The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel (17 page)

30

The second missile slammed into the central administrative complex.

This was the very building to which Harris and I had been heading, the very building that housed the command center from which the king was prosecuting the fight to regain control of his kingdom. This explosion was even more deafening than the first. A ball of fire soared into the air as the upper stories began collapsing and the main edifice of the structure imploded before our eyes.

“Come on; let’s go,”
one of the guards shouted over the roar of the flames.
“We can’t stay here. We need to move.”

He grabbed me and hauled me to my feet. The other two guards and Harris were scrambling to their feet as well, and we sprinted across the tarmac for the nearest hangar. There were no planes or helicopters parked inside, and I guessed this was why the guards were headed there. It was not likely a target and might give us some initial protection from the flames and flying debris. As we ran, I could hear the sound of antiaircraft batteries erupting behind and ahead of me, and moments later I could hear the sounds of sirens. Fire trucks and ambulances were streaming in from all directions, as were armored personnel carriers, military police vehicles, and probably even battle tanks. Moments earlier, the base had seemed so quiet,
almost a ghost town. Now it was about to be swarming with soldiers and first responders.

As we reached the hangar, we were rocked by a series of secondary explosions as fuel tankers and other vehicles parked near the sites that had just been attacked erupted in succession. The guards ordered me into a corner. Then they chained me to the side of a tow truck.

Guns drawn, they then set up a perimeter and ordered Harris to hand over his weapon. Harris started to protest but quickly thought better of it. Slowly, carefully, he drew his .45, set it on the pavement, and kicked it gently over to one of the guards.

“Can I make a call?” he asked the lead guard. “I need to reach my superiors in Washington.”

“Of course,” the MP replied. “You’re not under any suspicion, Agent Harris. We just have a protocol we have to follow.”

“I understand, gentlemen,” Harris said. “I know you’re just doing your jobs.”

With me chained down and Harris disarmed, the guards turned their attention from us to the possibility that anyone might be trying to help me escape. To me, of course, the very notion seemed ridiculous. This wasn’t a breakout. This was simply the forces of ISIS bringing the fight to the vortex of the king’s command-and-control operations. Abu Khalif had vowed to behead not only the president of the United States but the monarch of Jordan as well. That meant ISIS jihadists were likely attacking the Jordanian soldiers guarding the base. Would they break through? Would they actually make it here, to where we were now? What then? The only thing I feared more than being tried by the Jordanians was being captured by ISIS. There had been a time when I was useful to Abu Khalif. No longer. I had no doubt the ISIS emir would love watching me die a slow death.

“Op Center Alpha, this is Special Agent Arthur Harris with an emergency override. . . . Yes, sir
 
—my access code is X-ray-Niner-
Foxtrot-Three-Seven-Four-Three-Tango-Bravo. . . . Yes, sir. . . . Voice ID: ‘Kensington Station.’ . . . Yes, sir. . . . I am inputting that number now.”

I couldn’t imagine how Harris could hear over the triple-A fire, the sirens, and the raging fires. Yet before I could ask him what he was doing, he was dialing another number and talking to someone else. A few moments later, he handed the phone to the lead MP, who nodded a few times, asked a couple of questions, nodded some more, then passed the phone to his two colleagues. When the last one hung up the phone, he handed it back to the leader, who returned it to Harris. After they conferred among themselves, one of them made a phone call of his own. When that call was done, suddenly they were unlocking me from the wall and removing my handcuffs.

“Follow me,”
the head guard shouted.

I had no idea what was happening, but Harris motioned for me to do what the man said and promised to be right behind me. We started walking briskly, then began running. Soon we were climbing into the back of a Black Hawk helicopter that was already powered up and ready to go.

Harris shouted at me to put on my seat belt and hold on tight. Then we lifted off and shot into the stormy morning sky, rapidly gaining altitude and leaving the chaos behind us. As we banked to our left and took a north-by-northeast heading, I felt numb, staring out the window at the leaping flames and billowing smoke and terrible destruction below. One thing I didn’t see, however, was any sign that ISIS forces were striking the Jordanian troops holding the perimeter of the base, which only confused me all the more.

“What in the world is going on?” I shouted at Harris over the roar of the rotors as we reached a reasonably safe altitude and distanced ourselves from Amman. “Shouldn’t we be trying to rescue the king and the prince and the others? We can’t just leave.”

“Don’t worry,” Harris shouted back. “They’re not there.”

“What do you mean they’re not there?”

“The king and his team left the base yesterday.”

“Why?”

“To avoid something just like that.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“They haven’t told me,” said Harris. “It’s classified.”

