67
Arlington Heights, VA. Monday, 4:04 p.m. ET.
FBI Special Agent Alfonse Archer was hungry, grumpy, and tired of sitting around the safe house making small talk with the senator. Frank Higgs’s talkativeness had long since waned, and Archer hadn’t gotten anything useful out of him for hours.
Archer had better things to do, including solving several murders that all seemed to be related in some way to one Senator Frank Higgs. But it had taken time for his boss to identify another agent who satisfied a very narrow set of criteria to spell Archer as the senator’s bodyguard.
Archer shared Higgs’s suspicion that the Bureau might be compromised. Consequently, Archer and his boss had implemented even tighter security measures than “normal” VIP endangerment scenarios.
They had recently moved the senator to a new safe house, and had spent a great deal of time carefully choosing agents to rotate as Higgs’s bodyguards.
The new agent wasn’t due to arrive for another hour. The man was supposed to bring food, but both Archer and the senator were already starving. Archer used his phone to call the agent, to see whether he might not be able to bring their dinner a bit early. Pizza would be nice.
Piece of cake, thought Trojan the computer hacker.
Even encrypted cell phones had to identify themselves to the vast array of relay towers that made up the network’s backbone. That was how the whole thing worked. Every cell phone broadcasted an occasional message saying, “this is my phone number, and I am ready to receive a call.”
The towers received and cataloged these signals, and reported the list of the cell phones in their region to the computers controlling the network.
That way, each tower only had to handle calls involving the phones near it. Otherwise, the sheer number of telephone calls occurring every second would be overwhelming, creating nothing but gridlock and dropped calls.
That wasn’t all. Because each signal from each cell phone was time-stamped, and because more than one cell phone tower received each signal, the network could easily triangulate the position of each cell phone with impressive accuracy.
As a network administrator for a major cell phone company (in addition to his moonlight activities), it was alarmingly easy for Trojan to locate almost any cell phone user on Earth to within a few meters of uncertainty.
Even Special Agent Alfonse Archer, FBI, who was apparently holed up in an upscale DC suburb.
A young zealot received Trojan’s message, put his utility repair van in gear, and drove east toward the residence containing Senator Frank Higgs and his FBI bodyguard.
He didn’t use a navigation device, but he knew from experience that he was only half an hour away. “Thirty minutes. Get ready. Just as we have rehearsed,” Farhoud said to the heavily armed passengers hidden in the darkness.
68
Reagan National Airport, Washington, DC. Monday, 4:09 p.m. ET.
Stalwart ambled down the concourse toward his gate, his well-worn carry-on bag rolling behind him. He had just picked up an overpriced novel from the convenience store in the main concourse, and was looking forward to enjoying a few chapters before turning his computer on above 10,000 feet. But he had something to do first.
He approached the bank of pay phones just down the concourse from a fast food joint, and unzipped the top compartment of his bag.
He scooped a half dozen quarters from inside, along with a small sheet of paper with a telephone number. He dropped three quarters into the phone (how long had it been since a phone call cost a dime? He couldn’t remember) and dialed the telephone number on the small slip of paper. He knew this would be the only time this particular telephone number was ever used.
A familiar, jovial voice answered. “My good friend, how in the world are you? I hope those nasty bureaucrats and industrialists haven’t ground you down too terribly.” Archive always seemed to be in a good mood.
Hard not to be happy, Stalwart thought, when you own half the damn planet. “I’m very well, thank you. You must be very busy, so I won’t take much of your time.”
Stalwart tried to sound conversational. You could never assume your communications weren’t compromised.
“I’m just calling to confirm the appointment with our young Protégé.”
“Ah, yes,” Archive said. “That’s coming up, isn’t it?” Archive played his part beautifully. “His arrangements are all taken care of, I believe.”
The timing couldn’t have been tighter. Protégé was only “read in” to the group’s plans over the past weekend. The young GE executive probably wasn’t the only one who could provide what they needed, but if he had demurred, it would have set plans back by weeks.
“Perfect. Thank you. I think we’re in good shape, and I’m looking forward to our next soiree.”
69
Washington, DC. Monday, 4:24 p.m. ET.
Protégé’s phone buzzed. He glanced briefly at the message: “On track as scheduled.” He felt his heart rate quicken as butterflies hit his stomach.
Making the arrangements had been tricky. He’d needed to commandeer the prototype of his division’s high-powered directional electromagnetic transmitter, or HDET. Those were expensive toys, and there weren’t many in existence.
This particular piece of hardware had been developed as a concept demonstrator, a prototype that his division had used to bid for business. It had won its design competition, and GE had long since delivered the finished products—seventeen units—to the prime contractor for inclusion in a highly classified program.
It would have been better if Protégé could have found a production unit, as they were more reliable and more compact than the prototype, but his division hadn’t built any extras. It was the prototype or nothing.
The unit Protégé planned to use had sat in storage for over two years. The lab technician was beyond surprised when the “big boss,” as the tech sarcastically called Protégé behind his back, stopped by to inquire whether it could be made ready to travel by van. Today.
