“Same,” Alex manages to blurt.
“Your girlfriend’s quite the smart cookie. You ever understand a word she’s saying to you?”
Alex tries to keep his gaze fixed on his admirer, but good manners draw him back to Langenhahn for a few seconds. “She dumbs things down for me when it’s really important.” He wills a smile to his face to punctuate the joke, then immediately turns back to the tuxedoed man…who is already gone.
Langenhahn moves off. Alex tries to obscure his unease. “How do you think that went?” he asks Grace.
“Langenhahn’s a rubber stamp,” she demurs. “He just came over to get a look down my dress.”
“Anyone else you need to talk to tonight?”
“No, I think I’m good. Tired.”
“Me too.”
“The car’s still back at the bar,” she says. Alex nods. They’d had a drink beforehand, and he’d left the car four blocks away.
“I can go get it,” Alex offers.
“I can come with you…”
“Why don’t you stay? Mingle for a bit longer. I’ll be right back.” He seals the promise with a peck on her cheek and moves off. He needs to be alone for a while. He needs to walk off the uneasy feeling the tuxedoed man’s dead-eyed stare has left in his gut.
The journey back to the car also gives him time to think. Like a fresh Polaroid developing, his theory of the case finally starts to appear. An ethereal image begins to form, a vague connection between the Fort Eustis troop deployment to Iran and the homicidal fallout of Harling’s deposition. At the moment, however, his theory has no basis in fact. Rather, it’s the only inference Alex can draw from the evidence he has. Someone—possibly the man who called him at the CIA, possibly the man in the tux?—used Harling’s bank account as a temporary home for the money being siphoned off the Agency’s black budget. Money—particularly government money—doesn’t get stolen unless it’s going to be spent. And right now, the only use Alex can think of for ninety million dollars in classified CIA funds is the deployment of troops to Iran.
With this idea entrenched, Alex arrives at his Lexus. He gets in and turns the key in the ignition. As the car purrs to life, he hears a voice coming from behind him. “Alex…”
He turns quickly in the voice’s direction. This is pure reflex. His head is halfway around before he realizes he’s probably turning to face a gun’s silencer. So he’s relieved to find Gerald. The boy—and he looks very much like a frightened child in the half-light of the car’s backseat—looks more stressed than Alex has ever seen him, which is really saying something. “Gerald.” Alex exhales. “You scared the living shit out of me.”
“Welcome to my world,” Gerald mumbles.
“How…how the hell did you get into my car?”
Gerald shrugs. “Cars are just computers with wheels. Here.” He hands Alex a manila folder.
“What’s this?”
“I followed the money.” Gerald sounds distant, like he’s talking in his sleep, and Alex wonders if he’s taken something stronger than his ordinary antianxiety prescription.
“What money? The money from the black budget?” Gerald just nods. “Is that what this is?” Alex asks, referring to the file.
“This is where I get off, Alex. I owe you and I’m grateful, but I’m also done.” With that, Gerald starts to get out of the car, but Alex stops him with a hand to his arm. “I’m done,” Gerald repeats. He points to the file. “That’s everything, all right? Everything I could find. Game over, man.” He says this last bit in an affected Southern drawl meant to evoke Bill Paxton in the movie Aliens. “Game over.”
“What is this?” Alex demands, shaking the file in the air. There’s a label printed neatly in Gerald’s handwriting. “What is Operation Solstice?”
“It’s black, Alex. It’s the blackest shit around.” Gerald shrugs off the hand Alex has on his arm and opens the car door. “Please,” he implores, sounding as young as Alex has ever heard him, “whatever you do next—and for your sake I hope it’s burning that file and forgetting all about everything—whatever you do…please leave me the hell out of it.” With that, Gerald pushes out of the car, slams the door behind him, and walks off into the night. Alex assumes that Gerald doesn’t live in Maryland, certainly not within walking distance of where they are now, but he can tell that getting home is the very least of Gerald’s worries tonight.
