by Mike Maden
“Let me see if I can change it, then.” Pearce pulled out his smartphone and tapped on the photo gallery icon. He slid the phone over to Myers. She glanced at the first photo. Her face darkened.
“Royce Simmons. The man who killed my husband.”
“DUI. Three priors. Driving with a suspended license the day he plowed into your husband’s Lexus. Increasing the DUI penalties in Colorado was what got you into politics in the first place,” Pearce noted.
“That’s old news, Mr. Pearce. What’s that got to do with us?”
“Slide it to the next photo.”
Myers stiffened for a moment. She wasn’t used to being told what to do, but she complied.
Pearce saw her eyes light up for a moment, then dim again. “Mr. Simmons in a morgue. Broke his neck in a fall, I read.”
“Mike, you mind giving us a second?” Pearce asked.
“Sure. I need to call the hospital and check up on Hank anyway. I’ll send him your love.” Early turned to the president. “Call me when you need me, ma’am.” Early closed the door behind him.
“I take it there’s another picture you want to show me?” Myers asked.
Pearce nodded.
She flicked the touch screen. A man’s face.
“Cliff Calhoun,” she said.
“Tell me about him.”
Myers set the phone down and glared at Pearce. “What do you want me to tell you that you don’t obviously already know? When I learned Simmons was due for early release, I hired Cliff to follow him. And I gave Cliff the order to kill Simmons if he caught him driving drunk again.”
“How soon before Calhoun caught him drinking?”
“The first night he was released. He was in a bar, celebrating. Cliff said he knocked back a half dozen whiskey shots and as many beers in less than an hour. Got up, stumbled out to a borrowed car. No license, of course. Bastard was going to drive home. Sidewalks were slick with ice. Cliff broke his neck. Made it look like Simmons slipped and fell. Nobody cried for the son of a bitch, not even his own mother. I hope your intel told you that, too. As far as I’m concerned, it was a public service. If Simmons hadn’t gotten drunk again, he’d be alive today, or at least, he wouldn’t have been killed by me.”
Pearce thought about her answer. He could put her in jail for twenty-five to life with that confession. The only problem was, Pearce hated drunk drivers, too.
“Did I pass your test, Mr. Pearce? Can we quit playing games now?”
“Still not interested.”
“Why? Because I hired a man to kill a drunk before he could kill somebody else’s husband and father? I’ve never talked about it because I didn’t want to go to jail. Calhoun’s been dead for years, so I don’t even know how you could have possibly found out. But if you’re asking me to apologize, I won’t.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m a businessman, not a therapist. I don’t do personal vendettas. It doesn’t fit the company mission statement.” Pearce stood to leave. “You need to find somebody else.”
“Sit down,” she said.
Pearce ignored her.
“Please.”
Pearce hesitated, his hand on the doorknob.
Baghdad, Iraq
August 21, 2005
“Dick holsters. All of ’em.”
Annie stood in front of Troy’s steel desk reading the airstrike request denial again. She gripped the paper so hard her hands trembled.
It was only the two of them in the spartan operations office that morning. Troy sat and listened to Annie rant, but he was focused on the ring in his pocket. He’d been carrying it for a week, waiting for just the right moment to ask her. Somehow that moment never seemed to arrive, today included.
IEDs had been cutting down American soldiers and Iraqi policemen for months now, and slaughtering innocent civilians, too. Instead of chasing the bombers, Annie decided it was smarter to find the source of the remote-controlled bombs.
Ba’athists and Iraqi insurgents—many of them former Revolutionary Guards—had enough technical know-how to set off crude timed charges. But the Iranians had been supplying IEDs with sophisticated timers and remote-control detonators, many of which, ironically, were manufactured in the United States and smuggled via Singapore into Iran. The Quds Force operators were also particularly adept at fashioning shaped-charge IEDs, the kind of munitions that could even punch holes through the thick steel hull of the mighty Abrams main battle tank.
Annie worked her sources hard for weeks even as she turned new ones, chasing leads on the IED suppliers. She favored the “aggressive” interrogation of captured insurgents and had been reprimanded twice for the physical harm she’d caused to those in her severe custody. She once even sifted bare-handed through the shredded remains of a dead insurgent after he accidentally detonated a device he was trying to set. But it was a piece of hard intel shared by a friend in Israel’s Mossad that finally pinpointed Baneh, Iran, as the target.
Annie’s request for a satellite redeploy over the city gave her superiors the visual confirmation they needed to order an airstrike. But the request for an airstrike was denied from higher up the chain of command. President Bush’s political opposition had drawn a line in the sand at the Iraq-Iran border. The Republicans were afraid they wouldn’t get the war they wanted so badly if they asked for a declaration of war; the Democrats were too afraid to oppose a war that had gained such widespread popularity among the public. A compromise was reached. The undeclared Iraq war could continue indefinitely, but Iran was strictly off-limits. Reelection was the driving reality of Washington politics.
