Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  11

  As Muertos organized a rental car, Walker checked the email on his new phone.

  Two messages, both from Somerville.

  The first email from Somerville contained Muertos’s bio notes. He scrolled through the bullet points, forming a clearer picture of his new apparent partner. Born in Mexico. Immigrated when she was five years old. Grew up in California, then college in Florida. Poli-science and then graduate school in three languages: Spanish, Arabic, Farsi. Fourteen years in the State Department: South America desk for the first half, then seconded to the Iran desk in DC. Did most of her work stateside but for a couple of postings to the Embassy in Tehran. Her last performance review listed her as “above competent.” Her security clearance was lower than Walker had assumed. That was it.

  The second email from Somerville was also about Muertos, and was not a bio.

  Walker, Muertos was on an op that went wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be in Syria at all—she left her posting in Iran to take up a role as a back-room agent, working phones and coordinating, on a multi-agency anti-trafficking op. There’s little detail, but she ended up in a local Médecins Sans Frontières tent hospital in Damascus, in a delirious state. She was sedated and remained unconscious for around twenty-four hours. She was ID’d and shipped to Ramstein for observation. Medical reports there had her as showing signs of amnesia. Muertos skipped out of the military hospital during her second day there and had not been seen since. That was forty-eight hours ago. And she’s here? How’d she get back into the country? What was she doing in Syria? State and the FBI want to talk to her. I got chewed out for accessing her file—it was tagged back to Homeland. Could not access info on those two Homeland agents—but they are Homeland. Be careful.

  •

  Harvey called Krycek on their mission-specific burner phones.

  “They’re in Annapolis,” Harvey said.

  Krycek was in a chartered Homeland aircraft headed out. “I’m an hour out from landing.”

  “They just rented a car,” Harvey replied. “She used her State-issued cover ID and credit card. I’ve just seen footage from the rental agency. Walker’s with her.”

  “Sloppy,” Krycek said. “You said he was good.”

  “Which makes me think Walker wants us to be on his six,” Harvey said.

  “Why?”

  “Because they’ve got no leads of their own, so they’re waiting to see who comes for them.”

  “They won’t see me coming.”

  “Good. I’ve got their vehicle in the Homeland system for you to track it. Call me when you’ve completed your mission.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “And Krycek? You make sure this goes away. For good this time.”

  •

  “All good?” Muertos asked, dangling the car keys in front of Walker. She had her small handbag, and in her other hand was a plug-in sat-nav system from the rental company.

  “Yeah, sure,” Walker said, pocketing his phone. “You’ve got the address for Hassan?”

  “Putting it in now,” Muertos replied, entering the address and setting the sat-nav system on the center console.

  Walker watched her. Question her? Challenge her—reveal what he’d learned from the emails? Or better, see where it goes first. Watch. Listen. Probe. Was she telling the truth about anything? About David Walker? About Bloom being killed? Yes. She was genuine about Syria. There was real trauma there, under the surface, and her story of being in the hospital checked out. She wasn’t discharged, as Walker had been, but she told him she’d sneaked out. Walker had skipped out of many hospitals over his career, usually far-away military installations when he had a desire to stretch his legs and head for the closest Base Exchange to buy a quart of whisky to self-medicate whatever pain or trauma he’d most recently endured. He kind of respected her for that. And there was an urgency about her—in that action, and in her manner of recruiting him and pressing forward. So, observe, see where it goes.

  Walker asked, “Did you reach out to your contact about the nano-track of the money?”

  “I messaged her to arrange a meet,” Muertos said, pressing the fob of the key as they moved along a line of Ford Explorers until they saw a silver one with the indicators flashing in response. “It was an inter-agency op, so the money was being handled by the Secret Service.”

  “Secret Service?”

  “They’re the ones who run the technology, to combat money-laundering and financial crime,” Muertos replied. “My contact was there for years, recently moved over to the DoJ. She’ll make time for us, and we’ll talk to her in person later today.”

  “Secret Service is part of Homeland,” Walker said, looking over the top of the Explorer, but he couldn’t even see the top of Muertos’s head.

  “So?”

  “So,” Walker said, getting into the passenger seat, “I don’t really want to be hanging out with Homeland people right now.”

  “I trust her, Walker,” Muertos said, sitting next to him.

  They shared a look, then Walker said, “Okay.”

  “You need to make calls as I drive?” Muertos asked as she hit the ignition button. The big V6 thrummed to life and the dash flashed up all kinds of lights in the gloom of the overcast afternoon. Muertos entered their destination in the sat-nav.

  “Nope,” Walker said. “Let’s get this thing moving. See what’s what at Hassan’s house. Then your Secret Service friend.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re expecting to find out much,” Muertos said as she drove through the rental lot and motored out onto the highway on-ramp. She drove fast. Confident. Eyes always checking the rearview mirror for tails.

  “It’s how I always sound,” Walker said, looking out the windscreen as Muertos navigated from lane to lane to try to find a quicker path through the early afternoon traffic. “I’ll sound satisfied when we get the answers we’re after.”

  12

  “Tell me about this agent that State was using,” Walker said. “Hassan.”