* * *
At the condo, after Alex is sure that Grace is asleep, he sits in the kitchen with his third scotch of the evening. Ignoring Gerald’s advice, he opens the Solstice file. His eyes scan the document impatiently, attempting to take the contents in all at once, like a hungry man trying to devour a buffet in a single swallow. The file reveals itself in flashes, words, and phrases jumping off the page:
OVERWATCH OPERATIONAL CONCEPT
Human immunodeficiency virus
Severe acute respiratory syndrome
H1N1
delivery mechanism
biological assassination
The Overwatch
assassination
Overwatch
ASSASSINATION
Alex understands what it says but wills himself to slow down, to turn back to the first page and read the memo in its entirety. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the memo’s meaning doesn’t change with a more comprehensive read. He thinks about reading it again—a third time—but knows he doesn’t need to. The language is remarkably easy to follow, the descriptions and plans contained therein are clear and precise. Nowhere in the memo is there an acknowledgment that what it proposes is illegal under two different presidential executive orders and the Biological Weapons Convention: it’s a plan for assassination using a bioweapons-grade virus.
TWELVE
NEW HAMPSHIRE AVENUE NW
WASHINGTON, DC
5:37 A.M. EDT
THE DAWN arrives in the form of shafts of East Coast sunlight. The condo’s vertical blinds carve the beams into claws that rake across Alex’s eyes, jolting him out of a deep slumber. It’s barely five thirty and Alex wakes to the realization that he fell asleep at the kitchen table, the Solstice file still open in front of him. The previous night’s sleep—if it could be considered sleep—was stressed and fitful, plagued by paranoid dreams that could have been produced only by a combination of three glasses of scotch, the file’s contents, and an extremely uncomfortable sleeping position. Still, Alex is under no delusion that he dreamed what he read—and reread, to the point of exhaustion, apparently. He knows that everything is very, very real.
Nonetheless, he sits up and reads it again. Just to make sure.
Halfway through his first read, Alex had understood why such operations were code-designated black. The description befits the secrecy in which projects like Solstice are conceived but also conjures up more malevolent connotations. There is a reason, after all, that agents and intelligence agencies that engage in covert behaviors like political extortion, forced coups, and orchestrated revolutions are colloquially said to practice the dark arts. Humans instinctively fear the dark. Our primal selves innately know that nothing good or safe lurks within the shadows. The contents of the Solstice file only confirm that. They also, for once, justify Gerald’s anxieties as something more legitimate than neurotic paranoia. His reaction upon uncovering the file last night was, if anything, understated.
As far as black operations go, assassination—known in the intelligence trade as wet work—is considered the darkest of them all. But using a virus, a disease, strikes Alex as a particularly stygian blackness. You can shield yourself from bullets. You can protect yourself against knives. Viruses, though, are invisible and, therefore, terrifying. Again, the primal self knows best and is smart to fear disease, particularly the variety for which there is no protection or cure—for example, a virus engineered to be a weapon.
Conveniently for Alex, however, viruses fall into his fiancée’s area of expertise. Or, at least, close enough to Grace’s area of expertise to justify his
confiding in her. She slinks out of the bedroom, clearly horrified to discover that Alex spent the night poring over work. Concern shrouds her face. It’s nice to have someone who worries about you, Alex thinks. And it’s particularly nice considering the kind of danger Alex now finds himself in.
“What’s going on? You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“You were out here all night? You slept out here?”
“Fell asleep out here. Actually, more like collapsed.”
“What’s so important,” she asks, her eyes finding the Solstice file and the half-empty bottle, “that it’s got you up all night killing half a fifth of scotch?”
“Something medical, it turns out.” He gestures for her to take a seat next to him. “I’ve got some stuff I should tell you.”
Grace sits as instructed and Alex tells her everything about the events of the past three days. Laying it all out for her—the suspicious money transfer, the even more suspicious deaths, the threatening phone call, and, finally, Solstice and its plot for bio-assassination—Alex feels like he’s back in court delivering a closing argument, summarizing and consolidating all of the evidence for a jury’s easy consumption. The only difference is that Alex’s case is incomplete; his synopsis of events lacks the cumulative tie-a-ribbon-on-it point that all good summations have.
