by David Archer
Ken rolled his eyes, and shook his head at Sam. "Okay, have you bothered to take a look at who's in the White House right now? The number one Islamic sympathizer in the entire freaking country is currently living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in DC. How do you think he got there?"
Sam stared at him. "Are you trying to tell me that the President of the United States owes Chandler favors?"
"What I'm telling you is that if you made that phone call you were just talking about, Chandler would hear about it before you managed to put the receiver down. Don't you remember the fuss a while back about just where the president was actually born? How do you think so many things got covered up and whitewashed? At least two federal judges ruled that the evidence showed that the president was not a natural born US citizen, and yet he's still in office. A political campaign can't arrange things like backdated birth certificates and modified school records, but the CIA can. Are you catching on yet?"
Sam looked at him for another moment, then simply turned and walked out the door. When Ken followed, he found Sam shoving his bag behind the seat in the Corvette, so he did the same with his own and then got into the passenger seat and shut the door. Sam slid in behind the wheel, put the key in the ignition and cranked the big engine up. He put the shifter in reverse, eased out the clutch and backed away from the room, then shifted into first and headed for the highway.
There was a small restaurant near the exit, and Sam pointed. "Want some breakfast?" he asked.
Ken nodded. "You know what? That sounds like a good idea. After all, it could be our last meal. We might as well enjoy it, right?"
Sam didn't answer, but downshifted and turned the car to enter the parking lot. He pulled up beside the building, shut it down and set the parking brake before getting out.
The two of them walked in and chose a booth near the window, where Sam could keep an eye on the car and Ken could watch for the death squad. They both ordered coffee from the bored waitress, and they both ordered the steak and eggs that was the house specialty, and waited without talking until their orders arrived. The food was surprisingly good, and Sam grunted in appreciation.
"Well," he said, "at least, if it turns out to be our last meal, it was a good one."
Ken grinned at him and nodded once. "It's actually better than I expected it to be," he said. "Pretty darn tasty, to be honest. I've eaten in so many restaurants in so many places around the world, that sometimes I forget what a decent meal tastes like. This certainly isn't bad."
They finished eating, and walked back out to the Corvette. They were just about to open the doors when a car pulled into the parking lot in a hurry, its tires squealing, and four men jumped out. Sam and Ken reacted almost as one, spinning to face the car and drawing their weapons in a single movement.
The four men who had exited the car suddenly froze, seeing a pair of automatic pistols pointed at them. None of them was armed, and the panic in their faces told the two instantly that they were just some guys in a hurry to get breakfast, and not a group of CIA assassins. Both men holstered their weapons, muttered apologies and got into the car, and Sam quickly drove them away. In the rear view mirror, he could see the four men staring at them and for the first time cursed the fact that his car was rare and noticeable.
"Well, we scared those poor guys half to death," he said. "Think that will lead Chandler's people to us, somehow?"
"No doubt about it," Ken replied. "Those boys will be calling the police, and anything to do with you or me is undoubtedly flagged to get Chandler's attention. If they got your tag number, then he'll know we were here in fifteen minutes. Maybe less. I think you'd better take the next exit, and start driving randomly for a while. They're going to be expecting us to be heading for DC, and of course we are, but that doesn't mean we can't take a detour to throw them off our trail."
Sam nodded, and when the next exit appeared he eased up the ramp. It ended at a road that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, a two-lane blacktop that only went north or south. Sam took a left and headed north, and because they seemed to be out in the boondocks, he opened up the big engine and raced the car up the road at more than a hundred miles an hour. When he saw a town approaching a few miles up the road, he dropped his speed back to the limit.
The road he was on met a state highway in the middle of town, so Sam took another left, actually heading away from their destination. Once they got out of town, he opened the car up again, and only minutes later came upon another highway headed north again. He took that turn, as well, and followed that road for about twenty miles before turning east once more.
"There aren't enough roads in this part of the country for me to throw them off for long," he said, "but maybe that gave us a little bit of an edge. This road should take us close to where we're going, and we can figure out the last bit of the trip when we get into the city." He glanced over at Ken, who simply nodded. "So how are we going to get close to this guy if I can ask? I mean, you do have a plan, right?"
"I've got several," Ken said, "and which one we use depends on what's going wrong at the moment. One thing you can be certain of, no matter how we try to plan, Chandler is going to be one step ahead of us. You see, he knows exactly what we are out to do, which is put a bullet in his brain. He'll be thinking through how he would plan to do that if he were in our shoes, so whatever plan we come up with, he will have already thought out. Now, that means that we better have more than one plan, so when one starts to go wrong we can simply switch to another. Make sense?"
Sam rolled his eyes. "It makes so much sense that it actually scares me," he said. "Somehow, I think I'd be happier if I didn't understand you at all. But what I was really trying to ask, is what our first step should be when we get to the city. Can you tell me?"
