The Asset (10 page)

Kennedy could tell he would crush Camille's little birdlike heart if he didn't comply. And soaking Alia for a massive dinner tab was the least he could do after she'd put him through hell.

“All right. I'll go.
Merci
, Camille.”

She nearly burst with happiness.

“
Merci
, monsieur. Our car service will be waiting.
Bonne soirée!”

She hopped away, and Kennedy went back into the suite to shower, change, and, in a glass of Japanese whiskey, find some courage to face the outside world. The clothes Alia had given him were a huge improvement over his own—tailored dark gray wool trousers, slim-fit black dress shirt, finished off with a buttery black leather jacket and boots. He looked like a hit man and vowed to burn his wardrobe when he got back to LA.

Dinner was exceptional. The place the zealous concierge had chosen for him was diminutive, with ten tables, and no menu. The chef prepared the meal, poured the wine, and Kennedy dutifully ate and drank until he thought he was going to burst. After dinner, the chef passed out small, hand-rolled cigarillos, and most of the guests enjoyed a smoke and a digestif on the tiny brick patio with a view of the Paris Opera House.

His second reservation was at a nameless speakeasy built into ancient catacombs beneath a cathedral in the Marais neighborhood. The drinks were works of mixology art and the clientele a collage of magazine-­clipping beautiful people with brains and charm to match. When the bartender found out Kennedy was American, he introduced him to some other Americans and a few Brits gathered round the taps. They made all the Botox and bad dye job starfuckers in LA look like deranged zoo animals.

When his new friends invited him to join them on their bar crawl, he respectfully declined. He was keen to have time to himself to think more about the job and reckoned he shouldn't show up to meet Alia and her team with jet lag and a hangover. He took his drink to a quiet corner table and thought long and hard about her offer. He didn't know what they were going to ask of him, but he was fairly certain they wouldn't have put him through the three-ring terrorist-abduction circus if they didn't expect a pound of flesh.

The thing was, they were handing him exactly what he wanted on a silver platter. He would be able to pursue the would-be attackers in a meaningful way, with the CIA juggernaut at the tip of the spear. One of his stipulations for taking the job was going to be that they pay him enough to walk away from his consulting business. He had a feeling, based on Alia's apparent financial trappings, that that would not be a problem. Still, he couldn't just gloss over the fact that he was dealing with the CIA, the same people responsible for the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, and Iran-Contra. It was not an organization heralded as having the best interests of American citizens in mind. And like Operation CHAOS—a domestic spying program
the CIA started in the 1950s, long before the NSA initiated it—this could easily have damaging effects on peoples' privacy and constitutional rights.

As intriguing as it was, he had to be honest with himself. Getting into bed with them was like curling up next to a pit of vipers, and he would need to take precautions to protect himself. On the other hand, the CIA's tactical approach and relative freedom to operate with impunity was one of the reasons they got things done. They tended to shoot first and let a congressional committee ask questions later.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He'd just received an e-mail from Noah Kruz's VIP W(inner)s Circle, an invitation-only service for frequent seminar attendees. Ironically, the title of Kruz's thought for the day was “The Decisive Animal.”

When people say they are making a “gut decision,” they are talking about instinct. Before our brains had the ability to intellectualize everything through the neocortex, we, like our animal brothers and sisters, relied on instinct to make choices. Thinking, which should be referred to as “indecisiveness,” forces us to agonize over our most basic, meaningless choices. Instinct kicks in when we are faced with life's biggest decisions because it is still our most reliable sense.

Kennedy had trusted his gut on many occasions, and it had always worked. It was when he had time to think about things, or overthink them, that he'd made the biggest mistakes in his life. There were a lot of reasons to say no to Red Carpet, but he only needed one to say yes.

PARIS

Day 5

T
he 6:30
A.M.
wake-up call
came like a slap. A team of well-scrubbed hotel workers brought breakfast and a fresh hit man ensemble. Kennedy checked his e-mail. Before going to bed, he'd pinged Wes Bowman and inquired about Alia. Kennedy had surreptitiously snapped a picture of her with his phone when she gave it back to him, and he had e-mailed it to Wes. Wes e-mailed him back and verified she was a CIA employee. Of course, he was extremely curious why Kennedy was even asking about her, especially after their dinner in London. He wondered if Kennedy was stepping into something he wouldn't be able to clean off his shoe. Kennedy lied and said he met her on a business trip to Paris—a random encounter at the hotel bar. It wasn't a bulletproof lie, but it seemed to satisfy Wes for the time being.

After breakfast, Kennedy went out to meet his driver. It was a brisk autumn morning and the sun drew an intense saturation of color from the heroic buildings and seething river of noisy cars. A blacked-out Mercedes sedan pulled up to the curb and the driver, wearing mirrored aviators, opened the door for Kennedy.

“Passport, monsieur,” he said as Kennedy slid into the backseat.

Kennedy showed him his passport and the man held the photo page under a small ultraviolet flashlight. He nodded and handed it back.

“Seat belt,” he said, fastening his own.

The driver barely heard the click of Kennedy's seat belt when he punched the accelerator. He drove as if the entire French gendarmerie were in pursuit—weaving in and out of traffic, taking unexpected turns, and barreling down narrow alleys with a few inches of space between blurred metal and brick on either side. Eventually, he joined the normal flow of traffic.

“Where we are going, we are not allowed to bring any new friends,” he said in a pedantic tone.

Kennedy nodded, but was doing everything in his power to keep his breakfast down.
Some fucking spy
, he thought to himself.
Carsick in a high-speed chase.

They stopped in front of St. Eustache church and Kennedy got out.

