by Jack Carr
Holloway stood up and looked at his watch before turning to address his men.
“WARNO in thirty minutes. Time is of the essence on this one. It’s going to be a long night. The next time you sleep we might be on our way to Russia.”
CHAPTER 58
Washington, D.C.
REGINALD PYNE RELISHED HIS role as gatekeeper to the president. One could say that the president of the United States was the world’s most powerful figure but, in Pyne’s mind, the man who controlled access to the president held the real power. A soldier for most of his life, President Grimes was acutely susceptible to Pyne’s influence and manipulation, not having been raised in the literal and figurative swamp that was Washington, D.C.
Roger Grimes had spent a career as an army officer and was selected as vice president to provide ideological balance to a ticket that would have otherwise leaned too far left for many of the nation’s crucial swing states. With a decorated hero of the War on Terror by his side, the previous president cruised to an Electoral College victory.
After Grimes was sworn in as vice president, he found that he was soon relegated to the background, rarely meeting with the president or his senior staff. It became clear that he had been mere arm candy during the campaign and that the close advisory role that had been promised to the American people had been a façade. Grimes handled it like a professional and took it upon himself to focus on veterans’ issues, appointing a commission to assess the VA health care system and then overseeing the implementation of its recommendations.
Pyne, a longtime Washington insider and former lobbyist, helped guide then–vice president Grimes through the morass of the federal government as he tried, mostly in vain, to advance the causes of those who had served their nation in uniform. The VP learned to trust Pyne’s political judgment and took his advice as he would that of an executive officer in the Army. For his part, Pyne played the loyal soldier, biding his time for an opportunity to gain even greater influence. He couldn’t care less about the VA. Those soldiers were stupid enough to volunteer knowing the risks. They were lucky to get free medical care for life. So what if they had to stand in line for a few hours?
Pyne found that the techniques from a book he’d read at Harvard on how to manipulate women into bed worked equally as well outside the realm of sexual coercion. Its methods helped him to influence and control both male and female politicians on policy issues. Sometimes he couldn’t believe how easy it was.
He’d started his professional lobbying career during a time when the tobacco industry was under attack. He’d learned that the old ways of throwing money at politicians and then threatening to support their opponents in the next election if they didn’t stay on board didn’t work the way they had in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The opposition had organized and adapted. One had to play the game differently.
There was no law against stupidity. If these idiots wanted to smoke and make the tobacco industry even more profitable, who was the government to stop them? Volenti non fit injuria. To a willing person, no injury is done. Besides, the U.S. government needed those tax dollars. How else were they to pay for a cradle-to-grave welfare state?
He’d successfully delayed a 2006 court order mandating that tobacco companies advertise the ill effects of smoking. The government was forcing private companies of a legally available product to spend their hard-earned profits to undermine their own business. He had tied them up for ten years in appeal after appeal. That the product he defended killed more than 480,000 of his fellow citizens annually didn’t bother Pyne in the least. It was a free country. And imagine the health care costs if those half a million people a year lived. The country would have to care for them for even longer. One of his main takeaways from a philosophy class while in college in Boston were the words of French biologist Jean Rostand: Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.
Pyne thought about how lucky they were that the media was so focused on the so-called opioid epidemic. With multiple states’ attorney generals and their plaintiff lawyers distracted by the mere seventy thousand opioid deaths a year, tobacco could recover from the hits they’d taken in the nineties. That his company was killing Americans at the equivalent rate of a 9/11 attack every three days didn’t faze Pyne in the least. While Vice President Grimes was fighting for his country, Pyne fought to keep tobacco addictive and profitable.
His success in dealing with unconstitutional decrees from the government caught the attention of the budding vaping industry and Pyne was offered lucrative stock incentives to draft the strategy to deal with emerging federal regulations from the Food and Drug Administration and backlash from do-gooder groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and the American Cancer Society. Big Tobacco acquired controlling stakes in the leading vape companies early on, infusing them with capital for growth. They recognized the small electronic devices with candy flavored liquid smoke were a gateway to their tobacco products and an opportunity to co-opt the next generation of customers.
Pyne managed to hold off regulation and a government-mandated review of vaping’s health impact as long as he could among an avalanche of increasingly devastating evidence. He’d been involved in D.C. lobbying long enough to know when it was time to abandon ship. The writing was on the wall. The multibillion-dollar e-cigarette industry was about to be regulated into submission. Pyne took his money and ran for an even more distasteful occupation: political operative.
Although his salary peddling cigarettes and the windfall of exercising his e-cigarette stock options in the vaping industry put him into what was increasingly referred to as the “one percent,” Pyne was still an outsider. The families that controlled the tobacco and vaping companies had the homes, the cars, the jets, the multiple ex-wives, and the art collections. They had their names plastered over everything from university chairs to the wings of world-renowned museums. In both instances, Pyne once again felt left behind, a hired gun to be kept content with leftovers from the plates of royalty. Where would they be without him slogging through painful media training, reading depositions, being deposed, and sitting through state and federal congressional testimony?
