Authors: Andrew Britton
The Operative (11 page)
He stared over his sight, waiting. Then he glimpsed the snub-nosed barrel of an assault weapon poking from behind the wall to his right, fingers in cutoff gloves wrapped around its forestock. A poor target, but his goal was not necessarily to score a hit with his first shots.
Taking a steadying breath and exhaling quickly, Kealey squeezed off a round. He missed the gunman, as expected, but the killer went for the bait. He leaned around to return fire and this time exposed himself enough for Kealey to get a clear shot. He pulled the trigger, and the pistol discharged with two sharp cracks, his arm jolting with recoil. The masked man fell back silently, clutching his throat, the MP5K dropping from his grasp.
Kealey quickly rolled onto his left side, saw the second gunman lean through the entrance from the right, his weapon spurting. Bullets splattered where Kealey had been just moments before, pecking into the low walls and fallen glass to the left of Allison. Kealey took aim over the nub of his sight and fired three rounds in rapid succession. His shirt puffing at his chest, the shooter jerked violently and then sagged forward onto the floor of the walkway.
Kealey didn’t waste an instant pushing to his feet. It bothered him for a moment that he might have just killed two Americans, possibly brothers in arms with the Company. For all he knew, the rent-a-cops had been part of an enemy plot and these guys were just cleaning up.
In which case they should have identified themselves, he told himself.
It was all that gray in a world that had once been black and white that had driven him to seek Allison’s counsel in the first place. Espionage was not a business for anyone who craved clarity.
“Stay down until I call you,” he said to Allison when the gunfire failed to draw reinforcements.
His pulse thudding in his ears, he ran across the walkway in a half crouch, stopping to check on the first man. He was completely motionless where he’d fallen, a fist-sized hole in his throat, blood pooling on the tile. Kealey whirled toward the second shooter, who was still alive and was struggling to get off his back by rolling onto his side. Seriously wounded, the front of his shirt soaked with blood, he had managed to hang on to his gun and was bringing it up into firing position.
Kealey took a lunging stride toward him, kicked the weapon from his grasp, and smashed his foot into the vicinity of his chest wound, at the same time driving him back against the side of the walkway. The gunman produced a low, froggy croak and went limp, sagging against the wall.
Moving swiftly to retrieve the shooter’s weapon, Kealey slung its strap over his arm, knelt over his motionless form, and pressed the muzzle of his Sig into the man’s temple. But he realized at once that additional force would not be necessary. The man was unconscious, a pinkish froth dripping from his wide-open mouth to his chin. If he’d coughed that up from his lungs—and Kealey had seen pulmonary bleeding often enough to recognize its signs—then it was a safe bet that he wouldn’t last much longer.
Kealey lowered the Sig, pulled aside the bandanna, and studied his face. It had no distinctive characteristics. A light-skinned, brown-haired Caucasian, he could have come from anywhere on the planet. A Bluetooth headset on his right ear did, however, catch Kealey’s attention. He removed the headset and, checking it for any obvious tracking signals, saw none and dropped it in his jacket pocket.
Searching him quickly, Kealey found a cheap prepaid cell phone in his trousers and pocketed it alongside the headset. Besides the weapon and a six-magazine ammunition pack over each shoulder, that was it, all he was carrying. The man had no wallet, no documents, no identification of any type.
Kealey slipped the 9mm packs over his shoulders and hurried back to the other shooter. He took the MP5K from his unresisting fingers, shucked the unfired round from its chamber, removed the partly spent magazine, and put it in a separate pocket from the headset and phone, tossing aside the gun. Then, curious, he pulled off the man’s mask, tugging a little to get the edge of the fabric out of the wound. It came free with a spray of blood that splattered Kealey’s shirt and jacket.
The dead man had black hair, olive skin, and a long, narrow face. His features might have been Middle Eastern, but they also could have been Spanish, Greek, Indian, southern Italian, or something else altogether. If the gunmen had the same ethnicity, or seemed to, it might be a clue to their origins and motives. As it was, Kealey could glean nothing from his appearance.
