“Good morning, gentlemen,” Sam said. Both men jumped. Sam saw recognition dawn on their faces, and deepening shock along with it.
“I’ve had quite a night,” she said. “So please forgive me for keeping my seat.”
The surprise lasted but a second on Cullsworth’s face, and Sam smiled inwardly as she watched the smooth, practiced politician in him rise to the occasion. “Why, Sam, you look like you’ve been the victim of an attack!”
“You should see the other guy.”
“What in the world’s happened to you?” Cullsworth asked.
Sam wore an exaggerated smile. “I became reacquainted with your associate last evening,” she said, the gun pointed at Jarvis even as she looked at Cullsworth. “The one with all the fucking knives. We met at the Senator’s apartment. We all got along swimmingly, as usual, though it seemed like I might have interrupted something. Anyway, he treated me to an insider-only tour of a famous DC landmark.” The smile left her eyes and her face hardened. “But then his visa expired.”
Jarvis seethed.
Cullsworth shook his head. “Really, Sam, you should see a doctor. Let me call one for you.” He stepped toward the phone on his desk.
“Stop!” she commanded. “Stay right where you are.”
Cullsworth froze, surprised at the force in her voice.
Jarvis smirked. “There’s the Sam I know and despise,” he said.
“Always a pleasure, Tom. I have some fun planned for you. In the meantime, I’d like to ask you both to raise your hands in the air, and keep them there for me,” Sam said.
Neither man moved.
Sam raised her eyebrows. And her pistol. One or the other did the trick. Cullsworth’s arms moved slowly upward. “You must know you’re making a huge mistake, Sam,” Cullsworth said.
“I think Tom’s making the mistake,” Sam said. “His arms aren’t raised yet.”
Jarvis studied her defiantly. “I’m sick of your bullshit, Sam.”
“I feel threatened, Tom.”
Jarvis sneered. “What are you going to do, shoot me?”
Sam moved her finger to the trigger and aimed. “Left testicle, or right?”
Jarvis raised his arms.
“You’re not the average lemming, Sam,” Cullsworth said. “So I want you to think this through.” His face constricted into a frown. “We cannot stand by while men dismantle the republic that has stood for over two hundred years. We must not run roughshod over every nation on the globe, and ourselves in the process!”
“Spare me the sermon,” Sam said. “You’re a common criminal.”
“Daniel Ellsberg. Edward Snowden. Bradley Manning. Patriots, all of them. Heroes.”
Sam shook her head, feeling tired. “You’re an idiot and an asshole.”
“In troubled times, the greatest acts of patriotism are often against the law. The system goes so far astray that it takes someone with the courage, the vision, the fortitude to step outside the system, to pull it back on track, to save it from itself.”
“No argument here,” Sam said. “But for one tiny detail. You didn’t just leak a few dirty secrets to the press, Mr. Secretary. You’re a murderer.”
“How many more lives will we save? If we stop just one war of aggression from ever starting, how many countless thousands of lives will be spared?”
“You disgust me.”
“This is fun,” Jarvis said, “but I’ve got places to be. Put the gun away, Sam. Really, what are you going to do, kill us? Call the police?” He sneered again.
Sam smiled. “I’ve got something much better planned. On your knees, both of you.”
She stood slowly, unsteadily. She cursed her frailty. Jarvis had certainly noticed, and he had the air of a man who didn’t have much to lose by trying something desperate. “Now!” she commanded. “Hands on the back of your head.”
Reluctantly, the two men did as she commanded.
“Don’t do anything stupid here, Sam,” Jarvis said.
She laughed. “I never liked you, Tom, and I’m not going to miss you.”
“Seriously, what do you think you could possibly do to us? Call the FBI? Metro?” Jarvis laughed. “Hip pocket. Owned. Mine. They’ll show up, alright, but they’re going to leave with you in cuffs.”
