Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel

by William S. Cohen

  “Something else, Sean?”

  “Hamilton, sir. I want to go to Guantanamo with his attorney, Akis Christakos.”

  “Leave it to George Winthrop, Sean. It’s a DoD matter. They run the place.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I think it’s a matter for the Commander-in-Chief. Handling an illegally held American citizen is not in the military’s portfolio. For all we know, they’re waterboarding him right now.”

  Oxley’s face tightened and he silently glared at Falcone, who quietly said, “If Christakos and I take the legal route—a petition for a writ—”

  “I know the goddamn legal route, Sean,” Oxley said, his voice rising. “It means you go public and the whole goddamn thing gets splashed all over the media. This sounds like a warning, a threat, Sean. Something I don’t expect from a straight-shooter like you.”

  “It is a warning, sir. Unless there is a high-level intervention, this can spin out of control. And there’s another facet to this, sir.”

  “You’re piling on, Sean. Be careful.”

  “It’s Leonid Danshov, an American citizen who was drawn into this … rendition. He—”

  “Sam Stone briefed me about Leonid Danshov, probably killed by the FSB,” Oxley said, dismissively waving a hand. “It’s a highly classified Agency matter. We’re not making an incident out of it.”

  Oxley sat down again and motioned for Falcone to do the same. “Sam Stone told me Danshov was a CIA operative,” Oxley said. “But Sam didn’t tell me that Danshov was involved in the rendition.”

  “Two Russians were also killed during the operation.”

  “What?! Jesus! Who was running this?”

  “Theoretically, I was, sir. But as I said, it was Carlton who set it in motion, using Ray Quinlan as a cutout so there’d be no Carlton fingerprints. Ray was just a messenger. He had little knowledge of the details. I was told to arrange the rendition through a security firm known to Carlton. I was given the impression that the CIA was not aware of the operation. That was not true. As for Danshov, he was to be part of the rendition team. He was killed by the FSB and had to be replaced,” Falcone said, leaning forward, hands clutching his knees. “His replacement was a Mossad officer. The Mossad was all over this, sir.”

  “The Israelis? Why? How?”

  “Carlton was looking for deniability for you and decided to reach outside our intel community. The Mossad jumped at the chance. Israel enjoys learning American secrets. And it gave Israel a chance to tweak Lebed over selling air defense systems to Iran.”

  “Jesus! Who knows this? I mean Israeli involvement…”

  “Stone, Carlton, Drexler, the retired Army general who—”

  “I know who Drexler is,” Oxley said impatiently. “Shadowy guy. Anybody else?”

  “NSA analysts can pretty easily put a lot of pieces together and get a picture of what happened. So can Lebed, but to save face he can’t go public.”

  “Same for me, Sean. Now I wonder what in hell…”

  “Everyone involved in this—everyone who knows or thinks he knows—is a professional, sir. They all know how to keep secrets.”

  “Okay, let’s assume—and hope—that it stays sealed up. What do I do with Hamilton?” Oxley spoke rapidly, as if the faster he talked, the faster this thing would go away.

  “You call the general in command at Guantanamo, sir, and tell him two lawyers are on their way there to pick up Hamilton. And you tell the general that officially none of this happened.”

  “I suppose that could work,” Oxley agreed. “Guantanamo has always been good at making believe things didn’t happen. Okay. You get Hamilton out. Then what?”

  “You order Stone to arrange for Hamilton to be taken to a CIA safe house. He gives Ben Taylor the coordinates of Asteroid USA and tells him how to activate its audible signal. If Ben verifies the information, Hamilton gets his part of the bargain: He meets J. B. Patterson, who tells him the FBI no longer considers him a ‘person of interest,’ and Attorney General Malcomson gives him a grant of immunity signed by you and immediately placed under federal court seal.”

  “And I give him a goddamn Presidential Medal of Freedom, too?”

  “That could wait, sir.”

  Oxley allowed himself and Falcone a weak smile, then asked, “And what happens if he decides not to talk, doesn’t give Taylor information about the asteroid?”

