The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (9 page)

Kealey smirked. “And yet—we have turkey.”

“Don’t!” Clarke snapped.

Carlson glared. The President ignored them, as he did all intramural squabbles, checking the message alert on his laptop. Kealey caught Rayhan’s little smile. That made the rebuke tolerable.

“Sorry, Mr. Secretary,” Kealey said.

“You
do
understand that we’re concerned with national security and untold lives here, not your feelings.”

“I understand it as well as you do, Mr. Carlson—”

“Back on topic,” Clarke said angrily.

“—but I have asked my uncle, man to man, to talk about what he did for the OSS. It’s something
I
wanted to know. He has always refused. Not declined: shook his head and said no more. I think secrecy is so deeply bred into him he literally couldn’t do it.”

“Would you get him to
try
?” Clarke asked in a hard voice that was more of a command. Since Kealey no longer worked for the government, the general had to couch it with the lightest dusting of deference.

“Of course, sir,” Kealey said. “I’m just not clear what we’re looking for. His debrief seems pretty thorough.”

“He’s—what, late eighties?” Breen inquired.

“That’s about right,” Kealey said. “I wouldn’t count on age to have—what’s the expression? ‘Withered him’?”

“ ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,’ ” Rayhan said. “Shakespeare.
Antony and Cleopatra
. He helped me to learn English.”

The President looked up. “Thank you for restoring civility to this meeting.”

The young woman smiled slightly, blushed, and looked down at Carlson’s file.

“I’ll check to see if he’s home—” offered Kealey.

“He’s home, Mr. Kealey,” the President said. He indicated the laptop. “An FBI field agent is mowing his lawn right now.”

Kealey nodded. “I’ll grab my toothbrush and leave at once.”

“I’m wondering if it would help to have Ms. Jafari with you,” the President asked.

Kealey regarded her. “I think most men would rather talk to her than to me.”

Carlson was professional enough not to comment.

The President regarded her. “Would you mind? You might hear or ask something Mr. Kealey could miss.”

“Not at all, sir.”

The meeting broke up quickly, Carlson remaining behind and the President’s chief of staff arranging for a car to take Kealey and Rayhan to get their belongings and then to Quantico. From there, a Marine Corps helicopter would ferry the two to New York.

Clarke buttonholed Kealey in the corridor outside the Oval Office. They stepped away from the earshot of the Secret Service agent stationed there.

“Does everything have to be a battle getting to the actual battle—” Clarke asked in a loud whisper.

“It’s how I stay in shape.”

“
And
a joke?”

Kealey looked down. He was looking at his shoes but what he saw was a park with Allison Dearborn and a sense of peace. “If I didn’t jab at these guys I’d kill them.”

“We’re not here to be best buddies,” Clarke said. “We’re here to protect the nation.”

“These guys? They’re here to wield power. Against enemies if they can, against allies if they can’t. Sharing information—horse hockey. The unified intelligence services made a big intelligence bureaucracy with fewer seats on top. Carlson’s king of his hill and a big part of his job is to swat at guys like me who help elevate guys like you. You respect the people in the field, General, because you’ve been there. Carlson’s just a user and a self-promoting bureaucrat.”

“With whom I defend our shores.” Clarke pulled Kealey closer to the wall, his voice a hoarse, conspiratorial whisper. “I told you I was tired, Ryan, but that’s not the half of it. We’ve thrown this big K-rail of Homeland Security against enemy traffic, but instead of fighting for the win, the services are fighting to get their mouths to the trickle-down flow of intel. That only allows us to flex certain muscles. Plus I’m doing double the work.” He jerked his head toward the Oval Office. “I have to play the diplomat at every meeting. I don’t tell. I suggest. I don’t require, I requisition. We’re all doing that.”

“You’ve got Streaming Intelligence—”

“Yeah, with a couple of kids, one of them a freaking genius, basically sitting on their hands and watching computer programs do all the work. Programs written by one group, shared by all of us, non-actionable without going through the proper channels. I tell you, Ryan, my damn hands are tied in a way that they never were in the field. All that bonhomie after September 11—it got big-governmentized the way everything does. It’s enough to make me a MiLF.

