Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel

by William S. Cohen

  Once again Oxley was dragging him back into government service. This time, though, there’d be no one to protect him or back him up. Out on a limb in the dark. He’d been there many times before. But this was different.

  Oxley. He was always an all-take-and-no-give man. He was the President and always the smartest guy in the room. Everybody owed him their absolute fealty and respect. He demanded it as an entitlement. Nothing ever bounced back. Nothing ever shook his self-confidence, a character trait that one pundit called his egotistical self-absorption. Others just considered him arrogant.

  In politics, there’s a price to be paid for hubris and conceit. Oxley’s party had been pummeled in the most recent national elections. The losses were unprecedented. The public wanted to bring Oxley down to earth-bound levels. And while he wasn’t on the ballot, those politically affiliated with him were. In voting against them, people were voting against him.

  Most of Oxley’s cabinet officials were bailing out of a sinking ship, to the surprise of Oxley, who expected everyone to go down with him. He insisted on loyalty, but he had shown none to others.

  And now this, whatever it was.

  * * *

  Falcone assumed that the mission had something to do with Hamilton. A couple of days ago he had received a call from Akis Christakos, who asked for the Sullivan & Ford files on Hamilton.

  “Christo, what’s up?” he now remembered asking.

  “This is just a routine change-of-counsel request, Sean,” Christakos had said, his tone suggesting that he wanted to stay lawyer-to-lawyer within professional bounds.

  “How about lunch?” Falcone asked.

  “Not for a while, Sean. Lot to do.”

  “Okay,” Falcone said, surprised by the turn-off from the usually ebullient Christakos. “As you might expect, Christo, some of the files are in FBI hands. Hamilton’s original attorney was Paul Sprague, who resigned. He mostly handled SpaceMine matters. The FBI also took Harold Davidson’s files. As you know, Hal was killed in the shootings here.”

  “I’m well aware of all that, Sean. Just send me whatever you have that refers to Mr. Hamilton as a Sullivan & Ford client.”

  “Sure thing, Christo. Hope to see you soon,” Falcone said. He had been tempted to make a crack about the way Hamilton ran through lawyers. But he realized that Christakos was in no mood for levity.

  A short time later, a messenger had arrived and Falcone signed off on the transfer of the Hamilton files.

  * * *

  Hamilton. Falcone drank deeply and felt an immediate sensation of heat filling his throat and moving up into his head. Picking up a remote control, he flipped on the sound system that was already keyed to his favorite iTunes album by Enigma. The band’s name seemed particularly appropriate at this moment. Secretive. Shadowy. Mysterious. The allure of a hypnotic melody pulling him into the dark, into what was most likely to be an impossible and probably disastrous mission.

  Hamilton. Last I heard he was in Moscow, Falcone thought, going back over what he knew and what he suspected about an operation that was supposed to give Oxley deniability. What did Oxley hope to do once he got Hamilton back? Put him on trial for murder? Give him a full pardon? Tell the world that Hamilton had put a large asteroid on a collision course with Earth? Or maybe it would be on a course that would end with a big hole in the United States. Maybe Oxley was thinking about the end of the world—and how that would work out for him.

  The questions and the wicked thoughts about Oxley continued to drop into Falcone’s mind like crows on fresh road kill. “Remove the man from where he is.” Just like that. “Remove the man from where he is.”

  Falcone had been involved with some rendition operations in Nigeria and Somalia. Special Forces men and women worked with the CIA on some of the renditions. By now a lot of them have retired, he thought. And the private security guys with that kind of ops experience are pretty much out of work since we’ve pulled almost everybody out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Finally, he decided he would call Quinlan and tell him, “No dice. Get some other damn fool to carry out a mission impossible.…”

  Falcone finished off what was left of his drink and returned to the bar to replenish it. On his way back to the chair, he glanced at the photograph of Karen and Kyle and felt a familiar wave of darkness coming. He had abandoned them when he went off to Vietnam to satisfy what he claimed was his patriotic duty, knowing that he was just as much going to war to satisfy some primordial blood lust for combat. And they died and were buried while he was caged and beaten in a sweltering hellhole. A tragic accident. They became just another highway statistic.