  “Patterson arrests him for tampering with evidence, conspiracy to commit murder, and conspiracy to impede a federal investigation.”

  “Any of those charges true?”

  “The case against him is weak. Very weak. And Akis Christakos will have no trouble getting an acquittal.”

  “And all of this will be all over the media.”

  “Yes, sir. And, of course, the source of all this—the asteroid threat—will also come out, undoubtedly spreading panic and stock market nightmares.”

  “You certainly brought me a lot of good news,” Oxley said, rising again, obviously eager for Falcone to leave.

  As Falcone turned toward the door, Oxley added, “What about Carlton?”

  “Frankly, sir, I don’t give a damn. Just don’t let him near me.”

  “Sorry, Sean. But you’ve got to go over this with him. I’m ordering you to go down the hall right now and question him face-to-face. Calmly. That’s the only way you—and I—are going to find out why Hamilton wound up in Guantanamo.”

  “Yes, sir. You can be damn sure I’ll find out.” Falcone punched out his words, signaling an intent to get physical with Carlton. He turned to leave the Oval Office, but paused as if he had a mere afterthought. “There’s one other thing you should know, Mr. President,” Falcone said, taking a deep breath before continuing, “I have it from a good source that Vladimir Putin didn’t die from a rare blood disease. Lebed had him poisoned.”

  “What? You’re sure of this?” Oxley asked, not quite believing what Falcone had just said.

  Falcone nodded. “Next time you talk to Lebed or he threatens to take any more territory, you might let him know that you know his dirty secret. I’m sure some of Putin’s old friends might take a dim view of the man who knocked off their leader.”

  “And your source for this assassination?”

  “Mossad,” Falcone said in a half whisper.

  “Jesus!” Oxley exclaimed. “You trust the Israelis on something like this? They play a double game. You know that.”

  “Mr. President, Hamilton would not be out of Moscow without them. I think you need to trust them. Besides, it’s almost Chanukah.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s a good time to accept a gift.”

  71

  “Mr. Falcone is … is coming in,” Carlton’s assistant said in a voice of warning. The door flew open, Carlton stepped around his desk, and, in two strides, Falcone was standing before him. Falcone was a few inches taller, but they had similar trim physiques. Falcone jabbed his right fist into the center of Carlton’s chest. Falcone’s right hand shot forward again and closed around Carlton’s shirt and tie, tearing away two buttons. Falcone’s attack sent Carlton reeling back into his chair, which shot backward, banging into a bookcase.

  “That was for your goddamn bald-faced lie,” Falcone said quietly. “The President ordered me to be calm. I’m calm now, Frank.” Falcone sat down in a chair in front of Carlton’s desk.

  “Christ, Sean,” Carlton said, straightening his tie and, like Falcone, breathing hard. “You could have killed me. If I had a heart—”

  “I’ve seen your medical record. You’re strong as an ox.”

  “How’d you see my medical records?” The pitch of Carlton’s voice reflected a level of anxiety about the contents contained in the records.

  “When I was deciding to suggest you for your job.”

  “Yeah. Well, I guess I can blame you for all this.”

  “Like hell you can,” Falcone said, bolting up from his chair, and stepping closer to Carlton as if he was about to take his head off.
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  “Come on, Sean. You knew the deal.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t sign up for Guantanamo.”

  “There were special circumstances, Sean. Even the President doesn’t know all the details. I … I guess you deserve to know what happened,” Carlton said, leaning forward, bracing his hands on his desk. He paused before continuing.

  “I thought of Guantanamo after the last rendition operation we ran out of Pakistan…”

  “Pakistan? Now I’m really confused.”

  “It all started with a Paki walk-in at the embassy in Islamabad.”

  “That sounds familiar,” Falcone said. “Happened all the time.… Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “You’re right,” Carlton continued. “Lot of Pakis try to collect our rewards for information. We rarely get anything useful—even from their intelligence service. But this guy had something interesting. He showed us a cell phone with the image of what he said was a tactical nuclear weapon.”

