“Now there’s an invitation to the dance,” she said, grinning derisively.
“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
“We do this, you’re on board?”
“Uh-huh.” His voice was now thick with lust.
“You know what you’re doing?”
“I know I want to fuck you like there’s no tomorrow.”
“You may not have a tomorrow.”
“All the more reason.”
“It will cost you.”
“I’ll take out a home equity loan.”
“I warned you. I’m mean.”
“Before this is over, you’ll learn to love me.”
“Like the axe loves the turkey—the hammer, the nail.”
She stared at him a long, hard minute, unsmiling, her face empty of emotion. That’s what got to him. Her eyes, Rashid would later remember, were flat as a diamondback’s, deader than prayer, empty as the intergalactic void, absent of any emotion as two broken windows in an abandoned, gutted house.
“It’s your funeral,” she said.
He nodded feebly.
She began pulling off her black thigh-high boots.
3
“Let’s go play Thelma and Louise.”
—Elena Moreno
This time Elena and Jules were at a Baltimore McDonald’s.
“Did the paper go for your article?” Elena asked.
“They slammed it down so hard it bounced,” Jules said.
“It was the story of the century.”
“Of the millennium. They don’t care though.”
“What happened to ‘publish and be damned’?”
“I got damned instead.”
“To what?” Elena asked.
“I think they want me in shackles and leg irons.”
“Oh my God,” Elena said. “They threw the Patriot Act in your face.”
“Like it was chiseled in stone on Mt. Sinai,” Jules said.
“They’re stuck on stupid.”
“They’re no ordinary cowards,” Jules said. “I’ll give you that. They went around me and showed our story to your boss, Conrad.”
“Who immediately fingered me as your source,” Elena said robotically, staring at the ceiling.
“It had to be you. You were the only one in possession of the facts.”
Elena leaned across the table, put her hand on her friend’s arm, and smiled. “That meeting must have been terrible.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
* * *
When Jules Meredith, in a black three-piece suit, entered the New York Journal-World’s fourteenth-floor conference room, John Jennings and Helen Myer were waiting for her at the table. Jennings was in shirtsleeves, and Helen wore a simple but elegant blue dress. Neither of them was smiling.
They were holding copies of the article—based on Elena’s intelligence findings—that Jules had written.
“I don’t know what to say,” Jennings had said. “We told you to stop dredging up this Saudi stuff. It’s old hat. Everyone knows they have rogue billionaires who contribute to terrorist-front charities.”
“This time they’re financing something big, something horrific,” Jules said, “and it’s coming here.”
“Who says?” Helen Myer asked. “If your CIA source is so good, why’s the Agency discounting the threat?”
Jules struggled to keep her composure.
How did Helen know the Agency was dismissing Elena’s findings?
“You’re wasting your time and our money,” Helen said.
Jules stiffened. The tiger in her gut was pacing its cage, on the verge of breaking through the bars. She struggled to hold it in.
“How do you know they aren’t responding to the threat?” Jules asked. “I stipulated this material was ‘eyes only.’ You two weren’t supposed to show it to anyone.”
Her two bosses exchanged quick glances.
“Material this sensitive,” Jennings said, “has to be checked out.”
“If we printed it and were wrong, or if it contained classified information, we could all end up in jail,” Helen said.
“The Agency and the White House are in criminal denial over this impending attack, Helen,” Jules said. “That’s the point of the article. Someone’s put the fix in over there, and we all know who that person is. Newspapers exist to expose such conflicts of interest, such negligence. We’re here to wake people up and tell them the truth, not lull our leaders and people into apathy.”
“You have no smoking-gun evidence,” Helen said, “and we can’t go forward without hard proof.”
“The CIA agent quotes two deeply placed, high-level informants in this piece,” Jules said. “The agent quotes them verbatim. The informants say the attacks are going down. They’re risking their lives to protect us.”