  While most Americans treated him and his fellow POWs as heroes, Karen’s parents were cool, distant. They blamed him for not being there to protect their only child and grandson. It wasn’t fair, but there was no way Falcone could lighten their grief and resentment. Besides, he shared their assessment of guilt.

  Falcone rarely drank anything but strong black coffee before nightfall. In fact, his doctor warned him that his normal ten cups a day were the reason he couldn’t sleep more than a few hours at night. He was overtaxing his heart, and one day, its thump would go silent.

  But what was he to do? He needed the caffeine to keep a mental and physical edge. And the hour-long workouts—sometimes twice a day—gave him a clarity of mind and indefinable sense of well-being. So he was fit. But for what?

  Or so he tried to rationalize. Falcone knew that a deeper reason than fitness compelled him to burn up calories and unwanted pounds. Activity, even if inefficient, prevented him from being alone with his thoughts, with himself.

  Relaxing with vodka in his hand, he inevitably felt the fall of the barrier that warded off introspection. The years in Hanoi’s prison had given him too much time alone, too much time to think about the choices he’d made, or those that had been made for him before he entered an unforgiving world.

  In that world, he managed to live with his contradictions. Once he had been a public man living behind the facade of an engaging and empathetic leader, a man reflecting the very best of what Americans cherished and demanded. Ironic, he thought, how he and President Oxley each possessed this essential political ingredient. But there the similarity ended. Oxley was never given to self-doubt. He was never haunted by the ghosts of his past. Maybe those who lived charmed lives never had any ghosts.…

  Behind Falcone’s facade of optimism and confidence, which he frequently flashed for public consumption and reassurance, hid a man who carried a lifetime of concealed regrets in a pin-striped rucksack.

  He knew that guilt can hide inside a man, lurking somewhere in the corners of consciousness, floating like smoke in the darkness, sometimes causing him to lose a line of thought, pulling him away from a momentary state, not of happiness, but of grace. Guilt was Falcone’s inner companion that refused to leave. He had abandoned his wife and child in the call of service to his country.

  Even in prison, his patriotism had trumped his survival. He had been part of a spy network—a fact that had been kept secret for forty years after the war. Sending intel back through microdots in letters. Admiral Jim Stockdale ran it right under the noses of the guards. Prisoners sent coded messages in their letters home, risking execution as spies. Information in the letters—such as recommended bombing targets and plans for escape—preserved the captives’ sense of service to their country. Then one day he had no one to write to, no one to get letters from.…

  What a waste it had all been: all the killing—the slaughter of innocents who had no role in the stratagems of those who had unleashed the dogs of war. For this Falcone had survived years of torture and solitary confinement. But what of the anguish, the cries from those families who would never see their sons again? All of them wiped away with a diplomatic eraser, as if they never existed, never bled in a land they never knew, in a war they never asked for.

  Melancholia was the mood he tried to ward off with sheer motion. But it was back now, nagging him, taunting him w
ith self-doubt. Just what was he getting into? Frank Carlton had to have set this up and used Quinlan as the messenger to signal that this was a presidential decision—unspoken, unrecorded. But a decision, nevertheless.

  So he was being asked to serve President Blake Oxley once again—and, officially, the President would never know what Falcone had done. But how long were they going to keep asking him to do something for his country, anything for his country, everything for his country?

  He went back to the kitchen, took the phone Quinlan had given him out of his jacket pocket, and started to punch in Quinlan’s number. But he abruptly stopped and put the phone in his pocket. He stepped out onto his balcony and for a long time stared at the statue below of the Lone Sailor. Off on a new venture or just back from a long one? Falcone never could tell. No one could. He was just out there standing at the edge of the Earth that had been etched into the Navy Memorial’s stone palazzo.

  And me, Sailor. What exactly do I have to look forward to at this point in my life? Counseling well-heeled clients on some merger or acquisitions deal? Advise a corporate giant on how to secure an exemption from the latest Chinese effort to stifle competition?

