Oh, shit! “Are you sure? Positively?”
“I got it off the director’s desk last night. Some guy in the White House, his name’s DiContino, told the director that they have some sort of evidence.”
“What evidence?”
Garrity looked at the printout of Merriweather’s notes. “It doesn’t say. His scribbles don’t always make sense.”
“Fuck.”
“I figured with what’s going on that you’d want to know this fast.” Garrity listened for some kind of validation, but there was none. This man, these people, were his rainbow that led to the pot of gold. He had to do them right. But... “Is this true? I mean, that guy a while-back wasn’t just making it up?”
“That’s none of your fucking business.”
“Yeah. Okay. But, am I in any danger? I mean, could this lead to me?”
“Not if you keep your fucking mouth shut.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Don’t ever do this again. Never. Do you understand? You follow procedures from now on.”
“Okay.”
Garrity hung up as the line clicked off. A hand came up to his face. It was wet with perspiration, and it was trembling. His contact didn’t sound very sure of the situation, or of his semi-guarantee that this wouldn’t lead to him. To him. My God. That was a thought, a possibility, that Sam Garrity could not comprehend. Discovery. Prison. Prison.
He looked down at the phone and then to the sheets of printout in his hand. This was no fucking game anymore. It wasn’t fun. A missile? A nuclear missile? This was way beyond what he had envisioned.
“What have I done?”
* * *
“Got it!” Sanz said jubilantly. “The son of a bitch used his home phone.”
“Where?” Testra pressed.
“Area code two-oh-two. Washington Metro.” Sanz picked up the phone without prompting.
“Run it down,” Testra directed his partner. “Christ! Talk about self-incrimination! ‘Off the director’s desk’ and ‘some guy in the White House.’ Man, this guy is stone-cold gone.”
The phone to the Miami office was still ringing. Sanz knew they needed a trace fast. “We gotta get a warrant before that guy gets too spooked.”
“He sounded pretty far gone already.” Testra thought back to the conversation. “What do you suppose that stuff about a missile was?”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Sanz said, as his call was picked up on the other end. “Yeah, this is Freddy. I need a name-number search pronto.”
* * *
Anthony Merriweather drank slowly from the Styrofoam cup. He forced himself not to cringe each time it touched his lips. “President Alvarez, I believe your priorities are quite well-thought-out. Your main distractions, as you say, will most definitely be the loyalists who remain after the defeat.”
“Several dozen processing camps will do nicely,” José-Ramon Alvarez stated. “Your Marines from Guantanamo can have them constructed very quickly.”
“Yes. Yes, you are right.” Merriweather put his half-full cup down on the nondescript end table. They hadn’t been able to provide accommodations with any higher state of acceptability for a future world leader. But, as with many things, it would do. Very soon it would not have to.
“It is very nice of you to wait with us, Señor Merriweather,” Alvarez said hollowly. His guest would not see that. He could not. That such a brainless academic-turned-politician could be chosen to run the CIA was almost beyond belief. But Alvarez could not look a gift horse in the mouth. Least of all this dimwitted old stallion.
Merriweather dipped his head a bit. “It is my pleasure to see you off, Mr. President.”
Your pleasure, indeed. Soon the fool would rue the day he ever came to be associated with them, Alvarez knew. But by then it would be too late to extract himself from the careful web they had spun. The idiot was theirs, literally under their thumb, and he didn’t even know it yet. That pleasure of disclosure would come in due time.
“Mr. President,” Gonzalo Parra said softly as he leaned toward Alvarez from behind. “There is a call you should take.”
Alvarez looked up over his shoulder. “Can you not handle it?”
“You should take it, sir.” Parra’s tone was firm and convincing. It also triggered an alarm in Alvarez.
“Very well. Señor Merriweather, your pardon please.”
“Yes.”
Alvarez lifted his girth from the chair and followed his closest aide into the adjoining room. “What is it?”
Parra ignored the annoyed tone and handed his leader the cell phone. “It is Avaro. There is trouble.”
José-Ramon put the small black phone to his ear. “Avaro.”
“Yes,” the contact replied in Spanish. It was the agreed-upon language of their conversations.
He recognized the distress in the voice. “What is the problem?”
“The missile. They know about the missile!”
Alvarez jerked his head toward Parra. He could see that his aide already knew. “Who knows?”
“The CIA. The White House. Our agent got the information from the director’s notes last night. They have some sort of proof that the missile is there.”
“But how? The fool is here with me, right now, and he is calm. He would not be here if it were so.”
“I don’t know why, but our agent was certain.”
“This cannot be. Could they have found the tape?”
“They must have. How else would they know?”
Dammit! “If it is so, then why is the director here?” He looked to Parra as he spoke. “Why?”
“A trap?” Avaro suggested.
“Or he still does not believe it,” Parra suggested. “As before.”
Alvarez nodded slowly at his aide’s thought. That was it. The fool was still blind to it, even with his government telling him otherwise! “It is not a trap. They have no way to know that we know of the missile. There is no connection to us.”
“Except for Tomás and Jorge. They know too much.”
“But you took care of them, Avaro, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then we have nothing to worry of,” Alvarez said confidently.