“Director Conrad and the president say your agent is talking out her ass,” John said. “They even implied your obsession with the Saudis has driven you to fabricating those quotes.”
Jennings said “her.” So he and Helen had shown her piece not only to the Agency but to the president, and the two men had inferred Jules’s source was a woman.
The source was Elena.
* * *
“You gave them a chance,” Elena said.
“They pay my salary. I owed them a look.”
“And in return, they threatened you.”
“They’re just scared,” Jules said. “I’m not.”
“Then let’s do it,” Elena said.
“You sure?” Jules asked. “It’ll go harder for you. Look what happened to Snowden.”
“He wasn’t trying to stop multiple nuclear attacks.”
Jules opened her brand-new Lenovo computer and turned it on. “Don’t worry,” Jules said. “I disconnected the GPS.”
Jules’s cover e-mail was already written and addressed to contacts at twenty major media outlets, including four blogs and three Web sites.
“Someone will print this piece,” Jules said.
“Maybe all of them.”
Jules hit Send.
“I knew in my bones,” Elena said, “it would come to this. These people are just too fucking bad.”
“I have my go-to-hell bag packed,” Jules said. “You have our fake ID kits?”
“I’ve had them ready for months. Several each. I’ve also got us a clean car,” Elena said, “fake credit cards, bogus passports, phony driver’s licenses and registrations—all of them matching our new IDs.”
“Clothes? Hair dye?”
“For both of us.”
“You sure,” Jules asked, “you disconnected your GPSes? In your phones, computers, car, the works?”
“Yep.”
“How much cash could you scrape up?”
“Seventy-five k,” Elena said.
“Ninety-five here.”
“Small bills?”
“Copy that,” Jules said.
“Luckily I have firearms.”
“We’ll need them.”
“The car’s in the mall parking lot across the street,” Elena said.
“Mexico or Canada?”
“We’ll blend in easier up in the States. I have a friend we’re meeting with who’ll help us out.”
“Can we trust him?” Jules asked.
“I trust him.”
“Good enough.”
“Let’s go play Thelma and Louise.”
PART VIII
Behold, I come as a thief.…
—Revelation 16:15
1
“Reach too high, you fall too far.”
—CIA Director William Conrad
CIA Director William Conrad and President Caldwell sat in their shirtsleeves in the Oval Office on heavy stuffed chairs. They were drinking Highland Park twenty-five-year-old single malt scotch neat from rocks glasses. The bottle was on the circular teak end table between them.
“How much do you think the reporter knows?” Caldwell asked Conrad.
“Based
on what The New York Journal-World leaked to us, I’d say Elena told their reporter quite a bit.”
“What we saw in the article, what we squashed, is bad enough,” Caldwell said.
“We certainly rubbed Elena’s nose in it. Any chance she or this Jules Meredith woman will still publish it?” Conrad asked Caldwell.
“Depends how obsessed they are,” the president said.
“They have to know we’d lock them up pretty near forever,” Conrad said. “Jennings and Helen Myer told us they’d made it clear to Meredith. I don’t take them for a couple of traitors. They’ve been team players their whole lives.”
“Bill,” President Caldwell asked anxiously, “is there any chance that the women are right and that ISI/ISIS are plotting nuclear attacks on the U.S.? Look what they did to that Pakistani nuclear plant. Shouldn’t we put the country on a wartime footing? Order the National Guard to occupy our nuclear facilities and seal off the border?”
“George, you campaigned on a promise that you’d kick Islamist terrorism’s ass, and for three straight years, you’ve told the public you’re doing precisely that. The threat to the homeland was gone. Now, just before an election, you want to say you’re both a liar and incompetent?”
“But what if they are planning an attack?” the president asked. “Hypothetically?”
“We polled that, remember?” Conrad said. “The secret study? What would be the public’s reaction when word got out that the president hadn’t defeated the terrorists and the country was in for major attacks?”
President Caldwell nodded. “It was a disaster. An admission like that would cost us the November election and drag the whole party down with us. We’d lose both houses.”
