Plus, there was still the riddle of what Charley was doing in DC in the first place. Booty call? Business? Charley had lied to his bosses at Exel, and he had kept Kittredge completely in the dark about the trip.
Is Charley crooked?
Or, more precisely, was he more crooked than average? He was fond of observing that business, war, and politics were nothing but influence at the end of the day, and influence was about leverage, or the art of using what someone wants or needs in order to get what you want or need.
Over the course of their relationship, Kittredge had come to understand that Charley’s thoughts along these lines were more personal credos than mere observations. Charley was no bright-eyed idealist, and Kittredge had seen him work angles with the best of them.
There’s a word for that, Kittredge realized. Manipulation.
Charley was a manipulator. He’d never really thought about it in such stark terms before, but it was certainly the truth. Charley pushed and pulled a person’s levers to gradually bring them around to working for his own interests. He was patient and subtle about it, but, Kittredge realized, there was an ulterior motive behind almost everything Charley did.
So where does that leave us? Or leave me?
Was the relationship a lie? Kittredge felt there were genuinely soul-baring moments, and the day-to-day stuff wasn’t difficult, either, in the grand scheme of things.
Minus the manipulation. There was a lot of it, he started to realize, and usually over simple and silly shit, like emptying the dishwasher, doing the laundry, paying the bills. There was a thin layer of drama that covered things. Nothing too overt, but it was definitely there.
So, Charley Arlinghaus is undoubtedly a player. But in what game? And on whose side?
And do I want to keep letting him ball me? Undoubtedly, yes, Kittredge realized. Charley was amazing in bed, and he smelled good, in a way that never failed to get Kittredge turned on. That made up for many, many ills.
Kittredge called the nurse’s station in Charley’s hospital wing for an update. No news is good news, she told him. No more swelling, but no less swelling, either, and he was welcome to return during evening visiting hours.
As he ended the call, he felt his phone vibrate with a new text message. He looked at the small screen, and his blood ran cold. It was Arturo Dibiaso, demanding a dead drop at location four in Caracas. Tomorrow evening.
13
Sam parked her dented Porsche in front of her bombed-out front lawn, and walked wearily past the plastic tarp covering the gaping hole in the front of her house. The front door had also been wrecked, and workers were busily clearing debris from the inside of the house through the large portal where the door used to be. She brushed past them with a grunt of acknowledgement and made her way upstairs to the bedroom.
She badly needed a shower and a change of clothes. And she needed some sleep. But first, she badly needed some answers from the man who shared her home and her bed.
Brock had just emerged from the shower when she walked into the bedroom. He was stark naked, muscular, and well-endowed. Sam felt a visceral wave of desire, but the excitement wasn’t strong enough to penetrate the fog of her fatigue, and her worry over what Jarvis had told her about Brock.
“Hi baby,” Brock said, leaning in for a kiss. “You look tired. We should take a nap.” That was code for “we should copulate like rabbits, then fall asleep together.”
She welcomed his embrace, but knew she could do neither of the things Brock implied without some answers first. “Who is Arturo Dibiaso?” she asked.
“Sounds like the start of a bad joke,” Brock said.
“I wish it was. Do you know him?”
“Never heard of anybody by that name.” Brock continued to towel off.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. I mean, if he’s someone I’ve met somewhere along the way, I’ve certainly forgotten about it.” He perched a leg atop the bed and dried his undercarriage, but stopped when he noticed Sam’s intense gaze and troubled expression. “You look upset. What’s up?”
Sam searched his eyes. They didn’t waver. She’d never known Brock to lie to her, and she wouldn’t have any idea what his giveaways might be if he ever did try to deceive her, but she didn’t notice anything in his face. And Special Agent Sam Jameson was really good at catching liars.
She decided to honor their tacit but ironclad agreement not to pull punches or keep secrets. “Jarvis says he has phone records linking you to some Venezuelan guy named Arturo Dibiaso.”
“Venezuela? Home of the hater?”
“Yeah, Hugo Chavez. Not a big fan of Uncle Sam these days.”
“That describes just about everyone on the planet who isn’t us,” Brock observed. “What phone records? I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever met a Venezuelan in my life. Plenty of Mexicans, though I don’t have any of their phone numbers.”
“I don’t know. He didn’t show me. But that’s the reason they’re suspicious of me. They think the dirty cops were linked to some Venezuelan gang, which is linked to someone in Chavez’s regime, and they think you’re linked to all of the above via Arturo Dibiaso.”
“Sweet Jesus. What the hell gave them that idea?”
“The phone records, Brock. At least that’s what Jarvis told me. After I sat through a damned polygraph test.”
“Whoa! A lie detector? Aren’t you on the A-team? What the hell were you doing taking a lie detector test?”
“They thought I was in on the thing, too.”
“What thing?”
“I told you – that thing with the Venezuelans.”
Brock sat down on the edge of the bed. “I know you said that, but I’m trying to figure out who the hell they think I’m talking to. I mean, I’m happy to talk to them, maybe set them straight.”
“I don’t know if that’s a great idea right now. We have no idea what they really have on us.”
