Any Means Necessary: A Luke Stone Thriller (Book 1)

by Jack Mars

  “You keep saying they, they, they,” the cop said. “Can you be a little more specific? Who are they?”

  Ali Nassar sighed. “The Central Intelligence Agency. That’s who hired me. A man I know from your CIA.”

  An almost silent gasp went through the room, and Luke felt a sharp jolt in his midsection. It felt like his body was impaled by a spike. He looked around at the men in the room with him. Everyone—cops, Homeland agents—everyone seemed puzzled. There was a low level buzz of muted conversation. The CIA hired Nassar to help attack the White House? The CIA?

  Luke’s entire world spun beneath him. It felt true; Luke could always tell if someone was lying, and Nassar wasn’t. Either the CIA hired him, or he genuinely believed that they did. Luke, reeling, wondered if it could be true. If so, he would have to look at everyone around him differently. Who would he be able to trust?

  “It was a year ago,” Nassar said. “He visited me at my hotel room in London. At first, he called it Operation Red Box. Then, a month later he came to me and told me he made an error, it wasn’t Operation Red Box. We must never speak of Operation Red Box again. We must never even say the words. But I remembered it. I’m sure that is the name, but I don’t know what it means. So if you want to learn about Operation Red Box, don’t ask me anything. Ask your CIA Director instead.”

  “Who’s got this guy?” Luke said. “Is someone taking custody?”

  One of the men from Homeland Security raised his hand. “When the NYPD is done with him, they’re going to release him to us.”

  Luke nodded. “Good. Hang on to him.”

  He started walking toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” one of the men said.

  Luke didn’t even turn around.

  “I’m going back to Washington. I need to talk to someone.”

  Chapter 34

  8:33 p.m.

  Washington, DC

  The man wouldn’t meet him until nightfall.

  Luke waited alone on a wooded path by the shore of the Potomac River. The sun had just set, but no light was visible. A thick, cold fog had rolled in off the water sometime earlier. It swirled around him. No one could see him. He could be anyone in here. He could be a dead man. He could have ceased to exist. He could be the last person left on Earth. It was a good feeling.

  He had raced back here to Washington, only to end up waiting. He was past exhausted, and with so much at stake, the waiting bothered him. The man always made him wait. Always had, always would.

  Luke had talked to Ed Newsam on the phone ten minutes before. Newsam was in the hospital. Jacob and Rachel had managed to crash land the chopper in the middle of an empty Little League baseball field. Newsam’s hip was cracked, and he had been strafed pretty good with bullets, but he was going to be fine. It would take more than an Uzi to kill a man like Newsam. Still, he was out of commission, and the thought of that worried Luke just a bit.

  There was a lot more to do.

  “Quite a day you’ve had,” a voice said.

  Luke looked up. A tall elderly man in a long leather coat stood nearby, walking a small gray and brown dog. The man’s hair was so white it almost seemed to glow in the just settled darkness. He didn’t face Luke directly, but came closer and sat at the far end of the bench. He lowered himself to the bench slowly and with some difficulty. Then he patted the little dog with thin hands. A biscuit appeared in one of those hands like a magic trick, and the man fed it to the dog. He smiled at his own sleight of hand.

  “Nice dog,” Luke said. “What breed would you call that?”

  “Mutt,” the man said. “I think he must be half rat. I got him from the shelter. He was twenty-four hours from the gas chamber. How could I go to a breeder when there are so many lost souls on death row? It’s unconscionable.”

  “What can I call you?” Luke said.

  “Paul is good,” the man said.

  That was funny. Paul, Wes, Steve, the man always went by some nondescript name. When Luke was young, the name had been Henry, or Hank. He was the man without a name, the man without a country. What could you say about someone who was a Cold War spy, who sold his own country’s secrets to the Soviets, then turned around and sold the Soviets’ secrets to the British and the Israelis? And that was the little Luke knew about. There was probably a lot more.

