Siege of Lightning

by R. J. Pineiro

  He knew he had only one choice. Stay here, Cameron, and you’ll be shot. At least running he had a “sporting chance” of getting away. Oh, if I could only have my Beretta!

  He glanced toward the CIA man checking under a car fifty feet away. Fifty feet. He estimated the silencers reduced the accuracy of their weapons by over sixty percent.

  Cameron made his decision and, in a blur, rolled from under the sedan and rocketed across the aisle toward the adjacent row of cars. To his surprise, gunfire did not start right away, but it did come. The shattering windshield of a compact car next to him definitely confirmed his fears. The CIA men had fired without warning, without asking him to give himself up. Cameron knew then that he had been labeled for termination.

  Cameron heard a shriek…a woman! Then a yell from a man. Security forces would come. A round ricocheted off the concrete floor and crashed through the plastic grill of another compact car.

  The screams seemed amplified inside the concrete structure. Cameron came to the next aisle, crossed it, and reached the next row of cars. He dropped to a crouch and cut left, moving up the aisle behind the cars. Cameron heard other voices and screams in the distance as he counted fifteen cars. He abruptly stopped and hid in the space between two vehicles, moved near the front tires, and searched for the operatives.

  He spotted one running down the aisle away from him. The second moved in his direction but with the weapon trained on a row of cars across the aisle from Cameron. The man had not seen him yet.

  Cameron dropped to the ground and listened intensely for the footsteps. He waited. The man continued at the same pace. Cameron shrank back. The footsteps got louder. The figure loomed in his field of view.

  Cameron plunged forward with both arms in front. The rookie operative spotted him and began to turn the weapon in Cameron’s direction. Too late. Cameron intercepted the man’s arm with his right hand, and gripped and twisted the man’s wrist, keeping the weapon pointed away from him. In the same motion, he rammed his left hand against the operative’s face, two fingers extended like a snake’s tongue. The operative instantly released the weapon and brought both hands to his face with an agonized scream. Cameron drove his right knee into the man’s groin and watched him fall over and curl into a fetal position on the concrete floor.

  Cameron snagged the suppressed pistol—a Colt .45—and spotted the second agent bringing his weapon around. Cameron leveled the Colt on the operative and fired twice. The CIA agent fell with a scream, dropping his weapon while reaching down to his wounded thighs.

  Sirens blared in the distance.

  Cameron reached down and grabbed the first agent by the lapels.

  “Why? Why are you trying to kill me?”

  Cameron saw blood coming out of the man’s eyes. “Fuck you, Stone. Go…ahead. Kill me…you bastard. Kill me just…like you killed Potter.”

  Potter? What in the hell is going on?

  “Tell me who gave the order! Tell me!”

  “You’re as good as…dead, Stone.”

  “Tell me, you fucker! Who gave the order?”

  “You don’t…get it, do you? You’re…beyond salvage, asshole.”

  Cameron released his grip. The agent fell on his back. Beyond salvage?

  The sirens got closer. Cameron dropped the Colt and ran for the double doors. The airport lobby seemed undisturbed. Cameron mixed with the crowd and headed for his gate. He briefly checked his watch. The entire incident had taken under two minutes. He still had time to make his flight.

  CHAPTER TEN

  REVELATIONS

  And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

  —John 8:32

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  After spending a revealing thirty minutes in the Records department of the Office of Computer Services, Pruett stormed into Higgins’s office but found his subordinate wasn’t there. He checked his watch. Five-thirty in the afternoon. Higgins always stayed past six. Where could he possibly be? He walked back outside and spotted Higgins’s secretary coming out of the ladies room. He approached her.

  “Where is he?”

  The secretary, a middle-age woman known to the entire department as a closet smoker, tried to remain far away from Pruett. One sniff and Pruett realized she had been smoking in the bathroom again. Under a different set of circumstances he would have reprimanded her, but there were more pressing things on his mind.

  “He went out, sir.”