“How the hell could they have anything on us? We haven’t done anything?”
Sam cursed herself for feeling like she had to ask. But she had to ask: “Are you sure?”
“Baby, yes, I’m sure. I work in the Pentagon in military acquisitions. How many Venezuelans do you suppose there are, running around a US military weapons program?”
He looked at her. She seemed uncertain whether to believe him.
“And they have a military of, like, four donkeys and a biplane, don’t they?” he went on. “I mean, I don’t even know if they have an army. We could probably hand them everything we’re working on, and they wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with it.”
Her eyes continued to search him. The part of her who knew Brock James very, very well believed that he was telling her the truth.
The paranoid side of her was tough to ignore, though.
She felt that familiar panicky feeling begin again, the one that reared its ugly head whenever she started feeling vulnerable to a breach of trust by an important male in her life. My bastard old man. Why won’t he stay dead?
Brock saw it coming on. “Baby, I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I didn’t find you and turn my life upside down to keep you, just to lose you by lying to you. I don’t know Arturo whoever. Or if I know him, it sure as hell isn’t by that name.” He pulled her onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her. She felt stiff and distant. Afraid.
“Sam,” he said, “I want you to trust me because I’m trustworthy and I’m telling you the truth. But failing that, I want you to dig through everything in my life, if you have to, in order to figure out that I’m shooting straight.”
“Brock, I do trust you. I mean, I always have. And I don’t know what they think they know, and half the time they’re full of shit anyway. But it scared me. It does scare me.”
“I’m not scared, baby.”
“You should be. Big Brother thinks you’re spying.”
“Why? Tell them to dig through all my shit.” Brock’s voice rose. “You have all of my passwords. Use them
. And I never go anywhere without one of my two phones, except inside the security vault, and even then, the phones are right outside the door. So you can track everything, can’t you? Where I’ve been, who I’ve been with. I mean, they can do that, right?”
“I’m sure they already have. That’s what worries me, because they think they’ve found something.”
“Then let’s figure out what’s up. I don’t want to pussyfoot around this. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
She looked at him a long moment. Which voice to trust? She felt certain he wasn’t lying to her, but she couldn’t tell if that was just because she desperately wanted him to be telling the truth.
Her own motivations aside, she knew that there was no such thing as fact without interpretation, especially in the counterespionage world. And there was no way to know whether Jarvis and Ekman were lying about there being some connection between Brock and Dibiaso. It could all have been a smokescreen. They could be chasing some other agenda she had no idea about, and they could easily have invented the Brock connection to get her out of their way.
She made her decision. “I trust you, and I love you. Or maybe I trust you because I love you. I don’t know. But let’s stay on the same team, okay?”
Sam and Brock had no sooner fallen asleep when her personal cell phone rang. “Hi, Dan.” Her voice sounded groggy and thick with sleep.
“Guess it’s my turn to wake you up. Isn’t that a nice change of pace?” Dan Gable’s voice was annoyingly loud and cheery.
Sam checked the number. Gable was calling from work. “Didn’t I send you home hours ago?” she asked.
“Yes, but I got a call from the lab guys. I brought them in to analyze the bomb fragments. Are you sitting down?”
“Actually, I’m lying down.”
“Right. Sorry. Anyway, it was definitely a military bomb, but not from anything in the US stockpile.”
“That’s a relief. I think. I don’t know what I really expected. A bomb is a bomb, but it’s nice to know that nobody in the US military wants to blow me up in my home in the burbs.”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Dan said. “We’re pretty sure it’s a US-made guidance kit. But we’re tracking down whether it’s a version that’s used exclusively by our guys, or if it’s an export version.”
“Guidance kit? What are you talking about?” Sam asked.
“Sam, someone dropped that bomb from an airplane or helicopter,” Dan said.
“And it guided to the ultraviolet beacon you found on the multi-specs?”
“We think so. Like I said, I don’t know if it’s an export version or not,” Dan said. “We’ll know more tomorrow, after the military makes it in to work.”
“Export version? What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“Have you been living in a cave? Uncle Sugar is the biggest gun runner in the world. We make almost as many weapons to sell to other people as we make for ourselves.”
Sam thought about this. Foreign bomb, US guidance kit, dropped from an airplane or chopper in US airspace, with an explosion in a US neighborhood. Terrorism? If so, it was the seriously ballsy variety of terrorism, the kind that says I have access to government-only toys and I’m not afraid to rub your nose in it.
It seemed outrageous on the face of it – a military bomb exploding in a US city? Unheard of. Sam would never have believed it in a million years. Except that it was her front lawn the bomb had rearranged.
And the guidance kit may or may not have been sold to another country. Either somebody in the US had gotten their hands on a foreign bomb and strapped a US guidance kit on it, or another country had used a bomb it had purchased from the US to commit an act of war on American soil.
More than likely, a third party was in the mix. It would explain the in-your-faceness of the move if a fringe group was behind the hole in her house. And it would leave plenty of plausible deniability if there was a foreign government somehow pulling the strings. Very sorry, they could say – rogue actor, and our best people are investigating, etc.
