Whirlwind (3 page)

His smile was broad, broader than she had ever seen it. “This,” he beamed, “this means we are not turtles much longer!”

Turtles. Irina pursed her lips. Russians and Americans alike used the term. It was no compliment.

Turtles waddle slowly with their heads turned to the sky. Thus the derisive nickname given the lowest of low-level field agents, the ones who roam empty highways bordering secret bases by night, their tedious mission to take fuzzy photographs of experimental aircraft so secret that they are flown only after sunset.

It was an apprentice’s job easy training for beginners, and safe in these days of detente, old enemies become wary allies in their pursuit of terrorists. Let the turtles forage for low-level intelligence; it’s cheaper than a weapons inspection treaty and requires no tendentious ratification by senate or parliament…

What, she asked herself, could Dominik have found that will elevate us from the lowly ranks of the turtles?

He had his hand on a matte-brown box almost two meters long, a meter wide, a half meter deep. His cheeks were glowing, and his eyes sparkled with triumph. He’d found something important, she knew he had.

Should she tell him about the disk? No. Later, I will tell him later. He is excited now, too full of himself for having accomplished an espionage coup of his own. “What is it?”

Anxious orders tumbled out of his mouth. “No time to talk! We’ve got to get this out of here! Come on, help me carry it. Grab that end. Be careful, it’s heavy.”

Very heavy. About thirty kilos. Irina grunted as she lifted her end.

“They’ll have their backup generator online soon. Let’s move!”

Harsh, blinding, actinic, the lights sparked on before they reached the fence. Dominik and Irina were standing targets illuminated by the fires of frozen suns.

Dominik died then. A .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a Humvee served as the machinery of his death. Its slugs shredded his body, flensed it to shining shards hurled helter-skelter across an empty landscape.

Irina lay prone, screaming surrender. Bullets tore the air above her head, aimed not at her, but elsewhere. She forced herself to look up. Directly in front of her, not five meters away, the deer hung on a fence alive again with killing electricity. From a distance, from the machine gunner’s position, the animal must have looked like a man trying to climb the wires. A river of bullets exploded into the poor dead creature’s carcass.

Although dead, it danced.

Machine-gun rounds snapped another fence link. And another. A strand

IS

of wire, alive with twenty thousand volts of death, whipped in front of Irina’s eyes. It coiled and crackled as it reached hungrily for her face. She had to run. She could not. The air above her shrieked with bullets. The wire wove back and forth, a cobra’s sway, the true and actual incarnation of mortality.

Paralysis: unable to move, unable to breathe, she could only watch. The wire darted toward her one last time, as if conscious and consciously straining to touch her. Then as though disappointed it recoiled, sliding into that freshly rain-washed gully beneath the fence, and into the water it contained.

Lightning split the sky. The backup generator exploded.

Irina manhandled thirty kilos of god-knows-what under the fence, over the ridge, down to the Jeep.

Bullets shattered her rear windshield. She turned the ignition, thrusting the accelerator down as hard as she could.

And she drove.

She stopped only once the darkened parking lot of a sun-bleached motel to abandon the Jeep, shift her overnight bag and a heavy brown box into the rear of a tourist’s Volvo station wagon, cross its ignition wires, and flee back into the night.

Irina drove.

Airborne in Marine Corps One, the president’s personal whirlybird, Sam settled his ample rear end in his boss’s even more ample seat. Very comfy. Under normal circumstances, he would be a contented man.

Not today.

Bad enough that the National Security Agency was dithering umma, umma, umma about the whereabouts of twenty million dollars. Worse, pretty soon now Sam would be discussing Whirlwind with the last man on earth who should know about it. But worst of all was a mess so colossally disastrous that only a conceited sonofabitch named McKenzie could clean it up.

Not merely the best man for the job, the evil old bastard was the only man for the job. Everyone else with his qualifications was off chasing turbaned terrorists through third world cess pits The only available agents were desk jockeys and raw recruits none of them qualified for a high-stakes operation like retrieving Whirlwind.

Which left Sam with a single pain-in-the-ass choice.

