The Seven Year Itch (2 page)

Chapter 2

Thursday
Morning, FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

J.J.
searched for serenity in bottom of a Belvedere bottle.
The wait for his sugar-coated lies had dragged on for too long, and she’d lost
patience. After glancing around the small reception area to ensure no one was
watching, she removed from her purse a silver flask and smiled. It was filled
to the brim with relief. One small gulp and the soothing burn slipped down her
throat, calming her prickly nerves. Inside she felt on the brink of
dissolution. The 10 am swallow was just a necessary evil. It would get her
through the meeting, until time for her next dose of repose.

Another dead source.
She couldn’t stomach the thought of his demise. Two had been more than her fair
share. The unceasing cycle of loss had worn her resolve thin. She’d refused to let
another family suffer that pain if she could in any way prevent it. J.J. wanted
to tell the FBI where to stick her badge and gun, but she had promises to keep.
Promises to Viktor. Promises to herself. No matter what Cartwright said, she’d
see her case through until the end. And the end was as near as nightfall
because the op was simple and would go off without a hitch.

J.J. stiffened her back and squared her shoulders as the
elixir took effect. Her posture mirrored that of the powerful yet graceful eagle
perched atop her FBI badge. She’d eyed it, waiting for the carefully
choreographed denial and deception ritual to begin.

Blur the truth. Fool the enemy. Protect the state—or the
Bureau as it were.

From Naomi Jones McCall to Johnnie Mae Gibson to J.J. McCall,
the long-practiced routine hadn’t changed much. Forty years and still the same
old shit. For almost a decade she’d operated under the blind faith of equal
opportunity for all, but J.J. finally lost her last modicum of hope that
positive change was inevitable.

“Agent McCall,” Assistant Director of Counterintelligence
James Cartwright called from the door of his vast office. Only Director
Freeman’s office was larger. A wave of apprehension gripped J.J. as she
smoothed her hair down to the shoulder and stood to face him. She’d been
twiddling her thumbs for twenty minutes, waiting for him to deliver the
promotion board results.

Cartwright’s jaw tightened and his face contorted before he
said “Please come in and have a seat.”

“Yes, sir.” Her tall slender frame towered over his as she
offered a respectful nod and strode inside. She flipped her navy blue suit
jacket backward before parking herself in the burgundy leather executive chair
facing his desk.

Cartwright pressed his lips together and grimaced, expelling
a long breath as he closed the door behind her. Once seated, he clasped his
fingers together and tightened his lips. “You’re looking a little tired. When’s
the last time you took some time off?”

J.J. didn’t understand why people had taken so much effort to
tell her she looked like crap in recent weeks. A few sleepless nights had begun
to take their toll. All she needed was a good night’s rest and she’d be better
than her usual “okay.” But her appearance is not what she had been called in to
discuss. He knew it. And she knew it. “Come on, Mr. Cartwright,” she smirked.
“You didn’t call me in here to talk about planning my Disney vacation. I’m
fine.”

“Listen, I’ve had a long discussion with Jack and the members
of the board today. Even though you’re long overdue for a supervisor slot,
they...
I
can’t recommend you during
this cycle. However, you should know that your co-case agent, Antonio Donato,
is still in the running.”

She leaned forward in her seat, her expression incredulous.
She’d spent the last twenty-four hours mentally preparing for the inevitable,
but an unexpected burst of rage rushed through her at the sound of his hollow
words. “Tony? You mean the junior case agent that I’ve been training for the
past year? The one who’s been shadowing
me
on
my
cases?”

Three class action suits over the last 15 years, tens of
millions in discrimination settlements. Zero lessons learned. The FBI hadn’t
changed one iota. The speech should’ve been old hat. After all, she’d heard the
same one, almost verbatim, three times before. Somehow, the sting cut just as
deep as the first.

 
“I see.” She shifted
in her seat and braced herself. The tired and overdone “we need you on the
street” portion of his speech was next.

“This decision in no way reflects on your performance. If I
may speak frankly, you’re one of best recruiters the Bureau’s ever had—no one
disputes that.”

