In true Latin- and South-American fashion, it was necessary to grease the palms of various Venezuelan functionaries and adjunct offices in order to receive the permits, licenses, and judiciary findings that allowed commerce. Bureaucracy was its own industry, and bribery was its conveyor belt. So the embassy kept tabs, to the best of its ability, on the most relevant crooked officials to approach in order to get anything done.
This was the information that Kittredge provided to Exel Oil. The message traffic was basically gossip. It was stupid, really, that any of that kind of information should be classified “SECRET.” But it was most definitely classified, and that’s what made Kittredge’s next act fall unambiguously in the category of treason against the United States government.
He saved the relevant traffic streams to the thumb drive, which he placed in a small, smooth, cylindrical plastic container. Then he dropped his pants and hid the container where the sun didn’t shine.
He breezed through the embassy’s security checkpoint with nothing in his hands and walked out into the warm Caracas afternoon.
His hands shook and he felt adrenaline in his stomach as he did his best impersonation of a nonchalant pedestrian, and he had a moment of insight: he enjoyed the rush.
Exel had paid him reasonably well for his trouble, but they sure as hell hadn’t paid him enough to be suitable compensation for the hellish nightmare he had endured over the past couple of days. But the satisfaction and enjoyment of a secret, the knowledge that he was getting over on his government and employer, gave him a perverse thrill. For a brief moment, he felt that the adrenaline rush might really be the thing his life had been missing.
Then a passing car’s horn startled him, and he twisted quickly toward the sound. The sudden movement tore at the scabs that had begun to form on his lower back, where Quinn had used the belt sander and the table salt, and Kittredge was reminded that they called it cloak-and-dagger for a reason. And sometimes the dagger was in your own back. It wasn’t a game for pussies.
Deep down, though he enjoyed the thrill of secrecy and the fun of running around acting like a spy, Kittredge knew that he was a lightweight. Everyone was a pussy at the right level of pain, but he suspected that his threshold was lower than average. That made him scared.
So he stopped for a drink at his local hangout.
It wasn’t strange by Caracas standards, but it was definitely unusual behavior for a US government employee in the middle of a workday, and Kittredge wasn’t smart enough to be concerned about his profile. He sat at a sidewalk table, ordered stuffed Arepa, a bread cake filled with fish and cheese, and sipped vodka while he waited for his food.
Movement caught his eye, and he looked up to see Bill Fredericks staring at him from across the street. His blood ran cold, and he flashed back to his unpleasant interrogation with Fredericks just a little more than twenty-four hours earlier. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Fredericks walked across the street and approached Kittredge’s table. “Hello, Peter. Helluva nice day, isn’t it? A little muggy for my taste, but at least the temperature is agreeable.”
“Hi Bill. Fancy meeting you here.”
“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d say hi to my newest friend. How’s Company life treating you?”
“Go fuck yourself, Bill.”
“You’re still sore about the cameras, aren’t you?”
“Yes. And my back hurts. And I don’t appreciate what you did to my apartment. But thanks for asking.”
“Well, I understand your anger, but I won’t claim all of that antisocial behavior you just listed. And I’m glad we’re friends now.”
He smiled, but Kittredge didn’t reciprocate.
“Anyway, just saying hi,” Fredericks said. “We’re here if you need anything.”
“Making sure I behave myself?”
“Obviously. But here to help, too. Quinn gave you the number, right? Don’t be afraid to use it if you need to.”
“What a mensch,” Kittredge said.
“Hey, no hard feelings, okay? Lunch is on me. Take care of yourself, Peter.” Fredericks left the table, handed cash to Kittredge’s waiter, and walked out of the café.
Kittredge finished lunch and wandered aimlessly until the appointed hour. Always between one and one-thirty in the afternoon. That was when foot traffic was heavy enough to cover the drop, but not heavy enough to interfere. Dibiaso likely wanted to be able to watch the whole thing unfold, and too thick a throng at the El Valle Metro station would obstruct the view.
The time finally came. The whole thing was ridiculously unsophisticated. Kittredge stepped into the men’s room, pulled the container out of his ass and washed it off, and removed the thumb drive from the container.
Then he walked to the bank of pay-per-day lockers, deposited change in locker number sixty-nine (Kittredge always appreciated the innuendo), and locked the USB drive inside. That was it. Dead-drop, done. It went without a hitch.
He could return any time after three p.m. to retrieve the duffel bag full of silver bullion. He stopped at a bar to pass the time. Mental miscellany accompanied a double-vodka on the rocks, and helped Kittredge while away the two hours before he could collect his silver. Same-day pay was nice, but it contributed to his delinquency by giving him idle time across town from the rest of his life, time that he filled with booze.
He thought about the silver, and about how much he liked to pick it up, feel its heft, exalt in the shiny richness of it.
Oh, no. The silver! Was it still there?
He paid his tab and walked hurriedly out the door and around the corner to the Metro station. He rode to the end of the Blue Line at Plaza Venezuela, dashed through the turnstile and up the stairs, and bounded up the long escalator to the street. One half-block of Olympic sprint-walking, which was his interpretation of being in a hurry without being in a panic, brought him to el Banco de Caracas.