  Muertos took a while to answer. She was driving with the traffic toward Annapolis. Being a Sunday, people were heading back into town after a weekend away, or picking up their kids from sport, or maybe it was just regular Sunday drivers.

  Finally she said, “There’s not much to tell.”

  Walker let her have some silence, to see what information she might bring up. He watched out his side window. He had never spent much time in the area as an adult, and his memories of the place were specific to Georgetown and his father’s apartment there, which he’d spent many school holidays visiting. As his mother’s dementia set in, and she moved to Philadelphia to be with extended family and then went into palliative care, his father spent more and more time working and traveling. It coincided with Walker going to the Air Force Academy, and then being posted in the Mid East. Walker still couldn’t reconcile his father’s decision, and the more distance from those days, the more he wondered if he wasn’t so different from his father himself: distancing himself from the grief of his mother losing herself, and then repeating a similar pattern in his own marriage where work trumped all priorities.

  “Like I said before,” Muertos said, “no one on the team suspected him.”

  Walker asked, “Who brought him into your team?”

  “He was already in country. He was a shared asset, and we were down the food chain.”

  “CIA.”

  “Yep. I heard he got tapped when he was leaving the Navy—they were desperate to find and retain people with his ethnic background.”

  “Did you ever meet his superiors?”

  “Yes. The Station Chief in Syria, when addressing our team, personally vouched for him. They’d previously had him on the periphery of Syrian guys cycling through some of the training camps in Iran. Insurgents and the like. Then when Syria became a thing he was working for the Agency there. Then our joint taskforce was put together, and he became a shared asset.”

  “A periphery player sounds like a small fi
sh for the Station Chief to be spending time on,” Walker said. “That role’s usually just pressing flesh at Embassy events and reaching out to business titans and politicians with big golden handshakes, not low-level Intelligence officers being loaned out to State.”

  “The directive for Hassan to help us out came from up high,” Muertos said. “All available hands on deck to get spooks in country to recruit and run agents in Syria. I heard it was the Secretary of State who asked for Agency help.”

  “Do you know when he started in Syria?”

  “I heard it was around three years before we went in,” Muertos replied. “So, he’d been in country a long time, and his reputation was solid.”

  “And how’d Hassan get attached to your inter-agency op?”

  “Apparently he’d proved his worth. Several times. And we knew he wanted out. He’s got a young family, and too many of our people were being caught up in the shit storm of the Arab Spring.”

  “He asked to do higher-risk assignments to get out of field work earlier?”

  “Yep. His wife and two kids might be at the house we’re going to now. The inter-agency op I was attached to was to be his last task in Syria, then he was due to drive a desk at Langley.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Interesting?”

  “Wife. Two kids. Working for three-plus years without fail. A final op and then he’s due to get out—set up back here with a house and a stateside job and a cushy life, I’m sure. Why would he double-cross at that stage? Why would he throw it all away, when he was just about to be given his leave?”

  “So, you think he was made, before he was attached to us,” Muertos said. “Taken by the Syrians and bled for Intel? Made a deal to hand us over in exchange for his own life? Maybe even the lives of his family back here?”

  “It’s leaning that way. Doesn’t make sense for him to chuck it all away so close to the finish line. I wonder how the Agency have responded to what went down.”

  “Can you ask someone there?”

  “Not really. We have a kind of love-hate relationship, the Agency and me. Marty Bloom was my best contact.”

  “He was still CIA?”

  “He’s a lifer. Was.”

  “Well, I’m the only surviving witness to what happened there,” Muertos said. “So, the Agency won’t know that Hassan wasn’t there, right? Because no one’s debriefed me, and I bugged out when the Homeland agent was quizzing me in Germany.”

  And you weren’t meant to be there at all, Walker thought. You were on stress leave.

  “But you know for sure that Hassan’s back?” he asked.

  “My contact at the DoJ had his passport flagged: he came back the day after my op went south.”

  Walker was silent.

  “You think we’re wasting our time with him?” Muertos said, glancing across to Walker. “And if there’s a threat against his family, he might have good reason to keep silent, right?”

  “Maybe. But it’s still our best place to start. Then your nano-track of the cash handler.”

  Muertos sighed. “I have to say, Walker, that I really doubt that the head of the trafficking ring from Syria is here in the United States. I mean, to come to the lion’s den? It’s too risky. Crazy, even. Why not Portugal or Belgium or Greece—somewhere he can hide and that has little to no surveillance and lax security apparatus?”

  “In my experience,” Walker said, looking out his side window as a metro police cruiser blasted its way down the emergency lane, lights and siren blaring, “guys like that, when they feel the heat, they go to the end of the line—and that’s here. His money was here, so you say. His biggest market was here. His contacts are here. This is where he was going to bug out to, eventually, and set up a new life of his own, living large on the money he’d fleeced from so many of his own people. What happened at that meeting has meant that his plan was brought forward, is all. And if he’s been as successful at what he does for as long as you say, he’s got more than enough money stashed away to buy a house in Malibu and start producing movies.”

  “You think he’d really do that?”

  “I’m just painting a picture,” Walker said. “We’ll find out soon enough. What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing but a name. Tareq Almasi.”