  One thing you might say is he was lucky to be alive. Another thing is that it was amazing he could choose to live in Washington, DC, now, right under the very noses of people who would be happy to kill him or put him away forever. But perhaps betrayal had an expiration date. After a certain amount of time had passed, maybe no one cared anymore. Maybe all the people who once cared were dead.

  Luke nodded. “Okay, Paul. Thanks for coming. I want to tell you that I met with a man this afternoon. Up in New York.”

  The old man laughed. “Oh my, yes. I heard all about it. I gather you dropped in on him somewhat uninvited. Dropped out of the sky, in fact.”

  Luke stared into the fog. It was as thick as soup.

  “He said some things I don’t understand.”

  “Being smart is not the same as being quick-witted,” the man said. “Some people, as clever as they may be, are still slow in the uptake.”

  “Or maybe I understand what he said, I just don’t believe it.”

  “What was it?”

  “Operation Red Box,” Luke said. “That’s what he told me.”

  The old man said nothing. He looked straight ahead. A moment ago, his hands had been stroking the dog. Now they had stopped.

  Luke went on. “He said to ask the CIA Director about it. Well, I don’t have access to the CIA Director. But I do have access to you.”

  The man’s mouth opened, then closed again.

  “Tell me,” Luke said.

  The man looked straight at Luke for the first time. His face was like wrinkled parchment. His eyes were deep set and pale blue. They were eyes that still knew secrets. They were eyes without pity.

  “I haven’t heard those words in a long while,” he said. “I wouldn’t recommend you say them again. Never know who’s listening, even in a place like this.”

  “All right.”

  “I imagine you asked him a question to elicit that phrase. What was the question?”

  “I asked him,” Luke said, “who he was working for.”

  A long sigh came from the old man. It sounded like the air going slowly out of a tire, all the way, until there was nothing left. Abruptly, the man stood up. He moved quickly, and without the apparent frailty of a few moments before.

  “It’s been interesting talking with you,” the man said. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

  The gun appeared in Luke’s hand as if by magic, a better trick than the dog biscuit. It was a different gun from the one he had held earlier that day. This one had an eight-inch silencer attached to the end of the barrel. It was longer than the gun itself. Luke casually pointed the gun at the man’s belly.

  “You know this silencer?” he said. “It’s called the Illusion. It’s new, and you’ve been out of the game for a while, so maybe you don’t. Suffice to say that it works really, really well. A night like this one, with all this fog? The gun will go off, and it’ll sound like somebody sneezed. Not a loud sneeze. A quiet sneeze, like someone might do at the ballet.” He smiled. “We get all the best toys at SRT.”

  A ghost of a smile passed over the man’s lips. “I always enjoy our meetings.”

  “Tell me,” Luke said again.

  The man shrugged. “You should go home to your lovely wife and handsome young son. This is a situation that doesn’t concern you. Even if it did, there wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it.”

  “What is Operation Red Box?”

  The old man seemed to wince at the name.

  Luke waited a few seconds, but the man didn’t seem ready to speak. “Give me one reason not to pull this trigger.”

  The man blinked. “Kill me,” he said slowly, “and you won’t have me as
the source you need on future cases.”

  Luke shook his head. “There are no future cases,” he said. “If this one isn’t solved, there is no future for any of us.”

  Luke scowled. “What is Operation Red Box?”

  The man shook his head. “You’re in way too deep. You’ve become a danger to yourself and others, and the worst part is you don’t even know it. I won’t say the words. But the operation you mention is one designed for expedited Presidential succession. It’s for when a President has to be removed from office, but there’s no time to wait for the next election cycle.”

  “They were threatening to impeach the President this morning,” Luke said. “It was on the radio.” The statement felt odd as soon as he said it. Impeaching the President and terrorists blowing up the White House… the two items didn’t fit together. Luke was beyond tired. It was hard to make sense of things.

