Back Blast (54 page)

C
atherine King stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor of the CIA’s Old Headquarters Building. Her assigned control officer escorted her into a conference room—the same room she’d visited a week earlier to interview Denny Carmichael—then offered her a cup of coffee. When she declined, the young woman disappeared, and soon the door opened again.

Catherine had never met Matthew Hanley, the Acting Director of the National Clandestine Service, and she knew very little about him. All she knew of his CV was that he’d been a Green Beret, an SAD officer, and then had worked as station chief in Haiti. He’d been back here running SAD until yesterday, when he was tapped to take over NCS for the late Denny Carmichael.

She assumed Hanley knew the man she called Six, but she had no idea if Hanley still had any association with him, or even if Hanley had been involved in the manhunt for the ex–SAD operator.

But that didn’t really matter, because Catherine knew this morning’s meeting would not be about Six. It would be about Catherine. Or, more specifically, it would be about what Catherine planned on publishing. There was no other earthly reason why first thing in the morning on his first day in his new position, the new top spook in the United States would want to speak with an investigative reporter for the
Washington Post
.

When Hanley stepped through the door she found herself surprised. Where Denny had been lean and stately, Director Hanley looked like an old linebacker. She could tell from his eyes and his nose that he liked to drink, and she could tell by his frame that he liked to eat, but his ruddy complexion made her think he could handle both without ill effects.

He shook her hand gently and sat down. Smiling while he talked, he seemed night and day different from his predecessor.

There was significant chitchat at first—Hanley seemed to enjoy talking—but when he got down to business she realized he had a definite objective.

“Ms. King, I want to offer you a great opportunity.”

“An opportunity to do what, exactly?”

“An opportunity to help your country.”

She rolled her eyes. “By not talking about what happened at the safe house, you mean?”

“You can talk about it. I hope you will. But I hope you are . . . fair. Deliberate about what you say.”

“Have you read anything I’ve written?”

“Every week.”

“Then you know I am both fair and deliberate.”

Hanley seemed to consider a moment. Like he was playing chess and thinking over his next move. “I’m ready to make a deal. A really nice deal.”

“And I’m listening, Director Hanley.”

And then, for the next several minutes, Acting Director Matthew Hanley offered Catherine King unprecedented access to the inner workings of the CIA. Exclusives, tips, personal tours, and visits to places she could not have dreamed of getting into. Introductions to players, background intelligence on world figures, and data that she had never thought she would obtain from anyone in government, least of all from the top spy in U.S. intelligence.

Hanley finished his spiel by saying, “Denny Carmichael was not an evil man. I didn’t like him, never did. But that was because his methods were too top-down. He thought he was a puppet master and a king, and that’s not what this place needs at all. Everything bad that has happened, everything classified you’ve learned about in the past week . . . it was all Denny Carmichael. When he died . . . I’d like to hope that could all die with him.” He spoke in a pleading voice now. “Don’t destroy this Agency by reporting the crimes of a man who no longer needs to be stopped. Instead, watch this Agency closer than anyone in the Fourth Estate has ever watched us. Make sure I don’t become Denny. You can have a real positive impact on this organization, on this nation.” Hanley winked. “And you can probably write some damn fine stories in the process.”

Catherine kept her poker face, but she had already decided to be
extremely sparing in her reporting. She knew the power of the media to destroy, and she knew that despite all the nuance in the world, a thorough piece on the front page of the
Washington Post
about rogue bands of assassins killing their way across the nation’s capital under orders from the number two man at the CIA would cause politicians to gut the Agency down to nothing.

She wouldn’t do that.

That the new guy running NCS just offered her unparalleled access almost caused her to jump out of her chair.

Instead, she forced him into specifics, hammered out dates for meetings and general ground rules for sharing information, and then she kept her poker face as long as she could. Finally she reached out a hand. “I look forward to following your tenure here very closely, Director Hanley.”

