The Blowback Protocol

by Lars Emmerich

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  “It’ll take the rest of your life if you don’t play it right,” Sam said.

  He complied. The cast on his arm made assuming the perp stance awkward but Sam wasn’t sympathetic and made no allowances. The man appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties. He had a trim, fit build. Maybe six feet tall. He seemed exhausted, far more worried about something else than about Sam and her pistol. Sam searched him, zip-tied his hands behind his back, and sat him down in an armchair.

  “You look familiar,” the man said. His face was handsome, but his expression was taut and his brow was furrowed. His eyes were intelligent and penetrating but tired and a little bloodshot with dark circles beneath them.

  “Maybe I look like that one movie star,” Sam said. She snapped a picture of his face with her phone. She sent the image via text message to Dan. She typed, “Who is this asshole?” While she waited for a response, she backed a safe distance away from the man, her weapon trained on his chest.

  “Seriously,” the man said. “I know you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I know so.”

  Sam shook her head. “Enough. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  The man sighed in frustration. “Listen. Really, I don’t have time for this.”

  “I smell propellant,” Sam said. “Somebody shoot a gun in here?”

  The man was silent.

  “Listen,” Sam said. “This is a safe house for a criminal organization. Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?”

  “Some very bad people are holding a pair of hostages. They’ve already murdered a third. This was supposed to have been an exchange, only they didn’t bring the hostages. They thought they’d ambush me instead.”

  “Who?” Sam asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Who are the hostages?”

  “Spanish. Nobody you’d know.”

  “Who are the assholes?”

  A pause. A look. Sam could tell he was deciding something, like whether to trust her.

  He looked out the window for a moment, shook his head. “The Central Intelligence Agency,” he finally said.

  A spark of intuition struck and Sam narrowed her eyes. “Your employer.”

  His eyes snapped to hers. “Who said anything like that?”

  “Call it a hunch. Educated white guy playing cops and robbers in a faraway land. Not many ways to get into that game.”

  “Maybe I work security for a big multinational.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t talk like an enlisted man. You talk like a college graduate with a professional background.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Sam’s phone buzzed. Dan responded to her query. “Several positive matches. James Paul Hayward. Adam Flint Keppler. Peter Jefferson Kittredge.”

  “Three names? How?” Sam texted back.

  “Gets weirder,” Dan responded. “The Keppler and Hayward legends only showed up in the deep search.”

  “Meaning what?” Sam wanted to know.

  “He’s an operative. They’ve tried to destroy the remnants of his previous identities.”

  “But you found them anyway?”

  “Skillz,” Dan replied.

  Sam rolled her eyes.

  She turned her attention to the man across the room seated in the armchair. “No more bullshit,” she said. “You’re Hayward, Keppler, and Kittredge all rolled into one. And you’re a deployed asset.”

  She watched his eyes, his body language. She’d gotten good over the years at figuring out when something struck close to the mark. That was the vibe she got watching the man’s face. She didn’t notice any specific tells, like the twitch of an eye or a sudden glance away, a ploy to gain enough psychological distance to make up a story. But there was definitely something. She’d cornered him. “So tell me about your asshole friends.”

  He sighed and a resigned look came over his face. “Well,” he said, “one of them happens to be leaking body fluids right now.”

  “Sounds like the makings of a good story. I’m all ears.”

  The man told her of his trip to Cagliari, his visit to the neighbor’s house, his entry into the safe house basement, and his altercation with the lone Agency goon inside.

  Sam pondered what Kittredge-Keppler-Hayward told her. The leaking corpse in the basement meant hanging around the safe house wasn’t a bright idea, so she decided they would take their conversation elsewhere. Sam escorted the man with three names to her rented car. He asked her to remove the zip-ties around his wrists, but she refused. “We need to become better friends first,” she said.

  She started the car and drove down the hill, this time heading away from town. Neither wanted to speak in the car for fear it had been compromised with a listening device or video camera, so they drove in silence.

  Several kilometers northwest of Cagliari, Sam found a turnoff. Dirt road, poorly maintained, but it meandered into a forest. Sam negotiated the ruts and switchbacks until she came to a clearing. She stopped the car and helped the man from the passenger seat.

  A cold wind portended a stiff Atlantic storm. Sam wrapped a shawl, remnant of the old-lady costume she’d paraded around in earlier, around her shoulders against the chill.

  “Here’s how I see it,” she began. “Our interests might be temporarily aligned or I might need to shoot you in the throat. I don’t know which yet.”

  The man smiled. “Do I get a vote?”

  “Vote with your answers,” Sam said. “Real name?”

  “James Hayward,” he said.

  “The one your parents gave you?”

  A faraway look. A long pause. “Peter Kittredge.”

  Sam pursed her lips. “Tell me why that’s familiar to me.”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess.”

  “You’re lying,” she said, and he shrugged. “Tell me where you’ve been in the last five years.”

  He shook his head. “This is really what you want to know right now?”

  “Humor me. I’m the one with the gun.”

  “Spain. Singapore. Portugal. Northern Virginia. DC. Cologne. Caracas.”

