The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’ve given up ... well, smoking.”

  Kealey looked at him. “Okay. I’m guessing you can’t have coffee without a smoke?”

  Bishop smiled weakly. “Since I was thirteen.”

  “That’s a helluva double whammy. Most people would have trouble with just one or the other.”

  “I know. But I promised.”

  Kealey didn’t pursue the discussion. He saw the ticket in Bishop’s hand and suggested they board.

  The Acela—Amtrak’s equivalent of a bullet train—made the Washington-to-Boston round-trip several times a day, hitting Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, among other stops, along the way. As he and Bishop walked along the platform, Kealey did not see a lot of heads in the train’s windows or people on the platform. The conductors were standing beside an open door, chatting.

  “Looks like we may have a car to ourselves,” Kealey remarked.

  Bishop glanced over and nodded. He was carrying a small gray cabin bag that didn’t seem especially full. It had wheels, but he didn’t use them. Kealey felt the guy was trying hard to be present, but he recognized the mechanical movements, the programmed responses. He hoped Bishop would snap out of it enough to be of some use. He would need help in New York, not extra baggage.

  The first-class car wasn’t empty, but it was nearly so. They had the forward section to themselves. There were facing chairs and side-by-side chairs; Kealey selected the former, with a small table between them, close to the door. He didn’t want anyone overhearing what they had to say. That was another advantage trains had over airplanes.

  Not that they had anything to say, immediately. Bishop stared out the window as the train moved through the station. Kealey finished his coffee, ate a few bites of a biscotto, and tried to imagine what he was thinking. What does one think when his child dies? In a terrorist attack that he survives.

  “You want to talk about it?” Kealey asked.

  “Not really.” Realizing that had sounded more dismissive than he’d obviously intended, Bishop looked at him and said, “No thanks.”

  “I was there,” Kealey said.

  That got Bishop’s attention. “At the convention center?”

  Kealey nodded. “I was there for Julie Harper’s dinner.”

  Bishop leaned forward. “What do you know?” His eyes were open now, alert.

  “Only what you do, I’m guessing,” Kealey said. He leaned into the table. “Reports of an inside job. G-man killed last night near a Trask lab. And ... I’m sorry, truly sorry for what you’re going through.”

  That caught Bishop off guard. He had gone into professional mode, not thinking of his own loss.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “If it’s any consolation, even a small one, I took some of those SOBs out personally,” Kealey told him.

  “Not at the dinner,” Bishop said. “I was there.”

  “No. We were in the parking garage when it all started. Armed myself from my little trunk arsenal, made our way in through a kind of back door.”

  “We?”

  “My date, sort of. Allison Dearborn, a Company shrink. Her nephew—”

  “Was the one who tweeted,” Bishop said. “I heard about that. Your idea?”

  “We all pitched in.”

  “Well done,” Bishop said. “That’s why you’re on this job. Couple of directors playing who-can-you-trust.”

  “Pretty much. What about you?”

  “You mean, how did I get picked?” Bishop asked. He shrugged a shoulder. “Who knows why the higher-ups do what they do. I spent most of my career behind a desk. Then, suddenly, I got a field assignment.” Bishop smiled thinly and looked down. “It does matter, Ryan.”

  “Sorry?”

  “What you did in Baltimore,” Bishop said. “You got a chance to act. I’ve never felt so goddamn helpless.”

  “It’s only temporary,” Kealey assured him. “We’re going to find these guys, and we’re gonna skin them.”

  Bishop nodded. “You ever smoke?”

  “No. I’m vice free.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Unless we’re including the Ten Commandments.”

  That drew a little smile from Bishop. “I promised my daughter I’d quit. Just when I need one most.”

  Bishop looked like he was about to lose it, and Kealey sat back to give him space. Bishop rallied when the conductor came by for their tickets, followed by a porter, who asked them if they wanted anything to eat or drink. Kealey hoped he didn’t ask for anything hard. He didn’t. All he wanted was water and a bran muffin. Kealey was guessing that would be the first food he’d had in a lot of hours.