“But the missile,” Avaro said. “It will not be ours.”
Alvarez chuckled. “It most certainly will. All they have is a tape. It does not tell them where to find the missile. We do not even know, Avaro, but once we are in power, we will locate it. The Americans will only be able to scratch their heads and wonder. It will be our country, Avaro, and our missile.”
“Yes. I suppose it will be.”
“Do not suppose,” Alvarez said. “Believe.”
“I will.”
“Besides, it cannot be true,” Alvarez said jokingly. “Our friend the director says there is no missile, so there must not be. Not for a while, at least. If there was, it would make him look bad. We would not want him to lose his job. He does such a great service. A very valuable service.”
Avaro allowed a very infrequent laugh. “Yes, he does, Father.”
Alvarez switched off the phone and folded it shut. “That damned interpreter!”
Parra took the cell phone from his leader and laid it on the table. “Your words to Avaro were true. It is too late for anything to stop us.”
“He is my son, Gonzalo. I must ease his fears. But to have the Americans looking...”
“As you said, they will not find it. When the country is ours, they cannot just snoop around without our permission. Of course they will want to, but want and will are two very different things.” Parra knew his words were having the desired effect. Even men of power needed reassurance in times of great events. “We will have a country. We will have the weapon with which to guarantee our sovereignty. We will have the director right where we want him. And from all those things we will amass great wealth.”
Alvarez hoped it would be so. Hoped it would be as they planned. “Soothe me, Gonzalo.”
Parra smiled with just his
eyes. “In six months we will have the economy of our country moving in the right direction. In twelve months enough commerce will have returned that the moneys flowing in and out of our banks will be sufficient that the tracing of funds will be impossible...without the government’s assistance, of course.”
“You will make a fine minister of finance, Gonzalo.”
“Si, Mr. President. And I will see to our laundry business as if it were my child.” It was, actually. Parra had first suggested the lucrative use of the island’s financial institutions. There would be plenty of customers on the international market. Dirty money was a commodity of almost limitless supply among the world’s less savory power players. Someone had to “clean” it, and that someone was rightly due a very large commission for services rendered. “In eighteen months we will be generating more than one hundred million dollars a month. In three years that will more than triple. In five years...”
“Your words are like the touch of a fine, fine masseuse, Gonzalo.”
Parra nodded. His session was not finished. “By then we will no longer need the services of our friend in there. The money generated by our ‘sales’ division will be meaningless by then, and so will his protection. That we will be able to purchase. No one, I guarantee you, no one, will be able to refuse the sums we can offer. What we want will be ours.”
“He doesn’t even know he is working for us yet, and already we have signed his pink slip,” Alvarez joked. He thought of the amount earned from the director’s busy pen. It was peanuts compared to what lay ahead. Peanuts. “I love money, Gonzalo. I truly do.”
“Money is power, Mr. President.”
Alvarez nodded. There was much power to be had. In many forms.
* * *
“Bob, you know it’s good,” Chick Hill said as his editor ran through the story a second time.
“Good, sure, but is it true?”
“Old Limp Dick does not call the White House for nothing,” Hill reminded his boss. “Party line or not, they don’t like him, and he don’t like them.”
Bob Christopher, national editor for the Post, had no argument with that. Congressman Richard Vorhees had surprised many by not always falling in line with the President and his secretary of defense. Some said he was promoting his own agenda. The ones who didn’t say it simply agreed with those who did. “All right, morning edition.”
“Morning!” Chick’s hands went to his hips in a futile display of disagreement. Christopher’s look told him that. “All right.”
“Get it to copyediting.”
Hill took the hard copy and walked it down one floor to the copyeditor for the national pages. “Morning edition.”
The middle-aged man looked up. “Why didn’t you just transfer it?” All the Post’s computers were networked. It was standard to “send” a story to copyediting by pressing a button, not by hand delivery.
“ ‘Cause I needed the walk,” Chick answered sarcastically, reaching for his cigarettes as he walked away.
“Asshole,” the copyeditor said openly. Dealing with these prima donna “journalists” was his least favorite part of his job. At one time he had gotten some satisfaction in using them and the information they dug up to increase his net worth, but that part of his “night job” had slacked off in the recent past. His employers no longer craved the written word as they once had as if it were gold. Now he was much more often used simply as a message boy, the link somewhere in the middle of a chain whose other end he knew nothing about. And he’d continued to be blissfully ignorant as long as the end he did know of continued to pay him handsomely.
Back to the day job. Reading and rewriting, fixing the mistakes that these “highly educated journalists” made with comical regularity. Chimps at the National Zoo could do better.
Hold on. He read over the first part of the story again. Then the rest. “Well, isn’t this interesting.” He knew from experience that he would not be the only person to see it as such.
He picked up the phone and dialed the number from memory that he had so many times before. Doing so was not even that unusual. Part of his job included checking facts, and one of the stories in his basket was about the new economic-treaty provisions that the republics of the former Soviet Union had just agreed to. Where else would he get the confirmations he needed?
