Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  Someone? Rand bloody Arthur was who. The U.S. Capitol police worked for congressmen and senators. They provided security—even in the lawmakers’ home districts under certain conditions.

  Obviously, they were available for other jobs, too. Still, it puzzled Sam how Rand had convinced Oakland Raider and Red Jacket to kidnap and kill him. These guys weren’t goons or goodfellas. They were sworn officers.

  And then Sam realized that convincing a couple of law enforcement professionals to commit murder might not have been all that hard. Christ, he’d done the same sort of thing more than once. Not to commit murder, of course. That would have been a violation of Executive Order 12333, which prohibited CIA from engaging in political assassinations as a matter of national policy. But Sam had convinced scores of loyal Germans, Turks, Frenchmen, and the occasional Russian to betray their countries and spy for the United States. He knew that spies—agents—are trolled, hooked, and landed by exploiting their vulnerabilities. That’s what was behind the principle of EMSI—the tradecraft acronym for Ego, Money, Sex, and Ideology. Ninety percent of all recruitments are based on EMSI vulnerabilities.

  Well, there was a new vulnerability to exploit these days—fear of terrorism. In Washington, especially in the House and the Senate, that fear was endemic and overriding, With reason: Right 93, the plane that was brought down over Pennsylvania when its passengers overpowered its terrorist hijackers on September 11, 2001, had been heading toward Washington, D.C. It had later been surmised that the plane’s target had been either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. The president had been out of town on 9/11. But Congress was in session. In fact, there had been complete panic on Capitol Hill, because there was no evacuation plan in place for the 535 members of the House and Senate. And only days later came the anthrax attacks that had killed almost half a dozen and brought Congress to a screeching halt—the Hart Senate Office Building had been shut down for months. SSCI had had to move back into its old quarters in the Russell Building.

  In the fifteen months since 9/11, the Capitol police had instituted a wide-ranging array of security arrangements for their lawmaker protectees. The Hill was a fortress these days—tours had only recently been reinstituted. Surface-to-air missiles ringed the U.S. Capitol. Committee chairmen and senior members had protective details as large as any cabinet official. Christ, they rode around Washington in armored convoys.

  Congress wasn’t alone. In fact, from the White House down to the man in the street, the whole country was vulnerable to a level of fear that bordered on paranoia. The mood was a reaction to the constantly shifting threat levels, conflicting stories about al-Qa’ida’s capabilities, and constant apprehension over another anthrax attack reinforced by a growing drumbeat about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. That Richard Reid guy who’d tried to blow up an airplane with a bomb in his sneakers hadn’t helped either. Nor had the two scumbags known as the Washington snipers, who’d taken the cops a month or so to apprehend.

  Anxiety manifested itself everywhere, from alarmist newspaper editorials to bombastic speeches on the floor of the House and Senate, to the tabloid shrillness of television news broadcasts. According to the Washington Post’s style section, fashionable matrons gathered at chichi restaurants were as likely to discuss the daily threat matrix or the pros and cons of various brands of gas masks, or the best place to score under-the-counter Cipro as they were to talk fashion, politics, or kids. All over the city, the normally extroverted mood in the nation’s capital had transmogrified into a city that suffered from a terminal case of siege mentality.

  Given those realities—not to mention the fact that Rand Arthur was persuasive, a master of political manipulation, and an important, influential, senior member of the United States Senate—Sam knew an individual’s natural inhibitions could be overcome. Push the right emotional and intellectual buttons and you get homicide bombers like Richard Reid.

  Let me, Sam thought, put myself in Rand’s shoes. How would I play it?

  It was, Sam understood, a straightforward recruitment, which meant Rand had put it together with a lot of forethought and preparation. He’d targeted these two. It was even possible he might have been able to get his hands on their psychological profiles to help him get inside their heads. And tactics? He had Ginny. Or better, he had Michael O’Neill to teach him. It was simply a matter of asking the case-officer-turned-lawyer.

  Michael, tell me about the basics of recruiting an agent. How did they teach you to convince someone to commit treason?

  The same way my older brother taught me how to talk women into bed, Senator.

