Cold Shot (40 page)

“And I am acting. I kept you pacified until we reached the airport,” Elham told him.

“You knew?!”

“I suspected,” Elham said. “As I said, they lost all of their cards to play when the American spies escaped. But it was not entirely true that we were their only cards. The warhead is no card at all for them as long as it sits on their soil, which left
you
as their only card. I am nobody, a nonentity to the Americans, and that makes me of no worth at all. It also means that I have little to fear so long as they get you.”

“You betray me!”

Elham exploded, grabbing Ahmadi by the shirt and slamming him against the bulkhead. Jon and Kyra raised their carbines, fingers on the triggers. Carreño jerked in surprise and the younger woman thrust her M4 at him, the end of the barrel not a meter from his face and the SEBIN director lost control of his bladder. Jon carefully raised a hand, put it on the young woman’s gun, and gently lowered her weapon.

“You’re a coward and a fool,” Elham hissed at his superior. “I’ve dealt with you death merchants before. You never fight yourselves. You build weapons that men like me have to use, soaking ourselves in blood while you sit at home drinking and whoring. And you tell everyone how wonderful it would be if you could build and fire the ultimate weapons that would kill thousands upon thousands. Then you start mewling because someone dares to point a weapon at you.”

“But we have the warhead! We can—”

“Look out the window, you idiot!” Elham ordered him. He released Ahmadi so the man could turn his head.

Ahmadi leaned over the seats and raised one of the window covers. Across the hangar, American Marines were unloading the warhead crate from the back of the cargo truck. Venezuelan and Iranian soldiers were standing around, making no move to stop them . . . were, in fact, holding their formation outside the hangar.
If they aren’t stopping them, they’re cooperating,
Ahmadi thought. “Who are they?” he asked.

“Those are U.S. Marines,” Jon replied.

“It is over,” Elham told him. “Now give me the pistol in your pocket.”

Ahmadi gritted his teeth, hissing through them, and pulled the gun. The armed Americans shifted their rifles. He glared at them sideways, then thrust the pistol against Elham’s chest. “I should kill you.”

“That would be very difficult without a clip in the gun,” Elham said.

“What—?” Ahmadi twisted the pistol and checked the grip—empty. “Why give it to me—?”

“I gave you what you wanted so that you would do what I wanted, which was to sit down, do nothing, and be silent,” Elham said. He pulled the gun from Ahmadi’s hand. “And so you did.”

“You are a traitor,” Ahmadi said, his voice cold. He turned back to Jon and Riley. “I presume that you would grant me asylum in exchange for information—”

Faster than Jon’s eyes could follow, Elham dropped the empty pistol while pulling a second Sig Sauer P-229 from the small of his back. He raised the gun to Ahmadi’s head and pulled the trigger. The 9mm round punched through Ahmadi’s skull and buried itself in the bulkhead, spewing blood and viscera in its wake.

Ahmadi crumpled to the floor, the carpet underneath turning dark red.

“Put it down!” Jon yelled, his carbine less than a foot from Elham’s chest. Pulling the trigger would gut the soldier at that range.

Elham obeyed, kneeling and setting the pistol on the floor next to Ahmadi’s shattered head, then stood and raised his hands where Jon could see them. “You have nothing more to fear from me,” he told him. “Ahmadi was a fool, but I could not let you have him. He was a dead man from the moment he set foot on this plane.”

Jon stared at the Iranian soldier, then waved him off the plane. “Surrender to the Marines on the tarmac.” Elham nodded and walked out through the hatch.

Kyra stepped in behind him, then stopped and faced Carreño. “Your people shot me in the arm,” she told him. “That night on the bridge.”

“We all do our duty.”

Kyra smashed his face with the butt of the M4, dropping him to the floor by Ahmadi’s corpse. Then she walked down the rolling stairs.

•    •    •

Jon stood on the tarmac and watched as the Marines finished securing the warhead in the CH-46E Sea Knight helo. Kyra moved in next to him, her carbine hanging loose from its harness. He looked up at the Boeing and watched the SEBIN soldiers lowering Carreño’s prone form on a stretcher. “They weren’t very happy when you cracked him in the head again.”

“I wanted to shoot him in the arm,” Kyra said. “It would’ve been fair.”

“Maybe,” Jon said.