“But you said we were going to see the king.”

“We are.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We weren’t heading for the bunker,” Harris explained. “We were heading for this chopper. It’s taking us to the king, wherever he is.”

None of this was making any sense. “I’m not following,” I told him. “Why did they remove my handcuffs? It’s like they’re letting me go.”

“That’s simple,” Harris replied. “You’re no longer a suspect.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re no longer a suspect, Mr. Collins
 
—you’ve been cleared.”

“I don’t understand,” I said again.

“You’ve been part of a sting operation
 
—an operation that, I’m afraid, just went terribly wrong.”

31

As we shot over the eastern desert, Harris told me a story I could hardly believe.

“You were never really a suspect,” he began.

Try as I might, I couldn’t process what he was saying.

“Our investigation, and that of the Jordanians, ruled you out almost immediately,” Harris explained, “for all the reasons you spent the morning enumerating. We were also able to rule out fairly quickly the people you suggested could be suspects, though we looked at them all.”

“Including Prince Marwan Talal,” I said, more as a statement than as a question.

“He was actually the easiest to clear,” Harris replied. “As I said, he was in Baghdad at the king’s request at the time of the attacks.”

I felt terrible. “So you know who’s responsible?”

“Yes, and even as we speak, agents are arresting three suspects.”

“Who?”

“This all has to be completely off the record, Mr. Collins.”

“Of course.”

“No, really. I’ll tell you because you’ve been cleared. But there is still a significant amount of work left to do in this investigation.
It’s under way on three continents, in six different countries. And I believe there are many more arrests still to be made.”

“But you’ve got the mole?” I pressed, dying to know who it was.

Harris glanced at his phone and silently read a text message. “We do, and two of his coconspirators. They were literally just taken into custody.”

“So who is it?”

“You’re sure we’re off the record?”

“Absolutely.”

“Because you’re involved in this case, you can’t write about it at all. I’m sure the
Times
will cover the story. I’m sure the bureau will work with other reporters from the
Times
. But eventually you’re going to have to testify in this case, and we can’t have you writing about it. Conflict of interest and all.”

“I understand. You have my word.”

“Can I have that in writing?” he asked, pulling a sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and handing it to me.

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

I looked at the crumpled piece of paper on FBI letterhead. It was a nondisclosure form, but this was no boilerplate version. It contained detailed legalese written specifically for this case and specifically for me.

I laughed. “You don’t actually expect me to sign this without a written guarantee the FBI isn’t going to charge me with crimes against the United States or any other government, do you?”

“You’re kidding,” Harris said.

“I’m not.”

He stared at me for a moment, then took the paper and scrawled out such a promise and handed it back to me.

“Now sign it,” I said.

And he did.

“And date it.”

He dated it.

“And I’m going to need a copy of this before the sun goes down.”

“Right.”

“I have your word?”

“Yes. Can we get on with it?”

“Fine,” I said. “Can I borrow your pen?”

Harris handed me his pen, and I signed. When I was finished, I returned the pen and kept the form.

“When you show me a copier, I’ll be happy to give it back to you,” I said.

Harris wasn’t happy. But to my relief, he didn’t protest.

“So, you ready?” he asked.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure, but I said yes anyway.

“The mole is Jack Vaughn.”

I thought he was kidding. But Harris didn’t smile. Harris never smiled.

“Jack Vaughn?” I asked in disbelief.

Harris nodded.

“Jack Vaughn at CIA.”

Again Harris nodded.

“I don’t . . . I can’t . . .”

“Let me be clear,” Harris said. “There is no evidence as of yet that Mr. Vaughn intended to betray his country or set into motion such a deadly chain of events. But the evidence is conclusive: he is the mole.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Mr. Vaughn is having an affair,” Harris explained. “He and Mrs. Vaughn have been planning to buy a new house, waterfront property on the Potomac River, the Virginia side, a place where they would retire when he steps down from the agency. But along the way, the woman who was their real estate agent began meeting with Mr. Vaughn separately. She would show him various properties while
Mrs. Vaughn was out of town. It all seemed harmless enough, but we now know the real estate agent seduced him and they began sleeping together at these various properties while Mr. Vaughn’s security detail waited outside.”

I still couldn’t believe it. “How long has this been going on?”

“Several months,” Harris said. “But what the director didn’t know was that this wasn’t just an ‘innocent affair,’ if any affair can be called that. It was a honey trap.”

“A setup?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Harris. “The woman is an American citizen. Her father is American. But her mother is from Qatar. The woman herself was brought up Sunni. For years she raised money in the U.S. for Hamas. But recently she began working for ISIS.”