“Come again?”

“Military Libertarian Fanatic,” Clarke said. “Breen and I came up with that.”

Kealey’s mouth twisted. “And
I’m
a joker?”

“I know, but we needed something to smile about in these sweatbox sessions.” Clarke sighed. “It’s tough to stay focused, Ryan. I wouldn’t tell that to anyone but you because I know what you’ve accomplished. That’s why you keep getting dragged back in. I need someone I can hand off to.”

Kealey wished he didn’t understand; it would be easier to turn Clarke or Andrews or any of these guys down whenever they called. But he knew what Clarke was facing here, what the country was facing “out there,” and so he kept coming back.

“I wonder how he did it?” Kealey asked.

“Who?”

“Uncle Largo,” Kealey said.

“We beat the enemy that was on his plate,” Clarke said. “He probably felt the Reds were the next guy’s problem.”

Clarke wished Kealey well, then went to confer with Breen in the admiral’s West Wing office. Clarke understood that Kealey’s independence was what made him so effective, but his outspokenness had always been an abrasive part of their relationship dating back to when they first met in the Army. Military men like Clarke and Breen at least had some schooling in the essentials of détente; civilians like Carlson did not; and Kealey had simply never cared.

Kealey and Rayhan followed an intern toward the West Wing exit, where a black sedan with smoky windows was already waiting.

“I’ve never flown anything but commercial,” Rayhan said excitedly.

“It’s convenient,” Kealey said. “Best thing is, no nanny flight attendants.

The first stop was Kealey’s hotel room across the street. Even though he was here on vacation, out of habit, he always had a bag ready and was out in less than two minutes.

“You’ve obviously done this before. I guess at home you don’t have pets or plants,” Rayhan remarked after he’d placed the backpack in the trunk.

“When I had my house in Maine, I had a garden. I found a three-legged box turtle in that garden one day. All of them—the turtle and the garden—died within days of one another. And I was home the entire time.”

“I hope you did not attribute that to bad karma or a touch of death.”

“Why do you hope that? Worried about me already?”

“I am worried about myself,” she said. “Whatever happens I will be in close proximity to you.”

Kealey laughed. “No, it wasn’t that. I attribute it to reality: not taking an injured turtle to a vet and having a brown thumb.”

“I am relieved,” she said. “What did you bring with you? What should
I
bring?”

“Bare essentials for a day or two. And your passport.”

“All of that for a trip to New York?”

He grinned. “I was never a Boy Scout—in any sense of the word—but I always subscribed to their motto: Be prepared.”

She understood.

“How long have you worked for the DNI?” Kealey asked, wanting to know more about his traveling companion.

“Nearly two years. It is a perfect home for a Farsi-speaking physicist.”

Kealey didn’t ask her how often Tehran tried to get her to work for them. He suspected that apart from being an asset as an employee, she was probably unwitting bait for several counterespionage agencies. He would be shocked if eyes weren’t on her round-the-clock, if her electronics were not being watched, if everyone of Middle Eastern descent whom she knew, contacted, or who contacted her weren’t being observed—closely.

The young woman’s eager reserve was a welcome distraction. They could not discuss the matter at hand—not until they were onboard the chopper, whose flight crew would have the appropriate security clearance. So during the comfortable backseat drive they talked about her background, her training—she received her Ph.D. from Oxford—and how she came to the U.S. He had pinned her as a long-time London resident from her accent and wondered why British intelligence hadn’t sought her out.

“They did, but I felt I should be on my own,” she said. “My parents are very traditional. The pressure to marry is unrelenting.”

He left the comment alone. It was a familiar story with few variations. She asked about him. He told her how he had a master’s degree in business from Duke, ROTC’d his way to first lieutenant on graduation, and immediately signed up with the Green Berets. He made major in eight years and would have been happy to serve his twenty—until a traitor killed everyone in his outfit and left Kealey for dead. After months of recuperation, Kealey tied up that inside job in such a way as to leave him two options: court-martial or resignation. He opted to quit and was immediately scooped up by the CIA.