  Oh, yes. O’Neill, God bless him, would have been only too happy to oblige. He loved talking about his successes. He’d have told Rand about spotting potentials—explained the tricks of eliciting the verbal clues that identified weaknesses, character flaws, likes and dislikes. He’d have explained how to inventory the target’s strengths and flaws and then translate that list into a psychosexual vulnerability matrix that allowed case officers to predict with tremendous accuracy the responses they could provoke. He’d have explained how to set the hook—bring the target inside, and then, abruptly, slam the door to prevent escape. He’d have explained about control and manipulation. He’d have told Rand how case officers use familiarity, friendship, and camaraderie to lure their targets into a false feeling of closeness. He’d have given Rand examples of how to play agents’ emotions so well that when it becomes crunch time, an agent will feel closer to his case officer than he does to his wife or family. The case officer becomes the sole source of an agent’s salvation. I am your only friend, says the godlike case officer. Rely on me and no one else, or you will surely die.

  But the bottom line was that it didn’t matter how Rand had learned how to hook the two cops up. Because he’d done it. He’d spotted Red Jacket and Oakland Raider, he’d assessed their vulnerabilities, and then he’d recruited them in the same cold-blooded fashion any case officer would have done. They’d been snagged and netted by a pro.

  IN FACT, a similar scenario had worked before. Shortly after Sam had joined CIA, a renegade operative named Paul Allen Phillips hired almost a dozen retired Special Forces soldiers to instruct overseas classes in counterterrorism operations. He selected his targets with care—the same way Rand Arthur had no doubt singled out Reese and Johnson. He told his recruits they’d be working a clandestine assignment for the Agency. He offered them more than generous wages and hefty expenses. He produced paperwork that certified they were a part of a government-sponsored operation—papers they signed.

  But Phillips was lying, and all his paperwork was bogus. And instead of training counterterrorism forces, the poor schmucks traveled to an isolated camp in the Libyan desert where they taught terrorists posing as security officials how to kill innocent people. Paul Phillips pocketed millions from Mu’ammar Qaddafi.

  What would Rand Arthur pocket? Rand wanted to be president. How would killing Sam help him achieve that goal? Sam hadn’t the faintest idea. Not yet. But Rand wanted him out of the way. That was undeniable.

  The phone rang, startling him. Sam checked the caller-ID screen and saw Ginny Vacario’s office number displayed. He let his voice mail pick up the call. Two minutes later, she called a second time. And two minutes later, again.

  That was when the panic washed over him. What the hell was he doing sitting here? He was vulnerable. Rand Arthur knew where he lived. And who knows what Reese and Johnson were saying to the Arlington police? They could claim Sam was the target of some supersecret investigation and that he’d attacked them when they tried to detain him at the behest of a senior member of the U.S. Senate.

  Sam stopped cold. Panic was what they wanted—whoever they were. He’d first learned that in the Marines. And he’d learned it again during his DAO48 training. “The opposition will push you, crowd you, knock you off balance,” the instructors had said over and over again. “They will try to force you to make mistakes. But you must not cave. Instead, you go
offensive—provocative if necessary. You hit back harder, faster, dirtier. You get inside their OODA loop and you kick their asses.”

  Sam had never heard the acronym before. OODA, the instructors said, stood for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The term had been coined by a wartime philosopher fighter pilot named John Boyd, who argued that dogfights weren’t won by the pilots with the faster reflexes, but by the pilots who thought faster than their opponents—who got inside their enemy’s OODA loop.

  That’s what Sam had to do now. The opposition wanted him to panic. He had to get inside Rand Arthur’s OODA loop. Stage a counterambush. Run an op.

  Run an op. That was it. He had to run an op. Except it wouldn’t be an op to recruit an agent at Moscow Center, or convince some poor Turkish janitor working for the Poles to slip a bug in the ambassador’s office. Sam would be running a penetration operation that targeted officials of his own government.

  Sam shook his head. Not officials. Official. One official.

  Say the words, he told himself. You have to say them out loud.

  Sam looked through the gauzy curtains. He could make out the indistinct glimmer of lights in the office buildings of downtown Rosslyn. The workday was commencing over there.

