The SOG orders, supposedly sent from her desk. They would damn her, lose the directorship.
Holly’s question, Who at CIA wins with dead Senators and a war in Syria?
That, and who would win at the CIA if she went down?
With a war in the Middle East, who would they call to replace her but…
The answer was sitting right in front of her.
Gavin watched her for a long moment.
Then he smiled slowly, before rising to his feet and approaching her.
“You’re so slow on the uptake. I was worried about that but you were even slower than I thought. Now it’s all coming home to roost on you, Clarissa. I don’t have such pretty tits like yours, but I wonder if your precious Vice President will care so much about them when his wife is in jail for murdering two airliners. He’ll have to resign in disgrace, you know.”
Her intercom buzzed. She didn’t turn to answer it.
She waited him out but it took everything she had to control her breathing.
“If you hadn’t been fucking your way to the top, D/CIA would have been mine, not yours. Mine, goddamn it!” He screamed it right in her face.
“Yours?” She kept her voice soft to keep him close. His attention on her. In the background she heard the tiniest little metallic click. Unnoticeable if she hadn’t been listening for it.
Gavin shook his head. “You’ll see. There’s proof. My back channel is dead, so you don’t even get that.”
He said it like a threat, but she knew he didn’t have it in him—Gavin had been a political animal, never a field agent. His connection to Guest Seven had died some other way.
Oh!
Now it took everything she had not to laugh in his face.
Yes, Gavin had found a way to talk to Guest Seven, some operative at the Diego Garcia site who had tapped him straight into her cell’s phone. He hadn’t called from her phone, just using it long enough to find Guest Seven’s calls, then set a trace of his own until he found it, doctored it. And Guest Seven had killed Gavin’s accomplice during her escape, erasing the back channel.
“And as you sit in your ugly little cell,” Gavin was gloating, “—because it won’t be any pretty white-collar prison for you—I’ll leave you to figure it out on your own. If you’re an exceptionally good girl, maybe I’ll come by and tell you a little fairy tale to pass the time. Someday. After you’ve rotted for a long, long while.”
He backed her against the glass edge of her desk.
“Are you really that good in bed? I always respected Clark. Until you got your claws into him.”
Clarissa saw a motion in the background, but was well enough trained to not turn and draw Gavin’s attention there.
“Would you like to find out just how good I am?” She slid her fingers inside his pants.
His smile was slow and avaricious.
“No. Not that, you weasel,” she leaned in and snarled right in his face. “You wouldn’t last a single day as D/CIA.”
“Oh and why is that?” He tried to back away, but she had a tight grip on his belt pinning him in place.
At least until the moment that Kurt Grice slipped an arm around Gavin’s neck.
Gavin’s eyes went wide with panic, but he was unable to make a sound.
The head of the Special Operations Group had answered her text even faster than she’d hoped—she’d told him to “stay close” and he’d taken that very literally. She’d texted him because she’d wanted to discuss the implications of Holly’s message with him. Instead…
The intercom buzz had announced his arrival.
His sharp ears must have heard Gavin’s shout despite the room’s sound insulation. With his training, the locked door had probably only slowed him down for a few seconds.
Clarissa fisted her hand on Gavin’s belt, and used her grip to pin him in place as she drove her knee into his crotch as hard as she could.
Kurt’s tight air choke only allowed the smallest squeak to escape Gavin’s throat.
She leaned in until they were nose-to-nose, almost lip-to-lip.
“You have no idea how good I am.”
She took a half step back and looked at Kurt.
Kurt looked at her with no expression.
At her nod, he shifted from a cross-throat bar cutting off his air, to pin Gavin’s jugular veins with his biceps and forearm in a blood choke.
Gavin was too busy not believing this could be happening to even struggle.
Twelve seconds later, he slumped against Kurt’s arm, unconscious.
Releasing her hold on his belt, Clarissa placed her hand on the center of Gavin’s chest.
She and Kurt continued to watch each other; neither of them moved a single muscle.
She wasn’t worried about some “if I’m dead” letter of accusation; Gavin wouldn’t think that way.
At sixty seconds, when his brain should just be starting to die, she felt it.
Respiratory arrest.
His heart was still beating—sluggishly—but with no blood flow, his brain had given up on his lungs.
She nodded and Kurt let him drop to the floor.
Drastic medical action in the next two minutes might save him. At four minutes, he’d be a vegetable.
They waited through three more long minutes.
Then Kurt pulled out a small radio, “Heart attack. Director’s office. Call an ambulance.”
After nodding to Kurt, she stepped into the private bath until his team was done.
Clarissa took her phone with her this time.
She sent a Found him! as thanks to Holly. There was no answer; she hadn’t expected one.
Then she called the hacker twins. Knowing the missing link made it safe to purge the message paths so that nothing pointed to her.
If Gavin had his own connection to the Black Site…
“Any connections between Gavin Chalmers and CIA personnel at Diego Garcia?”
Heidi rattled some keys and then laughed. “A much-despised son-in-law.”
“Died last night?”
