Day of Reckoning (Shadow Warriors) Page 11

  Of course. Thomas shook his head. What a day…he knew Tex didn’t drink. He went to the same church as Harry—of course he didn’t drink. How could it have slipped his mind?

  “What would you recommend?”

  “Maybe a Dark and Stormy?” the bartender asked speculatively, looking up from the shot glass he was wiping. “Jamaican rum and ginger beer.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “He’s here,” Tex announced beneath his breath, waiting until the bartender had turned to fill the order. Thomas looked up into the mirrors, seeing the form of the DCS, a shadowy presence in the door of the bar.

  Nine o’clock on the dot. 2100 hours. Punctual as ever.

  The Dark Lord crossed the barroom and put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Glad to see you could make it, boys.”

  And then he was gone, moving toward an empty booth at the back of the pub. Thomas put out a hand toward his glass, tilting it back with a sudden, brusque motion. The rum slid down his throat, warming him against the coldness within.

  It wasn’t going to be enough. He drained the glass and set it back down on the bar, following after Kranemeyer.

  Party’s over.

  9:05 P.M.

  The foreclosed house

  New Market, Virginia

  She wasn’t sleeping. Harry knew it from the moment he walked into the room, but he closed the door with all the care he would have shown if she’d been sound asleep.

  He shifted the AK-47 to his right hand and sat down quietly in the recliner. The rifle had been chosen from the weapons in the vehicle after a moment’s careful consideration. The motorcyclists had been wearing body armor.

  He could barely make out Carol’s form in the darkness, laying there on the bed, wrapped up in the sleeping bag they’d brought from the safehouse.

  Laying there awake. He could tell by her breathing—he’d had a lifetime of listening to people sleep. Not all of them had woken back up.

  Harry leaned back in the recliner, letting the assault rifle rest across his lap. It was cold in the house, bitterly cold, but there was no way around it, with the utilities cut to the house. The bi-level, like so many houses built in the mid-90s, had been built with no thought of any heat source aside from electric. It hadn’t been until near the end of the Obama administration, when utility rates had skyrocketed, that people had started to reconsider.

  Cold. Yeah, that’s where he was. Out in the cold. He’d known it from the moment he had seen his picture splashed across Rhoda Stevens’ TV screen along with the Bureau’s APB. A bad picture, blurry even…but that life was forever over. His days on the run were only beginning.

  Harry rose to his feet, a slightly sardonic smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He ran a gloved hand over the receiver of the Kalashnikov, feeling cold gunmetal through the neoprene fabric. Perhaps he’d always known that it would come to this.

  9:15 P.M.

  The Black Rooster

  Washington, D.C.

  One thing that inevitably resulted in social awkwardness among spies was a universal desire to sit facing the door. It was a mark of their respect for the older man that Thomas and Tex gave Bernard Kranemeyer that seat.

  Respect, and to the extent that such men gave it, their trust. He’d been through enough hell to earn it.

  Thomas was on his second Dark and Stormy by the time the DCS got to the point of the meeting. Taking a small HP netbook out of the satchel at his side, he set it on the table and booted it up.

  Once he had the thing running, he withdrew a hand from his coat pocket and inserted a USB thumb drive into the side port of the small computer. Another moment, and a file from the thumb drive filled the screen.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Tex asked, his dark eyes narrowing into obsidian daggers as he glared across the table at Kranemeyer.

  The director’s mouth reshaped itself into a tight-lipped smile.

  “I thought about stuffing them down the front of my boxers, but,” he shrugged, “file theft has come a long way since the days of Sandy Berger.”

  “Why don’t we start with what this file is and what it’s doing outside Agency walls,” Thomas interjected, licking the last of the rum off his lips. He suddenly wasn’t thirsty.

  Kranemeyer sighed. “You probably heard that I received a call from Nichols shortly after he went rogue this morning.”

  A nod from both men. “During the call, Nichols used the emergency code Free fall.”

  Thomas exchanged a look with his partner. “Never heard of it.”

  “That’s what Lasker said too,” the DCS nodded. “Before your time.”