  Caracas? Sam’s mind flashed to the unpleasant time she’d spent chasing down a vicious little Venezuelan with a penchant for skinning his victims. “When were you in Venezuela?” she asked.

  “Just before Hugo Chavez died.”

  Sam narrowed her eyes at him. “That was an Agency hit.”

  “No comment.”

  “Why do I know you?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I was drunk a lot.”

  “I was in Caracas chasing down some VSS thugs.”

  The man’s eyes met hers and anger flashed in them. “They weren’t all thugs.”

  Then it clicked for Sam. Three years ago, she had been swept into a bloody conflict between rogue CIA elements and members of the VSS, Venezuela’s CIA equivalent. The Agency muscle had tried to strong-arm American access to Venezuelan oil but the VSS was violently opposed. The Agency had managed to infiltrate the VSS, and the result was a bloodbath that had decimated Venezuela’s intelligence apparatus.

  At some point during the chaos, Sam and Brock had stumbled onto a sloppy, hapless drunk named Peter Kittredge, and they had detained him and pressed him for information. The man before her in the Cagliari safe house was a much harder, sharper version of the man she remembered from Caracas, but she now saw the resemblance.

  “You were the CIA’s access agent, weren’t you?”

  Sadness came over his face. “Unintentionally,” he said.

  “There weren’t many survivors, if memory serves.”

  He looked at her. “None of the Venezuelans I knew survived the purge. They didn’t deserve what happened to them.”

  “Agency again?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Nice guys,” she said.

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Sam chuckl
ed. “Trust me. I know a hell of a lot more than just the half of it, but here’s what I don’t know. I don’t know why you’re still running with them. Why not leave?”

  “I tried. Several times. But they have a way of . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “A way of turning you against yourself,” Sam said.

  “That’s a really good way to put it. They have a way of turning you against yourself, and they know how to make it impossible to get out from under it all.”

  Sam thought a moment. “So you don’t like your job,” she said. “But that’s not the same as shooting your fellow agents. What’s the rest of the story?”

  38

  A cold, damp breeze whistled through the sparse Sardinian forest. The man took a deep breath and kicked at the gravel beneath his feet. “I worked at the US embassy in Caracas,” he said. “Economics. I spun economic data into propaganda. I drank. I got involved in things I shouldn’t have.”

  Sam closed her eyes and nodded. Familiar story. She had a hunch about where it was headed. “What things?”

  A long pause. “I sold things.”

  “Sold things,” Sam said. “Like nutrition shakes? Water filters? Girl Scout cookies?”

  He smiled. Lines grew around his eyes, adding a decade to his face. “Other things,” he said.

  “I need specifics,” Sam said.

  “I sold embassy data to a third party.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  He chuckled, shook his head. “To this day, I don’t really know. I was bored, I guess. Plus my boyfriend kind of eased me into it.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  The man looked at her. “Yes, I’m one of those.”

  “I don’t care who you sleep with. I’m just trying to put the pieces together.”

  “Charley Arlinghaus was his name. CIA agent. But I didn’t know it at the time.”

  Sam scrunched her face. “Your CIA agent boyfriend nudged you toward selling state secrets?”

  He snorted. “It gets better. As it turned out, my customers weren’t who I thought they were.”

  Sam arched her eyebrows, urging him on.

  “Exel Oil, not a real oil company.”

  “What were they?”

  “An Agency front.”

  Sam laughed out loud and Hayward looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a new level of cynicism.”

  He nodded. “They had me by the balls. They kidnapped me while I was back in DC. A giant knee-capper named Quinn ran a belt sander across my back until I signed the papers, which was all unnecessary because they knew everything already. I was selling US secrets to the CIA. The whole thing was a setup.”

  “For little old you? To snare Peter Kittredge, economic genius? Why didn’t they just approach you the usual way? God and country, all of that crap.”

  He shook his head. “These are really bad people. They do godawful things. There’s just too big a gap between the mom-and-apple-pie sales pitch and the disgusting shit these guys are involved in.”

  “So they went for the hard sell,” Sam said. “You were their door opener?”

  “In Venezuela, the VSS approached me, trying to get at the CIA. I sort of bounced between the two agencies, but the CIA managed to use me to get at the VSS. Quinn showed me pictures of what the Agency had done to the Venezuelans. The whole thing really shook me up. After Caracas, I ran. I wound up in Cologne.”

  Sam eyed him. She saw guilt in his eyes and sorrow on his face. “But they found you,” she said.

  He nodded. “I was trying to drink away the Venezuela thing, and I wasn’t making great decisions. They engineered another bloodbath and I ended up accidentally killing a girl. I wound up more trapped than ever. They shipped me back to the States to make me into what they called a ‘real’ asset. They spent a bunch of time and money on me. Some of it sunk in, but . . .”

  “You weren’t a true believer,” Sam said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “But they had all this . . . history hanging over my head, and I was stuck.”

  “You mean the secrets you sold in Venezuela?”

