The Matarese Countdown (24 page)

“How can you
say
that?”

“Because it would have happened wherever you were.… We’re riddled, Bray, right up to interagency memoranda, including office codes and confidential instructions to departments.”

“How do you know?”

“When the emergency signal came through and we learned what was taking place here, I called External Security and blew my stack. Where the hell was our air cover, our on-site sky patrols? They were always on the parameters of the corridor, six in the morning and six at night.”

“So where were they?” asked Scofield angrily. “Goddamn it, we heard them every time the flyboys came in! They woke up Toni in the mornings. Where
were
they?”

“X-Security told me they received an in-house order under the standard emergency code to stand down the Silent Horse escort fighters due to severe chopper maintenance.”

“
What?
Who authorized it?”

“Certainly not me, Brandon.”

“Your
office?
Who in your office?”

“You don’t understand. It could be anyone, but who would
dare?
”

“Rip your personnel apart!” yelled Bray, furious. “Put every son of a bitch and female slime on the racks until they bleed! You can’t do any less—they may as well have manned the guns and dropped those bombs themselves. Eight people killed and four more who probably won’t make it.
Do
something, Frank! I can’t but you can—goddamn it, it’s your
turf!
”

“Yes, it’s my turf and it’ll be done my way because I have both the authority and the responsibility, and my judgment calls aren’t based on obstinacy or a desire to stamp my own imprimatur on anything.”

“Oh?…” Scofield stopped; he reached over and gripped Shields’s arm. “All right, Squinty, I deserved that.”

“Yes, I think you did.”

“I’m angry as hell!”

“So am I, Brandon,” said the deputy director, his narrowed eyes steady. “But a putsch at the Agency, such as you suggest, would only drive our enemies farther underground while creating an atmosphere in which they could thrive. Dissension can be a very effective diversion.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Bray, releasing Shields’s arm as they continued walking. “I guess that’s why you’re an analyst and I’m not.… But what I
can’t
understand is that if I’m the one they want deep-dead, why not an assassin’s bullet in my head? Simple, clean, and quick, with minimum risk and maximum percentage of a kill. God knows we’ve got our own mole inside here. That red balloon wasn’t put there by one of Santa Claus’s elves.”

“No, but it answers your question. Whoever it was had to know that you, Antonia, and Pryce were rarely, if ever, out of sight of compound surveillance.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Certainly. We tried to consider every contingency we could dream up. We didn’t invest all this effort and materials, to say nothing of money, to have you taken out from in here.”

“How come I didn’t spot it? Or Toni or Cameron? None of us is an amateur.”

“It was done mostly by remote, according to sectors. A sergeant might call a corporal on his walkie-talkie and say ‘Bomba’—that was you—‘is leaving Sector Six, pick him up Seven.’ We divided the compound into grids—you know the rest.”

“Alternating vehicles,” agreed Scofield. “ ‘Brown sedan turning off Eighth Avenue, tail it Forty-sixth Street.’ ”

“Precisely. That tactic never loses its efficiency.”

“The old ones are usually the best, Frank.… What the
hell
are we talking about? We’re up to our necks in bullshit and we sound like a couple of trainees!”

“We’re talking like this so we can think, Brandon. It’s all we’ve got left.”

“We’d better stop thinking and start doing, Junior.”

“Really, Bray, I can tolerate the ‘Squinty,’ but not ‘Junior.’ Besides, as I told Pryce, I’m older than you.”

“You
are?
”

“Eighteen months and eleven days,
boy.
 … Since you’d rather not think, what’ve you got in the doing department?”

“First,” answered Scofield, “piece together what we have. The young corporal shot on the outside road; the infiltrator who scaled the wall to blow away Toni and me; Bracket and Denny poisoned, killed at a breakfast meant for me; the bombing strike we can’t trace with a target marker placed in here by a mole or moles we can’t find. Finally, there’s the Montrose woman’s contact at the White House. What does it all add up to?”

“Now you’re back to thinking,” said a sad but bemused Shields. “However, as to the Montrose flap, she’s clean, even if she did panic. How she can even function is beyond me. She’s got to be consumed by what may happen to her son.”