Heidi sobered, “Um. Yes.”
“Acknowledged,” she hung up.
That meant Ernie Maxwell hadn’t been a part of Gavin’s bid for power.
She sent him a text.
Site down?
Crashed. They could be talking about the Internet.
A man of action. A genuinely pleasant change from Gavin Chalmers.
How do you feel about coming to DC?
?
Middle East Desk just opened up. He’d done time on the ground in more of those countries than most Americans could even name, never mind locate.
On the next flight.
Yes, she’d always liked Ernie Maxwell.
76
For two long days, Andi didn’t tell anyone what had happened to Holly.
Miranda—pronounced fit and healthy by the base’s medic once her system had finished purging the morphine—had led the investigation. Stage by stage, they’d narrowed in on the cause.
Ironically, it was Mike who’d found it, the least technical person on the team.
When he had asked where Holly had gone this time, Andi had only been able to shake her head.
He’d looked ready to press her on it, but apparently saw something in her face that he wouldn’t like the answer. Unlike previous times, he’d hadn’t repeated the question even once.
Instead, he’d entered some strange mode of hypervigilance that Andi barely recognized as still being Mike. He drove them all as if solving this crash could somehow bring Holly back to life.
He’d been the one who found a small piece, deep in the debris field, with Cyrillic lettering.
Taz had known Holly’s fate the moment that Andi returned the Taser. “Holly wanted you to have this. It…helped.”
Taz had held it close.
Only Jeremy and Miranda remained safely unaware.
She accompanied Jeremy all through a long afternoon trying to find a way to tell him, but had never found it. Instea
d, Jeremy had taught her how to collect scrapings of powder burns and other areas for bomb residue.
“Would that be enough to tell if it’s Russian or not?”
He nodded. “Sure. With that new spectral analyzer, I could tell PVV-5A from C-4 clear as a thumbprint. Why?”
Andi had just said, “You’ll see.”
Everything Holly said had proved to be true. It was impossible that she was dead.
The Army had cleared the bodies, then set up a guard perimeter.
For two long days their NTSB team scoured the remains of the Senators’ crash. And part of another at the Falcon 7X site.
“Elayne said she blew it up. There’s not that much to know.”
And there wasn’t. Remains were gathered as well as possible, with samples kept for DNA matching. The Cockpit Voice Recorders had kept running right to the very end. They were…horrific.
And that was just the transcription: (laughter) (screams) (giggling) (more screams)… All with the same time mark.
Taz had taken on the burden of doing the transcription, and even the tough Latina had looked shaken by the time she was done.
By unspoken agreement, either Andi herself or Taz had always been close by Miranda’s side—though she appeared completely unaffected.
The Senate plane had been downed by a simple pressure trigger—engaging when the plane had climbed aloft into thinner air, and firing when the plane descended into higher pressure near landing.
Clarissa Reese had announced that a rogue Russian Zaslon operative was suspected of causing the Senators’ plane crash. Also that “he” had been regrettably killed in turn by “his” own people before questioning.
When she’d asked Taz about the half-truths, she’d laughed harshly.
“You got lucky. Your career avoided Washington, DC. It’s a nest of self-serving pit vipers. Everything has two messages, except when it has three.”
Andi tried, but the only one she saw was the near-truth of what had been reported.
Taz began counting on her fingers. “She told the press that the cause was discovered, by the CIA no less, and the crisis was over. So she looks good.”
Andi nodded, she understood that one.
“She told the Russians we had one of their Zaslon operatives, they don’t know for how long, and then we executed them. Those people are supposed to be untouchable. It will spook the crap out of them. They have to know they lost a female agent a year ago. But that they also lost a male one to us? They’ll be scrabbling around for months trying to solve that one.”
“Wow! That’ll be a witch hunt I want no part of. Is there a third one?”
“Yes,” Taz looked grim. “She told the American people and Congress that Russia is now practicing no-holds-barred covert tactics against us with the ‘execution’ of the Senate investigation committee. And the only answer to counter that is…”
“The CIA,” Andi almost choked on the initials.
If US-Russia relations had been souring before, they were now worse.
That must have been Clarissa’s intent. The CIA was supposed to help keep the peace, but they would have no role in a peaceful world.
She suspected that a lot more answers had died along with Holly.
77
The investigations were done.
Jeremy was, of course, taking a few final photographs that were sure to be duplicated by other images he’d already taken. Taz walked with him, not really looking at anything, but the Taser, with a fresh cartridge, was still jammed in her back pocket.
Miranda liked that they were doing it together. Jeremy had lost none of his drive, but he was…
“He’s better around her, isn’t he?” She asked Andi, who stood beside her on a slight rise overlooking the wreckage.
“I didn’t know him before. But they do seem to fit together well.”
“Like…” she decided to try for a metaphor, “…two pieces of wreckage finally fitting together?”
Andi laughed softly. “No, Miranda. That implies they’re both broken like wreckage—destroyed beyond use. No, they fit together like a parts of an airplane in manufacture, becoming whole. Though I don’t think they’re that far along yet.”