“The president’s not going to be happy about Ahmadi taking one in the head. We could’ve ripped Iran’s entire nuclear program open with him in custody,” Kyra said.

Jon nodded, exhaled, then finally asked the question he’d been wanting to avoid. “Have you contacted
Vicksburg
?”

“Just got off the radio with them,” she said. “Jon . . . Marisa died. The doctor said that the shrapnel he pulled out of her chest looked like a fragment from a .50 round. The bullet must’ve hit the Seahawk and splintered. The piece that hit Marisa nicked one of the arteries leading to her heart and tore up her lung. She never woke up.”

Jon just nodded slowly and said nothing. “The Venezuelan military doesn’t have any .50 rifles in their inventory. Their snipers use Dragunov rifles . . . they shoot a 7.62-millimeter round. But the Iranians have Steyr rifles. Those shoot .50 millimeter rounds.” He looked over at Elham, sitting next to Ahmadi’s wrapped corpse in the Sea Knight, hands bound with zip ties.

“You think he did it,” Kyra said, following the direction of his eyes.

“It doesn’t change anything whether I’m right or wrong.”

“Yes, Jon, it does,” she said. “All the time.”

DAY NINE

The Oval Office

“What can I do for you, Cy?” Rostow asked. The Secret Service agent closed the door behind the director of national intelligence as he entered. The president stood behind the Resolute desk, shuffling papers and arranging them in a leather portfolio. “I’ve got a briefing in ten minutes in the Press Room.”

“I understand, sir, I’ll keep this short,” Marshall told his superior. He took his place opposite the desk and stood stiff, almost a military stand of attention. “I’m here to ask you to refuse Kathy Cooke’s resignation.”

“Refuse it? I ordered it.” Rostow glanced up at his chief intelligence adviser, an unhappy look. “And I’m going to announce it in the briefing. Denied.”

“Then you’ll be announcing mine as well,” Marshall told him. “If you refuse, I’ll direct my own public affairs officer to release a statement to the
Post
to that effect.”

Rostow stopped moving papers, stared at Marshall, then sat down in his high-back Gunlocke chair. “What is this about, Cy?” he asked, his voice tinged with anger. “Cooke’s retiring a hero. Her people recovered a nuclear warhead. She goes out on top, but she’s going out.”

“Mr. President, when I accepted this post, I was aware that you have no particular use for the intelligence community, which is fair enough. You aren’t the first president to look down on our profession,” Marshall started. “Over the last year, I’ve gotten to know Kathy Cooke. She’s an honorable public servant and a fine leader who has acted in the best interests of this country and her people. Under her command, the CIA could be a tremendous asset to your administration. But you’ve only ever looked at her as a means of garnering political capital and you hate CIA for reasons I can’t fathom. Once this event broke, I had hoped that we could perform in a way that would change your opinion, but instead, I have been deeply disturbed by the callous way you’ve treated her and her officers. I should have intervened on her behalf sooner, but once we learned there might be WMD in Venezuela, I felt it important to support the effort to find it and eliminate it even if I didn’t approve of your decisions.”

“Tread carefully,” Rostow warned.

“I’m your principal intelligence adviser, sir,” Marshall reminded him. “Or at least I’m supposed to be. In that capacity, I feel that I owe you my honest opinions. And in my opinion, you and your national security adviser demonstrated poor judgment through the crisis and are doing so again now in asking Kathy to resign—”

“How dare you!” Rostow cut him off.

“I dare because I’m a career military and intelligence officer and I will not serve under a man who is willing to sacrifice intelligence officers for his own political ends!” Marshall said, refusing the interruption, his own temper flaring. “I’m a flag-rank military officer, so I understand and appreciate ambition—”

“I thought military officers also understood insubordination,” Rostow said, quietly furious.

“I understand it perfectly well. And I’m prepared to accept the consequences of my choices, sir,” Marshall told him, undeterred. “But frankly, sir, you wanted your own Cuban Missile Crisis and you were perfectly willing to endanger American lives to get it. But worse than that, you didn’t even expect Kathy’s people to succeed. You were setting her up to fail so you would have an excuse to fire her. You were willing to endanger American lives just to force Kathy out of her office and save some political capital in the process. That I won’t abide.”

Rostow glared at Marshall. “She serves at the pleasure of the president.”