“Heavens no, not the FBI, too!” Sam said with exaggerated surprise. “What will I ever do now? I guess you won. I suppose I should surrender.” She smiled wickedly.
She circled behind Cullsworth, searched him, zip-tied his feet together, then fastened his hands together behind his back. She gave him a rough nudge, and he toppled over onto his side.
“Actually, I had an even better idea than calling the police or the Bureau,” Sam said, making her way over to Jarvis. “Sadly, it doesn’t involve shooting both of you depraved bastards, like you deserve. If I did that, I would no longer be able to feel morally superior to you, and that would wreck my healthy self image. So instead, I’m going to phone a friend.”
Sam watched Jarvis’ face. She could see his mind whirring behind a concerned look.
Suddenly, he connected the dots.
“You bitch!” He leapt to his feet and whirled to face her, fists flying.
She sidestepped the lame, middle-aged attack, then clocked him above his ear with the butt of her pistol. He fell awkwardly, landing on his backside, his legs and arms splayed open. She laughed derisively at him. “Seriously, Tom. You’re miles out of your league.”
“You can’t do this,” Jarvis said. “They’ll turn on you, too. They’ll view you as a loose end, as part of the problem.”
“That might be true,” she said as she fastened his wrists and ankles together, pressing the barrel of her pistol into his back. Then she leaned in close, her lips next to his ear. “But I can’t imagine what they’re going to do to you.”
She stood slowly and made her way back across the room, settling gingerly into the leather armchair. “Look at you two criminal masterminds,” she said with an ironic smile. “Seeing you, lying there like dog shit stuffed in Armani, nobody would believe all the trouble you’ve caused.”
She pulled out her burner and dialed.
“But my new friend certainly believes it,” she said, lifting the phone to her ear.
She smiled as a gruff, nasal voice answered.
“Mr. Dibiaso,” she said. “They’re all yours.”
Fallout
Part I
Prologue
It wasn’t like the old days. You couldn’t just use a hunting rifle to rid the world of problem people.
Perestroika ruined that for everyone. Satanic Soviets against God’s Good Guys used to be a great gig. Simple. Effective. Resonated with everyone’s innate xenophobia. The public would put up with just about any amount of gangsterism, as long as you told them it was a shootout between spies over nuclear secrets. And as long as you told them the good guys had won.
The assassin sighed. Bygone days turned a nostalgic sepia in the mind’s eye. He knew it was so, yet he was still subject to the illusion.
Could he be blamed? It was a ballsy game, back then. Bullets and blades. None of this biological weapon bullshit, he thought wistfully as he patted the vial of biological weapon bullshit in his suit pocket, shaking his head ever so slightly and tightening his semi-permanent grimace.
They’d have never stood for it, back in the day. No room for hacks and poseurs. It was all about high-velocity cars and high-velocity women and high-velocity bullets.
Highballs, high heels, high stakes, and high times.
Then the goddamned wall came down.
It was tough to find work for a while. People momentarily lost the stomach for permanent solutions.
But statecraft recovered in due course, as did spy craft. The two were inextricably linked, the assassin reckoned.
He was glad he persevered. Glad to have survived. Happy to still be in the game.
Such as it was.
Goddamned drones, goddamned germs, goddamned pencil-n
ecked pencil-pushers, MBA college boys playing at a man’s game.
His mark showed up, taking her reserved seat a few tables over from him at the sidewalk cafe on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a block from the White House, saving the assassin from tumbling headlong into another bout of self-righteous self-pity.
He put his gloves on.
Then he felt the vial of biological bullshit again. Hepatitis? AIDS? Bird flu? Mad cow? He had no clue, and he didn’t want to know. Sometimes staying alive meant staying dumb. Society lacked a clear enemy, which made people far more sensitive and far more litigious. Hence an even greater need for plausible deniability.
And all those goddamned video cameras these days. One surveillance camera for every ten Americans, he’d read.
