*
The masked men looked down at Muller for a moment and then the tall man ripped off his mask.
‘You think that’s all he’s got?’ asked another of his masked accomplices as they tore off their mask to reveal long dark hair and exotic eyes.
Lopez lifted an electrode from Muller’s belly, along with the tube of fake blood she had sprayed across the drill and Ethan’s clothes. The electrode was connected to a pair of car batteries concealed beneath the table, the current spread by the fake blood to prevent burns to Muller’s skin.
Ethan tossed the drill aside. Psychology was everything, perceived pain and bloody gore almost more frightening than the act of torture itself. He had once read that the threat of torture was often a more effective means of obtaining confessions than the actual application of the pain itself. In Muller’s case his awkward viewing angle and belief that his guts were being drilled out, accompanied by a mild pain that was vastly inflamed by his own imagination, had been enough to extract what they needed.
‘He just passed out in fear,’ Ethan said. ‘There’s not much else there, but we have a name and a location: Abrahem, Iraq.’
‘That’s not a lot to work on,’ Lopez pointed out.
Ethan turned to the two DIA men beside them, who had now also removed their masks.
‘Get in touch with the DIAC, give them what we know. Maybe they can figure something out from there.’
‘What about him?’ one of the agents asked, pointing at Muller’s comatose form.
‘Get him home, leave no trace, and then inform the local police of what he’s suspected of doing. A search of his clinic should reveal the names we’re after and provide evidence of his illegal activities. He’ll be repatriated to the US for trial. Let’s get this done and disappear.’
‘Where are we going?’ Lopez asked Ethan.
‘Iraq,’ he replied.
***
XVI
South West Waterfront Park,
Washington DC
The unmarked SUV pulled up at an oval near the Titanic Memorial in south west DC, where the Potomoc’s tidal basin met the Anacostia River at the Georgetown channel, the green waters sparkling in the sunshine.
Neither Hannah nor Vaughn had said a word during the short journey down from the Capitol, and their escorting agents had likewise remained stonily silent. As the SUV pulled up so one of them opened their door and stepped out, beckoning them to follow. As Hannah climbed out, the agent gestured toward a row of police patrol vehicles parked alongside the city’s EMC Fireboat launch.
‘You’re safe here,’ he said, apparently aware of their discomfort. ‘Take a walk in the park, why don’t you?’
Hannah rounded on the agent. ‘What the hell is this? You have no jurisdiction to accost federal agents going about their lawful business in…’
The agent climbed aboard the SUV, closed his door and the vehicle pulled away long before Hannah could finish her sentence. Vaughn glanced at the nearby memorial park.
‘We gonna take a walk then?’
‘What else do you want to do for them?’ Hannah demanded. ‘Bend over?’
Vaughn grinned, immune as ever to Hannah’s fiery retorts. ‘I want to know what the hell this is about and I guess the answer is in there.’
Hannah glared at the nearby wooded glade as she yanked her sunglasses back down over her eyes and marched toward the park.
The park was half empty at this time on a weekday morning, a few casual strollers and dog walkers here and there minding their own business and paying little attention to Hannah as she walked along the riverfront. At the end of the walkway was a wide wall, atop which was a stone memorial plinth of a man with arms outstretched, looking out across the Potomac.
Nearby a series of park benches were unoccupied except for one, upon which sat an elderly man in a dark blue suit, his hands folded comfortably in his lap as he looked at her. Hannah instinctively made her way across to him with Vaughn following.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Hannah demanded.
‘Nice to meet you too,’ the old man replied. ‘My name is Douglas Jarvis.’
‘Warner’s handler,’ Vaughn recalled from their research. ‘His name was mentioned back at that homicide scene in Virginia, remember?’
Hannah did indeed remember. Warner had spoken to a cop guarding the police line outside the hotel in which Stanley Meyer had been murdered, and later had been on the phone to somebody called Jarvis.
‘Mister Jarvis,’ Hannah greeted him with little warmth, ‘is it customary to abduct federal agents?’
‘No,’ Jarvis replied, unconcerned. ‘Agent Ford, I am here to offer you information for your own protection.’
‘My own protection?’ Hannah echoed, bemused. ‘I’d have imagined that it was your people who need protecting, after everything I’m uncovering right now.’
