The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  “I’m in the dungeon at Dulles, asshole,” I roared. “Get someone over here to get me out.” I slammed the phone down.

  “Who was that you were talking to?” the cop watching me asked.

  “The director of the CIA.”

  “Right.” He raised an eyebrow. “We get guys like you ten times a week. You may be King Shit in Indianapolis, Cass, but you’re just mouse shit here. Empty your pockets, turn them inside out and give me your belt and shoelaces.”

  As I did so, he added, “If you had a lick of sense, you’d have called a lawyer.”

  I settled into my own private cell. The place smelled of disinfectant and urine, the eau de jour of all the lockups I have ever been in. Willie Varner would toss his cookies after one good sniff. My back hurt like hell.

  I’d been in there an hour when a grizzled sergeant with a scarred face came for me. “You really are a spook!” he said in amazement.

  “Did the president call?”

  “Your assistant director dropped by.”

  “May his tribe increase.”

  “You wouldn’t have been arrested if you hadn’t—”

  “And you are really a bunch of damn fools. If you had bothered to ask why I was chasing someone, you might have made a significant arrest. As it is, he made a clean getaway. Congratulations. The next assassination in DC, I hope you bastards choke on it.”

  That certainly wasn’t a nice thing to say. Maybe they didn’t deserve it, but I was kinda pissed by then.

  “The man running from me left a carry-on somewhere,” I told the sergeant. “If you paragons of law enforcement get your act together, maybe you can find it. And my stuff. And maybe I can spot him on the videotape of people in the terminal.”

  *

  Fish stood behind a car in the long-term parking lot, a huge affair of a hundred or so acres, packed with cars, and tried to catch his breath. The big man, some kind of athlete, running him down, and he didn’t have a weapon. Just off the plane with no way to defend himself against a man six inches taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier who ran like a deer. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that face—the square jaw, the look—and he knew ice-cold terror for the first time in his life. So he had run.

  What to do now?

  He had a car, parked somewhere in this flat monument to the air age, but they made videotapes of every license plate that went through the tollbooths. And he had driven his own car.

  He tried to calm down and list his options. Time was pressing. Soon the man who chased him would get the police interested and they would start searching this lot. He had to be gone by then. Being gone meant wheels, since Dulles was twenty-five miles from downtown Washington.

  He could steal a license plate and put it on his own car … but he didn’t have a screwdriver. He could break into someone’s car and steal that … but again, no screwdriver or pocketknife to strip the ignition wires. He could go catch a bus downtown … take a taxi … steal a police car …

  A man walking toward him pulling a suitcase decided him. He let the man pass while he played with his cell phone, then, when he was twenty feet ahead, pocketed the cell phone and fell in behind him. A black guy, wearing a suit, maybe 160 or 170 pounds.

  After walking another hundred yards and changing rows, the man pulled a set of keys from his pocket. Up ahead a car flashed its lights. Now it beeped. More lights flashing. The guy was playing with the fob as he walked. Some kind of midsized sedan.

  Fish lengthened his stride. Came up behind the man silently and quickly as he reached his car. Grabbed the man and slammed his head against the sheet metal of the car, denting it. The man went down, dropping the keys. Fish picked them up, then opened the car door and looked inside.

  Yes! The ticket to get out of the parking lot was over the visor.

  He scanned around—no one watching.

  Used a button on the key fob to open the trunk and lifted the man into it. Slammed the lid and looked around. No one staring or pointing or screaming.

  He pushed the guy’s suitcase onto the backseat, then got into the driver’s seat and put on his seat belt. Inserted the key in the ignition. Started the car. Put it in reverse and carefully backed out of the parking space.

  The car had been in the lot four days. Fish paid the lady with cash, then headed for Washington.

  As he drove he thought about the man who had chased him. He recognized him—the guy who gave him a pizza when he was casing the Grafton building the day before the Internet crashed. That guy recognized him in the airport. Fish assumed the meeting had been by chance, a coincidence, one of those things.

