Jarvis reddened.
“And no matter what you thought might have been going on with Brock and Dibiaso, you had an obligation to warn me. But you two were too busy covering your own asses, you nutless bags of manure.”
“Wait a minute here, Sam,” Jarvis said. “There are national security concerns–”
“I’m sure the Inspector General will be very interested in hearing them,” Sam said. “You can forget your fucking promotions, both of you.”
She got up to leave.
Brock followed, visibly angry. “I know a betrayal when I see one,” he said. “I will hunt you bastards down and kill you with my bare hands if anything happens to her. That’s a promise, not a threat.”
He gave Jarvis and Ekman a hard look before turning to follow Sam.
They had taken two steps toward the door when Jarvis spoke. “Wait,” he said.
Sam kept moving, and Brock followed behind her.
“Sam, wait,” Jarvis said again. “Let’s please talk about this. I’m sure we can find a way forward.”
Sam stopped. A small smile crossed her lips. She recognized the bureaucratic language of surrender.
You’re mine, you pussies, she thought as she turned around. She spoke slowly and calmly. “I’ll tell you how this is going to go down. One whimper from either of you, and I will kick up a shit storm like you’ve never seen.”
Ekman and Jarvis looked at her, resignation in their eyes.
“First, Brock and I are going to return to Dayton for another friendly chat with Fatso.” Sam’s voice was low and even.
Jarvis blinked, and opened his mouth as if to protest, but Sam silenced him with a raised finger. “I will do that with your full support and resources, Tom,” she said. “No questions asked. And Frank will accompany us.”
She looked at Ekman. “You are now my human shield. We’ll be attached at the hip. If they want to get to me, they’ll have to take you down in the process.”
Ekman and Jarvis exchanged uneasy glances. She could tell they were looking for an out. “It’s not a request, gentlemen,” she reminded them. “You’re both guilty of dereliction of duty, and I will destroy both of you without batting an eye.”
The silence clanged around for several long moments. Sam looked at Jarvis, her gaze unrelenting.
Finally, Jarvis nodded, beaten.
He had just opened his mouth to speak when the office door opened and Dan Gable walked in, all five-eight and two hundred stocky pounds of him, carrying a manila folder.
“Sorry to barge in,” Gable said. He saw the glum look on Jarvis’ face. “Looks like a fun party,” he deadpanned. “Unfortunately, I’ve got something you all need to see.”
He pulled photos out of the folder. “I’ll warn everybody that these are a bit gruesome.”
It was a ridiculous understatement. Brock looked away after a brief glimpse of the blood and exposed sinew and innards.
Sam’s stomach turned, but she forced herself to study the macabre, inhuman scene.
The victim’s skin was flayed in strips, some of which hung loosely from the muscle beneath, like torn jeans. The man had been partially disemboweled. His lips had been removed, sliced clean off, leaving his face locked in a permanent, satanic death howl.
Sam recognized his hollow cheek bones, the shape of his face, and his bald head.
And his eyes.
“Jesus,” she said.
“That’s Fatso Minton.”
The Incident
Reckoning
Part I
1
Six corpses and a bomb.
It had been a shitty week. And though it was Friday, there was no end in sight.
Special Agent Sam Jameson emerged from Homeland Security Deputy Director Tom Jarvis’ office and walked quickly down the hallway toward the elevators. She was on her way to her office in the bowels of the country’s third largest bureaucracy.
Brock followed in Sam’s wake. She was still overcome with relief at her discovery of the coincidence that had falsely associated her lover with a brood of very bad people, who Sam suspected were responsible for as many as five of those corpses.
Maybe the bomb, too. It was hard to say.
It was good to have Brock back in her life. Now, they could try to stay alive together, instead of trying to stay alive apart.
She wasn’t quite sure why the cops had it in for her, and she hadn’t gotten much help from her two bosses at Homeland.