“Then the next administration could have a special prosecutor determine how you could be 180 degrees wrong—how you could fuck up your assessments so disastrously and cost so many Americans their lives.”
“Hell, that’s what I’d do to them,” the president agreed. He paused and stared out the window at the South Lawn. “Is there any chance that she’s right … about several imminent nuclear attacks on the U.S.?”
“Let’s assume a worst-case scenario—that she’s figured out something that the CIA, NSA, the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, U.S. Cyber Command, the FBI, NATO, and Interpol combined have all overlooked. Let’s assume Elena Moreno is smarter than all of us put together. That still doesn’t negate the fact that Meredith is capable of exposing our offshore business transactions with Shaiq. As you know, I’m in on some of those deals myself. She implies as much in her article, if people can read between the lines. She’s a genius when it comes to getting financial dirt on people, and, George, you’ve been concealing assets and income from the IRS for eighteen years. She’s close to uncovering those accounts, if she hasn’t uncovered them already. Give her the rest of the year, and she’ll find them. She’s just too damn good at this shit. And anyway,” Conrad said, “if Pakistani terrorists did nuke us, as horrendous as those strikes would be, you and I could ride that out.”
“Assuming we weren’t at Ground Zero,” the president said.
“Granted, but if we weren’t killed, we could come out stronger politically.”
“Nine eleven did enhance George W.’s position,” the president said.
“Gave him his second term and the Patriot Act.”
“Remember those apartment building bombings in Russia in ’99—in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk?” Caldwell asked. “They so terrified the Duma that it gave Putin dictatorial power.”
“We still believe Putin staged those bombings himself so he could scare the country into letting him usurp that power,” Conrad said. “That’s the Agency’s official classified assessment.”
“Well,” Caldwell said, laughing, “it worked.”
“Can’t argue with success,” Conrad said. “You know a so-called terrorist attack worked for Hitler, too. Look at what the Reichstag fire did for him.”
“It made der Führer the absolute dictator of Germany,” Caldwell said.
“A nuclear terrorist attack against the U.S. would do something very similar for us,” Conrad said.
“We could come out on top, couldn’t we?” Caldwell agreed.
“We ought to have ‘a New Presidential Powers Act’ locked and cocked, in the can,” Conrad said. “We can ramrod it through Congress the next day—hell, the same day—while the country is in the grip of stark terror, blind panic, and mass hysteria.”
“Just think of what we could do without all that checks-and-balances, separation-of-powers bullshit,” Caldwell said, his tone heated.
“There’d be a new sheriff in town,” Conrad said, nodding.
“I can finally tell Congress and the court to go fuck themselves,” Caldwell said.
“Our way or the highway,” Conrad said.
“Leave them with their hearts broken and their throats smokin’,” Caldwell said with a smile.
“I’m not sure I even see a downside to it,” Conrad said. “Except for the casualties, of course.”
“Worst case for us is that we would survive it legally, politically,” President Caldwell said analytically. “We win that second term, and I seriously increase my political power. But the important thing is we’d survive this present crisis. What we can’t survive is Elena and Jules Meredith exposing our financial dealings, specifically those dealings with Shaiq ibn Ishaq.”
“I wish we’d never met that cocksucker,” Conrad said.
“Ah hell,” Caldwell said fatalistically, “getting involved with him was unavoidable. At the time, I was facing utter financial ruin, and those offshore partnerships with him seemed like a good deal for you, too.”
“We were also facing financial fraud—the kind they lock people up for,” Conrad started.
“Until Shaiq paid certain people off,” the president added.
“We wouldn’t be here without him. Those partnerships he brought us gave us a chance for you to pay off our creditors, put away some real money—offshore, tax-free—and even bankroll your run for the presidency.”
“So we have no choice. If they try to go public, we hit them with everything we have,” the president said.
“Maybe we should go after them with everything we have … now,” Conrad said.