  “Faster than impeachment,” Paul said. “And more certain. Think abrupt change. Think 1963. It’s an operation reserved for when the President’s loyalty is no longer unquestioned. It’s also for when events are too large, or too sensitive, for the man in office. It’s for times that demand action.”

  “Who decides this?” Luke said.

  Paul shrugged. He smiled again. “The people in charge decide.”

  Luke stared at him.

  “Tell me you don’t know who’s really in charge,” Paul said, “and I will start to wonder about your mother’s relationship to the milkman.”

  The old man stared at him. There was a wild sort of light in the man’s eyes. To Luke, he looked like a carnival barker, or a conman with the traveling medicine show. The man smiled. There was no humor in it.

  “You saw the White House blow up today, did you not?”

  Luke nodded. “I was there.”

  “Of course you were. Where else would you be at a time like that? Did it look like a drone strike to you? Or did it look like something else? Think back. Perhaps it looked more like a series of detonations, bombs that were planted inside the building, maybe days or weeks ago?”

  In his mind’s eye, Luke saw the explosions again, an entire line of them, moving from the West Wing, along the Colonnade, to the Residence. A huge explosion tore the Residence to pieces, throwing a massive chunk of it high into the air. He felt the shockwave again, the one that had threatened to knock their helicopter out of the sky.

  But how could someone put bombs inside the White House?

  Everyone who worked there had high-level security clearance, from the maids and the maintenance men, to the dishwashers and onion peelers, to the press secretary and the President’s chief-of-staff. Everyone was vetted. If bombs had been planted, then that meant…

  An inside job. All the way inside, inside the security apparatus, inside the intelligence community, far enough inside to take a group of explosives experts, erase their pasts, give them new identities, and get them jobs at the White House. Jobs without close supervision, jobs that gave them wide latitude to roam the hallways, especially at night when no one else was around.

  In Luke’s mind, a whole series of assumptions began to give way. All day, he had been focused on a ragtag group of terrorists. They were minimally trained, but they were violent and they were clever. They were hiding, they were running, they were employing asymmetrical tactics, using their smallness as a weapon against a vastly superior enemy. Maybe those men even believed that’s what they were doing. They may have stolen the nuclear material. They may have flown the drone, and even blown up a part of the White House. Yet, still, they were but a small cog in a machine. They were being used by something much larger, something much more sophisticated.

  What Ali Nassar said was true. It was the American government all along.

  A strange feeling of heat began to radiate along Luke’s spine. It went to the top of his head and down along his shoulders and arms. He looked at his hands, half expecting them to burst into flames. A wave of nausea passed through him. For a second, he thought he might vomit. He didn’t want to do that, not here, not in front of Paul.

  “How can I stop it?” Luke said.

  Paul shook his head. “My friend, you don’t stop Operation Red Box. You get the hell out of the way. This isn’t your fight, Luke. If you try to make it yours, you will fail. You will fail in a way that will probably feel spectacular while it’s happening, but in the end will be much closer to pathetic.”

  “Then give me enough to do that.”

  Paul grunted, and then laughed. “You’re a fool. You have no knack for self-preservation. You’re like one of these Japanese kamikaze pilots from World War II, flying an airplane full of bombs into the side of an aircraft carrier. Except in this case, the plane you’re flying is a bathtub toy.”

  The old man paused, thinking for a moment, seeing Luke would not back down.

  “Okay. You’re looking for a way to die? Get in touch with a man named David Delliger. He’s the Secretary of Defense, in case you don’t know. He was roommates with the President at Yale. There’s no way he’ll be in on the plot, but he will be very, very close to it, probably without knowing. The pieces will only become clear to him after the fact, but he’ll see them. Maybe he has no knack for self-preservation either. If so, the two of you will make quite a pair.”

  “What about the President?” Luke said.

  Paul shrugged. “What about him?”