  “Beep him for me, would you?”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “Thanks. There’s something very important I need to discuss with him.” Pruett walked back into Higgins’s office, his own old office from years back before he’d gotten the promotion. Higgins had definitely remodeled it quite a bit. Most of Pruett’s old furniture was gone and replaced with more modern stuff. In the CIA department heads were given a certain budget to furnish their offices. The higher up one went, the larger the budget got. In his case, Pruett had declined the opportunity to purchase new furniture after his last promotion. His old boss, who’d been assassinated, had been a good friend of his. Pruett had kept the office almost intact for sentimental reasons, and also out of respect. To this day he still used the same leather swivel chair and oak desk as his predecessor.

  Pruett smelled something burning and immediately thought Higgins’s secretary had been smoking in there. After a few seconds he decided the smell was not that of cigarette smoke, but left over from something that had been burned inside the office. Pruett recognized the odor because he had sometimes burned highly classified material and confidential information until he’d gotten his own personal paper shredder. Before that he had been too lazy to walk halfway down the hall to the closest paper shredder to dispose of security trash. Some of his peers used the security trash cans located just about everywhere in the building. He never did. He didn’t trust them. Instead, he’d opted for burning letters and small documents in a metallic trash can he’d left to Higgins when he’d gotten the paper shredder.

  Pruett briefly scanned the room and spotted the trash can next to Higgins’s desk. He walked toward it and spotted a few burnt sheets of paper inside. He had been right. Higgins had picked up one of Pruett’s old bad habits.

  Pruett knelt down next to the trash can, tilted it and took a closer look. Whatever it was had burned thoroughly. He spotted two sheets of paper, totally blackened and curled up but not yet collapsed. He noticed a staple on one corner holding them together. A third sheet had already crumbled. Pruett couldn’t help himself. It made sense. While investigating George’s murder and the sabotage of the Sun workstation, he’d had a short discussion with the filing clerk of the Records department of the Office of Computer Services, where Pruett had found the computer printout and cover letter that George had filed a day earlier. A small note attached to the cover letter indicated that one copy was made from it and passed to the European desk. From there it must have found its way to Higgins. The computer printout contained three events in a possible NASA pattern—the deaths of Claude Guilloux, the Rocketdyne worker, and the Athena scientists. Now Pruett wanted to find out why Higgins hadn’t discussed that with him prior to the issuing of Stone’s termination order.

  Pruett felt the heartburn returning. He had just finished chewing two antacid tablets, and realized it was going to take more than that to placate his upset stomach. He reached into his pocket, grabbed the pack, and popped another tablet in his mouth.

  Too many questions, too many things he didn’t understand. He exhaled. Why did Higgins tell Pruett that three of the dead men in the warehouse were French police officers when George’s printout clearly indicated that they were “unidentified men”? Is this the conflicting information regarding Cameron that George mentioned in his note? Something wasn’t right.

  He stood up and stared at the curled, blackened sheets of paper. Could that be the copy of the p
rintout and cover letter that George sent to…? He narrowed his eyes, shifted them towards Higgins’s pile of mail on his desk. What if Higgins never got a chance to read George’s memo? Pruett reached the two-inch-thick stack of papers on the corner of the desk and quickly browsed through it. The memo wasn’t there, which meant that unless the filing clerk had made a mistake, Higgins had to have read it. Pruett’s eyes drifted back to the trash can.

  “Damn. I can’t believe you’re gonna do this, Tom,” he murmured as he took a white sheet of paper from Higgins’s personal stationary. He knelt next to the trash can once more and tilted it to a forty-five-degree angle. He slid the white sheet of the paper under the burnt ones and at the same time slowly set the trash can on its side. The burnt sheets softly rested over the white one. Pruett slowly pulled the white sheet out, curling up the edges to keep the burnt sheets from falling off. He got up and shook his head, disappointed in himself for not trusting Higgins. But under the circumstances…

  He straightened the trash can with his foot and slowly walked outside.

