The Blowback Protocol

by Lars Emmerich

  The Blowback Protocol

  A Sam Jameson Thriller

  Lars Emmerich

  Contents

  Copyright 2017

  The Blowback Protocol

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  Copyright 2017

  Lars Emmerich

  Polymath Publishing and Consulting, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, government agencies, or corporations is unintentional, but probably well-deserved.

  The Blowback Protocol

  A Sam Jameson Thriller

  1

  Sunlight peeked into the room and crept slowly across the floor, bathing ornate furnishings and marble colonnades in orange warmth. A lone man snored quietly, tangled in bedsheets.

  He stirred. Consciousness returned slowly at first, his mind in a fog until his involuntary stretches sparked painful protest from battered limbs. Reality set in. His stomach tightened and his pulse quickened. Dread settled over him.

  Tomorrow had become today. If everything went according to plan, it would be his last day on Earth.

  The man rubbed his eyes and groaned. He would have pleaded with the gods and the fates, but he considered them to be fabrications of weak and frightened minds. He would have pleaded with them, but he had vowed never again to beg or grovel. He was a different man now, and it wouldn’t have done any good. They were immovable. They would offer no mercy.

  He turned and faced the window, squinting into the painful dawn light. A strained breath burned his chest. Perspiration formed on his brow. His mind reeled, tumbling between denial, defiance, and fear.

  He thought of his brief but devastating affiliation with the US Central Intelligence Agency. It was easy to blame them. They were more than blameworthy, but he couldn’t lay it all at their feet. He and the Agency had conspired together to lay waste to his life and many others.

  Katrin floated into his mind’s eye and his breath hitched. He imagined her the way she’d looked the last time he saw her, the last time he would ever see her: white silk draped lazily over provocative curves, long blonde hair falling over delicate shoulders, fierce blue eyes ablaze with betrayal and anger. Those eyes haunted and convicted him.

  Guilt seized him with a vice grip as his mind traced the path that had brought them all to the brink. A wrong never to be righted. A sacrifice she would never know or understand.

  His life for hers.

  The phone on the nightstand bleated. He jerked with alarm. Mother of God, it’s already starting. He stared at the phone, willing his wits to return, willing fortitude and backbone and courage.

  “Hello,” he said, his voice far less unsteady than his gut.

  “James Hayward?”

  “Yes,” he lied. How many years had it taken for him to master himself, to finally inhabit his own skin? And now, on the last day of his life, the last man to speak to him wouldn’t even use his real name.

  “You are ordered to proceed,” the male voice said in an American accent. “Do not deviate. You are now and will remain under surveillance until termination.”

  Termination . . . how artfully apropos, Hayward thought. Anger flashed, but he let it pass. “I understand.”

  “You are instructed to infiltrate and retrieve the item in one hour.” The man didn’t wait for a response. Hayward heard a click and the hum of an open circuit.

  Hayward replaced the receiver, stood on trembling legs, and let the bedsheets fall at his feet. He walked slowly to the shower and started the water. He felt the shower’s soothing calm and the sensation sparked a pang of regret. Death really seemed to put life into perspective, he mused with an idle detachment that seemed inappropriately irreverent. But what the hell was an appropriately reverent thought to entertain in a circumstance like this?

  He turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, and stood before the mirror. His mid-life paunch was gone, replaced by muscular contours. His stooped, apologetic posture was also gone, replaced by a confident, capable stance. Hair once stringy and long was now close-cropped, and a wastrel’s padded jawline had given way to the carved hardness of an operator. But the biggest change was in the eyes. They were clear, hard, purposeful, understanding.

  But none of that would do him any good today. Today wasn’t for clarity or hardness or purpose. It wasn’t for action, for striving, for victory. Today was for atonement.

  “Fine mess you’ve made,” Hayward said. It sounded small and inane, a waste of breath, a waste of time.

  Breath and time. Suddenly his most precious commodities.

  He dressed in yesterday’s clothes. He left his 9mm Smith & Wesson under the pillow and his little Ruger .380 on the nightstand. He wouldn’t need either of them and they might complicate things. Their comforting heft might plant seeds of revolt, might entice him to do something foolish or prevent him from doing what had to be done.

  On top of the ornate dresser sat a hotel room key card and the keys to a rented car. He ignored them and palmed an ID badge, covered in Chinese characters and adorned by a photograph of a Westerner’s face. He slipped the ID card into his pocket and left the room.

  Hayward strode out of the hotel and into the morning sun, its smothering warmth already settling heavily over the towering bustle of Singapore, and reached into his pocket to retrieve a cell phone. He texted a memorized message to a number he’d come to know and despise, one last bit of sick humor at his own expense: “The end begins.”

  2

  Nine and a half thousand miles away, a phone buzzed, interrupting a memorial service at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC.

  Special Agent Samantha Jameson, Chief of Homeland Security’s Counterespionage Division, turned toward the disturbance. One row ahead and two people to the right, a middle-aged man of medium height and medium build reached into his pocket to silence his phone. Prominent chin, aquiline nose, hair a mix of brown and gray with a circular bald spot that made him look like a monk. Sam scowled at the man’s lack of telephone etiquette but her annoyance was short-lived. Her mind was otherwise occupied.

