The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  Silence followed.

  “Neither did I,” Randolph said. “Sure, the pundits and news personalities provided the usual clamor—my apologies, Bonnie.”

  The attractive news anchor pretended to be offended, then smiled gamely.

  “But what struck me as utterly remarkable,” Randolph continued, “was how utterly unremarkable society’s reaction otherwise appeared, all the way ‘round the globe. Only the Greeks rioted, and even they were quite on their normal schedule!”

  Laughs and nods. He’s right, Protégé thought. He couldn’t recall a single story of serious rioting or widespread violence.

  “Aside from our Hellenic friends, everyone else just wore around a bit of a glum look. I asked myself why that might be.” Randolph struck a pensive pose. “Then it came to me. What had happened, what had really happened, was this: precisely nothing.”

  He allowed it to sink in before continuing. “Ask yourself, what was really lost? Did crops fail? Did communication or transportation become impossible? Did the houses involved in the bubble financing frenzy suddenly collapse? Did anything of tangible value—food, shelter, safety, or security—actually disappear? Not in the least.”

  He spoke the next sentence slowly. “Only a gauzy contrivance evaporated.”

  Protégé wasn’t sure he agreed. “Fair enough,” he interjected. “But millions of people lost the right to live in their homes. That’s far from insignificant.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Randolph answered. “But why did that happen? Did the homes become uninhabitable?”

  Protégé shook his head.

  “Not at all,” Randolph agreed. “Only the agreement changed. The collective collusion, if you will, shifted beneath borrowers’ feet. It was a crisis only because we all agreed to behave as if it were one. Then we came to our senses. The sun rose. Birds sang. Life moved on.”

  Protégé didn’t let him off the hook. “Point taken. But millions of jobs also evaporated, and most will never return. That’s also quite tangible.”

  Randolph smiled. “Quite so, but again, we should evaluate the cause. Why did those jobs exist in the first place, before the crash?”

  “Because they created value,” Protégé started to answer, but he stopped himself. He realized that he really didn’t know what value many modern jobs actually created.

  In his years spent climbing the ladder in a large corporation, Protégé had become convinced that most middle-class jobs involved little more than attending meetings and shuffling information between committees.

  Ninety-eight percent of the people who worked for him were employed only because it was difficult to reliably identify the two percent who would actually go on to produce the lion’s share of the revenue.

  Protégé chuckled and shook his head. “I really don’t know, honestly.”

  Randolph smiled. “You’re certainly not alone. I tend to think those jobs existed only because of the hyper-inflated valuations made possible by currency manipulation.

  “Arbitrarily printing more money gives the illusion of value creation, but it only works until some event prompts us to lift the curtain and examine things closely.

  “Derivatives and other speculation instruments accelerate and further confuse the process. Then, in a flash, the jig is up, and we’re forced to examine what we’ve really done.”

  A new voice joined the discussion, a deep basso that resonated in the large dining room. “Like you say, Randolph, only the agreement has really changed.”

  All heads turned to the entryway to view the new contributor to the conversation.

  A tall, large, athletic, middle-aged man with an obvious gravitas strode toward the table. “Nothing real suffered any damage whatsoever,” Art Levitow, the Director of the Department of Defense’s Senior Quantum program, said with a smile.

  Archive rose to his feet, beaming. “Art! You scoundrel! It’s wonderful you could join us! Ladies and gentlemen, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, please meet one of my best friends in the world. Art is a brilliant quantum physicist and an enormously talented leader. And he’s one of our courageous inside men.” The two men shook hands and embraced.

  “So sorry I missed the day’s festivities,” Levitow said. “It took forever to get out of Nevada.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Randolph’s staccato intoned, “I relinquish the floor to our newly arrived companion, who is eminently more qualified than I am to take it from here. Art, if you please?”

  Levitow smiled. “Thank you, Randolph, and it’s wonderful to see you again. I hope I can do justice to what sounded like an exceptional introduction to the topic.”

  He paused. A wry smile crossed his face. “They say one should always begin a talk by grabbing the audience’s attention. Here’s my attempt.”

  He put on a serious look. “My friends, I have it on good authority that we are about to witness the world’s first bloodless devolution.”

  50

  Somewhere on the East Coast. Saturday, 8:52 p.m. ET.

  The interrogator walked into the room, shook Thierrot awake, and began his questioning without preamble. “Is your name Henry Dalton Thierrot?”

  Thierrot got his bearings, then nodded. The motion hurt the muscles in his neck. Every muscle in his body had contracted violently during the electric shock torture he had endured hours before. The individual shocks had lasted mere seconds, but there were dozens of them, and they had left Thierrot’s muscles cramped and exhausted.

  Afterwards, he had been unstrapped and dragged to a nearby room, where he was thrown into a hospital bed and handcuffed to the rail. He had fallen asleep almost instantly, completely worn out.

  “Please answer verbally. Is your name Henry Dalton Thierrot?” The interrogator’s voice was flat and emotionless, but conveyed obvious authority.

  “Yes.” Thierrot’s raw, hoarse voice sounded foreign even to him.

