The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  *

  Zoe Kerry parked her car and sat for a second. She had indeed seen the dark government sedan and two heads dropping out of sight.

  Worried, she went upstairs and used her key to open her door. She went straight to the window and, without touching the curtains or turning on a light, looked out at the brightly lit parking lot. She saw the agents, now upright, sitting in the two front seats of the sedan.

  Taking her purse, she walked out of her room, leaving the door ajar, and knocked on the door of 209. The Chinese gentleman opened the door. The television was on.

  Kerry walked in, watched the man close the door behind him. “Have you been watching the lot out front? There are two men in a car in the row closest to the street.”

  The man had venetian blinds on his window, now closed. He went to the window and looked. He turned back. “I haven’t been looking.”

  “So you don’t know how long they have been there?”

  “No, but—”

  “Did you see anyone you don’t know on this floor today?”

  “Yes. I was going down to check my mailbox, and I saw a man walking down the hall past my door. He got into the elevator.”

  Now she was really worried. “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “Yes. A big man, about three inches over six feet. Wide shoulders, close-cropped brown hair, tanned face and neck. Clean-shaven, square jaw, dark sweater and dark trousers, leather shoes, no tie or hat. He was very fit, walked like an athlete. About thirty years of age, I would say.”

  Tommy Carmellini.

  “Did he come out of my flat?”

  “I don’t know. When I saw him he was walking toward me. He passed and entered the elevator.”

  Kerry had always known this day might come, and she had made plans. It was time to go. “You haven’t seen me today,” she said. “I’ll get in contact through the drop when I can.”

  She walked out, opened the door and strode to her apartment. Grabbed her getaway bag from under the bed and took a moment to glance again at the car out front. Still there. Watching and waiting for a warrant.

  She pulled the door shut behind her and went out the rear entrance. Walked across the parking lot to an older Ford sedan that had been there for weeks. The FBI and CIA didn’t know she owned this one. She got in, inserted the key. The engine started. The battery was only three weeks old.

  She drove around the building and picked the lane that would take her to the sedan where the two men sat. Stopped in front of it and put the transmission in park, left the engine running. Got her purse, opened the door and walked to the driver’s side. The window was down. She paused by the driver’s mirror, where she could see them both. She knew the man behind the wheel, didn’t recognize the other one. Neither was wearing his seat belt. Two empty coffee cups were in the cup holder, and a thermos between them.

  “What are you doing here, Jay?” Zoe Kerry said, leaning down to look straight into his face.

  “Aah…”

  “Waiting for you,” the other man said, reaching under his coat.

  She already had her hand in her purse. She pulled her service pistol and shot them both, as fast as she could pull the trigger. She got the driver in the face, and a shower of blood and brains sprayed against the headrest. The man in the passenger seat had his pistol half out when her bullet hit him just below the chin. She steadied the gun, aimed and shot him again, in the head.

  Then she turned and walked back to her car, putting her pistol back in her purse. She got behind the wheel and put on her seat belt. Zoe Kerry drove out of the lot, waited for a break in traffic, turned right and accelerated away.

  *

  I was watching Kerry’s apartment, waiting for the lights to come on. When they didn’t, I got worried. Now what? Were these federal cops still waiting for some judge to sign a warrant?

  Seven minutes after I saw her car go around the building, I saw a car stop in front of the FBI car. I got the binoculars up. Kerry got out. Walked over to the car. Between the vehicles speeding by on the street, I saw her shoot into the car. Three little pops, almost inaudible over the traffic noise. A semi rumbled by. When next I saw the car, a faded blue, it was waiting at the entrance. Then she turned right and was gone, her taillights fading down the street.

  There wasn’t a chance in the world I could get out of McDonald’s, run the Benz over the median and chase her. And no chance to turn right, go to the next corner, hook a U-turn and catch up with her in rush hour traffic.

