The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (8 page)

WASHINGTON,
D.C.

I
t was a beautiful day, and Ryan Kealey had an urge to hunt dinner and cook it on an open fire. Since both of those were frowned upon in the nation’s capital, he settled for gyros on a park bench in Constitution Gardens near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

He and Allison had done nothing but walk since breakfast. Though Kealey hadn’t shaken the feeling that something was in the shadows, waiting for him—perhaps explaining his desire to grab a shotgun and shoot something—he managed to push it far enough aside to enjoy the day, the sights, and the company of Allison Dearborn. He didn’t know where, if anywhere, the relationship was going. Or if it even was a relationship, as opposed to a good friendship with sex. But whatever it was, it was easy and relaxed for both of them.

Even so, throughout the day, from Ford’s Theatre to the Lincoln Memorial, Kealey felt phantom vibrations from his cell phone. He enjoyed the downtime and he did not miss carrying the fate of a city or field operatives or even his own survival on his back. Counterterrorism was an unending relay race in which the baton had to be passed to others. The problem he had—and which he was sure his predecessors had with him—was that every generation had its own way of doing things. This younger generation, the late twentysomethings on up, relied so heavily on ELINT, electronic intelligence, that he feared they would lose the intuitive skills necessary for the job. They, in turn, felt that he put too much trust on intangibles like instinct and patterns of human behavior—which had been drummed into them as an evil thing: profiling. The kind of thing that had kept El Al Airlines safe from hijackers for decades.

So they kept circling each other with more suspicion than they applied to the enemy. And, of course, the numbers of youngsters were swelling while the numbers of old-timers decreased.

That’s why the movies keep casting younger and younger James Bonds
, he mourned privately. No one would believe that someone even in his forties would have the energy for these kinds of sustained operations.
The stakeouts alone tried strong men’s bladders
, he had to admit.

A man with an iPod and new wedding ring walked by. The fortysomething looked at Kealey, then did a double take when he saw Allison. Kealey was relieved, then a little perturbed—she had a life outside of him?—when the man half smiled at Allison, tamped down the apparent kneejerk reaction to talk to her, and moved on.

“Friend?” Kealey asked when they were a half block away.

“Patient,” she replied.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell?”

“You know I can’t tell,” Allison said. “But what makes you say that?”

“Checked me out first, I heard a distinct disco beat from the iPod, and he had a new now-it’s-legal wedding ring,” Kealey answered.

“Jesus, Ryan,” she said lightly but with an edge of disapproval in her voice.“Did you ever meet a stereotype you didn’t embrace?”

“Was I wrong?”

She didn’t answer, which was an answer. She had released his arm to protest. He took her hand in his.

“Putting aside the sensitivity training that you got that I missed,” Kealey said, “is that what bothered you? My profiling?”

She walked in silence . . . in thought. He gave her time. He glanced at an alternative press headline in a plastic newspaper kiosk. He remembered when the concerns of those things were about people’s liberty, not pets and the rights of the physical planet.

“It isn’t the profiling,” she said.

“Good, because you know it’s a useful tool.”

“I don’t want to get into rights issues, Ryan. It’s the fact that I’m trained to do this kind of analysis, and I still have to talk to people to root out what they’re about. You do it in about a second—”

“Less,” he said with a wink.

“And you’re generally close to a bull’s-eye.”

“I have to be, but it ages me,” he said. “My body draws energy on account, and I never really stop to replenish. We’ve talked about that. I’m like a weightlifter who doesn’t eat enough meat.”

“It’s funny,” she said. “It’s your body that reacts—yet we call it intelligence work.”

The oxymoronic assessment was not as sarcastic as it sounded. Kealey had often told his former CIA boss, Jonathan Harper, that the biggest drawback to any bureaucracy was what he called the 3Bs—the Brawny Brain Bank. Good ideas entered any system at the bottom. By the time they reached the top, hoisted on the tops of shoulders, the idea had been replaced by muscle. That was how targeted assassinations became full-scale invasions, how secret ambassadorial missions became declarations of war, how stakeouts became raids. It didn’t matter which level or branch of government it was—that was how it went.