Sweating, he badged into the safety deposit room, found his locker, and inserted the key with trembling hands.
Empty. Fourteen pounds of pure sterling silver, the sum of his remuneration for selling US State Department secrets to Exel Oil, was gone. In its place was a note: We’ll keep this safe for you. Kisses, BF.
Kittredge pounded his fist into the lockers and hollered curses. Women and children stared at him as he slumped to the floor. He fought back tears, progeny of his exhaustion, intoxication, and utter defeat.
They had bent him over in every way possible.
He sat leaning against the wall, arms folded over his knees, and cried quietly into his sleeve. He felt helpless, completely powerless to exert any control over any facet of his life. Friday night’s booty quest had quickly morphed into a complete calamity.
Was there any corner of his existence that hadn’t been violated over the past two days? He couldn’t think of one. My life is a shambles, he repeated over and over to himself.
Despair turned to anger. Kittredge may not have been the most butch of men, but he was no milquetoast, either. He had picked himself up and dusted himself off plenty of times before. Granted, he had never before had his entire life reduced to rubble in front of him. But he knew how to persevere.
Sitting on the safety deposit room floor, Kittredge’s anger hardened into resolve. He would find a way out of the situation. He would find a way to shove it up Fredericks’ ass, he decided. And Quinn’s too.
18
Special Agent Samantha Jameson left her office at seven a.m., retrieved her dented Porsche from the parking garage at the Department of Homeland Security, and headed toward her bombed-out home.
As she drove in angry impatience, one thought occupied her mind, clouded her vision, and tore at her heart: he lied.
They didn’t have any rules in their relationship except honesty. They’d both survived awful relationships, and had been stripped entirely of their patience for head games or manipulation. They had told each other viciously difficult truths about themselves, and some of those truths had c
aused pain for the other. But they had done it, because above all, they valued having no secrets between them. They always delivered it with love, but bare-naked, bare-knuckled honesty was the cornerstone of their relationship.
Until now. If Ekman’s cell phone triangulation printouts were correct, it looked like Brock had taken miles-long car rides with a man he claimed not to know, on several different occasions.
Why would he lie to me about that? And who the hell is Arturo Dibiaso?
She knew that if it was true – if Brock had lied to her – it was over between them. Life was too short to wonder whether the man she loved was somehow playing her.
And it was pretty clear that he had lied to her. Convincingly, too. Bastard.
She had grown up in an environment like that. She could always tell that her old man was lying, because it happened just about every time his lips moved. Missed birthdays, all-night benders, promises long forgotten – they all took their toll on Sam’s psyche, and she had lived the clichéd troubled teenager lifestyle to compensate.
She had let more douchebags than she could count climb all over her body and heart. All the while, she had vehemently denied her need for male affirmation even while seeking it desperately.
She had put herself together professionally, gone to a great school, caught the eye of the spook recruiters, and risen rapidly through the ranks at Homeland, but that was all elaborate overcompensation for the brokenness she felt.
She had endured shitty relationships with horrible men, most of them older, many of them married, all of them completely wrong for her. Her pinup model looks and razor intellect made her trophy material, and she had no shortage of attention. She hated them, but hated herself more.
She had been lying to herself and she knew it, but truthfulness seemed too bitter a pill. To acknowledge the truth would have meant the end of the life she had constructed. It was a horrible life, but change took courage. While Sam was a balls-to-the-wall counterespionage agent, her no-prisoners style had its limits. She knew that making the choice to see herself clearly would inevitably have demanded a life overhaul that she lacked the strength to undertake.
Unsurprisingly, she drank. A lot. Trembles and shakes were a daily reality toward the end. She almost didn’t survive. One Tuesday morning, after returning from the convenience store with a fresh bottle of vodka, she had sat in her garage with the car motor running, daring herself to do nothing while the fumes overtook her.
Then, improbably and at a deep, wordless level within her, a will to live intervened. She turned off the car, went inside, and began living.
She hadn’t thought that she could endure reality unvarnished by an insulating layer of inebriation, but she had beaten the odds and beaten the addiction. And she had thrived. Her sobriety was hard-won, but she did it all by herself. And she stuck to it. Thirty-eight months and counting.
She learned that life was precious, brutally short, and never to be wasted by putting up with bullshit. Especially from a lover. She lived with abandon and rolled with the punches in almost every other area of life, but she could never compromise on honesty. It was the center of her existence and the mechanism of her mental health.
I trusted you. She felt nauseous thinking of Brock’s deception. You were the one, you fucking bastard. She loved him wildly and madly. She couldn’t imagine walking the earth without him.
But she couldn’t stay with him. He had lied. It would never, ever be the same between them.
Sam wiped her eyes and hardened her heart as she arrived home. She had to park across the street from her house, as the cleanup crew had placed a dumpster in her drive to collect the remnants of her bombed-out entryway.
She walked past the workers without a word, lost in her own private apocalypse. She packed a duffel bag full of clothes and sundries, and threw in three full clips of hollow-point .45-caliber ammunition for her Kimber semi-automatic.