Tom Jarvis was a douchebag bureaucrat, and Francis Ekman was a milquetoast sycophant, and she was still uncertain why they’d withheld a key piece of information: the name of the guy who had probably dropped the bomb in the front yard of their very expensive Alexandria brownstone.
If Fatso Minton had indeed dropped that bomb, karma had already delivered its comeuppance. Sam was certain that the gruesome imagery of Fatso’s mutilated body would add itself to the regular rotation of macabre horrors in her dreams.
Sam and Brock moved like a phalanx through the sea of Homeland clerks milling about in the hallways. Dan Gable hustled to keep pace.
Frank Ekman, Sam’s newly-appointed human shield, brought up the rear. There was a strong chance that Homeland was compromised, and a strong chance that Ekman and Jarvis were themselves the problem, but Sam and Brock had been forced to bring this particular enemy close. It was necessary to reduce the number of variables in their world. It was tough to run from both the good guys and the bad guys at the same time.
“Wait here, Frank,” Sam said as they passed Ekman’s office. Sam’s boss did as she told him. Sam had him over a barrel.
Ekman peeled off, nodded at his secretary, and shut the door to his office.
“Will you please call me right away if he goes anywhere?” Sam whispered to the secretary, who gave her a puzzled look in response. “We have plans,” Sam explained. The secretary nodded.
The pencil pushers averted their eyes as Sam, Brock and Dan approached the elevator lobby. The kind of people who were content to sit in dark cubicles writing memos harbored a natural aversion to alphas, the kind of people who caught spies and flew fighter jets. The clerks cleared away.
They also whispered amongst themselves. There had been rumors that Sam was somehow tainted by involvement in unsavory activities, rumors likely started and perpetuated by the bureaucrat whose office Hurricane Sam had just left.
She had left Tom Jarvis red-faced and with his mouth agape. It hadn’t mattered much that he sat two rungs above her on the organizational chart, and just two rungs below The Man Himself. What mattered was that Jarvis was no match for Sam, and his decades of office work hadn’t stacked up well against her years in the real world.
She pushed the button and waited for the elevator. She smiled at a few of the staring cubicle dwellers, who immediately looked away. Dan and Brock watched with amusement.
They held their conversation until they were alone in the elevator, when Dan spoke up. “I’m glad you’re here in person. A few things have come up that I’m glad we don’t have to talk about by phone.”
“I imagine,” Sam said. “It’s been a hell of a week for you, too. I appreciate all of your help. You’ve been a godsend.”
“No sweat. How’s the remodeling going?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.
“Great. We saved a ton of money on the demolition,” Sam quipped.
The elevator dinged, and they made their way to Sam’s office, with its million-dollar view of Capitol Hill in one direction and the Washington Monument in the other.
Sam sat behind her desk, drew a long breath, rubbed her eyes, and blew the air out slowly. “What a grisly scene,” she said, referring to the pictures Dan had brought into Jarvis’ office minutes earlier.
In addition to the human tragedy, Fatso’s death was wildly inconvenient. Sam had planned to return to Fatso’s home in Dayton to ask him a few more pointed questions.
One pointed question, really: why did you drop a goddamned bomb on my goddamned house?
>
“So we’re back at square one?” she asked Dan.
“Fortunately, no. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He sat in a chair adjacent to the couch in Sam’s office. “Who’s the one guy you’d love to have a conversation with?” he asked.
“Dibiaso,” Sam said without hesitation. “Jarvis apparently knows him as Martinson.”
“Exactly. His burner phone was active for roughly two weeks, and he made several dozen calls.”
Brock shook his head. “What are the odds that he and I rode together twice in the same damned carpool?”
“Stranger than fiction,” Sam said.
“Here’s the deal,” Dan said. “I have no idea how Ekman and Jarvis learned Dibiaso was using that particular burner phone. I haven’t found anything confirming it, and neither of those clowns are talking.”
Sam shook her head. “That’s a problem.”