“You aren’t suggesting…?” the president asked.
“It may be our only chance,” Conrad said.
“Then she’s going down?” the president asked.
“Both of them. It’s our best shot.”
“Then we have to move now.”
“I have a team in place.”
“Then it’s lock and load?”
“Loaded for bear.”
“The poor babies.”
“Reach too high, you fall too far.”
“I don’t know,” Caldwell said.
Conrad stared at him. “What’s wrong, George? You never had anyone hit before?”
“Not really.”
“It’s always unpleasant, but in this case—if it makes you feel any better—you never had a choice.”
“But they’re women,” the president said.
“More’s the pity, but they did it to themselves.”
“I don’t know. What exactly did they do?”
“They flew too close to the sun,” Conrad said.
President Caldwell poured himself another glass of Highland Park 25, finishing the bottle. He drank it straight down. Conrad went to the corner bar. He selected and brought back another bottle of the Highland Park 25. He poured them each half a glass neat.
“We take care of those two first,” Conrad said, “then I’ll get you everything on any potential terrorist nukes.”
“Elena Moreno would have been our best source in that regard,” the president said.
“I
know, but we clean up our own mess first. Whatever happens afterward happens.”
“You’re right. Has to be done. Still, they didn’t deserve this.” The president helped himself to a large swallow.
“They knew the deal when they signed up,” Conrad said. “They wanted to run with the big dogs? Fine, but big dogs also bite.”
2
“What did you expect? Hearts and flowers?”
—Adara Nasira
Hasad drove the white Ryder Navistar 9400 truck with the Cat engine, air brakes, and ten-speed transmission off I-81 and onto SR 254. He was pulling a forty-eight-foot semitrailer. According to the map, they were fifty miles outside of Staunton, Virginia, in one of the least populated counties east of the Mississippi. The GPS directed him to one turnoff after another over several circuitous mountain roads until they reached a small hollow with an old farmhouse and a large red barn off to the side.
He drove behind the barn, got out, and opened the semitrailer’s rear door. Inside was a forty-foot shipping container. He took out a key and unlocked the container’s padlock. Pulling open the door, he looked inside.
A man and a woman had been keeping house there for over almost two weeks. Their waste bins and port-a-potties were full, and the shipping container was overflowing with empty beer cans and wine and whiskey bottles as well as food wrappers. Unused to the light of day, both of them were blinking. The man and the woman were both dressed in black Levis and tank tops. Like Hasad’s, the man’s body was covered with long-forgotten, long-healed bullet wounds and knife scars. This was a man schooled in the profession of arms.
“Looks like you two had a nice trip,” Hasad said to Adara, shaking her hand.
She nodded, silent.
“I had a sneaking suspicion you might be running things,” Rashid said, blinking. “Can you tell me what’s happening?”
“You two are getting out of here,” Hasad said, “and you don’t have much time.”
“We really need a shower and clean clothes,” Rashid said.
“You need to get as far away from this place as you can by nightfall. See that van over there?” In the field behind them was parked a black RAM ProMaster 2500 van with heavily tinted, one-way windows. “Under the van’s rear floor in a hidden compartment, there’s a 12-gauge pump, two H&K 9mm NATO submachine guns, and two 9mm Glocks—all with extra ammo. You also have an envelope with written instructions, new IDs, credit cards, and $90,000 in money belts. You each have offshore accounts in the Caymans, which my Swiss banker will replenish periodically. I will get you even larger amounts later. You have knapsacks with new clothes, toiletries, cold sandwiches, Cokes in a thermal bag, and a Thermos of coffee. You also have a full tank. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t speed. You can pull over for gas but otherwise don’t stop until you meet Elena and Jules at this location.” He handed them photos of the two women, an address, a city map with an X marked on the location of the meet, and Elena’s cell phone number. “You have five hours to get there. They’re on the run, and you two are going to help them.”
And Into the Fire Page 12