“Okay, thanks Dan. I’ve got to get some sleep, and then I’ll chew on this some more.”
“One more thing first, if you don’t mind. Who’s Fatso?”
Whoa. Sam knew her pause was too long, but she couldn’t help it. She hadn’t expected Dan to have any knowledge of what her polygraph test had revealed hours earlier, and she wasn’t allowed to talk to Dan about it, anyway. It was asinine, but if she violated Jarvis’ security order, it could land her in jail. “Why do you ask?”
“I walked by Ekman’s office on my way to the pisser a minute ago. I overheard the name, and he looked like he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar when he saw me looking at him.”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Sam said, knowing that her dodge was insufficient but unable to think of anything better to say to her deputy.
“Obviously. But who’s Fatso?” Dan asked again.
“Nobody. Nothing to worry about. At least, nobody to worry about over an open phone line. You follow?”
Dan got the message, and changed the subject: “Where are you staying? You’re not at home, are you?”
“Where else would I be? It’s not like I’d be hiding from anyone, wherever I went.”
“You could stay in a safe house.”
“Sure, Dan. But that would require me to make up my mind about who the good guys were.”
“Always paranoid.”
“Can you think of a good reason not to be?”
Dan couldn’t. He signed off, promising to update her as soon as he heard anything new. For the second time on the same Sunday, Sam told her deputy to go home to his family.
She collected Brock and went downstairs into the basement strong room. She shut and locked the door, and turned a recording of the surf on the stereo to drown out the noise of the construction upstairs. Workers had been called in to remove the shattered remnants of her bombed-out entryway and seal the opening from the elements.
Sam and Brock crawled in bed in the panic room and slept like the dead.
14
El Jerga – The Shiv – boarded his flight in Caracas, Venezuela. He took his seat without so much as a nod to the person next to him. He wasn’t big on conversation with strangers.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t talkative. It was just that he couldn’t talk. A smashed trachea and larynx had almost killed him, a decade ago last spring. Injured on the job, but he couldn’t exactly collect worker’s comp. His reward for the excruciating suffering and the gruesome scar on his neck had been the privilege of more work for the same employer.
It wasn’t like he could quit, though. Venezuela was a small country, and Caracas was not nearly big enough to hide a man like El Jerga. He was, consequently, a lifer. His work would end when he ended.
Scar tissue covered most of his damaged and deformed larynx, and his voice was a horrible croak, like tires on gravel mixed with an emphysema patient’s death rattle. He didn’t use it much. He let his hands do the talking.
He checked his messages one last time before the flight attendants began chirping about cell phone use. Just one message, from El Grande: stay on schedule.
As if I’d do anything else, El Jerga snorted quietly to himself. Puta. He pictured El Grande in his fancy office building with his young, nubile secretaries taking turns sucking him off while he stared out at the Caracas skyline. Even the Venezuelan Special Service, known for its ruthlessness and swiftness of action, had its strap-hanging bureaucrats.
But unlike most office-dwellers, El Grande had teeth and balls to go along with his occasional officiousness. It didn’t stop him from grating on El Jerga’s nerves, though.
He popped another pill to help him settle in for the five-hour ordeal to North America. The flight route would take them over millions of square miles of open ocean. Drowning in the ocean was El Jerga’s second greatest fear.
Flying was his first. Pigeon, they sometimes called him. They had to throw a rock at him
to get him to fly. He’d rather drive for two days than fly for two hours. El Jerga could easily look a man in the eyes while choking him to death, or blithely slit the throat of a pretty young doncella and watch the spark of life leave her body in bloody spurts, but he needed beta blockers to climb aboard an airplane.
The phone vibrated again. El Grande: don’t wet your pants, Pigeon.
Puta.
The flight attendant began her scripted harangue, and El Jerga turned off his phone, closed his eyes, and tried to think of something pleasant. Like the upcoming job. He would get paid handsomely to unleash the nastiness at the center of him. What could be more pleasing?
15
Peter Kittredge, Deputy Special Assistant to the US Ambassador to Venezuela and sometime-spy for Exel Oil, gazed absently out the large picture window of his eighth-floor DC flat. The view was spectacular, encompassing the Washington Monument and the Capitol, but he barely noticed. He was busy trying to figure out what to do.
He hadn’t yet replied to Arturo Dibiaso’s text requesting another dead-drop. It was a problem for a few tiny little reasons. First, the dead-drop location was in Caracas, Venezuela, and his boyfriend, Charley Arlinghaus, was lying in a coma in a DC hospital; second, the Central Intelligence Agency – or a couple of guys who did a damn convincing impersonation – were wise to his little moonlighting gig with Exel, and would undoubtedly want to play along in any Exel-related activities.
Third, he didn’t have any of the information that Dibiaso wanted. He would have to collect it from the embassy before making the drop. That would be tough to pull off without raising suspicions.
Kittredge had less than twenty-four hours to figure a way through all of those snags, then fly back down to Caracas to collect the information from the embassy servers and make the drop across town for Dibiaso.
So you’re saying there’s a chance, Kittredge mused glumly.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 9