The Exile rk-4

by Andrew Britton

  Kealey hurried over, pressed two fingers against Phillips’s neck, then slid one finger down the side of his jaw.

  Abby stared at him. “Ryan, is he-”

  “Shhh!” Nothing from the carotid or facial arteries. Kealey lifted Phillips’s wrist, felt for a pulse there, didn’t detect one. And the pinkish red foam on his lips and chin was a bad sign-it meant a lung had been punctured and would have been filling with blood as he tried to draw in air. Kealey looked up, shook his head. “He’s gone,” he said, snapping his eyes to Swanson’s stunned face. “Where’d your guy go?”

  Swanson nodded behind him. “Ran off in that direction, I think.”

  “No way to tell if he’s bolted or gone for reinforcements,” Kealey said, shaking his head. He motioned toward Phillips’s body. “Take him back to the Jeep.”

  The field op swallowed hard. “What about you?”

  “I’m going in,” Kealey said, nodding toward the house. “Abby…get Mackenzie on the phone. Tell him to stay put out back.”

  “And then what?” Her voice was trembling. “You can’t go in alone.”

  “Listen to me, Abby. Somebody’s sure to have called the police by now. We have to get this done before they show. And I’ll need you on the lookout,” Kealey replied.

  “But Mirghani might have more guards inside-”

  “I can handle them.” Kealey sprang to his feet. “I’ve got my cell. When you two hear the sirens, warn me if you can and get out of here. I’ll meet you back at the embassy.”

  He turned toward Mirghani’s house, leapfrogged the low iron fence, and raced over a tiled outer court to its front door, trying the knob. As expected, it was unlocked; his men had been in the process of clearing the place out when Kealey’s team arrived.

  He pushed the door open, went through, and assayed his surroundings, the Glock extended in his grip. He was in an entry foyer that broadened out into a spacious, cleanly furnished oval parlor or living room with a polished hardwood floor, wide archways on two sides, and light organdy curtains over its rear windows. Kealey peered through the arch to his right, saw it gave way to another open parlor with some damask chairs and pillows, an inlaid coffee table on an oriental rug, and a number of packed and half-packed cartons on the floor. A hasty inspection revealed that another arch on the far side of that room led to a kitchen.

  There was nobody in any of the rooms.

  Cautiously, Kealey stepped deeper into the main parlor, moving along its left wall. Then he pivoted on his heel to look past its second archway and saw a flight of runnered stairs climbing up to the home’s second story.

  His gun still pointed out in front of him, he turned through the arch and streaked up the steps, taking them two at a time. On the second floor he passed two bedrooms, a bathroom, a hallway with a large walk-in closet on the right wall. Still no sign anyone was present.

  He reached into a pocket for his cell. “Mackenzie, it’s Kealey. I’m inside the house.”

  “Roger,” the agent said. “I…I heard what happened to Phillips-”

  “We can’t afford to think about that now,” Kealey said. “You see anybody leave through a back door?”

  “No.”

  “You’re positive? Not out the door, the garden, a window…?”

  “Nobody left the house,” Mackenzie said. “Not through any entrance but the front. I’d have seen him.”

  “Then Mirghani has to be in here someplace.” His eyes swept the hallway. “Where the hell-”

  “Kealey? You all right?”

  “Yeah,” Kealey said. He’d settled his gaze on the walk-in closet with its closed sliding door. “Stay where you are, Mackenzie. I’m going to need you to be there, copy?”

  “Roger that.”

  Kealey pocketed the phone, moved across to the right side of the hallway, flattened his back against the wall, and then sidled along to the edge of the closet’s door. His 9mm in his right fist, he reached his free hand across the wall for the closet door’s finger pull handle and tugged the door open on its tracks. Finally he heaved himself off the wall with a half turn so he’d end up looking directly into the closet.

  There was the loud discharge of a gun inside it, and a bullet shrieked past his ear. The bodyguard hidden among the row of hanging garments had no chance to get off a second shot; Kealey, reflexively down in a squat, pumped three shots into his heart and watched him droop backward into a corner of the closet, one leg bent underneath him, the other sticking straight out across its floor.