“I’ll never understand metaphors.”
Mike was still wandering around the site as if he’d find something gone astray.
“What’s he looking for? I told him we were done.”
“I don’t think he even knows. I suspect that each piece he turns over, some part of him hopes that he’ll find Holly.”
“Oh, is that a metaphor?”
“No, just a sad truth.”
The sun was going down and the scorching heat of the day was cooling, almost pleasant.
“Three days,” Andi’s voice was soft.
“What?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to say anything.”
“But you did. What was three days?”
Andi sighed. “It was three days ago, at just this time of day, that I saw Holly…uh…fly away.”
“I didn’t dream it, did I?”
“I was hoping you weren’t awake,” Andi’s voice was impossibly soft.
“I wasn’t sure.” Even though it was medically unlikely, she could still feel the drug lurking deep inside her, making her doubt each experience, as if she didn’t doubt them enough herself to begin with.
“I told Taz, but not Mike or Jeremy.” She waved toward Mike as he nudged over a seat cushion with his toe, “but I think he knows. Or at least some part of him does.”
“Oh.”
“Do you think I should tell them? Him and Jeremy?”
“Tell them what?”
“That Holly sacrificed herself to save us from that crazy Zaslon operative. She also stopped a war. If Elayne had gotten back to the Russians, terrible things would have come out.”
Miranda actually looked at Andi’s face in surprise. “Is that what she did?”
“You don’t think she stopped a war?”
“Oh, that? Knowing Holly, it wouldn’t surprise me. I always let her take care of that sort of thing. I only care about the planes.”
“You don’t think she sacrificed herself? We both saw it.”
Miranda thought back to the transcript of Mike’s interview with Quint Dermott, the copilot on the Airbus crash. The way I figured it, if anyone knew how to survive, it’s Holly Harper. So, I told Dani we needed to get on the ground fast. Seems Holly had the right of it as usual. Crikey! Her parents buried her when she was sixteen, yet she just saved my life and a whole mess of others’ on that plane. How many times has that woman survived being dead?
Miranda merely shrugged at Andi’s look as she turned to the M-ATV waiting to take them back to camp.
“But—”
Miranda turned to look at her.
“I try not to worry about what I can’t change. I learned that from an incredibly wise person.”
“Who?” Andi followed her to the vehicle.
“You.” Miranda climbed aboard and waited for the others to catch up with her.
78
Night. Only at night.
Daylight had too many eyes.
Too much heat.
The secret to crossing the desert. Move at night.
Walk heavy to spook the snakes away.
What snakes? Not her desert. Don’t know.
Finding food in the desert. Hunt at dawn and twilight.
Raw lizard, no head.
Scorpion, cut off stinger and poison sacs.
Finding water… No water.
Flecks of dew licked from a slit-open and laid-out plastic water bottle.
Now. Mirages?
Elayne flying aloft.
No. That was before. Three days. Yesterday. Last week. Some timeless time ago.
The Mi-28 Havoc.
Landing.
SASR training—she’d loved the rotorcraft.
Punch in the commands.
Especially the weapons systems.
A salvo of mi
ssiles, striking into the evening sky.
Then setting the autopilot. Hanging onto the hull, leaning into the cockpit, and pressing “Initiate.”
Elayne on some rant. Jacking herself off on death.
So fast. It had happened so fast.
By the time she’d let go, she’d been lucky not to break an ankle from the long fall—or worse.
Nothing to salvage from the helo but a small bottle of water.
Nursed, but long gone.
A gun. Not hers. Two knives that were. And a hat.
No water.
Digging into the gritty dirt. Buried. Hidden. Hidden while the Russian helicopters killed the Russian Havoc flown by an autopilot with only a screaming maniac for a passenger.
The Russians. So close.
She’d laid buried long into the night. Wasting the night, but the Russians had been hunting. Hunting for…her.
At night.
No water.
Crossing that first ridge. Out of sight of the Russians. It had taken her until dawn.
Somewhere in that long first night…her phone battery had run out. Last charged…at Quint’s?
Quint. Dear Quint.
The little boy who had interrupted more than a few good tussles when she was a teen seeking…
Relief.
From family.
From the madness of Elayne.
But Elayne’s spirit had gone walkabout with her, following her across the parched desert. Chortling over details about the diverse, even unique ways she was going to screw each and every one of them—to death.
No, none of that was her.
Was Quint right? Was she in a relationship with someone? Mike? A real one?
She remembered Mike’s first words to her a year ago, right after she’d faced down a one-star general to protect Miranda.
What is wrong with you two? Are you trying to get shot?
Clear as if it just happened.
In the desert.
Different desert.
Long ago.
Didn’t matter.
Other than Mike, everyone she’d ever slept with was military (or close, in Quint’s case). Mike was always a surprise and seemed to care about her despite how many times she’d pushed him away. Maybe despite himself. His background remained as murky as her own, but he’d found a way to move past it, and she’d always admired that about him.
Havoc: a political technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 7) Page 23