at the crash site, with no emergency services for thousands of miles.”

“I thought they left Russia days ago,” Kennedy said. “Langley is just learning about their plane going down now?”

“They had laid over in a city called Surgut.” She showed them remote Surgut in the Khanty-Mansi province on a sat map. “Juarez's plan was to acquire a new aircraft there to ensure they couldn't be tracked on their way back to Paris.”

Kennedy could no longer keep silent about the intel Trudeau had sent him. Lentz was gunning for them, now that they knew his secret, and everyone in Red Carpet deserved to know.

“Alia,” Kennedy said, “tell them about the nukes.”

Alia stopped cold, staring at him in disbelief.

“What's he talking about?” Nuri asked.

“Kennedy, I know you're under a lot of strain, but I would advise you to allow me to finish this briefing.”

“Trudeau found out Lentz had bought twenty-five Russian RA-115s—miniaturized nukes weighing fifty to sixty pounds—from the arms dealers,” Kennedy said, ignoring her. “They're called ‘suitcase nukes' because they can easily be transported in a suitcase or backpack. Each of them has the firepower of six to ten kilotons of TNT, only a few kilotons less than one of the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima.”

“Why didn't we receive this intel?” Best asked.

“You know the protocols with these types of weapons,” Alia said coldly. “And Trudeau clearly didn't follow them.”

“Trudeau sent the intel to Juarez and me. He felt like someone other than Alia and him needed to know.”

“That wasn't his call to make,” Alia said.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Love asked, looking at Kennedy, fearful.

“He wasn't supposed to know,” Alia said.

“And I was hoping you were going to tell the team,” Kennedy retorted.

“It doesn't work that way,” Alia said.

“How does World War Three work, Alia?” Best asked bitterly. “What's the fucking protocol that won't mean shit while we all burn?”

A line had been crossed. It was one thing for the others to question procedures, but Best was a soldier. He was supposed to follow orders to the bitter end. Kennedy felt like they were rapidly approaching a meltdown in Alia's leadership viability.

“If Lentz was able to do this to Trudeau and Juarez, we're dead,” Love said.

“You got that right,” Nuri said. “I'm just glad someone had the balls to tell us the truth.” She nodded to Kennedy.

The room was quiet. Alia switched off the projector and poured herself a drink. Kennedy wanted to quit, to fold in the face of absurd odds. But he knew he couldn't. He knew he'd gone well past the point of no return. Doing anything other than stopping Lentz was nonnegotiable. He needed to be the leader he'd been asked to be.

Alia finally spoke. “As of now, I'm suspending all Red Carpet operations for twenty-four hours while I go back to DC to discuss the next steps with my superiors.”

Kennedy could feel her closing herself off to the team. She had no intention of coming back to Boston. He couldn't fight her. He had to reel her in.

“Alia, this is your baby,” Kennedy said calmly. “Don't go to DC. Don't let them derail us. Love is right. We're dead. But we're the only ones who know enough to move as quickly as Lentz. Handing this off is like handing someone a grenade with the pin pulled. It will just blow up in their face and Lentz wins. I appreciate your situation, but fuck Washington, fuck politics, and fuck your career. We've got nukes on the street, so it's do or die. Besides, do you really want to kowtow to a bunch of misogynist military brass who'll just tell you to stand aside and try not to cry while the men do their work?”

Alia was silent for a long moment, thinking.

“I agree with you,” she said finally, surprising everyone. “And I'm sorry for keeping you all in the dark. Now that my superiors know what we know, they're going to try to take this over. In their minds, they have no choice.”

“I don't know about you, Alia, but this is the kind of shit going rogue was made for,” Nuri said.

Best shot her a look. Alia lit a cigarette.

“We do that, and we'll have two enemies we won't walk away from,” she said.

“Fuck 'em,” Best said. “I'm all in.”

“Me too,” Kennedy said.

“I'm with you,” Love said, looking directly at Kennedy.

Nuri piped in. “Like the man said, we got bang bang on the street, boys and girls, and no one wants to be another Mark Rossini.”

“Who?” Love asked.

“FBI agent who had information that could have prevented 9/11 but
had his intel suppressed by the CIA's Alec Station unit to avoid embarrassing the Saudis,” Kennedy said.

“And the stakes for them to suppress were
way
lower then,” Nuri added.

“What do you think?” Best asked Alia.

“I think we can all agree that any action other than trying to stop Lentz is an action that will guarantee our failure and his success. We are the only chance we've got, and we can't waste any time.”

“So what's our next move?” Nuri asked.

“I think we have to focus purely on taking Lentz off the board,” Alia said.

“I like the sound of that,” Best said.

“Good,” Kennedy said. “I think I know where to start.”

K
ennedy broke his theory down
for everyone. The avionics communication equipment Lambert had tracked down in Kuala Lumpur, combined with the suitcase nukes Trudeau had discovered in Norilsk, meant Lentz could turn aircraft into long-range missiles with a nuclear warhead and a sophisticated guidance system, allowing him to execute a “coordinated strike” against multiple targets in the United States—major cities, military and political targets, critical infrastructure, power plants, and anything else that would help to cripple the country. And since he would have total control of the aircraft, he could wait until it was near final approach to its target before he took the wheel, making it impossible for civil air defense to deploy fighter jets to shoot it down. The attack on Kennedy at Logan confirmed that Lentz had operatives in place to install the equipment. Provided he had not already completed his aircraft sabotage operation, their best bet would be to catch him in the act. Since he had taken out most of Red Carpet, he might not expect them to come out swinging.

“So how do we intercept—if he's still out there?” Best asked.

“The answer is in the data communications being routed through Lentz's secure servers in Cuba,” Kennedy said. “We use Rico's taps and compare them with my airport taps to identify IP addresses at airports communicating with Lentz using his IM app. Presumably the owners of
those IP addresses are embedded in maintenance. Then we analyze communication frequency and drop-off. It's probably safe to assume he's in frequent communication with his operatives when they are in the midst of sabotaging an airplane. After the job is done, it's probably safe to assume comms would slow or stop abruptly. If that's the case, we're too late. But if we find a comm cluster, we might be able to take him.”

“Sounds like a long shot,” Love said.

“Agreed, but it's all we have outside of Alia convincing the FAA to ground all flights for emergency inspections,” Kennedy said.

Alia, Nuri, and Best laughed.

“What's so funny?” Love asked. “Can't you people pull that off if you have cause? All flights were grounded on 9/11.”

“Yeah,
after
the Twin Towers went down,” Nuri said. “Alia would be asking for the same thing, based on a theory backed by decent intel, but nowhere near signed confessions. And, no offense, Alia, but you're not exactly the darling of the company at this juncture.”

“None taken,” Alia said. “I think Kennedy's plan is worth exploring. I'll buy some time with Langley and call in some favors. As for the rest of you, I'm sending you to your own individual safe houses to get some rest. Get the details from Best. We can recon tonight after I know what kind of resources we have at our disposal.”

“Why not stay here?” Kennedy asked.

“Too well known at Langley,” Best said. “Which makes it too well known period. These other places came from my friend at the bureau. They're witness protection safe houses, so they're way off the grid.”