And it had to work as designed when it arrived at its destination.
To call the request unusual was a terrific understatement. The grizzled old tech had wanted to make certain the boss wasn’t going to make him endure all of the hassle for nothing. “You sure you’ve got enough power to use this thing where you’re going? It ain’t like you can just plug it into the wall outlet.”
Protégé assured him the device’s unique power requirements would be met, and the technician had dropped everything to fulfill his boss’s request. It was no mean feat, but the tech got it done.
The directional transmitter and its associated electronics now occupied most of the back end of a delivery van. Protégé planned to drive the van himself. He’d had to break a date with Allison, which he wasn’t happy about. She’d promised something special and a little kinky, and he couldn’t remember making a more reluctant rain check request in his life.
He glanced at his watch. Time to roll. Traffic was going to be a bitch if he waited any longer.
70
Washington, DC. Monday, 5:15 p.m. ET.
The Facilitator replaced the telephone receiver. “It’s happening,” the Intermediary had told him. The encrypted voice-over-Internet technology had made his underling’s voice sound thinner and more nasal than usual, and the occasional packet loss had given him the impression he was talking to a machine.
In many ways, he was. The Intermediary was nothing if not efficient, emotionless, and focused.
The sick old man pondered his next move. He was tired in a way that sleep couldn’t remedy.
Because of Higgs’s intimate connections with the very top of the intelligence world, and because of certain inconveniences in his own organization’s structure, the Facilitator had been forced to employ people further away from the clandestine mainstream, if there was such a thing, than he would otherwise have preferred.
The poor results had been disappointing, but not terribly surprising.
The Facilitator’s small but exceedingly powerful organization now clamored to find and kill Higgs before it was too late.
Recent developments had confirmed his suspicions. While it had always been inevitable—entropy ensured that daylight eventually found even the darkest secrets—the potential leak had come at a most inconvenient time. It had created a colossal mess.
He had spent a great deal of time in recent days pondering whether the Consultancy had been betrayed, or if someone had merely self-assembled the thin clues that linked together his carefully constructed coterie, comprised of the world’s most powerful people.
Had someone talked out of turn to Senator Frank Higgs, or had the senator merely stumbled upon it accidentally, his mind somehow primed to see the connections?
It wasn’t as if conspiracy theorists hadn’t explained all of the arguments—sometimes quite cogently, in fact—pointing to the existence of an organization such as the Consultancy.
But they were, after all, conspiracy theorists. In this regard, the Facilitator had been blessed. Few categories of people were more easily dismissed as crackpots and losers.
The fact that the conspiracy nuts were right, in this case, was beside the point. They were mostly disbelieved.
Until they weren’t. Just as air slowly leaked from a balloon, the truth had a natural tendency to escape captivity. Sometimes circumstantially, sometimes by human error, and sometimes deliberately, clandestine connections usually tended to unravel.
Cleanup was inevitably messy. But it was rarely this messy. The Intermediary was scrambling to control the damage and tie up loose ends, which had seemed to multiply over the past several days.
The detective running the Curmudgeon case had inexplicably panicked. He’d wanted his hand held. What was the use of employing someone if you couldn’t count on him when the chips were down? The Consultancy had been forced to make a move before the Curmudgeon investigation spun out of control.
Fool. Thierrot believed that he had moonlighted for a number of years for both the CIA and Mossad. In fact, Thierrot had only ever worked for the Consultancy, which had organized and maintained the elaborate double-agent charade. It was expensive, but the misdirection had proven extremely useful over the years.
In the end, however, the irascible, disagreeable flatfoot hadn’t left them any wiggle room.
They had first confirmed that the detective had no idea of their identities, which would have created more problems to fix. Then they simply flipped his switch to the “off” position. Suicide, this morning’s paper had reported. After nearly three decades of service.
The Facilitator shook his head. What a waste.
Thierrot’s death represented one fewer loose end, to be sure, but it was not nearly the most important one. There was still a problem that could bring the whole thing down at once. Frank Higgs. The Facilitator’s jaw clenched involuntarily.
Higgs knew the Facilitator’s name. The Consultancy chief was sure of it. Curmudgeon had warned the Intermediary that it was a strong possibility.
Informing the Intermediary was a move of great loyalty and courage on the Monsignor’s part, one that the Facilitator appreciated deeply.
It was also the move that had necessitated the priest’s immediate death. What if Higgs had shared his conjecture with the Monsignor, despite the latter’s emphatic assurances to the contrary?
And what if Higgs was right about the Facilitator’s identity?
They couldn’t take that chance. The Monsignor and the senator both had to go.
It was horrible, really, both personally and pragmatically. The old priest was undoubtedly the most useful agent on the roster, and exceedingly likeable to boot.
But above all, the Facilitator’s identity must be protected. It was the golden rule of the Consultancy.
