Imminent Threat

by Jeff Gunhus

  After the last call, her dad had grown sullen and then finally dozed off in his chair. She wondered when was the last time he’d slept.

  She was surprised when she sensed Anna walk up next to her seat. She held a steaming cup in her hand. “I found chamomile and honey in the galley back there. Good for your throat.”

  Mara took the offered cup and sipped. It felt wonderful. “Thanks.”

  “May I?” she asked, pointing to the chair next to her.

  Mara nodded. As Anna took her seat, she smiled at her dad.

  “The ability to sleep anywhere is a gift,” she said.

  Mara agreed. On mission, sometimes sleep came in ten-minute increments. “How’s the shoulder?”

  “I’ve had worse,” she said. “For all his imperfections, your father is a damn fine shot. He stopped me without causing any permanent damage.”

  Mara appreciated the sentiment. But they both knew that at the distance her dad had taken the shot, there was a huge amount of luck that had gone into the type of wound she’d received. An inch either direction and the bullet would have smashed through bone or pierced a lung. Her dad was a good shot, but not that good. No, she’d been damn lucky, and they both knew it.

  “I’m sorry he did that,” Mara said.

  Anna scrutinized her. “Are you? If I’d gotten the shot off, you would have gone over that edge. I knew that was the case. But I still was going to shoot.”

  Mara felt an odd blend of emotions. Respect for Anna’s truthfulness, but still unsettled at the cold manner she described how she’d nearly sacrificed her to achieve her goal.

  “I would have done the same thing.”

  “Maybe,” Anna said, not sounding convinced. “If I was on the ledge, maybe. But what if it was him?” She pointed over to her dad. “Would you have taken the shot then? Or if you’d been in his place, would you have let me take the shot, knowing we’d get Scarvan, but your father’s neck would be snapped in the hangman’s noose?”

  Mara had played the scenario out a million times since the villa, trying to determine not only what she could have done differently—starting with not getting caught––but what her dad could have done differently to resolve the standoff. Each version, though, netted the same result: she and Scarvan both dead.

  “I don’t know,” Mara said. The answer frustrated her, but it was honest.

  Anna seemed to appreciate the response. She put a hand on Mara’s arm and leaned in. “I wouldn’t be hard on your father, then,” she said. “I’ll forgive him if you will.”

  “Just like that?” she asked.

  “He was saving what he loved most in the world,” Anna said. “Isn’t that why we all do this job?”

  “What is it that you love?” Mara asked.

  Anna turned looking forward, struck by the question. “I love the world, I suppose. People.” She turned back to face Mara. “The promise of more.”

  Mara accepted that. She had her dad, but she also had Joey. And now Rick, too. He wasn’t just a fling, at least not for her. Maybe there was something long-term there. The promise of more.

  “I know what you mean,” Mara said.

  “But we will meet Scarvan again, hopefully in time to stop his mad plan. When that happens, you very well could be in the same position I was in at the villa. The same position your father was in. Only this time it might not be just that Scarvan escapes, but that he kills hundreds, maybe thousands. You have to be ready for that. You have to know what you’ll do.”

  Mara sipped her tea. There was no response she wanted to give.

  Anna stood, nodding to Mara’s cup of tea. “Need a refill?”

  Mara shook her head. “No, this is just the right amount.” She was talking about both the tea and Anna’s odd version of a pep talk. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” Anna said, her kind tone and smile somehow coming across like a discordant musical note. This was a complicated woman. Mara hoped her dad knew what he was doing with her.

  Anna walked over to where Scott was asleep against the window. She sat next to him and leaned over, placing her head on his chest. He stirred and, careful to avoid her bandaged injury, pulled her closer to him. Mara heard them speak in low voices and then they kissed. She turned away, suddenly feeling like she was intruding on their privacy.