The call was answered at 1125 Sixteenth Street NW and forwarded to the third secretary for consular affairs. Five minutes later, after a trip to the photocopy machine, the copyeditor left on his regular lunch break. A car departed the Russian embassy at the same time.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DESIGN AND CIRCUMSTANCE
The Pave Hawk appeared from behind the unmaintained gantry at Launch Complex 12 and raced across the green earth of the Cape at fifty knots toward the target. From a mile away, visible clearly in the unfamiliar daylight, the helicopter appeared to be skimming the ground, its altitude governed by the two groups of dark forms hanging below the fuselage, one higher than the other. As it drew closer to the target—an abandoned range-safety bunker that had once been a haven for crash crews during launches—the dark objects became distinguishable as men. Actually they were much more.
Twelve hundred feet from the bunker, the Pave Hawk slowed, its nose flaring slightly as it dropped twenty feet toward the ground. Four Delta troopers, suspended on SPIE (Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction) rigs below and behind their five comrades, hit the ground running, their weapons in hand. A single pull on their release handles freed them from the fixed shoulder harnesses. They began moving quickly to their right toward a group of drums arrayed in a large circle.
Lieutenant Duc, after depositing his first package right on the money, released the aft SPIE rigging and nosed down toward the primary target a quarter-mile dead ahead. He dropped twenty feet more in altitude, leaving a clearance of just that same distance between the boots of the troopers hanging from the forward rig and the ground. Crossing Central Control Road, he accelerated to sixty knots, pushing the dangling troopers toward the rear in a steady sway. The five men remained facing forward, a product of the SPIE rig’s designed stability, their stubby MP5SD4 submachine guns trained on the low gray structure that was coming at them fast. Very fast.
“On target,” Duc said, alerting the men twenty feet below to prepare for landing.
Major Sean Graber heard the warning in his earpiece, but there was no need to key the mic on his right chest and respond. He, like the four others arrayed to his sides on the rig, bent his knees slightly and kept his legs close together without letting them touch. Their boots caught the ground as Duc flared the Pave Hawk, the bunker practically in their face. They all released and went for the two entrances, one each on the north and south sides. Sean, Lewis, and Goldfarb took the south; Antonelli and Quimpo the north.
Graber heard the SPIE rig hit the ground a few yards away as the Pave Hawk cleared to the south, away from where the power masts and the lines strung between them would be. His moves, like all the troopers’, were quick and crisp. They went to each side of the door in crouches. One trooper reached for the top of the hinge side and stuck one end of a gray strip there. The other end hung straight down against the door as a plumb line would, a small wire trailing to the hand of the trooper who had placed it there.
Step one, Insertion, had just been completed.
“Go!” Sean said into the mic.
The triangular shaped det cord exploded as the troopers closed their eyes to avoid the bright flash, though that was more a concern in darkness. A hollow core of aluminum inside the explosive strip, shaped like a V pointing toward the door, focused the force of the blast against the old steel door. It ruptured along a straight line running from top to bottom and tilted inward, swinging toward the latch side, before falling to the concrete floor with a clang. On the north side, the same process was repeated within a second of that on the south.
Step two, Entry, was done.
The proper entry of a room or building where hostiles might be is
choreographed long before any attempt is ever considered. When done simultaneously from several points—the preferred method in order that those being assaulted should be surprised from multiple directions—the planning takes on an even higher importance. Shooting a friendly is a distinct possibility in these situations, and this is why each trooper is given an area of responsibility to watch. His slice of the pie. His own personal killing zone.
Lewis was first through the south door, Graber behind him and Goldfarb bringing up the rear. The trio turned to their left, covering the west end of the open, single-room bunker. Lewis claimed the southwest corner and everything between it and him as his. Goldfarb did the same for the northwest corner. Sean took the middle and was the de facto backup should any surprises present themselves. To his back Antonelli and Quimpo had divided the east side of the room into just two sections.
Step three, Assault, was finished.
“All right, outside,” Sean ordered. The run-through, their second, had gone better, and faster, than the first. There would only be time for one more. The biggest hindrance was that the practice runs had all been “dry”— no firing. The makeshift facilities at the Cape were just unsuitable for that. Too much of a chance for ricochet existed, and any chance of that right now was unacceptable. The only other negative was the light conditions. Daylight practice, when the real thing would be going down at night, did not translate fully into complete situational awareness. They were unable to use the NVGs— attached uselessly to their titanium helmets so as to give the “feel” of the real thing—or the LAMs attached beneath the suppressors on the business end of their MP5SD4s.
Ideal, it wasn’t, Major Sean Graber knew, but then he and his men weren’t paid to work under the best conditions—they earned their money by making any situation the most favorable for them and the converse for any bad guys. That, he was confident they could do.
Sean waited for Buxton to trot over from the “cooling tower” with his team. “How’s your timing, Bux?”
“Fifty seconds from touchdown,” the captain reported.
“Good.” Sean checked the timer on his watch. “We were in and done in twenty seconds from touchdown. That means under two minutes for the show.” The “show” was the most interesting part of any mission, namely the time when getting killed went from possibility to probability. “I want to shave five more seconds off our transition on the last run-through.”
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