Jarvis smiled. ‘You ever heard of Pandora’s Box?’
‘I’ve read Hesiod,’ Hannah snapped back. ‘I’m not interested in mythology, Mister Jarvis, I’m interested in justice and I won’t stop to get it.’
‘Don’t wish too hard,’ Jarvis suggested.
‘Why did you bring us here?’ Vaughn asked, curious. ‘You could have just called us in or allowed us into the DIA when we turned up earlier today.’
Jarvis slowly got up from the park bench and slipped his hands into his pockets as he stood before them.
‘You’ve been given some kind of carte blanche by Director LeMay to go all out after Ethan Warner.’
Jarvis’s forthright assertion of what had been a covert directive put Hannah off balance.
‘The details of our operation are classified and cannot be shared with any outside party regardless of…’
‘Take the stick out of your ass,’ Jarvis muttered as he waved Hannah aside with an idle wave of one hand. ‘You’ve stood in front of the DFBI and now you think that you’re on a mission for the good of the world, best buddies with LeMay, untouchable.’ Jarvis smiled faintly. ‘Didn’t stop me from grabbing you off the street, did it?’
Hannah frowned. ‘You trying to make a point?’
‘You’re being sold up the river,’ Jarvis replied. ‘LeMay wants somebody expendable to pursue Warner to the ends of the earth, to do whatever it takes to prevent the DIA from exposing what LeMay’s got his dirty little paws into. You think that you can’t cross any lines, that you can walk roughshod over your superiors in your mission, and that when you’ve achieved it you’d be lauded to the world as a superhero and showered with plaudits for your valiant achievements.’
Jarvis looked at Hannah for a moment and then at her partner, Vaughn.
‘Let me guess about her,’ he suggested to Vaughn. ‘Headstrong, impulsive, tenacious and likely to get herself into trouble before she even knows what she’s doing?’
Vaughn raised an eyebrow. ‘Hit it on the head.’
Hannah shot him a hurt look, then glared back at Jarvis. ‘What’s your point?’
‘You’ll be used by LeMay and then disposed of,’ Jarvis replied. ‘He’ll use you as a means to get what he wants, and then you’ll find yourself out of the Bureau before you even know what the hell happened. Non–disclosure agreements signed, healthy pension, everything they can offer to get you out of the building and off their minds, and if you fight back…’
‘What?’ Vaughn asked, although Hannah remained silent.
‘Then they’ll play dirty.’
Hannah scoffed. ‘You’re watching too much television, Jarvis. The Bureau looks after its own, as does the entire intelligence community.’
‘Valerie Plame,’ Jarvis replied, ‘a CIA agent whose identity was exposed by the Bush administration after her husband, a former US Ambassador, criticized the intelligence used by that administration to go to war in Iraq. Valerie and her husband ended up taking members of the administration to court. They even made a Hollywood movie about it.’
Hannah gritted her teeth. ‘The administrations have learned f
rom the mistakes of the past.’
‘You keep telling yourself that.’
‘LeMay isn’t going to suddenly turn on me.’
‘It’s exactly what he’ll do because you’re just like Ethan Warner.’
‘I’m nothing like him.’
‘You’re exactly like Warner, because I originally hired him for the same reason that LeMay’s chosen you: expendability. You’re used to perform a task and then dropped like a hot rock. The only reason Ethan’s still anywhere near the DIA is because he’s so good at what he does and we have history going back to the Corps, something I’m not willing to betray. If he hadn’t had that, I wouldn’t have fought so long and hard to maintain him as an asset. You, Hannah, don’t have a damned thing to protect you and Special Agent Valery Jenkins is champing at the bit for any reason to come down on you.’ Jarvis smiled. ‘You’re about to become the perfect patsy.’
Hannah shook her head, chuckled.
‘You’re just covering yourself with scare stories,’ she replied. ‘I’d have thought somebody at your level could come up with something more original. You’re worried about what I’ll uncover.’
‘That’s right,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Agent Ford, I can’t do this meet again. I brought you here in an attempt to ensure that we would not be observed by LeMay or any of his assets who I’m certain will already be looking for you. If you keep digging you’re going to come up against people who are everything you see on television and worse. I wish I could reveal more but I cannot.’
