Man of War

by Sean Parnell

  The crowd was frenetic.

  Steele saw the bar to his right and stepped into the fray. The scene reminded him of a fishing trip he’d taken in South Africa, where the captain chummed the waters and laughed when the great whites rolled in.

  The music was so loud that Steele had to turn the radio’s volume all the way up to hear Demo say, “Sounds like my kind of party, mano.”

  Steele knew that right now Felix was outside, making a choice. The scarred ex-Legionnaire would either beat feet for the docks or alert his boss and then try to put a bullet in the back of his skull. No matter the decision, Steele knew he was running short on time and needed to find Jean-Luc before the alert was given.

  He scanned the faces sitting at the tables as he moved. Years of practice allowed him to easily separate the predators from the prey. Finally he saw Jean-Luc peacocking at the bar. The Frenchman was hard to miss even among the chaos, because of his signature silver fauxhawk. He was chatting up a young girl, most likely underage, whose glassy eyes were fixed on the bar. The girl picked a rolled bill from the bar, bent her head, and aimed the open end at a mirror with cocaine lined across its surface. Steele waited until her head was down and then slipped in behind Jean-Luc. He jammed his finger in the base of the man’s back.

  “DGSE, don’t move,” he ordered as the girl sucked the white powder up her nose.

  “Merde,” Jean-Luc cursed. The Frenchman had good reason to fear the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure, or Directorate-General for External Security, as it was known in the United States; they had been after him for years. But he quickly regained his composure and started negotiating. “Listen to me. I know what they pay you in France and I will double it right here, right now.”

  He was stalling and Eric knew it.

  The girl looked up from the dope, a smear of white on her nostril, and Jean-Luc made his move. But Steele was ready and caught his hand creeping toward the bottom edge of the bar where a panic button was installed.

  “Push that button and I will burn you down,” Steele said, this time in English.

  “Hey, where did you come from?” the girl demanded.

  The Frenchman recognized Steele’s voice and tried to play it cool. “Don’t worry, Judith, dear, Eric is an old friend. Jesus, buddy, you scared me.”

  He tried to turn around, but Steele wasn’t having it. “Get rid of her,” he ordered, pulling the man away from the bar by the back of his Italian suit coat.

  “Give us a second, love.”

  Steele didn’t wait for her to leave. He muscled Jean-Luc a half step to the right, until they were both facing the mirror over the bar. In this position he could watch Jean-Luc’s face and make sure no one snuck up on his six.

  “What do you want?” Jean-Luc demanded, his eyebrows darting upward into sharp little Vs, giving him the look of a frosted Satan.

  “What was our deal?”

  Jean-Luc’s tongue flashed nervously across his thin lips, eyes scanning for the help that wasn’t coming.

  “What was it?” Steele asked, switching to French so there would be no confusion.

  “No more guns.”

  “That’s right. No more guns. So imagine my surprise when I found out that you were facilitating a deal between Burrows and Ronna.” Steele was lying—he had no idea what involvement the man had in the arms deal—but he knew that Jean-Luc got a piece of every deal that happened in his place. “Where are they?”

  Steele had to get moving. Right now there was no sign that anyone was on to him, but when things broke bad, which he knew they would, it would happen in the blink of an eye. There were enough guns in the club to start a second intifada, and if there was going to be gunplay, he wanted to start it.

  “VIP,” the Frenchman hissed.

  “Take me to them,” Steele said, grabbing a handful of jacket and pulling him closer. He checked the mirror; no one was paying them any attention. He yanked the FN from its holster and shoved it into the back of Jean-Luc’s waistband. He held him close, giving him a final warning. “You play it straight and I will let you live, but if I even think you are stepping out of bounds I am going kill you. Now walk.”

  Steele stayed close, an easy smile on his face. They were just two guys walking through a crowded club. He just hoped the ruse would hold up.