  As the jet soared over the Atlantic, she tried to get some sleep of her own. But each time she tried to fade away, Scarvan’s grinning face appeared in front of her. The bastard had not only gotten the best of her, he’d gotten into her head, too. She stayed awake for the hour, thinking through her conversation with Anna. What would she sacrifice to stop Scarvan? Who would she sacrifice?

  After spinning on the question for far too long, she reached the simple conclusion: stop the son of a bitch before it ever got to that point.

  She called that Plan A and decided to go with it. After that, she shut her eyes and slept like a baby the balance of the trip into DC.

  CHAPTER 42

  Hawthorn never shrank from a fight, even with the president of the United States. Not when it was warranted. And not when the president was being an obstinate pain in the ass.

  For as many fatal flaws the previous occupant of the Oval Office had, and Preston Townsend had enough of those to go around, at least Hawthorn had been plugged directly into the man’s psyche. He’d been best friends with Townsend’s father and had known the president since he’d been a child. That gave him the ability and the right to call him out on his bullshit when he saw it.

  President Patterson had no such connection to Hawthorn. They did have a relationship, more professional than friendly, but one built on mutual respect. The idea for Alpha Team had been the president’s own and he’d considered no one except Hawthorn to be its leader.

  Still, in the coming confrontation, he knew he could only push so far.

  That was why Scott and Mara could prove helpful. He knew full well they would speak their minds, no matter the consequences. Sometimes that served a very direct purpose, even it was likely to rattle a few cages.

  He’d met his team at Joint Base Andrews when the Citation X landed. He’d spoken to Scott by phone during their flight but wanted a full briefing from his team on the drive to the White House, hoping he could glean something new from his questions. But by the time they arrived at the White House and made their way to the Oval Office, not much of the landscape had changed. They were dealing with a highly trained, motivated operative willing to die to accomplish his goal.

  The Secret Service’s nightmare scenario.

  “Hello Mr. President,” Hawthorn said, stepping in first. “Thank you for seeing us.”

  Patterson sat behind the Resolute desk, jacket off, his reading glasses perched at the end of his nose as he read the documents in his hand. He didn’t look happy. “You’d think my own intelligence services would have been able to know the Russians and the Chinese were meeting last night. Or that maybe they’d have some idea what they were talking about about? Nothing. First time I saw it was on CNN this morning.”

  Hawthorn took stock of the people in the room. Mitch Dreslan, director of the Secret Service, tall, lanky in a cheap suit and a wide tie. Nancy McKeen, Patterson’s chief of staff, a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners practitioner in the dark art of bureaucratic war, stood on the back wall like a gunfighter not wanting anyone to get behind her. Rick Hallsey, Dreslan’s rising star, assigned to the president’s protective detail for the upcoming trip to New York. He glanced at Mara and caught the look between them. He tried to give his team some semblance of privacy, but he still knew full well that the two of them were in a serious relationship. He wondered if Dreslan knew about the connection. It certainly added an interesting dynamic to the room.

  “I’m doing the UN speech in New York, Jim,” President Patterson said. “There’s no discussion about that.” He threw the document on the desk and stood. “Even if I don’t know what the Russians and Chinese are up to.”

  Hawthorn watched as the man
pulled his suit coat on. He knew Patterson to be a creature of habit. While he’d work behind his desk with his coat off and sleeves rolled, he always donned the jacket when he got up.

  “Sir, with all due respect––”

  “Whenever I hear that phrase, I know something’s coming I’m really not going to like.” He motioned for his guests to sit on the sofas in front of the fireplace. He took one of the chairs for himself while Hawthorn sat on one couch and Scott and Mara sat on the other. Dreslan, Rick, and Nancy McKeen remained standing where they were.

  “Sir, Jacobslav Scarvan is an imminent threat to your safety. Precautions need to be made.”

  “Precautions are always taken,” Dreslan said. He sounded testy and Hawthorn recognized the tone of someone mad that someone was playing univited in their sandbox.

  “Mitch, you and your team are the very best in the world,” Hawthorn said. “But it’s not going to be good enough. Not this time.”

