by Peter Darley
“Well, you can’t stay in this bare room for hours. You’ll go crazy.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Finally, Brenham agreed. “I’ll bring some refreshments and a portable television down for you, and then I’ll sort out a room with bathroom facilities.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Cullen turned to Brenham. “What would you like me to do now, sir?”
“Check the surveillance tapes on Kerwin and Rhodes, and see if anything’s been said in the last two hours. We’ve got to keep on top of those two.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cullen and Brenham stepped out of the room. The door closed, leaving Jed to his solitude.
Jed moved across to the two-way mirror and stared at the unconscious form of Cynthia Garrett slumped across the interview room desk. Bitterness rose in his chest at the thought of what she and her cohorts had done to him. They’d tried to kill him twice, forced him into hiding, and his fiancée had no idea what had become of him. They had to be brought to justice, and he was determined to see it happen.
In a locked, isolated monitoring suite situated on the headquarters’ ground floor, Cullen sat at a computer terminal, wearing headphones. He gazed at an audio bar on the screen before him and moved the slider forward from where he’d set the marker earlier.
For the first ninety minutes, the sound bar was static, with only sporadic blips indicating mere ambient noise. From that, he was able to ascertain Agent Rhodes’ office was unoccupied.
At ninety-two minutes, there was a notable spike followed by continuous activity. Door closing, two men, and a conversation. Cullen moved the slider back to the beginning of the activity and clicked ‘play’. The echoed sound of Rhodes’ office door closing came through the headphones, and then the voice of Agent Pete Kerwin. Cullen smiled at the convenience. He’d got both of them in the same room. Sitting back, he listened to the discussion with keen interest:
“I’m telling you, Karl, something’s going on,” Kerwin said. “Wilmot thinks it may be nothing to do with us, but he wants me to keep an eye on what’s going on down on the sub-level.”
“Kerwin, you’re being paranoid.”
“No. What I saw wasn’t normal. The FBI doesn’t deliver people here. It was like they wanted nobody to know what was going on.”
“Except for Cullen, right?”
“Yes. Why the hell would Brenham put someone like Boy Scout in charge of something so top secret?”
Cullen froze. They’re on to us. With desperate concern, he listened to the conversation as it continued. After several minutes, Kerwin dropped his bombshell:
“I’ve got to get back down there and see what I can find out.”
“All right, you do what you have to do,” Rhodes said. “But in my opinion you’re worrying over nothing.”
“Let’s hope you’re right.”
Moments later, there was the sound of the door closing.
Cullen checked the time of the sound bar spike as the door closed: 12:58. He checked his wristwatch: 13:12. Oh, shit.
With frantic speed, he shut down the monitoring equipment, bolted out the door, and ran in the direction of the elevator.
***
Kerwin gingerly approached the interrogation room he’d seen the prisoner being escorted toward, and stopped to look around.
He came to the door and tried the handle. Predictably, it was locked, but he knew the layout. There were observation rooms along the corridor to the right.
He continued along until he reached the door he suspected would be the right observation room. Carefully, he approached it and gripped the handle. Turning it slowly, he pushed it open and peered inside. The room appeared to be empty. He stepped toward the two way mirror and suddenly halted. Someone was in the room.
Kerwin looked to his left and saw a look of horror in the eyes of a man in a baseball cap. Only then did he realize who it was. “No. It can’t be.”
He turned to run, but suddenly felt his throat being constricted by Jed Crane’s forearm.
“You son of a bitch!” Crane pulled Kerwin back inside and kicked the door shut.
Jed gasped for breath as Kerwin jabbed an elbow into his solar plexus. The pain was crippling, forcing him to crawl to the back of the room. He looked up to see Kerwin’s six-foot-four, shaven-headed form coming closer. Within seconds, he felt himself being lifted up by the lapels under the force of two sixteen-inch biceps. In desperation, he ignored the debilitating pain in his stomach and wrapped his hands around Kerwin’s throat. Kerwin pressed his right palm into Jed’s face, causing Crane to lose his balance.