Hannah glanced without concern across the Potomac’s choppy waters. ‘I’ll remember to play nicely.’
Jarvis took a pace closer to her.
‘I know about the blood that you found at the hotel in Virginia, Hannah,’ he said. ‘I know that you’re looking into the man that it belongs to.’
Now Hannah’s gaze snapped back to Jarvis. ‘Mitchell.’
‘Ethan has encountered Aaron Mitchell on two occasions, and on both of them he barely escaped with his life. You don’t know what you’re getting into here Hannah, either of you. These people will crush you like worms without the proper support, and while Ethan does have that protection I can assure you that you don’t.’
‘I have the Director of the FBI behind me,’ Hannah protested. ‘How does protection get more powerful than that?!’
‘Because LeMay is part of the threat,’ Jarvis replied. ‘He’s using you to fold up our investigation because we believe that he’s a part of something called Majestic Twelve.’
Vaughn stepped up now, concern etched into his features.
‘Warner mentioned something about an MJ–12,’ he said, ‘some kind of cabal, industrialists and politicians? We took it as fantasy.’
‘It’s real,’ Jarvis assured him, ‘very real. Forget television programs. MJ–12 has existed now for some seventy years and is on the record, despite attempts by the CIA to destroy those records during investigations in 1973 and again in 2004. Enough remained that the Government Accountability Office was able to mount a case against the agency, which resulted in its Director resigning.’
‘Natalie Warner,’ Hannah murmured, almost to herself. ‘She worked there, at the GAO.’
‘And was almost killed by Aaron Mitchell’s predecessor,’ Jarvis acknowledged, ‘a man named Mister Wilson. At the time I had believed that I was working for the government, when in fact both I and my superiors had been working for Majestic Twelve – that’s how highly placed these people are. Now, we’re working against them and have both the DIA and elements of the administration supporting us.’
‘The same kind of administration that you just berated for having betrayed Valerie Plame?’ Hannah challenged.
‘Like you suggested,’ Jarvis countered, ‘each administration can learn from the mistakes of its predecessors, and this one is not so beholden to the hawks in Congress and the Senate. LeMay is part of the old guard, a stooge of Majestic Twelve or perhaps one of its members. He wants you to stamp us out, to bring us to justice for real or imagined crimes, and thus remove the threat of exposure.’
‘Or bring you to justice because you’re the one working for Majestic Twelve,’ she suggested in reply.
Jarvis grinned.
‘That’s the intelligence game for you,’ he said. ‘I can’t prove one way or the other who the enemy is, Hannah – that’s something that you’ll have to decide for yourself. But believe me, LeMay will cheerfully see you betrayed and abandoned if it suits his purpose and there will be nothing that you can do about it.’
Hannah watched Jarvis for a moment in the bright sunlight.
‘I could just arrest you right now, have you brought back for questioning.’
‘Yes you could, and I would not resist. But then I would be freed, just as Ethan and Nicola were, and you would be back to square one.’
‘That’s the kind of power that this MJ–12 could wield,’ Vaughn said. ‘You’re spinning us a tale but there’s nothing to substantiate any of this.’
‘Except Aaron Mitchell,’ Jarvis countered. ‘You have a choice. You can choose to obey LeMay and pursue Ethan Warner, who even now is on his way to Iraq in pursuit of another threat against our country’s security, on the pretence of his having some awareness of the events behind Stanley Meyer’s murder. Or, you can pursue a man whom you actually know was present at the unsolved homicide, who is supposed to be dead but isn’t and keeps vanishing whenever local law enforcement appears on the scene.’ Jarvis raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘I know where I’d put my money.’
‘You and I are not the same people,’ Hannah said.
‘I know,’ Jarvis grinned, ‘which is why I’m giving you this advice instead of letting you walk into the end of your careers and perhaps worse. It’s your call what you do. Don’t take my word for anything I’ve said, just be mindful that for now you can trust only yourselves.’
Jarvis walked past them and away down the path. Vaughn called after him.
‘And what the hell are we supposed to do if everything you’ve said turns out to be true?’
‘Call me,’ Jarvis replied without looking back. ‘By that time, I’ll be the only friend you have.’
