The Blowback Protocol

by Lars Emmerich

“Telling us what?”

  “A warning, maybe. That someone was watching me.”

  “And breaking into your house.”

  “That, too.”

  “So, who sent the warning, and how do they know you’re being watched?”

  “Damn good questions,” Sam said. “Chasing down the answers should save you from the usual office boredom for a few hours while I fly back to the States.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Dan said. “You’re a lifesaver. But I wouldn’t fly back to the States right now if I were you.”

  “Why is that?” Sam asked.

  Dan explained. Sam’s name had been leaked to the press, and someone in the administration had expressed deep concern over reckless federal agents endangering the public. Senator Oren Stanley decried Sam’s “criminally negligent” decision to move against Tariq Ezzat in the park with innocent civilians around. The cable news crowd was holding a new public trial for her at the top of every hour. The hounds were baying for her blood. Every half-hour, they re-aired a heartbreaking interview with Frank and Elizabeth McCulley, who called for justice to run its course, and prayed their daughter’s death would not be in vain.

  Worst of all, the Department of Justice had sought and obtained an indictment against Sam for criminally negligent homicide.

  Sam sat in stunned silence, unable to comprehend what Dan had just told her. A weight descended on her chest, familiar and overwhelming, making it difficult to breathe. Blood rushed in her ears, her gut tightened, and she fought back tears.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Dan asked. He suddenly seemed even further away.

  She cleared her throat and took a breath, steadying herself. “I’ll call you back in a while,” she said. She ended the call without waiting for a response.

  Indicted for manslaughter. She sat silently in utter disbelief. How many times had she put her life on the line for her country? How many obscenely dangerous situations had she endured and survived? How many criminals and spies were no longer a threat because of her bravery and sacrifice? And it’s all going to end with a fucking negligent homicide indictment? She couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

  She pondered her next move. She wondered whether there was any point in doing anything at all. She wondered if she would even be able to muster the strength to get up from the chair she was sitting in.

  The little girl’s death was a devastating tragedy that would never leave Sam’s psyche. Maybe she had made a terrible mistake. Or maybe she had done the best anyone could have done in the circumstances. Either way, the lives of Sarah Beth and her family had intersected by chance with Tariq Ezzat’s, and the result was horrific and unrecoverable. It was absolutely a crime, but was it hers to atone for?

  Sam wasn’t sure how much time passed. It might have been an hour or longer. They announced her flight, but she didn’t move. She stared at the ticket in her trembling hand, trying to decide what to do.

  Last call for boarding came and went, but Sam sat motionless. She just couldn’t go home. Not like this.

  Not without a fight.

  12

  With a practiced flick of his wrist, James Hayward let himself into a Kuala Lumpur flat belonging to a man named Kirksman. Kirksman didn’t appear to be at home, so Hayward helped himself to a club soda from the refrigerator and collapsed into an overstuffed easy chair in front of a gratuitously large television.

  Kirksman was a fascinating character, Hayward thought. His English got worse every month, even though most of the man’s clients were Americans and Brits. It seemed that the poorer Kirksman’s communication skills became, the more money he made. Hayward wondered whether Kirksman’s terrible English made him seem more mysterious and therefore more legitimate. Kirksman didn’t do what most people would consider to be mainstream work. The little Malaysian man was a glorified smuggler. He flew passengers and cargo wherever the money demanded, regardless of who else might have disapproved.

  Kirksman’s clientele was colorful. Most were in the drug trade. Some, like Hayward, were in intelligence. A handful dabbled in both, which had struck Kirksman as odd, until Hayward had explained to him once during a lights-out midnight flight through restricted airspace that an intelligence service capable of funding itself would never be fully at the mercy of its political masters.