  What I did do was drop the binocs, turn on my headlights, drive out of Mickey D’s, go down to the corner and U-turn to go back to the apartment building. Stopped in front of the parked sedan and walked over. One look was enough. No ambulance crew or doctor could help them now.

  A woman came walking toward me. Middle-aged, wearing a coat, with a key fob in her hand. I got into my car, fished my phone from my pocket and dialed Jake Grafton’s cell. Behind me a woman screamed. I glanced back. She was standing beside the government sedan looking in. As the phone rang, I put the Benz in gear and headed for the street.

  *

  I got back to CIA headquarters at a little after eight that evening. Grafton was in his office with Sarah Houston and Sal Molina. I had met Molina a time or two in the past and knew he was a heavy hitter at the White House, a dumpy fifty-something guy in rumpled slacks and a ratty sport coat. Sarah looked as gorgeous as ever; you would never know she had just put in a long day at the office.

  Grafton didn’t introduce me, merely asked, “What have you got, Tommy?”

  I pulled the copy paper from my pocket and handed it to him, then sat down beside his desk facing Sarah and Molina. “These documents were in her getaway bag under her bed. New name, Janice Alice Johansson. Passport, driver’s license, credit cards, a lot of cash, old fifties and hundreds—I didn’t count it. Nice loaded snub-nose .38 Smith & Wesson, blued. Two speed-loaders ready to go. She had a notebook in there. I figured Sarah could do magic with all those phone numbers and account numbers.”

  “Tell them about the shooting,” Grafton said.

  I did so.

  “After the shooting, you drove across the street and checked to see if either of the agents was still alive?”

  “I did. They weren’t. I left and called you.”

  “Why didn’t you follow her?” Molina asked.

  “It’s a divided street with a raised concrete median. She turned right, I had to turn right. By the time I could get behind her, she was long gone. So I went over to see if I could do anything for the guys she shot. They were dead.”

  “You broke into her apartment?”

  “Earlier that afternoon, before she got home.”

  “Why?” Molina asked.

  “I told him to,” Grafton said flatly. “He was obeying my orders.”

  Molina looked at his hands.

  Jake held out the papers to me. “You and Sarah go copy this. Sarah, do your magic. Who the phone numbers belong to, what the other numbers are. Get a night’s sleep and get on it first thing in the morning. Tommy, bring the papers back after you’ve copied them. I’ll call the FBI with the passport and ID info.”

  Sarah and I trooped out, leaving Grafton facing Molina, who looked tired and angry. I don’t know what he had to be pissed about. With the ID info we had, Kerry was going to get picked up sooner or later, and Molina wasn’t in the car with the agents and consequently was still alive.

  *

  “So the men who shot down Air Force One were Russians?”

  “Yes. Russian mafiosi. Four of them. Here are their names.” Grafton held out a sheet of paper from the small envelope that had been passed to Carmellini at noon.

  Molina glanced at the slip of paper, then handed it back. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “They spent three or four months in China. Then their trail peters out. The FBI will tell you all about their activities in America.”

  “China,” Molina muttered, and rubbed his chin. “How do you know
this Russian of yours is telling the truth?”

  “I don’t know, Sal. Do I look like Diogenes?”

  *

  As the copy machine did its thing, Sarah said, “I’m sorry about Anna.”

  I grunted.

  “Want to go get some dinner?” she asked.

  “I’m not hungry.” I eyed her. “I could use a drink, though. Or two.”

  After I returned Grafton’s paper pile to him and Sarah locked hers up in a secure safe in her office, we left the building together. She drove her car, and I followed her. It was raining lightly again. Windy. A miserable damned night. The wipers merely smeared the windshield, and a trickle of water dripped from the roof seal above the rearview mirror.

  Maybe I should have just sat in Kerry’s apartment and waited for her. Cuffed her with her own cuffs and visited until the FBI got its paperwork blessed by a judge and came for her.

