Unmanned (9780385351263) (8 page)

“Well, I thought you guys trained together because you were going to serve together. Am I wrong?”

Bickell shrugged and shifted his weight to his other foot.

“Look, if you really have nothing to say—”

“After you came all this way, you mean?” Bickell frowned. “I’m sure it wasn’t that hard to tell that I’m not exactly fond of Castle. Nobody likes the prick, if you really want to know, so I don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to him. But he’s not a fuckup. He’s one of the few people over there who knew his ass from a hole in the ground.”

“That’s a start, I guess.”

“It’s also an end.”

Bickell gestured toward the door. Just like that, without even a scrap of useful information. Cole’s desperation surged toward anger. He stood, face flushed, and stepped within inches of Bickell, who didn’t budge.

“So you’re good with all this, then? The fuckups and the mistakes? All those dead kids, that’s okay by you?”

Bickell came right back at him, and for a moment it felt like being back in basic, or his first year at the Academy, getting reamed out nose to nose by some screaming asshole on a parade ground.

“Did I
say
I’m good with it? Fuck, no! But I’m not risking my ass for some weak vessel who’s going to leak secrets all the way back to Vegas. And please tell me you didn’t fly commercial, with a ticket on plastic and two forms of ID. Please tell me you’re not that much of a fuckup.”

“None of your business.”

“It’s
completely
my business. I might be more pissed off than you are about the state of play, but I’ll be damned if I sweep any dirt toward some stupid bastard who might as well be posting this conversation on Facebook. So, to repeat, how did you get here? By what means?”

“Not by plane.”

Bickell backed off an inch.

“Using any plastic?”

Cole shook his head.

“Cash only, and a fake ID.”

“Cover name?”

“None of your business.”

“Good answer. Next time don’t volunteer all that other shit, even if somebody asks.” Cole reddened in embarrassment. “And you can consider this a favor, Captain Cole, like a free security evaluation. But maybe I underestimated you. Or maybe I just wanted to. Always hated all you cocky bastards on the flight line.” This finally coaxed a smile out of Cole. “Before you say another word I want to show you something. Then we’re going to start over, beginning with your knock at the door.”

Cole followed him to a hall closet, which Bickell opened onto a recorder, red light on, needles jumping with every sound. Cole blanched, then looked around, as if expecting a team of operatives to
emerge from behind the furniture. When nothing happened he drew a deep breath.

“You tape all your guests?”

“Only when some Agency geek drops by to set up the equipment. This is their stuff. They were here yesterday.” He let that sink in.

“You were expecting me?”

“Everybody was, apparently, to hear my people tell it. Tell me something …” The needles kept jumping. Bickell paused, annoyed, then punched the Off switch. “If you were to find out what actually went wrong, and why—which I don’t know myself, by the way—what would you do with that kind of information? Who’s your client?”

“Client?”

“Who’s paying the freight?”

“Nobody.” He didn’t dare mention the journalists.

“For the sake of argument, let’s say I believe that. Where do you go next, then? Where do you take this kind of material?”

“I guess that depends on who I thought would be in the best position to make sure these things don’t keep happening. At least not with our birds.”

Bickell shook his head.

“Don’t duck the question. This isn’t Amnesty International and you’re not working for some war crimes tribunal. Where do you see yourself going with this? To a desk jockey in the Pentagon? To goddamn CNN, even? Or maybe back up the chain of command, to whoever the hell didn’t officially send you here and didn’t officially give you any marching orders? I know about your court-martial. Was this part of your plea agreement, maybe? Some sort of undercover arrangement?”

It was an odd but appealing theory, which made Cole wonder what other forces might be in play. It also offered an easy way out.

“Something like that.”

“And this superior of yours, who’s he reporting to?”

“I don’t know.”

Bickell smiled.

“Well, if my people knew you might be coming, that tells me your sugar daddy is compromised, no matter how high up the chain of command.
So act accordingly. And wherever you go next, it better not be Creech. Once you’ve started something like this there’s no reset button, no reboot. It’s shop till you drop, understand?”

“Then where should I go next?”

“I’ve got a few ideas. But first, a little housekeeping.”