  “Tareq Almasi—we’ll ask Hassan. If he’s been in country working as long as you say, he’s bound to know more.”

  “I like your confidence.”

  “I’m not here to idly watch. I want answers, about Bloom, and my father.”

  Muertos stared ahead as she drove. “We all want answers.”

  13

  The house of the Hassan family was a facsimile of the houses either side of it and across the road. Timber double-story townhouses with tiny porches atop a small flight of timber stairs. Dark slate-gray roofs and battleship-gray walls painted with a white trim. The whole neighborhood was the same. The streets were named after poets. Walker imagined that if you lived there and were headed home from a big night and you got your poet wrong, you’d end up trying your key in every front door until you found your home. On closer inspection, there were minor details differentiating each house. Decorations and paintwork and junk and trinkets on porches. Things the owners did to remember which house was theirs. Flags were popular. American, mostly. A few First Navy Jacks, depicting a rattlesnake in the middle of thirteen stripes, and the motto “Don’t tread on me.” Retirees, Walker figured. Lived near Annapolis while they served and stayed there long after they’d left the services, near what they knew, with the people they trusted.

  Muertos parked the rental at the end of the block beside a fireplug, the car spaces all full, the illegal park the only option. They walked the footpath. It was wet underfoot from an afternoon drizzle that would not let up. There was a chill Atlantic wind blowing up Chesapeake Bay. Walker popped the collar of his jacket around his neck. A quiet Sunday fading away to night, all the kids and grandkids indoors killing time while waiting for dinner. As they passed the houses Walker heard some kids laughing, a couple of loud arguments, someone yelling for more beer from a backyard, a dish breaking, a football replay blaring. The wind and low-pressure system kept the smell of wood-fires at street level, making the air heavy. The whole time they headed toward their target house, Walker was checking the street. Observing. Looking for guys sitting in cars who might be watching Hassan’s house. The thing was, static surveillance was so tech-driven these days, and manpower so expensive, that if the CIA were watching the house of one of their Intelligence officers recently returned from a long posting overseas, they’d do it remotely. There’d be cameras and mikes hidden everywhere—in the house, and pointed at the house. That’s the CIA.

  It was Homeland Security that he was worried about.

  “You know what you want to ask him?” Walker asked as they neared the house number.

  “Where he was that day would be a good start.” Muertos glanced across and up at Walker. “I want to ask if he sold us out, and got all my colleagues killed.”

  “You want me to take the lead?”

  “Sure. Though I can’t guarantee you I’m not going to punch him in the face if it seems he’s responsible for my colleagues’ deaths.”

  “You know,” Walker said, heading through the hedgerow of evergreen box that formed the fences to the houses, clipped to waist height and each grown square to form a gap where a gate might be at the bottom of the stairs, “in my previous life, as an Intel officer, some people would say that I was a lot better at destroying things than talking to agents and their families.”

  “And what would you say to that?”

  Walker winced as he ascended the stairs, the wound in his thigh giving a niggling pain that heralded what would likely become a reminder through life: one of those dull aches that came with the cold weather and hung around through to spring.

  “I’d say they were about right,” Walker said. He rang the doorbell. The door was solid timber, no window panes set in it, no windows eith
er side, no peep hole. The kind of door in the kind of neighborhood that said to all and sundry that things don’t happen around here that aren’t meant to: the residents were predominantly Navy, or ex-Navy, or civilians connected to the Annapolis Naval Academy, and they stuck together; it would be a fool of a burglar or home invader who tried anything against the Navy family. Walker heard a child’s fast footfall on the timber floor beyond. Growing louder. “Don’t mention my name in there.”

  “Why?”

  “House could be bugged, and you can bet that as soon as we’re gone he’s going to call his section chief at the CIA and give them every detail.”

  “Okay. So, if he asks, you are?”

  “Matthew Dellavedova.”

  “And he is?”

  “He was a point guard for the Cavaliers. Scrappy and determined fellow.”

  “The Cavs? Ew.”

  “A hater? Don’t tell me—you’re Dub Nation?”

  “Yep. How’d you guess?”

  “I heard the smugness in your voice,” Walker said, as he heard heavier feet coming down the hall, then a bolt sliding on the other side of the door. And I read your bio notes, Rachel Muertos, recently of San Francisco.

  The door opened.

  A man stood there. He was small and wiry, with wide-open eyes that took in everything.

  Hassan. And it was clear from the first look that he wasn’t going to play ball.

  14

  Hassan looked at Walker, and in that look Walker knew that a fight was coming within the next couple of seconds. Here Walker was, taking up the man’s whole doorway. From Hassan’s point of view—a guy fresh from working as an undercover operative in the Middle East—the men who came knocking on your door and looked tough like Walker were either military or worse, and they never made pleasant house calls unannounced. From Walker’s point of view, Hassan didn’t look like a guy who’d been through the ringer by the Syrian regime. Quite the contrary. He looked healthy and alert and wary. Then his eyes shifted, to the right, to where Muertos stood, and his eyes went even wider—there was recognition there, and it was clear in that look that he wasn’t going to welcome them inside.