Back Blast (44 page)

J
ordan Mayes arrived at Langley at eight in the morning and then, after dropping off his coat and briefcase on the seventh floor, he attended a few meetings he had scheduled with staffers who were working through the weekend. Just after noon he took the elevator down to four to visit the Violator TOC. He was surprised to find Brewer out of the office. But he’d just poured himself a cup of coffee when she entered, briefcase and travel mug in hand.

She looked like she had just changed into fresh clothes. Mayes wasn’t a particularly kind man, although working his entire career next to a frosty personality like Denny Carmichael made him appear that way sometimes. But still, he found himself pleased to know Brewer had scheduled a break to rest and attend to herself.

“Hope you had a chance to recharge your batteries,” he said as he held up the pot to refill Brewer’s cup.

But she shook her head and took him to the side of the room. “Actually, sir, I’ve been up all night. Most of it here. I had a change of clothes in my office, but I haven’t been home in over forty-eight hours.”

Mayes was about to order her to leave the TOC for four hours to go home and catch some sleep in a real bed, but she took him by the arm and led him even farther away from the group. “Sir, I’m glad you are here. I need you to see something.”

For the next five minutes Brewer showed Mayes a collection of images from all the Violator sightings of the past week. Specifically, these images were of a group of Middle Eastern–looking men who showed up either during or just after several of the sightings.

“What made you look for these men in the first place?”

“Dakota, the JSOC operative. He and his team had noticed these unknown subjects at multiple locations.”

Mayes was as confused by this as Brewer, and he told her so, but he got the impression she did not believe him. When he asked her for her conclusions as to who these individuals were, she seemed to weigh each word carefully before it came out of her mouth.

“My conclusion is, either someone working here in the TOC, or someone in a leadership role who has access to real-time TOC analysis, is sending this proxy force out into the field to assist with the Violator operation.”

Mayes said, “That leaves someone in this room”—he looked around and counted twelve analysts and technicians, all of whom he had known for some time—“including yourself, myself . . . and Denny, of course.”

Suzanne Brewer agreed. “I recognize the fact I might not be read into everything going on, but I can’t help but think some of my concerns earlier in the week that I was missing part of the puzzle might make a little more sense now.”

“You thought Gentry did not shoot Babbitt or Ohlhauser, and you thought Gentry had been injured somewhere other than in Chevy Chase.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jordan Mayes was confused, and didn’t know what to make of all this, and this made him feel both impotent and angry. He took it out on his subordinate. “Well, Suzanne, what do you want me to say? These images are indeed troubling, but I don’t have the answers for you. I can assure you Denny and I aren’t running these personalities ourselves. If your operation here is tainted, you need to get a handle on it posthaste. We have enough problems without a group of unknowns shadowing our movements.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and Mayes saw in her face she wished she hadn’t brought it up at all.

He returned to his office and had just sat down when he received a call from one of the electronic intelligence technicians he’d assigned to the Catherine King operation the evening before.

“Mayes.”

“Sir, it’s Kevin Morvay calling from the fifth floor, Signals Intelligence. You asked us to notify you if we found anything of interest in the e-mail of Andrew Shoal at the
Post
?”

“I’m listening.”

“Uh . . . would it be possible for you to come up to my cubicle? I think you should see this in person, and I don’t really want to forward it.”

—

C
ourt did not leave Glen St. Mary immediately after seeing his father. Instead he drove into the woods behind his old high school, parked his Bronco, and slept for over three hours. He woke just after noon, feeling surprisingly good, and then he made his way back to I-10, which would take him west to I-95.

He’d only driven a few minutes when he saw the sign for the Econo Lodge just off the road in Macclenny. On a whim he pulled off the interstate, then rolled into the parking lot. He checked the tags on every car in the lot, looking for D.C., Virginia, or even Maryland plates. These would either be CIA or feds, down here hunting for him. His father had hinted that the area was crawling with people who didn’t belong, so Court expected to see cars belonging to the surveillance members.

But he saw nothing at all other than local vehicles, and a few from nearby Georgia.

It was the middle of the day, so he wondered if all the CIA vehicles were now deployed out on the streets. With a shrug he started to head back to the interstate, but then he noticed a Travelodge Suites, just across from the Econo Lodge. It looked dead over there—only a dozen or so vehicles were in sight—but he drove over anyway and began checking license plates on the cars parked at the small two-story property.

In the front of the building he saw no cars with tags that aroused suspicion; so he turned around the side of the building and headed into the back. Immediately he was surprised by the number of vehicles. While only a dozen cars had been parked out front, there were twice that number in back.

Court passed them by, careful to keep the bill of his ball cap low.

He thought there was a good chance he would find Virginia plates, making it likely they were CIA, but instead he found tags from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Four more vehicles, all large sixteen-passenger vans, were parked at the end of the row, and all four had North Carolina tags.