  Ain’t hindsight wonderful? I’m sure she could have answered many of my questions.

  Of course, if I had stayed, I’d have probably killed her before the feds knocked on the door.

  Now I kinda wished I had waited.

  *

  Sarah and I ended up at a chain bar/restaurant. Safely ensconced in a booth by a window, with a football highlights show on a television above the bar that I could glance at from time to time, we ordered. I decided I was a bit hungry and ordered some wings with my bourbon. Sarah ordered white wine and a salad.

  After the waiter left, I told Sarah about the Asian gentleman who lived in apartment 209, right down the hall from dear ol’ Zoe. “Great setup if he’s her control,” I mused aloud.

  “The vast bulk of Chinese Americans are not spies,” she said, “nor are all coincidences suspect, but it wouldn’t hurt to check this guy out.”

  “You can do that?”

  “It’s what I do, Tommy,” she said, slightly exasperated.

  Rain smeared the window. Looked like it was setting in to rain all night.

  “I’m sorry about Anna,” Sarah said again.

  I just nodded.

  “I thought you were never going to get married.”

  “So did I,” I said, a bit more forcefully than I intended. “I should have left Anna in Switzerland. She’d still be alive if I had.”

  Sarah frowned. “Don’t start that what-if crap. Pretty soon you’ll be wishing you had never been born. I know! I have a patent on what-if.”

  Sarah Houston had a good face. Actually, she was lovely, with big dark eyes that seemed to see everything. She had certainly made her share of mistakes though the years, enough mistakes for a dozen people, but she seemed to be trying to get on down the road. Maybe there was a lesson there for me. Sarah was no saint, and I wasn’t either. Just two very mortal people.

  Our drinks came. We didn’t have much to say to each other. Superficial things about Jake Grafton and the agency and the state of the universe. I had finished my bourbon when my wings and her salad arrived, so I ordered another drink.

  We finished eating and were watching the rain, each of us lost in our own thoughts, when she asked, “Where are you sleeping these days?”

  I had been thinking about Zoe Kerry, wondering where she was tonight. Wondering if the FBI had alerted every badge-toter on the East Coast to watch for her. I abandoned Zoe and saw Sarah’s reflection in the window. I turned my head to see her face clearly. Well, she wasn’t drunk. Not with only one glass of wine in her. “At Willie Varner’s,” I said.

  “Think he could spare you for an evening?”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Picking up men in bars is bad for your reputation.”

  She smiled. “I’ll try not to make a habit of it.”

  “I accept.”

  I followed her home.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  War is not merely a political act, but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.

  —Carl von Clausewitz

  Finding the watcher or watchers at Naval Base Norfolk was an impossible task without bringing in hundreds of Homeland Security agents, FBI agents and police, and even that might not be enough. Or might cause the watcher to trigger the weapon, if he could. The best option, Jake Grafton thought, was finding the weapon or weapons that Grafton suspected were there without alerting the media or public. Or the watchers.

  The navy brought in four SEAL teams. Each team was given a section of the anchorage to search, starting at the carrier piers and radiating outward. Their diving boats were navy dredges, which were used periodically to pull sediment from the bottom of the anchorage to keep it deep enough for the deep-draft carriers. Barges used to hold the dredged-up muck were rigged alongside with a sponson between the barge and dredge, leaving a gap that divers could use to enter and exit the water.

  If the weapon was merely lying on the bottom, the dredges would of course pull it up eventually. Since the dredging went on year-around, presumably it wasn’t there.

  The SEAL officer in charge stood on the small bridge of the dredge and used binoculars to scan the pier. It had to be there, somewhere, he thought, in an area that the dredges wouldn’t normally do. So he sent his men swimming in that direction after entering the water.

