The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (5 page)

WASHINGTON,
D.C.

“I
t’s too early to be thinking.”

Ryan Kealey was staring at the ceiling when Allison Dearborn touched his forehead. Her fingertips were light and had the desired effect of relaxing his brow.

Kealey turned and regarded her. He pushed the lump of pillow down so it wasn’t covering his mouth. He didn’t ask how she knew what he was doing. She’d known him too long—and too well.

“Is that my—what’s the acronym? BBF?”

“BFF,” she said. “Best Friends Forever.”

“Right. Is that my BFF or my shrink talking?”

The woman appeared wounded, though it was tough to make out details with the hotel drapes drawn and the only light coming from the red-glowing digital clock behind Kealey. He could just make out the slight dip in her eyebrows, felt the disapproving tap of her index finger, which was still on his forehead.

“It’s the whole me, the amalgamated self.”

“Oh, ‘amalgamated,’ is it? It’d say it’s too early for twenty-dollar words.”

“Don’t try to turn this on me, Ryan.”

“What do you mean?”

“
I’m
right here, in bed with you. You’re the one who’s off somewhere. I’m just trying to reel you in. It’s okay to take some down time. You’ve earned it. You deserve it.”

Her tone wasn’t accusing or critical. Allison wasn’t like that. He surrendered to her concern by smiling.

“Since you know what I’m doing, you know I can’t help myself.”

“I know you don’t want to help yourself,” she said. “But I’ve had my say.” She peered over him. “It’s not even six a.m. I’m going back to sleep.”

Her companion took her finger from his forehead, kissed the tip, then lay back and continued to look at the ceiling . . . and to think. It wasn’t about work, as Allison seemed to think. It was about her.

Kealey was accustomed to waking in unfamiliar beds—though more often than not they weren’t actually mattresses but cots, sleeping bags, or even piles of scrub tucked against a big rock. They were located in places like South Africa, India, and Iran. The longest he had ever been anywhere was Maine, when he resigned from the CIA. He got a teaching gig, bought a three-story house in Cape Elizabeth, and spent his spare time fixing it up with Katie Donovan. Kealey suspected that when he was lying on his final bed, if he still had all his marbles, he would look back on that period with Katie as his happiest. At least, if he could slide from this world with that thought in his head, he would be content.

But being an itinerant was a lonely business.

A couple months earlier, Kealey had reluctantly gone back to work for his former bosses, CIA Director Robert Andrews and Deputy Director Jon Harper. It was a onetime assignment, preventing the destruction of Manhattan, but it had cost him both physically and psychologically. Apart from the pressure of rooting out the imminent plot, Kealey had been partnered with a man in turmoil: an agent who had just lost his daughter in a bombing. Harper’s wife had been badly injured in the same blast. Early in his career, Kealey had learned to push emotional matters to the side, like unwanted asparagus when he was a child. But eventually the “mental vegetables,” as Allison called them, had to be dealt with.

You can’t feed that kind of psychic damage to the dog under the table
, he thought.

That was one reason he had begun seeing Allison Dearborn. She ran the Agency’s deprogramming division and she also handled what were called HAS—Hardcore Agent Studies. The designation did not mean that the agents were necessarily ruthless killers or so stressed that they were open to being turned by enemy operatives. The symptoms manifested in those individuals were clear and unambiguous: increasing temper at home, deepening suspicion of those around them, withdrawal from previous social activities.

No, the HAS was designed to find individuals who had seen, caused, or been chin-deep in death and suffering, shouldered responsibility for countdown-clock danger, and showed absolutely no ill effects.

That suggested a self-anesthetization—emotional shutdown that could, in the middle of a mission, cause an individual to suffer a complete, unannounced meltdown. After her first interview with someone she nicknamed “even-keeled Kealey,” Allison Dearborn felt that he was a textbook case for repression/suppression tendencies.

