Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  “And now you think it could be because he made Almasi’s contact here. Which could well lead back to, or be, Harvey.”

  “Yep. Think about it. If Steve found out about Harvey, he could have gone out there, off reservation so to speak, gathering Intel to get him—and then the attack on his convoy. It’s the sort of thing he’d want to do. He loved undercover work, blending in, disappearing and then emerging with a big win. But whether he was killed on that convoy, or if he survived and went dark . . .”

  “You think he’d do that to you, pretending to be dead for this long?”

  “Didn’t your father do that to you?”

  Walker nodded. “Yeah, he did that. To me, and my mother. Because of something he had a hand in creating, which then got set loose among terror outfits, something called Zodiac.”

  “Well, I think Steve just might do it too, to protect me, especially if he suspects Harvey,” Muertos said. “Part of me thinks: what if he knew who was doing all this, and didn’t get the chance to tell anyone? I mean, after all, the Secret Service is run by Homeland.”

  Walker was silent.

  Muertos sipped her coffee then tossed the cup and said, “What? What, Walker? Is this suddenly too much, because I didn’t tell you everything from the get-go?”

  “No,” Walker said. He headed around the car to face her.

  “What then?”

  “I know that this has gone from shit to worse,” Walker said. “I know that. Look at what’s happened in the past twenty-four hours: all the dead, and those surviving. It’s a wreck. Harvey, known operationally to his guys as DS, is clearing house. He’s near the end of his objective, and we still don’t know what that is, although it has something to do with human trafficking. So, where we currently find ourselves in this story is right at the grim end, and I’ve gotta tell you, Rachel, these kind of stories—where you’re holding out hope against despair—they’re doomed. I’ve been here so many times, had agents I’ve been running disappear in the field because something they were all touching on suddenly came to a close. I’ve seen it, lived it. It never ends well, and you seldom get closure. I’m saying this because there might be no satisfying end for you, so steel yourself for that. You might never find out the truth about your husband. Or you might find out what happened—but that knowledge might well be something you’d rather forget.”

  It was the first time he’d called her Rachel, and it was the familiarity and care as much as the content of what he’d said that made her eyes water. It got to her, it was personal, as if the gravity and weight of all that she’d lost, all that perhaps she might yet have to lose, arrived in that one moment.

  “Are you telling me to walk away?” she said. “To let you fix this?”

  “I’m saying that you can. It’s an option. I’ll get to Harvey. I’ll get what answers I can, exact what justice I can. You don’t have to be there.”

  “I need to know,” Muertos said. “I need answers. Not justice, though if—if Steve’s really dead, and it comes back to Harvey? And if that in turn is connected with Sally’s death? Then, sure, I want justice, Walker. I want it bad.”

  “Okay,” Walker replied. He looked around the car park. “Okay. Just stay behind me, the whole way. We’ll both get answers.”

  Then a phone rang in Walker’s pocket.

  58

  “Breaking protocol,” Walker said into the phone.

  “And we’re gonna need new phones after this convo, because I have news,” Paul said. “I’ve got the info on the owner of that farmhouse that blew. You sitting down?”

  Walker asked, “Do I need to?”

  “My search led to a company, registered to a tax office in the Caymans,” Paul said. “Took some digging. But in the end, there’s a paper trail that leads to one Senator Charles Lewis, of Connecticut. He’s a big shot, Armed Services Committee, Ways and Means, and Intelligence Oversight. Got his fingers in powerful pies all around town. Might be a good time to leave this thing alone, my friend?”

  “Let’s never mention powerful pies ever again.”

  “Noted. I’m sending you a dark-web link to a site I created to house all his relevant info.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Walker said. “And I’ve got a new name for you to look into.”

  “Why am I not surprised . . .” Paul said. “Okay, shoot.”

  “Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Daniel Harvey.”

  “Okay, great,” Paul said. “Let’s make some more enemies in high places, shall we?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “What do you want, his social-security number?” Paul was getting exasperated. “Or how many times he goes to the toilet each day? I can get info, sure, but you know what? Behavior is still harder to find out about, yes, even online, unless the target’s house and office are wired up the wazoo.”

  “Paul, I want you to see if he has connections to any of our Syrian friends.”

  “Okay. I’ll email you the link to the site where I dumped the Senator’s info, and I’ll do the same for this Harvey guy.”

  “Anything jump out at you in the Senator’s background?”

  “I’m not an analyst, but he looks like any other federal politician, I’d imagine,” Paul replied. “By that I mean he’s led a boring enough life. Old-school money from New England. Family has deep ties in industry and politics all the way back to the Mayflower. Had family serve in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, then pretty much every other war after that. That said, he’s got big money backers, as anyone would have to have to get to that level of politics. That’s one place you could look? Big money does funny things to people, and to get the kind of money they need to run for office and keep it, they’ve often done some not-so-funny things, right?”

  “Did you get access to the Senator’s security-clearance files?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s where I’ll start,” Walker said. “They’ve already done the leg work for me—if there’s areas of concern, they’ll be in there. See if you can get the same for Harvey, as well as any worries that may have come up inside his military records.”

