The Blowback Protocol

by Lars Emmerich

  Sam was incredulous. “What the fuck? Holding him where?”

  “At a federal facility.”

  “Goddammit, they put him in jail? What the hell do they think he witnessed?”

  “I’m pretty sure they know he didn’t witness anything,” Dan said. “But they do know you pretty well.”

  “I’m coming home.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what they thought you would do.”

  “And I’m going to give them something to arrest me for.”

  42

  Stress wreaked havoc on Sam’s stomach as she prowled the hotel room, spat curses, and thought of vile punishments for the assholes who had dragged Brock into the morass.

  But between fantasies of inflicting pain on the suits at the Justice Department and her own supervisors at Homeland, an occasional rational thought broke through. To wit: going home was a terrible idea. It was hard as hell to be a fugitive in America, especially the kind of high-profile fugitive she had become. What could she really hope to accomplish while trying to stay out of custody?

  Brock was a big boy, a veteran of several wars, supervisor of a hundred highly capable personnel, and he was more than able to take care of himself. Other than turning herself in, what could she possibly do to help his situation? He would undoubtedly call Digger Donaldson, an old F-16 buddy from Korea who had hung up his G-suit to become a lawyer (and never lived it down). Digger was tenacious and a little bit ruthless, and he would have Brock out of jail in no time.

  Which meant she must go home. Because she must see him. It was suddenly the most important thing in the world. Everything else suddenly turned to nothing at all. She had just spent the loneliest week of her life, ostracized and pursued by the society she served, cut off from her best friend and lover. The prospect of burying herself in Brock’s embrace warmed the center of her. It was suddenly a need, like oxygen.

  They would figure out what was going on with the Doberman thing together. They would clear her name together. It wouldn’t just be her any longer, trying to stand up under the weight of it all by herself. He would be back in her life, back from whatever godawful cesspool atop an oil deposit he’d been sent to “protect.”

  She felt a gentle touch on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” Hayward said, “but I need to know what the hell to do next. I need your guy to work his magic.”

  Sam was instantly embarrassed. At the first mention of Brock’s name, she’d forgotten all about Joao and Katrin Ferdinand-Xavier, about the Doberman group and ChemEspaña and Hayward’s situation altogether. “Shit. Let me call him back,” she said.

  Dan immediately thought of the same two possibilities to explain how the Agency had thwarted Hayward’s ploy to discover Katrin and Joao’s location. If CIA had used a radio relay, there would be no way for Dan to help. There were more than enough signal-gathering satellites in orbit to pinpoint even the weakest of radio signals, but Sardinia was one of the sleepiest spots on the planet. Not one of the spy satellites would be pointed anywhere near Cagliari.

  But the other possibility was much more promising. Perhaps the Agency goons had bounced the video off a couple of communications satellites. Homeland didn’t monitor that kind of thing, but the NSA sure did, and Dan had a friend inside the big box at Fort Meade.

  They discussed their options and formed a plan, which turned out to be remarkably easy and quick to execute. Hayward had taken careful notes on the times he received the video transmissions of Joao and Katrin reciting the odd phrase he’d concocted to trip the NSA’s terrorism filters. Dan’s contact inside the NSA—an affable young genius named Alonzo—located the data on Hayward’s videos with almost no effort. The videos were “hits” on the worldwide computerized anti-terrorism dragnet, which made them hard to miss.

  Alonzo compared the transmission length and content with all the satellite signals near Cagliari that the NSA had collected during the timeframe in question. It took less than a minute for Alonzo’s computer to find a match. From there, it was just a matter of following the signal’s route in reverse, which turned out to be even simpler than it sounded.

  Neither Sam nor Hayward were surprised by the results. The signal originated in northern Virginia, Alonzo said, home to a few dozen CIA safe houses. The Agency goons had shackled Katrin and Joao and flown them to the Land of the Free, where the CIA could bring all manner of grisly techniques and resources to bear with impunity.