  Her gaze returned to the casket. It was made of polished aluminum with stainless steel rails for the pallbearers’ hands. It was beautiful, simple, and elegant. And small. No larger than four feet long. Not nearly big enough for an adult. The sight of its awful, devastating smallness caused a lump to choke Sam’s throat.

  The aggrieved sat in silence in the first row, smothered and bowed by pain, mere feet away from the tiny body inside the coffin. Sam watched them in their agony. Her heart broke for them all over again.

  Next to the casket, a picture of five-year-old Sarah Beth McCulley stood atop a simple memorial display. Blonde curls, bright, beautiful eyes, enormous smile, all innocence and cuteness and goodness and joie de vivre. The wrongness of it stabbed Sam in the chest.

  Sam was tall and athletic, but she sat with her shoulders hunched and her back bowed, reeling from sleepless nights and days spent in sorrow and worry. Her face was beautiful and striking, framed by fire-red hair, but dark rings encircled her eyes. Their piercing energy had faded, and fatigue and remorse clouded her features. Her own devastation haunted her, stole her breath, settled in her stomach like a stone, as it had countless times over the past four days. The words assaulted her from within: This is my fault, and everyone here knows it.

  A pipe organ thrust out a dirge and Sam jumped at the sound. Mourners sang with weak voices. The dead girl’s family sat in numb stillness. Bile rose in her th
roat as Sam struggled not to fall once again into the abyss that had swallowed her over and over since the little girl’s death. My doing. My failure. My fault.

  The priest’s smooth, melodic tones clashed with the raw, tragic sorrow of the occasion. He spoke with contrived certainty about things eternal and unknowable, aiming at comfort but leaving only emptiness and loss as the echoes faded into the old cathedral.

  Sam’s mind lost its grip on the moment. She slipped back into pained recollection. A gray winter day. Littlefield Park in Arlington, Virginia. The squawk and static of tactical transmissions in her earpiece. The news that Tariq Ezzat was approaching. A dozen factors to weigh: a public space with civilians nearby, but her team had worked long and hard for weeks to gain the opportunity to move against Ezzat and his network of terrorists, to extract the intel she knew he must be holding in his head. She recalled the tension and weight in her gut as she spoke into her transmitter: “Take him.”

  The scene played out for the thousandth time in her mind. She was powerless to stop it, doomed to witness the tragedy over and over again. Ezzat’s sudden sprint. The blur of the man’s hand. The bark of his gun firing.

  Elizabeth McCulley’s scream.

  Sarah Beth McCulley’s still, lifeless form, slumped in a widening pool of crimson.

  Tears fell from Sam’s eyes and her shoulders shook. The church’s organ started again, snapping her awareness back to the present, dredging up more muted singing from the congregants, and then it was over.

  Frank McCulley steadied his wife, small and frail and wrecked, and the two made their way to the back of the church. They walked slowly, hollowed eyes cast in the distance, faces pale and haggard.

  Sam followed their progress. The evidence of their suffering weighed heavily on her heart as they drew nearer. She held her breath.

  Frank’s head turned and his eyes met Sam’s. His face changed. Grief and misery gave way to deep, seething anger.

  Air escaped Sam’s lungs, but she couldn’t draw a breath to replace it. Her body seized and she couldn’t move.

  McCulley glared at her. Then he turned away in disgust, tightened the grip on his wife’s arm, and they walked slowly out of the church.

  Sam’s eyes burned with tears. She rose, unsteady, and walked on wooden legs to the exit, mumbling apologies as she moved against the flow of mourners.

  A cold drizzle seized her as she stepped outside. Frosty wind from the Potomac chilled her to the bone, leaving her open and vulnerable in her grief and guilt. Her car was parked a block away, downwind, but Sam stepped into the teeth of the cold breeze, west along H Street, a few hundred yards from the White House. The icy wind assailed her but she felt the rightness of this small suffering, punishing herself for the devastation her decision had wrought.

  One miscalculation. One mistake. That was all it took.

  That was all it ever took.

  She rounded the corner, barely noticing as she brushed against a passerby, a medium-sized man in a black suit with an aquiline nose, a prominent chin, and a monk-like bald spot. It didn’t register that she’d seen the same man just moments before, seated one pew ahead and two people to the right of her, fidgeting to turn off his buzzing cell phone.

  And she didn’t notice the small object he slipped into her coat pocket as they passed.

  3

  Sam walked slowly with the flow of foot traffic, lost in her thoughts. A cold drizzle settled over the city and she hunched her shoulders against the chill, but she kept moving. She had no destination. She was propelled only by a desire not to stop, as if stopping would allow everything to catch up with her again and crush her beneath its weight.

  At some point, she became aware of her intention to walk to her meeting with Evan Kent, the director of Homeland Security. Kent was three or four levels above her in the gargantuan bureaucracy, and an entire world away in terms of his priorities. He was a political animal. Sam was an operator who caught spies. The animosity and mistrust was deep and endemic.