BICKELL ERASED THE RECORDING
and told Cole what to do next. Cole left the house through the front door and waited on the porch until Bickell called out from inside. “Okay. Silent five count, then let ’er rip.”

Cole counted slowly to five, then knocked. Twice, like before.

“Keep your shirt on,” Bickell said again. “I’m coming.”

This time Cole refused the invitation to step inside. He tried to sound natural as he repeated the lines Bickell had fed him.

“No offense, but I’d be more comfortable doing this outside. We can walk while we talk.”

Bickell hemmed and hawed, playing the spider to the fly. But Cole didn’t give in, so Bickell finally came out onto the porch. Having concluded their performance for the recorder, they headed toward the lakeshore, where even on a chilly winter day distant motorboats were plowing the main channel, throwing plumes like snowmobiles. Once they were a safe distance from the house, Bickell got down to business.

“Let me ask you something. What makes you so sure this is all about the Agency?”

“It was Castle’s op.”

“He might have ordered up the bird, but there are plenty of people with wish lists in that part of the world. Privateers and fly-by-nighters. Sheep-dipped Special Forces platoons, green badgers with their own outfits, you name it. Down on the ground it’s a regular fucking carnival.”

“Whoa, whoa. Sheep-dipped?”

“Active military, but with a special security clearance so they can work directly for the Agency, or maybe for some green badger with his head up his ass.”

“And a green badger is …?”

“Cleared by the Agency, but not an Agency employee. A green badge gets you into the building at Langley. A blue badge means you work there.”

“Are you talking about contractors? Like Blackwater, or IntelPro?” Cole watched for a reaction, but Bickell was poker-faced.

“This is even murkier and more incestuous. Maybe it’s an ex-employee doing a contract job. And maybe he’s working with a contractor, or maybe he isn’t. Either way, green badgers can do shit that blue badgers can’t. If they’re caught on the wrong side of the border, well, hell, they’re not government employees, are they?”

“Plausible deniability.”

“They can also operate domestically. Right here at home. Places that are no-go for the Agency are always open season for them. Same with the contractors—the Blackwaters and IntelPros—except they operate out in the next orbit where things are even loopier. Not just different rules of engagement,
no
rules of engagement. The Wild West, Fort Apache, take your pick. The new frontier of covert warfare.”

“With the drones?”

“With everything. Firefights by proxy. Security checks on the home front. In some ops, half the guts get farmed out to some hireling, or to a bunch of converted nut jobs with M-16s. It’s a damn good business to be in, that’s for sure. When the Agency got rid of me, who do you think my first visitor was, one day after I got here?”

Cole shook his head.

“An international security consultant with two slots to fill. Offering triple what the Agency pays and twice the freedom. Before I even had time to say no, two more called. It’s great for the job market—No Spook Left Behind—but down on the ground?” He shook his head.

“A mess?”

“We had an op going last July, sheep-dipped unit near the border pulling an all-nighter on the prairie. They staked out the house of some former source who’d been tipping off our targets. Our Pred is
at twelve thousand and I’m in the trailer, watching. Two hours before go time, eight bogeys show up in the opposite quadrant, moving in on the same party. Who are they? Fuck if we know, but before we can lift a finger they storm the house, clear every room, then leave our bad boy dead on his doorstep. Mission accomplished, but by who? Blue badgers? Green badgers? Contractors? We never did find out. They’re all out there, and every damn one of ’em has his own list of HVTs.”

“Who’s keeping tabs on them?”

“I asked that question a month before they sent me home. Took it all the way to the desk chief in Washington. Nobody would give me a straight answer. At first I thought they were stonewalling. Now I’m convinced they just didn’t know, which frankly kinda blows my mind. They’ve got a rough idea for numbers, maybe even names. But ops and targets? Spheres of influence? Or who’s shooting at who? Good luck with all that. So naturally you end up with competition—for sources, clients, results. And competition breeds mistakes.”

“Who’s making them?”

“Who isn’t?”

“And that’s what happened with my missile strike?”

