The whine and rumble of the Cessna Citation business jet’s engines filled the cabin. Sam did her best to relax. She was more successful than Brock, who appeared extremely nervous.
With good reason. The FACI receptionist had sent them into the back room to negotiate the terms of their transportation, and they’d ended up paying every ounce of their gold to two men who could only be described as thugs.
“That was like a mob movie,” Brock said after they’d emerged.
“It isn’t over yet,” Sam said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to our first stop in Panama, and have to do some renegotiation.”
“At least you’ve got the pistol,” he said.
“For the moment.”
They’d boarded the plane wordlessly. The pilot and copilot seemed cordial enough, but the fat security man, with greased hair and greasier armpits, was nothing short of surly.
Sam had no doubts that she’d be able to win any sort of a physical confrontation with the fat man. But she wasn’t sure how many reinforcements might join him when they landed in Panama.
“You think these guys might warn the VSS?” Brock asked.
“Anything’s possible. I’m pretty confident they’re not directly involved with the VSS right now, because we’re on the plane. If they were less independent, they’d just have held us up and handed us over to them directly.”
“After they took our gold,” Brock said sullenly.
“Of course,” Sam agreed. “But I think they’re probably shopping the information around right now, looking for a juicy offer.”
“Wouldn’t that be bad for business? ‘Fly with us, end up dead.’ Not exactly a catchy sales pitch.”
“Right,” Sam said. “But it depends on how big an offer they get. And we’re not exactly their ideal customers, so they probably won’t care much one way or the other.”
Brock chuckled grimly. “Guess we’d better bring our A-game from here on in.”
Sam nodded her assent as the aircraft took the runway, accelerated, and lifted off to the west.
The coast of Venezuela receded in the distance behind them.
Part III
23
It was a lazy Saturday afternoon, but Tom Jarvis wasn’t the lazy type. He reclined in a plush leather chair in the downstairs study, one of two exquisitely furnished offices in the museum-sized house in Wolf Trap, Virginia, while the desktop computer saved its files and whirred to a stop.
Jarvis stared out the window, lost in thought.
It was unraveling. It had been for a while. There wasn’t much he could do about it, and he’d been forced to take drastic steps. They were extreme measures, and he hadn’t felt good about them in the least, but a quarter-century in the clandestine services had left him somewhat inured to the pangs of conscience, mute and fleeting as they might be after so many years.
Blowback was always a strong possibility. He was perched precariously between two federal behemoths and a ruthless little band of third-world thugs. He happened to dislike the Venezuelans a little less than he disliked the other two agencies that paid him, but he had never expected things to become quite so messy.
So it was time. He was as ready as he would ever be.
He inserted a small key into the locking mechanism on the computer’s face, gave it a quarter turn, and slid the hard drive out of its receptacle.
Life or death, he thought, looking at the small metal box full of silicon. CIA would execute him, no questions asked, if they got their hands on the files.
If Homeland found the disk drive first, the result would be the same, but it would take a decade longer. There would be an arrest, and a trial with a foregone conclusion, and then they would take ten years to let the appeals run their course before sending him to meet his maker.
Neither was an acceptable end game, Jarvis had decided.
He’d been extremely careful. He hadn’t ever connected his computer to the internet. He accepted only CD ROM files, scanned them for malware, then smuggled them to work to be shredded and incinerated with the rest of the classified waste he and his fellow Homeland bureaucrats generated every week.
Each time a new transaction appeared, Jarvis repeated the process. He received the payment details, fed the account information through the one-time encryption algorithm on the computer in his study, copied down the encoded results in a place so obvious that it would never be discovered, and destroyed the disks.
It was extremely dangerous. Death was the best he could hope for. Imprisonment for life would be worse.
But it was necessary. What good was an account full of money if you couldn’t access the account? It was like a lost wallet full of cash.
So he had contained the evidence as neatly as possible. He had taken precautions, at least those precautions that were within his wherewithal to comprehend.
Other, more effective measures likely existed, Jarvis knew, and he also knew that the electronic security game moved at a blindingly fast pace. This knowledge gave him the vague awareness that he had likely developed a form of complacency over the years, a psychological inability to recognize the vulnerability inherent in his habits. Yet, despite the stakes, he was unable to break the momentum of those habits.
Probably a damn good time to get out of the game. It wasn’t healthy to linger past one’s prime, particularly when so much of the clandestine world had become focused on the movement of little ones and zeroes.
I’m a walking coelacanth, he thought, making his way over to the large gun safe positioned against the exquisitely carved oak bookcase.
He entered the code and the lock yielded, revealing a second safe nestled inside. This one required a key, which he produced from his pocket. The smaller safe contained a duffel bag.
He checked the bag’s contents, adding the hard drive full of fatal information to the cash, passports, credit cards, and 9mm pistol inside.
Jarvis reached back into the safe-within-a-safe, feeling along the bottom until his hand found the small piece of paper.