Hanley shook her hand, and she could see on his face that he recognized he’d just paid dollars to someone ready to accept dimes.

“I bet you do, Ms. King.”

—

A
rthur Mayberry opened the wooden door to his home, but he left the storm door locked. Through the Plexiglas and bars he saw a white male in his thirties standing in the morning sunshine. He wore a suit and tie, and a serious expression.

The media had moved from his sidewalk a week or so after Jeff Duncan nearly blew up all of Columbia Heights, but these damn cops just kept coming.

Bernice appeared at Mayberry’s side just as he said, “I’ve told you boys everything I know.”

“I’m not here to ask questions.”

“Then what can I do for you?”

The young man held out an envelope. “You can take this, and not ask
me
any questions. To be honest, I don’t care for them any more than you.”

Mayberry looked at the envelope. “Well, what is it?”

“
That’s
a question, Mr. Mayberry. Please pay attention.”

Mayberry unlocked the door, took the envelope. He opened it. It was a fat stack of one-hundred-dollar bills.

“Lord have mercy,” he said softly.

The young man smiled a little. “Someone wishes to apologize for any inconvenience you might have endured in the past week or two. He asks that you accept this as repayment for the damages.”

Bernice looked at the money. She whispered, “Drugs.”

The man in the suit took no offense. “Not at all, ma’am. This is something else. Are you familiar with the FBI’s Witness Protection Program?”

Bernice said, “I . . . I believe I saw it on
Law and Order
.”

“Yes . . . well . . . things aren’t always how they appear.”

Arthur gasped. “You mean to tell me Jeff Duncan was in the Witness Protection Program?”

The young man raised an eyebrow and, with it, he gave a little smile.

Arthur Mayberry said, “No questions?”

“Exactly right, sir. Have a nice day.”

The man returned to his car, the car rolled off, and Mayberry locked the door. Only when this was complete did he pull the cash out of the envelope.

“How much is it?” Bernice asked.

Arthur Mayberry took a moment to thumb through it, making sure all the bills were hundreds. They were. He said, “It’s enough to where we won’t ever have to rent out the basement to another crazy man.”

The Mayberrys looked at each other and shared a smile.

C
ourt Gentry wore a full beard and mustache, and his dark brown hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. This, along with the leather jacket, faded jeans, and work boots, gave him the look of a man who fit in well here. There were tens of thousands of miners, farmers, and other industrial workers in southern Pennsylvania, and most all of them dressed like this—more or less, anyway—so he did not look out of place at all.

Not even here, at Somerset Regional Airport—not that his look mattered much, because all the commercial flights had flown for the day, he was far from the terminal in a private hangar, and there was no one else around.

Just Court and a sleek white executive jet, its turbines spinning slowly.

Court sat alone in the hangar’s tiny executive lounge, his small backpack at his feet and a bottle of water in his hand. The TV high on the wall was set to CNN. Court had watched several stories about the crazy happenings a couple hundred miles to the southeast of here in D.C., but he’d learned nothing new.

A second aircraft landed in the dark distance, then it taxied over and parked in the hangar, next to the plane right outside the window of the executive lounge. Court waited quietly for a few minutes, then watched a single man deplane and walk down the air stairs and up the steps into the lounge.

Matt Hanley wore a wide Cheshire cat grin, but to his credit, he didn’t try to hug his former employee. The two men just shook hands. Matt sat down in the chair in front of Court, then he produced a flask from inside his coat, along with two shot glasses.

“You bring those all the way from Langley?”

Hanley shook his head. “Stole them off the plane. Actually, it’s an Air Branch aircraft, so as long as I give them back or expense them, I can do whatever I want with them.”

He poured two shots of neat scotch and passed one to Court, and they drank them together.

Hanley said, “You’ve been up in the mountains two weeks?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. How much did that suck?”

“It beat D.C.”

