by James Phelan
“The Germans don’t have a transcript?”
“Nope,” replied Hutchinson. “INTFOR seems to have a more updated version of NSA encryption gear than the US Government has.”
“No big surprise there,” McCorkell said, turning slightly to look out his window. “Bellamy’s a big guy—he’s a big player, in every sense. And getting bigger by the day.”
“What do we do?”
McCorkell faced his number two, said, “Is this guy, the van driver, still at the embassy?”
“I’m waiting to hear back. Someone got to the legal attaché before I did.”
“Bellamy.”
“Fair assumption. I think we’ll have silence there for a bit. The whole embassy in Rome is in lockdown due to the bomb going off in the street outside.”
“How about the Station Chief?”
“Uncontactable at the moment. I’m working on it.”
“Rome—that’s Bev Johnson?”
“Yep.”
“She’s good people. Keep trying,” McCorkell said. “What was the car chase about?”
“There was a hit, in an apartment: Italian guy named Felix Lassiter, who ran cutouts for a whole bunch of money men. Maybe even CIA. Italian CSI are arriving on the scene now. They’ll work up DNA samples from the scene, but they’ll take a while.”
“Nothing’s fast down there.”
“Yep. I can have someone from Quantico reach out, to expedite things.”
“Do it.”
“Right.” Hutchinson made a note. “They also found one of our van driver’s buddies in the apartment: similar cleanskin ID to our van guy, but for an old Marines jacket.”
“Can we question him?”
“That’ll be hard. He’s KIA at the scene with half a golf club stuck in his eye socket.”
McCorkell swiveled back toward Hutchinson. “A golf club?”
“Seven iron.”
“In his head?”
“Yep. Must have taken a decent swing. He mustn’t have heard the fore call.”
“Who did that?”
“Probably our pair from the VW.”
“Who are they?” McCorkell looked closely at the grainy printout from an intercepted traffic camera. “A man and a woman?”
“Yep. She’s a dead end so far. And, in a sense, he is as well.”
•
Walker came to.
He was flexicuffed to a metal chair that was bolted to the floor in the middle of a bland room that contained nothing but a door, another chair, a table, and a long, horizontal mirror on the facing wall.
A CIA safe house.
Walker had been in plenty of such places, refuges for agents and field officers. He’d been in rooms like this, reserved for different types of houseguests, though he’d never been strapped to the interrogation chair. He breathed deeply.
Walker was exactly where he wanted to be.
A guy came in. Walker knew they had watched him wake, through the two-way mirror. The guy was average in every proportion. He kept his ski mask on: smart move. He moved with a slight limp—the guy who’d copped it in the nuts in the take-down on the street.
He held a bottle of water to Walker’s lips, and Walker drank half of it.
The guy left, closing the door behind him.
Walker flexed his forearms against the plastic cable-ties behind the back of the chair. There was a little wriggle room—they hadn’t done them as tightly as he would have instructed.
This will be interesting.
Seventy-eight hours to deadline.
10
Walker did not have to wait for long.
The door opened and four men entered. All wore ski masks, with just their eyes visible. The water boy with the limp now carried two eight-liter bottles of water. Another, out of shape, left-handed, carried towels. Another had a taser holstered on his belt, a hand resting on it for a quick draw. He was a big guy, capable, fit. The fourth bore nothing but a slight swagger. Lean and confident. Every movement predetermined and exact. He was their leader. He would be Walker’s interrogator.
“Sorry about your nuts,” Walker said to Water Boy, who stood to Walker’s right, arms crossed. He did not reply.
“Did I train any of you?” Walker asked. He looked from mask to mask. Nothing telling. He felt he had always been a fair instructor. Tough, but to the point. Methodical.
The leader gave a hand gesture.
The guy with the taser and the guy with the towels undid the padlocks that housed the front legs of Walker’s chair to steel eyelets bolted to the floor. The back legs, still anchored by hardened-steel locks, acted like pivots, and the two guys tilted Walker’s chair back forty degrees and held it steady.
Walker had been water-boarded more than once before. First at SERE Survival School, with the Air Force. Then at Fort Bragg, training with Delta to earn his place in the 24th. That’s where it started, this interrogation technique; until recently, water-boarding was something that Americans only did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as SERE: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. In these harsh exercises trainees were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless opponent who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It was something that American soldiers were trained to resist, not to inflict. Later, after 9/11, when the world changed, Walker had shown recruits how to water-board at the CIA’s training ground in North Carolina. The nation’s defensive technique to show strength under duress had become an offensive means of obtaining information.
He’d spent six months training guys just like these. Maybe even one or two of these guys. In a way, Walker hoped that he had trained them, because at least then he knew that they’d be beyond proficient.
Walker settled his breathing. He knew he could last about two minutes by holding his breath. Decent interrogators, however, would be wise to his breathing rhythm and not allow him such a length of time to hold out.
If Walker were running this, he would not start this way. He would try talking to their guest first, then see where that went. Nice cop having a chat, bad cop to verify the story, then the confession afterward to an even nicer cop. Two days of sleep deprivation, repeat process and compare results.