  Dreslan’s face betrayed none of the annoyance Hawthorn was certain he felt. The Secret Service head hadn’t climbed the ladder as far as he had by wearing his emotions on his sleeve.

  President Patterson turned to Scott. “Jim here tells me you have a theory of what the guy plans to do.”

  Scott cleared his throat. “Yes sir. I think it’s more than a theory. I’d give it a ninety-five percent likelihood. In this business, that’s as good as it gets.”

  “Tell me your thinking,” the president said, sitting back in his chair as if ready for a long story.

  “After Scarvan was shot and left for dead, he somehow made it alive to the shores of Mount Athos. It’s a remote isthmus, part of Greece but governed as a semiautonomous state. The entire area is dedicated to monastic life, whether in the monasteries or in smaller living units all the way down to tiny, one-man huts called sketes.”

  The president made a motion with his hand, indicating Scott needed to speed things up.

  “Scarvan was found and cared for by an old monk named Father Spiros in one of these tiny, remote huts. Which is how he evaded notice. Unexpectedly, during his recovery, it appears Scarvan found religion.”

  “Eastern Orthodox?” the president asked.

  “A variation of it,” Scott said. “Monks choose to live in the isolation of the sketes for many different reasons, mostly having to so with their desire to be closer to God. For Father Spiros, the skete was the Church’s desire to have him farther away from the other monks.”

  “A troublemaker,” the president said. “Something you can relate to.”

  The president’s attempt to lighten the mood fell flat. Scott continued. “Yes sir. Only I don’t subscribe to a religious dogma of such orthodoxy that I’m willing to set the world on fire to punish it for its failings.”

  Scott paused. The president shifted uncomfortably in his chair, his eyes moving to Hawthorn.

  “Keep going, Scott,” Hawthorn said. “I think you have the president’s attention.”

  “Father Spiros believed in an apocryphal interpretation of the Bible, with intense focus on the Book of Revelations. Moreover, he operated under the belief that God had shared with him the path to the end times. In a series of visions, God showed him how the world must be cleansed with fire in order to usher in a new world.”

  “How is this any different than the typical doomsdayer, whackadoodle bullshit we hear all the time?” Nancy McKeen asked.

  “Father Spiros’s apocryphal vision came with a role for Scarvan to play. The world’s descent into chaos was a necessary predicate for the second coming. You’re right, doomsday cults around the world share the same idea. You see it every time there’s a war in the Middle East, or back during the Cold War face-off between the U.S. and the USSR, there’s someone pointing to the signs of the end times. Only Father Spiros wasn’t content to watch the world crumble. His vision was that man had a necessary role to play in helping the world’s descent and, being an obedient instrument of God, the task fell to him.”

  “And he convinced Scarvan to believe these same things?” McKeen said. “Seems a little farfetched, doesn’t it?”

  The president looked as if he agreed with her. Hawthorn jumped in. “The details are unclear on how it happened, but the results speak for themselves. In 2004, Africa’s senior Greek Orthodox leader, Patriarch Petros VII of Alexandria, Egypt, flew to Mount Athos, intent on silencing an elderly monk there who was creating a following among several young priests across the world. This subversive movement called not only for an extreme orthodoxy, but a punitive form of it. There are always zealots in any religion, but in this case, it was taking on real-world implications.”

  “Like what?” Nancy asked.

  “Followers of Father Spiros took over a monastery on Mount Athos and barricaded themselves in with enough guns and ammo to fight off an army. The Church threatened excommunication, but they denied the Church’s authority. The standoff went on for years.”

  “That’s it?” Nancy asked, looking incredulous.

  “When Patriarch Petros, the third most senior person in the Orthodox leadership, flew to Mount Athos to confront Father Spiros, his helicopter crashed minutes from landing, killing him and all twelve people on board. Only small bits of wreckage were found.”

  “That was so long ago,” Rick said, speaking up for the first time. “Scarvan was dumped into the ocean twenty years ago. Why now? Why would he wait?”