He’d thought the newer and hipper e-cigarette company would welcome him into the clubs and parties he’d yearned for since his youth. It turned out that the gates to the kingdom were guarded by the same old boys’ network that had plagued him all his life. They just wanted him to work the same magic on vaping that he had on tobacco and then go home. After discovering that money alone was not enough to open the coveted door, Pyne had given notice and exercised his stock options. On the way out, he leaked an internal memo on the company’s advertising practices and an independent medical study on what was intended to show the benefits of vaping as an alternative to combustible smoking. The marketing memo clearly outlined the promotion of candy flavorings via social media marketing campaigns targeting children. The medical study warned that because the vape liquid contained lipoid components and toxins, when heated they caused an acute chemical inhalation injury to the lungs, or as a federal lawmaker whose daughter had died at a college party after vaping with friends stated, “It poisons and kills our kids from the inside out. This is murder.”
Pyne had gotten out just in time, leaving those at the company to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic as it headed for the inevitable. His memo and medical study, leaked to New York regulators and a producer at 60 Minutes, along with a New England Journal of Medicine study on vaping-induced lung injuries, ensured the opioid epidemic was quickly replaced by outrage levelled against the beleaguered vaping companies. Say what you would about opioids, at least they’d never concocted a branding strategy around addicting children to their products. They specifically aimed their deadly prescription drugs at adults.
Reginald Pyne had grown up one of the worst kind of impoverished, a working-class kid in a sea of wealth. Even as a child he in
sisted on being called Reginald. When his classmates found out how particular he was, they tormented him by bestowing him with the nickname “Reggie-boy,” a name he detested. His father had been a firefighter until a devastating injury almost killed him. After the accident, the Pynes continued to live in what had turned into an exclusive enclave of New York, although across the border in neighboring Connecticut. His mother combined her meager salary working at the front desk of the very prep school Reginald attended with her husband’s disability checks to make ends meet. Her position at the school discounted the tuition enough to allow Reginald to enroll with the children of means; the Pynes wanted the best for their only son.
Reginald would watch his friend’s mothers zip off to play tennis after dropping their kids at school, the fathers having left in chauffeured vehicles for the commute into Manhattan well before dawn. There they managed the hedge funds and banks of Wall Street, which provided the money that gave them the power to look down their noses at the likes of the Pynes. Reginald’s family didn’t belong to the exclusive clubs reserved for the top echelon of society, nor did they summer in the Hamptons or on the Cape. None of this went unnoticed by young Reginald. Years later, his success would certainly surprise the kids from his old Greenwich prep school, half of whom were probably addicted to Xanax and whose kids were almost certainly destroying their lungs with watermelon-flavored toxic smoke. They’d be asking him for favors soon enough. All he needed to do was bide his time. His patience had finally paid off when the previous sitting president was forced to resign over what became known as the Capstone Scandal, the testing of an experimental PTSD drug on active-duty SEALs without their knowledge.
Overnight, Roger Grimes was president and Reginald Pyne was his most trusted advisor. Thrust into the most overwhelming job in government, Grimes relied heavily on those around him. As chief of staff, Pyne wielded a tremendous amount of power. It was the opportunity he’d waited for his entire life. This morning, he was meeting with the CIA director and her senior staff for a highly classified briefing in the secure White House Situation Room. Ordinarily, such a meeting would be attended by members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence, as well as representatives of the various agencies that made up the U.S. intelligence community. That was the “old way,” as the staff called it. “Pyne’s way” was different.
Under the new regime, the only people in the room would be Pyne, the CIA director, Janice Motley, and Victor Rodriguez, her head of Paramilitary Operations. Even with all of the security clearances involved, the White House and cabinet leaked like sieves. The chief of staff could not risk word getting to the president over, under, or around him. If you wanted the president, you had to go through Reginald Pyne. All the clubs he wasn’t invited to growing up now held the door open for him. He’d finally found the elusive power he sought. He was somebody.
The CIA executives were ushered into the secure White House Situation Room, a low-ceilinged conference room dominated by a large table that ran its length. Identical black leather chairs surrounded the table and Motley and Rodriguez chose two near the head while they waited for the chief of staff to enter. The number of empty seats made the room seem bigger than it was, the inner sanctum of the world’s last remaining superpower.
Janice Motley was a deadly combination of intelligence and toughness. An African-American woman in her mid-fifties, she was a relative newcomer to the Agency but had a long background as a staff attorney for the Senate Intelligence Committee. She had been appointed by the previous president to rein in what he saw as a cowboy culture among the clandestine service but her initial decisions surprised her former colleagues. One of those was to approve bringing James Reece back into the fold as an asset, which was an enormous political risk given his status as a domestic terrorist. Subsequently she’d approved the operation that resulted in Reece and Freddy Strain saving the life of the U.S. president by foiling a sniper and chemical weapons attack in Odessa, Ukraine. Those events had propelled her to the directorship. She hadn’t forgotten that it was the bold actions of Reece and Freddy who had made that happen.
