Carver sat forward. Based on how locked down the crime scene had been, he had hardly expected the president to discuss Preston’s murder with anyone outside the circle of trust, not to mention the British PM. “What was his reaction to the news?”
“Actually, he called with news of his own. There was another octagon-shaped piece of fabric found this morning. This one was in London.”
“London?”
Speers nodded. “Inside the mouth of Nils Gish.”
The name didn’t register with Ellis. “Who?”
Carver’s fists clenched as he considered the implications of what he’d just heard. “Sir Nils Gish,” he said just loud enough to be heard. “Member of parliament, leader of the Labour Party and possibly the next British prime minister.”
Ellis made the sign of the cross — quick touches on the forehead and both shoulders.
The president leaned back, resting her elbows on the armrests of her chair in a classic power pose. “High ranking members of Congress and Parliament were assassinated on the same night, within approximately three hours of each other.”
“Two killers,” Carver deduced. “Or two sets of killers.” Only a handful of military jets could get from London to D.C. in just three hours, and even that didn’t allow for ground travel, to say nothing of the prep time that went into any professional assassination.
The treatment of the D.C. crime scene made more sense now. FBI chief Fordham had kept the late Senator Rand’s D.C. residence locked down tight. This was much bigger than a lover’s quarrel gone wrong, or the wrath of a vengeful loan shark.
“No group has claimed responsibility,” Speers added. “In both cases, black-and-red striped fabric was left in the victim’s mouth. Someone is clearly sending a message here. Agent Carver felt there might be a connection to some ancient European group.”
“Not so fast,” Carver objected. “What I said was that a piece of fabric like it was used by a certain assassination squad in Renaissance Europe. Since nobody alive has ever seen one, obviously this is an organization who’s read about it, as I did, and decided to co-opt the symbol for their own purposes.”
The president raised an open hand. “Work out the details on your own time. How are we going to handle this publicly?”
Speers’ jaw tightened. “Whatever the spin, it’s going to be a circus.”
“All the progress we’ve made calming security jitters will vanish. It’s not like these men were simply shot. They were brutally tortured. Forget the fact that we were under no obligation to provide secret service protection to the senator. People will look at this as a huge security failure. And since Preston was a presidential hopeful, the media is only going to fan the flames.”
“And once people start speculating about whether these assassinations were state-sponsored, there won’t be enough oxygen left in the room for anyone to think straight. It’ll make it that much tougher to catch these monsters.”
Every head in the room reluctantly nodded. Carver checked his watch. It had been at least four hours since the senator’s death. The fact that no group had yet claimed responsibility for the murders was highly unusual. It was also deeply disturbing.
Fordham licked his lips before speaking. “We may need to practice misdirection as a strategy.”
“With all due respect,” Ellis said, “What are you going to tell people? That Senator Preston went to live on a big farm in the country?”
“Let me worry about that,” the president said.
“If the truth gets out, the scandal would be bigger than the missing WMDs in Iraq. Bigger than Benghazi by a mile.”
“Just do your job,” the president put forth in a tone that officially sealed the discussion on that topic. She leveled her gaze at Carver and Ellis. “Starting now, this case is your entire world.”
As much as Carver had wanted to get out from behind the desk in McLean, this wasn’t the way he wanted to do it. After months of boredom, Operation Crossbow had only just started to get interesting, only to be wrenched out of his hands.
“What about support?” Ellis said.
“I want as few people knowing the details as possible,” the president cut in. “Julian here, and Chad Fordham, will oversee this operation personally.”
Speers’ protest came immediately, but the president cut him off. “You both have competent deputy directors. Let them run things for a few days. I want your full and undivided attention on this.”
“This is a mistake,” Carver said. “We should have dozens, if not hundreds, of people on this.”
“I think I’ve made myself clear. We can’t afford a leak.”
She had a point. As the business of keeping secrets went, this was about as big and juicy as they came. “When can I see the London crime scene photos?”
Speers sucked his teeth, as he always did when he was about to say something disappointing. “You can’t. MI6 won’t chance transmitting anything electronically.”
Carver’s face felt suddenly hot. “We have a pact to share intelligence data that is mutually beneficial to international security.”
“Oh, they’re fully willing to cooperate. It’s just that they insist on doing it in person.”
“What is this, 1985?”
“The hactivists have them spooked,” the president explained. Earlier that year, a group claiming to be former WikiLeaks members had risen from the organization’s ashes to release sensitive video that MI6 had shared with the CIA. Before either side could deploy its forces to shut the video down, the Allied Jihad had used the material to identify a British double agent within the Iranian government. He had never been heard from again. Similar moves by hacker activists — who believed that governments had no right to withhold even sensitive information from the public — had so terrorized governments across the globe that even diplomats had been transported back to the industrial age, at times refusing to communicate even benign correspondence by email.
“Fine,” Carver conceded. “I’ll go to London if that’s what you want. But I suggest that Ellis stays here.” He deliberately avoided eye contact with his new partner. “We can’t afford to let the trail in Washington get any colder.”