  “That was my question, too,” Scott said. “I went to Mount Athos to find the answer.”

  “And?” the president asked.

  “Somehow along the way, Scarvan pledged not to leave Father Spiros’s side while he was alive. Apparently, he had visions of his own and was working on a different set of divine instructions.”

  “Someone ought to check what kind of mushrooms the monks are growing,” McKeen said.

  Rick followed up on the questioning. Hawthorn noticed Dreslan’s disapproving look at his subordinate. “So, he waited until Father Spiros died before he left?” Rick asked.

  “Only Father Spiros finally grew tired of waiting,” Scott said. “He not only wanted to set fire to the world, he wanted to watch the flames. After years of trying to convince Scarvan to leave Mount Athos and bring about their plan, he instead faked his death so Scarvan would launch into action.”

  “Nice,” McKeen said. “Sounds like a real charmer. I assume we have this Father Spiros in custody for questioning?”

  “No, one of Spiros’s followers, following the old man’s orders to kill him if it seemed like he might endanger the operation, shot him in front of me.”

  “Then we have that person to interrogate,” the president said.

  Scott shook his head. “That man is not available to be questioned. When we made it clear he would answer to us, he threw himself off a cliff and broke his neck.”

  “Jesus,” the president said under his breath.

  “That’s who Scarvan thinks he’s helping,” Mara said, taking over the narrative. “But before he executes that plan, he had other executions on his mind.” She went through the litany of the Russian operatives Scarvan had killed and detailed their interaction with Belchik. Finally, she described Scarvan appearing on a boat in the middle of the Seine shouldering an RPG. Everyone in the room had seen the footage and been briefed, but they were all ears hearing a firsthand account of the event.

  Mara left out her interview with Marcus Ryker. When she’d glanced over to Hawthorn when she got to that part of her story, he gave her the barest of signals for her to stop.

  “This man should not be underestimated,” Mara said. “Even with us guessing at his target, he still poses a threat.”

  “Prague is a good example,” Hawthorn said. “Scarvan raided a secure location, him against how many men?”

  “At least ten, maybe more,” Mara said. “Not to mention me, a Czech counterterrorism operative, and Scott toward the end of the engagement.”

  “And killed Kolonov and then just got away?” McKeen said. “How is that
possible?”

  Scott spoke up. “Because, even at his age, we’re dealing with one of the most dangerous operatives there’s ever been. That’s what we’re here trying to explain.”

  “And now he’s coming for me in New York?” the president said.

  “No, he’s coming for the world,” Hawthorn said. “Motive, means, and opportunity.”

  “Motive,” Scott said. “His religious zealotry and his twenty-year festering anger over what happened to him at the hands of his own country take care of that. Means: even at his age, he’s demonstrated that his craft and abilities are incredibly dangerous. And, as you’ve already been briefed, we believe Omega is supporting his efforts, giving him access to funds and whatever weapons he needs. We don’t know how he’ll deliver his blow, but we know he’s capable of making it happen.”

  “And opportunity?” the president asked. “He’s going to hunt down heads of state one by one. I suppose he’d be starting with me?”

  “No sir,” Scott said. “When you deliver your speech to the United Nations General Assembly to all the gathered heads of state, Scarvan will be there. And he plans to kill every last one of you.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Mara eyed the president, gauging the man’s reaction. She saw the moment he made the connection.

  “The United Nations,” the president said, almost sounding impressed with the audacity of the whole thing. “Son of a bitch.”

  Most of the room was silent as he said the words. The exception was Nancy McKeen, who gave a derisive snort at the suggestion.

  “Impossible,” she said. She looked at Dreslan. “That’s impossible, right?”

  Mara jumped in. “In two days, there’s a General Assembly meeting in New York to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary. This will not be a normal general assembly meeting. Nearly every country plans to have their head of state or government attend to act as the ambassador for the meeting. Each delegation will include past leaders and dignitaries.”