  There were two guards flanking the arch leading into the VIP section. Steele tensed. If Jean-Luc was going to make a move it would happen here, but the man just nodded and walked past. Everything was going smoothly, and Steele thought he might just pull it off when Demo’s voice filled his ear.

  “Eric, we’ve got trouble.”

  Chapter 5

  Virginia

  It was 11:30 p.m. and CIA Director Robin Styles was standing barefoot on the balcony outside her bedroom. God, the tile is cold, she thought, curling her manicured toes against the chill. She had been up since four waiting for the team she had sent to Algiers to report in. The later it got, the more her sleep-deprived brain ran over the list of things that could have gone wrong.

  No news is good news.

  When she finally began to feel the effects of the Ambien she grabbed the empty wineglass from the table at her feet and stepped inside.

  Her bedroom was well furnished and warm, a far cry from the one in rural Kentucky where she had grown up. Styles could still remember the sound of the leaking faucet and lying in bed listening to the drip, drip, drip reverberating off the steel sink.

  She eyed the bed on the way to the bathroom, wanting nothing more than to dive beneath the comforter and go to sleep. The picture on the bedside table quickly dissuaded her.

  The photo was of her mother and it was the only memento in the room. Everything else was replaceable. Styles kept the picture to remind her of what happened to people who took the easy road. Her mother had everything she needed to get out of Kentucky, but traded it all for a five-minute romp in the back of a rusted Ford pickup.

  If you could see me now, Momma.

  Styles went into the bathroom to wash her face instead of jumping into bed. As the first female Director of the CIA, she knew the importance of “optics.” It doesn’t matter how good a job I’m doing, she thought. If I got caught on camera looking like a tired hag, the media would go crazy. She followed up with a gentle toner and a nighttime cream. Only after she had finished her ritual did she finally crawl into bed and drift off to sleep.

  A rattling on her nightstand woke her up three hours later. Styles came out of the sleep like a ship emerging from the fog, eyeballs burning, the room out of focus and hazy.

  It can’t be morning already.

  The clock on the cable box said it was 2:30 a.m. Styles rubbed her hand over her face, trying to place the vibrating sound. What is that noise? Then it hit her: my cell phone. She snatched the offending device off the table, and cursed when the phone snagged on the charger.

  “This better be good,” she snapped.

  “You need to get down here.”

  Jesus Christ, what now?

  The line was unsecured, and as much as she wanted to ask what had happened, she simply said, “I’m on my way.”

  She got dressed and grabbed the keys to the Jeep on the way to the garage. As the Director of the CIA, Styles had a driver and a government-issued Suburban, but government vehicles were equipped with GPS chips, and the last thing Styles needed was someone finding out where she was going. In the last twenty-four hours she had broken enough laws to earn a free room at the black site of her choice. Treason was one thing, but what she had done, shit, they didn’t even have a law for that. Styles didn’t want to think about it and held to the mantra she had been using since President Cole took office.

  Cole can’t burn you if he doesn’t know.

  Robin Styles had joined the Agency back in the 1980s when America was still fighting the Cold War. While her colleagues were fixated on Russia, Styles got the Middle East desk. She quickly proved that she was more than just a pretty face, developing intel that H
ezbollah and the PLO were an emerging threat. She tried to warn her boss, but the man laughed at her.

  Then in 1983, Islamic Jihad blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut and the jokes stopped. Styles got a promotion and hadn’t stopped climbing the ladder since.

  Thirty minutes later, Robin Styles pulled across the railroad tracks, the Jeep’s headlights spraying over the fractured concrete drive. The industrial plaza was a mix of warehouses in dire need of a pressure washing and squat office buildings that looked like gray pillboxes. It was not the place you’d expect the CIA to have an off-the-books listening station, which was why Styles put it there.

  She pulled the Jeep into a spot next to a sign that read looking glass solutions. On paper, LGS was a telecom provider, but in reality it was a CIA shell company Styles had been illegally funding for five years. When she cut the headlights a man in light blue coveralls stepped out of the shadows. He was red-faced from the wind, and peeking out of his jacket Styles saw the rear sight of an H&K MP7.

