Agent of Influence: A Thriller (25 page)

             
Allan stared him down, his frustration now at its zenith. “God damn it, Bret! I don’t care about how it plays in the press other than I don’t want it interfering with whatever is left of this pathetic excuse for an investigation! What about Malcolm? How come I haven’t heard from him on this yet?” He tried to call him earlier, but all he was told was that Director Ray was unavailable.

Allan needed to find out if there was news regarding the whereabouts of the woman. Bret seemed eager to give up, and the President was beginning to think that Malcolm might be correct. Bret seemed to be looking for the right moment to bail. Allan knew he was in a bind when he was relying on the head spook to give it to him straight. This was turning into the political equivalent of a sixteen-car pile up on the freeway, and the entire nation would soon be slowing down to gawk at him.

“I’ve been trying to reach him. Still no luck. But back to the possibility of a leak, sir. I can’t help but think there may be a bug planted somewhere. I don’t know if it’s here, in my office or at the CIA, but that is the only thing that makes sense to me. There are just too few people who know about this, and I would bet my life that they wouldn’t divulge anything.”

“Our offices are swept everyday for bugs. You know that better than I do. That is as implausible as a leaker,” Allan said with a disbelieving look.

              “I know, but I can’t think of anything else.” Bret was truly concerned about how the news got leaked to the press. He was glad to see it, but someone beat him to it, and he needed to find out who had the contacts to unearth such sensitive information.

Allan stood up and motioned for Bret to leave. Bret swept his belongings into his briefcase and was ushered out the side door by the President. After seeing him out Allan stretched his tall frame and pushed his hands against his lower back to stretch. He was very much looking forward to exercising more when he left office. When he was elected he was a sixty-six year old with the physical conditioning of a man twenty years younger. Now he felt like a seventy-year old with the aches and pains of someone in a nursing home.

The stoic face of a Secret Service agent appeared in the same doorway a second later, his chiseled features displaying no emotion. Allan Gray looked at his favorite agent and laughed. “I hope you’re having a better week than I am, Jamal.” Jamal acknowledged his boss with a nod and a smile.             

“Call my
wife for me and tell her I’ll meet her in an hour. I want her to look over this speech I have to give. She is better at this fluff stuff than I am.”

“Yes sir. Don’t
forget about your videoconference with General Thomas as well sir. That is in twenty minutes.”

“Yes, yes. Give my wife a call first though. Then we will head down to the control center. I need to do a few things here first. I
will need a few moments to myself.” He motioned for Jamal to close the door. The Secret Service agent pulled the curved door shut, leaving the President alone with his thoughts.

Slumping in his high backed wooden chair his mind turned back to Bret’s warnings. A bug would make more theoretical sense than someone leaking information, but he just did not see how it was possible.  The security team took too many precautions for someone to pull off a stunt like that. Plus, the person would have to have the highest clearance to get access to any of the areas where they even discussed the operation. That left only a handful of potential culprits. In addition to the di
fficulty in placing a device, the bug would also have to be removed, or the team of sweepers who constantly inspected every room would catch it.

An awful thought crossed his mind for the first time, and he looked at the closed door and hypothesized that perhaps Jamal, or another Secret Service agent planted the bug. What about the team that swept the offices? Perhaps one of them was the culprit. The list of possibilities suddenly appeared much greater, and the threat less benign the more he contemplated it. He thought about Jamal once again. Was it possible? A man in the Secret Service for over ten years with an impeccable career and unblemished record? Jamal worked hard all his life, rising through the military ranks, Special Forces, and eventually to the Secret Service. He had done more for the United States than every self-centered politician in the city of D.C., and Allan knew it. He felt ashamed at the thought and tried desperately to distance himself from it.

Their chance for a successful operation was rapidly closing though, and he vowed to keep an open mind to all possibilities. No one could be fully trusted at this point. He made a mental note to call Bret and have him pull the files of all the Cabinet members and Secret Service agents who were assigned to the White House detail. The backgrounds of the president’s closest confidantes and guardians were checked every year for any personal problems that could lead to them being blackmailed by a foreign enemy. One more search of the files appeared to be a good idea right now. Pulling on his charcoal gray suit coat he walked out of the Oval Office, making his way towards the living quarters of the White House. Jamal fell in silently behind him, followed closely by the Military Attaché carrying the latest nuclear weapons codes.

Allan gestured to his Chief of Staff who was sitting in his office, the phone stuck to his ear and a look of extreme irritation on his face. The voice on the other end of the phone was yelling so loud that the President could hear it in the hallway. He could not tell who it was, but the tone was clearly aggressive. The Chief of Staff motioned to his watch, informing the President that he was running behind.

“I have one thing to take care of upstairs, Barry, and I’ll be right back,” Allan said, and then took off without waiting for a reply.  The White House no longer felt like the secure environment it should have been, and for the first time he felt entrapped by it instead of empowered. All the people closest to him could be his biggest problem, and not the great asset he thought they were. He wondered if this
was how Nixon’s paranoid mind first started operating. 

Chapter 30

Alex sat in the living room of the cabin, reading the printout of the article Anna pulled off the Internet for the second time. She had received a phone call earlier that clearly upset her, and then appeared from her room a few moments afterwards, handing him the article and requesting he read it carefully. He was now officially on the payroll, and he poured over every word looking for some sort of clue. The headline along with Anna’s reaction left no doubt that things were heating up sooner than anticipated.