North Carolina? The first thing that came to mind was Fort Bragg,
home of JSOC. Court couldn’t really picture thirty or forty Delta Force or SEAL Team 6 shooters rolling down in a bunch of passenger vans, but he couldn’t rule it out.

Curious, but just barely, Court committed two of these tags to memory as he passed, then he returned to the street.

He drove back to the Econo Lodge and parked. Then he pulled out his smartphone. He surfed the web to a site that offered registration information about license plate numbers to anyone who paid a ten-dollar fee.

Court pulled out one of his prepaid credit cards and typed in some numbers, then he put in the first tag number.

The page thought for nearly a minute, then it spit out a few lines of information.

The car was registered to a corporate fleet in Perquimans County, North Carolina.

Court’s blood ran cold.

Harvey Point was in Perquimans County.

Quickly he typed in the second tag number and found it was registered to the same fleet. These were CIA vehicles, Court had no doubt, and they’d come from the Point. Court only knew two ground unit divisions of the CIA that were permanently billeted at the Point. One was the Special Activities Division; they had a Ground Branch installation there. The other was the Autonomous Asset Program.

Matt Hanley had told him Ground Branch was not involved in the hunt for him. That left AAP. Court wondered if Denny had them taking part in the hunt.

Court all but burned rubber getting back on I-10. He had a mission now, a place to go. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off, but he had every intention of infiltrating Harvey Point and going back to where it all began.

—

J
ordan Mayes drove alone through the gates of Alexandria Eight. He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere without his bodyguards, but he’d slipped out without letting the security logistics office know, and he’d taken his own car, which had been parked in the lot at Langley for the past week.

Here at the safe house he stopped halfway up the driveway, showed his credos to the guard force positioned there, and then continued on to the
front door. He climbed out of his car, pulled out a briefcase, and walked into the building. In the large great hall he was checked and wanded and his briefcase was opened and looked through, and then he walked alone up to the second-floor south wing doorway.

He crossed the wide and high south wing hall into the large conference room, made a right, and entered the narrow hallway there. This led him past the bathroom on his left, and then, also on his left, the stairs up to the attic. Beyond this Mayes found DeRenzi and two other security officers standing in the open doorway to Denny’s office. The men parted with a nod to let the second-in-command of the National Clandestine Service through, and then Mayes found Denny sitting at a table by the window and working on a laptop.

Denny looked up. “What is it?”

Mayes said nothing.

Carmichael looked to the security team. “DeRenzi. Step out.”

“Yes, sir.” The three men left and shut the door behind them.

“Talk.”

Mayes walked over to the table, and he stood over Carmichael. “Your attempts to play this entire hand so close to your vest that even I don’t know what you are doing have failed you, Denny.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning this.” Mayes opened his briefcase, took out an iPad, turned it on, and offered it to Denny. Confused, Carmichael took it.

Carmichael saw a film waiting to run, so he tapped the “play” icon with the tip of his finger.

It was the video Andy Shoal had obtained from the woman working in the sandwich shop that morning.

Carmichael watched the entire video without comment and without emotion. When it was over, he simply handed the device back.

“Where did you get it?”

“Out of the e-mail account of Andrew Shoal, the
Washington Post
reporter. It came from an account belonging to a woman who works at a fast-food restaurant in Dupont Circle. So far Shoal hasn’t sent it anywhere else. I had the tech alter the coding of the video, corrupt it, which just means if he tries to send it now it won’t play. But he’s seen it, he obviously gave some
import to what he saw there, and the woman who recorded it presumably still has it on her mobile device.”

Carmichael looked out the window. “What do you think you see there, Mayes?”

Mayes couldn’t believe the question. “Obviously, Denny, it shows a bunch of wounded cops who I seriously doubt are cops. One of these men looks like he probably died within minutes. Nothing like this was reported by Metro D.C. If this gets out, the press will—”

Carmichael shouted, tension in his voice, “It won’t get out!”

“Tell me what is going on, Denny.”

The older man rubbed his face in his hands a moment. After some delay he nodded, looked back to Mayes, and softly said a name.

“Al-Kazaz.”

Mayes cocked his head. “The Saudi intel chief? I know you are old acquaintances. What does this have to do with him? These are his men?”

“You might say, for purposes of the Violator operation . . . these are
my
men.”

Jordan Mayes started to sit down in a chair at the table, but it was as if his knees gave out suddenly near the end of the movement. He dropped roughly into the chair.

“Mother of God.”

—

O
ver the next thirty minutes, Denny Carmichael told Jordan Mayes everything about Gentry and the Saudi relationship to him.

Not just their service in the Violator hunt—but
everything
.