The chair improvising as board was a mistake too. A dangerous set-up.
Maybe these guys are on the clock.
Or worse.
Maybe they knew who he was. Or rather, who he used to be . . .
•
McCorkell looked at the photo of Walker and Clara.
“What do you mean he’s a dead end?”
“Let me give you a bit of background,” Hutchinson said, flipping through his notepad. “With that pic we got a match on facial rec to one Josiah ‘Jed’ Walker. Former Air Force, officer in the twenty-fourth Tactical. Joined up after college, Georgetown, where he was first approached to join the Agency—”
“Wait—Walker, from Georgetown . . .”
“Yep, one and the same,” Hutchinson said. “His old man was David. You knew him?”
“Knew him and then some. Go on.”
“Jed Walker turned the Agency down, the first time round. As an Air Force officer he did a tour in Iraq and three in ’Stan. Been decorated with everything from the Air Force Cross down, including three Purple Hearts.”
“A regular Billy Waugh.”
“You bet. Mustered out as soon as he became a Lieutenant Colonel, which he made pretty much as fast as you can get, and a short time later went to the CIA as part of the Special Activities Division.”
“Maybe he liked the field work,” McCorkell said. “That last promotion would have seen him driving a desk.”
“Sounds like that’s where the brass wanted him: they saw how good Walker was, how smart he was, and wanted him around the office to help steer the ship. Anyway”—Hutchinson checked his notes—“at the Agency he stayed on a year at The Point, training their fiel
d operatives and whatever the fuck else they do there, then three years out in the big wide world running agents.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere there’s trouble. It seems he specialized in a lost art.”
“And what would that be?”
“Running APs,” Hutchinson said.
McCorkell looked at the image again. There were two different kinds of agents that an intel officer ran: “agents of influence” and “agents provocateur.” The agent of influence tries to change opinion in the country where he operates; an agent provocateur, or AP, is sent to stir up trouble and create chaos.
“Walker literally wrote the book on twenty-first-century APs,” Hutchinson went on. “The last record we have is that he bugged out days after the Arab Spring wound up. The final citation is a Distinguished Intelligence Medal to add to his collection.”
“So, he was a busy boy, and what, burned out? Took a job for some decent money? God knows he would have been fielding offers to make more in a few years than during a lifetime at the Agency.”
“Doesn’t look like it. He came in from the cold within a year and did some odd jobs for various agencies and departments, stuff no one else would touch.”
“The guy’s an addict.”
“Looks that way. It’s a hard life to leave behind, for those good at it.”
“Then why not sell out and do it for hire permanently?”
“Beats me.”
“Maybe he has. Maybe he joined INTFOR.”
“And maybe he hasn’t.”
“He’s too patriotic?”
“You knew his old man, you tell me.”
“Hmm. Maybe he’s gone nuts. Too long at the coal face. Last location before Rome?”
“That’s where it gets interesting. Very interesting.” Hutchinson leaned forward in his chair and passed over the file he’d put together. “Says there that around nine months ago Walker was listed as KIA. His family had a funeral for him, a coffin in the ground at Arlington next to his dad, but there were no remains to bury.”
Hutchinson passed over a separate file on the Yemen mission.
“So maybe MIA listed as KIA . . . who ran him then?” asked McCorkell, then opened the folder and saw the front sheet. “Department of State? A guy like Walker?”
“That’s what it says.”
McCorkell ran his eyes over the scant few pages on Yemen.
“My question,” Hutchinson said, “is why. Why’s he now come out of hiding?”
McCorkell was silent as he read about Yemen, then closed the folder and said, “Hutch, you need to go talk to State. I want to know everything about this last op of his. It seems they’re more than a little wrong when they say Jed Walker is dead.”
11
“Sure you guys don’t want to ask me anything first?” Walker said.
Silence from the four men. The top of a large water bottle was removed. A towel was readied.
Walker said, “Did you get an ID on those guys back at the apartment?”
The men remained silent. Each had a task.
The towel was placed over Walker’s face and held in place from behind. One, two, three layers. He didn’t flinch. The chair was tilted back further. He waited for what was next. Settled his heart rate down around seventy. Breathed a little deeper.
Walker busied his mind. He thought about the men at the apartment. The B Team.
Private contractors. Big money was moving through Felix. But who’s paying them to take him out? If it’s the government, neither the Pentagon nor the Agency have to worry about Congressional Oversight. Those guys were private, all right; ex-military working for the money, not a cause. What was their purpose? To stop Felix Lassiter? To make sure that whatever was in his head was buried forever?
The chair was tilted down to the point where the top of the backrest was leaning against the tiled floor. Walker’s head was now lower than his heart: water-boarding 101. The trouble with a chair like this, though, was that it was reliant on the two guys either side being strong enough and quick enough to get him upright between sessions. A slipped hand on the wet metal frame, a second too long for Walker—it could be CPR time. Many Afghan insurgents had died in interrogations like this, via hastily improvised interrogation rooms in the field. Sloppy work, this, for an A Team. Standards are slipping.