“It sounds like a problem,” Dan said, “But it may not really be a problem. Here’s why. The phone’s user – maybe Dibiaso, maybe someone else – spoke with roughly a dozen people. I accessed those phone records via the trapdoor—”
“You got a warrant?” Sam interjected.
Dan laughed. “You’re joking, right? Who needs a warrant in the digital age?”
Sam shook her head. “I didn’t hear that.”
“As I was saying,” Dan went on, “I looked at those records. All of them were burners, little prepaid phones that weren’t in use for much more than a few weeks.”
“Not helpful,” Sam said.
“Right,” Dan said. “Definitely not ideal for our purposes. They’re easy to track geographically, but it’s really tough to associate those accounts with any particular person. You have to have some other information, like the phone’s location data overlapping with a person’s known address, or credit card information used to purchase the phone.”
“Do you have that?” Brock asked.
“No. We have nothing at all, on anyone who used any of the phones that Dibiaso – or whatever his name is – spoke with using the burner number that Ekman gave us. Those phones were all bought with cash and used in public places.”
“Doesn’t sound like good news,” Brock said, looking glum.
“No, but it’s very telling,” Sam said. “These dudes were more than investment bankers cheating on their wives.”
“It does have a pro vibe about it,” Dan said. “But there’s one thing that jumped out at me.”
Sam nodded, hoping to accelerate Dan’s dramatic pause.
“One of the phones subsequently popped up in a foreign country. Any guesses?”
“California?”
Dan frowned. “Venezuela.”
Sam nodded thoughtfully. “So that improves our confidence that whoever used this phone – who I think signed the Pentagon visitor log as Avery Martinson, and Ekman and Jarvis refer to as Arturo Dibiaso – is somehow relevant to the Bolero investigation.”
“That sounds interesting, but inconclusive,” Brock said.
“And not very helpful, really,” Sam said.
“Right, but the thing is, we got lucky twice,” Dan said. “Whoever ventured down to Venezuela with that phone was a bit sloppy. They turned the phone off twice in front of one particular address, and turned it on a couple of times in the same spot.”
Sam sat up. “Almost like they turned it off while they were home, and turned it on again when they left.”
“Exactly,” Dan said. “Didn’t want to give away where they were staying. Except they weren’t smart about it.”
“So you got the address, then?”
Dan handed her a slip of paper.
Sam looked at Brock. “Ever been to Caracas?”
“I’ll brush up on my French.”
“Spanish.”
“Guten Tag, Fräulein.”
“You’re a natural.”
2
Peter Kittredge picked dirty underwear off the floor of his Caracas apartment.
He found himself in a rough spot.
While the Agency-inflicted wounds on his back were healing, Kittredge wasn’t certain whether he would ever fully recover from the wounds his participation in a CIA assassination had inflicted on his conscience.
And he had nothing to wear. Someone had ransacked his apartment, and he wasn’t finished picking the broken glass out of his carefully tailored ensembles. Plus, he hadn’t done laundry in almost two weeks.
It was funny how the small things got to a person. Putting on a pair of unwashed underwear was symbolic of the mayhem that had taken over his entire life.
He selected a reasonably clean white tee from the pile of dirty clothes still strewn about the bedroom floor and pulled it free of the mess.
As he draped it over his head, he heard something clatter on the hardwood. It had a hard, plastic sound.
Several seconds of searching ended the mystery: an old-school cell phone. Nothing smart about it. It had a tiny display, actual buttons, and a stubby antenna sticking up from the top.
Kittredge had never seen it before.
Charley. You cheating bastard.
Theirs was an open relationship. They could have sex with whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted. The only caveats were not to play coy about it, and not to get emotionally attached.
Burner phones were a far more dangerous sign in an open relationship than in an exclusive one. In the latter, there was the chance that it was just casual sex. In the former, it was the kiss of death. It meant emotional attachment.