When Carmichael finished, his second-in-command looked out the window to the southwest. A thick bank of clouds grew low, gray, and ominous, approaching like a wall closing in on Washington, D.C. After a moment Mayes just said, “Jesus Christ, Denny.”

Carmichael kept his eyes on Mayes’s face. “Of course, you see the problem here.”

Mayes nodded distractedly. Then, “Of course I do. Why didn’t you—”

Carmichael interrupted. “Anything I did or did not do is all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? Could I have managed this better from the
beginning? Absolutely. I acknowledge that. But you see I had to make a series of on-the-fly critical decisions. Some I got right. A great many, as a matter of fact, but they have been eclipsed in importance by the very few decisions I got wrong.”

He shrugged. “And here we are today. You are now in the fold, and I need to know that I can count on you for the good of the future of this Agency.”

Mayes finally looked away from the window and towards his superior. “You just told me all this so I would know the stakes.”

“I just told you because you asked me to tell you.”

“Bullshit. If I turn and walk away, you’ll send Hightower or someone else to term me.”

Carmichael’s face was impassive. “Of course not. Jordan. That’s ludicrous. We’ve been together for twenty-five years.”

“We have . . . and that’s the first time you’ve ever called me Jordan.” He stood and headed for the door on shaky legs.

Carmichael followed him. “You walk out on this and you know what this will do to the Clandestine Service. You
have
to see this through now. Court Gentry must die, because if he reveals what he knows, our human intelligence operations will be set back a generation.”

Mayes thought about everything Carmichael had just told him. It was true. Right or wrong—and right now this all seemed so
fucking
wrong—Gentry had to be terminated. If not, Carmichael’s assertion that CIA covert HUMINT would suffer for a generation seemed, if anything, like an understatement.

He said, “This is a lot to take in, Denny. I just need to go home. I just need to think.”

Carmichael’s severe face hardened even more. Mayes had never seen colder eyes in his life.

Carmichael said, “Think all you want, Mayes. But do your thinking alone, and in silence.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and he left through the door to the narrow hallway, passing DeRenzi and his men without a word.

T
he café on Tel Aviv’s King George Street offered outdoor seating that afforded a nice view of Meir Garden, but Mossad officer Yanis Alvey wasn’t taking in the view. He sipped his espresso at a small table outside, but mostly he just sat there, looking at nothing and no one. A smoky bus thumped by, and other patrons at the tables around recoiled or covered their noses.

Alvey just ignored it, lost in his melancholy.

The sun had set an hour earlier, and the evening air cooled more and more each minute. Alvey wore a short-sleeve shirt with a light cashmere vest over it, not enough to ward off the April breeze, but he wasn’t thinking about the cool air, either.

He sensed movement in front of him and he looked up in time to see a middle-aged brunette with a small backpack hanging off her shoulder standing at the foot of his little bistro table. For an instant he thought she looked familiar, but he could not place her. She looked down at him, though, like she knew him well.

An uncomfortable feeling for an intelligence officer, to be sure, especially when he recognized the person, but he did not know from where.

“Mr. Alvey?” she asked.

English. That caused him to refine his hunt to put a name to the face. A name was on the tip of his tongue for an instant, and then it melted off. No.

“Who are you?” he asked. Refusing to confirm his ID before getting more information.

“My name is Catherine King. I am with the
Washington Post
.”

Instantly he knew exactly who she was; he’d seen her on television, and he’d read hundreds of columns she’d written over the years. He began to
stand to leave. His eyes flickered all around, hunting for a suitable escape route.

“Please wait. Sit down with me a moment. I’m not going to ask you anything. Not yet, anyway. I need to tell you something. After I tell you, if you like, you can get up and walk away, and I promise I will not pursue you.”

Alvey kept the nervous furtive eyes, but he lowered back to his seat.

The waiter came and she ordered an espresso. Alvey declined her offer to buy him another.

Soon she said, “A mutual acquaintance of ours told me this story. It’s a good one. I speak to liars with depressing regularity, but I believe this man believes what he is saying. That doesn’t make it true, mind you. I’m just letting you know I am normally quite skeptical of tall tales.”

“Who is the acquaintance?”

“He wouldn’t give me his name, but you know who he is.”

Alvey smiled. Bemused. “Without his name, I highly doubt that. I know a lot of men.”

“Yes, but how many of them shot you in the stomach in a Hamburg stairwell?”

Alvey measured his breathing carefully. Intent on not giving any of his emotions away. “Not so many.”

“I presumed as much. Well, this man is in serious trouble. He thinks just maybe you might be able to help him.”

The muscles in Yanis Alvey’s neck twitched. “Help him, Ms. King?
Help
him? If he were sitting where you are sitting right now, I would dive across this table with this butter knife and stab it through his heart. I don’t want to help him. I want to kill him.”

Catherine King had not expected this at all. “But why?”

