by Saul Herzog
Assets didn’t officially exist. The medals they received were awarded in secret ceremonies, posthumously. The agency was required by act of congress to maintain complete deniability in relation to all their activities and that secrecy was pursued to an extreme degree.
If anything went wrong, anything at all, if their identity was compromised in any way, they were immediately disavowed.
And in the group, disavowal didn’t mean you lost your job, your 401k, the gold watch on retirement. The government didn’t leave loose ends.
If an asset was compromised, the group director was authorized by a secret executive order drafted during the Nixon administration to issue a kill order. Only the director knew it, but it was in fact the most common way assets met their end.
They were trained to act alone. Operations were not coordinated with the military or the rest of the CIA. They were not supplied by the military with weapons or equipment. They had to source everything on their own, buying on the open market the way anyone else would. They received no political pre-approval for their actions, and performed them without anyone in the government knowing what they were up to.
Actions were financed from the Pentagon’s black budget, completely classified funds that were made available in numbered offshore bank accounts. It meant assets were often entrusted with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars of government money that they would never be required to account for. If that ever led to complications with the IRS, the government would not step in to explain where the money had come from, and would not offer any kind of immunity or assistance against charges of tax evasion or money laundering.
The assets had to look out for themselves.
They had to watch their own back.
If anyone from the government ever came for them, it would not be to offer assistance.
The group maintained just four assets, and they were on their own.
Truly.
They were legally required to lead solitary lives. Their familial relations, such as they were, were monitored in minute detail. Part of the selection process was to identify candidates who were unmarried, had no children, and no close living relatives. Their mental well-being was constantly monitored, and the group’s medical program included more psychological and psychiatric assessments than physical evaluations.
The whole thing seemed like a recipe for disaster.
But it worked, and had done since the end of the Cold War when the group was established to deal with the ever-widening range of asymmetric threats faced by the world’s sole remaining superpower.
Objectives were communicated to the director by the Pentagon, sometimes in a formal briefing, sometimes casually, nothing was put in writing, nothing was spelled out explicitly, and weeks or even months or years later, quietly, in a way that was tailored in every respect to look like it had nothing to do with the government, the objective was met.
And it was truly deniable. No one in the government, not even the president, knew for sure if the group had been behind an incident.
Roth didn’t report to anyone. He didn’t answer to anyone.
Laurel checked her watch again. She got up and made herself a cup of dark roast from the coffee machine in the corner.
She didn’t regret her decision. She was glad she was where she was. It offered her the opportunity to do something real. But she’d be lying if she said it had worked out the way she’d imagined.
She had her own office. She had access to vast resources within the group, including a staff of specialists who provided planning support. She had her own budget.
She’d done everything Roth asked of her, including deleting her civil record and legally changing her name and identity. She’d cut ties to everyone she knew.
She’d built her own network of properties, apartments, vehicles, weapons stashes, safety deposit boxes, and bank accounts around the world. She’d traveled to dozens of countries to cultivate contacts in foreign spy organizations and embassies. She’d recruited her own informants in the US military and State Department.
She’d been there two years.
She was ready for action.
She was locked and loaded.
There was only one problem.
She had no asset.
She had no one to activate.
Her slot was empty.
Something had gone wrong with her predecessor. She’d been compromised. She was gone now.
Retired.
The term was ambiguous.
She knew it probably meant she was dead, but there was a sliver of doubt that allowed her to fool herself into thinking it might be something else.
Every asset had a codename. They were named after the cars the handlers had owned when the group was first created.
Paramilitary Operative Codenames
1. Mustang
2. Rebel
3. Camaro
4. Hornet
Special Operations Group Database
Laurel’s was slot number one.
Mustang.
She sat back in her chair and sipped her coffee. Roth supposedly had something important to tell her, but he was so late now, even by his standards, that she was beginning to give up hope of him ever showing. She wasn’t even sure he was in the building.
Then she saw Roth’s office door open. Finally, she thought, but it wasn’t Roth who left the office, it was Mansfield. Harry Mansfield was the NSA Director, and as far as Laurel could tell, his job was to make Roth’s life as difficult as possible. Their arguments were legendary.
If they’d been at it, she wouldn’t be seeing Roth any time tonight.
The first time Laurel met Mansfield, it was at a meeting at the White House, and right in front of the president, Roth threw a cup of water in Mansfield’s face.
She looked at her watch. If she left the office now, she’d be home by eight. She gathered her things and then noticed something was up. She could see commotion through the conference room window.
A specialist stood to get people’s attention. Then another.
Laurel got up and opened the door.
A third specialist rose from his computer. “Comms are down,” he said.
