Shakedown

by Newt Gingrich

  Garrett held his pistol close to his leg, making it harder for those hurrying around him to see, as he walked toward the staircase. He kept his eyes on the Roc, who’d noticed him too.

  The Roc showed no immediate sense of alarm. If he were clutching a pistol, Garrett thought, surely one of the teenagers milling around him would have screamed. But none was paying attention to the Palestinian assassin.

  Commuters pushed against Garrett as they descended the stairs onto the platform, reaching it at the same moment that the arriving northbound train came to a stop. The Roc was now thirty yards away from him, but both men were mobbed by passengers.

  The Roc entered a railcar seven down from where Garrett was standing.

  Garrett began pushing through the throng of commuters, but he couldn’t reach the seventh car before its doors closed. He hesitated, turned slightly, and realized his mistake. Tahira was standing twenty feet behind him. The Roc had been luring him out onto the platform, away from the mezzanine bridge, under which she had been hiding.

  She now had a clear shot. He spun to face her, raising his pistol, as the subway train started to move, leaving them alone on the platform.

  Tahira was aiming the Iranian-made Thunderbolt pistol. She had the drop on him. He would be her first face-to-face kill. It had always been her father who pulled the trigger, wielded his knife, or set off booby traps. Now she would be responsible for taking another life.

  Their eyes met. She hesitated. Garrett had no idea why.

  His round tore into her left biceps, shattering the bone. Tahira screamed, but still she didn’t discharge the pistol.

  His second shot punctured her heart.

  Garrett ran to her. No blood was gushing from her chest wound—her heart was no longer pumping. He dropped to his knee. She was dead.

  Garrett had never fatally wounded a young woman before. He looked at her tender young face. She was a terrorist. Her gender and age shouldn’t have mattered. Yet they did.

  Garrett glanced at the subway train’s final car as it disappeared up the track.

  Part III

  If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

  —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 3, scene 1

  Twenty-Four

  Commander Boris Petrov piloted the Golden Fish into an inlet off the northern African coast—a safe hiding place before attempting to sail unnoticed from the Mediterranean Sea into the Atlantic Ocean.

  The assassination attempt on Big Jules Levi and round-the-clock shifts had enabled Petrov to depart from the Cold War submarine base in Balaklava Bay four hours before a Mossad team arrived to investigate suspicious activities there. Nothing remained inside the mountain hideaway except scorched concrete.

  The title of commander was self-given, although Petrov had served on submarines in the Russian navy before his career was cut short. Two Russian military police investigators had identified him as the leader of a ring selling stolen military supplies on the black market. Petrov had been jailed in the Black Dolphin prison in Orenburg, home to Russia’s “worst of the worst.” It was there that he had encountered a cowering Taras Aleksandrovich Zharkov, whose rich father made him easy prey. Petrov had become Zharkov’s personal bodyguard for a hefty fee, and after they were released he was the muscle behind Zharkov’s business enterprises.

  Fighting came naturally to Petrov, who’d been born and reared in West Biryulyovo, an impoverished, crime-ridden Moscow neighborhood boxed in on two sides by rail lines and the third by the Moscow Ring, the major highway that encircled the city. There were no Metro stops in West Biryulyovo; city officials hoped to keep its ninety thousand residents contained. Gangs ruled. Petrov had a long arrest record by his fifteenth birthday. A local tribunal had given him a choice: either join the military or be sent to an adult prison. Enlistee Petrov had been assigned submarine duty because few others wanted it.

  With the enthusiasm of a weekend mechanic turning a rusty Lada into a hot rod, Petrov had used Zharkov’s unlimited budget to retro-mod the Golden Fish. Gone were the submarine’s original diesel engines. The Cold War relic’s twin propellers had become a single screw. Batteries that rarely could hold a full charge had been replaced with giant lithium-ion ones. Petrov had paid special attention to the old hull. Romeo-class submarines had been based on Nazi Germany designs. Their hulls could take a submarine to three hundred meters before being crushed by pressure. Engineers had redesigned the Golden Fish hull, adding another hundred meters to its crush depth.