On it was written his goodbye to a wife who barely spoke to him, to kids who never called. In characteristic fashion, the goodbye note said everything except what was important. Sorry I had to leave on such short notice, it began. Urgent business at work. People might ask after me, it went on, so feel free to pass my cell phone information to them. I’ll be checking messages regularly, and hope to return home soon.
A fitting end to a life spent going through the motions.
He set the note on the vast granite counter in the kitchen, and walked out the back door. He followed the cobblestone path through the backyard to the detached garage full of restored vintage sports cars. Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and even a Bentley or two sat in climate-controlled elegance.
The dehumidifier hummed in the background, and the familiar, comforting smells of motor oil, gasoline, and fine handcrafted machinery greeted his nostrils.
This had been the hardest part for Tom Jarvis: choosing the one car he would take into his new life, knowing he would have to say goodbye to all of the rest. Heart-rending.
He ran his hands along several of his cars, feeling their curves, indulging in a maudlin moment. He’d bought them for pennies on the dollar and painstakingly rescued them from dilapidation, raising them again to their proper glory over months and years of tireless work. To the extent that Tom Jarvis loved, he loved his cars.
The 1984 Testarossa. He had made his choice long ago, anticipating the need for haste when the time came, knowing that his inevitable indecision would prove tragic unless he prepared himself properly in advance.
Jarvis tossed the duffel bag into the passenger’s seat, pressed the button corresponding to the appropriate garage door opener, folded himself into the driver’s seat, and turned the key. The engine purred to life, adrenaline surged, and Tom Jarvis drove away from his home, looking back only to ensure that the garage door had descended behind him.
A wistful feeling came over him as he drove for the last time down
his street, his many recollections of a mirthless and joyless marriage suddenly awash in the pleasant sepia of nostalgia.
The moment passed quickly, and Jarvis returned to the pathological detachment – her words, probably first uttered by that marmot of a psychologist she was seeing, and probably sleeping with – which had served him so well over the years in what could be a very distasteful line of work. She had once told him that she could smell the rot of his amoral core, a declaration that encapsulated their uneasy union better than any other he could think of.
She blamed his employers for turning him into an unfeeling monster, but Jarvis knew better. His employers had merely given him the means and the opportunity to fully become what he always was. Her role had been to make him apologize for it, over and over again, in more ways than he could count.
He turned left at the bottom of the hill, exited the affluent subdivision, and headed toward the Dulles Airport Access road, reflecting on the irony of it all. It was his moral desuetude, the same unflinching response to nothing but the exigency of the moment, which had enabled him to achieve the results so cherished by his Agency handlers over the years. It wasn’t lost on him that those same characteristics might also have made his handlers mad enough recently to kill him on sight.
Pathological. She probably wasn’t far from right.
Certainly there was some pathology to the way he had simply migrated entrepreneurially toward interesting business arrangements, heedless of the underlying ideologies at play. He was always aware that ideology strongly motivated his employers. All of them, at some level, had sworn fealty to some god du jour; the strongest oaths were sworn to The Republic, and he, Agent Tom Jarvis of the Central Intelligence Agency, had mouthed those same words along with everyone else, all those years ago, acutely aware of the awkward vacuum he felt inside as he did so.
But he’d rarely thought of those ideas since, other than to recognize them for their utility. Ideology was a form of leverage, one that he applied whenever necessary or convenient, profiting at each step of the way, ruthlessly cutting ties or fading deftly into the background when the dogma became too prominent, too shrill.
He viewed it as a running joke he was playing on the rest of the world: he worked for people who did unspeakably horrible things to other people, in the name of liberty and freedom. Most recently, the VSS, but their impassioned cries weren’t any more or less compelling than many others he’d heard over the years.
Tom Jarvis didn’t do unspeakably horrible things in the name of a greater good. He didn’t believe there was such a thing.
Rather, he did unspeakable things because he found it useful to do them.
But he wasn’t delusional. It was obvious that his demented indifference – another clever turn of phrase his wife had brought home from the marmot’s office one day – was precisely the character trait that had landed him in his current predicament.
One more quick little stop, he breathed.
One hard drive, and one surprise.
He would reduce the former to rubble and ashes, and toss it into the river.
The latter, he would leave for his pursuers.
Doing so wouldn’t bring him joy or pain. It would simply be useful.
24
Dan Gable turned on his new burner, and checked for messages. There were none. He turned it off again, feeling his chest constrict.
Dan rode shotgun in the FBI sedan. He looked at the driver. Special Agent in Charge David Phinney seemed competent enough. Dan had never met him before, which wasn’t unusual in the gigantic US federal system, but the guy had an air of confidence and alacrity about him that Dan found professionally appealing. That was a relief.
But not hearing from Sam made him uncomfortable. They should have landed by now.
Just a delay, he told himself. He’d hated having to entrust them to hastily-made third-world travel arrangements with an outfit he hadn’t thoroughly vetted. It was tenuous at best, and he worked hard not to imagine her and Brock being thrown into a ditch somewhere in Caracas with their throats slit.