So, of course, we became lovers
, he thought as he looked over at her dark silhouette
. I sure didn’t repress
that
desire.

They didn’t act on it until Kealey had resigned from the Agency. Not because they thought the rules were fair—regulations can’t stop most people from doing what they want or need to do; if they had, Kealey would have been a far less effective operative. He and Allison just didn’t want their superiors to suffer any disciplinary blowback. Kealey felt that Harper, an old romantic, might have covered for them if he found out. It wouldn’t have been fair to put the deputy director in that position.

And here they were. Kealey felt that their sessions, the ones in her office, had helped him to open up. He trusted Allison as a psychologist but he had always found it easier to talk to women. He felt that they actually listened.

Kealey knew he wouldn’t be going back to sleep. Once his mind turned on, it was like a perpetual motion machine. Maybe that was one of the reasons he’d been such a puzzle to
Dr.
Dearborn as opposed to Allison. Kealey didn’t think he internalized anything. He just burned it off as thought.

The hotel’s terrycloth robe lay in a pile on the floor. He scooped it up as he walked by. He shut the bedroom door as he left and made a pouch of coffee in the kitchenette. The curtains weren’t drawn here, and as the smell of strong coffee filled the room, he went to the window. Across Lafayette Square sunrise showed dully on the East Wing of the White House. It had been dark when they arrived on Friday night. They’d stayed in most of Saturday, except for a late stroll to the Off the Record tavern in the hotel—he hadn’t paid the White House any attention until now.

It was odd how his impression of the President’s home had changed since he first laid adult eyes on it. He had been working on his master’s degree in business from Duke University and was about to enter special forces training—the result of a strange meeting with an even stranger relative, his Uncle Largo. Kealey hadn’t been to Washington since grade school and made a point of spending a week here. Seeing the so-familiar structures, face-to-face; gazing upon the Declaration of Independence and other documents on display at the National Archives, it all had a kind of Disney World quality, everything sterile and looking the way it was supposed to look. But not the White House. Uncle Largo got him a tour and he was surprised to see it wasn’t quite the museum he had been expecting. It had “operative function,” as a CIA white paper once accurately described it. The presidential portraits were there, of course, and it was both thrilling and momentarily surprising to turn and see Gilbert Stuart’s famed portrait of George Washington hanging innocently on a wall—no fanfare and crepe, no special lighting or restrictive ropes. It was a wall hanging. But the White House was also an office building. People were always in a rush, typically in packs. Back then, Kealey couldn’t have defined the cliques but he had sensed them, just as at school where you knew the jocks from the economists from the chemistry majors, the scholarship kids from the moneyed brats, the frat boys from the affirmative action students. After retiring from the Green Berets as Major Kealey and joining the CIA, Kealey wasn’t surprised to find that the White House was not about the famous facade or the celebrated garden or the historic art. It was a place where legislative deals were made, where strategies were hammered out in long, draining sessions, where wars were plotted—typically in shorter, more direct sessions—and impending disasters were studied and, for the most part, averted. It was about unfolding narratives that were not history
yet
. It was a place where the bottleneck of responsibility rose upward, sometimes at a slow boil like LBJ struggling to enact and enforce civil rights legislation; sometimes rapidly, such as FDR learning about Pearl Harbor as he lunched in the Oval Office study or JFK and his team huddled in the windowless “woodshed,” built where the Truman bowling alley once stood, deciding the fate of civilization during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962.

The sun-reddened walls and columns at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue paled with each passing moment. Filling the white mug with black coffee, Kealey returned to the window. The White House was now its familiar self, surrounded by green with the Washington Monument rising proudly behind it. Kealey could make out the snipers and security personnel on the roof. It was Sunday morning and there were, for the first time he could recall, no protesters at the front gate. Perhaps it was too early in the morning or too late in the summer; perhaps no one cared much about the lame-duck president, David Brenneman; most likely all of the above. The sparse air and ground traffic did nothing to dispel the quiet.