  “Piece of cake,” Sam said glumly. “All we have to do now is figure out how the hell to get home without being arrested or murdered.”

  Hayward smiled. “Leave that to me.”

  43

  Hayward didn’t disappoint, and Sam soon found herself strapped into a finely upholstered seat on an upscale private aircraft powering its way west. Kirksman—the colorful Malay mercenary pilot with the ever-deteriorating English facility—aimed his jet into the late-winter jet stream, which added over an hour and a half to their flight time from Cagliari to DC. They planned to land at a commercial air hub, but to steer well clear of the commercial area of the airport. Homeland was all over commuter travel and Sam would be arrested in moments if she dared set foot in a commercial airport. But private jet travel, domain of the rich and powerful, was virtually ignored by the security apparatus.

  Sam and Hayward hatched, discussed, and discarded half a dozen plans of attack. They had both agreed that any progress in either of their predicaments likely required returning to the States, but they were far less than clear on what to do once they arrived.

  Their situations were similar. They both needed to stay under the radar. There was an outstanding warrant for Sam’s arrest, and there was probably an outstanding warrant for Hayward’s execution, though the Agency had not yet taken advantage of its many opportunities to kill him. It seemed that only a small collection of ones and zeroes—the chemical formula invented by Joao Ferdinand-Xavier and his team of engineers—stood between the Central Intelligence Agency and James Hayward.

  “Let’s take it from the top,” Hayward suggested. “Maybe we’ll stumble on something that we haven’t thought of before.”

  Sam agreed.

  “You’ve heard my soap opera,” Hayward said. “I’d like to hear yours.”

  Sam narrowed her eyes. She wasn’t sure she was ready to confide in anyone with a CIA link. In fact, she was quite sure she wouldn’t ever confide in a CIA agent unless they happened to be pulling out her fingernails.

  “You don’t trust me,” Hayward observed.

  “You’re not wrong,” Sam said. “I’ve seen enough of the Christians In Action to watch my step.”

  “As you know, I’m not exactly a member in good standing.”

  “So you say.”

  “You think I’m playing you?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if you were.”

  “Yet you got on the airplane with me.”

  “The price was right,” Sam said. “Plus, I figured I could take you, if it came down to it.”

  Hayward smiled. “You probably could.”

  He swirled his glass of club soda and gazed out the window. Then he turned back to Sam. “If I was inclined to burn you,” he said, “I would already have more than enough to use against you.”

  Sam pondered. He was probably right. She hadn’t told him much, but her very whereabouts were a closely guarded secret at the moment. He could jam her up in spectacular fashion by simply dropping a dime to the Justice Department.

  “But what would be the point?” he asked. “What would I gain?”

  She shrugged. “What was the point of any of the Agency involvement in my life over the past week?”

  “Damn good question,” he said. “Maybe if I knew how they led us to the same safe house in the middle of the Med, I could be helpful.”

  “And maybe find a leverage point for your own situation,” Sam said.

  “Exactly. It’s not all altruism up in here.”

  Sam smiled. She had plenty to lose, and the stakes were about as h
igh as they came, but her spider sense wasn’t tingling. Hayward gave her the right vibe. She decided to fill him in on her situation.

  “I caught a case,” she said. “Petty crime, but organized and coordinated, and involving a bunch of people who showed up on the watch list.”

  “Which flavor?”

  “The usual. Radical Islam.”

  Hayward nodded. It was all a bad cliché by now and something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Young Koran-thumpers felt oppressed, committed some desperate act of terror, and then learned what it was like to really be oppressed, which worked wonders for recruitment. They signed up faster than Uncle Sam could shoot or detain them.

  “We identified someone we thought was important to their organization,” Sam went on, “and duped him into a meeting.”

  She had to stop there, because her memories of that meeting invaded her mind in force. It was the smallness of the little girl that got to Sam every time, the vision of that tiny little person, pigtails tied in pink ribbons, patent leather shoes on her little feet, her body twisted in a bloody heap while chaos erupted all around.