The reality in Iraq, however, was that dozens of people were getting injured or killed by Iranian-built IEDs every day, and the severity and frequency of the attacks were increasing.
In Annie’s mind, the gutless politicians back home were just as guilty of the carnage as the Iraqi insurgents.
“They’re all dick holsters,” Annie grunted again. She crushed the paper into a hard little ball and threw it across the room.
“You’ve got to let it go, Annie,” Troy said.
“I can’t. You know that.”
“What else can we do?”
“We could go in ourselves.”
“We’d never get approval.”
“Who’s asking for permission?”
“No support? On a mission like this? Good chance of getting killed that way.”
“Maybe. But more of our people will get killed if we don’t. Guaranteed.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“Is that your head or your dick talking?”
“You mean my head or my heart?”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“Both,” Pearce said.
“Sorry. Pick one.”
“Okay. Heart.”
Annie dropped in Pearce’s lap. She pulled a handful of hair behind her ear. That was her tell. Pearce braced himself.
Annie’s bright eyes bore into his.
“Sorry, mister. Wrong answer. We didn’t come over here to go steady. We came here to win a war. Right?”
Pearce took a deep breath. Old ground.
“Right.”
She smiled. “Good boy.” She affirmed his answer by patting his broad chest with her hands. Felt something in one of his shirt pockets. It was the ring, of course. But this wasn’t the time.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
She started to say something but held her tongue.
Pearce thought about asking her what she was going to say, but he knew she wouldn’t answer. Her mind had already turned to the mission.
Annie slipped off his lap and grabbed her cell phone. “I’ll handle logistics,” she told Pearce as she dialed. “You handle Mike.”
The President’s Dining Room, West Wing, the White House
>
Pearce took his hand off the doorknob, turned around, and took his seat.
“Unfortunately, it took the death of my son to wake me up to what’s been going on down in Mexico. The horrific violence. The sheer volume of drugs like methamphetamine and brown tar heroin flooding into our country, killing our children. I was too damn busy making a pile of money in the IT industry, or running a state government, to pay attention to any of it.”
“We had to deal with the heroin trade in the Sand Box,” Pearce said. “It was a primary revenue source for the bad guys. Some of our guys got caught up into it, too.”
Myers took another sip of coffee. Pearce drank his tea.
“Mike briefed you on the ambush of the Marinas?” Myers asked.
“Yeah. Somebody obviously leaked. They find out who?”
“Not yet. Probably doesn’t matter. If they find the guy—or gal—there’ll just be another one next time. I’m afraid the Castillos were sending us a message, and they set those poor young Marines on fire to make sure we got it. They want us to know that the Mexican government can’t fight this war, let alone win it.”
“And neither can you, at least not with American troops. Otherwise, you’ve broken one of your campaign promises, right?”
“It wasn’t just an empty campaign promise to win votes. Too much blood and too much treasure have already been spent fighting the War on Terror for more than a decade now. If we invade Mexico, we’re probably in for another ten years of bloody warfare. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it. I’m not even saying we couldn’t win it. But the American people don’t have the will to start another war right now, let alone to make the necessary sacrifices to see it through.”
“So what’s your plan? Where do I fit in?”
“I can’t fight and win the drug war. But I’ve got to send my own message. I can’t control what Castillo does in Mexico, but I’ve got to keep him from crossing the border at will and killing American citizens with impunity.”
“Hire more Border Patrol agents. Call up the National Guard. Seal the border.”
“Can’t. At least not now. The budget freeze cuts across every department of government, Border Patrol included. And troops on the border are considered racist, fascist, and xenophobic by the rabid left and increasingly so by the middling center. Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think, but the political reality is that the moderates in Congress won’t authorize troops on the border or slash other welfare programs to beef up the Border Patrol. More important, a great deal of trade takes place across that border. We gum it up too much, and we hurt the economies of both countries.”
“That doesn’t leave many options,” Pearce observed. “Maybe it’s best to let this dog lie.”
“I was raised with the belief that action is morality. It’s quoted so often it’s a cliché now, but Burke’s aphorism is still true. All it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.”
Pearce shook his head. “The only problem with that kind of thinking is that every zealot with a suicide vest thinks he’s the good guy fighting evil, even when the bus he blows up is full of innocent civilians.”
“I’m not talking about ideology or politics. I’m no moral crusader. I’m talking about putting down a rabid dog before it bites somebody else. My job is to save American lives. I think that’s something you understand quite well.”
Once again, Pearce had to process for a moment. “So what do you want to do?”
“I believe in Occam’s razor. In this case, the simplest solution is the best one. I want to send Castillo a clear message. Blood for blood. I’m convinced he killed my son, so I’m going to kill one of his sons. Tit-for-tat.”
“A telegram would be cheaper.”
“I’m willing to pay the price,” Myers said.
“Why only one son if they’re both killers?”
