She smiled at the recollection.
Ultimately, she decided that the best way to cope was to get to work. She put on a pot of coffee and sat down at her desk.
She checked her phone. Five messages. Two solicitations (what the hell had happened to “do not call?”), a message from her mother, and one each from Dan Gable and FBI Special Agent Alfonse Archer.
She listened to her deputy’s message first. They had made a breakthrough on the identity of the Brit who was wounded in the Maple Center firefight. His name was Ian Banes. He was an orphan, well educated, entered government service in the UK after university. Standard—he was obviously a spook.
And he had died during the night. His surgery had gone well and the doctors had thought his wounds were quite recoverable, but the night nurse responded to a code blue in his room and wasn’t able to revive him. Toxicology came back negative.
Sam shook her head. If someone had dropped by to finish him off, it certainly wasn’t the same set of clowns who had sprayed all the bullets around town on Friday. The senator had put them out of business.
Plus, a quiet little homicide by poison didn’t quite fit the earlier modus operandi.
Dan Gable’s message also mentioned that despite the lead investigator having apparently gone AWOL, Monsignor Worthington’s phone records had finally been assembled. The spy-priest had kept a number of different telephone accounts, and it had taken considerable effort to assemble a chronological record of his calls over the past year.
She sent her deputy a text message: “Thanks Dan. Can you pls send me a link to the phone records?” She wanted a soft copy of the priest’s telephone calls. Computers were so much better at finding trends than humans were.
Then she listened to Archer’s message. “I’m sure you’re a bit overwhelmed right now, but I wanted to catch you up just in case there’s a connection between the cases.
“Senator Higgs is dancing for some guy he keeps calling the Intermediary.”
The goddamned Intermediary.
“I can’t tell if the senator really doesn’t know the guy’s name,” Archer’s message went on, “or if Higgs is just jerking me around, but I haven’t gotten anything else . . .”
Sam didn’t wait for the message to finish. She sent another text to her deputy: “Urgent: Need Frank Higgs’s phone records too. Right now if possible.”
There was a time when Sam thought the man to be entirely apocryphal. She had heard whispers over the years, wild tales told in hushed tones of some ultra-deep operator with unprecedented power.
It had all struck her as the usual conspiracy bullshit, and she hadn’t paid it much heed.
Then, several years ago, a controversial case involving espionage and conspiracy-murder charges had come across her desk. It involved several mid-level executives in a large oil conglomerate.
The case was a ball of yarn, as they all were, but this case was unusual because the leads kept pointing her to higher and higher echelons of government, both legislative and executive. Nothing ever quite coalesced into hard fact or immutable evidence, but all indicators pointed northward on the federal government’s organizational chart.
Leads disappeared or clammed up, which again was nothing out of the ordinary in a counterespionage investigation, but there was something different about this particular case.
Not even the good guys seemed to want it solved.
It took forever, but she had been able to cobble together enough evidence to ask for a warrant. The judge had turned her down outright.
Irate, she had waited for him by his car. “Are you on the take?” was her opener. Smooth.
The judge was a grandfatherly old gentleman, and he had understood her passion and her anger. She remembered the brandy on his breath as he leaned close to her ear. “A man must do many things, Ms. Jameson. Above all, he must protect his family. I sincerely hope that you never truly understand why I denied your warrant. You will do what you must, but I advise you as strongly as possible to let this one go quietly.”
She hadn’t. She had complained loudly to her bosses, who had shared her outrage and taken up her banner.
Her division chief and his boss had marched over to Justice. They had returned castrated and zip-lipped.
The case was never officially closed, but DHS immediately stopped allocating resources to it. Sam’s bosses retired within months of their visit to the Department of Justice.
One man, her former division chief, died within the year. Natural causes, they’d said. At fifty-eight years old. An avid marathoner.
Rumors of the Intermediary again circulated in conjunction with the controversial case, but this time, Sam didn’t dismiss the speculation outright. Cheesy cloak-and-dagger moniker notwithstanding, someone was throwing a great deal of weight around behind the scenes.
She had kept her eyes and ears open over the intervening years, and had heard whispers of the Intermediary no fewer than a half dozen times.
Even the name bothered her. Intermediary. Go-between. Going between whom? This guy seemed to swing the hammer of the gods, yet he was just a gopher? Either the name was designed to deceive, or there was an even more powerful player pulling the Intermediary’s strings.
It was deeply unsettling that the lead investigator in the Monsignor Worthington murder case was missing, too. Thierrot was his name, the disagreeable old-school flatfoot with the big gut and the nasty temper. Clearly, he wasn’t on vacation while his investigation went on without him. What had he stumbled upon? Who had he pissed off?
Was there a connection between the detective, the dead priest, and all of the Senator Frank Higgs drama? She was beginning to think the senator played an even larger role than she had first suspected.
Sam stood and paced the room. She had her work cut out for her. If Avery Martinson was correct, Brock’s kidnapper was answering to one of the most powerful and secretive men in the world.
Her time was running out. They had kept Brock alive for a reason, but they would eventually run out of use for him, one way or the other.