“With all due respect, sir, no one could. I think my record
speaks for itself.”

He nodded and shifted his gaze toward the window. Then he
turned toward her and dropped his head into the palms of his hands in. His
frustration was apparent. “Summa cum Laude at Howard University. Top of your
class at Quantico. Your mother would be proud of the woman, of the agent you’ve
become. But please understand, my hands are tied right now,” he implored. “With
this mole situation, the Bureau...hell, the country can’t afford to lose you—or
your sources. We need you on the street.”

“Ugh!” she grunted as her leg jutted out. He’d lied and the
itch felt more like a stab…in the back.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s nothing, the thing, you know,” she said, shifting
in her seat, trying to brace for another untruth. “Anyway, you and I both know,
if this was about the streets, I’d be working out of Washington Field, not Headquarters.
I was really hoping for something a little more original this year.”

•
 
•
 
•

Washingtonians widely regarded the J. Edgar
Hoover building, FBI Headquarters, as the ugliest piece of architecture ever to
occupy humans, with its awkward boxy design. The drab mental-hospital paint,
scuffed commercial-grade linoleum, and furniture as old as Hoover himself
undercut its “World’s Premier Law Enforcement Agency” image. And the pervasive
scent of disgruntlement and despair could suck the joy out of Santa Claus. The
air of negativity could only be trumped by the stench of paranoia at Langley.
And trouble was never more than a few steps away. Capitol Hill—nine blocks
south. The White House—seven blocks north. The U.S. Attorney General—directly
across the street.

Director Russell Freeman and Jim Cartwright controlled a
“bigot list” that contained the names of personnel with access to “the vault,”
an ultra-secure compartmented Headquarters facility. Agents planned and executed
the nation’s most complex and damaging espionage cases from this space. Only employees
with “need-to-know” could enter. Inside, secure file safes locked in four
secure breakout rooms held key intelligence from the most valuable
counterintelligence sources. One compromise, one dead source, one slip of the
tongue to a dimwitted congressman with no sense of national security, and hell
would be paid. The price? Career and freedom. At least that’s the way it was
before the failed search for
ICE Phantom
.

A decade earlier, during the Hanssen damage assessment, a
sketchy Russian source suggested a second mole was burrowed deep within the
Intelligence Community. The heads of all Intelligence Community agencies
initiated Operation
ICE Phantom
—Intelligence
Community Phantom—to find the turncoat allegedly more dangerous, more insidious
than Hanssen and Ames combined.

A stagnant search had since yielded nothing, nothing except a
dead-end ghost chase. As of late, the only mark of his existence was J.J.’s
dead sources. They’d been dropping off too quickly, suggesting the mole was
afraid, desperate. These facts were all but completely ignored by senior
leadership who opted to claim ignorance, a game J.J. and Tony could ill afford
to play.
   

One source vanished from the face of the earth and the other
was brutally murdered. Only one remained thanks to the son-of-a-bitch selling
secrets like popcorn at National’s stadium. And the new target would no doubt
be Viktor Plotnikov, codenamed
Karat
.

J.J. broke every rule and regulation to protect him:
falsified FD-302s, the Bureau’s official interview reports; intentionally wrote
a false assessment identifying him as a low-level diplomat to conceal that they
knew his true identity; and Robert Ludlum couldn’t produce better fiction than
that found in his “duplicate” case file. She even designed his codename as an
operational security measure. The misspelling would differentiate those who’d
seen his file from those who’d merely heard about him. She refused to lose
another source to the
ICE Phantom
or Golikov’s thugs.

Jack Sabinski, J.J.’s immediate supervisor and the bane of
her professional existence, drowned in denial, and J.J. and Tony had long
suspected his reasons were rooted in more than professional self-preservation.
ICE Phantom
had struck during his duty,
his watch. The blame was squarely at Jack’s doorstep. Rather than confront the
problem, Jack thought it better for him, for his career, to simply ignore the
problem. Rumors of moles deterred other agencies from sharing intelligence with
the Bureau and frightened sources that feared arrest, imprisonment, death, or
some combination of the three. Not to mention, they wreaked havoc on the
already tenuous relationship between the FBI and CIA.

