by Jim Geraghty
After Katrina and Alec completed detailing every moment on the ground in Turkmenistan and Cyprus, filling in the gaps in the local agency station reports, Mitchell’s face cycled through several dozen emotions and he rubbed his temples for thirty seconds or so.
“When I talk to the president an hour from now, he is going to want to know … is the threat contained?”
Raquel raised a hand and turned the room’s attention to a PowerPoint she had prepared and loaded onto the room’s computer and display monitors.
“Our best estimate is that the Isoptera program recruited about sixty young men and set them up as Atarsa sleeper agents. Five were killed in the first round of attacks—Detroit, Beverly Hills, et cetera. Four were captured in the second round of attacks, the ones where they posted the video of the targets a few days beforehand—Sidwell Friends and the rest. Five more were killed or apprehended after the restaurant stabbing attacks in Columbus, Nashville, Jacksonville, Boston, and Washington. Three more were caught in Princeton, Manhattan, and Buffalo. A fourth was shot by police in Chicago. There was a fifth attacker …” She looked over at Ward, who refused to let her take any heat for his actions.
Ward interrupted. “I intercepted Norman Fein as he was preparing an attack on the William and Mary campus.”
Mitchell put his finger to his chin. “And what did you do with him, Mr. Rutledge?”
Ward looked for the right words. “The woods are dark and scary, sir, very easy to get lost out there.”
The FBI representative at the other end of table cleared his throat. “The information I have here from the Virginia State Police is they’re treating him for exposure and dehydration. They found him gagged and bound to a tree.”
Ten heads turned to Ward in unison, all sharing the same skeptical and disapproving look.
“There are a lot of ways something like that could have happened,” Ward said, waving his hand. “Camping trip gone wrong. Really elaborate hide-and-seek. Bondage games.”
The old men around the table shook their heads in disapproval.
Raquel continued. “In the past forty-eight hours, the FBI rounded up an additional forty young men who went through the Isoptera program.”
Two of the old men at the table had been tallying the sums themselves on paper in front of them.
Mitchell looked at them. “By my math, that’s fifty-five arrested or killed. If our best estimate is there are sixty of these nut jobs out there …”
Raquel nodded in disappointment. “We cannot say with any certainty that there are no more Atarsa sleepers remaining. The best guess of our analysts is that anywhere from three to ten remain.”
Mitchell sat back in his chair and let out a long sigh.
“There’s one key point to remember,” Katrina said, pointing to the timeline of the attacks. “All of Atarsa’s attacks were carefully scheduled and organized with great discipline. Starting from the New York broadcast, to the poisoning of Director Peck, to the submission of video clips from others … No one from the second wave did anything until the first wave was done. No one from the third wave did anything to even arouse suspicion until the second wave of attacks failed. And so on.”
“Fein would have been part of the fourth wave,” affirmed Ward. He shot a defiant look at the FBI liaison. “Lucky for us, he got a little tied up.”
“The signal hijackings were the ‘go’ signal to each wave of attackers,” Katrina said confidently. “Without a new ‘go’ signal, the remaining Atarsa sleepers may never ‘awaken.’ At the very least, we can be reasonably comfortable that those three to ten sleepers out there are waiting for a launch signal that will never come.”
Mitchell chewed this over.
“And we feel confident telling the president that the signal hijackings are finished because you blew up a church parking lot, am I correct, Ms. Alves?”
Dee shrunk in her chair. He made her elimination of the Atarsa broadcast operation sound so wrong. “Yes, sir. Many frightened commuters, some automobile accidents, but no civilian casualties. Well, no major civilian casualties. I mean, really major.”
“What about this Azi Dhaka figure connected to the charity?” Mitchell asked.
Katrina looked at a detail of the description of Azi Dhaka, only about five feet tall. Grub, the hooded figure who had screamed at them after they found the Atarsa alter in the village, was about that height.
“We encountered a man in the village of Erbent who may have been Azi Dhaka,” Katrina stated.
“He drew a knife on us, we subdued him and then grilled him,” Alec elaborated.
“Grilled him? You didn’t mention an interrogation over there,” Patrick Horne objected.
“No, I mean, he was literally grilled in a propane gas explosion,” Alec answered. “Or if you prefer, flame-broiled.”
Mitchell looked down at the text he was supposed to read aloud to the president. “This ‘Angra Druj,’ Sarvar Rashin woman can’t record any new videos … because Ms. Leonidivna shot her in the head.” He nodded to himself, suspecting the president would find that development satisfying.
“Through it,” Alec corrected.
“Angra Druj had a gun to someone else’s head. Deadly force was necessary and justified,” Katrina said firmly. She looked at Alec, who returned her look with another expression of sheepish gratitude. Mitchell exhaled in what seemed like frustration, and Alec bristled.
“And the ringleader, this former Iranian propaganda officer whose dad worked for Khomeini …” He shot an exasperated look at Alec. He turned the page of the report and winced at a photo of what was left of Gul, taken at the airport. “Jesus Christ, Alec, you knocked him around like he was a … a …” Words failed the director.