  And here as well. Sam swallowed hard, gritted his teeth, and said in a low, even voice, “Rand … Arthur.”

  7:07 A.M. He grabbed a suitcase and started stuffing it with clothes and some innocent-looking possessions he’d taken with him when he’d left Langley. He took all the Edward Lee Howard files, including his own notés and the copies he’d made of Virginia Vacario’s verbatim transcripts, and stuffed them into his document case along with two cell phones, his laptop, the American-flag pen drive, and some other files.

  Then he went to a two-foot-high, custom-built fireproof safe that was lag-bolted six inches into the concrete slab under the wood flooring of his bedroom closet. Kneeling, he punched an eight-number combination into the first of the two electronic locks. The thick door released with a growl. Behind it was a second door.

  Sam punched a six-number combination and waited until a red light blinked half a dozen times, then turned green. He punched the six numbers in reverse, then hit the pound key, turned the handle, and eased the door open. He pulled out two thick pocket secretaries, flipped them open, and removed a number of items. He reached into the back of the safe and took out a manila envelope, from which he extracted five thousand dollars in used twenty-, fifty-, and hundreddollar bills. Before he closed the safe door, he rearmed the automatic detonator on the small, thin Thermite charge that would incinerate the contents if the safe was broken into or moved.

  CHAPTER 27

  1:45 P.M. Sam drove out of the garage into bright tropical sunlight, peering through the windshield of his rental car until he saw the arrow leading to the airport exit. He’d never been in Tampa before and so he drove slowly, finding his way to the connector road that led to southbound Interstate 275. He’d changed his appearance and silhouette before using a side entrance to leave his apartment building. It was a three-block walk to the Rosslyn Hyatt. Sam entered the hotel through the garage, then took an elevator to the mezzanine, found a restroom, and modified his disguise, adding a mustache, changing hairpieces, and switching clothes and shoes. Then he descended to the lobby, where the doorman got him a taxi to Reagan National Airport. At Reagan, he’d paid for his tickets and reserved a rental car under an alias without receiving so much as a second glance.

  In fact, Sam was carrying three separate identities with him. At the moment, he was Dale Miller of Detroit, Michigan—the only one of the three legends for which he also had a valid U.S. passport. But he had working credit cards, legiti mate driver’s licenses, and other assorted pocket litter under the two other names.

  He accelerated onto the long Skyway Bridge and finally connected to 1-75 south just east of Bradenton. There was construction from Sarasota all the way to Venice. But then the traffic picked up speed and Sam crossed the Port Charlotte Bridge just after four o’clock.

  Sam exited 1-75 at Route 17, pulled to the side of the road, and checked the computer-generated map he’d printed out before leaving Washington, tracing the route with his index finger. Then he slipped back into traffic, drove past a small strip mall and the twin pillars marking the entrance to a golf club. He turned into a gas station and topped off his gas tank while he checked for surveillance, and paid in cash. He pulled back onto Route 17, drove a hundred yards, then veered right, onto a pitted two-lane blacktop, which he followed for half a mile. He turned right again and followed the road as it led in a wide counterclockwise arc at whose apex stood a neat white stucco house with green trim. An aged, sun-bleached, salt-stained Buick sat in the driveway, shaded by four tall coconut palms.

  Sam parked behind the Buick, turned off the ignition, locked his car, and walked on cracked pavement past a wheezing air-conditioner compressor to the weathered, louvered-glass-and-aluminum door of the screened-in porch, setting off a battery-powered frog that croaked loudly when Sam broke the beam to ring the bell.

  There was no answer. He waited a quarter of a minute and pressed the button again, peering down the screened-in porch to where a big butterscotch-colored cat lay asleep on the rim of a gurgling fishpond, its four paws in the air.

  The front door finally cracked. Charlotte Wells poked her head through the opening, squinting into the brightness behind Sam. “Who’s there? Can I help you?”

  “Charlotte, it’s Sam. Sam Waterman.”

  “Sam? Sam Waterman?”

  “It’s me, Charlotte.”

  “Come closer so I can see you. I’m not wearing my glasses. The door’s open.”