  “Hacking the Pentagon, sure, why not, I’ll put that on my list,” Paul said. “When do you need all this?”

  “Now.”

  “Okay. So, I’ve been up all night doing this. You know, there’s these weird people I’ve heard of who need this thing called sleep.”

  Walker ended the call. He pocketed the phone, then checked the two Homeland agents’ phones. Neither had received a call, but he figured that would change pretty soon once those guys didn’t check back in with Harvey.

  “What do we do now?” Muertos said.

  “Let’s leave the borrowed Ford here and take the Homeland vehicle,” Walker said. He took the acquired Homeland cash out of his shirt pocket, about five hundred and change, and tucked it under the sun visor, then put the keys in the side pocket of the car and locked it. He felt bad for the high school teacher in Virginia, but figured the car would be noticed and towed soon enough, and would find its way back, and eventually that teacher would find the nice little bonus. Walker liked teachers. He’d married one, once. His thoughts of Eve soon turned to Muertos and her husband, Steve, and while he had the new phone in hand he sent a message to Paul to look into the guy’s background and service records.

  Sure, Paul replied. Add it to the list.

  Walker drank his coffee. He knew he needed to find a way in to Harvey—but then figured the guy had a few more hours of office work ahead of him, and as bent as Harvey might be, he would have all kinds of official demands on his time. Walker tossed his empty coffee cup in the trash, and then went to the Homeland SUV and held the passenger door open for Muertos.

  “Where we headed?” she asked.

  “Watergate Hotel.”

  In his lap he held the two cell phones. One of them rang silently, vibrating, the screen lit up with one word: DS. It stopped after about thirty seconds. Then, as long as it might take someone to call the other phon
e, the other one rang. Same thing, same caller—DS—then it stopped.

  •

  Deputy Secretary Daniel Harvey ended the call for a second time. He looked out the window at the sprawling campus of St. Elizabeths. They’d missed their check-in, but they were likely still operational, too close to the target. He figured he’d give them another two hours before sending Krycek to their location.

  59

  “Really?” Muertos said, looking up at the infamous landmark. “The Watergate Hotel?”

  “I’m a sucker for history,” Walker replied. “Who doesn’t like a good ’gate suffix. Nipple-gate. Monica-gate. Panama-gate. In fact, since Rio in ’16, I think we’ve come full circle.”

  “How about we’re going to get killed-gate.”

  “Not today, Muertos, not today.” He instructed the bellboys that he wanted to access his car once it was parked, then walked through the doors opened by staff in smarted-up versions of old-world-opulence-type uniforms. “This place works, logistically, for what I want to do, because it curves back and looks onto itself. That, and we’re nice and central—there are plenty of places we can bug out to, if it gets to that.”

  He remembered something Bloom had drilled into him: When making a critical contact become a tactical advantage, always know the layout of the place you’re going to use. He’d been here twice, as a teen, and remembered the basic layout of the building. Despite the recent renovations, the building’s footprint remained the same, and the exits and entry points seemed familiar.

  “And we’re doing what here?” Muertos asked as she followed Walker, and he checked in using Agent Kingsley’s license and credit card. He booked a corner suite on level six, and was handed two key cards—stenciled with the tongue-in-cheek note: Watergate—No need to break in. She followed Walker across the lobby to the business center. “Is that wise? Won’t Homeland track it?”

  “Soon enough,” Walker said. He sat at a computer, typed in the URL that Paul had sent to his phone and opened the security-clearance file for Senator Lewis. He hit print, and as pages started to stack up in the printer tray he turned to Muertos. “I need you to go and get another room, on level seven or eight, that looks back at the suite, and we’ll work there. That way we can see them coming.”

  “You want Harvey to come to you?”

  “Yes.” Walker collected the paper as it was spat out of the laser printer, then hit print on what Paul had found so far on Harvey—his military records, and security-clearance forms with dozens of pages of background checks.

  “What’ll having more people come after us achieve?”

  “I want to know how they respond to losing their guys,” Walker said. “And it might spook Harvey, and it will diminish whatever resources he has left. They might see the booking I made in Kingsley’s name and think he and Jennings are still tracking Acton.”

  “But they’re not answering phones,” Muertos said. “Which will eventually ring alarm bells.”

  Walker nodded. He logged out of the webpage and cleared the browser history, then stayed by the printer, taking the pages from the output tray each time it neared capacity. He watched as Muertos went to reception and booked the other room with cash, then returned with two more key cards.

  “If Harvey is running these agents on the side like this,” Muertos said, “having them kill people? Well, what’s stopping him from just sending a SWAT team to the location to get us?”

  “He doesn’t know we’re alive, remember?” Walker replied, looking out the glass-boxed office in the foyer, taking in the exits and vantage points. “When his agents don’t reply, he’ll send someone here to investigate. But Harvey won’t risk a big visible take-down because whatever he’s up to he’s now winding down, not escalating. He sent those two guys to deal with Almasi and Bahar and us, then on to Acton, because I took down his better guys yesterday at the hospital.”

  Muertos looked uneasy. “He still has Krycek.”

  Walker nodded. “And he’ll be here on the east coast by now.”