  Entering, Kealey crouched over the dead man and took the gun from his slackened grasp. It was a 9mm semiautomatic Caracal, the ammo usable for his own weapon. Depressing the catch, he ejected its magazine and shoved it into a cargo pocket on his trousers. Then he stepped over the guard’s outstretched leg and pushed aside the clothes on the hanger pole-traditional Arabic robes and shawls as well as Western-style suits.

  There on the back wall of the closet were the telltale seams of a safe-room door…and the camouflaged digital peephole lens above it. Kealey moved deeper inside, stood in front of the steel-reinforced panel, and rapped it with his fist. The solid thud he heard was reminiscent of when he’d tested the door of the EU team’s armored BMW in Yaounde.

  Kealey heard his phone trill in his pocket. Abby probably. She must have heard the shots. But there was no time to answer.

  “Mirghani, I know you can hear me!” he shouted. Exactly how much time did he have before the police stormed in? Not much, it couldn’t be much at all, though he guessed he’d been in the house less than five minutes. “I’m telling you right now, you’re coming out. ”

  No answer. Kealey hadn’t figured he’d get one.

  “My people have the back entrance to the house covered!” he yelled. “Either you leave with me or you aren’t going anywhere.”

  Nothing. Kealey’s mind raced. Mirghani would know the police were on the way. Figure he could wait things out till they got here. Unless…

  Whirling in a circle, Kealey holstered his gun, then sprinted over to the stairs and down to the first floor. He couldn’t afford to lose a second.

  In the main parlor now, he turned, ran through the foyer, and a heartbeat later was out in the courtyard. Abby was standing there inside the fence. Her cell phone in her hand, she was looking at him with tense, agitated features.

  “Kealey, what’s going on? I heard the gunfire inside, and when you didn’t answer-”

  “Just wait here,” he said. “Don’t move.”

  And then he went loping across the street, zigzagging past rubber-neckers toward the Cherokee, where Swanson sat tensely behind the wheel, Phillips’s body covered with a blanket in the cargo section. He hurried around back without a word, yanked open the hatch, looked around for a jerrican, knowing there had to be one. This was an Agency vehicle, and here in Sudan, where you never knew when you’d be traveling hundreds of damned miles through the desert, it would be as standard as a tire wrench.

  Kealey found the plastic container almost right away, reached inside to grab it from a storage slot in the rear compartment, then slammed the hatch shut and deliberately sloshed its contents around. It was three-quarters full, maybe better, meaning there had to be almost five gallons of gasoline inside.

  He returned to the driver’s door. “Swanson, listen,” he said through its lowered window. “The second the cops get close, I mean the second, you and Abby take off without looking back…and make sure they see you. I’m going to need a deke, got it? We’ll have the embassy take care of the rest. These sons of bitches are going to find out soon enough we’re trying to save their president’s miserable ass.”

  Swanson stared at him. “Kealey…what the hell are you doing?”

  Kealey didn’t stop to answer now, but instead dashed back across to the house with the jerrican, pausing only to motion Abby toward the Jeep before he plunged inside, this time hooking sharply right through the two downstairs parlors into the kitchen. He looked around for matches, pulled open a draw
er, still didn’t see any, decided to quit searching, and grabbed a dishrag from a countertop near the sink.

  He wound the rag tightly into a makeshift torch, uncapped the jerrican, poured gasoline over one end. Next he went to the range, turned on a burner, and held the saturated end of the dishrag in the flame. It immediately caught fire.

  Kealey went bounding to the second floor with the fiery rag in one hand and the open jerrican in the other. He’d need water in a minute, but the rag was really ablaze now, and he again jogged on past the bathroom to the walk-in closet.

  “Mirghani!” He held the rag and jerrican up to the safe room’s peephole now. “See this? I’m setting fire to the closet-and if you think the police are coming, you’re wrong. I’ve got them fooled. Same if you think the firemen can get here before the smoke kills you. You watch, Mirghani. Watch! ”

  And with that Kealey began dousing the closet with gasoline, splashing it over the clothes draped over the hangers, the walls, even the body of the guard he’d shot. When he’d emptied the container, he stepped back from the door panel and tossed the burning rag into the closet.