  He cleared his throat. “It was late November of 2000—things were heating up in the West Bank.” A snort of disgust. “Scratch that—when do things ever cool down over in that godforsaken piece of real estate?”

  A cheer went up from the crowd playing darts at one end of the bar and Kranemeyer’s eyes swept the room. No visible threats. “David Lay was in his third year as the Agency’s Station Chief Tel Aviv, which meant Operation RUMBLEWAY was under his operational control. I was still in the military, but wound up attached to Langley’s Operations Directorate for the duration of the mission.”

  He gestured to the screen. “These are the mission files for RUMBLEWAY. Nichols met me on the ground at Ben Gurion and briefed me on our way into the embassy. He struck me as little more than a kid, but as it turned out…he already had nearly a year of black ops experience under his belt. He knew the languages, he knew the culture, and he knew the players in the region. Word in the field was that he was the second coming of Lawrence of Arabia. In the days before 9/11, no one knew the region better than Nichols, and no one had his respect for the people and their faith. Time was, I wondered if he was a Muslim himself. As it turned out, that wasn’t accurate.”

  “What was the purpose of RUMBLEWAY?” Tex interrupted quietly.

  “It was just after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The NSA had traced a transfer of money from the PLO to the families of the suicide bombers. Nothing unusual there, but they dug deeper—found out that a member of the PLO had run support for the operation, working with bin Laden. An odd marriage that, but that’s terrorism for you.”

  An ironic chuckle escaped the lips of the DCS as he leaned back in his chair. “He’d been on Mossad’s radar for nearly twenty years—they’d tried to take him out in ’93, but the Clinton administration got wind of it and pressured Rabin to rescind the kill order. The dirtbag—I’ll call him Yusuf—was Arafat’s cousin.”

  8:29 P.M. Central Time

  An apartment

  Dearborn, Michigan

  The rattle of gunfire over the cranked-up TV speakers nearly drowned out the sound of the key in the front door. Nearly, but not quite.

  Nasir Khalidi looked up from his videogame controller in time to see his brother push the door open. When he glanced back at the screen, his character was lying dead on the ground, felled by a sniper’s bullet.

  Jamal’s face bore an all-too familiar look of righteous disapproval. “The time you waste with that thing…”

  A chuckle escaped Nasir’s lips as he tapped the reload button. “It’s a nice way to wind down after eight hours hanging onto the back of a truck.”

  Five seconds, he thought. Wait for it.

  It was more like ten, this time. Then, Jamal’s voice from the kitchenette, in an oft-repeated, “Nice way to wind down? A tool of imperialism, you mean.” His brother popped back out of the kitchenette like a rabbit out of its hole and stood there watching him, his arms folded. “You do know that the American government uses these—these games, as you call them, to train their crusaders, to condition them to kill our brothers in the house of Islam.”

  Nasir shrugged, taking another sip from his Mountain Dew. “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

  “If that’s the way I want to look at it!”

  “Relax,” Nasir replied, hitting the POWER button to shut off both the TV and the vi
deo game console. It was going to be one of those nights. “You’ve lost your sense of humor, my brother. What’s happened to you?”

  He saw his brother pause, as if there was an answer there on his lips. An answer he would not speak.

  At length, Jamal walked back to the couch, standing behind him hesitantly. “Forgive me, brother…family should not argue like this. What’s happened to me? I have found a faith that I once thought I’d lost,” he whispered, a reverent intensity in his voice, along with a shadow of the brother he once had been. “And it has given me purpose in this life of ours. That’s all I want for you.”

  He reached down, squeezing Nasir’s shoulder. “That’s all our father would have wanted.”

  And then he was gone, leaving Nasir sitting alone in the cramped, now-darkened living room of the small apartment.

  Family. That meant everything—their only lifeline back to the world they had once known. No matter their differences, he couldn’t betray that…which was why Jamal’s name had never appeared in the reports he left in weekly dead drops in exchange for his freedom.

  And yet he knew, much as he had tried to deny it—had tried to lie to himself.

  It has given me purpose…

  His brother was involved.

  9:32 P.M. Eastern Time

  The Black Rooster

  Washington, D.C.