Laurel went to her office and opened the global satellite relay on her computer. Usually she could zoom in on any spot on the globe and get a live view. She could direct the orbiting cameras directly from her desk. It was the most complex communications system she had access to and if it was glitchy it was a good barometer of wider issues across the network.
The relay was completely offline.
She’d never seen that before.
She opened her camera monitors.
Part of her job was to prepare resources likely to be of use when she was assigned an asset. To that end, she’d placed cameras in the offices and homes of some of her informants and targets. The cameras were on a completely separate network from the satellite relay.
They were down too.
And then the fluorescent light above her head flickered. Across the office, the lights went out, one by one.
Everyone went silent. The government had invested billions of dollars in the group’s resources. They had backup upon backup, servers, generators, ventilation systems, you name it. They should have been completely immune to the vagaries of telecoms and utilities outages.
On the the sixth floor of the CIA building, the comms were never down.
The power was never out.
She could have heard a pin drop.
And then, as suddenly as they’d stopped, the hum of the air conditioners coming back to life filled the room. There was an audible sigh of relief from the office. The computers began to reboot. The lights came back on.
The looks on the faces were puzzled, bemused even.
“What was that?” one of the specialists said.
“The raptors just slipped out of their pen,” another said.
Laurel checked the satellite relay. It was back up.
9
Laurel had trouble s
leeping that night. She groaned when her five AM alarm went off. She stumbled into the bathroom and popped three extra-strength Tylenol before getting in the shower and letting the warm water coax her to full consciousness.
Something had been off about the night before. The glitch. It was unnerving. She should have been able to put it from her mind, Roth had ordered a full security audit which she supposed would be the end of the matter, but it niggled at her.
And her goldfish was dead. Again. She flushed it down the toilet and went to the kitchen.
She needed coffee. She had the fanciest espresso machine she’d been able to buy, copper with brass accents, and she made herself a strong americano. Then she sat at the counter and stirred stevia into it. She turned on the TV and let the news anchors drone on a while. Before she knew it she was running late.
CIA headquarters was in a leafy suburb outside the city. It was a nice place to live, but Laurel had refused to get an apartment there. Instead, she paid twice as much to live in a loft on U Street in downtown DC. It was lively, with dozens of nearby restaurants and bars. It let her escape the world of federal bureaucracy she inhabited for work, but it meant leaving early to avoid traffic.
She dressed hurriedly, she could put on her makeup in the car. Her Tesla was a block away at a charging station and she bought more coffee at Starbucks on her way to it.
At Langley, she passed through security and went straight to the conference room. Her meeting with Roth had been bumped. She was ten minutes late but he would be later. He wasn’t on time as a matter of principle. He was a man so aware of his own importance he’d ordered the Cadillac Escalade used for his transportation to be fitted with the same protective measures the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia used. The upgrades included a bombproof undercarriage, bulletproof windows, and a specially built, supercharged 6.2 liter Hemi V8 engine that delivered 707 horsepower at 6,000 rpm and could get the massive vehicle from zero to sixty in less than four seconds.
Laurel forgave his quirks. He was a master at what he did. He got results, and at the end of the day, that was what they were there for. She didn’t care that he ruffled feathers. The world had bigger problems.
She made her third coffee of the morning, black with sweetener, and Roth’s, just black.
Levi Roth was in charge of the most sensitive, high-value operations in the entire CIA portfolio. His status rivaled that of the CIA Director, the Defense Intelligence Agency Director, and the president’s National Security Advisor. Not only did he have direct access to the president, but unlike his rivals, he had full operational autonomy.
So when he came into the conference room, stepped up behind her, and lightly patted her ass with an open palm saying, “Good morning, Vietnam,” in an atrociously bad imitation of Robin Williams, she accepted it as part of the natural order of things.
Besides, and this wasn’t anything she ever would have admitted to herself, there was a part of her that enjoyed the attention. She liked being the only woman in the room. She used it to her advantage. In a place where everyone was constantly learning new ways to take out their opponents, charm was her secret weapon.
“You want one of these?” she said, taking her coffee from the machine.
“Sure,” Roth said.
Roth took a seat at the conference table and flicked a switch, obscuring the windows. He opened his laptop and pulled up a slide.
Laurel sat next to him and passed him his coffee.
“What have we got?” she said.
On the screen was a photo of a manilla envelope. A label was printed on the front.
Lance Spector
US Army SFOD-D
Syria
Hand Deliver
“Lance,” Laurel gasped.
She’d never met the man but knew the name as well as her own.
“The one and only,” Roth said.
“He’s in Syria?”
“No he’s not.”
“But he’s back in play?”
Roth spread his hands. “That will be up to you.”
