Threat Zero

by Nicholas Irving

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “Why?”

  “They want you out of the way. Shooting you dead in your sleep is always an option, but my guess is that some folks have this outsized impression that you’re a big badass or something and can actually fight back.”

  Harwood smiled. “Well, that’s a possibility.”

  Bronson returned the smile. “I’m actually starting to like you.”

  “Don’t,” Harwood said, deadpan. “Just tell me how our country got so fucked up while we were overseas protecting everyone back here. Hard to believe.”

  “Not so hard,” Bronson said. “Look at Crossfire Hurricane and all the Spygate stuff. It’s insane, but it’s real. Nothing is outrageous anymore. People are openly threatening President Smart and the Secret Service doesn’t do squat. These people we’re talking about actually got so comfortable that they were planning the overthrow of the government. My people. The FBI. All the pinheads in HQ.” Bronson pointed at his chest. “That’s unacceptable. And this bullshit is just a step down, you know, aiding and abetting our enemies.”

  “Brookes is capable of all this? Just to cover her ass?”

  “Well, she plans to run for president, also. So, there’s that. But no, it was basically just power and money.”

  “Well, she’s toast now,” Harwood said.

  “Not so fast, gunslinger. There’s a trail, most of it has evaporated, and just because Maximus Anon says it’s so, doesn’t make it provable in court.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Actually, I’m not. And this is why I saved your ass.”

  “My ass was just fine,” Harwood said.

  “About ten dead MS-13 gang members out there. Local cops will be thanking you. But Stone and Weathers are still on the mission.”

  “Well, I’ve got three objectives. Clear Samuelson’s name. Make the people that killed him pay. Keep Hinojosa alive, because that’s what Sammie would want, if she’s his sister.”

  “And this is where I have to step in as an FBI officer of the law,” Bronson said. “You can’t work on this case. He’s your friend.”

  “It’s a free country,” Harwood said. “I can do as I please.”

  Bronson nodded. “That it is. For example, if I were to tell you that a playboy named Chip Ravenswood who lives at the Wharf in Washington, D.C., was working for Sloane Brookes and he may hold the key to everything, there would be nothing I could do to stop you from paying a visit to his condo or her compound.”

  “And you can’t pay him a visit because this entire operation is being run by your boss, the director of the FBI, who hopes to be attorney general one day in a President Brookes administration.”

  “Bingo,” Bronson said, pointing a finger like a gun at Harwood. “And we’ve got about twenty-four hours to sew this up.”

  Bronson held his phone up that showed the latest tweet from three minutes ago.

  Maximus Anon: A LOT of activity in SE DC. MS-13 acting as hitmen for dems looking for yours truly, but not to worry. I’m safe. They want me bc I know the truth. Sloane Brookes had Raafe Khoury killed to conceal her involvement in Iran $& intel laundering. #CampDavidAmbush her doing too. @FBI Director Kilmartin is wrapping things up fast. Is he involved? #Brookesgate

  Harwood knew that if Maximus Anon was right, Team Valid would be coming after him within the next few hours. Somehow, they were tracking his location even after he and Hinojosa had inspected every bit of gear and discarded two tracking devices.

  “If this is Brookes, how is she tracking us?”

  “Like I said. You’re off the case. But remember the rules of engagement. Every soldier has the right to self-defense.”

  Bronson’s phone buzzed with a call.

  “This might be for you. Georgia area code.”

  Harwood took the phone and answered.

  “Reaper, you’re one hard person to get in touch with,” Monisha said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, thanks for checking up on me,” she said with a bite of sarcasm. “Minnie and Pops are taking real good care of me, though.”

  “I’ve been talking to Bronson about you. He said you’re fine.”

  “He’s the one who’s fine. Seen pictures of him,” Monisha said.

  “Focus, Monisha, what’s up?”

  “Like I was telling you before, you know, those guys tried to kill me and I single-handedly took them down,” she said, pausing.

  “That’s the story everyone is telling,” Harwood said.