“Because he is a bad and dangerous individual. Dangerous to my nation, the nation I have sworn to protect with my life. Yes, I helped this man in the past, but that was before I knew the truth.”

“He tells me he is innocent,” she said, her voice unsure now. Then she said, “Why would he send me all the way over here to prove he was innocent if he wasn’t?”

Alvey seemed to think this over for a moment. Finally he nodded. Said, “The reason is obvious. He has no idea what he has done.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Why should I talk to a reporter?”

“Because I have information, too, Mr. Alvey. Perhaps you are curious. And perhaps . . . the both of us can piece some things together that might be interesting.”

Alvey looked away. “I’m not curious at all.”

King persisted. “You have seen the news from Washington. Our mutual friend is the one at the center of this. The one being blamed for everything. Perhaps you think he’s done something wrong, and that’s why you would wring his neck if you got the chance, but can you really say you believe he is crisscrossing D.C. on a mass murder spree?”

Alvey looked back to the woman from the
Post
. “No. I don’t believe he would do that.”

“Then the CIA is after the wrong man. If you can help them with your information, wouldn’t you? Together maybe we can figure this out.”

Slowly Alvey stood from the table. Catherine thought he was going to walk away without another word, but instead he surprised her. “We can take my car. We will talk while we drive. A running meet, we call it. A café like this is not safe for such stories. Not even stories from long ago.”

Catherine stood and followed.

—

A
ndy Shoal had spent all of Saturday afternoon in his apartment in Arlington, sitting on his couch with his notebook computer on his lap.

He’d begun working on a new story without telling anyone what he had, for one simple reason. He needed to
know
what he had, and he was confused by how today’s evidence fit in with everything else he and Catherine had learned in the past week.

On his notebook computer in front of him he had a hundred or so data points—all the reporting that had been done in the past full week. Beginning with his first conversation with Detective Rauch, just after midnight on Sunday morning in Washington Highlands, and ending with the discovery that a group of armed men dressed as cops and riding around in fake squad cars had been wounded in the shoot-out in the Metro that killed former CIA chief council Max Ohlhauser.

He thought back to all the blood on the ground in Bethesda. He and Catherine had decided it couldn’t have come from someone who had
already been bleeding for hours. He also thought about the vigilante nature of the shooting on Rhode Island Avenue, and about how much it contrasted with the other attacks of the past week.

It was as if there were different groups operating at the same time, in the same places, and now he had evidence that proved this to be true. These ten men in the video from Dupont Circle—Andy counted four wounded and six others—were some sort of hit team.

He was so worried that these men might be American spies that he didn’t want to contact the CIA to ask for a statement, and he was too early in this even to contact Catherine. If he was going to make it into the ranks of King’s investigative team, he would need to show he could do more than pound pavement and get people to talk. He needed to put puzzles together himself.

He closed his laptop and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. Leaning his head back against the back of his sofa for a moment, he realized he needed some caffeine to keep going.

At six p.m. he went downstairs to the tiny convenience store in his building, planning on buying some protein and a Red Bull to help him power through for just a few hours more.

He was the only customer in the shop; the nice Indian lady who nearly always worked the two p.m. to ten p.m. shift was the only other person in sight. He gave her a tired smile as he passed her stacking cartons of yogurt in the front cooler.

In the back he snatched up a cold Red Bull, then he grabbed a roast beef sandwich nearly the size of a football that was wrapped in microwave-safe plastic. Heading back to the front he heard a noise and looked up. Three men in black raincoats filed into the market, moving purposefully.

The Indian clerk said, “Can I help—”

And then she stopped talking. She backed up into the stacked crates of yogurt, knocking them all to the floor, and then she tumbled over on top of them.

Andy thought she had just been clumsy, so he rushed to help her up, but only for a few steps, because now he saw the guns. Two of the three men in raincoats had pulled silenced pistols, and they raised them out in front of their bodies.

Andy dropped his sandwich and his can of Red Bull and he stood there. A deer in the headlights as he stared down the barrel of a long black gun.

—

W
hile one of the Saudi assets raised his Glock and fired at the primary target, a second asset eliminated the bystander by firing several suppressed rounds into her head.

The third asset did not even draw a weapon. Instead, he walked directly to the counter, stepped behind it, and located the security camera Blu-ray recorder. He popped out the disk running in the machine, and he slipped it into his pocket. He then turned the Blu-ray player off, giving the impression it had not been running today at all.

By the time he finished he heard the last cries for mercy from the man on the floor. The asset behind the counter did not even pause to look at the target. Instead he just went to the front door and held it open for his two colleagues, who both slipped their weapons into their raincoats before calmly walking out into the late afternoon.

The third asset followed.

After only thirty seconds inside the convenience store the three Saudis were back on the street. An old van with stolen plates pulled up to the curb, and the three men climbed in, barely breaking stride.