  The gas-soaked clothes and body burst into flame with a whuuuump of displaced air, orange-yellow tongues of fire fiercely leaping upward over everything, climbing the walls to lick at the ceiling.

  Kealey had time to hear an alarm go off before he ran back down the hall to the bathroom, snatching a large bath towel from a rack, then going to the tub and opening the cold water tap. He soaked the towel under the faucet, threw it over his head like a shawl, and returned to the walk-in closet.

  It was already filled with churning, acrid smoke, gray blobs of it spewing into the hall, making his eyes water and his throat involuntarily clench. He hadn’t lied to Mirghani; while the door and walls of the safe room were bound to be fire resistant, possibly saving every material possession he might have stashed in there, it would not keep the carbon monoxide smoke from seeping through. He would die of asphyxiation if he stayed put.

  The cold, dripping towel still covering his head and shoulders, Kealey thrust himself inside through the searing flames.

  “Come out of there, you stupid bastard,” he said, almost overcome by smoke. The towel was sizzling around his head, steam coiling off it; it would not keep him from the fire’s clutches for very long. He could already feel the hair on his arms singeing from the heat. “Come on out! I told you I just want to talk-”

  The door suddenly burst open, a man Kealey identified from photos as Ishmael Mirghani pushing into the closet, wheezing and gagging. “You’re a lunatic,” he gasped and hacked out a series of sputtering coughs. “Whoever you are, you will kill us both…”

  “ Shut up! ” Kealey hollered and yanked him from the closet. The smoke had gotten so thick around him, it was hard to see, but he had no problem hearing the jangle of household fire alarms and, underneath it, the more troublesome howl of oncoming sirens. He had to get out of the place, toot sweet, and could only hope Swanson and Abby would provide a diversion if he needed it.

  Grabbing Mirghani by his arm, he towed him downstairs into the main parlor, then outside through the door into the back garden. Outside its low hedge, Mackenzie sat parked against the curb in his Subaru.

  “Let’s move,” Kealey said, hustling Mirghani along toward the car. The sirens were close now-too close for anything that remotely passed for comfort.

  “Where are you taking me?” The opposition leader was sweating profusely, and Kealey didn’t think it was from exertion.

  “You’ll find out when we get there,” he said and then wrenched open the Subaru’s back door, shoved Mirghani through it, and followed him inside.

  A split second later Mackenzie went screeching off into the gathering dusk.

  CHAPTER 20

  WASHINGTON, D.C.,SUDAN

  David Brenneman had always felt something special sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Executive Office. Inspiration was probably the best word for it, but there was also a certain assurance imparted by its impressive size and solidity, its sturdy design fashioned from the timbers of a nineteenth-century British expeditionary vessel that had braved and survived the Arctic wastes to return intact. FDR and Truman had sat behind it in times of peril and momentous decision. John F. Kennedy, whose solitary ponderings had often run deep into the night, must have gathered his will and inner fortitude at that very desk when the Russians and Cubans threatened nuclear war in the summer of 1962. Brenneman, who as a young man was an enthusiastic member of Kennedy’s Peace Corps and was originally moved toward public service by his early admiration of the murdered president, liked to think the desk was infused by that which was best about the men who had preceded him as occupants of the Oval Office-their strength of purpose and higher ideals, regardless of political affiliation.

  This morning, however, he felt like an exposed impostor, unworthy of the place he occupied behind the Resolute. A pressed-wood desk might better suit him…some less than authentic material, wood shavings and flimsy veneers held together with glue.

  How had he allowed himself to be so badly led by the nose? When had he become such a fool? He thought of his pigheadedness, his unwillingness to listen to trusted advisors, his dismissal of men who had his best interests-and the best interests of the nation-at heart. He thought of his faulty judgment, colored by some amok inner wrath rather than anything that approached wisdom, intelligence, and a calm examination of information. He thought of his refusal to probe and question, his eagerness to lash out in vengeance…and he looked across a desk that now seemed a reminder of his unworthiness at John Harper and Bob Andrews, two of the men he’d ignored, and then at the troubled face of the woman he’d dragged along with him, Brynn Fitzgerald, who had been as susceptible to manipulation as he himself.