  “They are waiting for you inside, ma’am.”

  The building was a no-frills operation and the bare concrete floors were dotted with strips of carpet tape. The walls were also bare and the pipes were exposed in the ceiling. Styles had poured millions into the facility, but the only way you would know it was if you had access to the vault.

  Styles hadn’t kept an iron grip on the CIA by playing by the rules. Her job was to protect the United States from its enemies, especially those in the White House. She hadn’t had these problems under the previous administration. President Bentley had been her ally. But Cole was a different story.

  She badged herself through the steel door and stepped into a small room with tan walls and a desk surrounded by a bulletproof cubicle. The door closed behind her, causing her ears to pop.

  The room was soundproof, with a lead insert that kept cell phone signals from coming in or out. Styles knew this because she had signed off on the plans and paid for the building using money siphoned from the black fund.

  There was one more door, and when she stepped through, Styles was in a room smaller than her den. It was cooler in here and the only light came from the two large monitors sitting on a desk. The temperature was kept low to protect the supercomputers that took up the rest of the space. About the size of a refrigerator and arrayed with a panel of blinking lights, the massive machines hummed behind a protective steel cage that kept anyone from ripping out one of the drives.

  Unlike the guards, the man behind the desk was in his late twenties. He was dressed in a stained T-shirt and had a wispy beard. His workstation was clean, but the trash can was full of empty Red Bull cans and foil gum wrappers wadded into little balls. He rotated the chair toward the door, his face void of its usual cocky grin.

  Above all the assets that made up Styles’s arsenal, she liked the geeks the best. There was no guile in their motives, and as long as she made sure to give them the newest gear and the fastest Internet, they were happy. It was a lesson the NSA ignored, which in Styles’s opinion was the main reason why Edward Snowden had developed a conscience and decided to leak reams of classified documents to the world.

  Not that it mattered. Styles had managed to turn the fiasco to her advantage by stealing the STATEROOM program, one of the top-secret assets Snowden leaked from inside Russian custody. According to the Director’s congressional testimony, STATEROOM didn’t exist anymore. The satellite map covered in blue and green dots on the technician’s monitor said otherwise.

  In its most basic form STATEROOM was a clearinghouse for government and commercial telecommunication assets, a database of audio and video recordings that was updated every second. Styles called it “the unblinking eye,” and it was illegal as hell.

  The blue dots were commercial platforms, and the government owned the green ones. The tech double clicked on a blue dot he had marked with a red pin and the UAV’s heads-up display filled the screen. Styles knew it was a passive link, meaning that the tech could control the camera if the feed was open, but could not alter the drone’s flight plan, and at 30,000 feet in the dark, the drone wasn’t much.

  “What is so important?” she asked.

  The tech’s fingers rattled over the keyboard and a satellite overlay popped up below the feed. It showed a highway and an antenna icon moving east. When he clicked on the icon a little box displaying the speed, compass heading, and lat/long appeared.

  “I found Breul’s phone,” he said.

  Styles was impressed. Two decades at the CIA had told her that locating Ali Breul was a fool’s errand, a task she equated with finding a needle in a stack of needles. But her geeks had come through. The jolt of triumph was tempered as her sleep-deprived mind processed what the tech had just told her.

  “How did you get the phone?” she asked, praying he was smart enough not to use the NSA.

  Phone intercepts were the purview of the National Security Agency, who used their satellites and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, or ISR, platforms to signal all over the world. The boys at Fort Meade had “turned over a new leaf” after Snowden went public, promising Congress that they had shut down their surveillance programs. Styles knew it was bullshit.

  The NSA was still spying on the world. They just weren’t sharing it anymore.

  “I ran it through a few open repeaters and cell phone towers. Actually got a hit faster than if I had used the NSA.”