  “Yeah, right, Reaper. Listen, I’m uploading this document and texting to this number. I researched it and I wish I was there to help you, but Sergeant Major says I can’t go.”

  “Okay, do that. Speaking of which, put Sergeant Major on. I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Yeah, the love is just oozing out of you,” Monisha said.

  There was a slight rustling as the phone changed hands and Murdoch said, “Ranger, don’t waste my time.”

  “Roger that, Sergeant Major. Trying to figure something out.”

  “I’ve looked at what Monisha has. Her notes are good. Take a look at those. You got about three different problem sets you have to deal with. And I’m telling you this is big stuff. If you solve this, we’ll send you to the Middle East to solve world peace.”

  “No thanks, Sergeant Major. Been there, done that. I’ve got that T-shirt.”

  “Roger that.” They both hung up about the time Monisha’s text came through with a Word document attachment. Harwood opened the document as Bronson leaned over his shoulder.

  “Damn, Reaper, you stink,” Bronson said.

  “Rather this than your aftershave. Okay, here it is.” Harwood and Bronson read the text on his outsized smartphone:

  Carly gave Sammie flash drive. Didn’t trust cloud. BLUF: Brookes was dealing with Perza and Sultan fams to get money to mullahs in Iran to continue nuke deal after nuke deal canceled. Masters found emails that have now disappeared. Only copy on the flash drive-don’t worry CSM has it;). Stone and Weathers are bad guys. They will kill you. (Pls don’t get killed). Sammie said that whatever Hinojosa tells you, she may be Sammie’s sister, but they didn’t get along at all. She ain’t that cute, btw.

  Harwood looked up at Bronson, who had obviously read ahead.

  “Hinojosa’s cute,” Bronson said.

  “True, but where is she? What’s her deal?”

  “Anyone’s guess. The helicopter’s transponder is off.”

  “You don’t seem that worried,” Harwood said.

  “I’m concerned. Someone told my helicopter to stand down. That’s not cool. Someone else knew where you were and pulled you out using the exact same method I intended. That’s a level of penetration I’ve not seen before,” Bronson said.

  Harwood nodded. “Maybe so.” But what he was really thinking was that while Bronson was looking him in the eyes, he was communicating something else. They were tucked away in a cove talking about a conspiracy to aid an enemy of the state, Iran, and conduct espionage by selling nuclear secrets to the number one state sponsor of terrorism around the world. To what end? The divisions in the country ran deep, but people weren’t insane enough about politics to want to have damage done to the country, were they?

  “If Iran developed a nuclear device more rapidly, then President Smart canceling the Iran deal would look pretty stupid,” Harwood said.

  Bronson pointed his finger at him like a gun, the thumb collapsed like a cocked hammer as he said, “We have a winner.”

  “All that bullshit aside, these people killed Sammie and his girlfriend,” Harwood said. “All because the girlfriend tripped over something and tried to do the right thing.”

  Bronson nodded, as if urging him to continue.

  “They’re meeting tonight at the senator’s compound. Everybody who is responsible,” Harwood continued.

  Bronson nodded.

  “They’ll have security, including this Ravenswood guy. Team Valid, most
likely, will be defending the compound,” Harwood said.

  Another nod.

  “Justice will never be done to any of these people because bureaucrats just survive like cockroaches,” Harwood said. “And you can’t do anything because you’re government.”

  Bronson spoke finally.

  “And you’re off the case.”

  As Bronson was stepping from the boat to the jet ski, he detached the jet ski from the small trailer to which it had been secured. He led the nose of the jet ski to the side of the boat, lifted the trailer, which stood about three feet high above the motors, and locked it into place. He stepped onto the jet ski and pushed the ignition button.

  As the engine coughed, Harwood said, “Are you Maximus Anon?”

  Bronson held his gaze, shook his head with no sign of evasion. If Bronson wasn’t Anon, then who could it be?

  “Kilmartin? The FBI director?”

  “Think about it, Ranger. You’ll figure it out. What’s that Snow White saying? Who is the fairest of them all?”