  “Yeah, everybody knows Pakistan has developed tactical nukes,” Falcone said. “Their foreign secretary even said publicly that Pakistan would use them against Indian troops if they even entered Pakistan territory.”

  “Right. The intel boys call them suitcase bombs. Well, this guy said he had taken the photograph at an ISIS operative’s hideout in Pakistan. He said for ten million bucks and protection of his family he’d lead us to the guy.”

  “Jesus! Any confirmation?”

  “Yes. Our guy in Pakistan who tries to keep an eye on their nukes said it looked like the real McCoy. And he had heard of rumors about a missing nuke. We immediately got the walk-in, his wife, and their two kids into the embassy compound. We agreed to pay the money when we got the nuke and its keeper. Well, he did lead a SEAL team to get the guy in camp near the Afghan border. But no nuke.”

  “And the President doesn’t know this?”

  “What he doesn’t know is that I arranged for the nuke keeper to be taken to Guantanamo and questioned.”

  “Jesus, Frank. You took him to a place the President hates. A place where you could torture him.”

  “No, not torture. I called my Mossad contact, told him the story, and asked for a man I believe to be the finest interrogator on the planet.”

  “A Mossad officer?”

  “Yes. He’s both a rabbi and a psychiatrist.”

  “Damn! Israel again. Frank, what the hell is going on?”

  “What’s going on, Sean, is Daesh,” Carlton said.

  “The newly preferred name for ISIS,” Falcone said, shaking his head.

  “The bastards hate the word because ‘Daesh’ sounds like an Arabic words meaning ‘one who crushes something underfoot.’”

  “I thought ISIS for ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Iran’ was very descriptive,” Falcone said.

  “When you watched over the world for the President,” Carlton went on, “there was no Daesh. There certainly were terrorists—Al Qaeda, the Taliban. But they had not conquered vast pieces of territory, ruling over it with sharia law and claiming a caliphate. These cutthroats changed the world. They’re all over the place, Sean—all over the Mideast, Paris, Brussels … everywhere. And the best intel about them comes from our only trustworthy Mideast ally, Israel. I rely on the Mossad far more than the CIA, which did not see Daesh coming.”

  “But an Israeli psychiatrist? The CIA has—”

  “Their shrinks haven’t got the soul, the existential sense of this guy Hamilton.”

  “And you asked for this shrink out of the blue?”

  “I had met him here, in Washington, a while ago. I was invited to the Israeli ambassador’s residence, and he introduced some people to me. Mossad people, without saying they were. And the shrink. His name is Ishmael Korbin. You’ll be meeting him at Guantanamo. He sees interrogation as a matter of finding what he calls ‘the angle of repose’—the angle that a pile of sand takes just before the slope begins to slide. Once the slide starts, he says, the truth starts.”

  “Heavy stuff,” Falcone said, not sounding convinced. “And it worked?”

  “I saw it work, Sean, watching unseen in a safe house in Islamabad. Korbin spoke Urdu. I, of course, couldn’t understand him. But I could sense that the Paki was listening, leaning forward, saying something back to Korbin and nodding. Korbin told me later he had started with quotes from the Koran and some Urdu poetry. The guy started crying. Then Korbin took out a map, his tone became sort of stern, and he got the guy to agree that he could best serve Allah by acting on the fate that took him to Korbin.”

  “And?”

  “And he led a SEAL team to a camp near the Afghan border. They got the nuke and wiped out the camp.”

  “I assume you didn’t give the nuke back to the Pakis.”

  “Correct. It’s safe in our hands. Don’t ask me where.”

  “The Israelis…?”

  “I’ve already told you more than the President knows. But I can tell you that you’ll soon meet Ishmael Korbin. The Hamilton rendition was about to start when I got the Israelis to allow Korbin to stay on for a few days. I briefed the Israeli ambassador on the whole story. And he got the PM to approve.”

  “God, Frank! That took balls, dealing with Israelis and blacking out the President. When did you first get so cozy with them?”

  “Right after I succeeded you.”

  “You know, I can believe that,” Falcone said. “They never completely trusted me as a senator or as adviser. And then there’s Oxley. He hates Weisman.”

