The Blowback Protocol

by Lars Emmerich

  The proprietor nodded, then smiled and went on his way.

  Hayward saved the document onto the computer’s hard drive. Then he powered off the computer and used his penknife to pry open the computer’s cover. He removed the hard drive from the rack inside the housing, then tucked the drive into his pocket and left.

  He wasn’t certain what to do next, but there was no doubt about one thing: the game had changed.

  26

  In its long history, the “Global War on Terror” had influenced a variety of human activities in unimagined and unintended ways. But it was a universal reality, Sam reckoned, that wherever needs or desires were restricted, a shadow economy always grew to fill the gap.

  Travel was no exception. Getting around the globe had become nearly impossible for some segments of the human population. But people still needed to get around, and an entire network sprang up that was devoted to moving people and their belongings unofficially across imaginary lines. It was useful in a wide variety of circumstances. And it had proven beyond useful for Sam. She was on her way from Tripoli to Cagliari, site of the “jackrabbit” message’s terminus.

  She used a little bit of Dark Web savviness to arrange boat transportation from a small, private, hidden pier somewhere west of Tripoli. A small, thin, frail man welcomed her with a warm smile, helped her to a seat on a medium-sized fishing boat that seemed several major repairs shy of seaworthy, and wrestled with the boat’s controls until the engine sputtered to life.

  Once the old man got the boat into open waters, it became clear that there was a lot more horsepower under the hood than was strictly necessary to haul fishermen around. The little man pushed the throttle forward and the big motors pressed Sam firmly into the seat. The bow rose, the wind noise grew to a dull roar, and the boat blasted northwestward through the darkness. The trawler might have begun its existence as a fishing boat, but there was no doubt in Sam’s mind that the rig’s primary use these days was in the smuggling trade.

  The drone of the engine, the rhythmic motion of the boat, and the exhaustion of the past few days had a potent combined effect, and Sam drifted off to sleep.

  She was visited by powerful imagery from her subconscious mind. Brock. He was in some sort of danger, though the specifics remained diaphanous and mysterious. Yet he was helping her somehow with some sort of existential struggle, urging her to persevere even while she argued that she just wanted to rest, to let the fates intervene in whichever direction they wished, to let the chips fall where they may.

  She saw deep disappointment in his eyes, and she understood. Whatever was going on, it was her fault. Brock was disappointed in her. She was disappointed in herself. There was death and destruction and blowback, and it was all because of her. Innocent people were suffering, innocent people had died, and there was no denying her culpability. It was all on her, and the guilt and pain was overwhelming, beyond what she felt able to bear.

  She wept, loudly and bitterly, and she felt Brock’s hand on her shoulder. He spoke to her, his eyes clear and deep, his words unintelligible. The disappointment never left his face. She reached for him, longing to throw her arms around him, to feel his strong embrace, to drink in his scent, strong and masculine and safe. But he kept moving away from her, and she couldn’t quite reach him.

  Brock spoke to her again. She listened carefully, stared at his mouth as he spoke, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. His touch went from comforting to jarring. His hands shook her shoulders back and forth, that look of disappointment growing even deeper. Had she lost him? Had she driven him away? “Don’t go!” she wailed. “I don’t want to be alone!”

  And then she was awake.

  Her hair was wet with sweat and sea spray. Sunlight curled over the horizon. The wiry old man’s face was inches from her own, speaking loudly in Arabic, concern in his eyes. His hands were on her shoulders.

  “Jesus,” she breathed, gathering her wits. “I’m losing my fucking mind.”

  The old man brought her some tea, then pointed to a spot on the horizon. “Sfax,” he said. It was the name of a port town on the east coast of Tunisia, a little over an hour away, Sam guessed. They had made incredible time, must have been doing thirty knots all night.

  “Shukraan,” Sam said. She felt the warm liquid chase away the cold emptiness in her stomach, but the shattered feeling lingered in her head and it was much more difficult to shake.