“Go in and light two candles and cross yourself each time,” the driver instructed. “And wait for the priest to show you the way.” He laughed and drove off, tires squealing.

Inside the cathedral, it was deadly quiet, save for the random padding of clergy going about their solemn business. As instructed, he approached the long iron votive rack and lit two candles, crossing himself over the flames. A priest approached and bowed to him slightly, saying nothing. He motioned for Kennedy to follow him, and they walked past the whispering prayers of the altar boys to the back of the cathedral. They went through the transept and down into the entrance of the sacristy. The long, ancient hallway was dark and smelled of musty candle wax. The priest stopped at a carved wooden door, bowed again, and walked away.

Kennedy opened the door and followed the dim light down spiral stone steps.

When he reached the bottom, there was a heavy metal door with a caged lightbulb over it, like the entrance to an underground missile silo. He knocked and waved at the camera lens staring at him from the corner of the ceiling. After endless unlatching on the other side, the door swung open with an air lock hiss. Juarez, the man he'd met at the golf course, was standing in the doorway.

“Good morning. Sleep well?” Juarez said congenially, shaking his hand.

“I guess after the last forty-eight hours I shouldn't be surprised to see you.”

“We're full of surprises,” he said, locking the door behind them.

“Golf course was a nice touch. People always in your business out there.”

“I know, right? Sorry about the frisk.”

“Let me guess, tracking device?” Kennedy asked, handing Juarez the copper bracelet he'd been wearing since they met at the club.

Juarez pocketed it.

“Also helped me monitor your vitals in transit. Not bad for a rookie. Must have ice water in your veins.”

Juarez led him into the operations center, a dimly lit hive of cubes and computers, with analysts working quietly.

“What do you do for Alia?” Kennedy asked.

“Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group. Otherwise known as a rat catcher. I run teams, like this one, when the company is addressing threats that may directly affect the US on domestic soil. I was actually the first to identify this particular threat, and they brought in Alia the wunderkind to plan the op, which is why you're here.”

Juarez opened two heavy steel doors and they entered a conference room lined with video monitors that reminded Kennedy of a Jason Bourne movie. Seated around the conference table was the Red Carpet team. To say the people Alia had gathered for Red Carpet were an eclectic group would be an understatement. As Kennedy casually surveyed them, he could not, for the life of him, see the majority of them doing spy work of any kind, which made him feel a little less like a fish out of water. Alia strolled in and smiled warmly at Kennedy.

“Everyone,” Alia said pleasantly, “this is Kennedy, our team leader. You and Juarez have already met, so let me introduce you to the rest of the team.”

First to step up was a boisterous midwesterner in his thirties with a heavy beard and the build of a former offensive guard or rugby prop.

“Lambert. Nice to meet you,” he said, crushing Kennedy's hand in his giant mitt.

“Lambert is a specialized skills officer,” Alia said. “Before we plucked him from his high-paying job in the private sector, he was an aerospace
engineer working as a global sourcing consultant for major aircraft and air traffic control equipment manufacturers. If our terrorist endeavors to exploit vulnerabilities in either of those areas, Lambert's job is to sniff him out.”

“Provided the terrorist is a
him
.”

All eyes turned to the corner of the room, where a young Asian woman wearing all black clothes, with closely cropped, precision-cut hair and razor-­sharp features, stared back at them, mildly defiant. She was pretty but did her best to avoid being thought of as such by cultivating a non-gender-specific art school ninja look. Her presence was intense, like standing near a live electrical wire waiting to zap you senseless if you got too close.

“This is Nuri,” Alia said. “She's our top computer network specialist.”

“I prefer the term
hacker
,” Nuri interjected. “
Computer network specialist
perpetuates the Asian nerd stereotype.”

Instead of shaking his hand, she blew Kennedy a kiss.

“Why don't you tell him a little about your role here,” Alia said politely.

“If you insist,” Nuri said confidently.

She pulled out her iPhone and tapped the screen a few times. All the computers in the room started playing ABBA's “Dancing Queen,” and a swirling disco ball appeared on their screens.

Alia folded her hands patiently and waited for her to finish. Juarez looked like he was going to go ballistic.

“Computers are stupid. Networks are even stupider,” Nuri began. “My job is to own them like my bitches. But you know who is stupidest of all?”

“People?” Kennedy guessed, following her lead.

Nuri's eyes lit up. Kennedy had just scored half a Skittle with her.

“Exactly. Which is why I wrote an algorithm that feeds off the biggest human behavior databases in the world and applies the commonalities to an anthropological predictor modeling program,
which
makes it really fucking easy to predict what people will do, because they all do the same shit over and over—”

“And you apply that to network administrators—like the one that set
up this network—to unzip security systems that operate like all the other fucking security systems in the world.”

“I like this guy,” Nuri said to Alia.

“My job is similar, but I hack humans instead of machines,” Kennedy added.

“I
really
like this guy,” Nuri said again, killing the music and disco balls.

“Good,” Alia said, turning toward a tall, slender man in his fifties who was looking back at her with a pained expression. “I think you'll all get to like Kennedy in short order and see why we made the right choice asking him to lead this team.”

The man stood and shook Kennedy's hand, bowing slightly, a gesture Kennedy could not differentiate between respect and contempt.

“Trudeau,” he said drily, “weapons specialist.”

“We poached Trudeau from DoD. In addition to being an adviser to three secretaries of defense, he was chief editor of
Jane's Defence Weekly
and
Jane's Intelligence Review
. He knows
everyone
in arms manufacturing. Like Lambert and Nuri, he's a specialized skills officer.”