The CIA officers started to pour the water over the layered towel covering Walker’s face.
And here we go . . .
Walker held his breath and stayed calm.
Two minutes.
Walker knew that water-boarding had proved a useful enhanced interrogation technique in the war on terror. He could not deny that the gag reflex and drowning sensation it created were extremely effective; through the helpless terror it instilled came results that saved lives. He also knew there was a risk of death from actually drowning or suffering a heart attack or damage to the lungs from inhalation of water; and that long-term effects could include panic attacks, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Walker didn’t have time for any of that. And he didn’t have time for this. The longer he stayed here, the colder the trail would become.
He too was on the clock. He’d come to this house for a purpose, and this wasn’t it.
Walker exhaled. Then inhaled—and immediately started to convulse.
The towel was lifted and he coughed out water then breathed in a few settling lungfuls of air.
Seventy-seven hours to deadline.
12
“And then a CIA team picked him up?” The man spoke English with a thick Italian accent, along with a slight whistle through a gap between his front teeth.
“Yes, a rendition team. You have to clean this for me, quickly,” Dan Bellamy replied. “I’ve just messaged you the address.”
“You should have had me handle this in the first place.”
The man’s codename was Il Bisturi. The Scalpel. He specialized in getting rid of problems. He usually did mafia work around Naples, but he was not exclusive, not when the money was right. Bellamy had used him twice in the past year. He was effective, and expensive.
Bellamy said, “It started as a simple courier intercept.”
“It does not sound simple,” Il Bisturi said. “And now I am asked to fix others’ mistakes. It would have been easier if you had contacted me at the start.”
Bellamy exhaled deeply, said, “You don’t usually concern yourself with such minor work.”
“So, what, you keep me on file as a clean-up guy?”
“Every tool has its function. I respect your skill set, and I am willing to pay a premium for the urgency required.”
“Okay. Fine.”
“When can you be there?”
“I am two hours away.”
“No. That’s too long. I need this sorted right now. This man cannot be allowed to talk. You must have another option for me.”
Bellamy waited impatiently for the few seconds Il Bisturi kept him hanging in silence. Finally, “I can have a team there in twenty minutes, nothing sooner—or there will be another mess to clean up. Okay?”
“All right. And I want Walker alive.”
•
Walker was tilted backward, his head close to the floor again. The wet towel folded over his face.
These guys are playing bad cop. Good cop will come. He’ll have questions. Maybe it’s the taser guy. Or the leader. Get through it. You have time. Relax—
This time Walker’s breathing cycle was interrupted, by hard fingers pressed hard against his solar plexus as the water was poured.
Finding out if I’m timing my breathing to the deluge . . . good boys.
“If you try that again, we will be forced to hurt you,” a voice said. “And you know we have all kinds of enhancements.”
Walker breathed. Choked.
The chair came up. The towel came off.
Walker sucked at the air-conditioned air. Coughed out water vapor. Blinked at the bright room. Settled his elevated heart ra
te.
The two chair holders at the sides moved to the door, as did the water boy.
The leader told them to leave.
Walker watched as the leader waited for the others to depart, and then he turned to Walker. They locked eyes. Silence.
Two men, one seated, one standing, neither saying a word.
After a full minute the leader turned to the mirror and made a cutting motion across his throat.
He’s killing the recording. Finally we’re getting somewhere . . .
The leader turned to Walker and removed his ski mask. A balding guy with a buzz-cut, fine features and friendly eyes.
Walker knew the man. “Hey, Pip.”
“Jesus-fuck, Walker!”
Walker had known Philip “Pip” Durant, CIA counter-intelligence officer, for near on ten years. He liked the guy, had got drunk with him more than once, may even have sung karaoke with him at a KTV club in Beijing.
“I mean—what the fuck—you’re alive?” Durant sat on the plastic chair in front of Walker. Behind him was the two-way mirror set into the wall. Behind it was all sorts of recording equipment, along with the landlord, the officer assigned to watch over the safe house and take in any guests. “You know we had a funeral for you?”
Walker kept pressure on the cable-ties at his wrists. He had seen a six-foot-nine Marine break through three of them once, but he had been on crystal meth. It would be easier to use something to pry open the toothed locking mechanism and pull it free, maybe using a rivet or seam in the steel chair . . .
Durant asked, “Where have you been, man?”
“Around,” Walker said.
“Around?”
Walker nodded. Silence fell between them. Durant’s mood seemed to settle with every passing second. It was clear that this was not the reunion and catch-up Durant had in mind since pulling Walker off a footpath in Rome an hour ago.
“Walker, what are you doing here?”
“Same as you.”
Durant smiled. “No, I don’t think so. See, I’m working here. You—I don’t know what you’re doing, but it ain’t work. At least, if it is, it ain’t for us. Which makes me wonder . . .”
“Why not start with the talk?” Walker said. “I like this. Why the watering?”