  There was usually a lot of get-to-know-you chat on an almost three-hour train ride, but not this time. Kealey didn’t think Bishop was snubbing him when he went back to his tablet and checked e-mails. But it also didn’t help Kealey get to know the man on whom his life could possibly depend. That was important. He didn’t want to be relying on a man—even a thoroughgoing professional—whose thoughts were elsewhere.

  “I probably know the answer, but why did you agree to this?” Kealey asked.

  “You mean, now?”

  Kealey nodded.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Bishop said. His reply wasn’t challenging; it was a simple statement.

  “I don’t follow,” Kealey said. “I didn’t lose anyone—”

  “If you were still officially a Company man, you would have been given mandatory leave. You killed people in Baltimore. Enemy combatants as far as we know, but there’s been no investigation. The good fortune of you being in the right place at the right time, and armed, has not been questioned.”

  Kealey made a face. “I don’t think I like that.”

  “You misunderstand,” Bishop said. “Or maybe I’m not making myself clear. I don’t doubt you. But standard operating procedure has gone out the window. It always does in these situations.”

  “I’m here because the president asked me to be,” Kealey replied. “I have a habit of saying what’s on my mind, which is one reason I’m not a Company man anymore. Brenneman obviously felt the situation required that kind of outside point of view.”

  “And someone who was already primed by action, maybe even a little hair trigger after the day’s events,” Bishop said. “The president wanted a pit bull and not a bloodhound. I’ve seen hundreds of psych profiles over the years to understand how people get into one of the ‘triple o’ situations, where they overreact, overreach, or overcompensate. That’s why ninety percent of my subjects go bad. Not because they are bad, but because they shouldn’t have been doing what they were.”

  “Are you saying I’m a good witch or a bad one?”

  “Neither, Ryan. I don’t know you. I’m saying that I understand why the president picked you,” Bishop replied. “Since I got the call last night, I’ve been zeroing in on what we have here. The scope of this suggests we’re dealing with the ‘other’ ten percent. A person or persons who are bad because they are bad. That’s why I’m here. Because truly bad men don’t just take cash from the evidence locker or shoot someone because they’re angry at their spouse. They don’t just kill my daughter. They kill a lot of daughters. That’s not going to happen on my watch, if I can prevent it.”

  Kealey took a moment to reflect on what Bishop had said. “I like that. But there’s something that doesn’t jibe.”

  Bishop regarded him. “What’s that?”

  “We don’t know that New York has anything to do with Baltimore. Shouldn’t you be there, where the FBI poser was ID’d?”

  Bishop smiled thinly. “Touché. There’s something else.”

  Goddamn it, Kealey thought. Nothing ever changes, except to get worse. “What didn’t the sons of bitches tell me?” he asked.

  “It came in very early this morning, and I’m sure they didn’t want to wake you,” Bishop said.

  “I’m sure they just didn’t want to tell me,” Kealey said. “What i
s it?”

  Bishop touched the tablet several times, then handed it over. It was an eyes-only message from FBI director Cluzot:

  Cargo from Quebec hijacked. Believed to be in NYC.

  “What cargo?” Kealey asked. A frisson of fear rolled up his spine. His first thought was of a nuclear weapon.

  Bishop leaned over and tapped another button. A color photograph came up. It was a mug shot with an RCMP stamp in the corner.

  “Top assassin, Pakistani born, spent her teenage years in Damascus and Cairo” he said quietly. He touched a button, and the screen dissolved. It would take a password to get back in. “Heartless merc, no apparent ideology. A CIA agent and I put her on a private jet up there with three Pakistani caretakers. At least, we thought they were. We don’t know what happened, except that three Pakistanis were found dead at the airport after we left, the plane ended up in New York, it was on the ground for under an hour, and then it headed out over the Atlantic.”

  “To where?”