She had to find the Intermediary before that happened. Then she had to bend him to her will.
53
Las Vegas, NV. Sunday, 8:33 a.m. PT.
The inside of the utility van parked across the street from Jonathan Cooper’s house smelled of fast food and stale farts.
In the back, an unshaven man listened over the headphones to a relaxed Sunday morning unfolding inside the Cooper household.
After a cup of coffee, Jonathan played in their backyard pool with their little girl. She was a well-behaved toddler, the man thought. Much more so than his own kid. But boys were different than girls. At least that’s what everybody said.
His phone alarm went off. He had selected the “foghorn” option, but it always disoriented him when it sounded. After a second, he remembered what it meant: time to report.
He navigated the smart phone’s browser to a particular blog site, some tripe about home security, then logged into the site as VegasBabyVegas.
He searched for the appropriate blog post, which was now over a year old, and scrolled to the comments section. “I like it when everything’s buttoned down at home,” he typed.
He submitted the comment, then went back to listening.
54
Washington, DC. Sunday, 11:34 a.m. ET.
Stalwart sipped coffee and enjoyed a late morning breeze coming in off the Potomac. His cell phone vibrated. “No cold feet in Vegas,” the text message said. He didn’t recognize the number, but he knew who the sender had to be.
Stalwart had worried about the young Senior Quantum physicist’s resolve, but Whitey’s text indicated there was no evidence of trouble brewing. Cooper’s task wasn’t difficult by any stretch, but it was critical. Everything depended on him.
Stalwart smiled. Still on track. It was shaping up to be a big week.
Then he returned his attention to the PowerPoint briefing on his laptop, entitled “Mobile Anti-Satellite Targeting
System Manufacturing Update to the Vice President of the United States,” which was due the Secretary of the Air Force by 3:00 p.m. On a Sunday.
He sighed. I won’t miss the churn, he thought. Not for a second.
55
Somewhere on the East Coast. Sunday, 11:56 a.m. ET.
Brock James felt a searing pain in his leg. He cried out, and reflexively tried to sit upright, but was restrained by a very large man.
“This is going to suck for a while,” the muscular giant with the strange eyes said in a quiet voice. “But we can’t have this thing getting infected. At least not yet. I’m supposed to keep you coherent.” He poured more hydrogen peroxide on the large wound in Brock’s thigh.
The fluid entered the wound, and Brock felt white hot pain from deep within his thigh as the sterilizing agent fizzed and burned its way through the bullet hole that ran clean through his leg. The pain was intense, and Brock emitted loud sentences comprised of nothing but curse words.
He was laying on a mattress in a dank concrete structure somewhere, with a small door on one end. There were no windows. A single light bulb dangled from the ceiling, providing barely enough light to confine the darkness to the corners of the room.
The pain slowly subsided as he pressed hard on his leg in the area just above the bullet’s entry wound. “What do you want?” he rasped. Brock still had no idea why the man had shot and kidnapped him in the middle of the night.
The man’s wolf eyes sparkled as he laughed aloud. “What do I want? Doggy-style sex twice daily. Lucky for you, you’re not my type.” He poured more medicine on Brock’s leg. “But I think you’re probably more interested in what they want. That’s not my department.”
The man set the bottle of hydrogen peroxide next to the mattress. “Feel free to torture yourself whenever the mood strikes,” he said with a sardonic smile. “There’s food over there.” He nodded his head toward a fast-food bag on the corner of the mattress. “Piss down the drain in the corner and crap in that bucket over there. Put the lid back on when you’re done, unless you want me to stop feeding you.”
The man walked to the door and inserted a key into the dead bolt, and then into the handle. The door opened, and he stepped into the dark hallway. “Yell and pound all you want,” the large man said. “Nobody can hear you.”
The door slammed and locked.
56
Somewhere on the East Coast. Sunday, 12:03 p.m. ET.
After confessing to being a double agent, Thierrot had expected hours of interrogation. He still had no idea who was holding him captive, but they had obviously done their homework. They knew his entire history, and he had expected a wire brushing for details regarding all of the spies he had known and worked with over the years, on both sides.
Instead, they had asked him just two questions.
What is the Intermediary’s name?
What is the Facilitator’s name?
He didn’t know either answer.
They hadn’t bothered to torture him further. They knew they had broken him, and they knew he was telling the truth. He had no idea of the two men’s identities.
He had heard rumors about high placement in the US Establishment, but nothing more. He had done the occasional job for the Intermediary over the years, but he always dealt directly with a go-between.
After the short period of questioning, they put him, unrestrained, in a well-furnished room. They gave him back his clothes, which he donned eagerly. To be naked is to be vulnerable.
They wheeled in a gorgeous steak dinner. Medium rare, perfectly prepared, along with creamed potatoes, asparagus, and a bottle of cabernet, followed by a chocolate torte.
The sudden hospitality was utterly disorienting, but Thierrot resolved to take things as they came. Enjoy the sun when it shines, he reasoned.
Sometime later, a man came for him. Thierrot had never seen his face, but he recognized the man’s voice. Thierrot thought of him as “Mr. Ressiknation” because of the strange way the man pronounced the word resignation.