  “But you think he’ll send him here, to check in on his other two guys?” Muertos looked around the foyer, full of nervous energy.

  “Yes.” Walker tapped the couple of hundred printed pages in his hands and headed for the door, Muertos in tow. He strode across the foyer and hit the lift call button. “And in the meantime, we’ve got some reading to do.”

  •

  Harvey tapped at his desk, the burner phone on it, waiting for the call from agents Kingsley and Jennings, a call that was now two hours overdue. He typed an email including the phone numbers of his two missing agents, and demanded an immediate request for location of those phones, then sent it to the tech department. The reply came back within two minutes: both phones were at the Watergate Hotel, where they’d been for over an hour, unmoving.

  Now, why are you at the Watergate . . . He called his best operative, Krycek. He had failed in San Francisco, and today was his chance at redemption.

  “Get to the Watergate Hotel,” Harvey said. “Kingsley and Jennings are there. They were meant to be taking care of Acton. See what they’re up to.”

  •

  It took an hour of reading and arranging and Walker stepped back to admire the scene he’d arranged on the floor of the hotel room. Muertos passed him a cup of coffee made in the room’s machine. The room was actually three rooms: a king-sized bedroom, an en suite with an oversized spa bath and a walk-in shower, and a room that served as an open-plan living area with a galley kitchen, and a balcony with outdoor seating. Walker had moved the furniture around in the living room to create a twelve-foot space in which he could arrange his thoughts on paper, reorder the information to look for a pattern not immediately obvious.

  “What’s it all mean?” Muertos asked. “What are you looking for in this mess of papers?”

  Walker pointed to an area of printouts that were connected. “My father, in Syria. And Bloom. You. Almasi. All there at the same time.” He pointed to the Senator and Harvey. “These two have a few connections. The earliest connection I can see is that they’re both part of the Society of the Cincinnati.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A hereditary club,” Walker said, picking up a piece of paper. “A rich-old-white-guy thing, going back to revolutionary days. They meet up right here in DC.”

  “You think the club’s connected to this?”

  “I can’t see how. But it shows that they’ve known each other for at least twenty years, when they became members following the deaths of their fathers around the same time.”

  “Their fathers probably knew each other too,” Muertos said. “If the club is as exclusive as you say. So, the Senator and the Deputy Secretary may have been friends since they were young.” Muertos picked up a stack of bio notes on Senator Lewis. “Think we can reach out to him, ask him about Harvey?”

  “We could,” Walker said, “but what if they’re working together on this?”

  “Or was Harvey using the Senator’s country house without his knowledge?”

  “That’s the question I’d like an answer for,” Walker said, “before we approach Senator Lewis.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  60

  “My agents are in place,” Fiona Somerville said as she walked into the room. “Any sign of the guys from Homeland?”

  Walker shook his head.

  “This is Rachel Muertos,” he said.

  “I’m Fiona Somerville, FBI,” Somerville said, and the two shook hands. “Where’s the target room?”

  Walker passed Somerville the small binoculars and pointed at the room across the way, where the hotel curved and looked back on itself. Somerville looked to where Walker pointed, saw the cell phones on the bench in the suite on level six.

  “How’s it going to go down?” Walker asked.

  “I’ve got six agents in the building, and another four in vehicles outside.” Somerville handed the binoculars back to Walker. “When your guys show, we’ll take them down, a
nd we’ll keep them out of the picture for eight hours. Max. But then that’s it—they’ll be out on the street, unless you can find evidence to warrant charges, because Harvey will know we’ve taken his guys, and he’ll move on me.”

  “Eight hours will do,” Walker said. “And there’s an Agent Clair Hayes who will ID them as her abductors, so if it comes to it maybe her Director, or the Attorney General, will step in to keep Harvey off your back until we can get to him.”

  “That’s all well and good, but as long as Harvey retains his power and influence, there’s not a huge amount we can do—he can have all this classified as some bullshit training op, have it filed away under national security, sweep everything under a rug.”

  “He’s ordered the assassination of two Secret Service agents,” Muertos said.

  “Don’t worry about Harvey,” Walker said, looking from Somerville to Muertos. “He’ll get his.”

  “You better be right about this,” Somerville said. “If you don’t take down Harvey, you can bet he’ll do all he can to take my job after I arrest his guys here today.”

  “Don’t worry about your job,” Walker said.

  Somerville smiled. “So says the guy with no job to speak of.”

  “Take it from a pro, unemployment is vastly underrated,” Walker said, checking the scene again with the binoculars. “Besides, I’m so busy, I couldn’t possibly fit in a job.”

  Somerville laughed, then looked at the scene on the floor, hundreds of pages all laid out like someone threw a thick file at a ceiling fan.

  “This looks like a typical Walker mess,” Somerville said.

  “Organized chaos,” Walker said. He took ten minutes to brief Somerville on everything they had, and all they’d experienced since yesterday. As he spoke he again checked the scene across the way with the binoculars. There was no activity. The two Homeland agents’ cell phones remained on the kitchen bench of the corner suite. Muertos poured more coffee. Somerville perched on the arm of a sofa, listening.