“There, you see?”Allison said.

“What?” Kealey asked. He had already forgotten what they were talking about. His brain didn’t really want to work today.

“You’re looking around, humming. I think about things. You don’t.”

“Actually, I
was
thinking.”

“You were musing, ruminating—I know the look. It’s free-form, your mind drifting free as a little cloud.”

“If you say so—”

“I do. My brain is like an old adding machine and we end up in the same place—your instinct and my thought. Only you get there faster. It’s mildly annoying.”

Her little smile and tight hug on his arm didn’t soften . . . much less the frustration she obviously felt.

“But I do the process less completely than you do,” he said. “And I’m not looking to cure someone. Usually, I’m deciding whether or not to shoot them. I create an outline of some person or event. You assemble a treatise. I form instant impressions, you conduct careful studies. There’s a big difference in what we do.“

She liked that. He could tell by the way her mouth relaxed; her hold on his arm relaxed just a little, and she looked down. She always did that when a topic was done. That was something else that came with profiling: it made dating easier.

No
, Kealey thought,
I am happy to be here now, doing what I’m doing, not rushing to someone or someplace in crisis.
Which was exactly why, a few hours later,
astzatziki
sauce dripped from pork to the napkin on his knee, coating his fingers, he was not surprised when his cell phone finally did vibrate. Fate disfavored the contented.

Kealey glanced at the number as he chewed.

“Fletcher Clarke,” he said, answering Allison’s querying look.

“Does he know you are in D.C?”

“I didn’t tell him,” Kealey said somewhat uneasily since Clarke rarely called for social reasons. But he unlocked the phone and answered the call.

“General, you’re on speaker, so don’t say anything sensitive.”

“I called your office at the university, and they said you were in town for a few days. Exactly where are you?” Clarke asked.

“Not far from the foot of the Great Emancipator, on the edge of the Reflecting Pool—trying to decide whether I should jump in.”

“Not just now,” Clarke said.

“I’m listening, General.”

“Your Uncle Largo—are you close?”

“Well, I guess you could say sort of. I don’t see him much because he lives on Long Island, about a half hour by train outside New York City.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“About a decade ago at my aunt’s funeral. Why? What’s up?”

“I’ll tell you when you get to the White House,” he said.

Kealey hesitated. Clarke heard it.

“Come on, Ryan. You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

“It always is. When do you need me?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Scale of one-to-ten—”

“Multiple converging lines. An eight with a possible ticking clock.”

“Who else?”

“Breen, the President, a physicist on her way—and Carlson.”

“Aw, jeez.”

“You don’t have to work with him, Ryan—just listen to whatever he has to say.”

“Why? It’s usually too cautious and too late.”

“Ryan? We need you here.”

Kealey looked at Allison. She understood it was serious. Kealey stuck the rest of the gyro in his mouth and picked up his can of Sprite Zero.

“On my way now,” said, rising. “And I’m sorry, General.”

“For?”

“That ‘always is’ crack. It wasn’t aimed at you. I’m just—”

“Tired. I know,” Clarke said. “Me, too.”

Kealey said he’d see him in a few minutes and hung up. He looked at Allison. “Sorry, babe.”

“Hey, if you don’t want to be alone, you don’t date a doctor, a firefighter, or Superman.”

“I’m off to find a phone booth.” He smiled and kissed her.

“Mmm. Oniony.”

“You want to power walk with me?”

“No—I think I’ll sit here for a while and savor. It was a good weekend.”

He kissed her again. “The best. I’ll call you later.”

He saw in her eyes that she didn’t really believe that, and she wasn’t wrong. When you went to the White House on business, you were either out in a few minutes or stuck in a black hole where time vanished.

It was just about a quarter mile to the White House, and he walked briskly along Constitution Avenue NW, sipping his soda, and trying to imagine what national emergency could possibly involve his secretive Uncle Largo.