  The guilt was always just a little bit under the surface. Sarah Beth McCulley was dead. She hadn’t just died on Sam’s watch; that would have been miserable but tolerable. Sarah Beth McCulley was dead because of her. If Sam had aborted the op, the girl would still be alive, going to kindergarten, playing in the park, doing what little girls did.

  What made it so devastating for Sam was that the choice had seemed right. She had weighed the odds and considered the probabilities, and she thought she was taking the lowest-risk course with the best payoff.

  Maybe that was why it was so crippling. The choice had come from the center of her, from her years of field experience, from the cumulative lessons she had taken to heart. But maybe she was way out of whack. Maybe the voice she thought was coming from the middle of her was really coming from the middle of nowhere, out of touch, half as competent and surefooted as she needed it to be.

  What would that mean? Would she have the wherewithal to get out of the mess she found herself in? Would she get anyone else killed in the process? She shivered as the misty spray from the ocean chilled her skin.

  Sam disembarked in Sfax and made her way to the next waypoint in what was revealing itself to be an extremely well-developed underground transportation network.

  She ate at a small restaurant in the heart of downtown Sfax. She was ravenously hungry, and she felt her disposition and outlook improving with every bite of food.

  The rendezvous for the next leg of the journey went according to plan. The young man’s name was Mahmoud; at least that was how he introduced himself. He brushed against her in the café and surreptitiously handed her a tourist brochure that read: “Mahmoud’s Most Pleasant Flying Adventures.” It contained an address printed beneath the picture of a small, aging twin-propeller airplane with a faded paint job. If the marketing photo looks like hell, Sam wondered, how horrible must the real thing be?

  She wasn’t in a position to be terribly choosy. Traveling via normal channels was a non-starter. She’d no sooner show her face at any international airport in the world and her likeness would be captured on video camera and digested by a facial-recognition algorithm. She would be flagged as a person with an outstanding warrant. The American Police State would know her whereabouts within a matter of minutes, and she would disembark her first flight—no matter where it happened to land—to a criminal’s welcome, handcuffs and all.

  So Mahmoud and his outdated flying contraption it was. She hired a cab to take her from the café to the address on the brochure. The cabby gave her a knowing look but said nothing. He was probably used to playing his part in the underground railroad and Sam surmised that a little discretion went a long way in his line of work. Odds were better than even that anyone making use of sub rosa travel arrangements was running from someone or something.

  The cab dropped her off outside a shack adjacent to a dirt clearing. No runway, no pavement of any kind, and she was sure the “airstrip” had flooded recently, because the dried mud featured deep tire ruts. Her stomach lurched. She changed her mind about Mahmoud and his flying death trap. She was going to find some other way to Cagliari.

  Except the cabby had already left, and Mahmoud, all gleaming teeth and mirthful energy, bounded from the shack. “A beautiful day for flying, no?”

  Sam wasn’t sure about that.

  “No worrying,” Mahmoud said, ushering her toward a modest hangar barely visible behind a line of trees. “Safety first. I check everything twice.”

  Twenty minutes later, after a takeoff roll that was every bit as bone jarring as the rutted dirt airs
trip portended, Mahmoud’s Most Pleasant Flying Machine clawed its way into the air.

  The plane clattered and rattled something fierce, and it was a good half-hour before Sam relinquished her death grip on the armrest. Ten minutes later, they were over the open ocean with no land visible in any direction. Sam studied Mahmoud’s instrument panel. It looked woefully rudimentary. Inadequate, more like.

  “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Sam asked.

  Mahmoud smiled. “Of course. I fly to Marsala and back five times every week.”

  “I’m not going to Marsala,” Sam said.

  Mahmoud’s smile broadened. “Yes, I think you are.”

  “I’m trying to get to Cagliari in Sardinia. I don’t even know where Marsala is!”

  He patted her hand. “Yes, ma’am. You will get to Cagliari, but I will not fly you there. It is not my territory. It is mafioso territory. So a mafioso will fly you.”

  “Jesus,” Sam said, shaking her head.

  “No, ma’am,” Mahmoud said. “Not Jesus . . . Giacomo. He is an excellent pilot. Almost as good as me.” His face beamed.