"Yep," Ken said. "Our first step is to stay alive. If I had to guess, I'd say there are probably two dozen armed men trying to track us down right now, and half of them are in that city keeping their eyes on the most likely approaches they think we would use. The mistake they're making, however, is in thinking that we're going to try to get to Chandler in his office. Now, granted, I've done some incredible things in my career, but I'm not Tom Cruise, and this isn't Mission: Impossible. Maybe in the movies, some super spook could slip right into CIA headquarters, but I don't see it happening in real life, and certainly not with two guys whose faces have targets painted on them. No, what we will have to do is draw Chandler out, away from his office and away from his goons. In order to do that, we've got to have something he wants. And it will have to be something he wants badly enough to risk his life to get it."
Sam's eyebrows went up a notch. "And we've got something he wants that bad?"
Ken smiled at him. "We don't," he said, "but you do."
Another notch. "I do? Care to enlighten me on that?"
"Sure," Ken said. "You have my head. And you're willing to serve it to Chandler on a platter!"
2
Ron Thomas tapped on his boss's door and waited until he heard the old man inside call out for him to enter. One thing you never did was walk in on Harry Winslow without his consent; those who did so had a tendency to end up dead.
"Ron," the old fellow said in his southern drawl, "what might you have for me this morning?"
"We got an ID on one of the bodies from your house," Ron said without preamble. "Somebody didn't do a good enough job of scrubbing his past, and we got a hit on his fingerprints. He's an ex-Marine named Robert Hawthorne. He was recon, with an impressive body count in Afghanistan. No family, no living relatives, and just the kind of guy the company likes to go after for wet work."
"And have you anything that ties him to Grayson Chandler? Any kind of link at all? Knowing the name of a man I just killed doesn't help me unless I can link him to the bastard who sent him after me."
Ron shook his head. "I've got Kathy working on it, and Jeff is digging into it as well, but so far there's nothing. That's why they use guys like him, so there won't be any connections. Unless somebod
y slipped up even worse than they did in not clearing his prints out of all the computers, we’re not going to find anything to connect him to Chandler. Harry, you know that, so don't get mad at me for not being able to do what can't be done."
Harry chuckled. "Gotta keep my top man on his toes," he said. "How do you think I learned enough to get where I am today? It was from an old scoundrel just like me. I'm just passing on the same kind of training I received. One day you'll thank me."
Ron grinned and nodded. "Probably," he said. "Anything I can do for you this morning?"
Harry finally looked up at him. "Yes," he said. "Send Eduardo out for some doughnuts, but not the ones we usually get. There's got to be someplace in this city we haven't already gone, so pick one of those. And have somebody bring me another cup of coffee, mine's just about empty."
Ron rolled his eyes. "Well, there's no sense in that, now, is there? I'll get you a cup, be right back." He turned and walked out of the office, and went to the break room they had set up when they moved into the new building. He took down one of the big Styrofoam cups that were stacked on the counter, and filled it with coffee from the urn that was marked “Battery Acid.” Only he and Harry could stand to drink the coffee out of that one, because it was so strong that if they left the spoon in it for a couple of days, it would dissolve. At least, that was the rumor.
He carried the cup back to Harry's office and knocked on the door again. Even if you were bringing a gift, you still didn't walk in on Harry unannounced. Harry told him to come in, and he set the cup on the edge of Harry's desk. The old man opened the door without looking, reached in and took out what looked like a stirring stick which he stuck into the coffee. He held it there for a couple of seconds, then pulled it out and looked at the end. It was still white, so he dropped it into the trashcan, then picked up the cup and took a sip.
"Good stuff," he said. Ron knew that was his dismissal, so he turned and left the office again. He stopped at the security room and asked Eduardo to go and get the doughnuts. "Harry's a little paranoid again," he said, "what with Chandler after him, so run over into Aurora. I think there's a couple of places on the main drag there, so get a couple dozen regular glazed, and then a couple dozen assorted. That ought to cover us." He reached into a pocket and counted off a couple of twenties, which he gave to Eduardo. "Don't forget to bring me a receipt."
"No problem, chief," the big Hispanic said. "You want anything else while I'm out?"
Ron shook his head and headed back to his own office. This place was a far cry from the little two-man operation he'd run for the last couple of years, while Harry was in deep cover as a drug lord. Only a few of the local cops had ever even heard of him, which only went to show how well Ron and his assistant, Jeff, had done their jobs. Ron had enjoyed seeing the looks on the faces of those cops when it was revealed that Harry was the Homeland Security agent who had been instrumental in thwarting the most devastating terror attack our country had ever known. Now that Harry was running the HS office in Denver, he had a natural budget to work with, a real staff that included genuine agents and intelligence analysts, and a very nice office building only a stone's throw from the state capital. It was nice to feel like you were finally getting the respect you deserved, Ron mused.
He sat down at his desk, turned to the computer monitor and began scrolling through the reports his people were constantly posting to their internal server. Ron was something of a legend in the agency, already, because he always seemed to be right on top of whatever his people were doing. So far, no one above him had caught on to the fact that he required all of his analysts to keep notes on the computer of everything they read, did, or even thought about the information that came through their hands. What kind of supervisor would he be, he wondered, if he hadn't left himself a way to look at those notes?
