The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller

by Andrew Britton

  “If you say so—”

  “I do. My brain is like an old adding machine and we end up in the same place—your instinct and my thought. Only you get there faster. It’s mildly annoying.”

  Her little smile and tight hug on his arm didn’t soften . . . much less the frustration she obviously felt.

  “But I do the process less completely than you do,” he said. “And I’m not looking to cure someone. Usually, I’m deciding whether or not to shoot them. I create an outline of some person or event. You assemble a treatise. I form instant impressions, you conduct careful studies. There’s a big difference in what we do.“

  She liked that. He could tell by the way her mouth relaxed; her hold on his arm relaxed just a little, and she looked down. She always did that when a topic was done. That was something else that came with profiling: it made dating easier.

  No, Kealey thought, I am happy to be here now, doing what I’m doing, not rushing to someone or someplace in crisis. Which was exactly why, a few hours later, astzatziki sauce dripped from pork to the napkin on his knee, coating his fingers, he was not surprised when his cell phone finally did vibrate. Fate disfavored the contented.

  Kealey glanced at the number as he chewed.

  “Fletcher Clarke,” he said, answering Allison’s querying look.

  “Does he know you are in D.C?”

  “I didn’t tell him,” Kealey said somewhat uneasily since Clarke rarely called for social reasons. But he unlocked the phone and answered the call.

  “General, you’re on speaker, so don’t say anything sensitive.”

  “I called your office at the university, and they said you were in town for a few days. Exactly where are you?” Clarke asked.

  “Not far from the foot of the Great Emancipator, on the edge of the Reflecting Pool—trying to decide whether I should jump in.”

  “Not just now,” Clarke said.

  “I’m listening, General.”

  “Your Uncle Largo—are you close?”

  “Well, I guess you could say sort of. I don’t see him much because he lives on Long Island, about a half hour by train outside New York City.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “About a decade ago at my aunt’s funeral. Why? What’s up?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get to the White House,” he said.

  Kealey hesitated. Clarke heard it.

  “Come on, Ryan. You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

  “It always is. When do you need me?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Scale of one-to-ten—”

  “Multiple converging lines. An eight with a possible ticking clock.”

  “Who else?”

  “Breen, the President, a physicist on her way—and Carlson.”

  “Aw, jeez.”

  “You don’t have to work with him, Ryan—just listen to whatever he has to say.”

  “Why? It’s usually too cautious and too late.”

  “Ryan? We need you here.”

  Kealey looked at Allison. She understood it was serious. Kealey stuck the rest of the gyro in his mouth and picked up his can of Sprite Zero.

  “On my way now,” said, rising. “And I’m sorry, General.”

  “For?”

  “That ‘always is’ crack. It wasn’t aimed at you. I’m just—”

  “Tired. I know,” Clarke said. “Me, too.”

  Kealey said he’d see him in a few minutes and hung up. He looked at Allison. “Sorry, babe.”

  “Hey, if you don’t want to be alone, you don’t date a doctor, a firefighter, or Superman.”

  “I’m off to find a phone booth.” He smiled and kissed her.

  “Mmm. Oniony.”

  “You want to power walk with me?”

  “No—I think I’ll sit here for a while and savor. It was a good weekend.”

  He kissed her again. “The best. I’ll call you later.”

  He saw in her eyes that she didn’t really believe that, and she wasn’t wrong. When you went to the White House on business, you were either out in a few minutes or stuck in a black hole where time vanished.

  It was just about a quarter mile to the White House, and he walked briskly along Constitution Avenue NW, sipping his soda, and trying to imagine what national emergency could possibly involve his secretive Uncle Largo.

  Whatever it was, he found himself uncharacteristically eager to get to the meeting and find out. He tossed the empty can in the trash and picked up the pace as he hurried along 17th Street NW, past the Ellipse toward the White House.

  “We need to know what the damn thing smells like.”