  He drained his glass and stepped back into the apartment. He knew what he had to do. He went to the kitchen and took the phone that Quinlan had given him, along with the coaster that had 800 555 7820 written on the back.

  24

  After one ring, a soft female voice answered: “You have reached 800 555 7820. You have been recognized and given the name ‘Chamberlain.’ We are prepared to meet you tomorrow. Please expect to stay overnight. If this is acceptable, you will be picked up at your residence at seven a.m. If this is not acceptable, hang up, dial the number again, and ask for another appointment in the name Chamberlain. Thank you.” Click.

  Falcone stood for a moment, the phone in his hand. Chamberlain: A clear sign that this outfit—whatever its name—knew him quite well. When he had traveled overseas during his time as national security adviser, he had picked Chamberlain as his code name. Falcone admired Joshua Chamberlain, whose decision to charge and rout the Confederate forces at Little Round Top led to the Union victory in Gettysburg.

  He stomped on the phone, which shredded into a half-dozen shards, then picked up the pieces and extracted the subscriber identification module, the heart of the phone. He went to the sink, turned on the water, switched on the garbage disposal, and dropped in the postage-stamp-size SIM chip. Then he cracked the shards into smaller pieces, wrapped them in paper towels and walked around, dropping the packets into different wastepaper containers, which the housekeeper would empty.

  He next went to the kitchen phone and called Ursula, who never was without her cell phone.

  “Yes?” The word of greeting that she preferred over “Hello.”

  “Ursula, I’m going to compose a letter of resignation and email it to you on your private email tonight. It will have my regular email signature,” he said. He knew there was no need to tell her to keep it secret; she routinely kept everything secret.

  “Yes,” she said, this time without the question mark.

  She’s in the I-not-to-reason-why club, too, he thought as he continued: “I want you to hold it. If you do not hear otherwise from me within ten days from tomorrow, please release it to the senior partners. They’ll take it from there.”

  “I shall resign also,” she said with an emotional tone that surprised Falcone.

  Falcone was touched and said, “Please, Ursula. The firm will need you more than ever. You’re the brains, the memory of the firm. Besides, I’m just being overly cautious. You’ll be hearing from me. Don’t worry.”

  “I will worry, sir. I will worry.… I assume this means you will not be in tomorrow.”

  “Right.”

  “I was about to call you,” Ursula continued. “Akis Christakos called at seven fifteen on my cell phone. He said it was urgent.”

  “Christo says everything is urgent,” Falcone said. “Tell him I’m tied up in a case and will get back to him as soon as I can. He’ll be mad, but that can’t be helped.”

  “Very well. And good luck.”

  “Thanks, Ursula. And don’t worry.”

  “Sorry, Sean. But I must worry. Goodbye.”

  Never before had she called him Sean.

  * * *

  Next morning, precisely at seven, the concierge called Falcone to say that his driver from Global Special Services was in the foyer. Falcone emerged from the elevator a few minutes later. A large man in black jeans and a black leather jacket led him out the door. He did not offer to carry Falcone’s overnight bag, showing he was an experienced bodyguard who always wanted his two hands free.

  At the curb was a black SUV with Virginia plates, motor throbbing. Global Special Services, Falcone thought. A private little army for the real dirty work.

  A second man, who could have been a twin of the driver, sat in the front passenger’s seat. “This will be a drive of approximately two hours and twenty-five minutes, sir,” the driver said. Neatly piled next to Falcone were the day’s Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.

  He picked up the Journal, scanned the headlines, then put it aside and leaned back, savoring liberation from the oppressive density of Washington, and the machinations and schemes of low-brow, ambitious power players. Washington was no longer a place for the elite, the cultural intelligentsia bearing degrees from Harvard, Yale, and other academic waterholes for the rich. After-dinner deals, brokered by cigar-chomping committee chairmen in the homes of media moguls, had been relegated to the ink of cartoonists long ago.