  “I’ve blown this terribly,” he said. “I want you all to know that I will own up to my mistakes, whatever the consequences from this point forward. That I will do what I can to rectify them. And I also want to apologize to each of you for actions that damned well might be inexcusable…”

  He fell silent, his hands balling into fists on the desk. He could feel his fingernails digging into his palm.

  “Sir, thanks to the capture of Ishmael Mirghani, we’re in a position to do what you say-prevent this whole thing from exploding on us and the rest of the world,” Andrews said from across the room. “We are still in a position to stop Simon Nusairi. He’s acquired the necessary weapons and equipment, and I won’t diminish the imminent threat of an attack in northern Sudan. But let’s remember he hasn’t yet launched it-”

  “No,” Brenneman interrupted. “He did with great success in Darfur, though, most relevantly for us against the refugees at Camp Hadith.” His voice sounded almost self-pitying to his own ears, and that had been far from his intent. “He and his people, disguised as regular Sudanese army, raped and killed my niece, and I took the bait. I bit like a fish going for the hook.”

  “It isn’t as if Omar al-Bashir is an innocent,” Harper said. “In fairness, the man’s earned his reputation for genocidal brutality and then some…”

  Brenneman shook his head vehemently. “Don’t massage me here. For all the ass kissing he gets from the Russians, Chinese, and his neighborhood friends in the Arab world, Bashir is a wanted criminal. An international outcast. We’d gone a long way toward isolating him without a shooting war that could result in more people dying…potentially tens of thousands of people. But I botched it. I authorized the misappropriation of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds at a time when our national economy is stretched to the limit. And before you stop me again, John, we can split hairs about what constitutes a legitimate CINC discretionary project, but the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee won’t when it comes time for midterm elections, and he’ll be completely justified in lining us up like targets in a firing range. We…no, I…could have listened to you and Bob. I could have paid attention back at Camp David. Instead, I dismissed you from my presence. I sanctioned Strale
n’s plan to deal with Somali pirates and get stolen tanks and helicopters into the hands of Sudanese rebels. I armed, equipped, and financed a small army lead by Simon Nusairi, who may be a worse devil than the one we hoped to unseat, and is certainly shrewder and more calculating in his ability to manipulate us.”

  The secretary of state produced a long sigh, her face worn despite a careful application of makeup, her mouth and eyes surrounded by radial lines, which seemed to have stamped the skin around them in an almost inconceivably short time. “Mr. President, with all due respect, we now have two choices. We can beat ourselves up about this, or we can do what you and Bob have explicitly and implicitly suggested today. Which is to act quickly and use the small window of opportunity that remains to take charge of the situation… rehabilitate it, if you will…before it deteriorates beyond repair.”

  “Brynn’s absolutely right,” Andrews said. “The capture of Ishmael Mirghani was more than an intelligence score. It could be an achievement that has lasting positive ramifications. And I don’t mean in terms of politics, but real benefits for the Sudanese people.”

  Harper was nodding. “When I met with Ryan Kealey in South Africa, I recall that we spent a few minutes pondering Mirghani’s reasons for splintering off from a couple of known rebel factions…particularly the Sudanese Liberation Army,” he said. “But here’s where the Agency takes some of the blame for what’s developed-it turns out it’s something that should have been assessed with organized, targeted intelligence analysis.” He paused. “Based on his questioning at the embassy in Khartoum, Mirghani is a far more politically and socially moderate alternative to Bashir than any other opposition leader in the country. That is why he parted ways with the SLA. When he first joined the organization, it was supposed to be a non-religious coalition of Darfurian peoples who were under oppression from Bashir. But it’s turned out to be highly polarized along tribal lines…and over time its reprisals against civilians who aren’t members of the cause have grown as barbaric as Bashir’s. Mirghani, on the other hand, split with them over those coercive tactics and has a record of vocal opposition to human rights abuses-”