  “Please listen carefully,” the man said. “You are Henry Dalton Thierrot. You are a detective in the Washington, DC police department. The Central Intelligence Agency pays you an annual cash stipend of $33,500 for information and various services. You do not report this income to the IRS. Your employer, the police department, does not know that you are also employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.

  “And the Central Intelligence Agency does not know that you also work for Mossad, who pays you just over $40,000 every year, in cash and precious metals.”

  Thierrot closed his eyes. That about sums it up.

  The interrogator’s eyes bored into Thierrot. “These are all true statements, are they not?”

  Thierrot slowly nodded his head. He was tired, disoriented, hungry, in pain, and miles beyond frightened.

  He drew a long breath, then exhaled. His diaphragm fluttered, like a child after a fit of crying.

  So this is how it ends, he thought. For what? What has all this pain and secrecy accomplished? For me or anyone else?

  “An answer, please.” The interrogator’s voice was unemotional but firm.

  Thierrot remained silent, eyes closed.

  He felt empty, alone, afraid. If the CIA didn’t kill him, Mossad certainly would. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to suffer any more.

  And he still had no idea who was holding him captive, or what they wanted from him.

  The interrogator rose. “Perhaps my colleagues haven’t yet completed their work on you, Henry Dalton Thierrot, officer of DC Metro, CIA, and Mossad.”

  He strode toward the door, his heels clicking on the hard tile floor.

  Thierrot heard the man’s footsteps pause at the door. He heard the door open.

  He thought of the interminable hours he had spent strapped down, drifting between narcotic sleep and utter panic.

  He thought of the electric shocks.

  I can’t take any more.

  “I’ll talk,” he croaked pitifully.

  51

  Washington, DC. Saturday, 8:10 p.m. ET.

  Trojan the computer h
acker stood up from his terminal. He hadn’t moved much in the last twenty-four hours, other than to reach into the small refrigerator by his desk to grab caffeinated energy drinks and shrink-wrapped, cheese-flavored, food-like products.

  He had worked through Friday night, and all through the day on Saturday. Caffeine had ceased to have an effect by five a.m. on Saturday morning, and he had switched to amphetamines. He hated doing it, as they always gave him heartburn, but it was unavoidable. He needed the focus and wakefulness.

  The uppers carried him through to the evening, and he was nearing completion of the computer virus he had agreed to write, but he had hit the wall. He was making stupid mistakes. It was time to get some sleep.

  The tall blonde-haired man he knew as Whitey was to return the next evening to collect the virus. Trojan had a little under a day to make it all work, including the file extractor. The file extractor was the snippet of computer code that unpacked and installed the cryptographic code-breaking algorithm once the virus was safely inside a host computer, and it was giving him fits.

  He set his alarm for 1:30 a.m. and lay down on his bed. He didn’t bother taking his clothes off.

  Sam Jameson flipped on the light in her vault at Homeland headquarters. She was one of only a few DHS employees milling about in the building on Saturday evening.

  Opening the top-secret vault had taken relatively little time, but it was time Sam didn’t have. She was desperate to find the beast of a man who had taken Brock. Every second counted.

  Avery Martinson knew that time was on his side. He could stall and stonewall for a long time, and it wouldn’t be any skin off of his teeth. He didn’t care what happened to the Air Force guy, really, and he sure as hell didn’t have any intention of squawking any sensitive secrets to the brash counter-spy chick, no matter what her clearances were. Clearances were one thing, but need-to-know was quite another.

  They had driven to the DHS facility in total silence. He could tell that she was tired and ragged. He planned to use that to his advantage.

  “Grab a seat, Avery. Be advised that I’m recording our conversation.”

  Sam slapped a manila folder onto the nondescript government-issue table and sat down in the seat across from Martinson. “Please state your name.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Sam blinked twice, then laughed. “You’re not off to a good start, Avery. You know how this works. I can have every one of your assets frozen by the time you get home tonight. You’ll have nothing but the cash under your pillow.”

  She looked at the fat CIA case officer for a long moment, then smiled. “Let’s try that again, shall we? Please state your name.”

  “Avery. Lynn. Martinson.” The pauses were sarcastic and unfriendly.

  “Much better. You’re dumb but trainable, just like your personnel file says.”

  She paused for effect, watching his eyes. They fluttered. Anger. She smiled.

  “Now that we’re getting along so well, what should we talk about next?” She struck a theatrically pensive pose. “Oh, I know. How about this: what is Jonathan Birmingham’s telephone number?”

  His face reddened. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Funny, you sure recognized his photo earlier. It’s those eyes, isn’t it? And that scar on his face. Hard to forget. Maybe you know him better by one of his other names. Everett Billings. Raymond Zielinski. Patrick Devlin. Aaron Lambert.”

  Martinson let out a deep sigh. He was cornered, and he knew it. She had collected every one of his agent’s aliases.

  He wondered how deeply she had dug into his life. It worried him. He was a man whose proclivities wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny.

  “Nothing to say?” Her gaze turned wicked. “Maybe you’d like to talk about your hooker habit instead.”

  There it was.

  She dropped photo after photo on the table in front of him.

