by James Phelan
“The op he was running when he was listed KIA?”
“Yep. And there’s more. I ran that by a guy I know in the Joint Chief’s office, and he’s just got back to me. It’s not just Walker.”
“What’s not just Walker?”
“There’s been a few unusual deaths relating to that cell-phone number Walker was chasing—some of the guys who inspected bin Laden’s body after the DEVGRU team brought him back to base, and a couple of analysts who were working on it at CIA.”
“Who’s investigating this?” asked McCorkell, moving toward the front of the taxi queue.
“Everybody did, at first, because it involved Navy deaths. DIA, NCIS, FBI; you name it. Open cases, all of them because they got nowhere. The thing is, none of those investigations linked the deaths to the cell number—and they’re all unrelated but for that fact.”
“Who do you think is doing it?”
“My first bet would be revenge hits, for bin Laden,” Hutchinson said. “That list is a mile long.”
“Maybe . . . but I don’t think so. That’s a smaller list than you’d think.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” replied Hutchinson. “What we do know is that Al Qaeda wants revenge. Seems like they’re now taking it.”
“Seems that way, yet this is the first I’ve heard of AQ reprisal killings attached to OBL,” McCorkell said. “But it doesn’t match their MO—I mean, they’d be gloating all over the net with their successes, right?”
“Maybe things have changed a bit since they lost their figurehead,” Hutchinson countered. “Maybe their new playbook is to do their thing but not announce it until the whole objective is in hand.”
“That’s a damn big maybe.”
“Yeah, well, look at what we’ve got: Walker was the first casualty, about a year ago. Since then the two Navy corpsmen on board the Carl Vinson who inspected bin Laden’s body and found the phone numbers stitched into his clothing have died, one on an op in ’Stan, the other while on leave. As have a couple of CIA analysts who went through the intel at the compound. And when I say they died, I mean graveyard dead, no mistaking it like with Walker.”
“They found a lot of intel in that compound,” McCorkell said. “I’m surprised we haven’t seen AQ engage some of the plans we found in the house. They weren’t planning on stopping after nine-eleven; they had plenty more big moves up their sleeve.”
“Maybe Walker knows about this.” Hutchinson was silent for a few seconds. “Maybe he’s the one doing this.”
“I’ve seen nothing to point to that. And it creates a big why.”
“Nothing pointing to it other than being listed KIA and living in the shadows for a year?” said Hutchinson.
“Your other idea is more likely: that we’re looking at AQ revenge on those who came into contact with the intel retrieved from the bin Laden compound, perhaps specifically those cell-phone numbers. They may all be related, as you say, but maybe Walker’s not related to that. Keep your eye on our prize.”
“It’s all related.”
“Maybe. I’m still not convinced.”
“Work with me here for a minute,” said Hutchinson. “Assume I’m right. How did the killer or killers track them down? The corpsmen, the analysts?”
“Pentagon for Navy, and Agency for their people,” replied McCorkell. “Human Resources records or some such. Citations records maybe.”
“Whatever, it’s an inside source, right? It’s got to be—that cell number is the only thing connecting the deaths.”
“Could they have hacked the info?”
“Via the Pentagon?” said Hutchinson. “Doubt it. Far easier to turn someone. Maybe it was innocuous.”
“It’s traitorous,” replied McCorkell.
“Maybe not, if sold the right way. Think about it. Some HR lackey with access to addresses of Navy personnel, next of kin and all that . . .”
“The corpsmen attached to the DEVGRU personnel are protected files,” argued McCorkell.
“Then that’s just made our job to find the leak a hell of a lot easier.”
They both paused.
“There was no other way,” McCorkell said. “Someone on the inside gave up details of our men.”
“I know,” replied Hutchinson. “Jesus.”
“This isn’t a reprisal,” said McCorkell. “It’s a clean-up op.”
“Then maybe we should be asking ourselves: what else did they find in that compound that needs to be silenced? I mean, is this just about that cell number?” Hutchinson paused, then added, “I’m arriving at Langley now. I’ll call you straight after with an update.”
“Okay. Don’t let them dick you around. They know about Walker, even if they don’t want to know about him.”
“Someone dick me around? Pfft.”
McCorkell ended the call as he climbed into the back seat of the taxi and said to the driver, “US embassy.”
•
Walker was in the back of an Alfa Romeo Giulia sedan, his wrists handcuffed in front of him with old-school steel police cuffs. The driver was American, though Walker wasn’t sure about the provenance of the two guys in the Chevrolet Tahoe chase car behind. Maybe they were local cops, under secondment, Feds of some sort, similar to those he had met near the internet cafe—but quicker, more agile.
The woman seated next to him had introduced herself as Special Agent Fiona Somerville, FBI. She had Walker’s backpack on her lap and had gone through its contents, none of it a worry but for the US passport made out to a fake name.
Walker guessed they were headed for the one place he didn’t want to go: the US embassy.
31
“The last place we have you is Yemen, a year ago,” Somerville said.