  “He’s safe now, isn’t he?” Luke pressed. “He’s ten stories underground.”

  Paul smiled. “I need to be going. It’s getting late for an old man to be out and about. These parks can be dangerous at night.”

  “The President is safe,” Luke insisted, grabbing his arm, frantic, needing to hear him say it.

  Paul slowly shook his head and removed Luke’s hand.

  “You don’t understand,” Paul replied, his voice hoarse, before turning around, drifting back into the silver and gray fog. “If this is truly Operation Red Box, then the President is already dead.”

  Chapter 35

  8:53 p.m.

  Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center - Bluemont, Virginia

  An earnest young man poked his head into the room.

  “Mr. President? We are going live in seven minutes. We’d like to have you on the set two minutes early.”

  Thomas Hayes sat in a leather barbershop chair in what amounted to his dressing room. The room was shaped like an oval. The walls were bare, except for the mirror in front of him and a long dressing table. In the mirror, he could see his Chief of Staff, David Halstram, trying to relax on the couch.

  David seemed to have two speeds—Go, and Go Faster. He couldn’t relax in the calmest of circumstances. Today had been anything but calm. He was fidgeting a lot. One of his shoes was tapping out a machine gun rhythm on the cement floor.

  The President held the final draft of his speech in his hand. Old-fashioned paper for President Hayes—he had never fully adapted to the digital revolution. David had the same speech on an iPad.

  Two young women were putting the final touches on Hayes. One was smoothing his makeup in such a way that it would look like he wasn’t wearing makeup. The other was fluffing his hair so that it was neat and presentable, almost but not perfect. He had nearly been killed today. He should seem at least a little bit windblown.

  “What does that mean?” he said to the young man who had spoken. “Is it a math problem?”

  “It means five more minutes, sir.”

  “Okay. We’ll be there.”

  When the man left, President Hayes looked at David again through the mirror. “What do you think of this phrase he uses toward the end, greatness awaits us? He’s got it in there three times. It sounds like the advertising tag line for a no-fee checking account. I mean, what am I supposed to do with that?”

  Hayes was nervous, as he should be. In a moment, he was going to go on air and talk to the American people about the crisis they were facing. He could only assume that nearly every single adult in the country, and
hundreds of millions more abroad, would see him or hear his voice. Every TV network was pre-empting their broadcasting. Nearly every radio network was. YouTube was streaming it live.

  It was the biggest single speech he was ever likely to give, and it had been whipped together this afternoon and evening by a lead speech writer that Hayes probably would have let go weeks before, if only he didn’t have so many other things on his mind.

  “Thomas,” David said, “you are the best public speaker I’ve heard in my lifetime. No, I wasn’t around for John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but that doesn’t matter. No one alive right now even comes close to you. Someone tried to murder you today. They destroyed the White House, and killed nearly two dozen people. The American people want to hear from you. I say speak to them. Speak from your heart. Move them, and lead them. Use this speech as a guide if you want, or throw the whole thing out and wing it. I’ve seen you speak off the cuff and bring entire rooms to tears.”

  Hayes nodded. He liked the idea of winging it. He liked the idea of taking leadership. And when he thought about leading, he realized what was missing now. That sense of dread, of trepidation, of being pulled apart like a piece of saltwater taffy. It was gone. The attack today had focused his mind. He felt confident. He felt that he could be a leader again. He no longer cared what the House of Representatives thought, or what people like Bill Ryan did.

  Thomas Hayes had been elected to lead by the people of the United States of America. Lead was what he intended to do.

  “Do you suppose Susan will show up for this?”

  David nodded. “I know she will. I talked to her late this afternoon. She doesn’t like you very much right now, but that’s neither here nor there. We’ll get that patched up later. In the meantime, she’s going to do her job. When your speech ends, and you are greeting and chatting with the most powerful people in America, and everyone gathers together for a show of unity in front of the cameras, she will be right out in front and very, very visible.”