“I’m not the one who can answer that. I just know it’s more complicated than Wade fucking Castle going rogue, or getting his coordinates wrong. He’s king of the hill for this kind of shit, the Agency’s tech guru on both sides of the water. No way it’s just a matter of him being duped by a single source.”

“Or maybe that’s what you’ve been told to say.”

“What I was
told
to say was absolutely nothing. I erased the goddamn tape to cover my own ass as much as yours.”

“It’s not like you’ve given me much.”

“I’m getting to that. The name of an op, for starters. Wade Castle’s baby from day one. Magic Dimes. As in dropping the dime. You watch cop shows, right?”

“Ratting somebody out, you mean? Like a drug dealer snitching to the feds?”

“Except these dimes do the snitching for you. That’s what gives them their mojo.”

“Are you talking about tracking beacons?”

“No bigger than a silver dollar, even though they’re called dimes. Slide one under somebody’s couch and he’ll get a rocket down his chimney faster than you can say Osama bin Laden.”

“That was how Castle marked his targets, by getting his sources to drop the dimes?”

“Some of them, anyway.”

“There was no beacon signal of any kind coming from the place we hit.”

“Not that you knew. When an Agency bird did the shooting, he let the Pred crews in on the signal telemetry. Whenever the Air Force was involved he kept it all to himself, to protect his sources. His only contact with the flight crews was by chat.”

“That’s how it was with me.”

Bickell nodded. “Castle likes to play things neat and simple, with minimal interference.”

“Then how’d things get so fucked up?”

“Partly because the beacon program grew faster than he wanted. Even before he could set up the first shot, somebody upstairs decided to make it a sort of pilot project, a trial run for interagency use. And not just for overseas use.”

“For using it here, you mean? Homing beacons for Predators?”

“Or for any other piece of hardware you might use to carry out remote surveillance on a suspect.”

“So, for the FBI, too, then.”

“Plus any of our so-called trusted partners in the private sector. Because if you’re not acting officially, then who needs a warrant?”

“Sounds sketchy.”

“If you want sketchy, read the PATRIOT Act. Enough loopholes to fly a whole squadron of Predators through. Castle was pissed when he saw where this was headed. And he only got more bent out of shape once he saw how wonderful everything was going with the Magic Dimes.”

“Like with my op.”

“Him and me both. I started asking myself what went wrong as soon as I saw the casualty report. Castle dropped off the radar shortly after that. I never did get his take on it. They sequestered him somewhere.
Days of debriefing. All I ever heard before they canned me was a name. Castle’s source, the guy he chose to place his beacons.”

“And?”

Bickell eyed him closely, as if still weighing whether to take the plunge.

“Mansur Amir Khan. A little shit Pashtun smuggler, everything from soup to nuts. Back and forth across the border with pack mules and bodyguards, maybe a dozen fighters on his payroll. Not a hell of a lot going on upstairs, but apparently he knew where a lot of the Indian chiefs liked to hide out. Maybe ’cause he was supplying them with something, I don’t know. Ammo, meds, gasoline. He was a conduit for everybody.”

“So he was the problem?”

“This is where it gets complicated.”
Great
, thought Cole, already overstuffed with information. He was the one who needed a recorder, not the Agency. “Not long after Castle starts dealing with him, Mansur becomes a very popular fellow in certain circles. By then of course he’s got a handful of Castle’s magic dimes jingling in his pocket. Somebody else got wind of it and wanted in on the action, and they had the money to outbid us.”

“The other side?”

“It’s not that simple. Could have been anyone from an al Qaeda groupie to some wild-ass green badger looking to make his name with a big hit. Or maybe just a local warlord looking to rub out a rival. Whoever it was, Castle’s dimes started rolling all over the floor, meaning he had to either track them down or shut down Mansur.”

“If he thought the targets were iffy, why keep calling in strikes?”

“Castle’s the only one who can answer that. But first you’d have to find him. And when you do, my old station chief would be much obliged if you’d let him in on the secret.”

“He’s
missing
? Even to the CIA?”

“Only for guys at my level. This kind of info gets compartmentalized beyond belief once a fuckup occurs. Especially when somebody’s name starts showing up on consultants’ enemies lists. Because you weren’t the only one who got burned by these mistakes.”