  “Well, that’s certainly true,” Carlton said.

  “So where did the trust in you come from?” Falcone asked. He had a hunch and decided to chance it: “Maybe … your wife?”

  “Sometimes, in paranoid moments, I think they recruited her, Sean,” Carlton said, smiling and shaking his head. “Whether they did or not, I’ve turned to them again and again.”

  * * *

  After graduating from the Air Force Academy, Carlton was assigned to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, headquarters of what was then called the Air Force Intelligence Command. He had a brilliant record at the academy, but he did not have the eyesight of a fighter pilot. And so he became an intelligence analyst. One day, in nearby San Antonio, he went on a tour of the eighteenth-century Mission San José. He was standing in front of what the guide called the Rose Window on a wall of the church sacristy. He asked the guide where the rose was and she replied that one of the window’s many mysteries was its name. He said he liked mysteries and bet she did, too.

  She was Ruth Greenfield, a descendant of Jews who had been brought to Texas in the 1900s by a Jewish aid group that diverted Russian refugees from crowded Eastern cities. Her parents warmly welcomed Carlton, an orphan, into the family. Their wedding was a civil ceremony.

  Through most of his career—Air Force intelligence, director of National Intelligence, presidential adviser—Carlton was a keeper of secrets that he could not share with his wife. Ruth Carlton once said he was married to secrecy, not to her. But they had a solid marriage because she could handle living beyond the borders of his dark world. She was a physical therapist, an occupation portable enough to maintain during their frequent moves. When he became director of National Intelligence, she became a partner in a Washington physical rehabilitation center. One of her patients became a friend. She invited Ruth Carlton to a synagogue, and there she rediscovered her Jewish roots. She changed her name to Ruth Greenfield Carlton.

  Occasionally, Frank Carlton attended synagogue affairs. He began adding new insights to his official policy attitudes toward Israel and gradually forged links with Israel that did not parallel Oxley’s. The President did not sense any shift. The angle of repose held.

  “I still don’t get it, Frank. The connection between the Pakistani and the Jewish shrink. Now Hamilton. Just tell me what the fuck is going on here?”

  72

  Oxley stood looking out at the South Lawn, hands clasped behind his back. Alone. Here so many presidents stood this way, ponder
ing their job, wondering what to do next. He turned away and glanced at the two paintings flanking the windows. On one wall was Childe Hassam’s rainy Fifth Avenue full of the flags and banners of World War I. On the other was the Statue of Liberty, by Norman Rockwell for the Saturday Evening Post of the Fourth of July in 1946, the first year of peace. War and peace. Once, he thought, we knew the difference.

  He knew that his mind ought to have been on China and the South China Sea or Japan and China, or America and China. But here he was wondering what to do about an American billionaire and a dangerous asteroid. He went back to his desk, where Harry Truman had placed a plaque saying “The Buck Stops Here,” and took over the Hamilton account.

  He kept his phone in a desk drawer. The moment he picked up the handset, an aide in the adjacent anteroom responded. He recognized Anna Bartholomew’s voice and said, “Anna, first, I want to call Sean Falcone, who left me a few minutes ago. I’m also going to make some other calls. These will be highly classified calls, Anna. And I do not want any documentation of them. Okay?”

  “Yes, Mr. President. I’m ready.”

  “Okay. I also want you to find Major Joseph Galafano and send him to me when I’ve finished my calls. I want him to meet me alone.”

  “Yes, sir.” She sounded flustered.

  “I hear he took you to the Marine Birthday Ball, right?”

  “Yes … yes, sir.… I…”

  “So I guess you can find him and talk to him so it seems unofficial. I don’t want to get involved with the Military Office chain-of-command bureaucrats.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.” She no longer sounded flustered.

  * * *

  Falcone was in a taxi heading for Christakos’ law firm when the cell phone rang.

  “Can you leave in a couple of hours or so?” Oxley asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Christakos?”

  “I can guarantee that,” Falcone answered.

  “You’ll be getting a call from a Marine who’s working directly for me. To make it simple, get Christakos to your place and wait for a pickup.”