  “Don’t do fairy tales. Too much real life,” Harwood said. “Kilmartin doesn’t make sense, though, because he’s covering for Brookes,” Harwood replied. “All I can think is that Iran is nothing but a terror state. You know that from Iraq.”

  “That’s why Smart canceled it. Anti-Israeli elements here in the United States have actually been assisting Iran all along. The plan has been to enable the Islamic forces surrounding Israel. Brookes is a major anti-Semite. Kilmartin is just a politico who was playing the odds and thought Brookes was going to be president. What we’ve got is a bunch of people who thought she was going to win, so they lied, cheated, and stole while jockeying for position, and now they’re all holding their jockstraps in their hand watching from the sidelines like a kid with a snot bubble coming out of his nose.”

  “So why not just arrest them tonight?”

  “Nothing against the law about having friends over to your house,” Bronson said. The jet ski engine whined.

  Harwood paused, processed what he thought Bronson was telling him, and asked, “What’s your perfect world here?”

  “The senator has committed crimes. It’s unlikely that she will pay any price. She’s got something on Kilmartin, so he’s covering for her. They’ve already killed your best friend, his girlfriend, and tried to kill your daughter. They’re not going to stop.”

  “You’re telling me stuff I already know, but I think I understand you. You want evidence that you can use in court to take down Kilmartin. That enhances your position in the FBI and accelerates you even further to becoming the first black FBI director.”

  Bronson smiled.

  “Who made you so smart?”

  “Thirty-three kills, plus a few extra. That doesn’t just happen.”

  “Go on,” Bronson said.

  “You want to break this case wide open. You’ve got inside information. You’re using me as a tool, but I’m good with it, because as you said, they’re coming after me and my people. Nobody does that.”

  “They’re not an easy target, Reaper. They’ve got a media genius on TV every night. The president’s briefer is slanting stuff every morning, throwing a slider or curveball ever so slightly. Former CIA director. Former U.S. senator. And there’s a wild card. Someone is giving them perfect information. Plus, some pretty heavy muscle with Ravenswood, Stone, Weathers, and some muscle around Fort Benning, near your house. But the unknown person may be the key to it all.”

  “No ideas?”

  “Not yet. World-class hacker, though.”

  “Can you call off Stone and Weathers?”

  “They are working for Brookes. Team Valid is her concept. I have no influence there.”

  “Blunt force trauma, then,” Harwood said.

  “Sometimes that’s the only way,” Bronson said.

  Harwood watched him speed off into the Potomac River, rooster tail spitting water twenty feet into the air.

  CHAPTER 19

  Sloane Brookes stood on her deck and stared at her boathouse, thinking, Should I just get in that fancy boat and go far away?

  The idea had been a good one. Once Smart canceled the Iran nuclear deal, funnel some discreet information to Iran to help them build a bomb that would embarrass Smart. Classic Machiavellian politics. Over a two-year period, Khoury had probably cashiered thousands of Q-level access secrets through the Sultans to the Perzas. Iran’s scientific community was robust, but kick-starting them with basic plans on how to build a nuclear device in the image of the U.S. arsenal seemed wise. Brookes assumed that the U.S. military would be able to defend against its own nukes better than something that the Iranians had randomly developed.

  The race between giving enough information and money to Iran so that they could accelerate their program versus chasing down Carly Masters had been filled with tension. Masters was about to get out of control, according to Jessup, as she worked with Samuelson to figure out what everything meant. Jessup had been monitoring their phones, computers, and clouds. The Camp David thing seemed like the perfect plan. Invite one of the Sultans to America, put him at Dulles about the time everything was going down, and then have Jessup work some digital magic to implicate the Sultan and Perza families as well as Samuelson. Lots of moving parts, but most had gone according to plan. They still had a chance to pull it off, but they had to meet tonight. No electronics. Spoken word only.

  But still, should she just get the hell out of Dodge, she wondered?

  It was all working out just fine until this Reaper came along and began sniffing around. He was supposed to die in Iran, which would have been the perfect ending. Instead, she felt as if things were just beginning.