“Piñata?” Alec offered. Mitchell shot him a look that shut him up for once.
The director looked down at his yellow legal pad. “This all began, what, a month ago, with Rafiq Tannous coming to Berlin and telling Katrina that Akoman had a mole in this agency. Did you ever encounter anything to support that claim?”
An awkward silence followed. Finally Raquel answered, “You mean besides the fact that you’re sitting at the head of the table right now instead of Peck?”
Mitchell recoiled. “Are you suggesting—”
“Not at all, sir,” Raquel said, raising her hands. “I’m simply saying that if Atarsa had a mole, it would make targeting Director Peck much easier.”
Everyone briefly looked at everyone else around the table with suspicion.
Mitchell looked over his list. “Fein, in the hospital. The broadcast team, dead. Druj, dead. Gul, dead.”
Ward cleared his throat. “Sir, Fabrice Vuscovi, who was coordinating the sleeper agents, is in Inova Fairfax Hospital’s intensive care unit with a severe laceration to her throat from a hand rake and massive blood loss. But she’s not dead!” He gleefully held up two fingers to Alec, raised his eyebrows, and mouthed the word two!, boasting he had managed to not kill either Atarsa operative he had encountered.
Mitchell stared at Ward with a withering stare for ten seconds, and then gave him sarcastic slow applause.
“You five really put me in an impossible situation,” Mitchell fumed. “Sure, you guys cut a path through Atarsa, but you left a trail of bodies halfway across the globe leading right back to this agency! I’m supposed to go to the White House, and the Hill, and our foreign partners, and now I’ve got to explain that we’ve been—”
“With all due respect, sir, how prepared was this agency and this administration?” All the heads in the room snapped to Katrina, the figure least expected to interrupt Mitchell. “How prepared were you?”
Raquel was too surprised to offer any disapproving look. Heck, Katrina was the last person in the world to ever be openly insubordinate, but she never took any grief from anyone, either.
“Atarsa managed to override broadcasting signals, poison your predecessor, and unleash a multi-week campaign of terror on American soil,” Katrina spoke to the man who was her
boss with a tone of confident command. “They planned this and prepared for years. They figured out exactly how to play our media and play our culture to maximize the psychological impact of their attacks. They studied the curdling milk of our culture and exactly how to turn Americans against each other in an unthinking rage. They blindsided everyone, and we started out ten steps behind them. If anybody else in the entire national security community had done a better job at any point, we might not have had to kill everyone we did. And this is with us getting lucky, over and over again! This agency and this administration have to recognize that the way they currently do things, by the time they notice the problem, all the good options are gone.”
Mitchell looked like he had been slapped.
“Considering the scale of this threat, and the exceptional efforts we had to make to eliminate that threat, you have only one appropriate response.” Katrina leaned forward. “Gratitude.”
Mitchell looked more than a little chastened. He nodded.
“All of you fought through hell out there,” he said, quietly at first, finding his voice. “I don’t want it to seem like I’ve forgotten that. And your point, that perhaps we’ve grown far too reactive instead of proactive with threats … well, there are days I would agree with that.”
He looked down and checked his watch.
“I have to get to the White House soon,” Mitchell said. “Rest assured, you’ll all be recognized and commended. We’re just going to have to make sure we’re all on the same page moving forward. Thank you.” He nodded, and they rose.
Mitchell turned to Raquel. “Stay.”
***
In the hallway outside, Patrick Horne made the most cursory of polite nods to Katrina and then scoffed audibly loud enough to an aide, looking at Alec, “Unbelievable.”
Alec stopped and turned. “Yes, that’s right, Patrick,” he said, smiling softly. “My team is unbelievable.”
“Lucky you didn’t get yourself and everyone else killed,” Patrick said. He turned to Katrina. “Watch yourself with this guy, Katrina,” he warned. “Hope it’s worth the risk to your life and career in exchange for …” He let the unfinished sentence hang in the air like a dare, as if what Alec could possibly offer her was unimaginable.
After a long pause, she finished his sentence.
“Full support in everything that I do, and absolute faith in me, even when I don’t have it in myself?” She glanced at Alec and smiled. “Yes. It’s worth it.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Patrick turned and started walking down the hall with his aide.
“Oh, hey, everybody, party at our house, Saturday!” Alec called down the hall. “All of you guys are invited! Deputy directors, executive directors, liaisons …” His voice trailed off as he continued. “All of you old men who hate me.”
“Kind of you to include Patrick,” Katrina noted dryly.
“Oh, Patrick’s not invited, I just want him to know where everybody is going to be having fun without him.”
***
After the others had left and the conference room had cleared, Mitchell removed a folder from his stack, one that included everything he wouldn’t be telling the White House.
“No word on this Mexican Jaguar character either, hm?”
“Everything we have suggests Juan Lopez is in the wind,” she shook her head sadly. “For now.”
Mitchell picked up three pages stapled together, reread a section, and shook his head with amused incredulity.
“I am not telling the president that one of our paramilitary officers claims he saw a giant termite-woman in the greenhouse.”