  Mystery solved, as far as Kirksman was concerned, and why should he worry the least bit about his clients’ motives and methods? A paying customer was a worthy customer. To Hayward’s knowledge, there was no form of payment Kirksman wouldn’t accept: cash, jewelry, bullion, automobiles, homes, apartments, appointments with very friendly women, and, occasionally, plastic surgery. Kirksman’s flexible economics were as close as the man ever came to ideology, Hayward surmised.

  Hayward looked at the obscenely large clock on the wall. Kirksman was ten minutes late. Hayward didn’t have ten seconds to spare, much less ten minutes. He picked up Kirksman’s home phone to dial his cell number, but at that moment Kirksman walked through the door with a bag of groceries in one hand and a leash attached to a small yippy dog in the other.

  “You’re late,” Hayward said.

  It took Kirksman a moment to get over his initial shock, but he recovered quickly. “My big hairy nuts,” he said. “Hayward, you look like hell.”

  Hayward shook his head and pointed at the ceiling.

  Kirksman waved his arm dismissively. “I have the place swept for bugs once a week,” he said in an undecipherable singsong as he set the bag of groceries on the countertop.

  “Not often enough for my comfort,” Hayward said. “I’d rather you didn’t use my name.”

  “Sounds like you have an expensive problem.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  “Absolutely,” Kirksman said. A greedy smile lit up his face. “How soon?”

  “Right now,” Hayward said.

  Kirksman clucked and shook his head. “That will be very expensive. I had plans.”

  “I have no illusions.”

  “Where to?”

  “Spain.”

  Kirksman whistled. “It’s my lucky day.”

  Hayward frowned. “Shut up and pack.”

  Kirksman raised his eyebrow, then obliged. He grabbed a stained canvas bag and started to shove things into it.

  “How long will the trip take?” Hayward asked.

  “Nineteen hours,” Kirksman said, “give or take. Plus a stop for fuel on the way.”

  Hayward winced. He couldn’t hide the chagrin on his face. He tried to empty his mind, but his thoughts gravitated to Katrin. What were they doing to her? His insides tightened and he flexed his fist. He recalled an extremely long evening spent in the basement of a DC safe house. The experience involved a belt sander and a saltshaker. Hayward was on the receiving end. He still had the scars on his back, a permanent reminder of who owned him and the lengths they would go to exert their will. He shuddered and his stomach tumbled. It made him nauseous to think of the depravity Katrin might be enduring at their hands.

  13

  Sam cross-referenced the address with the text Dan had sent to her moments before. Satisfied, she exited the taxi, adjusted her scarf and oversized sunglasses, and dodged traffic on her way across the street to the Izmir Tour and Travel office. A door chime announced her arrival, earning the attention of a middle-aged Caucasian man sitting behind the nearest desk.

  “I’d like to take a trip someplace quaint,” she said, also in accordance with Dan’s text. The man eyed her carefully. Without a word, he stood up and walked into the office in the back of the travel agency.

  Sam wondered where the camera was located, the one they were undoubtedly using to study her. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that they were running a complete biometrics analysis on her, but it couldn’t be helped. She had already decided that after her meeting, regardless of its outcome, she would have little choice but to go deep underground. It would have been much better if she could have just left the city—and the hemisphere—but that w
asn’t in the cards. Oren Stanley had seen to that.

  Several minutes passed, during which Sam occupied herself by browsing tourism brochures filled with the obligatory bikini models and oiled-up men with washboard abs. A vacation would be nice, she thought. Perhaps of the permanent variety.

  A tall American man with thinning hair and an athletic build emerged from the office. “Would you join me for a cup of coffee?” he asked.

  Sam followed him past empty desks, posters of cruise ships, and photographs of Turkey’s famous landmarks. They entered the office and the desk agent offered a curt nod on his way back to his post, closing the office door behind him.

  A loudspeaker spat white noise at the doorway. The walls were covered with padded fabric. The little room was a standard-issue security vault, engineered to keep conversations private.

  “Jim Price,” the man said, extending his hand. “I saw the news. This is a big risk for you, Agent Jameson.”