  Petrov had recruited two other experienced submariners who’d served with him. Neither could live comfortably on their paltry military pensions. Dimitri Kozlov was his second-in-command; Yuri Suslov, the submarine’s sonar operator. The remainder of the crew were young and inexperienced. As long as they did as told, Petrov didn’t care.

  He’d taken the Golden Fish on three earlier trips to test it and his novice crew. Oxygen levels in submarines are kept low to minimize risk of fires, resulting in crew members who tire easily and often become irritable. Despite Petrov’s improved designs, the recirculated air smelled of diesel gas, cooking, hydraulic fluid, human sweat, cigarette smoke, and sewage. There was no need for torpedoes, so that space had been expanded for Petrov and his two officers. All others “hot racked”—climbing into a bunk after a six-hour shift while their replacement was crawling out.

  The submarine’s fore contained one and a half decks. The upper housed living accommodations and a galley. Beneath, the lower level was home to batteries and fuel tanks. The aft was a single deck that contained the diesels and propulsion machinery. The boat’s conning tower rose slightly back from the submarine’s midsection. Directly under it was the control room, with its periscopes, radar, and communication gear.

  On each of the Golden Fish’s test voyages, Petrov had pushed the submarine to twenty knots submerged. His cutting-edge sonar identified other ships, including the Israeli submarine Drakon, long before they spotted him. When they did, he’d taken advantage of the submarine’s Russian “black hole” technology. It was what had enabled him to slip unnoticed through the closely watched straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

  There had been one problem during the test runs. Keeping the diesel engines running for hours had caused the engine room temperatures to soar past a hundred degrees, and that heat had quickly spread throughout the sub. As they dove to three hundred feet, water droplets began dripping from the walls, and the Golden Fish’s compressed metal skin made a groaning sound. The fear of water bursting in, making the submarine into a submerged coffin, had caused a crew member to panic, becoming unhinged.

  Petrov had ordered the terrified crew member brought to him, and beaten him unconscious with his bare hands.

  “On my boat, every man must do his duty,” he’d declared. “One weak man will bring us all death.”

  Now lingering near the lip of the Strait of Gibraltar, Petrov was about to face another challenge. NATO and US forces closely monitored traffic through the Strait, searching especially for Russian submarines.

  Petrov had studied the two traditional methods for tracking submarines. The first was visual. A submarine normally had to dive to three to four hundred feet, where the sunlight dissipated, to avoid being spotted from aircraft.

  The second tracking method was acoustical. The Golden Fish would have to evade not only sonar but also echo sounding and IFF (identification friend or foe) technology as it passed through the Strait’s narrowest section, a 7.7-nautical-mile-wide strip between Spain and Morocco.

  It was nearly dusk when Petrov’s sonar operator identified the HMS Aware, a nuclear-powered Royal Navy submarine approaching the Strait, bound for the Atlantic.

  “Its speed?” Petrov asked.

  “Twenty-five knots,” Yuri Suslov replied.

  Petrov navigated the Golden Fish from its hiding spot in the inlet and chose a course aimed at the Bri
tish submarine’s midsection. Petrov’s intent was to pass directly beneath it.

  “Now we’ll see how invisible we are,” he declared.

  Second-in-Command Dimitri Kozlov ordered silent running. Electric power was quieter than nuclear. All but essential crew were restricted to their bunks, toilet doors and their lids taped to avoid slamming, the galley sealed tight.

  As they approached the Brits, Petrov used hand signals to issue commands. The HMS Aware was two hundred fifty meters from the surface. Petrov dropped the Golden Fish to its limit, four hundred meters.

  The sensors on the British submarine should have been sounding an alarm as the Golden Fish neared. His face drenched in sweat, Petrov stayed on course. Afraid to move, speak, sneeze, or cough, his crew stood frozen like department store mannequins.