He was second-generation Agency, was Charlie, the son of one of Wild Bill Donovan’s handpicked buccaneers. During his long and piratical career, Charlie’s old man made only one mistake: trusting Henry Kissinger. Now, a quarter of a century after leaving Washington, that one time national security advisor traveled everywhere in the company of two muscle-boy bodyguards. Sam wondered if Henry the Kwas still afraid of Charlie. If he had any sense he would be.

Hi’s daddy’s boy, Sam thought, in every awful regard. Obnoxiously intelligent. Braver than lions. Righteous beyond the bounds of reason.

Righteous? Self-righteous is more like it. Charlie was the last of that galling generation who actually believed in something, the sort of loose cannon you never wanted to see in Washington a fucking patriot.

Shit!

Sam looked out the window. The capital dome was barely visible, haze-shrouded and disappearing in the distance. He was over the greenbelt now. Up ahead, Chesapeake Bay sparkled in the sun. Under other circumstances, he might have thought the view from five thousand feet to be pretty, maybe even beautiful. However he couldn’t enjoy it not knowing that his worst enemy was waiting for him, and, no question about it, licking his chops.

Pretty soon now, Sam would be feathering down at Charlie’s lair, and the very idea of it made him ball his fists. McKenzie had twenty-five acres, a great old rambling estate he’d inherited from his father. But that’s all he had. Fired without a pension, he could barely pay his property tax. If everything had turned out the way Sam hoped, Charlie would have been forced to sell the house and retire to Florida.

Or maybe Arizona. Arizona would be better. It was farther away.

Only now Charlie had what he’d never bothered to acquire during his career: a nest egg. Unless the NSA got lucky (smart was not an issue; smart wasn’t even in the running when Charlie was involved), that nest egg would support him for the rest of his miserable life.

And Charlie, the man who already knew too much, would be within driving distance of the Washington press corps for the rest of his days.

Sam pursed his lips like a man who had tasted something sour.

The deal shouldn’t have gone down like this. When Charlie got caught with his pants down, he should have been covered with a blanket, put in a box, and freighted far, far away.

Farther than Arizona, actually.

Trouble was, you couldn’t do that with Charlie. He had too many Friends In High Places, and, yes, the capital letters were appropriate. Reagan to pick the most egregious example simply loved him. “I like,” Dutch had mused, “having someone in this town who has the guts to disagree with me.” To which he’d quickly added, “Although one is enough.”

Powerful friends they stood by Charlie to the end. They weren’t able to keep him out of prison, but they did see to it that he got as sweet a deal as possible under the circumstances circumstances that were, let’s face it, pretty fucking dire.

It had gone like clockwork. Charlie should have gotten away scot-free.

Oh, sure, there was the usual journalistic whining. The New York Times was aghast, The Washington Post was horrified, and the foreign press vilified America as the Wild West complete with vigilante justice, lynch law, and all that bullshit. So what else is new?

What else turned out to be a digital camera, fresh out of the box, sitting next to one Nathaniel Whinston, the driver of a car who chanced to be in the right place at the right time. Mr. Whinston, an actuary with an entrepreneurial streak, put his snapshots up for auction. NBC submitted the high bid, but Whinston sold the photos to Fox News. Fox promised him he’d personally get forty-five seconds on-screen as part of the package.

What American could resist?

Whinston’s pictures were garbage, taken at night, and from too far away. Moreover, Charlie had been mostly backlit. No one could be certain it was him.

Which didn’t stop a talking-head media whore from pontificating, just outside the bounds of actionable libel, “The suspect appears to bear a slight resemblance to controversial Central Intelligence deputy operations director Charles McKenzie. Perhaps the police would be well advised to look for a man of Mr. McKenzie’s stature and build….”

The president freaked.

JS

And Charlie, in the time-honored tradition of Washington, was well and truly a lamb for the slaughter.

Almost.

Somewhere along the line it was discovered that he was under heavy medication for an impacted wisdom tooth, and the special prosecutor couldn’t get the dentist to budge from his story. Then too, according to Charlie’s credit card records, he’d been drinking heavily that night, even though no one at McCann’s Bar on Lexington Avenue had any recollection of seeing him. Add to this the right kind of lawyerly spin, and behold: a miracle! Charlie McKenzie is al chemically transformed from a run-amock CIA agent to a pitiable victim deranged by pain, confused by drugs, befuddled by alcohol, and inflamed with a righteous passion for justice.