The door burst open, and Jed felt the pressure leaving him. He looked up to see Cullen wrestling his opponent away from him, but knew the young agent was no match for a behemoth like Kerwin.
Shaken, Jed hurled himself at Kerwin and drove his fist into his jaw with every ounce of energy remaining in him. However, his adversary remained conscious.
Cullen grasped Kerwin’s left arm and held it in a lock.
“Hold him, Cullen. We’ve got to restrain him,” Jed said.
“I’m tryin’.”
Jed realized there was no way Cullen could hold Kerwin indefinitely and took over with the arm lock. “Get out of here and lock us in. Get the director!”
Cullen nodded and ran out the door. The click of the lock ensured Kerwin was trapped.
Jed momentarily released the rogue agent and pulled him up by the lapels. “Goddamn traitor.” With a carefully planted punch to Kerwin’s chin, he finally succeeded in knocking him out.
Exhausted, he sat back against the wall gazing at the limp figure of his former colleague. Hurry, Cullen. Please, hurry.
Forty-One
Firestorm
Brenham waited while Cullen unlocked the observation room door.
Crane looked up, startled, and then relaxed. He gestured to Kerwin on the floor. “Not a minute too soon. He’s starting to stir.”
Brenham glanced at Cullen. “Cuff that son of a bitch. We’re gonna have to work together and get him secured in one of the interrogation rooms for now.”
Jed assisted Cullen by holding Kerwin’s hands behind his back. Once Kerwin was incapacitated, Brenham stepped over and helped them to pull him off the floor.
“Cullen.” Brenham gestured to the door.
Cullen ran out of the room and returned a few seconds later. “It’s all clear. Let’s go.”
The three men held a tight grip on their senseless captive and ushered him out of the room.
Cullen slid a card key into another interrogation room’s key reader. Crane and Brenham wasted no time dragging Kerwin into the room. With an unceremonious shove to Kerwin’s back, Jed pushed him onto the desk.
Urgently, Cullen closed the door and locked it. The three men stood for a moment to catch their breath.
“If that clown was sniffing around down here, chances are Wilmot suspects we’re onto him,” Brenham said.
Jed nodded. “I agree.”
The director’s cell phone rang, and he answered it. “Brenham . . . Yes . . . Yes, of course. I’ll be right there.” He ended the call and turned back to Jed and Cullen. “Crane, you’ve got to get back to that observation room for now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Cullen, go get coffees for the two of you. You’re gonna need ‘em.”
“What’s going on?”
“You’ve got the toughest interrogation of your career to conduct. The FBI just arrived at the front gate with Brandon Drake.”
Brenham entered his office with Jim Connor by his side. Connor took a flash drive out of his pocket and handed it to him. “This is it,” Connor said. “It was exactly where she said it was.”
Brenham stared at the flash drive with hope tempered by bitter disappointment. The end of Treadwell’s faction was now in the palm of his hand—along with the names of men and women he’d trusted. While it represented the end of a terrible evil, it came at the cost of trusting his own judgment.
>
“I know, Jack,” Connor said, as though reading Brenham’s thoughts. “But the flash drive is encrypted. You have access to tech that’ll crack it far quicker than we could.”
“I’ll get it to Carrie Wilson immediately.”
“Do you trust her?”
“I don’t know. I won’t know anything until this thing is opened, and we’re running out of time. There’s no time to polygraph her.”
“I’ll have a unit on hand in case of an incident.”
“Did you manage to get any information out of Drake?”
Connor shook his head. “Just a mouthful of attitude. The army gave us all the artillery he took from Mach Industries. We passed it on to Agent Cullen. The Chevy he’d been driving around in was registered to a young man named Luke Smith, a computer repair technician from Flagstaff, Arizona. He’d been listed as missing for three weeks. The kid was only twenty-six years old. The Flagstaff Highway Patrol have alerted Mr. Smith’s family”
“Oh, dear God.” Brenham closed his eyes with the devastating thought of the grief Luke’s family would have to endure. Surely there could be no news more heinous for a mother and father. “Thank you, Jim. For everything.”