  They were now near enough to hear the sound of the Rolls-Royce nuclear reactor as the 318-foot-long HMS Aware continued west into the nine-mile strait.

  The Golden Fish continued northward.

  It happened. The rogue submarine sailed underneath the midsection of the HMS Aware undetected. Nothing. No reaction. No alarms.

  Petrov resisted his urge to celebrate. Instead, he turned the Golden Fish away from the Strait. He returned later that same day, and seventy-five minutes after entering the Strait, the Golden Fish emerged with its nuclear bomb in the Atlantic Ocean, on a course for the United States.

  Twenty-Five

  “Your first time inside our headquarters?” Connor Whittington asked.

  “No, but I’ve never gotten farther than the lobby,” Robert Calhoun replied. “But I assume you already know that from your records.”

  “What brought you to our lobby?”

  “The Memorial Wall. A story about it. One of the best-read pieces I’ve written. Got more than a million hits, and thousands of shares too. What are there now? A hundred and ten stars on the wall?”

  “Sadly, we’ve just added more than a dozen,” Whittington replied.

  “Oh yeah, one of them was an employee who killed herself, and people got upset about putting her on a wall with those who’d died heroes.”

  A waiter entered the CIA director’s private dining room and offered menus from white-gloved fingers.

  “Most days I eat a sandwich at my desk,” Whittington said, “but I wanted to carve out time to meet with you. Thank you for agreeing to do this completely off the record.”

  “I won’t tell anyone what you’re ordering for lunch,” Calhoun joked.

  Whittington didn’t find the comment especially clever, but he smiled just the same. “Have you eaten in the Senate dining room?” he asked. “On most Thursdays it serves meals from individual states. Last week, it was Iowa, and they sold out of chicken potpies.”

  “So that’s what they eat in Iowa?”

  “I had to choose the less popular glazed bacon and scallop salad with shiitake mushrooms and plum tomatoes.”

  “And what did the senator you met there have?”

  “I’d rather not say,” Whittington said. “But I will tell you the bacon was from an Iowa hog, and the scallops were not.”

  Calhoun was enjoying this tête-à-tête. The trick to getting information was befriending sources, getting them to relax. Calhoun liked to share a few personal stories, often embarrassing. That way, his sources let their guards down and forgot that he might skewer them on the next day’s front page. “Are you a cat or dog person?” he asked.

  “I didn’t invite you here to discuss pets.” Director Whittington was not a novice when it came to reporters. If anyone was going to manipulate this relationship, it would be him. He’d ordered a backgrounder. Robert Calhoun: Born in Topeka. Father a local judge. Mother a homemaker. Graduated from the William Allen White School of Journalism. Kansas University. First job at White’s famous newspaper—the Emporia Gazette—before the website pounce—more National Enquirer than hard news—lured him to Washington. Switched to Washington Interceptor two years ago. Paper had a far-left slant. Thirty-three. Divorced. Workaholic.

  The director ordered a Cobb salad. He was watching his weight, trying to combat endless meetings and little time for exercise. Calhoun ordered grilled beef medallions with shiitake sauce atop a bed of creamy polenta.

  “I don’t believe as director that I’ve invited a reporter to lunch,” Whittington said. “When I was on Capitol Hill, I dealt with lots of you, but not here. What’s the Washington Interceptor’s circulation now, around six hundred thousand?” He’d checked before meeting him.

  “That’s our print run. Twice that many online. We’re producing podcasts now, and I constantly tweet.”

  “You ambushed me when I was leaving the Hill the other day,” Whittington said. “That’s a specialty of yours, isn’t it?”

  “The people have a right to know. It’s my job to get answers for them.”

  “I assumed you simply wanted to sell newspapers. Get your name on the front page. You’ve published some real trash.” Whittington was purposely insulting Calhoun, curious when he would buckle.

  “I guess we all rationalize what we do at times, don’t we? Spying on others, recruiting traitors, undermining foreign regimes, lying. Yet in the lobby—what’s the quote? ‘And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’”

  Whittington spread a linen napkin across his lap. “You asked if I sent Brett Garrett and Valerie Mayberry to Italy. You planning on writing about them?”