She found a notepad and scrawled a note: “You broke our only rule, and you broke my heart.” She pasted it to the bathroom mirror, walked back to her car, and drove away.
19
Sam’s phone vibrated. Phil Quartermain. The last time she had thought about him was when she left the John Abrams scene, which seemed like seven decades ago. Apparently, the crooked cop who had tried to Taser her hadn’t gone inside the house to mess with Phil.
Or, maybe Phil was in on the thing, whatever the thing was.
She took a deep breath to try to cleanse the sobs from her voice. “Hi Phil.”
“Darling, you sound positively awful,” Phil said. She couldn’t tell if the overt gayness was an affectation he had acquired since being fired from the FBI – for his gayness, everyone said – or if it was a natural part of himself that he had stopped suppressing.
“Rough day,” she said.
“Boy troubles?”
“Among other things. How can I help?”
“Do you remember that key we found under John Abrams’ flabby ass? I found a suitable lockbox for it.”
“Where?”
“Can you come over? We’ll talk then.”
“Sure. You’re at Metro?”
“No, I’m taking a sick day. I’ll text you my address.”
“See you in a few,” Sam said.
The text with Quartermain’s address arrived seconds later, and she left the parking spot by the greenbelt near her house, where she had gone to think and suffer in private. She rounded the corner and headed toward 395 Southbound, which would take her to the Shirlington address.
Shirlington was a hip little micro-development with a couple of high-rise apartment complexes and a number of trendy shops, stores, restaurants, and boutiques. Like all of DC, it was overpriced, but not pretentiously so. Probably a great place for a single guy to live.
As she accelerated up the on-ramp onto the highway, she noticed a DC Metro police cruiser tuck in behind her. Her pulse quickened. Not this again.
She only had a couple of miles to go before the Shirlington exit, but Sam got all the way over in the far left lane. The police cruiser remained a dozen car lengths behind her, but followed her lane changes. I’m so over all of this, she thought.
She moved back over into the right lane and slowed to a crawl. The cruiser followed her lane changes, but came up on her quickly as she lowered her speed. Her move was designed to force the issue – either the cop would have to slow down below the flow of traffic to remain behind her, making it excruciatingly obvious what was going on, or he would have to go around her.
The policeman did a little of both. He stayed behind her for a while, until he realized how drastically she had slowed. Then he went around. She noted the car number as he drove past, and jotted it down on a parking garage receipt. She left a message for Dan Gable to track down the officer behind the wheel. Following her was a pretty brash move in light of the weekend’s events, and Sam planned to find a way to get her boot on the guy’s throat.
Her heart rate had almost returned to normal by the time she arrived at Phil Quartermain’s building. She rode the elevator to the twelfth floor and walked around to find apartment #1223.
It was a nice building – relatively new, well-appointed even by DC standards, and very clean. Maybe Brock will move down here. She realized that she really did think it was over between them. Lies were deal-breakers. But she knew that breaking up with Brock was going to be like losing a limb. She would never be the same.
Apartment #1223 was as far away from the elevators as possible, and she walked the entire length of a long hallway before arriving. The door was ajar. “Hi Phil,” she said, rapping lightly.
When she didn’t get a response, she called out and knocked a bit louder, but with the same result. She started to get a feeling of dread, like she knew what she was about to discover. She inhaled deeply to steady herself, and smelled the unmistakable, metallic scent she had come to recognize all too well.
She drew her .45, chambered a round, removed the safety, and announced her presence: �
�Federal agent. Hands up!”
Hearing no response, she kicked the door open, then immediately moved for cover around the jamb and listened intently for any movement. Backup would be ideal – necessary, most would say – but it was a luxury she didn’t have. Quartermain might still be alive, but if there was enough blood for her to smell it from the entryway, he wouldn’t be alive for long.
Sam ducked through the doorway and rolled quickly to her right, crouching behind the kitchenette counter. She peered around the edge and saw that the apartment opened beyond the kitchenette into a large room, but her view was obstructed by a large L-shaped couch. She listened again for movement, shouted again for hands up, and made her way toward the edge of the couch, being careful to stay low.
She peered around an end table and was instantly revolted by what she saw. Phil’s throat had been slit from ear to ear. The cut was catastrophically deep, and she could see the white cartilage of his exposed trachea. The carpet was soaked in his blood.
It took discipline to clear the rest of the flat, but it wouldn’t be healthy to be caught off guard by the killer if he was still on the scene. So she took her time.
The killer was long gone, and she returned to the great room to snap photos of the scene.
The large ottoman had been displaced from its carpet indentations, and a lamp had been knocked over, indicating a brief struggle. Quartermain had fought, but it hadn’t taken the killer long to subdue him, and saw the knife through his throat. Either the killer was a strong guy, or he had gotten the jump on Quartermain. Maybe both.
Sam realized that she had a problem: she didn’t know who she should call to report the murder. She wasn’t about to give the Metro guys unfettered access to her, especially after her most recent encounter moments ago on the freeway.
But until there was a bureaucratically compelling reason for Homeland to assert jurisdiction, the Metro guys called the shots, and they always got first dibs on a scene.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 11