Pyne let them simmer for a good twenty minutes, the oldest power play in the book. He then entered in a flourish, with his trademark blow-dried salt-and-pepper hair and capped-tooth smile. Despite a job that required long days indoors, his skin was tanned a deep copper. It didn’t seem like the job was keeping him too far away from the golf course. He offered both a decent handshake and took a seat at the head of the table, in the chair embroidered with the presidential seal. The signal was an obvious one; in this room, I am the president.
Pyne glanced at his watch. He wore an Ironman digital to work to appear folksy, a subtle but important manipulation. His Patek Philippe was at home. As was his custom, he started the briefing without small talk, indicating with a twirl of his index finger that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency was on the clock.
Director Motley cleared her throat.
“Thank you for meeting with us, Mr. Pyne. As you know from the President’s Daily Brief, an American citizen named Hanna Hastings was abducted in Romania. Evidence suggests that her captivity was at the direction of a senior Russian intelligence official named Aleksandr Zharkov and that she has been transported to Medny Island, a remote island in the Bering Sea off the Kamchatka Peninsula.”
Rodriguez was handling the visual elements of the presentation, using a laptop to advance the PowerPoint slides on the large LCD screens that lined the walls.
“How confident are you that this individual is on the island?”
“Based on IMINT and HUMINT, our confidence is high,” Motley replied, not giving up anything that would lead to further questions about the source of the HUMINT, a source Vic had been reluctant to reveal.
“But no SIGINT corroboration?”
Vic winced in his seat, but Motley remained unfazed.
“Correct, sir.”
“Go on.”
“We believe that Aleksandr Zharkov, deputy director of Directorate S in Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, is also currently on the island. He is the son of a well-known member of Russian organized crime in Saint Petersburg. I know that you are aware of the recent attack on a Montana ranch owned by the Hastings family. That was an attempt to kill one of our personnel and was carried out by members of Ivan Zharkov’s crime syndicate.”
“Who is that?” Pyne interrupted.
“James Reece, sir,” the director answered.
“Great. That guy should be in prison. Only reason he’s not on death row is because of that stunt in Odessa. Go on.”
“After the hit in Montana failed, Director Zharkov kidnapped Hanna Hastings in Romania in an attempt to lure her brother and possibly James Reece to Russia to look for her.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Here is a psychological profile on Zharkov,” Director Motley said, pushing a file to Pyne.
“CliffsNotes version, please. I have a country to run.”
“He’s a serial killer. He kills to fulfill an abnormal sadistic psychological gratification; thrill seeking and sexual. In Zharkov’s case it was brought on by finding his mother after her suicide.”
“This is giving me a headache. What’s his endgame?”
Rodriguez advanced the slide to a screen shot from the Dark Web.
“What the hell is this?” Pyne asked.
“This,” Motley continued, “is from a site on the Dark Web. For five hundred thousand dollars U.S., one can apply to hunt a person on Zharkov’s island.”
“What?”
“He imports prisoners from Africa. They become the prey. The website describes them as the worst type of criminals. Zharkov has taken care of the judge and jury parts. For half a million dollars, you get to be the executioner.”
“And you are telling me he wants to bring in some bigger game?” Pyne asked.
“That is correct, sir. He was using Hanna Hastings as bait and it worked. Two days ago, Ms. Hastings�
��s brother, a former Navy SEAL, contacted Aleksandr Zharkov via the Dark Web. His last communication indicated he was booking a human hunt in Kamchatka. Apparently he does not trust us to get his sister out. He has not been heard from since. He had a TS/SCI clearance and there are a few things in his head we would prefer the Russians not access.”
“Fucking SEALs,” Pyne said, rolling his eyes. “If they are not writing books, they’re causing international incidents.”
Director Motley ignored his sophomoric comment and continued: “In coordination with [XXX] and the Joint Staff we’ve developed two courses of action for your consideration and would like to brief the president as soon as possible.”
“What are our options?”
“Mr. Rodriguez will walk you through plans, sir.”
“Thank you, Director.”
The acoustics of the room were unusual, and Vic felt like his voice sounded louder than the situation dictated.
“Mr. Pyne, we briefed the Joint Staff this morning and they have moved assets into place to facilitate multiple COAs if the president decides to move forward with a hostage rescue mission to return Ms. Hastings and her brother to the United States. As you know, we have successfully extracted [XXX] [Redacted] [Redacted] with SDV assets.”
“The nuclear physicist last year. I remember approving the mission.”
Vic bit his tongue, knowing the president approved the mission, not his chief of staff.
“Yes, sir. This mission would use that same profile but instead of a rendezvous and extraction, the SDV would carry assaulters from [Redacted X X X X X X X X X X X]. They would infil to the target, and conduct actions on the objective using non-U.S.-attributable weapons.”