KBL (9 page)

“Please,” Ty said, “give me some of what you’re smoking.”

“That would be mistletoe.”

They laughed. Then the RSO grew serious. “Truth? The Pakis are the Grinch.”

Ty snorted. Wade was right about that. The Paks had been getting real aggressive of late. It was growing more and more difficult to break surveillance and get out into the boondocks, which is how Ty thought of the target-rich environment of North Waziristan, where he and the AWG personnel had spent the past eight weeks slipping tags onto targets that would be surveilled by UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) flying at fifty, sixty thousand feet.

Frankly, Ty was exhausted. Between the cover work and his real job, he’d been putting in eighteen-hour days. He was actually looking forward to the three-day Christmas weekend when the consulate would be shut down. “Guess I’d better call home.”

“Tell House o’ Spooks you want a replacement for Christmas.”

Ty punched the cipher lock on the SCIF door, opened it, eased inside, and then closed it firmly behind him.

Wade watched the CIA man open the SCIF door. He hadn’t been briefed on Ty’s mission, but as they used to say during the Cold War, the RSO had been around the bloc. He knew Ty was working one of Langley’s counterterrorist programs, and it hadn’t been lost on him that the three other civilian contractors looked very similar to some JSOC personnel he’d run across in Kabul, where they were known as Erasers.

Ty set his notepad down, then dialed the number Wade had left for him. It was a Langley number, but one with which he was unfamiliar. The phone was picked up after two rings. Ty said, “Two-one-four-one.”

The operator said, “Clearance?”

Ty recited the clearance code.

The operator said, “Go secure.”

Ty hit the button on the side of the instrument and waited until the LEDs went from green to red. “Secure.”

“I’ll connect you now.”

There was a pause. Ty heard the phone ring three times. Then an unfamiliar voice said, “Ty Weaver?”

“Yes.”

“This is Stuart Kapos. Good to talk to you.”

Stuart Kapos?
Whoa. Ty estimated that there were eight or nine levels of management between him and the director of the National Clandestine Service. “Sir?”

“Forget ‘sir.’ Call me Stu. Like the phone.”

Ty laughed. STUs was Armyspeak for secure telephone units, an older, more cumbersome predecessor of the instrument on which he was currently speaking. “Sir—uh, Stu.”

“Good to have you on the line. Two things, Ty. One: I apologize for extending you in Pakistan. But you have to understand that Whiskey Trio is mission critical. We’ve killed a large number of HVTs because of you and your colleagues. And we’ve put the fear of God into many others.”

“Thank you . . . Stu.”

“You’ve spoken with Patty—two days ago, I think—and you know that we’re looking out for her.”

“Yes, sir.” Ty’s mind was racing. What did the director of CIA’s National Clandestine Service want with him?

“So here’s the second item.”

“Sir?”

“I need you to go provocative.”

“Provocative?”

“You and your AWG team have done brilliant work, Ty. The Paks have no idea where you’ve been or what you’re doing. But now that has to change. I need you to get out of the embassy. Lose the official car. Leave a big wake. We want to see how they react. How closely they follow. If they try to impede you or provoke you, and if so, how.”

“You want me to blow my cover.”

“In essence, yes.”

In essence? It was a lot more than essence. Stu Kapos was asking Ty to paint a big red bull’s-eye on his back. “So you’re using me as bait, right?”

There was a pause on the line. “In a manner of speaking.”

In a manner of speaking?
WTF. Ty rolled his eyes. Bosses never, ever fricking changed. “Why? For what?”

“Let’s put it this way. We’re very interested in learning how closely ISI monitors us. And how they do it. More than that I can’t say right now.” There was a pause. “Does that still work for you?”

“How critical is this?”

“Absolutely mission critical.”

Ty thought about what Kapos was saying. “I’ve got an official passport. They can’t arrest me.”

He waited for Kapos to agree.

Kapos didn’t agree.

This was not good juju.

“I mean, the best they could do is PNG me, right?”

More silence. Then: “It would suit the mission better if you carried your blue passport instead of the official one.”

Jeezus H. Why not just ask him to wear a suicide vest? “You’re not serious.”

“You have your blue passport with you.”

“Sure. But I don’t have a Pak visa in it.”

“Not to worry. We’ll cover you.”

“Cover me?” Ty paused. “If you don’t mind my asking, Stu, what exactly does ‘cover me’ mean?”

“It means that we will do everything we can to protect you.”

“And what if they bounce me around a bit?” The Paks were not known for being touchy-feely.

“They could do that,” Kapos said.

Ty considered the possibilities. “Let me ask you a direct question. What if they come after me?”

“You mean if they try to use force?”

“Affirmative.”

There was no hesitation in the NCS director’s answer. “You’re trained. You should protect yourself.”

“Including deadly force?” In these politically correct days, when the Justice Department was going after CIA officers and prosecuting contractors, he wanted absolutely specific instructions. No winks and nods.