Hanley chuckled, but moved on. “Been digging into NCS files. Old code word programs and ops. I’ll be unraveling this shit for months, years maybe, but the short version is this: Carmichael was in some sort of a dysfunctional three-way relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel. He fed both sides intel pulled from the other, kept both in the dark about where he was getting information.”

“What could possibly go wrong?” Court quipped. He took Hanley’s flask and poured himself another drink.

Hanley continued, “Al-Kazaz figured out Denny’s game early on. This meant the Saudis had a disinformation conduit into the Mossad. Kaz gave up some legit operations to solidify Denny’s trust, and he gave up even more to make Denny look good to the Mossad. It was like setting up an IV, and putting good drugs through it.

“But after a while, Kaz started pushing poison through the line.

“Then came Operation BACK BLAST. Kaz knew about the Israeli infiltration agent in al Qaeda, but he couldn’t remove him, because it would tip CIA and Mossad off to the fact that they had a breach. So he concocted the perfect scheme. He organized the meeting between the cells in Italy, and he got Hawthorn to attend. He convinced Denny someone was going to kill him at the meeting, and that he had nowhere to turn. Denny sends his best assassin to rescue him. Kaz survives, the Mossad agent dies, and no one knows Saudi intel is the puppet master of the entire debacle.

“But it got even better for Kaz a year later, when he decided to create a rift between CIA and Mossad by leaking proof the CIA killed Hawthorn. Just imagine how much fun that must have been for al-Kazaz. Aurbach learns CIA schwacked his best man, Carmichael is put on the spot. Carmichael is pissed at al-Kazaz, but he is convinced the Saudis made an honest mistake with the bad intel; he doesn’t suspect he’s been tricked.”

“Why not?”

“Simple. Kaz gave up AQ assets left and right to backstop his story.
Carmichael knew he’d been getting gold from Kaz. And he knew that gold had helped him climb his way up in the Agency. He couldn’t let himself think for a second he’d been played because it would mean everything he’d put forward as a strength was now a weakness.”

“Kaz bought Carmichael’s trust and allegiance.”

“That’s right,” Hanley said. “When Aurbach dug for answers, Carmichael had to give you up. He knew he couldn’t let you talk to Mossad because you were the only one who knew you killed the man in the photograph you were given. If you were silenced, then the entire incident could be chalked up to a CIA assassin gone rogue, taking money to smoke the wrong guy, not a massive intelligence failure involving an illegal program.”

“But I didn’t play along.”

“No, you didn’t. Carmichael ordered your own team to terminate you. If you had died that night, the truth would have died with you, but you got away, went on the run and off grid. Carmichael then spent five frantic years trying to remove the compromise that could ruin him.”

Hanley downed another scotch, then said, “If you ever knew what this was all about, you could have walked right into an Israeli Embassy and explained it to Mossad. But you were kept in the dark as to why you had to die. You never knew BACK BLAST went bad, you never knew you killed Hawthorn, you never knew you were the one loose thread in an illegal operation that, if unraveled, could bring the entire U.S. intelligence community to its knees.”

“Now I know,” Court said. He looked out the window at the two planes. “Where does that leave me?”

Hanley said, “I want you back.”

“Back in the Agency?”

“Not exactly.” He paused. “Back running from the Agency.”

Court looked back at Hanley. “What the hell does that mean?”

“For the five years of the shoot on sight, you were out there, doing CIA dirty work, with no comebacks to us. You were the epitome of plausible deniability. All the other intel services knew we were after you, so whatever you did, we were in the clear.”

Court understood, but he said nothing.

“I want to harness that, Court. I want to run you, make you operational,
keep you on target with our intelligence, close-hold stuff you can’t get anywhere else. I want you out there, going after bad actors we don’t have sanction to go after any other way. You could be our best direct-action weapon ever.”

“What’s in this for me?”

“What do you want?”

Court thought it over. The question stumped him for a moment. “All I wanted was to come home.”

Hanley patted him on the shoulder. “You have a home. You just can’t stay here. It wouldn’t be safe. You have to keep moving, to remain in the shadows. We were never the only people out there looking for you.”