“How did she get involved with Sixteen Hundred?”

“Colonel Bracket. He and his wife are—were, in his case of course—close friends of Montrose’s. When the kidnapping took place and she was reached by what we can assume to be the Matarese, she was close to a breakdown. She had nowhere to turn, certainly not to the loose-lipped bureaucracy. According to Mrs. Bracket, who’s under a great deal of stress herself right now, Montrose confided in her husband, Everett, a military colleague and in some ways a mentor.”

“That sounds reasonable,” said Bray, nodding as they rounded the tarmac that was the Black Hawk helicopter’s touchdown. “She confided in him because he was a friend, a fellow West Pointer, and a confidant; she trusted him. But what about the White House?”

“Bracket was sent to graduate school at Yale and one of his classmates was Thomas Cranston—”

“I
know
that name,” interrupted Scofield. “He was one of us, wasn’t he?”

“Right up the ladder and damned good. In addition to his natural talents, he was a terrific salesman. If he’d stayed in Langley, he might have been plucked for the directorship, and I would have supported him.”

“Squinty, that could have been
your
job! Don’t you have any normal, jealous, hate-filled bones in that frail body of yours?”

“Not when I know I’m not qualified and enjoy what I do—which I do well. Cranston left the Agency to head up one of those think tanks funded by international academic wanna-bes. From there it was a quick jump into the political maelstrom. He’s now the President’s chief aide for national security.”

“So Bracket sent Montrose to him.”

“Yes, it seemed logical, and in light of what’s happened, it was sound. We have expertise and clout, but we’re obviously cancerous. Her son would have been killed if she’d come to us.”

“But what can this Thomas Cranston do?”

“I have no idea, but whatever it is, it’ll be very back-channel.”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then we should find out.”

“I’ve requested an off-limits meeting with him. Maybe we’ll learn something Sixteen Hundred doesn’t want us to know—at this juncture.”

“Aren’t we on the same goddamned
side?
” asked Bray, raising his voice.

“We sometimes work at cross-purposes.”

“That’s
crap!
”

“No question about it, but that’s the way things are.”

“All right, all right. Naturally, I insist on being at that meeting. Also Pryce and Antonia. We’re the experts, remember?”

“You’ll be included,” agreed Shields. “Not, however, Colonel Montrose. Cranston’s worried about her anxiety level.”

“Understandable … Now, about all these financial doings, the mergers, the corporations getting together, and, as I see it, corralling markets. I can help us here. I’m no computer but I remember names, relationships, friends of the Matarese, and the enemies they either swallowed up or destroyed. I just need methods of operation, backgrounds of company lineage—that’s important, it’s vital. The Matarese’s ultimate weakness is that they’re incestuous; they always call in their own, going back years, blackmailing or enlisting on greed. It’s a pattern, completely secret, but the outlines are there and I’ll recognize them.”

“Our researchers are working on everything you wanted. You should have it all within a few days. It will be couriered to you in North Carolina.”

“Another compound?”

“No, a mountain retreat consisting of a dozen terribly expensive condominiums in the Great Smokies. You should be quite comfortable at the unknowing taxpayers’ expense.”

“
Hold
it!” cried Scofield, his eyes on a scrap of silver metal on the tarmac. He reached down and picked it up. “It’s from the Black Hawk that bombed us to hell,” he said, spitting and rubbing the surface with his thumbnail.

“How do you figure?” asked the deputy director of the CIA.

“Our patrols fired back on the second or third pass and blew apart a small section of the fuselage. It couldn’t be anything else.”

“So?”

“The paint’s relatively new. Send this to Sikorsky, Maybe they can trace it to the original aircraft.”

“I’m not sure I understand you, Brandon.”

“It’s part of a maybe-maybe answer—maybe.”

“
What
is?”

“The Black Hawk that bombed and strafed us was a fake, disguised by the Matarese. Find out from Sikorsky who leased or bought an MH-Sixty K Special Operations chopper within the last six weeks.”

“I thought you left that world behind.”

“Antonia asked questions. One of the RDF gunslingers identified it.”

