Apocalypse Crucible (36 page)

The blow caught the CIA agent unexpectedly and spilled him from the wooden chair. He groaned and coughed, choking on blood from his busted lips and nose. Hardin stepped forward and kicked him in the stomach with his combat boot. When Winters tried to cover up in a fetal position, Hardin simply stepped behind him and kicked him in the kidney.

A cry of pain ripped from the CIA agent’s bleeding lips.

Remington grew conscious of the attention Hardin’s brutality was receiving from the two privates seated at the security camera network. Despite the horror that the city had been through after the latest attack, they still appeared somewhat uncomfortable with violence on a more personal level.

The captain looked at the privates and demanded, “Are you going to be spectators or security personnel? Or maybe you want to spend the next few days waiting on the Syrians to attack again while pulling KP?”

Threatened with the kitchen shifts, the privates turned their attention back to the security network.

The corporal against the back wall shifted slightly.

Remington pinned the man with his gaze. “You got a problem, mister?”

“Sir, no, sir.” The corporal tapped the front pocket of his BDU. “I was just thinking about lighting up.” He glanced down at the groaning CIA agent on the floor. “Looks like maybe I have time, sir.”

Remington studied the man, recognizing him after a moment. “Corporal Barnett, isn’t it?”

Barnett nodded but didn’t make eye contact, staring past Remington’s shoulder as every enlisted man was trained to do when dealing with officers in a potentially confrontational encounter. Eye contact was there only if a soldier was in a personal situation; otherwise an officer could read challenge into a too-level stare. “Yes, sir.”

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em, Corporal,” Remington said.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Remington watched as Barnett reached into his BDU pocket, extracted a crumpled cigarette pack, and shook out a cigarette. He lit up in cupped hands while Winters continued to breathe in short, painful gasps. Barnett didn’t seem to care about the discomfort the CIA agent was in.

The captain tried to remember if Goose had any solid connections with Barnett. Remington was certain Goose knew the man, but Goose had a way of knowing every man in the 75th.

Once he had the cigarette going, Barnett put the lighter away and resumed his position against the wall behind the prisoner. He glanced at the CIA man on the floor, but no emotion touched his eyes or his face.

“Corporal Hardin,” Remington said, “get that man back in that chair.”

“Yes, sir.” Roughly, Hardin squatted down, took a two-handed grip on the agent’s jacket, and yanked the man to his feet. Winters tried to take his weight on his own legs, but Hardin shoved him backward into the chair. Blood ran down his face and dripped onto his shirt. His eyes looked glazed, but there was a healthy dose of panic in them now.

“We’ll try this again.” Remington stepped back in front of the man, taking up his personal space again.

Winters looked up at him like a whipped puppy and tried to slide back in the chair.

“Tell me about Icarus,” Remington ordered.

“What do you want to know?” Winters asked.

Quick as a striking snake, Hardin backhanded the CIA man in the face. The blow was calculated and measured, hard enough to turn Winters’s face and cause enough pain to bring tears, but not hard enough to knock him from the chair.

Over the years, Remington had come to appreciate the different degrees of cruelty Dean Hardin could exhibit on command. Hardin’s whole world centered on himself, but he knew he couldn’t make it through life alone, so he allied himself with the strongest men around that he could tolerate or who’d give him freedom enough to take care of himself. Remington wouldn’t have been Dean Hardin for anything, and wouldn’t have risked being personal friends with the man, but the Ranger captain was plenty willing to utilize the other man’s capacity for violence.

“
Sir,
” Hardin said, speaking to Winters. “‘What do you want to know—
sir?’
The man’s an officer. Respect that.”

Straightening cautiously, raising his shoulder to block another such blow, Winters asked, “What do you want to know? Sir.”

“Outstanding.” Hardin grinned coldly and patted Winters on the cheek like a cherished pet that had learned a new trick.

Remington recognized the fear in the CIA man’s eyes and knew the emotion came out of self-preservation, one of the most powerful tools in an interrogator’s arsenal. Fear bent and broke men more than physical hardship ever did. Remington believed people were born into the world with fear, and everything they learned from the time they drew their first breath only strengthened that fear.

The world doesn’t care if you live or die,
Remington thought.
That’s lesson one, and welcome to our little refresher course.

“Have I got your attention now, Agent Winters?” Remington asked in a brusque voice.

“Yes.” Realizing his mistake almost at once, Winters threw a quick, fearful glance at Hardin. “Yes, sir.”

Standing at parade rest, rocking back and forth on his heels so he would be read as a constant threat on Winters’s personal radar—able to strike without warning at any given instant—Hardin smiled slightly and gave a brief nod.

“Good,” Remington responded. A kind word reinforced the reward system that usually balanced a punishment situation. The Ranger captain stood squared up, officious, exuding command. He was also a walking poster child for freedom and power to the CIA agent at the moment, a reminder of all that had been stripped from him. “Special Agent Cody is in pursuit of a covert agent here in this city?”

Winters hesitated. The brief indiscretion earned him a quick slap from Hardin. Winters cursed, and Hardin started to strike him again, causing the man to flinch.

“Wait,” Remington said.

Hardin halted.

Remington fixed Winters with his gaze. “The next time I won’t stop him, and he won’t stop with just slapping you. Understood?”