  “Well done,” Styles congratulated him. It was good news, but she knew he hadn’t gotten her out of bed to tell her that he’d found an asset’s phone.

  “This is a recording from the drone feed,” he said, pointing at the screen. He hit the play button and activated the drone’s thermal camera.

  The darkness disappeared, replaced by a gray landscape and a convoy of trucks that glowed black from the heat of the engines. The tech leaned forward, finger outstretched, and pointed at the lead vehicle. In the next instant there was a flash of light on the screen followed by an ink-black fireball that suddenly flared.

  “What the hell was that?” Styles asked, waiting for the thermal iris to refresh so she could see what was going on.

  Instead of replying, the tech zoomed in, and when the picture returned a moment later, the director saw tracer fire slamming into the convoy, which was now stopped and on fire in the middle of the road. A group of men appeared from what looked like a ditch. They advanced on the convoy, muzzles flashing in the dark.

  Oh my God.

  The first thing that popped into Styles’s mind was that in three hours the sun would be up and the President would get his daily intelligence briefing. The Director of National Intelligence would make sure the first thing he told President Cole was that Styles had lost a team in Tunis.

  She knew how Cole’s brain worked. The first question out of his mouth would be, “What were they doing in Tunis?”

  I have to get ahead of this. But how?

  The answer came out of sheer desperation. You are going to call a briefing. Get your story on record before Cole and his lapdogs hear it from anyone else.

  It was a game called “controlling the narrative,” and Styles was a master.

  She knew what would happen if anyone ever learned the truth behind the operation she was running. Going to jail would be the least of my concerns. Once the decision was made, she didn’t hesitate. “Kill the feed and erase the log,” she ordered. “I was never here, and this”—Styles jabbed a manicured nail at the screen—“this never happened.”

  Chapter 6

  Beirut

  Inside the Dragon’s Door, Demo’s warning was followed up by Felix’s voice on the security channel.

  “Security breach, code one. Blue jacket, black hair. I am sending a picture.”

  “You are blown.”

  Well, that didn’t take long.

  Steele couldn’t go back if he wanted to, the men standing guard behind him had seen to that. He knew there was an emergency exit on the back wall, but to get there he had to keep
going.

  The VIP section was divided up into little cubes with a walkway that ran toward the back of the building. The cubes to Steele’s left and right were built on top of a raised dais and surrounded by a waist-high wall. He couldn’t see over the wall because he was below it, but he assumed they were laid out the same.

  A never-ending line of servers bustled back and forth with trays of food and drinks. Steele had to push Jean-Luc to the side to let one pass, which gave him an opportunity to look up the set of stairs and probe the layout. The stairs were the only way in or out, and when he looked up after the server, Steele saw that the back wall of each section was mirrored.

  Got to go in fast and hard. The stairs are a kill zone and then three leather couches and a low table. One maybe two hard corners. Not good.

  “Which one is it?” he demanded, shoving the Frenchman forward while the clock in his head ticked away. Got to move. He didn’t hear his answer because of the noise, and Steele levered the pistol into Jean-Luc’s back. A not too gentle reminder as to who was in charge.

  Jean-Luc flinched from the pain and held up four fingers, then gestured to the right.

  Steele imagined twenty seconds had elapsed since Felix dimed him out. It felt like forever. Being exposed like this made his back itch. He glanced behind him, checking his back trail. Dammit. One of the guards had stepped through the archway and was standing in the center of the walk, his face lit up by the phone in his hand.

  Steele jammed his thumb down on the channel one button until there was a beep in the earpiece. The sound told him that the mike was now open and anything he said or heard would transmit to Demo without his having to push the button.

  “Get the car, things are about to get ugly,” he told his handler.

  “Already on it.”

  Steele ducked down, hoping the ebb and flow of high rollers and servers would protect him. When things went sideways, and they often did, there was no cavalry waiting on the other side of the hill.