Whatever it was, he found himself uncharacteristically eager to get to the meeting and find out. He tossed the empty can in the trash and picked up the pace as he hurried along 17th Street NW, past the Ellipse toward the White House.

 

 

“We need to know what the damn thing smells like.”

Kealey sat in the Oval Office with General Clarke, Admiral Breen, the President, Secretary of Homeland Security Max Carlson, and Secretary of State Jeff Dryfoos. It was Carlson who had made that colorful declaration.

“After nearly sixty years in the ice, I’d say it smells pretty fresh,” Kealey said.

“
Too
fresh,” Clarke added.

“And what about this sinking?” the President asked. “Was the blast on the frigate self-inflicted?”

The men were seated around a glass-topped coffee table in the middle of the room. The President was at one end, Breen at the other. Clarke and Kealey were sitting side by side, sharing a folder of gathered intelligence. Carlson was across from them. The white folder, boldly printed “Top Secret” in red across the top on front, contained the relevant section of Captain Kealey’s transcript, data records of the Arctic coordinates going back a quarter century, photos of the Iranian frigate taken as it cruised international waters prior to the encounter—and now printed images, just brought in by the President’s chief of staff, emailed to Carlson, showing the last seconds in the career of the
Jamaran.

“The explosion took place aft, in the weapons bay,” Breen said. “Not in a series, as if a warhead had detonated and then took out others, but in a single blast.”

“So, intentional,” the President said.

“Clearly.”

The President’s executive secretary knocked on the door and announced Rayhan Jafari. The President waved her in. Dressed in beige slacks and a white blouse, the young woman stepped in. The President continued waving her over. He indicated an empty chair beside Admiral Breen, who was looking at a laptop to his right.

“We just had a flyover by a Seahawk from the USS
Harry S. Truman
,” Breen said as the woman sat. “That was twenty-one minutes ago, an hour and five minutes after the explosion was detected. Chopper crew reported slightly elevated levels of radiation in the sea.”

“What is ‘slightly elevated’?” the President asked.

“The raw readings are 400 nm, up from 280 registered on the ship—”

“Those are nanometers—ultraviolet from the sun,” Rayhan said. “That uptick would be from a lack of cloud cover, not from plutonium.”

Breen’s jawline stiffened as he continued. “The seawater also had a radiation level of .2 pc.” He stopped and waited.

“That’s definitely from the ship—or whatever the ship had onboard,” she said. “Since the Japanese tsunami, all oceanic radiation has been elevated slightly. This reading is double that level.”

“Would you say the object was still onboard?” the President asked.

“No, sir. I would expect to see somewhere in the neighborhood of ten picocuries per gram for exposed plutonium, even underwater.”

“What impact would that have on a human being?” Kealey asked.

“They would die,” she replied. “Quickly.”

Clarke and Breen looked at the President at the same time.

“Suicide,” Carlson said. “Mass suicide.”

There was a moment of silence, broken by the President. “But after the plutonium had been handed off.” He shuffled through the papers, stopped at a satellite image. “By this hot spot in the fog.”

“That is not a radiation signature,” Rayhan said, looking across at the image.

“Heat,” Clarke said. “Oh, I’m sorry—Ryan Kealey, this is Rayhan Jafari, my radiation expert. Rayhan, Mr. Kealey is formerly of the CIA, now—”

“Not,” Kealey interrupted, smiling at the woman. “Happy to meet you.”

“The same.”

“So we have a source of plutonium. We have it leaving the frigate, but we don’t know where it went,” the President said.

“Sir, we’re scanning and coordinating data now,” Carlson said. “Satellite, radar, and radio chatter between commercial vessels. We’ll find it.”

“ ‘It,’ ” the President said, flipping back through the folder. “Ryan, what about your uncle? Do you think he can help us here?”

“Mr. President, I sincerely do not know. Uncle Largo has never discussed his wartime service with me, even when I asked.”

“This is national security, not the Kealey Thanksgiving table,” Carlson angrily pointed out.