  Kealey sat in the Oval Office with General Clarke, Admiral Breen, the President, Secretary of Homeland Security Max Carlson, and Secretary of State Jeff Dryfoos. It was Carlson who had made that colorful declaration.

  “After nearly sixty years in the ice, I’d say it smells pretty fresh,” Kealey said.

  “Too fresh,” Clarke added.

  “And what about this sinking?” the President asked. “Was the blast on the frigate self-inflicted?”

  The men were seated around a glass-topped coffee table in the middle of the room. The President was at one end, Breen at the other. Clarke and Kealey were sitting side by side, sharing a folder of gathered intelligence. Carlson was across from them. The white folder, boldly printed “Top Secret” in red across the top on front, contained the relevant section of Captain Kealey’s transcript, data records of the Arctic coordinates going back a quarter century, photos of the Iranian frigate taken as it cruised international waters prior to the encounter—and now printed images, just brought in by the President’s chief of staff, emailed to Carlson, showing the last seconds in the career of the Jamaran.

  “The explosion took place aft, in the weapons bay,” Breen said. “Not in a series, as if a warhead had detonated and then took out others, but in a single blast.”

  “So, intentional,” the President said.

  “Clearly.”

  The President’s executive secretary knocked on the door and announced Rayhan Jafari. The President waved her in. Dressed in beige slacks and a white blouse, the young woman stepped in. The President continued waving her over. He indicated an empty chair beside Admiral Breen, who was looking at a laptop to his right.

  “We just had a flyover by a Seahawk from the USS Harry S. Truman,” Breen said as the woman sat. “That was twenty-one minutes ago, an hour and five minutes after the explosion was detected. Chopper crew reported slightly elevated levels of radiation in the sea.”

  “What is ‘slightly elevated’?” the President asked.

  “The raw readings are 400 nm, up from 280 registered on the ship—”

  “Those are nanometers—ultraviolet from the sun,” Rayhan said. “That uptick would be from a lack of cloud cover, not from plutonium.”

  Breen’s jawline stiffened as he continued. “The seawater also had a radiation level of .2 pc.” He stopped and waited.

  “That’s definitely from the ship—or whatever the ship had onboard,” she said. “Since the Japanese tsunami, all oceanic radiation has been elevated slightly. This reading is double that level.”

  “Would you say the object was still onboard?” the President asked.

  “No, sir. I would expect to see somewhere in the neighborhood of ten picocuries per gram for exposed plutonium, even underwater.”

  “What impact would that have on a human being?” Kealey asked.

  “They would die,” she replied. “Quickly.”

  Clarke and Breen looked at the President at the same time.

  “Suicide,” Carlson said. “Mass suicide.”

  There was a moment of silence, broken by the President. “But after the plutonium had been handed off.” He shuffled through the papers, stopped at a satellite image. “By this hot spot in the fog.”

  “That is not a radiation signature,” Rayhan said, looking across at the image.

&
nbsp; “Heat,” Clarke said. “Oh, I’m sorry—Ryan Kealey, this is Rayhan Jafari, my radiation expert. Rayhan, Mr. Kealey is formerly of the CIA, now—”

  “Not,” Kealey interrupted, smiling at the woman. “Happy to meet you.”

  “The same.”

  “So we have a source of plutonium. We have it leaving the frigate, but we don’t know where it went,” the President said.

  “Sir, we’re scanning and coordinating data now,” Carlson said. “Satellite, radar, and radio chatter between commercial vessels. We’ll find it.”

  “ ‘It,’ ” the President said, flipping back through the folder. “Ryan, what about your uncle? Do you think he can help us here?”

  “Mr. President, I sincerely do not know. Uncle Largo has never discussed his wartime service with me, even when I asked.”

  “This is national security, not the Kealey Thanksgiving table,” Carlson angrily pointed out.

  Kealey smirked. “And yet—we have turkey.”

  “Don’t!” Clarke snapped.

  Carlson glared. The President ignored them, as he did all intramural squabbles, checking the message alert on his laptop. Kealey caught Rayhan’s little smile. That made the rebuke tolerable.