Tellingly, neither man carried hand or finger restraints of any kind. That proved his earlier assumption, when he saw the dead rent-a-cops: these guys were here to kill people, not take prisoners.
The Bluetooth receiver was identical to the other man’s. Kealey stashed the headset with the other one, then turned and gestured at Allison. Already on her feet, she ran and joined him in the entry to the walkway. Her face pale and distraught, she was holding her phone in her hand.
Kealey looked at her. ”What is it?”
“They have hostages,” she said. “He’s with them.”
“Does he know what they’re demanding?”
Allison stared at him, her lips working in mute silence, as if they could not quite fit around the words she wanted to speak.
Instead, she simply showed him the post.
We r on 3 flr. Many wounded in exhbt hall. Men w/guns killing ppl no reason, don’t know when I can post agn, they say will kill all of us i f—
CHAPTER 6
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“J
on, I’m so sorry,” said President David Brenneman as he strode into the small breakout room off the Situation Room—officially, the Executive Conference Room—and shut the door. “I’m not sure if it’s any comfort to you at all, but I have some idea what you’re going through.”
on, I’m so sorry,” said President David Brenneman as he strode into the small breakout room off the Situation Room—officially, the Executive Conference Room—and shut the door. “I’m not sure if it’s any comfort to you at all, but I have some idea what you’re going through.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
“And we don’t know anything yet,” Brenneman added. “We’ve been there before.”
Sadly, that was true. And anguished as he felt, Harper knew that the president was sincere. But it was still ironic hearing the president of the United States speak those words under these circumstances.
The ECR was part of the five-thousand-square-foot White House Situation Room complex occupying half the basement level of the West Wing. Set up by President John F. Kennedy following his dismal strategic attempt to overthrow Castro’s Cuban government, the complex continued to function as a command center for the president and his council of advisors, and as of the 2007 revamp, it was operated by the National Security Council, whose nearly two dozen military and intelligence watch teams perpetually supervised and identified domestic and global emergencies. Each team varyingly consisted of several duty officers, an intel analyst, and a communication assistant, who compiled and submitted the Morning Book—which included the National Intelligence Daily, the State Department’s Morning Summary, and any intelligence or diplomatic reports—to the active national security advisor. The NSA also received the hand-delivered President’s Daily Brief from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and personally updated the president at the beginning of each day and at the end with a Sit Room Note, summarizing reports, graphs, maps, and photos from other agencies and how they were publicly received.
Harper and the president had been waiting for the meeting’s teleconference attendees to be brought online when Brenneman asked Harper to step inside, hitting a switch to opaque the window into the ECR so they could speak in absolute privacy. Now the men stood facing each other, bonded by grief. Two years earlier the second-term president had lost his niece, Lily Durant, to an insurgent group in Darfur. They had ruthlessly wiped out an entire refugee camp, but Lily, who had been doing volunteer relief work with UNICEF, had been their real target. Caught in a surprise raid on the camp, she was raped and murdered in their effort to mislead Brenneman into believing the Sudanese government was culpable.
The twist was that Harper had been among the core advisors to have met with Brenneman at Camp David not long after the early evidence came in, as had his own boss, the director of the CIA, Robert Andrews. Andrews, along with a fellow intelligence advisor and two top members of the cabinet, was even now waiting at a conference table in the ECR, on the other side of the electronically fogged glass panel. Back then, Andrews and Harper had both smelled something amiss in the raw data coming from Africa and had advised Brenneman to be patient. No one wanted to launch a misplaced retaliatory strike. Waiting appealed not only to the commander in chief ’s moderate inclinations but also to his grasp on common sense, which was uncommon in Washington. Their instincts had proven correct, though they could not have known then that the architect of the Darfur incident was one of the president’s handpicked confidants: the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Joel Stralen. He had been determined to set the nation on a course of war with Sudan, killing great numbers of people in the hope of disrupting a nexus of anti-American sentiment, a hatchery for the next generation of terrorists.