  “I should warn you that I’m armed,” Sam said. “If you mess with me, I will not hesitate to shoot you in the balls.”

  Mahmoud’s smile remained at high wattage, unfazed by Sam’s threat. “I assure you, ma’am, my balls will need no shooting. You will get to Cagliari tonight. I promise.”

  Mahmoud delivered her safely to Marsala, Sicily. Giacomo was under the weather; he reeked of licorice and alcohol, and Sam suspected there was a bottle of Sambuca somewhere with his DNA all over it. So Giacomo’s son, also named Giacomo, stepped in to perform pilot duties.

  Sam was in a hurry to get to Cagliari, but the Giacomos were having none of it. The flight would take off no earlier than nightfall, they said, for security reasons.

  They kept to their word. Sam spent a restless afternoon holed up in the back room of a dilapidated café. It reeked of stale garlic and cigarette smoke. It severely tested her love of Italian food.

  Finally, night fell and Giacomo the Younger came for her. She could have sworn she caught a whiff of anise. Maybe Giacomo the Elder left a little Sambuca around for Junior to get into. But he seemed clear-eyed, and Sam didn’t press the issue.

  They drove around the island for just under an hour and stopped in the middle of nowhere. “Perfect,” Sam muttered. “Don’t you guys ever use a real runway?”

  Giacomo smiled. “This is a real runway,” he said. “Real bumpy.” Sam didn’t appreciate the humor.

  Giacomo handed her a flashlight to help her find the seatbelt. She strapped in and held her breath. The engines awoke reluctantly. The plane shook and shimmied while Giacomo performed a few preflight checks. Then he firewalled the throttles and the plane lurched forward into the darkness.

  The flight lasted several hours. Sam slept fitfully, never sleeping deeply enough to dream, which was fine with her. Her dreams held nothing but torment.

  Giacomo settled the plane back onto the earth after one in the morning, Sardinia time. He issued her a set of detailed verbal instructions which Sam took pains to memorize, then collected the other half of his cash payment. “In Euros, please. Nobody wants that American shit anymore,” he said.

  She walked to the specified house across from the airstrip, knocked the specified number of times, paid the specified number of Euros, and received the keys to a moped.

  She rode the moped to Cagliari. The cold, damp wind kept her awake during the twenty-mile journey. Her route took her to the top of a massive ancient wall spanning the southern edge of the city, dizzyingly high above the ocean below. A stiff, cold, soggy breeze chilled her to the bone.

  She found the address she’d received from Dan. He had correlated the IP address of the last computer the Jackrabbit message had reached with a stately manor perched atop the improbably large wall on the southern edge of town. The place was palatial, with a commanding view that probably reached Africa on a good day, but it was dilapidated, beat up by time and the elements, subject to the furies of the Tyrrhenian weather, which was much more like the Adriatic than the Mediterranean. The address wasn’t as derelict as the rest of the island, Sam noted, which had been victimized for centuries by corruption.

  Sam looked around in the dark but found no safe place to hole up and watch the mansion. She didn’t trust herself to stay awake, so she made her way back down the hill to Cagliari proper. It was a deflated town, half-empty, a weird mixture of medieval architecture and spray-can graffiti, the buildings tired and stooped and resigned.

  Sam found the inn and room number that Giacomo had specified. The room was unlocked and ready for her. She closed and locked the door, then collapsed onto the bed.

  27

  It’s just a phone call, Hayward told himself, hoping to calm his nerves enough to unclog his mind. He needed to be sharp. He stared at his face in the Malaga hotel room mirror. His eyes were hollow and dark. He had lost weight since the last time he’d studied his reflection, and his cheekbones were more prominent than he remembered. The ordeal was taking its toll on him, but he was certain his experience didn’t come anywhere close to the horrors Katrin was enduring.

  He closed his eyes, drew a long, deep breath, and pushed the green button on the new burner phone. It rang three times, then he heard a clunk and a series of clicks. The call was being re-routed and probably also recorded, he surmised.