“But you left that, too,” she said. “Because of men like—back there?”

“Partly that, but partly the bloodshed,” he said. “You’re either watching someone or killing someone. There isn’t much gray. So I went up to Maine to teach and now I am guest lecturing at the University of Virginia—but they kept calling and I kept coming and here I am again.”

“The killing—it’s to protect the country.”

“It is. As Thomas Jefferson said, the tree of liberty does require occasional bloodshed. Making that call, though—it requires both intellectual certainty and emotional detachment. I never mastered the latter. You remember the massacres in Houla, Syria, last year?”

“Of course.”

“The group that did them, the Shabiha, were the government’s strong-arm mercenaries,” Kealey said. “I read the interviews with survivors. They went into homes and stabbed, face-to-face, men, then women, then children. Or they lined them up and put a bullet in the foreheads of each individual. The Shabiha ignored their pleas. Maybe they enjoyed them, I don’t know. But they did the job methodically and thoroughly—over one hundred times. That’s the kind of ruthlessness a killer needs.”

“I heard many such stories growing up, listening from behind closed doors. It is sadism.”

“That’s another word for it,” Kealey agreed. “Whatever you call it, it was never just a job to me—even when I was going after a killer, even when I was saving the life of one of my men. What was worse, though, was that part of me envied the guys who
could
kill.”

She looked at Kealey the way Carlson had twenty minutes earlier. “They have no humanity.”

“They don’t smell a barbecue and think of a hut they torched with someone inside. They don’t splatter soup or tomato paste and think of a knife opening someone’s heart or throat. They don’t have a normal conversation and find themselves looking at a person’s eyes and wonder what the technical difference is between a living eye and a dead one. They do their deeds and move on.”

“But life without a soul . . .”

“Not one I’d want,” Kealey agreed. “That said, I could do without the thoughts and visions and nightmares that won’t let you write over them. Somewhere in here”—he tapped his nose—“there’s always the tart smell of gunpowder or the almond smell of C-4 or the combination of iron-scented blood and landfill rot they left behind in a cave or village or sniper’s post in a lonely apartment. Desk jockeys like Carlson back there don’t understand that. They don’t understand that sometimes, men like my Uncle Largo don’t talk because if they did,
this
is what would come out. Bitter, unbidden disgust. Revulsion about what you do, however necessary, and what you had to overlook to do it.”

“I understand,” she said. “But I would have pulled the trapdoor on Saddam Hussein without thinking, for what he did to the people of Iran during the war. I would do the same to those who oppress that nation now, hanging gay men from construction cranes. I do not think I would feel the anger you feel.”

Kealey grinned. “It’s not anger, Rayhan. I’ve never said it wasn’t necessary, and I do it all very, very well. My shrink, Allison, thinks my id likes killing and my ego and superego team up to keep that desire in check.” He shrugged. “She’s probably right. She usually is. If I hated it the way I just described, why would I be back?”

“You call your shrink by her first name?”

Kealey laughed inside.
The things that make an impression on people
—

“Yes. We have an unorthodox relationship.”

Rayhan sat back. “I do not doubt that all of what you say goes on inside. But I believe you are a patriot. I believe one can kill justly, and that you have. Not liking it—that is what makes sure the cause is righteous.”

Kealey was smiling to himself. What she had just told him was Psych 101. He knew all that even before he was ordered to see Allison.

From the first, their sessions had not been what he was expecting. Unlike civilian psychologists who let the patient do the talking and tend mostly to guide the conversation, shrinks who work for law enforcement and intelligence have to determine, pretty quickly, whether patients, who were relatively few in number and trained at great expense, are fit for duty. That requires more pushing and harder probing than typical “real world” sessions.

Also, Allison had a service file she had been able to review. Within minutes after they had started talking she had taken Kealey to what Rayhan had missed—perhaps because of her age, perhaps because of her limited experience. The psychological combat zone that Allison called “the gray areas.”