  “Are you okay?” Hayward asked.

  Sam discovered that she needed to dry her eyes. She nodded, embarrassed, surprised again at the intensity of her guilt and heartache. “Fine,” she said, her voice a little too husky.

  “The meeting didn’t go well,” Hayward observed.

  Sam nodded. “You might say that.”

  “Was he on to your play?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But he freaked out and pulled a gun. He killed a . . .” She started to say “little girl,” but she knew that she wouldn’t be able to form the words without losing her composure.

  She took a deep breath and started again. “He pulled a gun and fired. One of the rounds killed a bystander.”

  Hayward’s eyes narrowed. “Petty crime, you said? Like burglary?”

  Sam shook her head. “Even more benign. They exploited different sales tax rates between states, had rooms full of kids playing video games to find and sell game artifacts, skimmed tiny amounts on shipping charges for online sales, that kind of thing.”

  “How did anyone even catch a whiff of it?” Hayward asked.

  “Because they sent the money overseas.”

  “Jihad?”

  Sam nodded. “We just worked backward from the transactions to figure out where the money was coming from, and we worked forward to figure out who was involved on the other end.”

  “And the shooter was big in this organization?” Hayward asked.

  “I’m not sure if ‘big’ is exactly the right way to describe him, but the network node analysis seemed to show that he was at least a middle-manager of some sort.”

  “You wanted to flip him?”

  Sam nodded. “If possible. If not, I was planning to lean on him. Either way, he seemed like a solid lead.” Her eyes unfocused, remembering the lead-up to the op against Tariq Ezzat, wondering yet again if she had read the signs correctly, if she had missed an important warning flag of some sort.

  “Anyway,” she said, “after the . . . bystander died, Homeland opened an investigation on me, put me out to pasture.”

  “So what are you doing back on the case?” Hayward wanted to know.

  “Someone broke into my home,” Sam said. “They also planted a bug on me. I felt threatened.”

  Hayward frowned. “So you flew to Europe? Wasn’t that a little . . . drastic?”

  “Not at all. It’s healthy to pay attention when someone tips their hand. I decided a good offense is the best defense,” Sam said.

  Hayward shook his head and arched his eyebrows. “They’re going to tie you to a stake and burn you if they ever catch you.”

  Sam chuckled without mirth. “Thanks for the pep talk. Very uplifting.”

  “Sorry. I just mean, running from an investigation like that.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, it was a risk, but I couldn’t just sit around waiting to get killed.”

  “How do you know they want to harm you?”

  “How do I know they don’t?”

  He couldn’t argue.

  They were both silent for a long moment. Then a strange look crossed Hayward’s face. “What was his name?” he asked.

  “Whose?”

  “Your mark. The guy who killed the kid.”

  “I didn’t say he killed a kid,” Sam said, suddenly suspicious.

  “Didn’t he?”

  Her eyes locked on his. She assessed him. His face had that same open, guileless, genuine quality to it she had admired earlier. He was either a good man or a damned good actor, she thought.

  “Yes,” she finally answered. “He did. How did you know?”

  “Tell me his name,” Hayward said.

  “I don’t understand how you know he killed a child,” Sam said.

  “Just tell me his name.”

  Sam told him. Then she watched the color drain from Hayward’s face.

  “You knew him,” she said.

  “I knew of him.”

  “How?”

  Hayward didn’t answer. Instead, he just looked at her.

  But it was enough. Sam understood completely. “Oh no,” she breathed. “Tariq Ezzat was a CIA asset.”

  44

  In a twisted and gut-wrenching way, it all made perfect sense, but Sam couldn’t bring herself to believe it. She grilled Hayward mercilessly, her bullshit detectors on full alert, her eyes boring through his, looking for any signs of deception. If he was manipulating her, she ultimately decided, he was the best she’d ever seen. She felt certain she was getting all the facts as he knew them, which were earth-shattering.