Hannah watched Jarvis leave, saw through the trees the SUV return smoothly to pick him up with their FBI pool car alongside.
‘I’m not buying it,’ she said finally. ‘He’s got every reason to try to derail us or convince us not to pursue Warner.’
‘He’s got no reason to tell us as much as I think he just did,’ Vaughn countered. ‘C’mon, Hannah, we both know the intelligence game isn’t a black and white thing with good guys fighting bad guys. Jarvis said it himself, he’s ended up working for the wrong people without even knowing it.’
‘And you think that somebody in the position of Director FBI could be in the grip of some mysterious cabal? My ass, it’s the last thing I’d bother with if I were in the Bureau’s hot seat.’
‘But maybe not if you were on the way to the top and needed a push,’ Vaughn said. ‘Crazier things have happened. We should do what Jarvis says and take a closer look at this Mitchell guy, see if we can pin him down. He’s the link between all of them, this whole charade. If he is guilty of killing Stanley Meyer it proves everything that Warner and Jarvis are saying.’
Hannah thought for a moment and then her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She retrieved it and saw the name on her screen.
‘It’s LeMay,’ she said.
‘You gonna answer it?’ Vaughn asked.
‘What the hell else can I do?!’ Hannah snapped as she answered the phone.
‘Ford.’
‘Special Agent Ford, I need you to travel to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and catch Flight 275 for Hong Kong immediately. Seats have been reserved. There’s been a breakthrough in the case.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Report back to me when you reach Hong Kong. An agent named Bradley Hinkley will liaise with you at the field office inside the US Consulate Building.’
The line went dead and Hannah looked at Vaughn. ‘Looks like we’re off to Hong Kong.’
‘Just like that?’ Vaughn asked. ‘Why send us and not assign agents from the local field office?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hannah admitted. ‘He says we’ll be briefed when we get there.’
‘I don’t much like this,’ Vaughn said as they started walking. ‘Maybe Jarvis really is onto something.’
‘Yeah,’ Hannah said without conviction, ‘but what really interests me is why Ethan Warner is in Iraq – Jarvis let that much slip. What the hell is he doing out there and if it’s connected with some great conspiracy involving this Majestic Twelve then what does it have to do with LeMay sending us to Hong Kong?’
Vaughn did not have an answer for her as they walked back through the glade toward their pool car.
***
XVII
Dalecarlia Reservoir,
Washington DC
He felt bleak, despite the bright blue sky and warm sunshine filtering down through the canopy of trees overhead.
A narrow path wound through the woodland of Little Falls Park alongside the Potomac, a popular local destination where families gathered to picnic and unwind after a busy week. But he walked alone, favoring the solitude and the silence that the middle of the week brought to this area.
Aaron J Mitchell walked with a slight limp, still carrying the injury to his ribs he had sustained two months before when he had violently encountered Ethan Warner. Both of them were former Marines, although Mitchell had gone on to serve with the Navy SEALS and should have bested Warner despite his opponent’s youth. Yet he had not, and it had only been chance that had allowed him to escape the encounter.
The wound to his pride ached with a far sharper pain than the wound to his body. Time was not on Aaron’s side and for the first time it had cost him a victory in a game where the stakes were so high, failure really could be fatal.
It had occurred to him, on the few occasions when he allowed his mind to dwell on abstract reverie that his father would have glowed with pride at the sheer scale of that which Aaron had achieved. His father had served with distinction in the United States Army during the final year of the Second World War, a decorated soldier who had inspired in his fellow men the realization that anything was possible, even for a negro. As had happened many times before in an ancient and tragic irony, it had been the conflict of men that had thus conceived the respect of those fellow men hitherto considered inferior by the society of the time. Aaron, when his own time had come more than twenty years later, had followed in his fathers’ footsteps, joining the United States Marine Corps just in time to find himself cast into the steaming jungles of South East Asia and a conflict of unimaginable, incomparable brutality that had ingrained into Aaron’s mind the singular and special evil of mankind. Aaron had served two tours in Vietnam, had been himself decorated twice. During that period, a number of events that were to shape Aaron’s life occurred.
The Identity Mine (Warner & Lopez Book 3) Page 10