by Ben Coes
“What do we know about the vice president’s schedule?” he asked.
Flaherty slid the laser pointer across the table to a burly-looking man with black hair and a thick mustache. This was Hooley.
“Thanks, Andrew,” said Hooley. He pointed at a screen on the wall behind Flaherty, which lit up. It showed a map of the Hawaiian Islands. Hooley drew a red circle on the screen with the laser.
“The vice president is leaving with his family on vacation Thursday,” said Hooley. “He’ll be spending five days on the Big Island, here, near Kona. As you might expect, the compound will be heavily fortified, so trying to do anything on the island will be challenging. We’ve anticipated a western flight path toward the airport and have positioned a team of men here.” Hooley pointed to a small dot on the screen. “It’s an island about ten miles offshore. The team will employ surface-to-air missiles to take down the vice president’s plane.”
“As you know, Jim, the timing of this is incredibly important,” said Paul Hochman, an older man with short brown hair and glasses. “The death of the vice president must occur after Dellenbaugh is assassinated. If it happens beforehand, Dellenbaugh will be locked down.”
“Actually, the two deaths must be virtually simultaneous,” said Bruner, speaking for the first time. “The same dynamic will exist if President Dellenbaugh is killed before Donato.”
Kopitar cleared his throat. “There will be very tight communications protocols between the men in Hawaii and the gunmen at the stadium,” he said. “In addition, the team in Hawaii will be in possession of a variety of radio frequency jamming devices, all state-of-the-art. We’ll be able to disrupt the communications systems aboard Air Force Two across a period of approximately one to two minutes.”
“Finally, FedEx Field,” said Flaherty. “Carey?”
A younger-looking man with receding blond hair took the laser pointer. Carey Price pointed it at a screen just over his shoulder. The screen showed a three-dimensional blueprint of FedEx Field, outside Washington, D.C., home field of the Washington Redskins.
“The president will be announcing reelection at approximately twelve fifteen,” said Price. “We’ll stage two snipers at FedEx tomorrow, embedded long enough to establish points of fire and stow the necessary materials in order to then withstand pre-event scanning, dogs, and other measures that will begin Thursday morning. The gunmen will enter with the crowd on the morning of the announcement and establish position during the event.”
A door behind Bruner opened.
“Mr. Bruner,” said Benedetti, a tall man in a dark sweater and khakis.
Bruner stood up, eyeing Flaherty as he did so. Flaherty stood and started toward the door.
“Please excuse us,” Bruner said to the table.
Bruner stepped outside, shutting the door behind him. Flaherty and Benedetti were waiting.
“I received a call from the sanitarium,” said Benedetti quietly. “Romy escaped last night. She’s missing.”
“What do you mean?” asked Flaherty. “How could she? There’s no way.”
“She killed Dr. Courtemanche and two orderlies,” said Benedetti.
“Where is Kyrie?” said Bruner. “He was supposed to come here directly from Toronto.”
“He’s not answering calls,” said Flaherty. “At least not mine.”
Bruner took out his cell.
“Finish the meeting,” he said to Flaherty as he dialed. He held the cell to his ear. “She’ll need money. Have Kopitar track Courtemanche’s credit cards and cell phones. In the meantime, send a team into the theater. When they find her, they can kill her.”
16
HÔTEL DE PARIS MONTE-CARLO
MONACO
Kyrie’s cell vibrated on the credenza. He crawled out of bed and grabbed the phone.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?” said Bruner.
“None of your business.”
“I told you to come to Washington.”
“I didn’t feel like it,” said Kyrie. “You don’t tell me what to do. You might have everyone else drinking your Kool-Aid, but not me.”
“We want the same thing, Kyrie.”
“The same thing?”
“A world without Muslims.”
Kyrie walked out onto the terrace and stared at the glittering Monaco skyline. Then he went into the kitchen, picking up a bottle of vodka from the counter and taking a large chug. He was bare chested. His muscles were defined, his biceps round and large, his chest thick. He’d been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk. Instead, he looked morose, even angry.
“You just had to take her, didn’t you?” shouted Kyrie. “It’s all about control with you, isn’t it, Charles? You just had to take her.”
There was a long silence.
“That’s why I’m calling,” said Bruner. “Romy escaped from the sanitarium. She killed three people. She’s on the run. I’m going to ask you this again, Kyrie: Did she overhear our conversation?”
Back out on the terrace, Kyrie dropped the bottle. It shattered, with several pieces of glass tumbling beneath the railing and falling to the ground seven floors below. He moved back inside the hotel suite.
“Why?” he demanded.
“Answer me!” snarled Bruner. “Did she overhear our conversation?”
“Why are you so concerned?” said Kyrie.
“You know why. If she heard us, she could tell someone. Now answer me. Now!”