  Tariq Ezzat, member of the Doberman group, object of her team’s ill-fated operation in the park, the man whose wild gunshot killed a five-year-old girl, was also a CIA agent. A CIA agent embedded in a terrorist organization, operating on American turf. Sam shook her head. Now that’s a scandal worthy of a fucking indictment.

  She had more questions than he could possibly have answers. Had Ezzat gone rogue? Slipped out of the control of his Agency handler? Why hadn’t the Agency stepped in to put the brakes on Homeland’s op against him? Was there some deeper play going on? Or didn’t the Agency pay enough attention to their joes to know that Ezzat had gotten sideways with the Homeland counterespionage team?

  Further, if he was already on the Agency payroll, why the hell did Ezzat resist arrest? It would have been drop-dead easy for him to straighten out the situation with a single phone call. Ezzat would have been freed in a matter of hours if an Agency rep had shown up with a hand receipt. Interagency cooperation and all that. There was absolutely no need for Ezzat to go berserk, draw a gun, turn it into a tragedy.

  Sarah Beth didn’t need to die.

  The hollowness returned to Sam’s chest and her eyes burned. Her preoccupation with the Doberman safe house in Cagliari had relegated the miserable situation at home to a distant corner of her mind, but thoughts of the little girl and her bereaved family had come crashing back with a vengeance.

  With the sorrow and self-doubt came anxiety and worry. How the hell would she clear her name? Each minute she remained a fugitive made it that much harder to convince people of her innocence.

  “Who was running Ezzat?” Sam asked.

  “Hard to say,” Hayward said. “That’s not the kind of thing people talk much about.”

  “Then how did you know about Ezzat in the first place?”

  Hayward explained that his CIA team worked the acquisition end—using force and influence and good old-fashioned theft to obtain valuable goods to sell or exploit, such as the ChemEspaña formula. Ezzat, Hayward explained, was on the finance end, laundering money and moving it around. There wasn’t much interaction between them—operational security demanded it—but occasional crosstalk was unavoidable.

  “You can’t be serious,” Sam said. “You have a money laundering division at CIA?”

  “Of course not,” Hayward said.
“We just have people who need to launder money. It’s easier and safer to do that using someone else’s existing network than to establish your own.”

  Sam sat in stunned silence. The whole Doberman thing somehow had Agency stink on it. The CIA was using the jihadis’ financial network to move money around under the table. It meant that Homeland and CIA were actively working against each other at some level.

  If she’d had any lingering doubts about who might have been behind the break-in at her home, they were now erased. It also now seemed certain that Avery Martinson, the fat slimeball of a former CIA case officer who’d surprised her in Izmir with the surveillance picture of Brock, had been on an Agency errand.

  The question, again, was why? Why would the CIA try to intimidate a disgraced and suspended Homeland agent, already reeling from a tragic death that happened on her watch? She had been thoroughly out of the game, in no shape and of no mind to push further into the Doberman situation, which she now knew had been unfolding under CIA auspices. Why would CIA rope her back in?

  She thought of the roadside assault against the Libyan police officers that had allowed her to escape. She recalled the American accent she could have sworn she heard in one attacker’s voice as he yelled, “Allahu Akhbar.” Was that an Agency op, too? If so, what could their motive possibly have been? She sensed the beginnings of an insight, inchoate and foggy, tickling her brain. The thought was not yet mature enough for her to wrap words around it, but it felt huge and important just the same.

  She looked out the window. Kirksman’s flight plan from Europe to the US had taken the great-circle route, the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, which took them a long way north. The sea below them looked deathly cold. There was no land in sight. It deepened her sense of isolation and smallness.

  That was really the problem, wasn’t it? Isolation and smallness. The entire government seemed to be against her. The Justice Department had sought and won an indictment. Senator Oren Stanley had thrown his full weight into a trial-by-media campaign. Her bosses at Homeland had offered nothing in her defense. She had a few people on her side, but nobody who could move the needle in her favor. Wouldn’t it be terrific to turn the tables a bit?