Four men, and only four men, were ever to know the name of the Facilitator. One of those men was the Intermediary, a position vetted as thoroughly as the Facilitator’s.
The other three men were known as the Directors. In theory, the Directors could collectively decide to remove the Facilitator. In practice, in the rare circumstances necessitating a change in Consultancy leadership, the sitting Facilitator had merely died of natural causes.
All politics were local, and all agendas personal. Even more so in the Facilitator’s case. His work was entangled, quite literally, with his life. Both, he knew, would end at the same time.
He was arguably the most powerful man alive. He had chosen the candidates in each of the last four presidential elections, placed dozens of cabinet members, picked more congressmen, senators, and corporate CEOs than he could count, and directed the nomination and approval of dozens of four-star general billets, including the last few Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs.
But he knew that he lived each moment of his life beneath the Sword of Damocles.
He was therefore extremely interested in quelling any burgeoning public knowledge of his organization’s existence.
The situation was turning into nothing short of a quagmire. Killing a US senator would be a strong step, to say the least. And who would have guessed it would turn out to be such a difficult thing to pull off? Higgs was old, fat, and out of shape. How he had smoked both wet men at the hospital was beyond the Facilitator’s ability to comprehend. The old man couldn’t dwell on it because of his blood pressure. It was absolutely maddening.
Then there was the Homeland Security agent. Jameson. Did she have any idea how close she’d been to blowing the lid off of the whole damn thing several years ago?
She hadn’t connected the dots personally, he was fairly certain, but it was clear that one of her bosses certainly had. The skinny guy, if memory served. Increasingly, it didn’t, and the Facilitator couldn’t conjure the late marathoner’s name.
The Facilitator remained convinced that simply killing Sam Jameson years ago would have been too obvious, and would have ended up being a counterproductive move. But the complications she had created . . .
It was among the messiest near-exposures in Consultancy history. He had spent several weeks deeply afraid that the Directors would find him to be a liability. In actuality, they applauded his decisiveness and efficiency, but it could have gone either way.
Things were different now, though, and he’d had no qualms ordering Sam Jameson’s termination the second he’d learned that she had taken up the Curmudgeon case. Given her residual knowledge from the controversial oil conglomerate case several years ago, and given the closeness of the Curmudgeon connections, it was clear that leaving her on the job was simply too risky.
The Consultancy hadn’t yet penetrated Homeland deeply enough to have her administratively reassigned, so a messier solution was required.
Kidnapping the Air Force officer wasn’t exactly Plan A, and it certainly wasn’t an elegant Plan B, either. But he couldn’t blame the assassin. The girl hadn’t been home—thanks, once again, to that goddamned senator.
So they’d had to adjust their plans and make the best of things. They would squeeze Brock James for anything useful, then set the trap for the girl.
The change in plans had brought unexpected opportunities, too. Despite the bad luck of her failing to be at home for her own execution, Jameson’s narrow escape at the hands of fate had actually ended up working to their advantage. In a stroke of luck, her search for Brock James had identified another loose end for them—the CIA guy with the hooker problem—and there were bound to be more along the way.
But Sam Jameson was number two on their list, right after the senator, and her time was coming.
It would have been so much cleaner if he could just have put his sleeper in the FBI to work on the Higgs shootings. Six months earlier, he would have been able to do just that, but the guy had been promoted. How ironic that consolidating Consultancy control of the FBI had resulted in being able to exert less direct influence over such a critical matter.
While the special agent in charge of the investigation—Alfonse something-or
-other—worked directly for the Consultancy’s agent-in-place in the Bureau, the added degree of separation created a number of complications. It would have been so much cleaner just to have the agent in charge of the investigation take care of the good senator.
But life rarely worked that way. It was messy and complicated, as a rule.
The Facilitator shook his head and gazed out the window of his tenth-floor office. The Capitol building and the Washington Monument never ceased to be inspiring. He thought of them as his own, symbols of the power he wielded. If they weren’t his, then whose were they?
The thought was sometimes comforting, but not today. Today it just felt like weight.
The Facilitator sighed. At least they were moving toward a solution. The FBI mole had just passed along the new safe house address. It was high time the Higgs problem went away.
Then they’d deal with the girl from Homeland, finally putting a tidy bow on the entire mess.
The alarm on the Facilitator’s desk clock chimed. It was time for his meds. Getting too old for all of this, he thought.
71
Somewhere on the East Coast. Monday, 5:18 p.m. ET.
Hawk Nose led Brock back to his cell. Brock moved slowly, scorching pain punishing his every step. He wondered if the wound in his leg was becoming infected.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” the man had said at the end of the interrogation. “You’ve been most helpful.”
Brock had smiled. He most certainly had been helpful. He had enjoyed the opportunity, as a matter of fact, to inflict damage on his employer, though he was certain the secrets he had divulged during his mostly amicable conversation with Hawk Nose weren’t going to do much damage. You’d have to see the beam guidance equations in order to replicate the tracking results; Brock barely understood them, and he certainly didn’t have them committed to memory.
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