  “Sorry, Mr. Secretary,” Kealey said.

  “You do understand that we’re concerned with national security and untold lives here, not your feelings.”

  “I understand it as well as you do, Mr. Carlson—”

  “Back on topic,” Clarke said angrily.

  “—but I have asked my uncle, man to man, to talk about what he did for the OSS. It’s something I wanted to know. He has always refused. Not declined: shook his head and said no more. I think secrecy is so deeply bred into him he literally couldn’t do it.”

  “Would you get him to try?” Clarke asked in a hard voice that was more of a command. Since Kealey no longer worked for the government, the general had to couch it with the lightest dusting of deference.

  “Of course, sir,” Kealey said. “I’m just not clear what we’re looking for. His debrief seems pretty thorough.”

  “He’s—what, late eighties?” Breen inquired.

  “That’s about right,” Kealey said. “I wouldn’t count on age to have—what’s the expression? ‘Withered him’?”

  “ ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,’ ” Rayhan said. “Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra. He helped me to learn English.”

  The President looked up. “Thank you for restoring civility to this meeting.”

  The young woman smiled slightly, blushed, and looked down at Carlson’s file.

  “I’ll check to see if he’s home—” offered Kealey.

  “He’s home, Mr. Kealey,” the President said. He indicated the laptop. “An FBI field agent is mowing his lawn right now.”

  Kealey nodded. “I’ll grab my toothbrush and leave at once.”

  “I’m wondering if it would help to have Ms. Jafari with you,” the President asked.

  Kealey regarded her. “I think most men would rather talk to her than to me.”

  Carlson was professional enough not to comment.

  The President regarded her. “Would you mind? You might hear or ask something Mr. Kealey could miss.”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  The meeting broke up quickly, Carlson remaining behind and the President’s chief of staff arranging for a car to take Kealey and Rayhan to get their belongings and then to Quantico. From there, a Marine Corps helicopter would ferry the two to New York.

  Clarke buttonholed Kealey in the corridor outside the Oval Office. They stepped away from the earshot of the Secret Service agent stationed there.

  “Does everything have to be a battle getting to the actual battle—” Clarke asked in a loud whisper.

  “It’s how I stay in shape.”

  “And a joke?”

  Kealey looked down. He was looking at his shoes but what he saw was a park with Allison Dearborn and a sense of peace. “If I didn’t jab at these guys I’d kill them.”

  “We’re not here to be best buddies,” Clarke said. “We’re here to protect the nation.”

  “These guys? They’re here to wield power. Against enemies if they can, against allies if they can’t. Sharing information—horse hockey. The unified intelligence services made a big intelligence bureaucracy with fewer seats on top. Carlson’s king of his hill and a big part of his job is to swat at guys like me who help elevate guys like you. You respect the people in the field, General, because you’ve been there. Carlson’s just a user and a self-promoting bureaucrat.”

  “With whom I defend our shores.” Clarke pulled Kealey closer to the wall, his voice a hoarse, conspiratorial whisper. “I told you I was tired, Ryan, but that’s not the half of it. We’ve thrown this big K-rail of Homeland Security against enemy traffic, but instead of fighting for the win, the services are fighting to get their mouths to the trickle-down flow of intel. That only allows us to flex certain muscles. Plus I’m doing double the work.” He jerked his head toward the Oval Office. “I have to play the diplomat at every meeting. I don’t tell. I suggest. I don’t require, I requisition. We’re all doing that.”

  “You’ve got Streaming Intelligence—”

  “Yeah, with a couple of kids, one of them a freaking genius, basically sitting on their hands and watching computer programs do all the work. Programs written by one group, shared by all of us, non-actionable without going through the proper channels. I tell you, Ryan, my damn hands are tied in a way that they never were in the field. All that bonhomie after September 11—it got big-governmentized the way everything does. It’s enough to make me a MiLF.

  “Come again?”

  “Military Libertarian Fanatic,” Clarke said. “Breen and I came up with that.”