“Yes … yes, sir.”

Satisfied that the reward/punishment coda was properly installed, Remington repeated his question.

“Yes, sir,” Winters said. “Agent Cody is here to intercept a rogue agent.”

“A rogue CIA agent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“By whose authority?”

“Sir, I don’t know.”

“Or is he working to clean up his own mess?”

“I couldn’t tell you that, sir. We, my team and I, we take our orders from Agent Cody. We take those orders directly, sir. It minimizes the probability of our exposure, and we’re usually never in a situation that our government can own our actions or us. Sir.”

Remington paced in a measured cadence, his brain working quickly to assess the information he was getting. “You stated that Cody was here to intercept the rogue agent. Where is that agent bound?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Winters glanced fearfully at Hardin.

Remington hesitated just long enough that Hardin executed a vicious slap, knocking Winters from the chair again. Winters fell with a thud and groaned. Blood dripped from a new cut beside his eye.

“Wait,” Remington said. “I believe him.”

“Sorry, Captain,” Hardin said. “I thought he was shining you on.”

The corporal’s response was a carefully orchestrated one they’d used before. If Remington let a lull happen in the conversation after a negative answer, Hardin dealt out punishment.

“We’ll go with my feelings, Corporal.” The statement made it clear that Remington could serve as the CIA agent’s savior as well as punisher. “Of course, sir.” Hardin reached for Winters and hauled him to his feet and the chair again. “I’ll await your orders, Captain.”

“You said
intercept,
” Remington reminded.

“
Intercept
is the term Special Agent Cody is using.” Winters turned his head and wiped his bloody mouth on his shoulder.

“But you don’t know whom, or what, Icarus is on his way to.”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know what Icarus’s last mission was?”

Winters flexed his puffy lips as if trying to get used to their new size. “He infiltrated a group of terrorists. Sir. The PKK. They’re Kurdish terrorists.”

“I know that, Agent Winters.” Remington restored the man’s rank to inspire confidence. The address was subtle but rarely went unnoticed in tense situations where an interrogation subject examined the smallest word, the tiniest movement for hope that he or she would survive. “Icarus succeeded in penetrating one of the cells that were assigned to assassinate Chaim Rosenzweig.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Icarus helped foil that effort and was in turn discovered as an enemy agent.”

An uneasy look flickered across Winters’s face. “Agent Cody thinks that didn’t happen exactly that way. Sir.”

Remington stopped pacing and stared at Winters.

Shrugging, looking totally pathetic and helpless, Winters licked his bloody lips and said, “Agent Cody thinks Icarus was compromised.”

“By the terrorists?”

“By the Syrians, sir.”

Interest flared white-hot inside Remington. If such a thing had happened, it offered a possibility he might exploit. “Explain.”

“Icarus called in the hit on Rosenzweig late, sir,” Winters replied. “Almost too late. The assassins had the Israeli in their sights when covert ops took them down.” He hesitated, causing Hardin to shift toward him again, then ducked his head, burying his face in his shoulder in an effort to protect it. “Don’t hit me again! Please, don’t hit me again!”

Remington held up a hand to stop Hardin and kept it up long enough that Winters saw it when he peeked up to see why the corporal hadn’t hit him.

“If you don’t know,” Remington suggested, “tell me what you think.”

“I think that Icarus is a double agent,” Winters said in a rush. Blood flew from his lips as he spoke. “A week or two before the assassination attempt, while Icarus was still in deep and we had no plans of retrieving him, some of our operatives caught wind of an alliance between the terrorist groups in the Middle East. The PKK, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda. Some of Hussein’s bullyboys and warlords that got missed during the second Iraq war.”

“They’ve been networking for years,” Remington said. “That’s nothing new.”

“Networking,” Winters repeated. “Yes, sir, they have. But the word we were getting was that they’d lined up with Syria in a big way. Supposed to be an operation like no one had ever seen before. And something else was in the wind.”

“What?”

Cautiously, Winters shook his head. Hardin started forward, giving Remington plenty of time to raise his hand to stay the blow.

“What?” Remington asked. “What was in the wind?”

“Don’t know, sir,” Winters said, then rushed on. “My guess is that it was the Syrian attack. Maybe it was supposed to set off a wave of attacks throughout the Middle East. Maybe it still is.”

“Why would they risk that?”

“I can’t confirm this, sir.”

Remington nodded.

“The terrorist groups had heard that President Fitzhugh had made a deal with the Israeli government.”

“What kind of deal?”

“For the fertilizer, sir. The fertilizer that Rosenzweig created. Heard he was going to use it to turn the western states into a Garden of Eden. Increase the U.S.’s capability to produce food. That stuff would make a lot more farmland. The price was that once Fitzhugh got the formula for the fertilizer, he was supposed to use American troops to launch a full-scale attack against terrorist training grounds all over the Middle East. Against known leaders. That’s why Fitzhugh was posting U.S. Army units alongside so many United Nations Peacekeeping teams.

He wanted his army in place for the time when he gave the word. And when he did, there was going to be a bloodbath.”

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“Danielle, are you listening to me?”

Ignoring Cezar’s pleading voice and the desperate look in the young cameraman’s face, Danielle took out her satphone and started punching buttons.