“Noted,” Speers said, “But denied. Chad and I will supervise the domestic end of this. You are both to go to London and anywhere else necessary to find out who did this.”
The president stood up. “Until we know who’s behind this, and why, we are fully exposed.”
Speers glanced at his phone, reading an incoming text message. He looked up, apparently horrified by what he had read. “Madam President…Senator Preston’s house just went up in flames.”
Before anyone could react, Fordham also received a text. “It’s Bowers,” he said, gazing into his screen. “He’s all right.”
“Thank God,” Speers gushed in relief. “And the senator’s assistant?”
Fordham shook his head grimly. “Doesn’t look good. She was inside.”
Carver felt sick. It wasn’t just that Mary Borst was likely dead. All forensic evidence had just burned up in the senator’s brownstone.
Eisenhower Building
Washington D.C.
Speers ran his fingers over the oak surface of the partners desk that he had used during his seven years as White House Chief of Staff. Despite finding a few new nicks in the wood, he smiled, knowing that he wouldn’t be headed back to McLean tonight. After his debrief with the president and the others, he had stayed behind and formally requested permission to reclaim his old office in the adjacent Eisenhower Building.
The president was visibly irritated, but granted the request nonetheless. Speers didn’t mind a bit of social tension. That was part of the game. And timing was everything. As he had hoped, his audacity was trumped by the president’s desire to stay in the loop during the investigation into Senator Preston’s assassination.
The office’s current occupant, a GS-14 from the Office of Management amp; Budget, had been out when Speers arrived. His startled assist
ant, who sat in the neighboring office, was trying to get hold of him at this very moment. Speers couldn’t wait for the guy to get back here and take his horrendous photos down. A few beach pics from Guam, a random picture out the window of an airplane, and one of an old dog with an old woman that, for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, depressed him.
He sat in his old chair and adjusted the lumbar support and height to suit him. Then he set his computer on the desk, fired it up, and logged into the secure network. Per the president’s directive, he dialed Claire Shipmont to temporarily delegate oversight of the ODNI daily operations to her so that he could focus on the crisis at hand. “Don’t ask,” he said before Claire could get the first question out of her mouth. “Just know this is temporary, so don’t go making changes that can’t be undone a few days from now.”
“Yeah, I was thinking Mondays should be wear your pajamas to work day from now on.”
He liked Claire. He had, after all, plucked her from a Bay Area data analysis company to be his second in command. “Just one thing. There’s a technical support analyst named Arunus Roth. He works under Blake Carver in the NCC. Give him access to my office. He’ll be working in there.”
“I know who he is. He’s like a G-8 or something. He’s always hitting on my assistant.”
“Roth might be a little rough around the edges, but he won’t trash the place. He needs complete privacy for the next few days, and we won’t be seeing much of Carver, either.”
As Speers signed off, a file request notification appeared in the corner of his screen. Someone was requesting access to a file that Speers owned. He didn’t receive many these days, since he almost never had time to create any, much less administrate them. In the time that he had been heading up the ODNI, he spent more than 70 percent of his time in meetings, and the rest problem solving, reviewing reports and news. He scarcely had time to create anything of his own. Even his news releases and quotes were written for him.
He clicked on the file share request. It was from Chad Fordham. He was requesting access to Blake Carver’s official dossier.
Speers called Fordham, knowing that the FBI Director would be startled to hear his voice. Making a file share request outside of one’s own agency was a completely blind process. You couldn’t see who owned them.
The FBI Director answered on the first ring. “Anything you want to know about Carver,” Speers declared, “You can ask me right now.”
It took Fordham a moment to form a response. “Sorry, Julian. I never guessed this would go through you personally.”
“Just tell me what you’re looking for.”
“Well, everything, frankly. The president requested Carver’s involvement, not me. I want to know more about who I’m working with.”
Speers wasn’t about to lay everything on the table. Besides, Carver’s most interesting work had been deliberately omitted from the record. “You called me last year asking who the hell he was. You remember what I told you?”
He heard Fordham take a sip of something hot before speaking. “You said if I needed someone to parachute into a mountain fortress in the middle of the night to get somebody important, then Carver would be the guy.”
“That’s right. And here’s what I should have said — if you needed someone to figure out that the target was there in the first place, then Carver would also be the guy. You remember two years ago when the CIA foiled an Allied Jihad plot to kidnap that drone pilot out in Nevada?”
“Don’t tell me that — ”
“Yes, that was Carver’s operation. What else?”
“There’s a rumor that he’s in trouble with the House Committee on Domestic Intelligence.”
“Then you already know he’s protecting Nico Gold. It’s not what I’d do, but at least Carver’s loyal, which is more than I can say for most people.”
“And that’s all there is to it?”
“That’s right. He’s protecting an asset. That’s it.”
Fordham thanked Speers for his time and hung up. Speers had hunch that Fordham wasn’t the type to be satisfied that quickly, though. He’d find a way into Carver’s file with or without permission. Speers unwrapped a grape lollipop and decided he better see if anything needed editing.