“As do we all. But there is an inherent, unspoken trust among federal servants and soldiers that their president will treat them fairly, and that he certainly won’t treat them like expendable assets for political ends. You violated that trust, as many of your predecessors have before you. I won’t be a party to it and I will resign before I become part of that machine.”

Rostow leaned back in his chair, studying the DNI with a cold look. Marshall held his gaze, then went on. “But honestly, I don’t think you want that to happen. The problem with being part of a Cuban Missile Crisis is that historians will spend the next hundred years picking the event apart. With legacies come inspection. Journalists will question every decision that was made, every word that was said. They’ll be asking to talk to each and every one of us until we’re all dead. And I can’t speak for Kathy, but my recollection of events and your behavior in particular will be shaped very heavily by the next decision you make.”

The president laughed, disbelieving what he’d just heard. “That’s a bluff. Everything that just happened is classified. I could order you not to talk and send you to jail if you did.”

“You could, but the press has a way of finding out details even when nobody is talking,” Marshall countered. “And you won’t hold this office forever. Everything will get declassified in twenty-five years, assuming one of your successors doesn’t decide to release it all sooner. It might not happen for a decade or two, but it will happen, and maybe sooner than you think. And Kathy is only in her late forties. She’ll outlive us both.”

“Blackmail, Cy?”

“That’s not my intention, but I suppose it depends on what your true priorities are, sir,” Marshall informed him. “But there is a clean way out.”

“And what is that?” Rostow asked.

“Promote her.”

“Promote her?!”
the president repeated, incredulous. “Please, Cy, you’re wasting my time now.”

“Did you know she was Navy before she came to CIA?”

“I read that somewhere,” Rostow replied dismissively. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“In the Navy, it’s accepted that the captain of a ship has more freedom to act than an admiral behind a desk.” Marshall nodded. “The intelligence community is no different. The CIA director is more powerful than I am in a lot of ways and I think you know that. So here’s my suggestion—I still don’t have a deputy. You nominate her for the post, Congress will confirm her, probably unanimously. You’ll get to install your own man as CIA director. She’ll become the deputy DNI, she won’t have an agency under her immediate command. She won’t have as much power to act, but she gets to serve and retire on her own terms.”

The president paused to think. “And I look good for promoting the first woman CIA director to a higher post?” Rostow commented, staring at the Seal of the United States on the Oval Office ceiling.

“I’m sure,” Marshall said.

“Or I could fire you for coming in here and talking to me like this . . . replace you both.”

“You could,” Marshall conceded. “Though I’m sure the press would want to know why both the new director of national intelligence and the CIA director lost their jobs on the same day, especially after they helped the president of the United States score what will unquestionably be one of the biggest foreign-policy successes of his tenure.”

Rostow considered the argument, the debate raging in his mind apparent to the man standing on the other side of the desk. “If I agree, I don’t want to deal with her again. I don’t want to see her in this office again.”

“I can’t promise that. The world might not cooperate. But I’ll do my best to keep her separated from you.”

Rostow nodded after a few moments, still unhappy. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “You can leave now.”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. President.” Marshall turned, walked to the door, and let himself out. Rostow stared at him until the door closed, then fought down the urge to throw his portfolio across the room.

CIA Director’s Office

7th Floor, Old Headquarters Building

CIA Headquarter
s

There were almost no boxes, surprisingly little for her to pack away. A few of the curios on the walls had simply come with the office and never had been hers. Most of the other objects sitting on the shelves she had chosen to give up, all gifts from foreign dignitaries that were expensive enough that they had become government property the moment she’d accepted them. If congressmen couldn’t take a bushel of apples from a constituent, they certainly weren’t going to let an intelligence chief take a scimitar from a Saudi prince without making her pay for it. She could have bought them back for their market price, which in most cases would have been a sizable fraction of her salary, so she opted to let the Agency keep them. Now the museum staff had taken most of them away for storage, to languish in some wooden crates in a warehouse at the Farm or wherever the Directorate of Support kept such things. She’d never thought to ask. Eventually, some future curator would pull the best pieces and put them under glass down in the hallways for future masses to ignore as they walked past.

One object had never been put on the books. Kathy picked up the broken aircraft gauge. It was a piece of the heads-up display from that Chinese stealth plane that Jonathan had brought back the year before. He had guessed it was the altitude indicator. She pulled it out of the Plexiglass cube he had put it in, turned it over in her hands, then put the open box on the coffee table. That one was coming home.