  “We don’t know that, either,” Bishop said. “The transponder was shut off, and either it was blown up at sea or some pretty sophisticated technology was apparently employed to erase the image from radar. We’re still looking into that.”

  “Who was the agent in on the transfer?”

  “Someone from Rendition Group One,” Bishop said. “I tried to contact her. No response. When I called her boss this morning, he told me she was in New York on special assignment. He was not at liberty to reveal its nature. Frankly, I don’t think he knew.”

  “You suspect she’s looking for the missing cargo?” Kealey said.

  “I hope so.” He didn’t have to add, “Either that, or she’s in on the escape.” “I’ve got a call in to the powers-that-be but they haven’t returned it.”

  Kealey considered this. “There’s something a little off,” he said.

  “The timing?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bishop nodded. “Why was she involved before I was informed?”

  “Right. I can see that it wasn’t an IA issue, but as a matter of course, they would have wanted a debrief of everyone who was on-site.”

  “Ordinarily,” Bishop agreed.

  He didn’t have to finish.

  “Yet they called you for this,” Kealey said.

  “They did. When you think you’ve got a mole or a renegade, who do you go to?”

  “Right.” He didn’t have to say it. You go to someone their actions impacted. Someone who values the takedown more than their own security. Like Kealey, someone who was hair trigger.

  Kealey felt more comfortable with Bishop after that. He wasn’t being critical. What the G-man had said before about Kealey also applied to himself.

  “Do they suspect your RG colleague of being involved with what happened in Quebec?” Kealey asked.

  “They don’t not suspect her,” Bishop said. “That’s one of the things I’m going to have to find out.”

  Kealey leaned back into the seat to think about what Bishop had said. He fell asleep instead. The next thing he knew, they were arriving at Penn Station.

  CHAPTER 21

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  New York’s Penn Station was a bunker that used to be a palace. When the original station was ripped down and replaced with the new Penn Station and Madison Square Garden—under the theory that commuters would be more inclined to go to events if they were held right above trains to Long Island and New Jersey—the city lost a glorious and majestic landmark. That architectural disaster, in 1963, was one of the triggers for the creation of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

  The current station was a pair of below-ground hives without character or interest. Since the attacks of 2001, there had been a permanent presence of military reservists there, in addition to the police. Kealey respected their mission, while at the same time seeing hole after hole in the security. It was no different in Washington or at virtually any other train station in the country. Bags went unexamined, were not even spot-checked; tickets to board were glanced at cursorily by conductors as people moved down escalators to the tracks; dozens of shops received deliveries, probably daily, which might not contain bagels or I HEART NEW YORK T-shirts or magazines. This, in addition to the fact that tracks were accessible from the outside before trains passed under the Hudson and East Rivers. Kealey guessed that the backgrounds of porters and employees were only superficially examined.

  Of course, as the NYPD and Homeland Security knew, applying manpower to what law enforcement called those “open doors” would be a large commitment of resources with low-yield results. The lone bombers, the homegrown terrorists, would invariably find a way to slip through. The cops and soldiers were eyes on-site for aberrant behavior, and that was the best that could be done. Kealey knew what law enforcement also knew: that the al-Qaidas of the world, the real terrorists, were looking to strike in ways that the West hadn’t considered or had not yet faced. That was the unfortunate nature of this war: the only way to catch them was on the intel side, with HUMNIT and ELINT, the people who infiltrated enemy groups or watched their movements from places of concealment, the digital eavesdroppers who listened for cell phone calls and watched computer posts.

  It was for all those reasons that Kealey was not entirely surprised by what happened as they left the station.

  He and Bishop were booked in rooms across Seventh Avenue, at Hotel Pennsylvania. Scaffolding had been erected along the Thirty-Third Street side of the building, where workers were doing the initial prep work before dismantling the hotel, which was to be replaced by the city’s third largest building.