  The SEAL commander, Captain Joe Child, and the commanding officer of the base, Captain Butler Spiers, had been personally briefed yesterday by the chief of naval operations, Admiral Cart McKiernan, in a guarded conference room in the base administration building. Sitting beside the admiral was a civilian; he wasn’t introduced, yet Child recognized him from newspaper photographs. The man was Jake Grafton, retired rear admiral and interim director of the CIA. It was the most amazing briefing Joe Child had ever attended.

  After he had explained the threat, McKiernan laid it on the line. “As you know, we already have plenty of security precautions in place, including airborne fighters, a restricted area over the base, continuous helicopter patrols. Still, in light of this threat, we are going to do more. We are starting those patrols tomorrow, a week early. All commands have been notified.”

  He paused to gather his thoughts. “We have a carrier at the pier now, Harry Truman, undergoing maintenance on her catapults and other gear, and she isn’t scheduled to leave until mid-February. The Ford will be towed over from Norfolk tomorrow. The next carrier will be arriving three days from now, the eighteenth. Two more will arrive on the twentieth and the twenty-second of December. All will be here with their task forces, which means some amphibious assault ships and about eighteen destroyers. There isn’t enough pier space for all their escorts, so they will make port up and down the East Coast.

  “If we can’t find a bomb—because it isn’t there or we just can’t find it—I am going to have all those ships except Harry Truman and Ford stay at sea. The drop-dead date for that decision is four days from now, December twenty-second.”

  “What if there are several weapons?” Captain Spiers asked.

  “Even if we find one, we’re going to keep looking,” McKiernan replied.

  “A nuclear weapon,” Captain Spiers said. His face looked a little pasty. “Sir, we should be evacuating this base right now. Hell, we should be evacuating this whole area.”

  “That’s been discussed. The decision has been made to tightly hold this secret. It is entirely possible that there are one or more watchers who will detonate the weapon if they realize we suspect it’s here and we’re looking for it. Trying to move a million and a half people a hundred miles from here can’t be kept a secret. We’ll just have to find the weapon.”

  Spiers licked his lips. “But if we don’t?” he asked.

  “Then we’ll do what we can do, and hope for the best.”

  “Admiral, I have leave scheduled on the seventeenth,” Spiers said. “My eldest daughter is due to deliver—”

  “Cancel it. That’s an order. Your duty is here.”

  “—our first grandchild,” Spiers finished bell
igerently.

  “I want an acknowledgment that I have just given you a direct order, Captain.”

  Spiers’ Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Finally he said, “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Moving on, the SEAL teams will arrive tomorrow on transports. They have been told they are deploying to the Middle East. We’ll need barracks for them, with no one else in them. The day after tomorrow, you will announce a security exercise, close the base and search it. Every square inch. Your people will not be told about nuclear weapons, but will be told to look for anything—and I mean anything—that isn’t supposed to be there. All leave and liberty is canceled. No one, and I mean no one, goes on or off the base. The exercise will last until the twenty-second.”

  “We don’t have berthing for all these people who can’t go home,” Spiers pointed out.

  “Get cots and sleeping bags and porta-potties and berth your people in hangars. Set up chow lines. The ships’ crews will be staying aboard their ships. Figure out the details and get at it, Spiers. Get enough food on the station to last two weeks, for your people and the crews of the ships in port.”

  “Yes, sir, but we don’t have enough refrigeration—”

  McKiernan’s fist smashed on the table. “Then you’d better get a shitload of MREs anywhere you can find them,” he roared. “Do I have to can you and find someone who can figure this out?”

  “No, sir.”

  In the silence that followed that exchange, Captain Child pointed out, “Everyone these days has cell phones.”

  “The cell towers are going out of service even as we speak. We are sealing this base and searching every square inch of it. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The story is the base is holding a security exercise. Get it in the newspapers and on television today. A routine security exercise. If there is a watcher, he or she will expect us to take extra precautions since we are going to have all these ships in port. We would be idiots if we didn’t, and whoever planted this weapon knows that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Spiers had one last question. “How sure are we that there is indeed an armed nuclear weapon somewhere close?”