Obviously Stu Kapos understood the situation as well. “You will do whatever is appropriate to the situation. I’m not giving you permission to be a cowboy. So you do what you have to do—and let me be specific here, that includes lethal force—and we will back you up every way we can.”

“Understood.” Ty had no idea why they were asking him to get aggressive, or to blow his cover. But Stu Kapos’s corridor reputation was better than good. Unlike so many of the backstabbing managers at the Agency, he was, as far as Ty had heard, pretty much a straight shooter.

Moreover, while Ty may have had qualms, he was also mission-driven. Which was why, instead of quibbling, he asked the Soldier’s question: “When do you want me to start?”

“ASAP. Use the AWG people as your extraction team. Set up a protocol, so if there’s an incident they’ll come get you and bring you back to the consulate—sovereign U.S. territory. It’s all been worked out with their people.”

“And the folks from State?”

“We’re leaving them in the dark.”

“Even the RSO? I mean, ostensibly I’m working for him.” Ty very much wanted Wade to have some idea of what was going on. He might need the RSO’s protection and contacts if things went to hell.

“You can tell him you’re planning to get in the Pakis’ faces. Nothing more. Nothing about learning how they work.”

Ty sighed into the mouthpiece. “Okay. Will do.”

“Look, Ty.” Ty could hear Kapos breathing. “I know how tough this is on you and your family. But you’re doing God’s work, here. Believe me.”

The former Delta operator cracked a grim smile. “Frankly, Stu, I better be. It’s my ass you’re hanging out in the cold.”

6

The White House, Washington, D.C.
January 4, 2011, 1645 Hours Local Time

Under normal circumstances, the president’s daily intelligence brief was delivered by either his national security advisor or the special assistant to the president for counterterrorism at 6:30
AM
in the residence or 7:30 in the Oval Office. The fourth of January, however, was a travel day, and so the briefing took place at 9
AM
on Air Force One during the flight to Andrews Air Force Base as the First Family traveled back to Washington from their Christmas and New Year’s vacation in Chicago. The one event listed on the president’s schedule January 4 other than travel was a 4:30
PM
meeting in the Oval Office with the secretary of defense, a meeting that was closed to the press. The only thing out of the ordinary about the meeting was that no photographs were released. But no one in the White House press corps, or anywhere else, for that matter, noticed it.

One of the reasons for no photographs was that it wasn’t just the secretary of defense who was waiting in the Oval Office when the president arrived, accompanied by his special assistant for counterterrorism. Waiting alongside SECDEF Richard Hansen was D/CIA Vince Mercaldi. And Mercaldi, at the last minute, had asked that Vice Admiral Wesley Bolin also join them.

Bolin wore civilian clothes so as not to attract attention. He needn’t have bothered; there wasn’t a reporter assigned to the White House who could identify the elusive JSOC commander, who for years had successfully kept himself under the press’s radar.

Mercaldi and Bolin were unhappy when they saw the counterterrorism advisor shamble into the room in the president’s wake. Dwayne Daley had gotten the job after retiring from CIA in order to campaign for the president, serving as the campaign’s director of intelligence policy. In return, he’d been promised the Agency’s directorship. But due diligence showed Daley’s record to be spotty at best. As CIA station chief in Yemen, he had been blind to the ever-crescendoing support for Usama Bin Laden. His reporting on what happened in Sana’a was superficial and simplistic, ignoring shifting tribal alliances and their significance. Although he spoke Arabic, he allowed the Yemenis to control his access to anything but the most inconsequential intelligence. When the USS
Cole
attack occurred on his watch, Langley discovered, much to its embarrassment, that he had been deaf, dumb, and blind to the depth of the al-Qaeda threat within the country. Later, as CIA’s assistant director for intelligence, he had made a series of misstatements that had caused embarrassment both at the White House and in the intelligence community.

Bottom line: after several media outlets produced exposés on his missteps, the White House was told by several high-ranking Democrats that Daley was unconfirmable for any position that required Senate approval.

And so Dwayne Daley was offered the counterterrorism advisor job in the current administration, with the rank of deputy national security advisor and assistant to the president. Not because he was good, or bright, or even competent. But because of simple chemistry. For some inexplicable reason, the president was comfortable with Dwayne Daley. From the campaign on, he’d golfed with him, played one-on-one basketball with him. Worse, Daley managed to shut out the director of national intelligence and the CIA director after he somehow convinced the president that he, not they, should conduct POTUS’s daily intelligence briefs.

It was a chronic Washington conundrum. In many White Houses, this one included, competency all too often took a backseat to affability and chemistry. Otherwise, how else could disasters like Bush 43 staffers Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales and the current administration’s Dwayne Daley be explained?

The president shook hands all around, wished everyone a happy New Year, and then dropped into an armchair in the Oval Office’s seating area, his back to the desk where he normally conducted business. The others spread out on the two facing sofas.