“So Castillo won’t retaliate. He gets to keep one son alive if he keeps a cool head. The dead son will be a daily reminder to him to keep his war on his side of the border.”
“But what if he does retaliate? You take out his other son? Then he retaliates again. Then what do you do?”
“You were CIA. You must have read about the Phoenix Program?” She was referring to the CIA program that assassinated key Vietcong leaders during the Vietnam War.
“We studied it. A lot of mistakes were made.”
“But according to William Colby, the North Vietnamese said that the Phoenix Program was the most effective thing we ever did during the entire war.”
“Of course he’d say that. It was his program.”
“You think he lied about it?”
“I have no way of knowing. It was before my time.”
Pearce had mixed feelings about that war. His father had served in it and eventually died from it. “What I do know is that the Phoenix Program killed nearly thirty thousand Vietnamese.”
“I only want to kill one Mexican.”
“And that’s where my company comes in.”
“Yes. But it must be kept secret.”
“Who else knows about this, besides you, me, and Early?”
“Sandy Jeffers, my chief of staff, and the attorney general.”
“What does she say about all of this?”
“You don’t strike me as someone overly concerned with matters of the law.”
“I have people to worry about.”
“Without getting into the specifics, you’re operating under my authority as commander in chief, the same way President Obama dispatched SEAL Team snipers to take out the Somali pirates.”
“Our situation is a little different. We’re private contractors.”
“Then just think of it as a private contract for taking out the garbage.”
“And if this thing goes south?”
“Doubting yourself, Mr. Pearce?”
“Not at all. But humor me.”
“Then I’ll have your back. Mike will vouch for me.”
“He already did. I just wanted to hear it from you.”
“Is that why you’re recording our conversation?” Myers asked. It was an educated guess.
“Trust, but verify. In case I’m not around,” Pearce said. “Speaking of trust, why isn’t Greyhill in the loop?”
“I take it you don’t follow politics very closely. We had a shotgun wedding. Only the shotgun was pointed at me.”
“Is the operation covert or clandestine?” Pearce chose his words carefully. “Covert” actions fell under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, “clandestine” under Title 10. What Pearce was really asking was: are you notifying the armed services committees or the intelligence committees about this action?
“Neither. Or both. It’s irrelevant. This is a tactical operation. Congress doesn’t have the right to micromanage national security.”
“In other words, you want to keep this secret because your political opponents would make a lot of hay over this, even if it does go right.”
“I need to keep this secret because if I publicly shame Castillo, he’d be forced to retaliate.”
Myers locked eyes with Pearce. All her cards were on the table.
“Are you in or out?” she asked.
Pearce had an instructor at the Farm. He was one of the original cold warriors with the missing fingernails to prove it. The old man had drilled the Hagakure into their heads like sixteen-penny nails into wet lumber. Even now he could hear the spymaster’s raspy voice in his head.
The warrior makes all of his decisions within the span of seven breaths.
Pearce took just two.
Old habits die hard.
“Better call Mike back in,” Pearce said.
Myers pressed the intercom. “Please send Mr. Early back in.”
Early came in, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand. “You want me to throw th
is bum out?” he asked with a smile.
Pearce pushed out the chair next to him with his foot. Early fell into it. Pearce turned to Myers.
“No JAG lawyers looking over my shoulder. No bean counters asking for receipts. No squawking when I hand you guys the bill—and it’s gonna be a doozy. I do this my way, with my team, no questions. Are we clear on that?”
Myers and Early both nodded. “Agreed,” Myers added.
“I’m also going to need access to DEA intelligence and NSA databases, at least the ones my firm hasn’t already hacked. Without their knowledge, of course.”
“Mike will handle all of that,” Myers said.
“One more thing. I’m going to need you to flip the switch on DAS down there.”
“DAS?” Early asked.
“Domain Awareness System,” Myers said. “The domestic version is up and running in New York City. You know, like that TV show, Person of Interest. Links all of the CCTV cameras, criminal databases, public records, and just about every other surveillance or intelligence database to a central processing hub for total information awareness.”
Both men’s faces posed the same question to her. How do you know about DAS?
Myers grinned. “My company subcontracted some of the DAS software package on an NSA contract a few years back. The NSA uses a more robust suite of assets for covert surveillance in noncompliant cities. Deep web stuff.” She was referring to the fact that NSA was tapped into every major telecom, search engine, and ISP around the world, by either tacit agreement or covert operation, often through backdoor software and compromised system components. Essentially, there wasn’t a private or public database in the world that NSA couldn’t break into, especially in Latin America. “But isn’t deploying DAS a little bit of overkill, Mr. Pearce?”
“Pulling the trigger is always the easy part. Target acquisition is the name of the game. I can’t shoot ’em if I can’t see ’em. The more data we have, the better. We want to crack open as many of the Mexican intel databases as we can, but phone records, driver’s licenses, and car registrations will go a long way, too.”