  “…we knew we couldn’t go after Yusuf without the Israelis’ help, and the last thing Bill Clinton wanted to do was offend Arafat in the very twilight of his presidency.” Kranemeyer snorted. “For all I know, he might have even thought of pardoning the dirtbag, but someone convinced him that we could make the snatch. Grab him in the West Bank, throw a bag over his head and fly him out to Egypt. Let Mubarak’s boys give him a going over.”

  “Extraordinary rendition,” Tex remarked quietly. It seemed strange to refer to Mubarak now, years after his fall from power, but he had once been the face of Egypt.

  A nod from the DCS. “Exactly, but things didn’t go as planned.”

  “Does it ever?” Thomas asked, a caustic edge to his voice. He glanced down at the glass of brandy in his hand, his third drink of the night. The liquor was starting to affect him, he knew that—but hang it all, what a day!

  “On the day of the operation, Nichols went into Ramallah before dawn, carrying a Kalashnikov and dressed as a Palestinian fellah. We didn’t hear from him for hours. I suited up with Avi ben Shoham and an assault team from the Sayeret Matkal. We were going to head into Ramallah in the back of a pick-up truck, black balaclavas over our heads and flying the green flag of Hamas. Any luck, the PLO and Hamas would blame each other, not us.”

  The DCS paused to take a sip of his drink. “With twenty minutes to go, Nichols made contact. Free fall. That particular emergency code had been designated as the signal for mission abort. Turns out we’d been walking straight into a trap. At first we thought our informant had sold us down the river, but five days later, the man’s body was dropped off in front of the embassy gates in Tel Aviv, his genitals cut off and stuffed in his mouth.”

  That was the Middle East for you, Thomas thought, glancing around the bar in hopes of catching the eye of a waitress to refill his drink. They played hardball. “What happened to Yusuf?”

  “Six weeks after the abort of RUMBLEWAY, Yusuf stepped into his car and it blew up, killing him, his bodyguard, and his fourteen-year-old son. Our best intel was that it was a Mossad hit.” The DCS shook his head. “Moral of the story? Don’t mess with the Jews.”

  Tex cleared his throat. “What’s all that got to do with today?”

  Thomas smiled to himself, turning his glass between his fingers. Right to the point, as always. No beating around the bush. That was Tex.

  “Just to be honest with you, I don’t know,” Kranemeyer replied. “But it was the only operation that Lay, Nichols, and I were all involved in—before I became DCS.”

  “A signal?” Thomas asked.

  The older man nodded. “Ten minutes after the attack on Lay’s SUV, a call was placed from an encrypted satellite phone in the area. From what Fort Meade has been able to decrypt, the caller used the phrase Eaglefire. That was also a RUMBLEWAY code.” He leaned across the table. The music was changing in the bar, a hard beat replacing the slower vibe of happy hour. The voice of Bruce Springsteen belting out “Born in the U.S.A” served to further obscure Kranemeyer’s words.

  “I’m not going to ask either of you if you know where Nichols went,” the DCS began. Neither of them looked at each other. “But I know how these things go. Everyone in this business has a fall-back plan. We did back in my Delta Force days, I still do. The FBI catches up with Harry, they’re going to toss him in a cell and throw away the key. And if my suspicions are correct, if he’s acting on orders from David Lay, we need to talk to him first.”

  “And you want us to find him for you?” Tex asked, his eyes a dark void as he stared across at their boss.

  “Officially,” Kranemeyer replied, closing the netbook and returning it to the satchel at his side, “no. Everyone knows the CIA can’t operate on U.S. soil.”

  His eyes hardened, a look of determination passing over his features. “Unofficially…don’t come back without him.” Kranemeyer rose, pulling on his overcoat. “And if it turns out he is part of the problem, well, you know what to do. Good huntin’, boys.”

  And he was gone…

  Chapter 6

  4:00 A.M., December 14th

  The foreclosed house

  New Market, Virginia

  She could feel him, there in the darkness. Could feel his eyes, watching her. What time was it?

  A hand pressed gently down on her shoulder. “Time to leave.”