  They wasted no time running the biometrics, Sam thought as she sat on a plush but dated sofa. She shifted her weight and felt an object slip from her pocket. It slid past her hip and came to rest between the sofa cushions. She made no attempt to retrieve it. “You shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV,” she said with a tired smile.

  “I think the arrest warrant is probably real enough.”

  It was still extremely raw, but Sam managed a weak smile. “Ever have one of those months?”

  Price smiled for the first time. The business left his eyes for an instant, replaced by a hint of kindness. “As a matter of fact, I have,” he said with a small chuckle. “How else do you think I wound up running a shit-show CIA annex in a third-world country?”

  “You mean you don’t have Chief of Station in your sights?”

  He smiled again. “More like the chief of station has me in his sights.”

  Sam laughed. It felt good. She didn’t remember the last time she had laughed. Time to reexamine my life, she thought, not for the tenth or ten-thousandth time since February 25.

  Price handed her a cup of coffee and smiled. “How may I be of service?”

  Sam sipped, sizing him up. The line she had to walk was a thin one. For all she knew, someone was already en route from the embassy to take her into custody. On the other hand, she had questions that needed answers. The most pressing one being, why the hell had an Agency stooge just threatened her?

  The CIA man across from her seemed bright and capable. She could see it in his eyes. It was obvious to Sam that he’d been sent out to pasture—running a walk-in branch responsible for coordinating dead drops and other low-level Agency administration was no fast-track assignment—but he didn’t seem bitter about it. Either he had found some Zen peace in the aftermath of his career derailment, Sam thought, or he was crooked as hell and taking his revenge by taking advantage of a lifetime’s worth of clandestine knowledge to line his pockets. If the former, he might be able and willing to help her. If the latter, there was a chance he might be involved in whatever Avery Martinson was wrapped up in.

  Either way, an honest conversation with Price would probably move things out of bottom-dead-center. Sometimes, when you were out of ideas, it paid to stir the pot a little, just to see what would happen next. If she could keep the conversation short, she liked her odds of escaping any embassy involvement that Price might already have set in motion. Given her arrest warrant, embassy involvement would mean a set of handcuffs and a very uncomfortable plane ride back to the States.

  Sam took a deep breath and laid out her predicament, starting with Tariq Ezzat and the Doberman case, including the tragic death of the little girl, the relationship of the girl’s parents with Senator Oren Stanley, the funeral, the listening device, and the intrusion at her home.

  “You think the Agency is somehow involved?” Price asked when she paused for a sip of coffee.

  Sam shook her head. “I really had no idea what to think. Then one of your guys sat down across from me in a coffee shop a couple of hours ago.”

  “One of ours?”

  Sam nodded. “Well, formerly. Freelance now. He went by Avery Martinson in the Agency personnel records. Large man, sweaty, lots of forehead, lots of attitude. He liked underage prostitutes.”

  Price’s face was impassive. Unnaturally so, in Sam’s estimation. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one walking a thin line. “Not anyone I know,” he said.

  “But someone you know of?”

  A small smile crossed Price’s lips. “It’s a small community.”

  “Any reason why he would waste his time warning me off a case I’m no longer officially working?”

  Price took a sip of his coffee, using the time to prepare his answer. It was clear they were having two conversations. One was made up of the words Price spoke, and the other of the words he didn’t.

  “Maybe a client is concerned whether you’re working unofficially,” he finally said.

  Sam nodded, then pursed her lips. “I get that, but can you think of any reason someone might want to break into my home after I was suspended from the case?”

  Spies were liars, and Sam had developed a finely honed bullshit detector over her years of chasing, catching, and interrogating them. She watched a woodenness come over Price’s face for a fraction of a second, and his posture became a little too relaxed.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” he said.

  Sam nodded, digesting. Price knew something, but he wasn’t telling. She didn’t know him and didn’t have any leverage over him, and as a result she didn’t expect to get much more out of the conversation. That was okay. She had a contingency plan.