  “Have you reached him yet?” he asked the secretary.

  “No, sir. I’ve already beeped him twice. I’ll keep trying.”

  “Thanks…say, is that stack of mail on his desk from yesterday or today?”

  “All from this morning, sir. Mr. Higgins always goes through his daily mail before leaving the office in the evening.”

  “Thanks again.”

  Strange. Very strange. Why didn’t he mention George’s findings to me yesterday? And why isn’t he answering the beeps? Higgins was supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day—the reason he carried a satellite pager.

  Pruett headed toward his office, walking very slowly, attempting to minimize the risk of disturbing the fragile pieces of paper. Someone with the right tools might be able to retrieve some of the information as long as the sheets remained in one piece, but if they collapsed and disintegrated, all bets would be off.

  He made it to his office.

  “Hello, sir,” Tammy said. “My, my, what is that you’re—”

  “Get me the FBI.” Pruett interrupted. “The Microscopic Analysis Unit. Hurry!”

  He pushed open the door of his office and carefully walked to his desk, where he gently set down the white sheet of paper. The burnt sheets were still in one piece. Pruett stared at them. Innate curiosity had surpassed his sense of trust. He had to find out what was on those pieces of paper, and FBI had just the tool to do it.

  SOMEWHERE OVER THE NORTH ATLANTIC

  Cameron set the headphones down and leaned his head back. The movie was as boring as the flight. He had tried unsuccessfully to fall asleep twice in the last hour, but the excitement of the past few days remained with him, the adrenaline still in his system. So far he had been lucky. He had managed to remain alive in spite of someone’s plan to have him killed. Once again his mind explored the possibilities. One suspect was Chief Europe Higgins, for the simple reason that Higgins should have been the only one Potter would have contacted prior to the cauterization job. Under such an assumption, Higgins would know that Cameron was familiar with CIA cauterization procedures; therefore, when the assassination attempt at the Botanical Gardens only accomplished half the job, Higgins would have to assume that Cameron suspected that Higgins was the only other person who knew about the meeting, which meant that Higgins was to blame. But what if someone intercepted Potter’s call to Higgins? Or maybe my call to Potter? Cameron thought, recalling the gray truck parked next to the embassy’s side gate. In that case, Higgins would not be at fault. Maybe Potter was dirty and he got killed because he knew too much about Athena’s plans. Maybe someone in Athena thought of him as a liability. Cameron briefly closed his eyes. Possibilities.

  Something else that bothered Cameron was the issuance of the termination order—that kind of power only existed at the directorate level. In his case, only someone like Tom Pruett or someone above him held the power to issue such an order. Cameron shook his head, refusing to believe his old case officer could be up to something like that, unless…unless all Pruett knew came from information carefully fed by the mole. Someone could have altered the facts and given them to Pruett in such a way as to leave no doubt that Cameron had to be terminated.

  It made sense, he decided. It certainly made sense, and since at that point not too many things did make sense, Cameron had to follow that theory. He smiled. His analytical mind knew just one way to do that.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Pruett left Murphy’s room on the second floor and headed for the elevators. The retired Army sergeant remained unconscious. The doctors feared that Murphy had brain damage from lack of blood and oxygen. They had performed several CT scans on him without much luck. And while all of the test results showed normal brain activity during sleep, which indicated no major damage, they could not answer the question of whether or not Murphy would ever wake up.

  Too many questions. Even after going through the entire set of incidents several times and analyzing them objectively Pruett still could not come up with an explanation for why Higgins had withheld George’s information, which conflicted with one of Higgins’s reasons for accusing Stone. In addition, Higgins still had not responded to repeated electronic paging. The longer it took for him to get hold of Higgins, the more suspicious Pruett became.