  “Hello.” The voice was efficient, dispassionate, empty of almost every human quality. But it most definitely belonged to a human, familiar to Hayward. Artemis Grange.

  Grange was a legend, at least in the extremely small circles of the clandestine service. In the first half of his career, Grange was the quintessential CIA operator. He was brutal, efficient, resourceful, and feared. Then he became the consummate manipulator, and he now swam as a consultant in the murky waters where politics and statecraft and big business met spy craft.

  The Agency had placed Hayward under Grange’s tutelage for a time after Hayward’s Cologne meltdown. Hayward had never been an eager student, trapped as he was by circumstance and his own penchant for disaster-making, but he took what lessons were available from Artemis Grange.

  “Grange,” Hayward said. “Why are you doing this?”

  Grange didn’t reply. Trademark. Make the other guy reveal himself. Hayward wearied instantly of the mind games.

  “You want something,” Hayward said. “I have it.”

  “I’m listening.” Grange’s voice sounded preternaturally calm. It was well beyond an affectation. When you’d spilled as much blood as Grange had spilled over the years, it put other matters in their proper perspective.

  “My terms are two lives in exchange,” Hayward said.

  “Yours and who else’s?” Grange asked. Hayward heard the smirk in his voice.

  “You will spare Joao and Katrin Ferdinand-Xavier,” Hayward said.

  “You don’t want to grovel for your own life?”

  Hayward ignored the taunt. “I will specify a destination and a time. You will arrange transportation for them, and you will provide security. You will see to their every need. When they arrive safe and unharmed, you will receive further instructions.”

  “Such skill,” Grange chuckled, “managing your emotions and managing your mark. You had a bright future.”

  “You will provide me with proof of life within the hour,” Hayward said. “You will do this via live webcam. I will send a specific phrase, which Katrin and Joao will read aloud. You will email the link for this webcam arrangement to my account.”

  “Your confidence is inspiring,” Grange said. “Such a contrast from when we first took you in. You were like a little lost puppy. Except for the way you choked the life out of that poor girl. What was her name?”

  Hayward fought for composure. “You have sixty minutes, Grange. Starting now.”

  “Nora,” Grange said. “Nora was her name. Wasn’t it? You fancied her, slept with her, maybe even fell in l
ove with her a little bit?”

  Yes, Nora was her name, you fucking asshole. She was smart and beautiful and mind-blowing and thoroughly corrupted. It happened in Cologne. She set him up, let him fall for her, then played him right into the CIA’s hands. He snapped, lost his drunken mind, and in his nightmares he could still feel the sinew in Nora’s neck yielding to his grip.

  Hayward blinked away the onslaught of guilt and shame. He carried Nora with him every day of his life. She was one more reason—maybe the most powerful reason—he couldn’t let anything happen to Katrin.

  “Fifty-nine-and-a-half minutes,” he said. “Then I burn the ChemEspaña file.”

  Grange didn’t let up. “You killed her with your bare hands. You didn’t just tiptoe over the line, did you?” That cold laugh again. “You leapt right over it.”

  “Goodbye, Grange.”

  Hayward ended the call. His hands shook and his mouth was dry. Grange had a ruthless talent for evisceration, for hitting right where it hurt the most. Hayward balled his fists and cursed.

  Then he gathered himself. There was work to do.

  28

  Artemis Grange placed the phone back in his pocket and rubbed his prominent chin. He looked out his office window at the DC skyline, now consumed by darkness. Rush hour was long over, the self-important drones had all fled to their faraway homes, and the District had taken on the familiar deserted ambiance Grange preferred.

  Hayward’s voice was still in his ears and Grange had a decision to make. The ChemEspaña situation had received significant attention, as had the Tariq Ezzat fiasco. Senator Oren Stanley had whipped up a well-designed and superbly executed furor over the negligent Homeland agent responsible for the little girl’s death, and the media was still gobbling it up by the shovelful. Director of National Intelligence Alexander Wells had expressed his “deep concern” to Grange that the ChemEspaña information was still not secured.