“You’re sure?”

“We are. For the last two years, she’s been receiving monthly wire transfers from the Gulf through a series of banks in Europe and the Caribbean. But that’s not important. What you need to know is she has been buying and selling homes to military officials at the Pentagon, members of the House and Senate, and all kinds of other officials in northern Virginia. She’s been using her access to these people’s homes to gain classified information and feed it back to her superiors. Six months ago she received an order to approach Claire Vaughn and offer to help her and her husband find a retirement home. She came well recommended by friends in the area, so Mrs. Vaughn agreed. But the woman quickly bypassed Mrs. Vaughn and focused her attention on Mr. Vaughn. And once they started sleeping together, she began learning little tidbits of valuable information.”

“Like details of the peace negotiations?”

“Exactly.”

“And details of the summit?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“And she was feeding everything she learned back to ISIS?”

“Yes.”

“But you just said something about this being a sting operation that went awry,” I noted. “What does that mean?”

“The bureau caught wind of Vaughn’s affair a few weeks ago,” Harris said. “It wasn’t really our place to interfere in a personal matter, but the more we learned about the woman, the more concerned we became. Still, her tradecraft was too good. We were sure she was getting information out of Vaughn, but we couldn’t get a judge to give us a warrant to bug his house or the houses where they would have their, you know, liaisons. What’s more, we were having trouble finding out how she was getting her information back to ISIS, and without that we felt we couldn’t execute an arrest warrant. In short, we hadn’t yet built a case that would hold up in court.”

“And then came the attack on the summit?”

“Right. At that point, Mr. Vaughn and his mistress were the prime suspects. But we still didn’t have conclusive proof. I briefed the king on this, privately
 
—as you can imagine, this is all extremely sensitive. I didn’t even tell Prince Feisal. I couldn’t. Only the king. I told him our suspicions, and then I told him our plan. What if he arrested you? What if I interrogated you? And what if I persuaded you to call the director and plead with him to help you
 
—at a time where his mistress might be able to overhear the conversation or get the details out of him? My team and I felt certain that if this woman learned where you were and where the king was, she would find a way to feed that information back to ISIS. Once she did, we’d have her red-handed. And that’s exactly what happened. Mrs. Vaughn is out of town. The woman was at the Vaughn home tonight. That’s the voice you heard talking to him. Just minutes after you got off the phone with the director, my team recorded her making a phone call to a source and telling that source these details. Our theory had worked. What we didn’t expect was that this would trigger a drone attack on the base.”

“You could have gotten me killed.”

“I’m sorry. We didn’t anticipate that.”

“But why did they hit the detention center?” I asked. “I mean, the main building I get. But the detention center? It doesn’t make sense.”

“There’s only one explanation,” Harris said. “They weren’t just trying to get the king. They were trying to get you, too. Apparently you’ve become a bigger target than we realized.”

“And they were tracking my phone,” I said, suddenly realizing how close I’d come
 
—again
 
—to losing my life.

Harris nodded. “Again, I’m sorry. But thank God you weren’t carrying the phone when the missile was fired.”

“Or that you weren’t.”

“Right,” he said, staring out the window of the Black Hawk at the vast stretches of desert below us.

“So who was the woman’s contact?” I asked, trying to get my mind off my own mortality.

“Her son,” Harris said.

“Did you suspect him?”

“No, actually.”

“Why not?”

“He served in the U.S. Army, worked for several years at the Defense Intelligence Agency, now works for the NSA at Fort Meade,” Harris explained. “I can’t say she used him every time. My team is working on that right now. But he’s the one she called today, and whomever he called, they obviously moved pretty fast to organize this strike.”

My mind was reeling. Then we started experiencing violent turbulence. Hail began pelting the chopper. Lightning flashed all around us. We began descending, but not nearly fast enough for me.

“Do you think Jack knew who the woman was?” I asked. “I mean, do you think he was actively working against the president, working to kill him, to kill the king?”

“No, I don’t,” Harris replied. “As I said, the investigation is ongoing. But when it’s all said and done, I think we’re going to find out he was guilty of adultery, not treason.”

“So where does that leave me?” I asked Harris, who was suddenly looking for an airsickness bag and not seeing one anywhere.

“You’re in the clear,” he replied, looking green and holding his stomach.

“And the king knows all this?”

“Most of it, but I’ll need to fill him in on the latest.”

“So why does he want to see me? Why isn’t he sending me home?”

“Honestly, I have no idea,” Harris admitted. “But I guess we’re about to find out.”