Kyrie shut his eyes, trying to block out the thought of Romy. He didn’t answer Bruner.
“I’m going to have Vincent and Knox kill her,” said Bruner. “You’re too close, Kyrie. You worry me.”
“It’s not your decision, Charles. She’s my wife. I’ll kill her.”
“Are you questioning my authority?”
“Let me play this out for you,” said Kyrie. “If either of those pigs touches her, not only will it be the last thing they do that doesn’t involve having their brains blown out, then I’ll come for you and your wife. Maybe I’ll kill her as you watch. I told you this when we started. We’re partners. Don’t ever fuck with me.”
“Since you put it that way,” said Bruner quietly.
“You pushed the issue,” said Kyrie. “I don’t ask for a lot. I do what needs to be done. But on this issue, I’m adamant.”
“If you had just done what needed to be done ten years ago,” said Bruner, “we wouldn’t be in this predicament.”
“Why was it that my wife had to die and yours didn’t?”
“She wasn’t your wife at the time. She wasn’t even your fiancée. You knew what we were planning. It was your idea. The operators were to have no attachments! No families! Those were the rules. You wrote them yourself.”
Kyrie was quiet for a few moments. “Can Kopitar find her?”
“He’s working on it.”
“Tell him to get me the tracking information as soon as possible.”
“Kyrie, it must be done. No hiding her. No house on some island somewhere. She knows too much.”
“I meant what I said, Charles. If anyone lays a finger on Romy, all I can say is, may God help you.”
17
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY
Dewey took an elevator to the basement level of the building. He walked along an empty corridor to a large black steel door. Next to the door, embedded into the wall, was an ocular scanner. He stood in front of it until the glass lit up. A moment later, there was a click and the door opened.
This was the entrance to a massive suite of conference rooms, offices, training areas, and athletic facilities that belonged to the CIA’s Special Operations Group, or SOG, the paramilitary arm of the Agency’s Special Activities Division. SOG was responsible for operations that included high-threat military and covert operations, often run in coordination with U.S. Special Forces. Usually, SOG ran operations the government didn’t want to be officially associated with.
SOG employed a handful of strategists, logistics coordi
nators, and mission designers, but most of its people were operators. Of these, all were male and all were culled exclusively from Special Forces units, including Delta Force, DEVGRU, Force Recon, 24th STS, Green Berets, and Rangers. There were 240 operators inside CIA paramilitary. Thirty were classified as nonofficial cover, or NOC. NOCs didn’t carry any objects or clothing that could associate them with the U.S. government and if compromised during a mission were usually on their own, with the Agency and government denying any connection. While SOG recruited operators of the highest caliber, NOCs were a breed apart, men willing to step into foreign countries without any safety net. Only a handful of individuals inside the Agency knew who the NOCs were. Dewey was classified as a nonofficial cover—Tier 1, one of only four given this top designation. Only CIA director Hector Calibrisi and Bill Polk, the head of the Directorate of Operations, commonly referred to as the National Clandestine Service, knew who the four Tier 1s were.
Dewey rarely stepped foot inside SOG’s basement. Offices filled one side of the facility. Every office was occupied by an individual wearing a headset, staring at a computer screen. Dewey knew how vitally important they were to the successful planning and management of covert operations all over the world, but seeing them at their desks and workstations gave him an anxious, slightly nauseous feeling. This was what Calibrisi wanted for him. Paris, he guessed, was just the beginning. An easy trip—part of an official delegation—with little responsibility and even less risk.
Had he been one of these desk jockeys two years ago, Jessica would still be alive.
Dewey walked down the brightly lit corridor, passing a spacious sunken gymnasium at least three stories tall, with a suspended track, where dozens of people were working out. Dewey went around the corner, entering a large locker room with carpeted floors. The wooden locker doors each had a brass nameplate. It resembled a locker room at an exclusive country club, though instead of wrinkled old men in bright green golf pants, this room was filled with men who were ripped in muscles, most in their late twenties and early thirties. Dewey walked over to his locker. He didn’t recognize any of the men who were there, and no one looked up when he passed.
The lockers themselves were also oversized, about three feet wide, and deep. Inside his locker, shoes and tactical boots sat on the bottom shelf. Several pairs of jeans, tactical pants, T-shirts, and tactical shirts were neatly folded on the next shelf. Above were a variety of tactical jackets and weapons vests, along with a few holsters. The next shelf up held a safe, accessible with a thumbprint. Dewey opened the safe. Inside was a trove of identification for use overseas, all of it counterfeit, including passports, visas, and other documents. The safe also contained stacks of currency—all of it U.S.—along with dozens of credit cards.
Above the safe, at eye level, was a wall of handguns and knives, neatly arranged. While the SOG facility had two entire rooms filled with weapons, each operator liked to keep a few of his own inside his locker. Magazines filled the top shelf.