  Meetings with the director were rarely routine, and this one promised to be especially inauspicious. He would place her on administrative leave, of course, pending the outcome of the formal investigation into the events of the preceding week, up to and including the death of Sarah Beth McCulley, five-year-old daughter of Frank McCulley, longtime chief of staff to Senator Oren Stanley.

  Sam thought of resigning her position as the chief of the counterespionage branch, but she knew Kent would never have it. He would reserve the right to discipline her publicly, for the sake of the department, and he could only do that if she remained on the payroll. She might still offer her resignation, not because it might prove a properly politic gesture under the circumstances, but because she genuinely wondered whether she remained fit for duty in the aftermath of the girl’s death.

  She had, without a doubt, misread the circumstances. As Agent in Charge, it had been her call to make, and she had followed her gut. She’d turned the details over and over in her mind a thousand times since the incident, looked at the circumstances from every angle she could imagine, but she still couldn’t convince herself that she’d have chosen any differently if she had it to do all over again.

  Which was why she wondered if she could ever be trusted again.

  Her instincts had rarely been wrong over her relatively long and reasonably distinguished career. She’d won more battles than she lost, caught far more spies and traitors and hit men than she’d let slip through her fingers, but her luck had clearly run out.

  She had made mistakes before, sometimes lethal ones. It went with the territory. Sometimes she lost sleep and sometimes not. But nothing like this. This was a disaster. It had turned her life upside down in the blink of an eye. And it had destroyed the life of a beautiful little girl whose father worked for a powerful US senator. Being responsible for someone’s death was no picnic, but Sarah Beth McCulley’s death had amounted to a personal apocalypse.

  Sam waited at a crosswalk for the light to change, her mind numb with exhaustion and grief. Her eyes rested on a short, chubby man in an ill-fitting suit across the street. His extra-large jacket fell at unusual angles in certain places and his gaze lingered on her for a moment before resuming his rendition of the ubiquitous DC scowl. At first Sam didn’t notice these things because she wasn’t thinking operationally, which was a clear violation of her favorite survival rule: always think operationally. But her instincts took over and it became clear to her a moment later: the man was carrying a concealed weapon, and he was watching her. The hairs on the back of her neck rose, but the light changed, the man walked on, and Sam’s mind resumed its self-flagellation.

  She trudged south and east, navigating subconsciously while her mind and gut gnawed on each other, lost in her own fog. Homeland was not a small place, full as it was of roughly a billion bureaucrats to Sam’s reckoning, but she was surprised to look up at some point and find herself at its massive front door. She had evidently not taken conscious notice as the city blocks disappeared under her feet.

  A surge of adrenaline hit her veins. Time to face the Man.

  She opened the door to the lobby and was met by a mass of humanity queued up in front of some sort of scanner, waiting for their daily dose of dehumanization. She looked at her watch and cursed. She was going to be late. “What the hell is going on?” she muttered under her breath. It was shift change, but Sam had never seen so many people in the DHS lobby at six in the evening.

  “New scanner,” someone replied to Sam’s mumbled question. “Picks up unauthorized electronics. Supposed to stop cyber-attacks.”

  “Jesus H,” Sam huffed. Undoubtedly part of the knee-jerk response to the previous year’s economic terrorism incident. The government never learned, and they’d spent trillions closing the barn door in the twelve months since the horse left.

  Sam pulled out her cell phone and called Director Kent’s office with her apologies. The secretary was sympathetic and sweet, which was out of character. She knows I’m
about to be slaughtered, Sam thought with a grimace.

  She noticed a voicemail from Brock and her heart leapt. She listened to his message. Air Force Colonel Brock James, keeper of her flame and her live-in consort of four amazing years, was stuck halfway around the globe helping Uncle Sam double down on all the ill-advised oil bets.

  She hadn’t seen him for three months. Their all-too-brief conversations had grown strained. He was damn near superhuman, but the strain of loving someone in her line of work was starting to show. He was tired of wondering whether she would survive her next investigation and tired of playing second-fiddle to her insane work schedule.

  They had talked about marriage, maybe even kids, though Sam thought they were both a little long in the tooth. She had been pondering a career change for quite some time—years, in fact, but for some reason she just couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger. Her job at Homeland filled some need of hers that she couldn’t readily identify, and she had a hard time getting Brock to understand. His tone on the subject had become angrier and more strident over the course of his most recent deployment to the Middle East, so they now avoided the subject in what amounted to an uneasy and unspoken truce.

  Sam melted a little at the sound of Brock’s voice, but she couldn’t make out many of the words over the hisses, pops, and clicks in the message. She didn’t know where he was exactly, but it sounded like a perfect hellhole.

  Her eyes moistened. A hug would do wonders, she thought, but it was evidently too much to ask of the federal government. Brock’s emergency leave request had been denied. He was stuck in some godforsaken desert somewhere full of goats and extremists, foreign and domestic, which left her to deal with the fallout from Sarah Beth McCulley’s death by herself.