Walker did not respond.
“It’s easier to talk to me,” Somerville said, “than those you’ll meet at the embassy.”
Walker watched the world outside, Rome’s morning traffic in full nightmarish flight.
“I need to know where you’ve been since Yemen,” Somerville pushed. “What you’ve been doing. Why you’re here in Rome. How it is that we have your DNA found yesterday at a homicide scene. What happened at the safe house. All of it.”
Walker remained silent.
Somerville continued, “I’m the closest thing you have to a friend left in this world.”
Walker smiled.
“Your old pal Pip Durant spent the night in hospital having a plate put into his face,” Somerville said. “He’ll be black and blue for a month and will be forever setting off metal detectors. Why’d you do that?”
Walker was pleased to hear that Durant got out of the safe house alive, and better yet that he was in serious discomfort. He looked forward to meeting him again someday. He wouldn’t be as gentle next time.
“Who busted you from the safe house yesterday?” Somerville asked.
Walker also wanted to know the identities of the guys who crashed the party but he remained silent.
“Walker, I’m trying to do this differently, don’t you see?” Somerville said.
As long as he was silent, he had time. But he also needed to convince her to take him some place other than the embassy.
“I saw the footage from the safe house,” Somerville said. “What the Agency guys did to you in the debrief room. I saw that you were stoic, that you said nothing. Look, I don’t do that CIA shit. But your time in my custody may be limited. Understand?”
Walker watched the cars careen in and out of non-existent lanes, somehow managing to avoid impact.
“If you give me something to work with, maybe I can help you,” she said. “Tell me who you’re working for, working with. Where you’ve been all this time. Why you came in from the cold. Tell me what you’re doing.”
Walker waited for her to talk herself out. To reveal something, anything that he didn’t yet know. Being picked up was a complication he didn’t have time for, and going to the embassy was not something he could allow to happen. 4239–185: that’s where he had to be
. Gotta get out of here . . . When the time was right, he’d make a move. He imagined incapacitating the driver and taking Somerville by surprise, using her as a shield against the guys in the chase car.
“Talk to me, Walker. Why don’t you start with Yemen.”
In this traffic they were twenty minutes’ drive from the embassy.
“Why you?” Walker asked her.
“Why me what?”
“Why are you here, taking me in?” he said. “Because you’re in counter-intel?”
“Maybe. Why, would a counter-intelligence specialist be interested in you?”
“I need to know.”
“Why?”
“I need to know what you know.”
“Funny, I was thinking the same thing.”
“You want me to talk, tell me: what’s your interest in me?”
Somerville paused for a beat, said, “My interest was not in you, but then we had a partial hit on you in Greece. Do you remember being in Greece?”
“Yes.”
“Right. At the time we thought the partial was bullshit—it was a seventy percent probable match; you were obscured, in profile, in a grainy CCTV pic. Hell, you were dead then. We thought it was a ghost. A false match. Couldn’t be you, right? Because you’re dead.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“What were you doing in Greece?”
“Looking for a friend.”
“Who?”
“No one special.”
“Felix?”
Walker did not respond.
“What was your interest in Felix Lassiter?” she persisted.
“What’s yours?” he countered.
“Did you kill him in his apartment yesterday?”
“No.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No. Now give me something.”
“Okay,” Somerville said. “I wasn’t tracking him. My surveillance focused on some people he was seen near on a couple occasions. People he was working for.”
“Felix worked for the CIA. He was a courier.”
“That was one employer.”
Walker smiled.
“Tell me what you know about him,” Somerville said.
“You’re taking me to the embassy,” Walker said, looking out the window.
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Not if you want me to remain alive.”
32
At the US embassy Bill McCorkell was shown to the corner office of the CIA Station Chief, Beverly Johnson.
“Hey, Bev,” McCorkell said, standing in the doorway.
“Bill, come on in,” she said.
“You look as I expected.”
“That good, huh?”
McCorkell nodded.
“Jed Walker. Jesus. This has been such a cluster fuck. Walker’s about fifteen minutes out, got a Fed bringing him in. Take a seat.”
McCorkell sat opposite. “I need to talk to Walker when he comes in.”
“Well, Bill, I would say that you’d have to talk to Special Agent Somerville, as she was lead agent on this because of some dinky piece of FBI paper she’s got.”
“Was lead agent?”
“She’s bringing him in, but she’s out of the loop once she gets here.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’ve got the stronger hand,” Johnson said, flipping her laptop screen around so that he could see. There was a letter, on the letterhead of the Director of National Intelligence, assigning Bev Johnson as the lead on the Walker case. “Since he was one of us, and he’s had a hand in the death of three of our SAD front-line operators at the house, the DNI has been good enough to ensure things stay in-house.”
“There’s a little conflict there, don’t you think, Bev?”
“Conflict?”
“Looking into one of your own. Especially if he has had a hand in the deaths of your three operatives at the safe house.”
“He had a hand in it, all right—Pip Durant confirmed it after he woke up from surgery.”