  He twisted the handle, pushed, and stepped over the threshold onto tile so hot he could feel it through his shoes.

  She squinted as he came closer, then opened her eyes wide. “It is you. In full war paint and a Joe Stalin mustache. What on earth?” She adjusted her shift, reached up, and touched his cheek with the back of her hand as if she were checking his temperature. “Come in out of the hot and tell Charlotte what you’re doing in this godforsaken neck of the woods—and shame on you, Sam, you never bothered to call beforehand.”

  She’d shrunk. That was the first thing he noticed. Charlotte had never been a big woman—maybe five feet two. Now she was a gnome, with unkempt white hair standing straight up, a floral-patterned housedress two sizes too large for her body, and a pair of ridiculous fluffy pink scuffs. The house was hot. It smelled of must, cat urine, and old age.

  “Want a drink, Sam?” She pointed to a kit-cat clock with its pendulum tail keeping time on the kitchen wall. “Sun’s over the yardarm—somewhere.”

  He rubbed his nose, which was already affected by the cat dander. “That would be great.”

  Charlotte padded to the refrigerator and removed an almost empty 1.75-liter bottle of Beefeater and a shriveled half lemon. She took a pair of old-fashioned glasses out of a cupboard, wiped them with a dish towel, then carefully took the bottle with both hands, tremoring as she poured an inch of gin in each. She added thin lemon slices and two small ice cubes to each glass. “You carry, Sam. I’ve gone a little shaky these days.”

  He took the glasses from the prescription-littered counter and followed her into the semidarkness of the living room.

  “Watch the cats.”

  “I will.” He waited until she’d turned on a light before proceeding any farther. There were two of them, curled on opposite ends of an overstuffed sofa whose ragged arms bore evidence that Charlotte’s cats hadn’t been declawed.

  “The one with the evil eye and the stub tail is Rem,” she said. “The baby calico’s named Svetlana.” She bustled to the sofa, swept Svetlana into her arms, stroked her head, then let the cat jump to the floor. “Defect to the bedroom, my darlings. It’s time for the humans to talk.”

  Sam watched as the black, white, and yellow kitten shook itself off, scattering fur on Sam’s shoes. Then it crawled under the sofa. The big gray with
the stubby tail never even moved. “Got ‘em well trained I do,” Charlotte cackled. She settled onto the sofa next to Rem, who rolled onto his back to get his belly rubbed. The cat cracked a green eye and regarded Sam suspiciously.

  Sam set Charlotte’s glass on a coaster. She picked it up immediately with both hands and raised it in his direction, “Here’s to you, Sam Waterman. Welcome to Oblivion.” She sipped, then clumsily returned the glass to the table. “This is the condition of my life: I’ve gone from Purgatory to Oblivion.” She looked at him quizzically. “And you, Sam? Tell Charlotte where you are going these days.”

  Still holding his drink, he settled into the armchair at the end of the coffee table. “I should let you know I’m hot, Charlotte.”

  “Hot?” She cocked her head in his direction. “Been a bad boy, Sam? Mischievous? Nosing around where Romanoffs don’t want you nosing?”

  He set the gin down. “It’s worse than that,” he said. “This is serious.”

  “Tell me, Sam,” she said. “Tell Charlotte all about it.”

  SHE’D LOST A LOT of her edge. Sam understood that much almost at once. How far the dementia had developed, he wasn’t sure. But it was there. She’d zone out; her face would go blank, then she’d look at him and smile. It was the smile of a child; guileless, innocent, wide-eyed. And then the synapses or whatever would reconnect, and she’d be back, her mind as sharp as ever.

  They talked until about six. Then Charlotte grew restless. She fixed them dinner—two slices of bologna between stale white bread slathered with mayonnaise, accompanied by a glass of sweet iced tea—then retired to her bedroom. Sam removed his prosthetics, peeled the wig off, washed his face, then found the linen closet. He pulled a sheet off the shelf, spread it atop the cat-hair-covered couch, and stretched out.

  He awoke at three forty-five in the morning when Charlotte flipped the kitchen lights on. The calico kitten was purring happily, asleep on his chest. He used the spare bathroom and splashed tepid water on his face.