  He nodded. “After a year of training, they sent me into the field. My job was to weasel my way into a situation. Make friends, maybe sleep with the right people.”

  Sam smiled. “Doesn’t sound so bad.”

  She saw a weak smile on his face that quickly faded. “A lot of lives will never be the same because of me,” he said.

  The silence lengthened. Sam pondered what to do with him. She glanced at his eyes. They were watching something that happened a long time ago, something terrible.

  “Tell me about right now,” Sam said after a while. “What were you doing in that safe house?”

  He shrugged. “Trying to be the fucking hero.”

  “How so?”

  “Joao Ferdinand-Xavier is his name. Chemist. Big brain. Spaniard of Portuguese descent. Runs a company with offices in Spain and Singapore.”

  Sam nodded, prodding him on.

  “He invented something special, something Big Brother covets.”

  “Let me guess,” Sam said. “Joao doesn’t have a price. He has a conscience.”

  He nodded. “And a daughter.”

  “Which was where you came in.”

  He turned pale, and Sam thought he was going to be sick.

  “Didn’t you say you were living with a man in Venezuela?” Sam asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “My personal life has always been . . . complicated.”

  “I’m not judging. I’m confused, though. Why the beef with your employer?”

  He shrugged, squinted his eyes a bit. “Because you can never force a man’s loyalty, and you can never fully destroy his morality.”

  Sam frowned. “What do you mean? Did you do something? Sabotage an op?”

  The beginnings of a smile caused those lines to appear around his eyes again. “I had never thought to use that word,” he said, “but that’s about the size of it.”

  “So you blew the Agency op on purpose.”

  He nodded. “I warned Katrin and her family about the CIA’s interest in Joao’s company.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  No answer, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math. “She means something to you,” Sam said.

  He met her eyes. He looked hurt and conflicted. “Yes,” he said. “I love her. But I wasn’t quite thorough enough with my bug search.”

  “Ouch,” Sam said.

  He nodded but said nothing more. Sam didn’t press him for details about what happened next, because there wasn’t any need. She knew enough about the CIA to know that whatever they had done was bound to be horrific.

  Sam let another long moment pass. She digested what she’d learned about the Agency’s connection to the Cagliari safe house. It struck her that there was a lot more she needed to understand. “I assume you found what the Agency is after,” she said.

  “That’s right. They murdered Katrin’s mother. They set me up to be the one to find her. I found an RFID tag buried under the skin of her leg. It led me to a database.”

  Sam shook her head. “Nice guys.”

  “You have no idea.”

  He fell silent.

  She pursed her lips. “Are you sure the data tag wasn’t a setup?”

  He stood up, kicked at the gravel beneath his feet. “I’m not sure of anything at all. They promised to kill me, and they’ve had plenty of opportunities to put a bullet in me since this thing went sideways. But so far, they haven’t tried very hard.”

  Sam connected the dots. “Which makes you think maybe you found the real thing, and they’re still looking for it.”

  He nodded. “Why else would they keep me in play? Plus, Maria’s scar wasn’t new. The tag had been embedded in her leg for weeks. Months maybe.”

  “Because Joao knew what he’d stumbled on,” Sam surmised.

  “And he knew what kind of people would want to take it from him.”

  “And you d
on’t think your Agency friends found it, too?”

  He shook his head. “Impossible to say. You don’t have to remove the tag to read the data, but my guess is they just missed it. Otherwise, why waste time messing around with me?”

  “Why indeed.”

  The wind kicked up. Sam’s chill deepened. She turned and walked toward the car.

  He called after her. “You’re not going to shoot me in the throat?”

  She shook her head. “Not at this juncture.”

  “Are you going to leave me here?”

  She looked around at the dark, desolate forest, then looked at him. “No,” she said.

  She opened the car door, then stopped. “But I’m going to need to know what to call you.”

  He thought for a long moment. “Hayward is fine.”

  39

  The Washington Monument was silhouetted in the setting sun, tall and pointed and vaguely phallic. The traffic below was deeply gridlocked. Man’s towering achievement, maybe topped with a dash of hubris, juxtaposed with his enduring ineptitude. Business as usual in the District.

  A mile and a half away, a mid-sized man walked into a mid-sized DC office building. The man had an aquiline nose and a prominent chin and a bald spot on the crown of his head that made him look a little like a monk. The office building looked like any other soulless cubicle farm.

  A large reception desk dominated the building’s entryway. A pretty young woman in a miniskirt stood to greet him. On her hip was a holstered sidearm. “Good evening, Mr. Grange,” she said. “Director Wells is expecting you.”

  His face took the shape of the closest thing to a smile in his repertoire. “Good evening,” Grange said, but he didn’t stop to chat up the pretty young thing. He wasn’t much for chatting, and besides, he took care of his infrequent desire for companionship on a transactional basis.

  He stepped into an open elevator, swiped a magnetic badge, and pressed his thumb against the button for the twelfth floor. Access was restricted unless your badge happened to be in the database. Grange’s badge had been in the database for decades. The number twelve illuminated cooperatively and the elevator doors closed.