             
Gray illegally investigates President-Elect Hardin
, blared the headline of the Post. Alex continued reading.
For the last three months President Allan Gray has been using the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the personal affairs of the incoming President. All potential presidential candidates are vetted by special agents of the FBI, but a source close to the President has stated that President Gray, who lost his re-election bid on November 2
nd
, has been conducting an illegal investigation since being defeated at the polls. The source stated that, in addition to an illegal probe into President-Elect Hardin’s past in his home state of Nevada, President Gray also sent a special agent of the FBI to Egypt to look into the history of Mr. Hardin’s family. The source also confirmed that the agent caused a minor diplomatic crisis with their badgering of Egyptian government officials. This led to the U.S. embassy in Cairo receiving a formal complaint from the Egyptian government. The special agent was then forced to leave the country.

             
President-Elect Hardin’s adoptive father and guardian Aman Kazim raised him since Mr. Hardin arrived in the U.S. in 1974.  According to the source, Mr. Hardin has no surviving family members. It appears President Gray attempted to prove the incoming President’s family has ties to terrorist organizations operating out of Cairo.  President Gray’s office has refused to comment on the allegations.
”

Alex finished the article and looked out the large picture window of the living room. The gravel driveway leading to the cabin was surrounded by a dense forest of pines, oaks, and other foliage that allowed only the bare minimum of light to hit the front of the cabin. The shadows of the huge trees created the appearance of late evening instead of mid-morning. It was the exact opposite of the view from the deck, where sunlight streamed in, magnified by the reflection off the river. For the first time he noticed the thickness of the window. It was certainly bullet proof, and served as a reminder that the cabin probably held many hidden secrets.
             

“The window can take just about anything except a direct hit from an RGP. No small arms fire can take it down though.” Anna strode into his line of vision, dressed in dark jeans and a black mock turtleneck.

“This article can’t be good news for us,” Alex replied as he nervously rapped the paper against the small end table. Judging by the hundreds of cuts and scrapes in the table he figured it must be as old as the original cabin.

              “Good assumption.”

             
“Is there any truth to it?” Alex asked.

“Yes, but of course everything has been turned on its head. Being in D.C. is like
Alice in Wonderland. Everything is backwards. It does give me a good launching point for where we need to begin though.”

             
Alex leaned forward in his chair, anticipating the curtains about to be lifted. “Yeah?”

“The agent in the article? The one who got kicked out of
Egypt?” Anna asked the rhetorical question. She waited for a sarcastic reply from Alex, and when it did not come she continued. He appeared to be slowly learning. “That was me. As I told you before, the FBI was investigating Zach as part of the routine background checks done on all presidential candidates. Since he didn’t come to the U.S. until he was fifteen, and due to my knowledge of Cairo, the job fell to me to do a little checking up on his background there.”

Alex listened in rapt silence. Anna Starks stood with her back towards him. She stared out the large window, her eyes soaking in the dense forest surrounding the cabin, as her mind returned to that time period a few months earlier when she had spent several weeks in
Cairo hunting for a past that did not seem to exist.

***

              She arrived back in Cairo in early October, just a few weeks after receiving her instructions from Malcolm. It was just a month before candidate Hardin became President-Elect Hardin. A heat wave was stifling the smog-filled Cairo air when her flight touched down in the ancient city.  The long drive from the airport on the northeast end to downtown Cairo, where the American Embassy and Egyptian government buildings were located, proved worse than normal. Anna had spent a large chunk of her childhood in Egypt so she was accustomed to the traffic. Her father was an American diplomat and her mother an Egyptian from a wealthy family. Her mother was disowned when she told her family she intended to marry the American.

When Anna Starks was first told this story as a young child it laid the groundwork for her distaste for the strict interpretation of Islam that her grandparents adopted, and that was growing in popularity throughout the 1980s and 1990s. She could not understand why her grandparents wanted nothing to do with her family. Her mother loved her father, and that should have been all that mattered as far as she was concerned.

She sat silently behind the wheel of her tiny car. She had already turned down a more reliable vehicle numerous times. The small car was the way to blend in. Whether it was donkeys in the early 1900s, or the present-day mass of compact cars, the city always overflowed with different modes of transportation. The one sure way to stand out was to be a woman driving an expensive car. She checked her battered mirrors and saw nothing of concern. She was not being followed. She maneuvered the French-made vehicle cautiously. There was only one rule on the highways into the city, and that was that anything goes. One did not avoid accidents in Cairo by obeying stoplights, merging correctly, or coming to a complete stop, but by closely watching for the winks and nods from other drivers. It resembled driving by feel instead of sight, and Anna was extremely careful whenever she got behind the wheel. A dusty baseball cap disguised her feminine face. There were few women drivers on the road, and she knew the occupants of the compact European imports darting by her were still uneasy with a woman right beside them in the traffic jam.

At over one hundred and seventy-five square miles
Cairo is approximately half the size of New York City. However, it contains double the number of residents compared to the Big Apple. Anna was sure every one of them was driving on the freeway today as she shifted gears and slammed on her brakes, bringing her dust covered Peugeot to a sudden stop on the Sari-Salim Freeway.  After fifty-five minutes of start and stop movement she finally managed to turn off the freeway and onto Abd Al-Aziz street. She began making her way towards downtown Cairo and her appointment at the U.S. Embassy. She had an early afternoon meeting scheduled with the American ambassador, a man whom her superiors had warned her about.

A career diplomat, the ambassador was a man who made a living kissing up to his superiors and never rocking the boat. This strategy was a sure fire way to have a long, successful career in
U.S. diplomatic circles, and he was content to live the easy life, using his government pension as play money. Anna knew he married into wealth, and that he requested a placement in Cairo for one reason. His wife wanted to spend four years exploring the culture, and the ambassador knew better than to upset the person holding the purse springs.