Yet
—

Native Americans used to talk about the telegraph wires “singing” across the plains. Kealey always felt like that when he was anywhere near the White House, that the spot was singing—or, perhaps more accurately, humming. Countless wires were alive, the hive was quietly humming. The computers and their sophisticated programs were sorting, analyzing, and flagging intel even while the staff slept. Auto-call alerts let them know if they needed to log on to websites from home or come to the office for secure access.

But there was something the machines didn’t have: instinct, a sense that something was building. It was an elusive quality, a little hum all its own, a buzz in the base of the spine, an alertness behind the eyes.

Without knowing why, Kealey suddenly felt as if his weekend non-getaway getaway with Allison was ended.

 

 

Rayhan Jafari showed her Office of the Director of National Intelligence ID badge at the West Wing, plopped her handbag and light fall coat with silver trim on the X-ray conveyor belt, went through the metal detector, then collected her belongings and walked down the quiet corridor to the office of the National Security Advisor. She felt the admiring eyes of the three security guards on her as she left the antechamber and headed down the white-walled corridor. As an attractive, twenty-eight-year-old woman, she expected that. As a Muslim woman, she found it unsettling.

Her high heels soundless on the blue-and-gold carpet, Rayhan declined an offer of help from the young guard at the next metal detector. She knew the way, even though she had only been called to a meeting of the National Security Council one other time in the past seven months. That had to do with communications between the Iranian forty-megawatt thermal heavy-water reactor under construction in Arak and the Ministry of Science in Tehran regarding isotachophoresis. Rayhan checked the translation, making only minor corrections, then explained that isotachophoresis was a component of gel electrophoresis that was primarily used to detect biological agents.

“So Tehran would be using the science to detect attacks aimed at them rather than to initiate attacks,” President Brenneman had said.

“That is correct, sir,” Rayhan had told him.

He thanked her and, with a nod from the director of the National Intelligence Program, she had left. Until today, that had been the nuclear physicist’s four minutes in the sun.

She wasn’t able to share that event with anyone, not even her parents or her housewife sister in Ipswich, England.

With a chin she had always felt was a little too pointy and dark eyes framed by straight, black hair, the petite, slender woman exuded calm confidence. Since an incident in school, she had never put herself in any situation without studying it, whether that was school in the United Kingdom or a date with a fellow student. Her sister Nasrin once remarked that secular life seemed more important to Rayhan than the Koran. Rayhan had maintained a smart, respectful silence.

As she passed the quiet offices, Rayhan still remembered the details about the NSC she had learned prior to beating out six other Farsi-speakers for the coveted job of senior advisor, nuclear threat assessment, for the director of national intelligence. The NSC was established by the National Security Act of 1947 and was placed in the Executive Office of the President. It is the principal source of information and counsel for the Commander-in-Chief regarding national security and foreign policy matters. The NSC also serves as the President’s representative for coordinating administration aims and efforts with the other intelligence agencies, all of them operating through the hub of the Office of Homeland Security. Chaired by the President, NSC meetings often included the vice president, the secretary of state, the national security advisor, the secretary of the treasury, the secretary of defense, and the assistant to the President for national security affairs. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the NSC military advisor and the director of national intelligence—General Fletcher Clarke, who was Rayhan’s ultimate boss and had recently replaced Shirley Choate—is the intelligence advisor. Other non-statutory members are the chief of staff to the President, counsel to the President, the assistant to the President for economic policy, the attorney general, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Other members of various government agencies were invited at the pleasure and sole discretion of the President.

Rayhan doubted they would all be present this morning. Only the President’s chief of staff, Stan Chavis, was already there. The balding, middle-aged man, who always resembled a harried accountant, was in shirtsleeves and a loosely knotted tie. He had been bringing up data on the laptop the President would use.

“Good morning, Ms. Jafari,” he said to the young scientist. He half rose and shook her hand.