  He went over the situation again. The cops would scarf up his carry-on bag, with his fingerprints and enough DNA to trace his family tree. Maybe he could get some help to deal with that. The guy in the trunk could just stay there. He would abandon the car, wipe the steering wheel and door latch and trunk lid and walk away.

  His real problem was the guy who chased him. True, he didn’t see him plant the bomb in Grafton’s apartment, but he put him there the day before. And he had chased him with mayhem on his mind. That guy … he was going to have to do something about that guy.

  Fish sighed. His heart rate was back to normal. He kept his eyes on traffic and drove carefully. And thought about being scared. He had peeped into the pit and didn’t like what he saw.

  *

  My flight to Switzerland left without me. When it pushed back, I was still in the airport cops’ office looking at videotapes. And I found him. By six o’clock that evening, we had reviewed enough videotapes to determine that our John Doe had flown in on a flight from Seattle. The airline provided the passenger list, and we sat staring at it. Which one was he?

  I tried to decide why our Dumpster diver didn’t exit the secure area down the escalator to the baggage carousels, and concluded that he had probably missed the sign. I knew the Dulles terminal intimately since I was in and out of there at least six times a year, so that was a mistake I wouldn’t make. These things happen to people unfamiliar with the terminal. Tourists from the provinces drop dead at Dulles every day when their bladders burst because they can’t find a restroom.

  Armed with his photo, the airport cops went to interview the airline personnel. One policeman sheepishly turned over the bag with my book and newspaper, and my carry-on, all of which were rescued by some family from Scranton on their way home from France. The Dumpster diver’s carry-on wasn’t found. Someone had probably helped himself. Or herself. Washington is that kind of town.

  I called Jake Grafton on his cell. He listened until I ran down and said, “Schedule another flight. If they won’t bump someone for tomorrow’s, call me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nice try, Tommy.”

  “Thanks.”

  I went to the head to pee and didn’t see blood. The cop who used a stick on my kidney would be disappointed. I had used my fist on the Dumpster man: I hoped he was pissing red.

  The FBI was there taking custody of the tape with the face of our friendly suspected bomber on it when I left the terminal. I limped out to the long-term lot, rescued my Benz and went home to my closed-up apartment. Fixed myself a frozen dinner and a tall bourbon and thought about things. My back ached and my face was slightly swollen, bruised and abraded from intimate contact with a street. There was a ripped place in my shirt, which had a few spots of blood on it. My blood. My trousers and sport coat were ruined. I looked like a sailor after a Saturday night drunk.

  About nine that night I called the airline and got myself on tomorrow’s flight to Switzerland. There were several empty seats, the lady on the phone said. She had a nice voice.

  “Are you on business or vacation?” she asked.

  “Vacation,” I lied.

  “Have you ever been to Switzerland before?” she chirped.

  “Yes.” That was the truth. I tell it occasionally for variety.

  “It’s a gorgeous country—I’m sure you know that. You’re going to have
a wonderful vacation.”

  “I’m thinking of quitting my job and moving there,” I said. “I know a thing or two about U.S. tax laws. Some bank might hire me as a consultant.”

  After we finished our tête-à-tête, I filled up a freezer bag with ice for my back and poured myself another drink. Found myself thinking about Anna Modin.

  *

  That evening Choy Lee and Zhang Ping ate at the Chans’ Chinese restaurant. Choy ate there several times a week. The menu was in Chinese characters and English, which was a touch for the locals who were looking for something “authentic.” The cuisine actually tasted similar to real Chinese fare, or close enough if you were Chinese and missing home badly. The owner, Sally’s father, spoke a bit of Cantonese and stopped to talk to Choy and Zhang. The waiters were Americans, black and white, and didn’t speak a word of the language. Choy chatted them up, drew out their stories and gave extravagant tips. That worried Zhang, but Choy waved it away. “This is America,” he said, and moved on to another subject.