  “Still digging. We don’t really have much of a foreign staff anymore. No one based in Italy, so I’ve been working the phones and doing interviews by email. I got the Bellagio cops to confirm that two Americans were involved in a high-speed chase and handed over to the Mossad after that failed attempt to kill Julian Levi.”

  “What makes you believe those two Americans were Garrett and Mayberry?”

  “I know they met with you recently here at the agency.”

  Whittington hid his irritation. He had a leak. “You were pretending you already knew, hoping I would confirm Garrett and Mayberry were involved.”

  Calhoun took a sip of the Diet Coke he’d ordered. The ice clinked against the side of the glass. Whittington recalled a time in Washington when having a cocktail at lunch was expected. Not now. “Mr. Calhoun,” he said, “who told you that Garrett and Mayberry met with me?”

  The reporter had a ready reply. “Sir, if I revealed my sources to you, then you’d know I couldn’t be trusted to keep our lunch conversation a secret.”

  Their white-gloved server arrived with entrées served on china plates emblazoned with the CIA seal. He refilled Whittington’s iced tea and Calhoun’s soda. They waited until he’d gone to continue their conversation.

  “How trustworthy are you really, Mr. Calhoun? You promised our talk today would be off the record, but based on my experiences on the Hill, that can mean different things to different reporters.”

  “You’re right. Sometimes politicians get confused. Off the record means I won’t use anything you tell me, but if you tell me something I already know, or I might hear later from a different source, then I’m free to use it, I just won’t attribute it to you.”

  “This later source,” Whittington said, “now will he or she be real or imagined? You see, Mr. Calhoun, I know a bit about how you reporters operate. I tell you something today, and later I get a call from you, saying someone else told you the same information. But you can’t say who told you because it’s a confidential source. When in fact you’re lying and simply looking for a way to put in print what I told you.”

  “That’s not how I operate,” Calhoun said. “I must say you have a rather dim view of reporters.”

  “I have a realistic one, born from experience in this city. I can’t stop you from publishing what I tell you under the pretense you’ve heard it from someone else. But if you want to have a long-term relationship with me, you will not play games.”

  “Why’d you invite me here if you don’t trust me?”

  “There are few
people I trust,” Whittington said. “I read your story about Brett Garrett and how he was suspected of murdering Andre Gromyko in Guinea-Bissau. You also implied he might have been involved in the killing of an Iranian who lived in a condo on the same floor as him.”

  “Actually, my story didn’t say they lived on the same floor,” Calhoun said. “Obviously you know about Nasya Radi’s death.”

  “I’d like to forge a relationship with you, Mr. Calhoun,” Director Whittington said. “On two conditions.”

  Calhoun, who’d been busy cutting his beef tenderloin, put down his knife and fork. “What sort of conditions?”

  “You can never reveal publicly that I am a source. Ever. You want me to be your Deep Throat, you need to make certain my name remains secret. Even if I die before you. No one can ever know we talked.”

  Calhoun nodded.

  “It will take more than a nod. Let me be perfectly clear. If you ever reveal I provided information, I will not only deny it, I will do everything I can to ruin you personally and professionally.”

  “What’s the other condition?”

  “I’ll help you focus your stories.”

  “You want to edit me.”

  “Don’t act as if that never happens. You and I both know your sources all have a reason for talking to you. All I am asking is that you write your story using my information the way I intended. In return, you get a backdoor channel. With my help, you’ll be the next Bob Woodward and win a Watergate Pulitzer.”

  “Not to split hairs, but Bob Woodward never won a Pulitzer for Watergate. The newspaper got it.” Calhoun picked up his utensils. Tasted a cut medallion. Gave the illusion that he was weighing his decision. Posturing. “I’d want to have twenty-four-hour access and your private cell.”

  “I can agree to that.”

  Calhoun pushed his plate aside. “Did you send Garrett and Mayberry to Italy?”