What it boiled down to was that he was basically looking over all of their shoulders at the same time, so that as soon as one of them made an observation, it was available for him to read on his monitor. It was an incredibly simple system, but it worked. When he had shown it to Harry, the old man had patted him on the shoulder and said, "Thank God you're on our side."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Ron asked him, and Harry smiled.
"It just occurs to me that if Hitler had had this little system of yours, he would have seen all of his strengths and weaknesses long before the allies had a chance to use them against him. I suspect that, had that been the case, we'd probably all be speaking German about now." The old man had simply turned and walked away without another word, and Ron wondered if he had just been handed a compliment or an insult. He never did figure out for sure which one it was.
Islamabad — something going on with Achmed Tubal's group there. Sent request for clarification.
David Akbar in London is meeting with investors from Syria later this week. He's looking for funding for some new weapon designs; we better keep an eye on this.
Denver international, security officers there say there's a discrepancy in the number of passengers that have passed through the airport in the last forty-eight hours. Flight records versus debarkation counts are showing that eight people got off of flights that they never bought tickets for. Three flights involved, originating from Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. Three extra people on each of the first two, and two on the one from Miami. Somehow they all boarded the flights without passes, and were ignored in the pre-takeoff count. The flight attendants are being flagged for questioning. This sounds a lot like the way we get people into other countries, by bribing or seducing the flight attendants into ignoring our people in the pre-flights. Considering the current uproar with people trying to kill the old man, I'm going to recommend sending our own people out to sit in on those interviews.
That last entry had come from Ginger Martin, one of the girls that Ron himself had recruited. She had been busted by the FBI a few months before, when they determined that she was planning some of the most daring daylight bank robberies in recent history. She had a knack for spotting patterns in security personnel behavior, and could exploit those patterns to create plans that allowed a crew to get into and out of bank vaults without being seen except on video, and then only when it was too late. That crew had been run by her uncle, who had somehow realized just how talented she was with computers and had been forcing her to help him plan these crimes.
Under the circumstances, Ron had been able, with Harry's help, to get her charges dismissed on the condition that she work for HS for at least five years. Her security clearances were limited, and she was on twenty-four-hour monitoring, which meant that all of her cell phone conversations were recorded and analyzed, and there were cameras and microphones hidden in her car and her apartment. Because of the way she had come to work for the government, she was considered a high risk, and so every move she made was under scrutiny. Fortunately, she didn't know that, so she was able to go on with a fairly normal life. As long as she didn't end up dating the wrong person, or offer to sell information to someone, she'd probably be fine.
She tapped on his door at that moment, and he looked up and motioned for her to come in. Unlike Harry's office, his was surrounded by glass. Ginger stepped inside and closed the door behind her, then took the chair in front of his desk.
"What's up, girl?" Ron asked. He was fairly sure he knew, but he wanted to hear her say it.
"Something funny out of the airport," she said. "According to their security office, we've had eight invisible men fly in on flights in the last couple of days. I bet a couple of them would be the ones Harry took out, but that means there are six more wandering around town. My guess is that some of them are probably looking for the old man, wouldn't you think? They put out an order for the flight attendants to be questioned about this, and I think we should send someone out to sit in on the interview."
Ron looked at her for a moment. "Who would you send, if it were up to you?" He asked.
"If it were up to me, I'd send me, of course. I think I'd spot a
lie faster than anyone else, and I'm certain that I could figure out exactly how they pulled this off. In my mind, there's only one of three answers. Bribery, drugs or seduction."
Ron cocked his head to the right, and grinned. "You’re forgetting blackmail," he said. "A threat of some unbearable consequence can make people do things they never do under normal circumstances."
Ginger shook her head. "No I'm not," she said, "because extortion is nothing but another form of bribery. You can bribe someone by offering them something they want, or with the opportunity to avoid something they would consider unpleasant. Either way, they make the choice that they consider most beneficial to themselves. It’s still bribery, no matter how you look at it."
Ron considered what she had said for a moment, and then nodded. "You're right, of course," he said. "Not very many people would be capable of seeing it that way, but you did. I'm impressed. When is the interview scheduled?"
"Tomorrow morning, 10 am. They're going to have all of the flight attendants gathered up together, and interview them one at a time. They had to reshuffle some of their schedules to get them all back to Denver, but their security office was pretty adamant about it."
"Yeah, I would be, too. Okay, you're on this. I'll put in an order for you to sit in on the interview, and to record it with both video and audio. You may want to go back over it later, so that way you can. Oh, and incidentally, good work."
Ginger grinned, and Ron thought he saw a hint of a blush, as well. It was really too bad that the agency didn't allow dating amongst its employees, because he suspected that she kind of liked him. Oh well, rules were rules. Besides, he sort of had a girlfriend. At least, when she wasn't mad at him for missing dates or being ridiculously late.
The morning dragged on, with good points and bad ones. Eduardo got back with the doughnuts, which was always a high point around the office, but then one of the secretaries got a call that her daughter had gotten sick at school. The lady wasn't essential to their operations, so Ron told her to go ahead and leave.