  Harry’s voice. Carol rolled onto her back, stretching wearily as she looked up at him. She could barely make out his face against the darkness.

  “Get any sleep?”

  Her only reply was a shake of the head. She unzipped the sleeping bag and swung her legs out over the side of the bed. “You?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice it.” A mirthless chuckle punctuated his words. “Got six inches of snow last night, still coming down.”

  His voice had changed, she noticed. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Could be,” he responded, looking at her as he rolled up the sleeping bag. “Might be a blessing—the snow is going to ground their choppers, but they’ll fling out a wider dragnet today all the same.”

  She reached for the Kahr and slipped it inside her jacket, close to her body. “Do you have a plan?”

  “Might call it that.”

  4:23 A.M.

  The Virginia-West Virginia Border

  Near Orkney

  The morning was cold—cold and dark, falling snow highlighted against blue and red flashing lights. The metal barrel of the Mossberg 500 in the hands of Sheriff’s Deputy Ricardo Sanchez was colder still.

  Murmuring an oath under his breath, the twenty-seven-year-old Sanchez laid the shotgun across the hood of the Shenandoah County Sheriff’s car and reached for a thermos of coffee.

  Four hours. Three to go. Man, it was raw. The form of his partner materialized from the other side of the two-car roadblock on the Virginia side of the mountain bridge.

  “What’s the news?” Sanchez asked, spotting the cellphone.

  “Nada, Rick,” Deputy Matthew Wilkes responded, slinging his department-issued AR-15 over his shoulder. “That was the wife. Wondering when I’d be back. She’s cold.”

  Sanchez laughed at that. He just had to. “Married three months, right? How’d she stay warm before she ran into the likes of you?”

  “Never asked,” Wilkes responded with a wry chuckle. “Not sure I want to know.”

  “Smart man. It’s what, ten minutes till checkin?”

  “Five. They upped the frequency—this Nichols fellow has somebody’s shorts in a bind for some reason.”

  “You see the info dump on FOX News at eleven?” Sanchez asked, shooting a look of disbelief
over at his partner. “Afghanistan, Iraq—this guy’s been everywhere, and that’s just the stuff they’re willing to talk about.”

  “So?”

  Sanchez shook his head. Wilkes had always been one to talk tough—usually he could back it up. But tonight? “So…we’re dealing with Jason Bourne and you’d better be taking it seriously, compadre.”

  4:31 A.M.

  The safehouse

  Culpeper, Virginia

  “Listen, I’m sorry, fellas.” It was probably the sixth time those words had come from Steve McNab’s lips in five hours, the words of a man who didn’t know what else to say

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” Thomas responded, looking over his shoulder at the retired F-16 pilot who’d been the safehouse’s caretaker. “You followed protocol. Protocol said if the chalk was up, you were to stay away. So you stayed away until you got our call.”

  “Sometimes protocol bites you in the butt,” came Tex’s succinct comment. He was kneeling at the door of the open gun safe, a notepad in his hands.

  “Give us a few, Steve,” Thomas asked, motioning for the pilot to leave the room. He waited until McNab had disappeared behind the closing door and opened the screen of his laptop. “Harry’s driving a 2004 Ford Excursion, NY plates, license number Alpha Delta niner Romeo two seven. The vehicle is registered under the name Robert L. Stephenson, so that’s likely his alias.”

  Tex looked up from his notes. “Any credit cards under that name?”

  “Likely—I’m looking into it now.”

  “Harry always preferred American Express, if that helps any.”

  “Figures,” Thomas said, clicking rapidly through the onscreen database. “Don’t leave home without it. Got it—expiration date 2/18, registered in the name of Robert Lewis Stephenson. Well, he’s not lost his sense of humor.”

  “Gonna be able to do anything with it?”

  Thomas’s eyes narrowed as he scrolled down to the bottom of the screen. “Think so. The trouble is going to be doing it without Langley’s firepower. There’s a backdoor into the AmEx network—Carol showed me how to get in during the Caracas op two years ago.”

  “Caracas?” Tex asked, getting up and coming over to the laptop. “That was right after she came to Langley—how’d she have the clearance to know about a backdoor like that?”