The Blowback Protocol

by Lars Emmerich

Grange closed his eyes. How many trips had he made to the same office? How many different directors had he counseled, nudged, cajoled, browbeaten? He should take the time to count them, he decided. A man eyeballing his own ascension should make an accounting.

  The elevator doors opened into a different world. The grim, gray prison of DC office life was for the first eleven floors. The twelfth floor was all opulence, influence, and power. The office had been redecorated more times than Grange could count, each time to more accurately reflect the tastes and sensibilities of its most recent occupant, but it was essentially the same as it ever was.

  Grange took his customary seat in what people called the Green Room. It contained a conference table and a phalanx of plush leather chairs. Floor-to-ceiling windows dominated one wall. The famous skyline lay beyond, shaded a mild sepia by the window tint. Someone less jaded than Grange would have appreciated the view.

  He didn’t stand when the director of national intelligence entered. Both by nature and position, Grange was largely immune to DC’s obsession with rank and pecking order, and he rather enjoyed rubbing it in.

  Alexander Wells wore an expensive suit, rumpled from a long day of sitting in meetings. “You’re sure?” he said without preamble.

  “Nobody is ever sure,” Grange replied, “but we appear to be on track.”

  “There’s a lot riding on this. It would be useful to know whether there is any suspicion in the senator’s camp, anything we should be concerned about.”

  Grange eyed the sunset while Wells eyed Grange. “The intelligence business teaches many useful skills,” Grange said. “Clairvoyance does not happen to be one of them. I have no notion of the senator’s state of mind.”

  Wells shook his head. “An educated guess, then.”

  “I see no reason for concern at this stage,” Grange said.

  “And the girl?” Wells asked. “She’s in motion?”

  “We’ve provided a few helpful nudges.”

  “You sent someone reliable, I take it?”

  “No,” Grange said flatly. “I sent an incompetent.”

  The director shook his head. “I suppose I deserved that,” he said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “But you know what I was asking.”

  “Yes,” Grange said. “I went myself. I gave the girl an appropriate shove. We have intervened occasionally since then, when required. She is on the path and I believe it leads in due course to the senator.”

  Wells met his eye. “You believe? That doesn’t inspire much confidence.”

  “I’m not in the confidence business.”

  “I find your cavalier attitude unnerving. You realize we’re exposed here?”

  Grange chuckled. “We’re always exposed,” he said.

  “You told me we were okay,” Wells said.

  Grange shook his head. “I told you to play the odds,” he said. “You heard what you wanted to hear.”

  “No,” Wells said, shaking his head. “You told me everything pointed to Stanley.”

  “All the evidence we know of does point to Stanley,” Grange snapped. “But do you believe we know everything there is to know about this situation? Do you believe for an instant the senator has taken no steps to protect himself?”

  A long silence.

  “What Oren Stanley did is unthinkable,” Wells finally said. “I want him to pay dearly for it, but more than that, I want him cut off. I don’t care about his Rolodex or his war chest. He’s a liability we can’t afford to keep around.”

  Grange said nothing.

  “How long will it take for her to find her way to the senator?” Wells asked.

  “I would hazard a guess, but that would be pointless.”

  “Christ, Grange, what the hell do we pay you for?”

  “Director Wells, you don’t pay me.”

  The director rose. “You’re worth every damn penny.” He walked out the door, leaving Grange alone in the Green Room.

  On his way out of the building, Grange waved at the pretty girl with the gun on her hip.

  40

  Sam started the car and turned on the heater. The cold, damp Sardinian breeze had left her chilled, and the fading light had cast the sparse forest in gray gloom. Hayward climbed into the passenger seat beside her. The clunky cast on his arm made the act of buckling up considerably more time-consuming than normal.

  “How’d you hurt your arm?” she asked.