The two directors exited the office and headed for the lower floors.
Five FBI task force officers accompanied Brenham and Connor into one of the CIA’s numerous operations labs. A young woman with blonde hair, sparsely adorned with black streaks, faced them with an understandably concerned expression.
Brenham handed her the flash drive. “Carrie, this has been encrypted. We need you to find out what’s on it.”
“I’ll do my best,” Carrie Wilson said, and inserted the flash drive into a laptop USB port. After accessing the drive, she smiled confidently and began a hacking procedure.
Before many minutes, she came to the first stumbling block. “I can already see it’s riddled with firewalls, and that’s just for the first encryption.”
Brenham leaned forward. “First?”
“That’s right. Once I’ve cracked it, a second encryption will appear. Whoever secured this sure as hell didn’t want anybody finding out what’s on it.”
“Do you think you can crack it?”
“A month ago, it would’ve taken considerable time, but since we had the Zenith Decrypt Fourteen installed, it’ll be a lot faster. A single decryption will take me around five minutes. A double will be ten.”
“Thank you, Carrie.” Brenham turned to Connor. “In ten minutes, we’ll have the answers we’ve been waiting for.” He looked over Carrie’s shoulder as page after page of computer codes scrolled along the screen.
***
Wentworth Cullen sat opposite Drake in an interrogation room. A squad of armed FBI agents waited outside the door.
Secured to the chair with steel wrist and ankle chains, Drake’s chilling, granite-like glare was unremitting. His attaché case of stolen artillery sat alongside the MZ-507 rifle, the samurai sword, and a backpack filled with cash on the desk.
“Had yourself quite a field day, didn’t you?” Cullen gestured to the equipment, his cavalier approach barely concealed his unease. “I mean just look at this stuff. It’s incredible. Since you won’t tell us the location of the electron key that unlocks that armor you’ve attached to yourself, we have a team over at Mach Industries picking one up as we speak. You’ll be flesh and blood like the rest of us soon enough.”
Drake’s hateful gaze beamed through his eyes, and then he lowered his head. It was clear he had no intention of cooperating.
“What did you hope to accomplish with all this?”
Drake raised his head again. “War!”
“War? War against whom?”
“You bastards who took my identity from me, my freedom, and gave me nothing but lies.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about. I had nothing to do with any of that. I’m under orders to gain as much information as possible about the traitors who did this to you.”
Drake chuckled. “Do you really think I’m dumb enough to buy that?”
“You’re facing charges ranging from breaking out of Leavenworth to mass murder, Drake. Right now, I’m all that stands between you and a goddamn lethal injection.”
Drake’s expression darkened again. “That’s not gonna happen.”
“Oh? And what makes you so sure.”
“Nobody takes me down but me.”
Cullen swallowed hard. Drake had just made a statement implying he was prepared to take himself out before letting anyone else do it. If that was his mentality, he was virtually invulnerable to questioning. “Look, it doesn’t have to be this way. My department can pull all kinds of strings. We’ve been infiltrated by a rogue faction that we have to take down. Your testimony could help us considerably. This is a golden opportunity for you, soldier, so don’t throw it away.”
Drake sat back and looked at Cullen as though studying him in an attempt to assess his truthfulness. Finally, he spoke. “Wilmot.”
Cullen leaned forward eagerly. “Tell me what you know, and I mean everything, Drake. I want it all. From the beginning.”
“Then if I were you, I’d get ready for one hell of a long story.”
Cullen took out a Dictaphone and pressed record. “Go for it.”
***
Brenham and Connor stared over Carrie Wilson’s shoulder while she entered a final bypass code. A window opened displaying a three page list of names and access codes.