  Her phone dinged with a text from Jessup.

  I BELIEVE MAXIMUS ANON IS DEKE BRONSON, FBI SPECIAL AGENT

  YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO THEN IF YOU’RE CONVINCED

  WORKING IT

  ?

  WILL TELL YOU TONIGHT

  K

  She went through the motion of flinging her phone through the window, but never released it. Snipers were supposed to kill people. She was planning to have Kilmartin’s ass tonight when he arrived. One of his agents had been leaking through Twitter as an anonymous source, laying out the entire conspiracy. The only upside was that it was so insanely crazy that only Fox News was covering it and the rest of the media was blowing it off as another lame conspiracy. Which of course it was so far fetched that it was easy for the journalists of the mainstream media to spin as tinfoil-hat kind of stuff.

  She had Ravenswood, Stone, and Weathers. Surely, they could kill two men who should already be dead. She looked at the high compound walls and thought more about her security. There was a safe room in her basement with a tunnel that led to the boathouse. All of her windows were blast- and bulletproof. There were three elevated areas within a mile where someone could have line of sight into the compound, but they were tough shots, if any shot at all. Like threading a needle. One was from the rock formation where she had met with Henry and the president’s briefer the previous morning. There were two other similar hillocks where a sniper could set up. Naturally, she had instructed Stone and Weathers to lie in wait at two of the three, assuming Harwood would occupy one of them.

  She dug through her pocket and retrieved two clonazepam pills she kept for emergencies. The stress was building and she needed a kick of the psycho-sedative. She crunched them dry in her mouth, tasting their sweetness, but swallowing with anticipation nonetheless. How many people had she killed? Well, zero exactly. But of course, she’d had killed the twenty-two in the Camp David Ambush. Four at the Sultan compound. Another seven at the Perza compound. Then of course there was Samuelson, but that was more Weathers and Stone’s idea, according to Ravenswood. Then there were the MS-13 gangbangers, which she didn’t really give a shit about, but still, she was oddly interested in the total number. Jessup had told her there were at least nine MS-13 members killed. She was already at forty-four dead at her direction. She wondered if ba
ttlefield generals felt this way—anxious but detached. Morbidly curious, even. These were part enemy, part innocent, part friendly. Was combat any different? She had always read about friendly fire and how they were an unwelcome but necessary cost of waging war.

  And war it was. Brookes’s drive for power wasn’t so much connected to ideology or lust for money. She didn’t care so much about the one percent difference between her and some opposing party member in Congress. And she had more money than she could spend in several lifetimes. Rather, her drive derived from a Kennedyesque belief that because she was Virginia royalty, she owed it to her heritage to assume the throne of power. Her contributors had eagerly donated to her, like subjects laying alms at her feet. The dinners, speeches, television shows, adoring believers, and unlimited access to everything were the perks of the powerful and she was at the pinnacle of her party.

  She believed in the party, for sure, but only as a vessel to transport her to her rightful place in history. Everyone dies; only legacies mattered. Her impact on history remained to be seen, and so far was diluted into a bunch of votes that made a difference on the margins. Not that making a difference was important to her, either. She needed that lasting impact. The one big thing. Obama had his healthcare deal, which turned out to be a nightmare, but still that was his legacy. Bush was remembered for the Iraq war and killing Saddam Hussein. That was a good news, bad news legacy that she wouldn’t mind having. At least it mattered in the grand scheme of geopolitics. Smart had his North Korea deal and tax cuts, both of which could change at any moment.

  Her big idea was to keep the Iran nuclear deal alive, give them a bomb, show how incompetent Smart was, defeat Smart, and then formalize the agreement again, which would require the elimination of the bomb she helped create. With all the diplomats out there having secret meetings with Iranian mullahs, she figured her using Jessup’s expertise at funneling the money, along with the skimming operation, was child’s play. Khoury the IT guy was supposed to be collecting the intelligence reports, feeding them to Jessup so that he could then provide them to Iran.