“Completely understandable, sir,” Raquel said. “The explanation is pretty simple: he was hit with the toxin they used on Director Peck.” It wasn’t the slightest of lip bites that gave her away; Mitchell knew it was a lie before she said it.
“Yeah, that explanation would work really well if I hadn’t already seen the crime lab team’s evaluation of the greenhouse and Rutledge’s post-incident medical evaluation indicating he was never exposed to any hallucinogenic substances.”
Raquel looked down.
“Horne double-checked. Don’t withhold things like that from me,” Mitchell glared. “If Rutledge had a stress-induced hallucination in the field, we can deal with it.”
She nodded and kept to herself the nagging question of how Ward, who had seen all kinds of intense combat situations in his adult life, and who had never given any indication of a propensity to hallucinations before, would have one now. And why out of all possible hallucinations, Ward saw a bug, while halfway around the world, Alec and Katrina had described an insect-like demonic figure at an underground altar, or the raspy inhuman sound coming from the Atarsa cultist in the Turkmen village. Or former director Peck’s strange comment during his breakdown about someone being a “bug.” Or the nightmare Katrina had described to her about a creature with antennae—or her previous, eerily prophetic dream about someone being hung from a McDonald’s sign.
Because Ward’s vision had to be a hallucination. Surely.
CHAPTER 68
APRIL 10
The party at Alec and Katrina’s house represented the revival of a long-dormant tradition. As if she hadn’t been good enough at everything else under the sun, Katrina cooked up an Uzbeki storm, and Alec basically loaded up a supermarket shopping cart at Total Wine and the local ABC store. (He did this even though Ward said he knew people in his neck of the woods who made their own artisan organic moonshine.) It was far too much for the two dozen or so guests. Alec made a point of inviting as many coworkers and friends as possible, many more than the house could hold, to ensure everyone felt welcome. Experience taught him that the full list never showed. Perhaps most important, he had invited the neighbors. (Alec had figured out neighbors never complained about a party’s noise if they were invited.) Former colleagues scattered in dangerous, far-flung corners of the world such as Pakistan, Ankara, the Balkans, London, Houston, Tallahassee, Ottawa, and Connecticut RSVPed that they would be there in spirit. Both friends with security clearances and without knew the general gist—if Alec and Katrina were throwing a party, then something, somewhere in the world had gone really well, and it was time to scan the foreign news wires for confirmation some notorious radical had met an untimely end.
Five days earlier, the president strode out along a long red carpet and stopped at a lectern in the East Room of the White House and announced with a smile that “the United States has completed simultaneous operations that eliminated all of the remaining Atarsa senior leadership.” The commander-in-chief credited the operation to “a small team of Americans from the Air Force and other government agencies” for intercepting the leaders as they attempted to flee from an airport in Cyprus. POTUS thanked the United Nations and the Turkish and Greek Cypriot governments for their “extensive cooperation.” (In fact, neither government had cooperated much beyond letting US personnel leave the country and slightly less than the maximum imaginable amount of public complaining about the secrecy concerning what had just happened in their jurisdiction.)
The ten minutes of live, prime-time remarks also credited the FBI for swift work in tracking down Atarsa’s sleeper agents and warned that while the threat of terrorism could never be said to be completely eliminated, this particular terror group had just suffered “a grievous blow, from which they are unlikely to ever recover.” Leaders in both parties quickly agreed to just forget about the FBI director’s press conference from last month, touting the arrests of four Atarsa sleepers, had inadvertently played directly into the terror group’s plans. The White House press secretary said she could offer no new information about the NORAD missile strike in northwest Washington, the “unrelated” crash of an Air Force supply plane in Cyprus and the sudden explosion of violence all over Mexico as the Craneos and Damascos cartels fought an unexpected turf war. The White House press corps furiously demanded answers until the president went on a tirade on Twitter and then the cable news networks
debated his as-yet-unproven accusation that a prominent news anchor often critical of the president was being treated for erectile dysfunction.
In Alec and Katrina’s house, they moved the furniture back against the walls to form the traditional makeshift dance floor, but it didn’t take long for a joyously heated, semi-sober argument about the playlist to break out. Alec had launched the playlist with Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town,” but Katrina pointed out that it wasn’t merely the boys who were back. They were placated once it was agreed that the second song would feature her, Dee, and Raquel singing a karaoke version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
Defiant exuberance was the theme of the playlist, featuring Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It!,” A-Ha’s “Take On Me,” X-Ambassadors’ “Renegades,” Fall Out Boy’s “Immortals,” and then Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal.” Ward selected the Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire Water Burn,” leading an enthusiastic, rousing chant of support of rooftop arson. Elaine declined to sing to “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Alec crooned an off-key version of Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” to Katrina.
Alec was about to express his yearning to be an infamous and feared punisher of the world’s wicked through Chris Cornell’s “You Know My Name” when Raquel suddenly looked with concern at her phone. She said she had to step out for a moment, and briefly, Katrina wondered if some new crisis had arisen at the most inconvenient time.
“Nope, an old friend just texted he’s in town,” she said. “He’s unexpectedly close by.” And with that Raquel headed out the front door.