Mr. Ressiknation led Henry Dalton Thierrot into an empty room. Hard tiles covered the floor, walls, and ceiling.
The man pulled a silenced pistol from his jacket.
Thierrot felt resigned sadness as he saw the pistol rise toward his head. He didn’t hear the shot that killed him.
57
Falls Church, MD. Sunday, 2:23 p.m. ET.
Senator Frank Higgs was still uneasy. FBI Special Agent Alfonse Archer, a.k.a. Big-A, had honored the senator’s request to move to a new safe house, but Higgs still wasn’t convinced that the Bureau wasn’t compromised to its core. He felt that even one federal agent knowing his whereabouts was too many, given the two attempts on his life and his growing number of dead acquaintances.
Ian Banes had been the latest. Archer had told him this morning. Banes had been in rough shape when the ambulance arrived, but last Higgs had heard, his friend was expected to pull through. The surgery to repair Banes’s innards had gone well, and there weren’t any signs of infection.
Bastards. What had Banes known that made him a threat? Was it retribution? Or insurance against American exploitation?
Was it an institutional decision, or some rogue actor on the fringes of the establishment with enough pull and power to call in a favor?
Those damned satellites. Things had gone wonky in Higgs’s world—even wonkier than usual—shortly after the business with the anti-satellite targeting technology began to unravel. Sure, he had funneled extra cash to Langston Marlin to help them win the bid, and even more to help them get their shit together after that. Lots of extra cash.
He had done this because he had been told to do it. From the Facilitator himself, he had been told. Impossible to know if that was true or not, but people very rarely threw the Facilitator’s weight around. It was best not to ignore instructions with the Facilitator’s stamp.
So he had risked jail time for corruption. Again. Higgs had no idea how much the other companies knew, but he was sure they’d be more than a little upset about it.
Still, he couldn’t see them ordering assassinations over it. That went well beyond the pale.
Higgs had a sense that he was on borrowed time. Archer had treated him more than fairly so far, particularly given the rather seedy nature of some of Higgs’s answers to the investigator’s questions. A less circumspect federal agent might have pushed for an indictment already.
But the FBI man couldn’t turn a blind eye forever, and more untoward details were bound to emerge.
Higgs’s earlier suspicions that Archer might be in on the attempts to snuff him had been allayed by time alone. If Archer were going to kill him, Higgs surmised, he would have done it already. They had spent the last thirty-six hours together in the same house.
But another danger was emerging, one that endangered Archer himself. Whoever wanted Higgs dead was obviously worried about some scrap of private knowledge becoming public. The longer Archer spent in his presence, Higgs knew, the greater the possibility that his pursuers would assume Archer was guilty by association.
Gotta change the game up, Higgs thought. It didn’t make any sense to lie around waiting to eat a bullet.
But he had no clue what to do next.
58
Aspen, CO. Sunday, 3:35 p.m. MT.
Protégé’s head was still spinning. The driver had dropped him off at the Aspen airport. Archive had stayed behind to tend to what he termed “last minute” preparations, but had arranged to have Protégé flown home.
It was entirely surreal. Protégé had spent the entire hour-long drive mulling over the events of the previous evening, and his mind continued to churn on the whirlwind weekend as he sat in the small, posh terminal awaiting his flight back across the nation aboard Archive’s private jet.
Sir Randolph’s fireside chat had been interesting. But Art Levitow’s revelation had been nothing short of earth shattering.
The tall oak of a nuclear physicist hadn’t begun his talk with
physics. Instead, he had started with politics.
In 1944, he had said, 730 delegates from all forty-four allied nations of the world held an international monetary conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. There, they had agreed to use the dollar as a proxy for gold.
The majority of the world’s gold was to be stored in American vaults, ostensibly because America was agreeably free of the kind of conflict that had torn Europe apart twice within the preceding thirty years.
Other currencies were to be exchangeable for dollars, which were in turn redeemable for gold. Physical gold, not worthless paper, Levitow had emphasized.
But that was all that foreign banks and governments ultimately got—worthless paper—when they traded their currency for gold. Just an “ownership deed” marked the transaction. The gold stayed in America.
For a while, Levitow said, American bankers and politicians played it straight. But soon, because America held much of the world’s gold and kept all of the books on that gold, the temptation to abuse the unprecedented power became overwhelming.
The American establishment soon sold the same gold multiple times, to multiple owners. Because the physical gold never moved—it stayed “safely” stored in American vaults—it was impossible to prove the con.
But it was the biggest con in human history, Levitow surmised.
And it soon gave way to the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history.
By the 1960s, it had become obvious that the American banking system wasn’t playing true with the gold supply. Many foreign governments and banks began to call the American bluff.
Since all dollars were supposedly backed by the appropriate weight in physical gold, a few foreign governments began demanding settlement in gold, not dollars.
In other words, Levitow said, foreign authorities were beginning to publicly doubt the validity and stability of the Almighty Dollar. They believed—correctly, as it turned out—that the US was printing more dollars than the gold stock could support.
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