Laurel shook her head. She never knew where she stood. She’d been brought in two years earlier to handle Lance. He was Mustang. Her slot.
It was clear that was what Roth had intended.
Until it wasn’t.
She’d been briefed many times on Spector, his psyche profile, his training record, his service with Delta Force, but knew almost nothing of his time with the group. Not his missions, not his tactical resumé, and not one word on his former handler and what led to her demise. She’d seen pictures, she knew exactly what she looked like, but that was it.
“You know I always had him slated to be your guy,” Roth said.
Laurel looked at him incredulously. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “Look at me, Levi.”
“Of course,” he said, shaking his head.
“I mean…”.
“Of course,” he said again.
“We were ready to go,” Laurel said. “Locked and loaded. I was in that hotel in Berlin in a pair of blood-red Louboutins and a lace dress. Remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“You pulled the plug at the very last minute.”
“Something wasn’t right.”
“Well, you sure took your time making up your mind.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“You couldn’t have thought of that before you…,” she couldn’t say it.
“I know it was disappointing,” Roth said.
Laurel laughed. “Disappointing?” she said. “Do you know what I went through?”
Roth nodded. He let out a long sigh as he looked at her.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said.
“Don’t,” she said.
He nodded. Retreated. Tried another approach. “At its heart, this is a game of instincts,” he said.
“Of course it’s a game of instincts.”
“One wrong move, one wrong … anything,” he said, grasping for the word.
“And people die,” Laurel said.
“Yes, they do. All too easily.”
“I know that,” Laurel said.
“And you know about your predecessor.”
“Only what you’ve told me.”
“Then you know how badly it can go.”
She shrugged. She was under no illusions. The game they played was dangerous.
“So we want to bring him back into play?” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Why?”
“Because he was the best asset we ever had.”
“If he was so good, why did you pull the plug?”
“I had no choice.”
“Something he did?”
Roth shrugged. “More like something he was about to do.”
“He’d become unreliable?”
“Unreliable’s not the word.”
“Damaged goods?”
“Something like that,” Roth said. “Yes. Damaged goods.”
“And now we want him back because of that envelope?”
Roth said nothing. There was more to it but she knew she wouldn’t get it out of him.
Laurel looked at the screen. An envelope. It wasn’t much.
“We’re going to pay him a visit, you and I,” Roth said.
“Where?”
“He’s been laying low under an assumed identity out in the sticks.”
“He’s in the US?”
Roth nodded.
“He’s been right here this entire time?”
10
Their flight was supposed to be direct to Missoula but the first major snow of the season had them redirected. That meant the Lincoln Navigator they’d reserved from Hertz wasn’t waiting at the airport and they had to make do with a Hyundai Accent.
“This isn’t going to cut it,” Laurel said to the Hertz employee who showed them the vehicle.
“It’s the only car they have,” Roth said.
“This can’t be all there is,” she said.
“Whatever they assigned you at the desk,” the kid said. He couldn’t have been out of school more than a year and didn’t look like he’d dealt with too many people like Laurel in his customer service career.
“Are those even winter tires?” she said.
“All our vehicles are safe for winter driving.”
“Really?”
“Yes ma’am, it’s company policy.”
She rolled her eyes at Roth. “Company policy,” she muttered.
The kid looked at them.
“Wait here,” Roth said.
Laurel waited with the kid in his heated Hertz cubicle and when Roth came back he had the keys to a Chevy Impala.
“Better?” he said when they were inside the car.
“Barely,” she said.
The drive should have been four hours but because of the weather it would be more like six.
Roth sat in the driver’s seat and adjusted the position. It looked like he was going to try and make the most of it. He tuned the radio to the local NPR station.
“What about some snacks for the road?” he said.
Laurel put on her headphones and tried to sleep. When she woke, they were past Whitefish and Roth finally admitted they should have waited for the military aircraft she’d requisitioned. That would have flown them straight to Malmstrom and the Air Force would have gotten them to Deweyville from there.
“I just hate those planes,” Roth said.
“You know we’re crawling through this snow because you wanted a hostess?” Laurel said.
They’d flown business class and there was no question the civilian flight was more comfortable.
“I didn’t see you complaining when you were watching your TV show.”
“Movie.”
“Ah yes, Adam Sandler. And they say the golden age of cinema is dead.”
Around Stryker, the snow got so heavy they had to pull over.
“Sure is beautiful country,” Roth said as they sipped lukewarm coffee in a gas station, but it had been dark so long Laurel wasn’t sure he was even fooling himself.
It was after midnight when they finally got to Deweyville. Their hotel was the EconoLodge, a modest, ninety-nine dollar a night place on the main drag that had the only vacancies in town when Laurel made the booking.