  Zhang regarded the restaurant people with open suspicion. Oh, he knew people had been bailing out of China for several centuries in search of a better life elsewhere, but for a patriot like Zhang, that fact, and those people, rankled. China was their heritage, who they were. And they had deserted.

  It was just another little irritant about life in America. Not speaking the language, Zhang felt like a stranger all the time, and that disconcerted him. It also made him underestimate the acuity of the people he met, which was a grave mistake for a clandestine agent. He never gave it a thought.

  All Zhang had to do was hold on, make sure the Americans didn’t find the bomb, or if they did, start the countdown and run for it. This countdown—the experts assured him that he had twenty-four hours to leave the area after he initiated the detonation signal with a radio transmitter. Zhang didn’t believe it. If he had been running the operation, the explosion would happen immediately after the capacitor charged, which took half a minute. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t.

  If it didn’t, keep on fighting. If it did … well, life had been a helluva trip.

  When they were eating, Sally came from the kitchen and sat down beside Choy. Of course he introduced Zhang, his “cousin.” Through Choy, Zhang gave his cover story in answer to friendly, innocent questions. There was no way out of it. She chatted some; then Choy said in English to Sally, “Could I pick you up tonight when you get off work?”

  “Of course,” she said. She bussed Choy on the cheek, and went back to the kitchen.

  Zhang didn’t know what had been said, but he had seen the glow on Sally’s face. That was a woman in love.

  When they finished dinner, Choy chatted up Sally’s father, complimenting him extravagantly, and tipped the waiter, a skinny black man, the same way. Zhang climbed back into the SUV and told Choy to drop him at his building, which was fine with Choy, because he looked at his watch.

  “What did you say to Miss Chan?”

  “That I’d pick her up when she got off work.”

  Zhang nodded. That explained her look. She and Choy were going to be lovers tonight.

  When Choy was out of sight, Zhang climbed into his pickup truck and drove to the overlook near the entrance to the tunnel that led under the estuary. It was dark by then, no stars or moon, with a good breeze down the bay.

  There was a carrier in. Zhang used binoculars to study the lights of the carrier tied to the pier. She was a huge ship. Over a thousand feet long, ninety-five thousand tons displacement. She was lit up as if it were Chinese New Year.

  He scanned the water that he could see. No boats moving. Nothing that was not the same as it always was. But there should be a harbor patrol boat. Zhang waited. Twenty minutes later it came down the Elizabeth River into view. Moving slowly with a spotlight playing about on the water.

  Tomorrow, he would buy a laptop computer that he could use to download the triggering algorithm from the Internet. He would wait another week and buy a boat. He would need Choy’s help with both purchases. If the man became suspicious, he would have to be terminated. To be on the safe side, he would also need to kill Sally Chan. Since they were lovers, Choy had perhaps told her things he shouldn’t. If he disappeared, she might go to the authorities.

  After he killed Choy, Zhang would be on his own. Zhang sat in the darkness with his binoculars watching the carrier and thinking about how he would accomplish his mission without Choy Lee.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

  —George Washington

  Jake Grafton had been calling Schulz’s office to report progress or the lack thereof in investigating the crash of Air Force One, as ordered. He never got through to the man and ended up talking to an EA. So after a day or so he just had one of his EAs call Schulz’s EA. Sunday morning he was summoned to the White House for lunch with Jurgen Schulz and the other heads of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

  He was getting dressed to take Callie to church—she wanted to go a couple of times a month—so she sent him to the bedroom to change from the slacks and sport coat he ordinarily wore to work and had donned this morning.

  “Your new gray suit,” she said. “With a white shirt and your new purple tie.”

  “Hey, this is a working lunch,” he protested.

  “It’s after church.”

  She had picked out the suit, which had been tailored to fit. He went and changed. After church the sedan with two bodyguards dropped Callie back at the condo and took Jake off to the White House.