There hadn’t been much choice, though. Sam and Brock had to get out of VSS territory. They had no other US assets on their side in Caracas, and the considerable risk of being double-crossed by the charter service was nothing compared to the inevitability of a long, painful death at the hands of the state-sponsored Venezuelan guerrillas. So he’d done the best he could, and he’d just have to hope for the best.
He focused on the task at hand. Phinney guided the big, nondescript sedan to the Wolf Trap subdivision, just west of the Beltway. Jarvis didn’t live too far from Langley, a convenient fact that saved them some time. The Bureau wasn’t keen to let Dan tag along, but he’d sold them on his utility as a fellow federal agent, and as someone who knew Jarvis personally, just in case the arrest didn’t go smoothly.
Dan felt the familiar surge of adrenaline he always experienced during field operations. They were rarer now than when he had started out as a young agent, and most of his “heavy lifting” these days was done at a computer keyboard. Feels good to get outside, he thought.
His next thought was completely unrelated: I need a pay raise. Jarvis lived in the lap of luxury. How the hell was he pulling this off?
Dan chuckled at his momentary stupidity. Jarvis could afford to live in such a posh neighborhood because he was being paid by three separate state security services. Maybe my little duplex isn’t so bad after all.
The procession of vehicles approached the Jarvis residence purposefully, but not in too big a hurry. Two vehicles at the tail end of the pack peeled off at the cul de sac entrance and formed a road block to prevent anyone else from entering or exiting.
Phinney parked the sedan in Jarvis’ driveway, and two more vehicles flanked him on either side. “Wait here,” Phinney told him.
Dan protested, but Phinney held up his hand. “A deal’s a deal.”
He waited impatiently in the car.
Ten minutes later, Phinney emerged, a frown and grimace on his face. “Too late?” Dan asked as Phinney plopped into the driver’s seat.
The Bureau man nodded unhappily. The baseball game was on TV, and he didn’t want to spend all weekend chasing a fifty-something turncoat around Northern Virginia. He picked up the radio microphone inside the sedan, depressed the talk button, and held the mic too close to his mouth as he spoke: “Wolfpack, Tango Fox Four Seven, request status update.”
“Update available. Request secure line,” came the terse reply. Phinney hassled with his secure cell phone, finally connecting after several false starts and a stream of curse words.
The dispatcher read an address. Phinney punched it into the sedan’s navigation system.
The trip would take forty minutes. Dan sighed heavily and settled back into his seat.
“Know any jokes?” Phinney asked as he led the convoy back out of the subdivision.
25
El Grande’s expression was sad, haggard, and weary. “You couldn’t have known,” he told Kittredge. “And if you knew, what could you have done?”
Kittredge took little consolation in El Grande’s words. “It was murder.”
“El Presidente is not dead. Gravely ill, but not dead. Tell me again how it happened?”
Kittredge obliged, covering the details of the previous Friday’s meeting between the US ambassador and the Venezuelan president, their respective entourages in tow. He’d recounted the events enough times now that his memory was becoming tainted by the act of recollecting.
He wasn’t sure how Hugo Chavez had become infected, but he was sure that Fredericks and Quinn were somehow behind it.
“It would have happened without your help,” El Grande said. “And from your description, I am not certain whether you helped at all, no?”
Kittredge nodded. He’d merely been the side show, the stooge whose dry, biased presentation on the economic benefits of Venezuelan oil interests selling out to corporate American overlords had served as both pretext and dist
raction from the main event: committing an act of biological warfare against a foreign head of state.
A long silence hung between them.
“What now?” Kittredge finally asked.
“For us, even though many things are changing, the things at the center are the same,” El Grande said, a distant look in his eye. “They advance. We must resist.”
He took a long drag of his cigar.
“You must do the dead drop tonight,” he said. “It is an important moment for us. We need a victory, however small.”
26
Sam felt perspiration run down her back, and she fanned her shirt. One glance across the aircraft aisle told her that Brock was just as uncomfortable. Sweat dripped from his brow. The overweight security guy looked like he might have a stroke, but he continued to glare occasionally in Sam and Brock’s direction.
The Freedom Air Charter International bizjet had landed without incident at the Panamanian airport more than two hours earlier. The captain had opened the door and deplaned, but beseeched them in no uncertain terms not to leave the aircraft. “It is best not to strain our delicate relationships here,” he had said. “If you still want to reach America, that is,” he’d added unnecessarily.
They’d given up speculating where the captain had gone – Brock’s theory was that he had a Panamanian honey – and did their best to keep their jangled nerves under control. They weren’t sure whether the security goon was there to monitor them or to protect them. Either way, his presence and demeanor did nothing to alleviate the feeling that they were extremely exposed, waiting helplessly aboard an idle aircraft while others decided their fate.
A man in a Panamanian officer’s uniform boarded suddenly, startling the security guy to his feet. They exchanged words in a dialect Sam didn’t understand. The large security man nodded and returned to his seat.
The diminutive Panamanian officer stood in the aisle between their seats, put an officious look on his face, and demanded to see their passports.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 43