  Kealey’s mouth twisted. “And I’m a joker?”

  “I know, but we needed something to smile about in these sweatbox sessions.” Clarke sighed. “It’s tough to stay focused, Ryan. I wouldn’t tell that to anyone but you because I know what you’ve accomplished. That’s why you keep getting dragged back in. I need someone I can hand off to.”

  Kealey wished he didn’t understand; it would be easier to turn Clarke or Andrews or any of these guys down whenever they called. But he knew what Clarke was facing here, what the country was facing “out there,” and so he kept coming back.

  “I wonder how he did it?” Kealey asked.

  “Who?”

  “Uncle Largo,” Kealey said.

  “We beat the enemy that was on his plate,” Clarke said. “He probably felt the Reds were the next guy’s problem.”

  Clarke wished Kealey well, then went to confer with Breen in the admiral’s West Wing office. Clarke understood that Kealey’s independence was what made him so effective, but his outspokenness had always been an abrasive part of their relationship dating back to when they first met in the Army. Military men like Clarke and Breen at least had some schooling in the essentials of détente; civilians like Carlson did not; and Kealey had simply never cared.

  Kealey and Rayhan followed an intern toward the West Wing exit, where a black sedan with smoky windows was already waiting.

  “I’ve never flown anything but commercial,” Rayhan said excitedly.

  “It’s convenient,” Kealey said. “Best thing is, no nanny flight attendants.

  The first stop was Kealey’s hotel room across the street. Even though he was here on vacation, out of habit, he always had a bag ready and was out in less than two minutes.

  “You’ve obviously done this before. I guess at home you don’t have pets or plants,” Rayhan remarked after he’d placed the backpack in the trunk.

  “When I had my house in Maine, I had a garden. I found a three-legged box turtle in that garden one day. All of them—the turtle and the garden—died within days of one another. And I was home the entire time.”

  “I hope you did not attribute that to bad karma or a touch of death.”

  “Why do
you hope that? Worried about me already?”

  “I am worried about myself,” she said. “Whatever happens I will be in close proximity to you.”

  Kealey laughed. “No, it wasn’t that. I attribute it to reality: not taking an injured turtle to a vet and having a brown thumb.”

  “I am relieved,” she said. “What did you bring with you? What should I bring?”

  “Bare essentials for a day or two. And your passport.”

  “All of that for a trip to New York?”

  He grinned. “I was never a Boy Scout—in any sense of the word—but I always subscribed to their motto: Be prepared.”

  She understood.

  “How long have you worked for the DNI?” Kealey asked, wanting to know more about his traveling companion.

  “Nearly two years. It is a perfect home for a Farsi-speaking physicist.”

  Kealey didn’t ask her how often Tehran tried to get her to work for them. He suspected that apart from being an asset as an employee, she was probably unwitting bait for several counterespionage agencies. He would be shocked if eyes weren’t on her round-the-clock, if her electronics were not being watched, if everyone of Middle Eastern descent whom she knew, contacted, or who contacted her weren’t being observed—closely.

  The young woman’s eager reserve was a welcome distraction. They could not discuss the matter at hand—not until they were onboard the chopper, whose flight crew would have the appropriate security clearance. So during the comfortable backseat drive they talked about her background, her training—she received her Ph.D. from Oxford—and how she came to the U.S. He had pinned her as a long-time London resident from her accent and wondered why British intelligence hadn’t sought her out.

  “They did, but I felt I should be on my own,” she said. “My parents are very traditional. The pressure to marry is unrelenting.”

  He left the comment alone. It was a familiar story with few variations. She asked about him. He told her how he had a master’s degree in business from Duke, ROTC’d his way to first lieutenant on graduation, and immediately signed up with the Green Berets. He made major in eight years and would have been happy to serve his twenty—until a traitor killed everyone in his outfit and left Kealey for dead. After months of recuperation, Kealey tied up that inside job in such a way as to leave him two options: court-martial or resignation. He opted to quit and was immediately scooped up by the CIA.