Or a parallel life. In Charley’s case, that seemed extremely likely. That parallel life may have included another serious relationship, or maybe not. Kittredge wasn’t sure whether he cared to know.
He was certain that he should have felt something, but he didn’t. He was numb. His VSS acquaintances had intimated that there was much more to Charley Arlinghaus than he knew. And Kittredge certainly had misgivings of his own regarding his boyfriend.
Ex-boyfriend, maybe. He wasn’t sure.
Charley had sort of nudged Kittredge into spying for Exel Oil. It had happened so slowly that Kittredge almost hadn’t noticed until he was already a long way in, probably too far in to get out.
And El Grande, the VSS guerrilla-looking guy who’d taken Kittredge under his wing, had claimed that Exel Oil and the CIA were really the same thing, working by various means to muscle in on the vast crude reserves under Venezuela’s lush jungles. The Venezuelan government had long ago thrown out the gringo oil vultures, as El Grande occasionally referred to them, but America’s otherworldly oil lust was nobody’s secret.
Sonuvabitch, Kittredge thought. A fine mess I dove into.
But it was better than dying of boredom in his modest embassy office, grinding through hopelessly uninteresting economic reports, he thought.
There was a reckless, wild, adventurous soul hidden beneath the sterile mountain of buttoned-down behavior and even more buttoned-down economic data that, before his exciting but ill-fated adventure spying for Exel Oil, had been the extent of his daily reality.
I’m well and truly screwed, Kittredge thought with absolute certainty, and this will definitely end poorly.
But I probably still wouldn’t change much if I had it to do over again.
He craved the rush, the ride. Even the abject fear was delicious in its vibrancy.
Sometimes.
Other times, it was just abject fear.
Kittredge turned on the burner phone. It took forever to time in. It wasn’t password-protected. Its call history was empty, and there were no voice or text messages.
He sighed. It would have been great to learn something about what Charley had been up to, but it occurred to Kittredge that at the moment, he probably already had all the excitement and intrigue he could handle.
As if on cue, his own phone buzzed.
Quinn. “Wear something nice, that shows off your broad shoulders.” Delivered with a fake lisp.
“Go to hell, Quinn.”
>
“Peter, my boy, life’s nothing without a sense of humor.”
Kittredge didn’t respond.
“Anyway, good chat,” Quinn said. “Hurry down. I’m illegally parked at your curb.” Quinn hung up.
Kittredge finished dressing in dirty clothes and left his apartment.
“Super-Agent Kittredge, how the hell’s it hanging?” Fredericks clapped him on the back.
Kittredge winced, his scabbed-over skin howling in protest.
“Still a little tender back there?” Fredericks leaned in conspiratorially. “Quinn goes overboard sometimes. He’s afraid to admit that he likes torturing people.”
“Well, it does make him a certifiable psychopath,” Kittredge said, taking a seat in the US embassy’s first-floor conference room next to an embassy coworker.
Kittredge had been surprised to learn from Quinn during the short drive from his apartment to the embassy that the morning’s festivities would be attended by none other than Ambassador Wolfe himself.
“Does he know?” Kittredge had asked.
Quinn had played dumb. “Does who know what?”
“You know what I mean. Does the ambassador know what you’re doing?”
“We.” Quinn had corrected. “What we are doing. Partners forever, remember? Says so on the paper you signed.”
“I’m serious, Quinn. Is he in on this?”
“No questions, little buddy. Those are unhealthy. Just play your part, speak your lines, and everything will come up roses.”
The ambassador arrived late, as was customary, hurriedly breezing in after everyone else had settled into their seats. It was an old trick used to solidify the pecking order. Everyone else in the room stood up at his arrival, as if he was a military general. It grated on Kittredge, just like it always did.
Maybe that was one of those little things that had driven Kittredge over the edge.
Fredericks spoke. “Mr. Ambassador, thank you for your time. I’m Jeff Santos, from the State Department Economic Policy Directorate.”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 31