  There was no answer that wouldn’t lead to more questions, and Hayward demurred. But Sam sensed that something important was lurking somewhere in the story. It was way beyond coincidence that two separate investigations led to the same safe house on the same little almost-European island, so she persisted. “I suspect we’re barking up different sides of the same tree,” she said. “So don’t mushroom me. I need to know specifics about what you’re involved in.”

  Hayward relented. He told her about Singapore. He told her about the ChemEspaña building, mostly deserted, and the safe that was supposed to contain Katrin’s redemption but instead contained nothing at all, and the panicked escape from beneath the noses of his minders, his harrowing tumble into the deafening darkness, the near-drowning, the way the water twisted and tossed and broke him. He told her about waking up to a worse nightmare than the ones that haunted his sleep.

  “Damn,” Sam said. “I thought I was having a bad week.”

  She guided the car smoothly around a sharp bend in the road, accelerating through the corner. She pondered Hayward’s predicament and wondered how it tied into her own.

  “So I’m going to ask you the obvious question,” she said.

  “You want to know what was supposed to be in that safe.”

  “I do.”

  Hayward pondered.

  Sam nudged. “They already had a wet man waiting for you at the safe house,” she said. “It seems you’ve already crossed a line or two.”

  He smiled weakly. “That I have.”

  Sam looked at his face. “Maybe I can help,” she offered.

  “I’m certain you can’t,” he finally said, “but I don’t have much to lose.”

  He told her about ChemEspaña’s breakthrough, about the neutron-absorbing paint Joao Ferdinand-Xavier and his team had invented.

  Sam was incredulous. “This is all about . . . paint?”

  He nodded. “And the process to make it.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Paint?”

  “Think about it,” Hayward said. “A paint that traps neutrons.”

  Sam shook her head. “Maybe I should know why that’s important, but I don’t.”

  “Radioactive substances emit neutrons.”

  The implications suddenly became clear to Sam. “Oh shit,” she said.

  “Right,” Hayward said. “All of those neutron detectors at borders and ports and airports are suddenly obsolete.”

  “And transporting nuclear weapons is suddenly very easy.”

  Hayward nodded. “That about sums it up.”

  “So the Agency wanted to shut down ChemEspaña,” Sam surmised.

  “You would think,” Hayward said, “but that’s not what we were doing.”

  Sam frowned. “You’re saying your handlers didn’t want to shut this thing down?”

  Hayward nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Sam arched an eyebrow, confused. Why would a US security apparatus not be interested in squashing such an obvious nuclear proliferation risk?

  Then she thought more about it. The CIA was a big bureaucracy, but its field operatives were atomized and very loosely supervised. Self-interested agents had famously wide latitude to pursue their own agendas. In fact, it was almost a tradition. As a rule, everyone kept two sets of books. The Agency’s budget was big, but not nearly big enough, and the unspoken rule was that entrepreneurship went with the territory. The poorly kept secret was that the CIA was the biggest gunrunner on the planet.

  But nukes? Nuclear freaking weapons? The idea that anyone remo
tely affiliated with the US government might be involved struck Sam as absurd.

  Absurdly lucrative, more like. States, quasi-states, failing states, revolutionary groups, oil-rich anti-American Middle Eastern organizations… they all seemed like enthusiastic participants. The world was full of deep-pocketed potential customers.

  But damn, what a risk! The downside of upsetting the world’s nuclear apple cart was unthinkable. It would come with the kind of blowback that leveled cities. Millions of lives were at stake.

  “Why was ChemEspaña allowed to develop this stuff in the first place?” Sam asked. “Didn’t the Spanish government have any clue what was happening?”

  Hayward smiled. “Of course they did.”

  “Why wasn’t it kept locked up somewhere? How was Joao Ferdinand-Whatever able to keep a copy for himself?”

  “I asked the same question,” Hayward said. “It turns out the Spanish government isn’t united in its nuclear aspirations. Some factions are violently opposed.”

  “All the more reason not to store the magic recipe in his hope chest,” Sam said.