  But change and progress aren’t synonymous. Those who came riding into the city on white horses during the past decade were not sent to repair the city but to destroy and tear it down so that usurped power could be returned to states. The irony, lost on the champions of change, was that the problems plaguing us were global but the politics were all parochial, too small to do anything about the existential threats heading our way.

  Falcone’s gloom began to fade as the SUV left Washington suburbia behind and headed for a country highway. Winter was officially only a few weeks away, yet the weather continued to defy predicted drops in temperature. Many of the trees rippling by along the country highway displayed leaves that refused to bow to the calendar. There was a clarity, a freshness that lifted Falcone’s spirit and caused him to forget thoughts that weighed on him like stones.

  “Where are we heading?” Falcone asked.

  “Southern Virginia, sir,” the driver said.

  “Where in Virginia?” Falcone asked.

  “Near Williamsburg,” the driver replied. Falcone recognized the two words as a kind of covert address. He began remembering a trip he took by White House helicopter while he was national security adviser. The travel log in his office would show that he had gone to Colonial Williamsburg, the living museum of patriotic life in eighteenth-century America. Actually, he had spent the day a few miles away, at the Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, commonly called Camp Peary but known to the CIA as The Farm. Operatives in the National Clandestine Service, the dark side of the agency, were among the CIA men and women trained at The Farm. It was also the remote, no-questions-asked site for highly secret rehearsals of missions involving Special Forces teams.

  When Falcone had served as a United States senator and national security adviser, he had often been driven to The Farm. He particularly remembered a visit with Frank Carlton when he was commander of Air Force Special Operations, his stepping-stone to director of National Intelligence. Carlton had proudly shown him the high spots, including an obstacle course that reminded Falcone of the Army Ranger training he had gone through during the Vietnam War. A briefing officer had introduced Falcone to a hard-eyed SEAL who led a team heading for Somalia under a mission with “lethal findings,” the delicate phrase for a killing authorized by the President.

  Now Falcone was going to the headquarters of Global Special Services, which
had chosen a location that was, in his mind, a little too close to Camp Peary for legal comfort. Proximity to an official federal site just about advertised GSS’s closeness to the U.S. government. GSS was one of the private security firms that had sprung up in the wake of the Afghan and Iraq wars and recruited veterans of Army and Navy Special Forces.

  But this one, he knew, had real connections, which was why Carlton had steered him to it. GSS specialized in off-the-shelf “special missions,” the ones that needed no presidential authorization, no notice to Congress, no scrutiny by White House lawyers. And offered the gift of deniability.

  The last time Falcone had been involved in such operations, he was a senator investigating how President Reagan could possibly have authorized one. It became known as the Iran-Contra scandal—the U.S. government’s secret sale of arms to Iran, then at war with Iraq, with the payments from the sale going to the Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua’s communist regime.

  As far as Falcone and other congressional critics were concerned, motivations didn’t matter and good intent wasn’t an excuse for breaking the law. It was the law in which we trusted, not the declaration stamped on our currency. And yet, here he was on his way to carrying out a mission that was outside the law he had sworn to uphold. He’d be no better than the brigands he used to chastise.

  The critic was about to become a conspirator.

  25

  After passing the exit for Williamsburg, the SUV traveled about ten miles along a farm road, then turned onto a secondary road leading east, toward the York River. The road narrowed like a sharpened pencil until two cars barely had enough room to pass each other.

  At a gated checkpoint was a small building constructed of stone and what Falcone presumed was bulletproof glass. Two men with automatic weapons signaled the SUV to stop. They wore black visored caps bearing the GSS diamond logo, and what soldiers call BDUs—battle dress uniforms—over armored-vest bulges. But these BDUs were black rather than the U.S. Army camouflage pattern. While they lifted their weapons and aimed them at the SUV, a woman in a well-tailored BDU stepped out of the gatehouse carrying a mirror on a pole. She checked the underside of the vehicle, leaned the pole against a fender, and pressed a smartphone-size device against the laminated identifications handed to her by the driver and his partner.