It was yet another of the forces driving his profession into extinction. One wrong step and your face would be all over You-view, or whatever the kids called that internet video thing.
His mark’s meal arrived. He didn’t remember her ordering, but then he remembered that she was a regular, and a wannabe mover/shaker, the kind of person who would put in a standing order at a trendy restaurant, then look too stern and preoccupied and important to enjoy it.
Salad is what they brought her. Twenty-something dollars on the menu, for fifty cents worth of rabbit food.
The assassin humphed. As good a last meal as any, he finally decided after giving it more consideration than it deserved.
He shook his head, annoyed at the wayward thoughts. He was on assignment, after all. No time for fuzzy-headedness.
He was still the best around, as far as he would admit, but he feared he might be hearing the faint thrumming of bat wings up in his belfry. Wasn’t getting any younger. Maybe time to remove the semi from semi-retired.
His B-team showed up. Right on time for a change. An elderly couple. Even more elderly than the assassin. They checked in with the hostess, who nodded, smiled, grabbed menus, and walked toward an open table.
Right toward his mark.
Showtime.
The assassin donned his hat, grabbed his cane, palmed the sealed glass pipette in his pocket, stood up, and made for the exit, dodging tables and diners.
He passed the hostess going the opposite direction, then the elderly B-team woman walking behind her. Next was the elderly man.
On cue, vertigo set in, and the old man stumbled into the old assassin, who stumbled into the mark’s table, upending glasses and clinking silverware against china.
Lost in the commotion was the sound of the sealed glass vial breaking open over the mark’s salad, its clear, odorless contents draining neatly into the overpriced arugula as the assassin’s gloved hand searched for a place to arrest his feigned fall.
“I’m so terribly sorry, ma’am,” he said to his mark, regaining his balance, setting aright the molested flatware, looking straight into her forty-something-year-old eyes, which registered officiousness and severity and focus and genetically bitchy overtones behind clumping makeup. The assassin didn’t doubt that somebody would want this particular DC muckety-muck out of the picture. She had that vibe about her, like maybe a few hundred people might like her better dead than alive. But maybe he was projecting.
She allowed a small wave and an unconvincing smile that never made it any further north than her cheeks, and let out a perfunctory “think nothing of it” in a tone that would have been much more at home in the company of a “bugger yourself,” then joined her assassin in restoring order to the contents of her table.
Apologies from the clumsy B-team man for good measure, a polite tip of the hat to the mark, and the assassin was on his way.
And that was that.
He walked out of the cafe, took a right, waited for the light, and walked toward the park and the setting sun, just an old man on a postprandial stroll, taking his air, as they used to say.
Hell of a night for it. Beautiful breeze, beautiful sunset. His mind was already long beyond the killer bug already at work on the Justice Department bureaucrat’s innards.
1
One year later.
Sam Jameson died once. In the line of duty. In the service of a not-terribly-grateful nation. Death by torture. It sucked.
Fortunately, her death didn’t take.
But it did rattle about in her psyche, lingering neurotically, prompting uncomfortable questions.
To wit: what the hell am I doing with my life, and why the hell am I getting killed over it?
She lived a pretty full-throttle existence before her untimely but short-lived demise, busting skulls and catching spies as a counterespionage agent at Homeland, which always sounded too much like Fatherland for Sam’s liking, with disturbingly similar overtones of xenophobia and aggression and totalitarianism. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and nobody else would employ a pinup girl with a mouth like a sailor and a mean left hook, unless there was first a disagreeable amount of reeducation.
But in her post-death life she’d taken a slightly different tack. She still followed her instinct, but no longer did she take the kinds of unreasonable risks she used to take.
That’s what she told the man she loved, anyway, whose voice she now heard, sexy and deep, intellect and testosterone adorably audible even through her tinny cell phone speaker.
“Why you?” Brock James asked. She heard notes of disappointment and anger. Dark clouds brought on by yet another ruined weekend.