  Hayward smiled. “Maybe. Or maybe that was precisely why Joao wanted a copy for himself.”

  “Leverage?”

  “Exactly. Spain has a very violent history. Joao wanted insurance that his friends in the government would stay friendly.”

  Sam pursed her lips and shook her head. “Was he on the take?”

  Hayward chuckled. “Of course. He was taking on a great deal of personal risk. He felt it should translate into an appropriate level of reward. It’s business as usual. All the way down to the librarians and traffic cops.”

  Sam shook her head and frowned. “Seems way too . . . reckless. Maybe keeping the formula was leverage with one group, but it must have made him a target for everyone else.”

  Hayward nodded. “Maybe Joao thought he could have it both ways.”

  “You certainly proved him wrong,” Sam said.

  Hayward fell silent. A pained expression came over his face. Sam was reminded that Hayward already had blood on his hands, and in all likelihood, neither the ChemEspaña man nor his daughter would survive their encounter with Uncle Sam’s hit men.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “That probably wasn’t called for.”

  Hayward took a long time to respond. “I did what I had to do,” he finally said.

  Miles went by in silence. The gray sky grew darker as the hidden sun descended toward the sea. Sam guided the car around the steep curves leading up the hill to Cagliari.

  She was still having trouble wrapping her mind around a couple of things. “How the hell can your people justify playing money games with nuclear proliferation?” she asked. “The risks are outrageous.”

  Hayward bristled. “They’re not my people,” he said. “And I would never vouch for their reasoning.”

  Sam shook her head. “Those arrogant sons of bitches. They must think they can control it—keep tabs on the buyers, use the technology as a door opener to infiltrate networks.”

  He nodded. “They want the bad guys to fund their own demise.”

  She shook her head. “They want it both ways,” she said.

  Hayward looked at her. “Just like Joao.”

  Sam switched on the headlights. The gloomy darkness swallowed their meager light. The winding road was poorly lit and poorly marked, and she slowed down. Minutes passed.

  They talked again about the safe house debacle. “I was dead certain I had the right spot,” Hayward said. “I checked everything a half-dozen times.”

  “Is it possible they manipulated you?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. There were plenty of stops along the way, but the software doesn’t lie. The originating IP address was right in that damned safe house.”

  “You sure the software’s legit?”

  “The best around,” Hayward said. “It’s NSA spyware, and it’s deployed all over the world. There’s not an Internet server farm anywhere on the globe that’s not infected.”

  Sam frowned, pursed her lips. “I was just thinking,” she said. “Sure, the video got to you via the web, but what makes us so sure it started there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, these guys are sneaky. They work for the world’s best-funded intelligence agency. Don’t you think they’re aware of the same Internet tricks you are?”

  Hayward shook his head. “I don’t know how,” he said. “It’s NSA software. CIA and NSA would never be caught dead collaborating.”

  Sam looked at him. “But you figured it out, right?”

  Hayward shook his head. “I met a guy.”

  “And you don’t think they could find the same guy? Or maybe just watch you meet him? Or hack your password?”

  A grim look crossed his face. He balled his fists. “How could they have fooled the damned NSA sniffer?”

  “Think about it,” Sam said. “They’d just need a computer and some sort of non-Internet relay. The hostages could be anywhere in a twenty-mile radius if they used a radio signal. And if they used a satellite—”

  “They could be anywhere,” Hayward said, defeat in his voice.

  Sam powered on a fresh burner and called Dan. No answer. She left a message: “Your dry cleaning is ready, and please call the following number if you have any questions.” She recited the new number for him to call and hung up.

  “Dan has a geeky trick up his sleeve for just about every occasion,” she said to Hayward, hoping to be reassuring, but the look on his face was more morose than ever.

  41

  They rounded the last corner on the way to Cagliari and Sam saw the lights of a sleepy mom-and-pop restaurant. “I could eat my shoe,” she said. “How about Italian?”