“He’s screwing with you,” Grace observes. “This kid—”
“Gerald,” Alex supplies.
“This kid Gerald is screwing with you.” She closes the file and tosses it onto the kitchen table as punctuation. “This is a joke, right? Did you tell him all the stuff you just told me?”
“Pretty much.”
“And then he serves up this.” She taps the file. “That kid is fucking with you. You said he’s smart, right?”
Alex just nods. He’s thinking back to Gerald’s high-school computer prank, and a picture of Gerald as an accomplished practical joker is starting to take shape in his mind. He looks again at the file and considers Grace’s suggestion. The possibility that Gerald ginned up a fictional conspiracy for his own amusement hangs in front of Alex like a lure, tempting him to grasp it so he can be pulled out of this conspiracy spiral. But there’s something he can’t discount. “What about the phone call I got?”
Grace raises her eyebrows, incredulous. “You mean the one with the disguised voice? The one that came from inside the Agency? The one that Gerald told you came from a dusty old file room?” She shakes her head in a way that suggests she finds it adorable that Alex has fallen for this obvious ruse. “That little shit must’ve been laughing his ass off, getting you to run all around the CIA. You’re both lucky his little prank didn’t get you fired or shot or worse.”
“You’re right,” Alex admits, grabbing the lure. He thinks for a few seconds, his mind wandering. Feeling Grace’s eyes on him, he adds, mostly for her benefit, “I should probably kick his scrawny little ass.”
“You’ll think of something,” Grace answers. “If there’s one thing you lawyers are good at, it’s payback.” She stands up from the table. “I’m gonna get ready for work. I have to e-mail the principal investigator on my grant application. I’m pretty sure the impact scores are out of peer review by now.”
Grace moves off, but she doesn’t get more than two steps away before Alex stops her. “How accurate was all this?” he asks, almost as an afterthought, holding up the Solstice file. “All the medical stuff in here. Weapons-grade viruses and such.”
The question brings the grave expression to Grace’s face that she usually reserves for topics like terminal cancer. “Frighteningly accurate.” She points at the file. “He’s got stuff in there about weaponization of very deadly viruses like Ebola and SARS-CoV and H1N1. He’s got data about aerosolization and delivery systems.” She shakes her head. “That little prick you’re friends with really did his homework. And it sounds like he’s smart enough to understand everything he read. He’s also a sick fuck.”
She leaves Alex with that thought. After a few minutes, he hears the shower running. It occurs to him he should join Grace. But he finds himself unable to look away from the file.
* * *
It takes Gerald fifteen minutes to stop laughing. Alex is standing opposite him in Gerald’s office, such as it is, in the bowels of the New Headquarters Building. Here, four stories belowground, there is no sound but the constant hum of the industrial-grade cooling system the CIA uses to keep its massive computer-server farm from overheating. Working constantly, the fans sound louder than a 747’s engine, but Gerald’s hacking guffaws—periodically punctuated by desperate gasps for oxygen—threaten to drown out even the cooling system’s din.
“I can’t—” Gerald tries. “You thought—” he attempts. Each time, the statements are buried beneath a fresh layer of hysterics.
“Are you gonna pass out?” Alex asks.
Gerald just continues to laugh.
“I’ve gotta say, this wasn’t among the variety of possible reactions I anticipated here.”
Gerald’s laughter hits a new level. If this is an elaborate performance on Gerald’s part, then his talents would be put to better use by the CIA in Pakistan, Baghdad, Moscow, or any number of places where the Agency could use someone with a good poker face and excellent tradecraft.
“Fuck,” Gerald finally manages to croak out, his face as red as a watermelon. “Fuck, Alex, I thought you were supposed to be smart. I owe you, remember? You helped me out. Do you really think I would doctor all this up to fuck with someone who did me a solid?”
It’s a good point. One, Alex has to admit, he hadn’t considered.