  He headed back to Langley.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Just before twelve-thirty in the morning, Cameron slowed down as he entered the quiet suburban neighborhood. He didn’t want to attract any attention to himself, particularly if there was some kind of neighborhood watch program set up. The flight from Paris had arrived on schedule at New York’s JFK. After minimum difficulty he’d gotten through Customs with nothing to declare, and had left the International terminal a mere thirty minutes after landing, giving him plenty of time to catch his connecting flight to Dulles Airport. Without any hassle, he had landed in Washington less than an hour ago. With the fake driver’s license, Cameron had rented a car at the local Hertz.

  Although he had not been in Washington for a few years, Cameron remembered clearly the multiple occasions when he had flown up from Mexico for meetings with his old case officer, then Chief Western Hemisphere. Several of the meetings had taken place at Pruett’s home.

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Exhausted, frustrated, and still in pain. Higgins approached the door to his office at twelve-thirty in the morning. Although his face showed just a few cuts, the brown turtle neck sweater he wore covered a dozen lacerations on his neck and upper chest. The cuts on his shoulder was by far the most painful of all, but bearable after being properly bandaged. In a way, Higgins guessed he should feel lucky. After all, he had managed to terminate George, and although he’s lost two of his men in the process, the police would never be able to learning anything from their bodies. Like himself, Higgins’s men had carried nothing that could link them to CIA.

  Needless to say, Higgins had not carried his CIA-issued beeper either, so before going into his office, he stopped by his secretary’s desk to check the messages he knew would be there.

  He found several messages. Most could wait until the following day. His fingers stopped moving when he reached a small note from his secretary. It said that Tom Pruett had stopped by earlier, and that she had beeped Higgins several times at Pruett’s request. He saw another message in Pruett’s handwriting requesting Higgins to call him immediately, regardless of the hour.

  Higgins ran a hand through his hair. In all the years Higgins had work for Pruett, the Head of Clandestine Services had come to his office only a handful of times. At the CIA, the mountain never went to Mohammed.

  Does he suspect?

  “Shit!” He rushed inside his office and carefully scanned the room. All appeared in order. The picture on the wall over his safe was just as he had left it, and no one else knew his com
bination. Not even Pruett. Higgins had been careful enough to get his combination lock changed after he moved in without his superior knowing about it. But even that didn’t matter. Higgins had always been extremely careful not to have any written record of his own dealings. He committed it all to memory. Pruett could have benefited from nothing in that office, even if he’d looked. But after Pruett had found sabotaged computers and learned about George’s termination, his visit could only mean one of two things. Either he was suspicious, or he wanted Higgins help in the ongoing investigations. After all, Higgins was officially Chief Western Hemisphere. It was his turf.

  Suddenly his door opened.

  Higgins turned around, his hand reaching into his coat. He kept it there.

  “Jesus Christ! Don’t do that again. You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. But it’s time to pick up the trash,” said the cleaning lady.

  The trash? The trash! Shit!

  Higgins raced for the metallic garbage can next to his desk. The burnt papers were there…or were they? He had burned three sheets of paper. He lifted the can up and emptied it on the carpet.

  All that came out was barely enough burnt paper to make up one sheet. He glanced at the cleaning lady, who wore a puzzled look.

  “Is everything all right, sir?”

  “Yes…yes, it’s all right. As you can see. I’ll also need my carpet vacuumed.”

  The cleaning lady shook her head. “Whatever you say, sir. I’ll go and get my vacuum—”

  “Not now. Later! I have to work now.”

  “Then it won’t be until tomorrow, sir.”

  “Fine, fine. Tomorrow is fine. Bye.”

  The cleaning lady frowned, turned around, and closed the door after herself.

  Higgins tightened his fists. He now felt certain of the reason Pruett had come to his office. His superior was suspicious of him. Why? Did he get a chance to talk to George before I terminated him? Or did he decide to go and check with Records and find the first computer printout? It didn’t matter. The fact still remained that somehow Pruett had become suspicious of him. Enough to come into his office and remove those burnt pieces of paper, which were probably being analyzed at that very moment. If the analysis was successful, Higgins knew Pruett would nail him to the wall.