Cameron Pryce and Antonia Scofield had gathered the personal effects of the dead and wounded—a chore the guilt-ridden Scofield could not accept. The unpleasant task finished, they joined Brandon and Frank Shields at the touchdown tarmac, along with Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Montrose.

“We’ll be escorted to North Carolina by four F-sixteens, two circling in front, two behind,” said the deputy director as the four compounders put what luggage they possessed on board.

The Black Hawk helicopter spiraled off the ground, Shields in the flight deck with the pilot and the flight officer, Scofield seated next to his wife, and Pryce with Montrose. For the latter two, the first airborne moments were awkward, neither knowing what to say to the other. Finally, Cameron spoke.

“I’m sorry,
truly
sorry—about everything.”

“So am I,” replied the Army officer coolly. “Would you have allowed Mr. Scofield to kill me?”

“That’s a tough question. I thought you were responsible for the air strike … at the time I probably would have. Men were killed, a lot more wounded. My reaction was pretty violent.”

“Mine would have been, too. I can understand that.”

“Then why the
hell
didn’t you tell us about your situation?”

“I was told not to, ordered not to.”

“By whom? A guy named Thomas Cranston?”

“I knew you’d find out. Yes, Tom Cranston, and with the authority of his boss, the President.”

“
Why?
”

“Because Cranston didn’t trust the CIA’s ability to thoroughly screen the compound. It turns out he was right, wasn’t he?”

“A good friend of mine, who’s up in the flight deck right now, is agonizing about that. He’s in real pain.”

“They’re everywhere, Mr. Pryce, whoever they are they’re
everywhere!
And we can’t see them, we can’t
find
them!”

“You don’t know who they are?”

“I only know the terrible phone calls from places like Cairo and Paris and Istanbul, telling me what will happen to my son! What would you do in my position?”

“Exactly what you did, lady. Go to the top, if you can, not the amorphous, leak-prone middle.”

“Cranston told me that there were channels above the intelligence community, or below, if you like, who could make threats no one else could match. I’m a mother, I want
my
son
back! His father died in the service of his country, and I’m all he has left. If I can’t have him, I’ll die trying, which I’m perfectly willing to do. I’m a soldier, and I know the risks, and I’ll go to the last extremity to get what’s due me. Which is why, thank God, I was able to go to the top. You’re part of a flawed organization, Mr. Pryce, and I’ll go around you to get my boy back. My husband and I have given enough!”

“May I make a suggestion?” asked Pryce, letting the emotion of the moment subside.

“I’ll listen to any suggestion as long as I believe the person making it is on my side.”

“I’m on your side, Colonel. So is Frank Shields, so are the Scofields.”

“I’m sure you are, as far as you can be.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You have your own agendas, and you have to cover your asses—reputations is a gentler way of putting it. I have only one agenda, the safe return of my son.”

“Not to contradict you,” said Cameron softly, “and I don’t mean to, but it seems to me you handled your responsibilities back at the compound extremely well. It was hardly your primary agenda.”

“Tom Cranston told Ev Bracket that it might be connected, so between them they got me the assignment.”

“
Might
be connected? That’s all you know?”

“Beyond the existence of a terrorist organization whose targets are you and the Scofields, especially Mr. Scofield, we aren’t on a need-to-know basis regarding specifics.”

“You
bought
that shit?” said Pryce angrily. “Excuse my language, but it
is
pure shit—sophistry is the gentler way of putting it.”

“I buy that shit, or sophistry, because I believe in the chain of command. I grant you it, too, has its flaws, but it’s far more often right than wrong. Information in the hands of the inexpert or inexperienced can be extremely dangerous.”

“Give me a specific.”

“I think it’s encapsulated in that old World War Two poster. ‘Loose lips sink ships.’ ”

“Even among those who’re skippering those ships?”

“If they should know, they’ll know.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that if even one captain of a ship isn’t informed, he may crash into another vessel?”

“I’m sure such possibilities are always factored.… What
is
your point, Mr. Pryce?”

“You’re a major player, Colonel, and you don’t have the whole picture—you should have. I’d think you’d demand it, considering Everett Bracket’s death, his murder, to be precise. He was your friend, a very close friend. In your place, I’d be terribly sad and angry as hell.”