“Save that to a flash drive, Carrie, and then delete all of the data from the mainframe,” Brenham said. “We can’t afford for anyone else to find it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brenham studied the list on the screen hungrily, his heart racing with despair at the sight of names of people he would have trusted with his life. Fortunately, Carrie’s name wasn’t among them. The list showed Nemesis was spread throughout both the CIA and SDT. “Oh, my God,” he said. “This is every bit as painful as I thought it would be.”
There were no unfamiliar names, which suggested the FBI and NSA were clear of them.
“I recognize some of the people on this file, sir,” Carrie said. “May I ask—?”
“Carrie!” Brenham cut her off.
She transferred the file to another flash drive, and then immediately deleted the original from the mainframe.
Brenham continued with a calmer tone. “Carrie, I want you to keep quiet and follow me. It’s for your own safety.”
“Safety?”
“Just do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brenham turned back to Connor. “Get your men ready. All of these clowns have to be taken in, but first we take Wilmot.”
Connor followed Brenham out of the lab with Carrie in tow.
Thirty minutes later, three FBI agents accompanied Brenham and Connor along the corridor to Wilmot’s office.
Deborah Beaumont stood in apparent alarm as they came past her open door.
“It’s all right, Deborah,” Brenham said, secure in the knowledge her name hadn’t appeared on the list. “I want you to go up to Assistant Director Hayes’ office. Carrie Wilson is there with her, and I want you to stay put.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, clearly puzzled.
They moved farther along until they reached Wilmot’s door. Connor gave his agents an instructive nod. He then stepped back while the officers opened the door and stormed into the office.
Startled, Wilmot stood, his face ashen.
Brenham stepped forward. “Take him in.”
“On what charge?” Wilmot said.
“Treason.”
As the agents moved in, Wilmot drew a cell phone from his pocket and held it up. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”
“Wait!” Brenham halted the agents in their tracks and noticed Wilmot typing something into the keypad. “We can add smuggling an unauthorized cell phone in here to your list of charges.”
“You wouldn’t believe what I’ve managed to have smuggled into th
is place,” Wilmot said. “If you don’t back off right now, Brenham, I’m going to destroy you.”
“Why, Wilmot? What do you hope to accomplish?”
“I’m trying to make America an invincible force that nobody can make war with.”
“With you at the helm?”
“Something like that.”
Brenham gestured to the agents again. “Take the son of the bitch.”
Wilmot pushed another button on the cell phone a split second before the operatives grasped him. The phone fell from his hand.
Brenham picked it up and read the screen––Sent: Firestorm. “What does this mean, Wilmot? What the hell is Firestorm?”
The building suddenly shook, and the unmistakable sound of gunfire rang through the floor from below, accompanied by a cacophony of screams.
Wilmot grinned vengefully. “That is.”
Forty-Two
The Torch
Drake concluded his account of events, and Wentworth Cullen shook his head in astonishment. “It’s an extraordinary story, Drake, I’ll say that much. In summary, you were a part of Operation: Nemesis from the beginning. Recently, you learned that, after you were injured in Afghanistan, Treadwell gave you a new set of memories that led to you becoming this Interceptor. Under this identity, you assisted in the rescue of your sister, where Wilmot faked your death. Afterward, he kept you in a CIA facility in Mojave where he restored your true identity. It was in this facility that Agent Garrett tried to seduce and kill you, and from where Wilmot sent you on a mission to kill Agent Crane, with a mercenary named Kane Slamer . . . whom you killed a couple of days ago.” He tapped the backpack. “And this is the money you say Director Wilmot paid you to kill Agent Crane?”
“Pretty cool, eh?” Drake said glibly. “Make a terrific TV series, wouldn’t it?”
“Don’t get smart with me, Drake. Your ass is still on the line. If it wasn’t for the fact that all of this fit so perfectly with what we already know, you’d be facing the death penalty. And you still are unless you cooperate. You could get away with the state pen if you stop screwing around.”