Her cigar humidor sat on the table beside the cardboard storage box. Kathy hefted the small cherrywood box and opened it. Five tubes rested inside, still sealed, with words written on the sides in permanent ink. She set the box on her desk, the top still open, and picked up the cigar tube lying there—a gift from Drescher. The man was a Mormon and therefore didn’t smoke, but he apparently had no moral objection to giving her a cigar. He knew she would never smoke this one, so perhaps in his mind there would be no harm done. She just hoped the man’s religious leaders hadn’t seen him browsing through a cigar shop for the Cohiba. She scrounged for a Sharpie, found one, uncapped it, and scrawled
Caracas 2018
on the side of the tube. Kathy examined her handiwork, then dropped the tube into the humidor.
Six. Not bad for two years.
There had been others, lesser operations that might have merited the ritual, but she was a woman of high standards.

The packing done, there was almost nothing left but a few meetings and farewells. Tomorrow, around noon, she would deliver a farewell address to the workforce in the auditorium, which would be broadcast to the outbuildings over the internal television network. Then, at the end of the business day, Kathy would walk out of the building and a security escort would take her home. In two years or three the new CIA director would invite her back to attend the unveiling of her official portrait, which would hang down in the main-floor hallway. He would give her a warm if perfunctory introduction and she would say a few words about her two years holding the post. There would be polite applause, some happy and brief reunions, perhaps a luncheon on the seventh floor in Agency Dining Room 1, and then she would leave again, reminded in the most painful way possible of the adage that no one is indispensable. If and when she might ever be invited back after that, she had no idea.

Kathy put her cigar humidor into one of the packing boxes and finally saw Jon standing by the door. Her secretary saw him at the same moment and chose to excuse herself from the room for official reasons that Kathy was sure were entirely contrived.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

Kathy stood there, rooted to the spot, unsure what she could say. “I’m sorry,” is what finally came out.

Jon shook his head slowly. “You have nothing to apologize for. You were right.”

“Right? Every decision I made was wrong. The mission wasn’t low risk—”

“You were right,” he interrupted. “You were . . . you
are
the CIA director. You made a decision based on the best information you had. It was information I gave you, so I can hardly complain. Things went south. That wasn’t your fault. But
this—
” He waved a hand around the office. “This is wrong.”

“This was inevitable,” Kathy told him. “Rostow never kept me on because he believed in me. He kept me on for—well, it doesn’t matter why he kept me on. He was always going to replace me once there was no more political gain in keeping me around.” Kathy watched him as he looked around the room. She doubted that either of them would ever see the inside of it again after tomorrow. “You never told me about you and Marisa,” she chided him quietly.

“Nothing to tell.”

“You two were serious,” she observed.

“I was,” Jonathan said. “Her, not so much.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Kathy told him.

“She left.”

“She regretted it. At least, Kyra thinks she did.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“Yes, it does.” Kathy walked over to him, reached up, put a hand on his cheek, and turned his face toward her. “You might not think so, but there are people who care about you. Even if they aren’t very good at saying it . . . or always free to show it. I didn’t know Marisa very well . . . I just met her once, when I assigned her to take over Caracas station. But something tells me that she really cared for you.”

Jon nodded, not agreeing, but, maybe for the first time she’d ever seen, trying to understand her feelings. “I did come on official business,” he told her. “You are still the director for another day.”

“I suppose. What is it?”

Jon held out a briefing binder. Kathy sat on the couch and Jon took his seat beside her. She opened the book. The first page was a cutaway diagram of the Iranian nuclear warhead. “The Department of Energy reverse-engineered the warhead, with an assist from some of our people and a few other agencies. They sent over the blueprints this morning.”

“And?”

“The Counterproliferation Center compared them to every nuclear weapon design that every known proliferator has peddled for the last thirty years. The layout doesn’t match any of them. Those were all older designs, uranium fission with an implosion setup usually. Ahmadi’s was a two-stage fusion-boosted design with a secondary. Polonium-beryllium trigger, tritium initiator, the whole smash. And it’s got a plutonium core, so someone is reprocessing nuclear waste.”

“Do you think the Iranians developed the design?”

“Not likely. This design is a serious jump from anything that’s been for sale and the Iranian nuclear program has had Mossad’s full attention for a long time now.”