Sam shrugged, a useless gesture in a phone conversation, but human wiring predated phones by a zillion eons. Plus or minus. “Born lucky,” she guessed.
She heard him let out his breath. Dead giveaway for exasperation, in her experience as his live-in consort. “They’re sending you halfway around the globe to view a case file,” he said. “Can’t they just email it to you?”
She shook her head, again pointlessly, eyes half closing as she let out her own sigh. “It’s protocol in cases like this one.”
“Like what one?”
“A guy died. Run over by a car.”
“In Budapest?” An edge to Brock’s voice. “Must happen a dozen times a day. Why do they need you there?”
“Because he was one of ours.”
A long pause. The energy changed.
“Shit. Sam, I’m really sorry.” More silence. “Anyone we knew?”
“Mark Severn,” Sam said, conjuring her coworker’s youthful face as she spoke his name.
Ex-coworker, to be completely accurate. As of yesterday.
“The bass player?”
“That’s him,” Sam said. “Was him, I guess.” She recalled a few enjoyable evenings watching Mark Severn’s rock band play in various Alexandria booze joints. The band was tight and well-rehearsed, and they were becoming kind of a thing around town. Sam and Brock enjoyed hanging out, tapping their feet, singing out of key, half-transported from the usual Washington DC manure for a few hours, overall an agreeable effect.
“Shit,” Brock repeated, anger replaced by commiseration. “I liked him.”
“Me too. He was going to be a good one.” Implying a marked contrast to the rest of them. Sam often complained that the Department of Homeland Security was a behemoth among bloated DC bureaucracies, and she respected precious few of her fellow agents’ skill and professionalism. The more ambitious among them were fat desk jockeys playing at cops and robbers. The less ambitious sent emails to each other about cops and robbers. Losing a rising star stung on personal and professional levels.
“Accident?” Brock asked.
“By all accounts.”
“I’m sorry you have to go. I made plans for us.”
Sam closed her eyes, feeling a tired burn inside her lids that accused her of working too hard yet again. “I’m sorry, baby. Really.”
“Forget about it. Duty calls. Will I get to see you naked before you leave?”
An airport announcement blared, making Sam’s response both inaudible and redundant. She repeated it after the harangue relented, just to fill the silence on the phone. “There
were tickets in the file Davenport gave me,” she said. “My flight’s in an hour.”
More silence on the other end of the line. Brock was an understanding guy by nature — twenty years as a fighter pilot tended to give one a rather sanguine approach to non-lethal setbacks — but he was obviously several notches south of happy.
“But listen, an idea struck me.” The corners of her mouth crept upward. “I have a proposition for you.”
It took a moment, but he came around. “I love your propositions,” he said, a small smile around his words.
“Join me.”
“In Budapest?”
Sam chuckled. “If you’re going to join me, then yes, it’ll have to be in Budapest.”
“Isn’t that in Africa or something?”
“Europe, smartass.”
“G’day.”
“Close.”
“Guten Tag.”
“Getting warmer.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Just buy a ticket. For Saturday. Two days should be plenty of time for me to finish up the paperwork on Severn. Then we could both really use a week off.”
“Strong offer,” Brock said.
“I’ll pick you up at the airport, and we’ll bonk like bunnies on our hotel balcony.”
“I’d fly to the moon to get in your pants.”
“Don’t. I won’t be there.”
“Europe it is.”
“Then I’ll see you Saturday.”
“I love you painfully,” Brock said.
“I love you worse.”
Sam dropped her phone in her purse next to her Kimber .45 — being the living, breathing personification of Big Brother wasn’t without its perks, which included, improbably, much less infringement on the Constitutional right to bear arms than the average US citizen enjoyed — and trudged wearily to her gate.
She sighed.
Long day behind her.
Long day still ahead.
2
His mother named him Nero. She was aiming at power and strength. She got ruthlessness and megalomaniacal insanity instead. She must have been sick on history day.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 55