“So . . .” McCorkell said. “Do I get any face time with Walker?”
“What for? No, you know what, I don’t want to know, not yet. Just hang around, let me see what we’re going to do with him, then I’ll talk to you.”
“Hang around?”
“Yeah,” Johnson said, smiling. “You’re in Rome, Bill. Go look at the goddamned Colosseum or something.”
•
Somerville and Walker were locked in a gaze. She was a few years older than he, and wore a dark suit that was clearly European rather than American in make and design. She was short, five-two or five-three, but he knew that she was capable, from the way she had taken him at the station: pressed her knee hard into his back and her snub-nosed .40 cal side-arm into the base of his skull. Quantico built some very fine agents. This was one of them.
Agent Somerville was not to be underestimated during his escape plans.
“I can protect you,” she said, “but only if you tell me everything. Give them all up. This is the only chance you’ll get. If this goes beyond me . . . well, after that safe-house shit, you’ll be handed over to someone far less accommodating. They’ll consider you a traitor, maybe even an enemy combatant, and you know what they’ll do to you. Guantanamo, at best. They’ll get you to talk. A federal or military tribunal will determine you’re a traitor and murderer of US intel personnel. Then, a lethal injection. So, talk to me. Take the chance.”
Walker shook his head.
“I can help you.”
“I’d like to believe that,” he said. “But you have no idea what these guys are capable of.”
33
A hundred meters behind Walker’s car, Il Bisturi answered a call on his cell phone.
“This photo you sent me . . . the woman with him in the car is a problem,” Bellamy said. “Walker too. This has changed things. I need you to deal with this. Quickly.”
“Define ‘deal with.’”
“Kill them both. Before they get to the safety of the embassy.”
“Understood.”
Il Bisturi ended the call and accelerated the Ducati, the third gear taking a second to spool up revs from the 1500cc engine but then it bit, hard, and spat him down the road, splitting the lanes between the cars as he eased off a little and reached into the pack strapped onto the gas tank in front of him.
•
Walker weighed his options. He could talk to Somerville, tell her just enough to persuade her to take him somewhere other than the embassy. But what would he give up? He had so little that would make sense to anyone, let alone convince them to put their neck on the block and career on the line. An FBI investigator would want something more solid than a stack of hunches and suspicions.
Something concrete.
To Walker, the culmination of a year in the shadows, working on his own—taking a few odd jobs for associates, old and new, to fund his investigations with untraceable cash—summed up to little more than a bunch of people getting killed. He couldn’t just announce that he had inadvertently unraveled an operation that would bring down the CIA . . . not if he wanted to be believed.
“Felix Lassiter’s man in Athens; I can give you that,” Walker said. “The last guy to use his Agency courier service, just a couple of days back.”
Somerville shook her head. “That’s nothing new to me.”
“He’s an off-books Agency asset.”
“I know.”
“So far off the books, he’s got two sets.”
“And? That all?”
“It’s a good lead. Solid. The guy’s a money man that the Agency uses as a source while also being one of the largest financiers of a whole bunch of trouble makers. You could look into him and put away several cells of arms traders and war mongers in the mid-east and Africa.”
“Walker, you don’t understand,” Somerville said. “He’s old history. And we have him. What was left of him. Did you kill him as well?”
Walker didn�
��t display surprise. He’s dead too? If there was a pattern emerging from the past few days, it was one of a clean-up. The people involved were being silenced, permanently.
Which told him: the deadline was more than real.
This news confirmed his strongest piece of intel so far: a date and time. But he didn’t have a location. For that, he needed to keep moving.
“I need to know your involvement in this,” Somerville said. “Everything you know, everything you’ve done from Yemen onward. Give up who you’re working for and with, and maybe we can make a deal.”
“First up, there’s no grand conspiracy on my part,” Walker said, looking out the side window. “I’m working solo.”
Somerville nodded, but Walker could see that she wasn’t buying.
“I was the start of something that’s now coming to a head. Something that’s happening very soon.”
“How do you know?”
“The body count is tallying up fast, and in public view. That’s worrying, I would think, to someone in your profession.”
“I investigate crimes. Do you want to confess any?”
“Yeah, well, I’m investigating a crime too.”
“So, what, you’re some kind of cop now?”
Walker remained silent.
Somerville said, “What crime are you investigating?”
“Murder.”
“Who was murdered?”
“Me. Bob Hanley. A DGSE agent named Louis Assif.”
“Your op in Yemen.”
Walker nodded. He could see that it got to Somerville a little.
“You need to tell me what happened there,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Because you’re a part of some Agency conspiracy to undermine our government’s interests in the war against terrorism?”
“What? No.” Walker paused for the slightest moment, filing that away. Maybe she knows . . .
“The time to confess is now, make no mistake,” Somerville said, starting to grow impatient. “It’ll only get harder when we get to the embassy, because there’s all manner of agencies and departments who will be lining up to have a crack at you.”