  The sidewalk was jammed with commuters and tourists, some waiting for taxis at the stand to the left, others going to work in the city’s once-thriving garment district. The first muted crack came after a woman had been spun 180 degrees just a few steps in front of Kealey. He had been unaware of her back, her yellow jacket, until she spun with a raw red hole in her forehead and dropped to the sidewalk, on top of her shoulder bag.

  A second crack followed a cabbie’s head exploding inside his vehicle as he pulled from the curb. The car, with its screaming occupants, turned into Seventh Avenue and collided with a hollow crunch against several other vehicles.

  From the first shot Kealey was on high alert, his instincts registering the attack before his mind had processed it. He pulled Bishop down flat, crouched for a moment, then ran to a trash can several steps ahead. He pulled down a young man in a business suit who was standing beside it; pieces of the man’s heart blew out his back as Kealey acted.

  This is for us, he thought angrily. The cab was to block traffic, but the deaths were to show that the victims could just as easily have been Kealey or Bishop. The gunman was a helluva marksman.

  Even though Kealey realized where the sniper was situated, there was nothing he could do about it. Even if he could get to his bag—he’d left it beside Bishop—his handgun didn’t have this kind of range. The shots were from very high up.

  Cops were gathering, and as soon as the first two went down, the rest withdrew to the safety of the station to await armored reinforcement.

  Kealey knew the gunman would leave before choppers could arrive. He had to get to the hotel. The killer might be expecting that but did not desire it; otherwise, the shots would have been aimed to Kealey’s rear, a signal he should head forward.

  Sirens broke through the terrified shrieks and sobs and the honking horns that were all around him. Traffic was trying to maneuver around the disabled taxi, to pull to the curb or down one of the side streets. The police and emergency units were converging from all directions. His ear attuned to them, Kealey heard police radios rasping behind him.

  The gunfire had stopped. People were beginning to rise as a terrible calm spread across the scene. They were in pockets behind the concrete walls of Madison Square Garden or behind the newspaper stand or the line of cabs. They were alone, rushing to get back into the station or into the arena.

  And t
hen a flurry of awful gunfire cut through them. It came from the same place, from a bolt-action weapon, judging from the delay, a slashing death that took down bodies alternately to the left and right of Kealey.

  The gunman was swinging from side to side, sighting and taking down targets in a heartbeat. It was formidable.

  Then everything was silent again. Kealey knew the killer was done. He hadn’t had time to get his gun from his bag, but Bishop was ahead of him: he had assumed the former agent was carrying one and had retrieved it. He flipped it over.

  Kealey acknowledged this with a hasty salute as he tucked the Glock in his belt. He pulled out his shirt to conceal the weapon so he wouldn’t be shot by police. Then he ran through the now-halted traffic, Bishop close behind.

  Yasmin climbed through the window she had broken to reach the scaffolding. She tossed aside the blanket she’d pulled from the bed to conceal herself, sidestepped the occupant—a young flight attendant whose spinal cord she had cut from behind—and stuffed her XM2010 Enhanced Sniper Rifle into a vinyl wardrobe bag. She had already donned the woman’s blouse and skirt while waiting for her audience to arrive from Washington. Cutting the woman’s neck in the back had prevented her from bleeding out on the garments. A deeper cut to get through the sinew and vertebrae, but as soon as the cord was cut, the woman fell, quite lifeless.

  Yasmin passed the bed on which she had dropped the key stolen from the housekeeper. The woman lay dead in a hall utility closet, the cheap pen bearing the Hotel Pennsylvania logo that was plucked from her cleaning cart still stuck a good 4 inches into her carotid artery. Less mess would have been ideal, but there just hadn’t been enough time. She glanced at the mirror to muss her hair and assume a look of panic, then grabbed her garment bag and rushed into the hall. Security here was little more than a few cameras, and it didn’t matter if they had captured her likeness. They would know who was responsible for this.

  That was the point, she thought—though the thought was not her own. All the young woman had to do was keep from being caught.