Success in that crisis had depended on Harper and Andrews probing beyond the obvious and being willing to gamble on a wild card named Ryan Kealey doing the job. Of course, that had been an overseas situation, a third-world battleground. It was not a major American city, with emotional resonance to the last attack on major American cities.
Now he stood looking at a changed Brenneman in the gloved silence of the room. A month shy of his fifty-eighth birthday, the president had thick gray hair, which had been almost completely brown before his niece’s death had leeched it of color, even as his once youthful face had become permanently lined and careworn, almost seeming to age a full decade overnight. Even the lyrical tone of his once sanguine voice, the narrative tool that had propelled him through college debates at Georgetown, long campaign trails to Congress, and had ultimately carried him through the crowds and into the White House, was stained by years of distress. Harper couldn’t help but notice the toll his friend had paid to pass through these gates, the hell that came with it. Nor would he wish to change places with the hard-lined leader. This time, he knew America had picked the right man for the job. And Harper was determined to give the guy the legroom with which to do it. Only one of them was faced with a personal loss, but both were processing the shock of another homeland assault.
“I appreciate your concern, sir,” Harper said, with deeper gratitude than the president might have realized. “It’s funny. I was talking to her when it happened, telling her I felt bad about missing her big dinner. She was telling me I shouldn’t.” He looked down. “What were we here to talk about, Mr. President? God, it seems so long ago.”
“It was the CIA,” the president said. “The Coyote. It was important.”
Harper nodded, his mouth tense, despising his show of weakness.
“Jon, listen to me,” Brenneman said, sensing Harper’s anger and jumping into the pause. “You have every reason to be excused from the meeting—”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“No, but it may be advisable,” Brenneman said. “There are plenty of good heads here to keep mine straight. I promise you’ll be fully briefed.”
“Sir, I prefer to stay involved. It’s really the best thing I can do in every respect. When the rescue workers have news ...” His voice trailed off.
“Of course,” the president replied.
What Harper told Brenneman was the truth. As he’d risen through the Company’s organizational hierarchy, his functions had become increasingly administrative. But intel gathering was his area of special expertise, and it was hardwired so that he could process critical events quickly, accurately, and intuitively through the rapid assembly and cataloguing of information. Personal or professional crises, they were alike in how he dealt with them. In this case the two were sadly inseparable.
“Who’s with us via video linkup?” he asked, wanting to shift the focus of their discussion from himself. The only way he could function was to actually start doing it. To turn his mind toward the tasks that lay right in front of him. “Sandy Mathis insisted he’d be glued to his desk at Quantico this weekend, so I’m assuming he was easy enough to find?”
Brenneman’s twisted expression indicated that Harper’s taut sarcasm had registered loud and clear.
“Sandy was coming online as we stepped in here. But I’ve left overall coordination of our remote participants up to SIOC,” he said.
That was a good call. The president was referring to the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center at the bureau’s Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. There the data pouring in from the nation’s one hundred independent Joint Terrorism Task Forces was merged into a single shared pool—a common watering hole that could be tapped by the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies. A spin-off, SIOC-I—from which particularly sensitive information was withheld—was for the country’s international allies to draw on. SIOC-I also had access to similarly redacted documents from thirty-two other nations.
Brenneman had kept his eyes on Harper’s face, reading the determination there.
“Okay,” he said finally. “We’d better rejoin everyone before they feel neglected.”
It was a joke, but just barely. People whose job it was to be paranoid found it difficult to keep that out of their own intra- and interdepartmental dealings.
The president went to the door and opened it, politely gesturing for Harper to precede him into the next room.
Its six large flat-panel wall displays situated around a rectangular conference table, the ECR had been designed to conform with other presidential chambers at sites inside and beyond the capital, including Camp David, Air Force One, and the top secret bunker installations in Mount Weather and elsewhere. The goal being to enhance the commander in chief ’s familiarity with and instant comfort in his surroundings at times of critical deliberation and national emergency.