  He had known for years that something like this moment was a distinct possibility, but he could never seem to stop himself. How long had they had this file? Who else knew? Martinson felt a shudder run through the center of him.

  “Your security clearance came up for routine reinvestigation six months ago. They’re a bit more thorough these days than you’re probably used to.” Sam watched Martinson’s shoulders slump. He began to tremble.

  “This is an impressive lineup of hookers, especially over such a short period of time,” she said. “I can only imagine the diseases that have crawled up your stubby little dick.”

  She found two more photos of Martinson’s fat white ass, naked and in compromising positions with questionably youthful females, and dropped them in front of him for effect.

  “And judging by the Ukrainian cheekbones on some of these girls,” Sam continued, “there’s probably some human trafficking going on here. That won’t play well for you, even if you’re just the john.”

  Martinson’s large torso heaved. Sweat beaded on his brow.

  “More to our point,” Sam went on, “this is not the kind of behavior Uncle Sugar expects from someone in a position of trust.”

  His hands began to shake. His heart pounded, his mouth went dry, and his eyes moistened. “Patty?”

  “The file doesn’t mention anything about your wife. But if you don’t tell her, they certainly will. They won’t want anyone having blackmail leverage on you, even after you’ve been fired.”

  His eyes welled up.

  “I’m surprised they haven’t dropped the hammer on you already,” she said after a long moment. “Maybe they’re still investigating, just to find out how dirty you are.”

  She let her revelations steep for a full minute before she broke the silence. “Avery, I don’t know who you think you’re protecting, but they can’t possibly return the favor. Not with all of this in your file.”

  He looked sunken and pathetic. Sam saw no vestige of the arrogant old-school spook who had sat defiantly across from her just a few minutes prior.

  She didn’t particularly enjoy dismantling a man this way, and she really couldn’t care less if he liked to have kinky sex with skinny prostitutes. God knows, she had certainly been through a long rough patch herself, especially during those years when she saw most of her life through the bottom of a bottle.

  But she didn’t have time to play games. Not with Brock at the mongrel’s mercy.

  “So here’s how it goes. You call your guy in, all the way in, with Brock James unharmed. No negotiation. If he doesn’t comply tonight, I burn him. Publicly. Wanted posters, TV news, and the whole nine. Guess who he’ll come after?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Martinson said.

  “Sure it is. One call. Done.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “I haven’t run him for over a year,” Martinson said weakly.

  Sonuvabitch.

  Sam felt herself deflate. She had hoped, maybe even assumed, that Martinson would be her last stop, and that he would hold the key to finding the mongrel and freeing Brock.

  Her jaw clenched and she let out a deep breath. “Who runs him now?”

  Martinson’s look of despair deepened. He shook his head, his mind reeling from the rapid collapse of his world over the past half hour.

  Sam slammed her fist into the table. Martinson flinched, his nerves continuing to unravel.

  She stood up and leaned across the table, her eyes inches from his. “I want a name.”

  He looked down at his hands, which shook visibly. It’s all over anyway, he thought.

  He sighed. “Will you spare my retirement?” he asked.

  Sam considered for a second, then nodded. “Sure. For your wife’s lawyers to take in the divorce.”

  He took a deep breath, sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes. “The Intermediary.”

  Sam cursed.

  The fat case officer was right. She was in over her head.

  52

  Alexandria, VA. Sunday, 8:54 a.m. ET.<
br />
  Sam awoke suddenly, arms jerking wildly. Her heart pounded in her chest as she slowly came to her senses. She had been dreaming of a violent struggle with the strange-eyed hit man.

  She looked around, disoriented. She had fallen asleep at her computer in the panic room down in the basement of her ransacked house.

  The clock read 8:54 a.m. It was Sunday morning. She had slept almost five hours, though the soreness in her neck would have led her to believe it had been much longer. She turned her head to the left, and a sharp, electric pain shot beneath her shoulder blade to the middle of her back.

  She groaned, stretched, and shook the computer mouse, which brought the Mac back to life. On the large display appeared Avery Martinson’s telephone records for the past two years, containing hundreds of numbers and over a thousand calls.

  She hadn’t gotten anywhere in her search for the Intermediary. Martinson had been obligingly forthcoming with his limited knowledge of the elusive puppeteer. But the Intermediary had always dealt with Martinson through cutouts, and a different one each time. The fat case officer hadn’t known which of the telephone numbers belonged to whom.

  Gloom and despair settled over Sam. It had been a full day, and then some, since Brock was shot and kidnapped from the home they shared together. She knew that the odds of recovering him alive were dwindling fast.

  But she took a bit of comfort in the knowledge that the hit man could easily have killed Brock on the spot, if that was his intention, when he broke into their home.

  Her mind drifted and she began to wonder what Brock might be enduring right now. Each possibility was darker and more painful than the last, and she was soon fighting back tears of fear and rage.

  Finally, she forced herself to focus. You know how this works. Get control of your mind. When Sam fretted over something, Brock was fond of quoting Mark Twain: “I’m an old man, and I have seen a great many trials,” he would say in his fake old-man voice, through a sideways smile. “But most of them never came true.”