  She put on a disappointed look, rose, extended her hand, and thanked Price for his time. “I appreciate your spending a few minutes with me,” she said.

  He smiled and handed her a business card that contained only a telephone number. Sam recognized it as a local Izmir number. “If I can ever be helpful in any way at all,” he said, extending his hand. His grip lingered and his eyes met hers meaningfully. “Sometimes it’s nice to find a friendly face in a foreign city.”

  The innuendo wasn’t lost on her. “You’re too kind,” she said, playing along. “I’ll be sure to call if I can think of anything.”

  The dawn of the vacuum tube was a momentous event. It led to the invention of the transistor. Integrated circuits followed, with hundreds, then thousands, then millions of transistors. With such quantities in play, objects inevitably began exhibiting emergent properties. Not intelligence, per se, but something very close.

  For example, a cell phone had the ability to record and broadcast a conversation, even while giving no outward sign of activity. Sam’s “lost” cell phone remained between the sofa cushions in Jim Price’s CIA annex at Izmir Tour and Travel. It was privy to a conversation that occurred immediately after her departure.

  That conversation was digitized and posted onto a server. The server’s physical location was in a former rubber tire factory in a gentrifying section of Denver, Colorado. Half a globe away from the tire factory, while sipping thick Turkish coffee, Sam downloaded the files and listened to the conversation through little white headphones.

  “Would a little notice have been too much to ask?” Price said. Sam heard annoyance in his voice. There was a long pause. Price was talking on a phone—likely the landline on his desk, or maybe a cell phone of his own, or even a burner, depending on the nature of the conversation he was having—and she only heard his half of the discussion.

  “She didn’t seem all that resourceful,” Price said. “She seemed like she’d spent the last week getting her ass kicked.” Clearly, Sam was the topic of conversation. She smiled. Her little visit to the travel agency had been a smashing success.

  “Already did that,” Price said after another lengthy pause. Perhaps he had been admonished to assign a tail to her, Sam reasoned, which he had already done. It would account for the ostentatiously in-love couple across the street at the sidewalk café whom Sam had pegged
as a surveillance team the moment they sat down.

  Static filled the recording for several seconds, punctuated by a few unintelligible grunts and non-words from Price, then, “Say that again?”

  More static. Then Price said, “You want . . .”—static—“stop her?”

  Sam’s body tensed, and the uncomfortable combination of worry and fear settled over her.

  On the playback, there was another brief pause, then Price said, “Understood.”

  That was evidently the end of the call. Sam heard what sounded like Price rummaging through his desk, then she heard the creak of an old chair, followed a few moments later by the sound of the door opening and closing. She heard nothing but static after that.

  She stopped the playback and pursed her lips. Price’s words echoed: Stop her. Perhaps her visit hadn’t been such a success after all. Perhaps it had been a serious miscalculation. Perhaps she had blundered right into the waiting arms of the people she’d been running from all along.

  But perhaps not. She knew more now than she did before her conversation with Price. Avery Martinson, that fat, sweaty dog of a man who’d ambushed her in the coffee shop hours earlier, was evidently not operating rogue and was in fact still entangled with the CIA in some capacity.

  Useful information? Time would tell. At least she knew what she was up against. The Agency’s pockets ran deep, and they had plenty of resources.

  A chilling thought struck: Was Doberman an Agency operation? They’d been roundly criticized in the past for their entrepreneurial efforts, which had included more than peripheral participation in the drug trade, as well as other criminal enterprises deemed “operationally necessary” in the pursuit of Liberty and Justice for All. But on US turf? That would mark a new low, Sam thought.

  And it would pose several practical difficulties. The American security apparatus was unique in human history for its reach and penetration. It would simply be impractical to hide criminal activity indefinitely. Someone would figure it out. Probably the Bureau. And the ensuing turd-flinging would be epic.