The president’s closest advisors on matters of security and intelligence sat in six big black leather chairs around the table. Among them were two members of his cabinet, Secretary of Homeland Security Max Carlson and the newly ratified secretary of state, Jeff Dryfoos, the latter taking the place of the vice president, who was in Asia. Dryfoos was a newbie, having assumed the post after Brynn Fitzgerald’s recent resignation and formal announcement of her presidential bid. Her run had surprised no one less than Brenneman, who’d encouraged her to enter the heated race as his preferred successor.
Also, there in person as Harper entered were CIA director Andrews and the director of National Intelligence, Shirley Choate. If the full fifteen-member cabinet had convened, they and all other non-cabinet officials except the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have sat in a row of chairs along the wall. With only two executive departmental heads in attendance, there was ample room for everyone at the table.
Harper took his place next to Andrews, saying nothing, having gotten his preliminaries out of the way before the president pulled him aside. That consisted primarily of learning that no one knew very much about the attack, and even less about the situation in the ballroom.
There were laptops in front of each seat. As Harper sat, Andrews turned his own monitor toward his colleague.
Harper recognized the familiar box in the center of the screen. It was from TA, the Company’s Tech Analysis division—findings from the Iridium 11 geosynchronous satellite that scanned the Baltimore to Philadelphia corridor:
NUMBER: 202-Private
USER: Harper, Julie
STATUS: Blocked
BASELINE: Operational
USER: Harper, Julie
STATUS: Blocked
BASELINE: Operational
Harper drew breath sharply. He had to struggle to keep from showing any emotion when he read the last line. It meant that while Julie’s phone could not be accessed, the number was still online.
Her phone had not been destroyed. That was the first positive sign he’d had since they were cut off.
“Thanks,” he whispered to Andrews.
The director nodded once and turned the monitor back.
Breathing steadily to calm himself, reminding himself that this was only the faintest positive sign, Harper turned his gaze to the wall monitor opposite him. He saw Mathis waiting quietly behind his desk 100 miles to the east. With his wire spectacles and horseshoe pattern baldness, he looked very much the part of the career administrator, which would accurately describe his résumé.
As the president took his seat, a voice came over the multidirectional PA in the center of the table. It was one of the watch officers in the next room.
“Mr. President, we have SIOC online. It will be up on screen four whenever you’re ready.”
“Thank you.” Brenneman settled into his chair. “Let’s roll.”
The presidential-seal wallpaper on the indicated video panel vanished and was replaced by the image of a short-haired man in his forties with heavy features and a thick, fleshy neck that looked as if it had been uncomfortably mashed into the starched collar of his button-down shirt. His hands folded on a desktop, his sleeves rolled to just below his elbows, he sat amid computer banks, monitors, and circulating facility personnel. Save for the missing crawl and the time stamp in the lower right corner, it could have been a feed from Fox News.
“President Brenneman, introducing assistant director of the FBI Joseph Ferrara,” said the watch officer.
Brenneman looked at the display. “Joe, let’s get right to it. What’s the latest?”
“Sir, in the last twenty minutes the Maryland state police have gotten an AW139 helicopter into the air over the center,” Ferrara said in his thick voice. “It’s streaming video, including thermal infrared imagery.” The SIOC chief glanced at a laptop. “The feed is being sent to you, File Code CC-A.”
That was the first feed from the convention center. The group all looked at their laptops. They clicked on the box in the center of the screen to access the image. It showed mostly smoke and chunks of concrete, moving from left to right, with batches of red and yellow shapes scattered throughout.
The shifting red shapes were people. The stationary yellow shapes were also people—those who were losing heat.
Dead bodies.
“Our field units from Baltimore have established a perimeter control and have agents outside the building—”
“What about the hostage situation?” Andrews asked. “Our I-eleven has intercepted tweets from several sources.”
“I was getting to that,” Ferrara said with a trace of annoyance. “We’ve seen those in the database, forwarded them to the agent in charge. She tells us that patterns of ongoing gunfire suggest people are being herded and executed.”
“Jesus,” Secretary Dryfoos said.
“They have six SWAT teams ready to go in, three from the FBI, two from the Baltimore PD, and one from the state police. They’re organizing now so they don’t shoot each other or innocents, with a T-minus of four minutes.”
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