He navigated to Carver’s dossier and began browsing through it, not quite sure what he was looking for. He cracked the lollipop between his molars, chewing it as casually as gum although it sounded like he was crushing rocks.
After college, Carver applied for the CIA’s clandestine service. But the evaluating psychiatrist recommended him for the Joint Strike Operations Command (JSOC) — a paramilitary spy, capture and kill force rolled into one.
Pulling up the results of Carver’s initial background check, he saw a handful of unpaid parking tickets that had shown up on his initial federal background check. Other than that, it looked like he had never broken the law. The polygraph hadn’t budged when he’d claimed that he had never had drugs or alcohol. Heck, he’d never even had coffee. He had grown up in a small Mormon town in northern Arizona. When the examiner asked if he was religious, he answered no. When asked if he believed in God, he’d said yes.
Back then he had listed his primary hobby as “hunting.” That figured. He had 5,000 square miles of Arizona’s White Mountains as his backyard. His father had taught him how to stalk game in the woods and be stealthy enough to kill an antelope with a bow amp; arrow. The psychiatrist asked him how many of his kills he had eaten over the years. The point of the question had been to discover whether Carver valued animal life, or whether he felt entitled to kill for sheer enjoyment. A typical response would have been, “We eat everything we kill.” Carver’s response was off the charts: “Fourteen deer, 12 elk, 151 ducks, 3 antelope, 29 geese.” He remembered every single one from the time he was nine years old. That was the super-autobiographical memory at work.
Aside from being an expert marksman, he had a high tolerance for risk, did not suffer from nightmares, and was just athletic enough to be dangerous.
Within five years of Carver’s joining JSOC, his unit became extremely active in Afghanistan as the war on terror switched into high gear. His unit would go out after a bad guy virtually every night. As the months and years went on, they had filled secret prisons and cemeteries with their trophies.
Eventually JSOC created an intelligence support branch, which was initially staffed by CIA. Carver’s commander reassigned him. They needed a mind like his in the command center. By all accounts he was great in his new role, but he hated it. He wanted to be out where the action was.
During the Hatch administration, when Speers had begun to suspect that something fishy was going on with the Pentagon’s relationship with Ulysses USA, he had gone to the CIA Director and asked him who their best guy was. Someone that was as strong in intelligence as he was in execution. Blake Carver’s name had been the first out of his mouth.
What followed was deliberately absent from the file. He had resigned from the CIA so that he would be accountable only to Speers. There was no more history.
Speers scrolled back up through the dossier. He stopped at the description of Carver’s cognitive disorder. It concerned him. In the wrong hands, it could leave Carver vulnerable. Due to enhanced episodic memory, most people with hyperthymesia spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about their past. They also have an amazing capacity to recall personal events or trivial details, including sensory details such as smells, tastes and sounds. Mr. Carver appears to have the rare ability to turn off “retrieval mode” so that he can focus on the present. He should, however, have regular neurological examinations to monitor the functions in his frontal cortex. Should he experience highly violent scenarios in the line of duty, for example, losing the ability to control his recall abilities could be far more crippling than a person with a normal prefrontal cortex.
Speers highlighted the entire diagnosis. Then he deleted it.
Somewhere Over the Atlantic
With a phone call
, Speers had arranged a private charter leaving immediately from Reagan National Airport. If they had to go to London, at least they were aboard a fast plane. The Gulfstream IV was capable of speeds just short of Mach 1, shortening the flight time to a little over five hours. That was way better than the winged whales Carver was accustomed to flying. With a few rare exceptions, his modus operandi had been hitching rides on military transport planes that happened to be heading his way. But in this case, he felt the cost of the charter — a couple hundred thousand dollars — was worth it. The trail was growing colder by the second.
As the Gulfstream cruised at 28,000 feet, Haley Ellis sat in a cream-colored leather chair facing his. She and Carver had said little to each other since taking off. They were both busy digesting a steady feed of public and classified information about the victims.
There was nothing obvious to suggest that Preston or Gish had ever met. The fact that they were both publicly elected officials from Western countries seemed to be just about the only thing they had in common. Carver was confident they would find a common link, but how long would that take? More than anything, it was the ensuing fire that puzzled him. How and why had it been started? The killers had placed a calling card in Preston’s mouth. Obviously some sort of message. Why would they then burn the place up?
He composed a text message and fired it off to Julian: anyone claimed responsibility? Speers’ reply: nope. Playing hard to get.
Now he received a stream of information from Arunus Roth about the senator’s executive assistant, Mary Borst. She was 26 years old. She held a Dutch passport, having been born in Amsterdam to a prominent politician named Vera Borst. Graduated with honors from NYU, where she had studied political science. Immediately after graduation she had worked as a volunteer on Preston’s reelection campaign, and had subsequently landed a job as a staff assistant in his D.C. office, where she had answered phones and staffed the front desk. In three years, she had worked her way up to an aide position, and then officer manager, before becoming Preston’s executive assistant.
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