The Senate investigating committee bought it. So did the judge upon whom, no doubt, Charlie’s heavyweight friends leaned heavily.

So when Charlie copped a plea, his honor wrist-slapped him with eighteen months at a minimum-security Club Fed.

Charlie thought he wouldn’t have to pull the time. Charlie thought he’d been promised presidential immunity. Charlie thought wrong.

He served out his entire sentence quietly, and didn’t say a single word, not even when his wife died. That’s when Sam started to squirm. Charlie’s silence was no other word for it ominous.

Now on his way to his first meeting with the man in two years, Sam ground his teeth. He’s known it, he thought, known all along that sometime, somewhere, something would go wrong not the kind of something that you solve with an ordinary black work guy, because those punks are a dime a dozen. Rather the kind of something that nobody but evil goddamned Charlie can handle because nobody but evil goddamned Charlie can burrow into an enemy’s mind the way he does.

The spooky sonofabitch. Mental telepathy is what it is. And mental telepathy is why he’s known that all he had to do was lie in the weeds and wait for the shit to hit the fan.

Goddamn the man!

Sam was mere months away from more power than he had ever dreamt of. The president planned the announcement for September. It was so close he could taste it. But he wouldn’t. Unless the Whirlwind fiasco was cleaned up pronto, he wouldn’t even get a sniff. Instead he’d be hurled into the outer darkness, a footnote to history and infrequent guest on Sunday morning talk shows.

If he was going to survive, he needed the best cleanup man there was. In other words, he needed Charlie. But the problem was the nosy bastard couldn’t be trusted to go fetch Whirlwind like a good dog. Charlie wouldn’t stop there. He wouldn’t stop until he knew the what and why of the thing. And once he knew that, Sam might as well kill himself.

Well, shit, he thought, this is an easy choice.

The trick was to stay cool, keep his dangerous temper under control, not let Charlie provoke him during what would be, beyond any question, a difficult bargaining session. Sam would win the negotiation. Winning negotiations was what he did, and no one did it better.

Then, later, after Charlie had handled Whirlwind, well… Sam would arrange for someone to handle Charlie. Handle him as he should have been in the first place.

He already had a candidate in mind, an independent contractor named Schmidt. Added bonus points: Schmidt and Charlie had some history, went back a long way, and what the hell, Schmidt probably would look at the job as a labor of love…

The rumble of the helicopter’s engines turned throatier as it began to descend. Sam peered out the window.

There was Charlie’s spread in all its emerald beauty, greener than Ireland in the spring.

And there was Charlie, too. Tall, craggy handsome with snow-white hair, he was striding out his back porch door and onto the lawn. As the chopper began to touch down, Sam lifted his hand in a wave of greeting.

Charlie turned, dropped his trousers, and bent at the waist.

Full moon.

Tuesday, July 21.

0900 Hours Eastern Time, 0800 Hours Central Time l_let me make sure I understand this,” Charlie growled. “A couple of munch king turtles sashay into a top secret lab because a generator explodes. Then, having filched something outrageously valuable, one of them manages to scamper away with the swag because, for an encore, the backup generator blows up.”

“In a nutshell, yes,” replied Sam, who sat uneasily in one of Charlie’s easy chairs.

“Said generators, and their crappy circuit breakers, doubtless having been purchased from your boss’s biggest campaign contributor.”

Sam’s cheeks reddened. “That’s a lie!” he snapped. “It was the Chairman of the Armed Services Commit… errr…”

Charlie leered.

By any measure, the conversation had not been cordial. Sam, impeccably attired by the finest haberdashers in London’s Jermyn Street, began by insisting that Charlie allow a pair of NSA technicians to sweep his house for bugs. Insult to injury, the two had even trampled through Mary’s beloved gardens waving their ever-so-sensitive detectors in every direction.

Six months earlier, Charlie had winced at the extra price a computer outlaw who called himself the Sledgehammer charged for shielding his underground Internet connection with the fine mesh net of a Faraday cage. Now he was happy he’d made the investment. The NSA nerds didn’t find a thing.