Court said, “If I stayed in the States, the government could protect me.”

Hanley did not disagree. Instead he just said, “You are an operator. You will always be an operator. Work for me. I’ll help you do what needs doing.”

Court thought a moment. “Two years.”

“What about two years?”

“Two years and I’m out. Done. Back home and under your protection.”

Hanley rocked his head from side to side while he mulled this over. Soon he said, “Done.”

Court said, “I approve all contracts. I get to take jobs from others if I want.”

Hanley nodded. “Of course. You are a subcontractor. Self-employed.” Hanley smiled. “I just aim to be your biggest and best client.” He stuck a hand out, and Court shook it.

Hanley said, “Glad that’s settled. Court, I want you to know that you always have a direct line to me. Always.”

Court understood what was coming next. “But since you’re D/NCS now, running all Agency ops, you will bring in a handler to deal with me directly.”

“That’s right. But don’t worry, I’m giving you one of the best officers in the Agency. Trust me on this, you’re in excellent hands.”

“Sure,” Court said, not convinced.

Hanley pulled out his iPad, touched a few keys on the screen, and then handed the device over to Court. He took it, somewhat confused, then suddenly he realized he was on a video chat. He saw an empty chair.

He looked up to Hanley. “
Really
, Matt?”

“A shitty way for a meet and greet with your new handler, I’ll admit. But she had to man the fort while I snuck around out here in the boonies.”

“She?”
Court asked.

As he said this, a woman appeared on screen and sat in the chair. She looked to be in her late thirties, not unattractive, with brown hair pulled back, fashionable frames, and perfect makeup. She beamed into the camera with a wide smile. “Good evening, Mr. Gentry. My name is Suzanne Brewer. I am so looking forward to working with you.”

Court looked up to Hanley for guidance, then, when none came, back down at the screen. “Uh . . . yeah. Me, too.”

“Matt let me know just a little about your career here, and I will get up to speed quickly. I just want you to know all the unpleasantness of the past is behind us. I am going to treat you with the respect and deference you deserve.”

Court nodded, feeling awkward about the exchange, but satisfied Hanley hadn’t pawned him off to some young case officer just out of the Farm.

“Cool,” he said awkwardly. The three of them talked a minute more, then Hanley disconnected the video chat and slipped the iPad back in his briefcase.

Standing up, D/NCS said, “I can’t begin to thank you for all you’ve done for the Agency. We didn’t deserve you. We still don’t, but with me and Suzanne on your team, I think you will know you are back in the fold. The family.”

Together the two men walked back out to the hangar. In front of the two aircraft, they shook hands again.

“What about Zack?” Court asked.

Hanley said, “I have a role for Zack. He’s not you, but he’s not half bad.”

“What will he—”

Hanley put up a hand. “Sorry, Court. Can’t tell you. It’s classified.”

“Cute.” Court let it go with a little smile. “You’re going back to Langley?”

“Yeah. Meeting tomorrow with the director. He’s got his head so deep in the sand he probably won’t hear a word I say, which is good, because I’m going to bullshit the hell out of him.”

“What about me? Where am I going?”

Hanley patted Court on the shoulder. “Something’s cooking in Hong Kong. Need you there, stat.”

“I have approval on all my contracts. Did you forget that deal you made with me ten whole minutes ago?”

Hanley chuckled. “You’ll get the intel on the flight over. If you say no, then you just got a free flight around the world.” Hanley winked. “But you won’t say no.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s just say it involves an old friend.”

“I have friends?”

“Not if you don’t get your ass to Hong Kong, you don’t. Don’t dick around with this one, Court. No time to waste.” And with that Matt Hanley turned around, headed up the stairs into his Gulfstream, and disappeared.

Court stood there a moment, then he looked up to the other aircraft.
His
aircraft. With the faintest of shrugs, he turned for the stairs and began
climbing.