“Although,” Gerald muses, “if I knew fucking with you could’ve gotten me a laugh like this, it might’ve been worthwhile.” He shrugs. “Thanks for the giggle. It almost makes getting the living shit scared out of me last night worth it. Hell, I wish I had concocted it.”
“Because then it wouldn’t be real,” Alex says, completing Gerald’s thought.
“Exactly.”
Alex looks down at the file in his hand. It feels heavy. It feels heavier than it did than five minutes ago, when he had himself convinced it was a prop in a practical joke. It feels heavier than it did last night when he collapsed on his kitchen table after reading it for the tenth time. The feeling must be written all over Alex’s face, because when he looks back up at Gerald, he sees uncharacteristic concern. “You okay, dude?”
“Didn’t sleep great last night.”
“I’m not surprised.” Gerald points toward the file and, with the wisdom of a prophet, advises, “There are ten shredders on every floor of this building. Do us both a favor and drop that into the nearest one. Drop it in, and forget any of this ever happened.” Alex looks at the file again. Gerald, sensing Alex’s ambivalence, points out, “This shit’s way above your pay grade. You’re under no obligation to mess with it.”
“It’s illegal,” Alex says. “It’s illegal and I’m a lawyer. I’m the CIA’s lawyer. One of them, at least. And if I’ve got a client doing something they’re not supposed to, I’ve got an obligation to try to stop it.”
Gerald shakes his head with vigor. “You’re not representing some DC gangbanger or a Fortune 500 company. This is the fucking Central Intelligence Agency. Even its secrets have secrets. All that happened here is you found out something you weren’t supposed to find out. When that happens, you do your best to forget it. When I told you this was above your pay grade, I meant it literally.”
“So maybe I just share this with my boss.” Alex shrugs. “Send it up the chain of command.”
Gerald shakes his head even harder, more in growing anger than any kind of fear. “The people in command already know about it. That’s how these things work.” Alex isn’t so sure that’s true, but he lets Gerald continue. “So you’d be telling them you know something you’re not supposed to. And that comes back on me, man. You show your boss that file, he’s gonna want to know how you got it. If I’m lucky, I’m only looking fo
r a new line of work. If I’m not, I’m looking for my own lawyer. To defend me against charges I violated, like, fifteen different federal laws.” Gerald lets out a derisive snort. “Seriously, for both of us, doing anything other than shredding and forgetting is gonna be—I promise you—more trouble than it’s worth.” The phrase elicits a caustic smirk from Alex. “What’s that look supposed to mean?” Gerald asks.
“Nothing,” Alex answers. “You just remind me of me.”
* * *
BEIT RAHBARI PRESIDENTIAL PALACE, IRAN
1300 HRS. ZULU
“Dr. Jafari,” Jahandar says, rising from his seat to shake the engineer’s hand. “Thank you for making the trip all the way from Darkhovin and joining me in my humble home.”
“It is my pleasure, Ayatollah,” the head engineer of Project 110 responds with a bow of his head. “It is a great honor.”
Jahandar smiles a bit, noting the man’s anxiety, having felt the perspiration on his palm when he shook his hand. Conversations are always easier to have with someone who’s uncomfortable. Particularly when the goal of the conversation is the procurement of information.
Jahandar waves a hand to offer Jafari a seat. They’re in one of the palace’s five reception rooms. Although Jahandar refers to it as “humble,” he chose the one they’re sitting in for its impressive—and, he hopes, intimidating—size and opulence. Antique Persian rugs cover the floor, and museum-quality art and antiques populate the space. Jahandar has never had much use for such trappings, but they do make him appear more imposing. (As if the title supreme leader weren’t imposing enough.)
An attendant pours glasses of iced green tea from a pitcher and promptly makes himself scarce. After taking a sip, Jahandar breaks the silence. “The work you’ve done in Darkhovin. Impressive. Most impressive.”
“Thank you.” Jafari bows his head again.
“And after so much time. How long have you been working on Project One-Ten?”
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