Sabinski would sooner leave the
ICE Phantom
free than take a chance on pissing off the CIA.
The incessant CIA complaints suggesting she’d been targeting Russian intelligence
officers too aggressively had grown at a breakneck pace, and he warned her
almost daily. When the FBI pressed too hard on Russian intelligence officers
operating inside the United States, the FSB (Russian FBI) played tit-for-tat
with CIA case officers in Moscow. But J.J. was devoid of interagency
sensibilities. What constituted “too aggressive” when FBI sources (sources the
FBI had shared with the CIA) were getting picked off left and right?

She didn’t give a damn about mucking up their operations. She
relentlessly pitched Russian officers. And when the Russian Ambassador cried
foul to the State Department, she took the heat alone, from Director Freeman,
from Jim Cartwright, and from Jack who was more than pleased to mete out the
disciplinary actions.

Her inability to hold her tongue, her flippant responses, did
little to help assuage matters. “Excuse my frankness, Jack, but they can cry me
the River Volta. I won’t make any apologies for doing my job,” she once said
after one of her daily hand slaps. “America is the FBI’s sandbox. If they don’t
want to play according to the rules, they can kindly collect their shovels and
pails, and take their asses back to the Motherland!”

The risk had been worth it though. She gambled her entire
career to recruit Plotnikov and the gamble was about to pay off.

•
 
•
 
•

“So, Mr. Cartwright—”

“Please, Jim.”

“So, Mr. Cartwright, you’re implying that if I performed my
job poorly, I’d be eligible for promotion?” J.J. eyed him with a skeptical
gaze.

He leaned back in his seat, heaved a long sigh, and shook his
head. “Really? That’s how you’re going to carry this? You know that’s not what
I’m saying.”

“Then I’m confused,” she said snidely. Her eyebrows scrunched
in feigned bewilderment.

“Honest to God, my hands are tied. I just
can’t
help you right now,” he pleaded,
almost as frustrated as she. He clearly wanted to assist but couldn’t. “You
wouldn’t believe the stress I’m under. I’m on my last leg here, J.J. I could
crash and burn any minute.”

She braced for the sensation but none came.

“You’re right, sir. I wouldn’t believe it.” She looked at her
watch and then at Jim. “I really hate to cut this short, but I’m running late.
Donato and I are supervising an op today. Are we finished here?”

Cartwright’s face burned red with frustration as he nodded.
“But before you go, hear me out. We’ve known each other for years. Don’t think
I don’t understand what you’re going through. Jack is...well...
Jack
. I’ll make good on my promise to
help you if it’s the last thing I do, but I’m certain you’re onto something
major, maybe the biggest case of your career. You’ve got to promise me you’ll
hang in there a little longer.”

She pursed her lips. He wouldn’t allow her to quit and she
didn’t understand why. She had a job to do, one he apparently needed her to
finish. “You know me. I won’t leave until my job is done. But, frankly, you’ll
never understand my predicament,” she said, standing to leave. “The core of
your humanity will never endure this kind of challenge. We, as minority FBI
agents spend every damn day defending rights that we are
still fighting
to fully enjoy right here at the F-B-One. Don’t you see?
When all goes according to plan today, we will get the answers we need. And
when this case is over, so is my career.”

He grunted as J.J. huffed and turned to leave.

“They won’t let you resign, J.J.,” he said.

His words stopped her cold. She turned back toward him. His
face had turned pale. “Excuse me?
Let
me resign?”

“They need Viktor Plotnikov and he won’t work with anyone but
you.”

“I beg your pardon, but I don’t need the Bureau’s permission
to quit.”

“But you’ll need your reputation. The FBI’s reach is far and
wide in the investigative community. You know what they’ll do. And let’s face
facts, you don’t work well with rules. You’ve given them plenty of ammunition
to leverage,” he said, his face now unnaturally colored as if he’d decided to
hold his breath until she relented.