  He felt like the best-dressed man in the room when he greeted his colleagues and the secretary of Homeland Security, Lewis Warren. Sal Molina, wearing his usual sport coat from Sears, inspected Grafton’s suit closely. “Wish I could afford a rig like that,” he said.

  “Eat your heart out.” Jake plopped down beside Molina and started looking at the paper piled in front of him.

  The menu was soup and salad. The soup was pretty good, tomato with peppers, so Grafton caged another bowl from Molina, who didn’t want his. While he ate he looked the group over. All the usual suspects were there, Homeland Security, FBI, and a gaggle of staffers.

  Plus Jurgen Schulz, of course. Schulz was a Harvard professor on sabbatical, loaning his brain and whatever it contained to the government to benefit his fellow Americans. Someday when the exigencies of politics pressed hard enough, presumably Schulz would go back to Harvard to teach a few classes a week to grad students and write a profitable big book about his adventures in Washington.

  It was a working lunch, when meant they talked and ate at the same time. The big news came from the FBI man, Harry Estep, over the soup. A van had exploded in the Sea-Tac Airport long-term parking lot Saturday morning. One man dead. His teeth said he was a Russian. Some fingers were found with intact fingertips. More fingerprints came off his luggage, which was in the car. The prints had been sent to Interpol and Russian police authorities to see if someone could put a name, face and history to him.

  “Who blew up the van?” someone who was not impressed asked.

  “We don’t know,” Harry Estep said with his chin jutting a little. “We’re investigating.”

  “What did they use?” the questioner persisted. It was a honcho from the NSA.

  “Forensics says dynamite. American manufacture. Five or six sticks, at least.”

  “I think the Post this morning had a story on the van.”

  “I think so, too,” Estep shot back.

  The pieces of the drone recovered in the field near the remains of Air Force One proved it to be a military drone, a Raven. None had been reported stolen, so the army was conducting an inventory. That would take several more days. Meanwhile, of course, the trail of whoever stole it and the controller was growing colder. Still, Estep said, when they knew where the drone came from, the people who had access to them would be given intense scrutiny. Vehicles were being traced, and people remembered people, but without hard des
criptions or driver’s licenses with names, the going was slow. Denver-area motel and hotel records had been exhaustively checked, and possibilities were being eliminated one by one. The airport security guard who survived had been working with police artists to try to reconstruct the face of the man who shot him. Estep passed around the picture. It was so generic that it could have been anybody, Jake Grafton decided. About the only thing the witness was sure of was that the face he saw was clean-shaven and white. And the guy had a big gun.

  This was all good solid police work, and in time a picture of what happened and a chronology might emerge. How much light it would shed on who and why remained to be seen.

  Tommy Carmellini’s adventure the previous evening at Dulles Airport was not mentioned by Harry Estep. Jake Grafton knew the FBI knew about it, so he didn’t mention it either.

  Vice Admiral Arlen Curry spoke for the intelligence community. NSA was mining telephone and Internet intercepts for clues. Another week would be needed, at least. Army and naval intelligence had no clues. Satellite surveillance had come up with a few photos of DIA at the time of the shootdown, but all they proved was that there was a van off the end of the duty runway that the president’s plane had passed over.

  Schulz broke in. “Admiral Grafton, what about foreign plots?”

  “We have found no connection yet to any nation or group, sir. Or course, we are still reviewing information from our sources. Two al Qaeda clerics, one in Iraq and one in Pakistan, have claimed responsibility, but they lack credibility. Their claims made them popular in their mosques for a few days, though.”

  By the time they had finished their salads, the agenda of the meeting had been covered. Schulz kept them there for another twenty minutes firing questions. It was a waste of time, Grafton thought.

  Schulz soldiered on. “People,” he said, “the lack of progress in this investigation is totally unacceptable. Answers are out there buried under some rock or other. Your job is to turn over rocks and find those answers. Use some brains and common sense to figure out which rocks to look under. Keep me informed three times a day.”