  Hayward looked at her. “When in Rome,” he said.

  They sat across from each other at dinner, held hands between courses, posing as a romantic couple on vacation in a place that, if no longer romantic, at least had a few vestiges of Old World charm.

  They discussed their options over dinner. In the absence of actionable intel, there weren’t many. A clear path had led them both to the Cagliari safe house, but there was no clear trail leading away from it for either of them.

  That the Agency boys were ready and waiting for Hayward was telling—his digital maneuvering certainly hadn’t given him the advantage he was banking on—but it didn’t offer much clarity about where Katrin and Joao might be held captive.

  For Sam, the Agency presence at the safe house wasn’t surprising. They were clearly interested in her and in the Doberman case, for reasons that weren’t yet clear. Maybe the CIA had intended to kill two birds with one stone at the hilltop mansion.

  Her mind churned again on the burning question: why? She wasn’t naïve enough to think they were all on the same team, but an Agency op against a Homeland agent would have been well beyond unusual. And she was one person pitted against one of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies. She felt certain that if they had wanted her dead, they’d have found an opportunity by now. So what was their angle?

  There was something else to consider. Perhaps the CIA attention meant she was getting too close to something. Maybe she wasn’t as lost as she felt. Perhaps she was on the verge of something important. She shook her head. It certainly didn’t feel like it. She felt alone and vulnerable, like the odds of a favorable outcome were just the tiniest bit above zero, like there was still something very nasty lurking just out of view.

  Hayward appeared to be suffering the same psychological malady. His expression was tired and grim. She wasn’t inclined to trust anyone with Agency stink on them, and she didn’t yet know Hayward well enough, but his interests appeared to be somewhat aligned with her own—at least for the moment.

  Unless, of course, he was lying to her about the whole damned thing. Stranger things had happened.

  But there was something in his eyes. They were tired and strained, sure, but also handsome and intelligent. Sam thought sh
e saw something else, too. There was a guilelessness about him, maybe even an earnestness. Of course, a genuine, guileless, earnest affectation was a terrific tool for deception. Perhaps he was just better at it than most. Time would tell.

  Exhausted, they rented a room at the attached hotel. The stairs creaked on the way up to their floor. They held hands. “Just for cover,” Sam said, hoping it was that and nothing else. For him and for her. How long had it been? Entirely too long, she decided, but she already had the Mehmet Kocaoglu encounter on her conscience. She didn’t need anything else to have to tell Brock about.

  She showered first in a strange Italian contraption affixed to the floor in roughly the center of the bathroom. It was a square-shaped enclosure with walls no taller than her knees, and it was equipped with a handheld faucet but no shower curtain. Quaint and not terribly functional. By the time she felt reasonably clean, the floor was drenched.

  She emerged from the water closet wrapped in a towel. She’d have opted for something far less risqué, but she’d discarded her disguises and had only the clothes on her back.

  She caught his eyes lingering on her. He looked away, embarrassed. Sam could tell he hadn’t intended to ogle her. She could also tell he liked what he saw.

  He showered. There was only one bed, not terribly large, and she climbed in.

  Minutes later, Hayward walked to the far side of the bed and climbed in, taking pains not to let his eyes wander. “Night,” he said.

  “Good night,” Sam replied.

  Her mind churned, keeping her awake. What did the CIA and the Doberman group have in common? How did it relate to Hayward’s absurd ChemEspaña situation? And what the hell did any of it have to do with her? She needed sleep, but it wouldn’t come.

  Frustrated, Sam got out of bed. She powered on her burner. A text message popped up from Dan. “Call immediately.”

  Sam slipped on her clothes and slipped out of the room. She called Dan and was immediately sorry she did. “The situation here is getting really ugly, Sam,” Dan said.

  “It was already really ugly,” Sam replied.

  “Brock has been shipped home from his deployment to the Middle East under guard. They’re holding him as a material witness.”