Dewey put on a leather shoulder holster. He took a Colt M1911A1 .45-caliber semiautomatic from the weapons shelf and tucked it beneath his left armpit. He grabbed as many mags as he could carry and shut the locker.
Dewey walked to the pool area and to a door at the far end. He heard the sound of gunfire in low, dull thumps through the thick walls. He pushed open the steel door and entered the firing range.
There were twenty carrels in all, half of which were occupied. Dewey went to the farthest one. He stuck in earplugs and put on specialized noise-tampering earmuffs. He hit a button at the side of the carrel, moving the target back until it was a hundred yards away. He took the pistol from its holster, slammed in a mag, then took aim at a target. Then Dewey triggered the .45, firing seven bullets in rapid succession. With each bullet, Dewey felt an electric shock run up his arm, like a kick, stinging his injured shoulder. But he kept firing. When the mag was spent, he hit the button on the side of the carrel and the paper target moved toward him. Dewey stared at it for several moments. He’d fired seven bullets but could see only one hole in the paper.
With each mag, his shooting improved as he learned to overcompensate for the kick his injury was causing. After six mags, Dewey stopped. He looked around, seeing if anyone was looking, then winced. He pulled back the collar of his shirt so that he could look down at the scar on the right side of his chest. It was irritated and red. Several small trickles of blood were oozing out from the edges of the scab.
Dewey eventually moved the target out to two hundred yards. For the next several hours, he fired a total of one hundred magazines, fifty with his left hand, fifty with his right.
Dewey was an excellent marksman—because he understood the importance of never assuming his skills. He practiced. More important, when an unforeseen factor potentially affected his ability, such as the still painful knife wound in his chest, he worked to understand it and how it affected him.
The last two targets demonstrated the importance of practice. The last mag fired with his left hand showed two bullet holes where the silhouette’s eyes were, a hole in the forehead, one in the neck, one in the center of the chest, and a hole through each shoulder. The last mag with his strong arm—his right—showed only one hole. It sat in the center of the target’s forehead. It was bigger than a single hole, as if more than one bullet had passed through. In fact, all seven had.
Back at his locker, he stripped off his polo shirt and threw it away. He took a shower, got dressed, then packed up a small duffel bag to take with him to Paris. As he left the locker room, he glanced at a clock on the wall. It was midnight.
* * *
A black Agency sedan dropped Dewey at the corner of Queen and North Royal in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. The usually busy streets of one of the prettiest towns in the world were empty. Cars were parked for the night. Lights in the gorgeous, historic town houses were for the most part shut off.
Dewey walked along North Royal until he came to a brick town house with a bright yellow door. A gas lantern affixed to the edifice burned softly next to the door. Dewey glanced at himself in the glass. His hair was still wet. He ran his fingers back through it, then rang the doorbell. He stood for more than a minute until, finally, he saw a light go on somewhere inside. He heard footsteps on the stairs, then the entrance hall lights came on. A figure appeared. It was a woman. She was wearing a dark blue Northwestern long-sleeve T-shirt that came down to the tops of her thighs. She had long brown hair. She walked slowly to the door, a sleepy look on her face. She looked, vaguely, like a movie star, voluptuous and innocent at the same time. She stood behind the door and stared out at Dewey. After a few seconds, she opened the door.
Daisy said nothing. Her expression remained stone. Dewey looked at her for a dozen seconds and then a dozen more. He wanted to say something, but instead he remained quiet and still. Daisy stepped forward and stood on the step above him, so that their eyes were across from each other. He reached out and took her hands.
“Hi,” said Dewey.
“I already told you,” Daisy whispered, her lips moving closer to his, “I don’t need a set of encyclopedias.”
18
LA MOTEL DES DEUX FENÊTRES
DIJON, FRANCE
The semitruck rumbled along the rain-crossed highway, its windshield wipers sloshing away the water as fast as they could move, which wasn’t fast enough. It was nighttime—or, more accurately, early morning. Very early.
In the distance, a few hundred feet off the highway, she could see the blinking neon sign of the motel.
“Ici, monsieur,” she said to the driver.
“Oui? Vous-etes positif?”
“Oui.”
The semi slowed down along the side of the two-lane road, and Romy climbed down from the passenger seat.
“Merci, monsieur,” she said to the driver before shutting the door.
She’d run for nearly ten miles through the deep woods that ran south from the sanitarium, finally collapsing beneath a copse of w
ild blueberries. She slept for an hour and then kept moving, walking several miles to Chevenoz, avoiding roads, looking out for people, climbing through the steep hills that led to the small village, where she’d hid behind a church until a truck driver stopped to buy gas next door.
It had been dusk when she approached him at the pumps.
“My car has broken down and I am trying to get to Paris. I have money, monsieur.”
“I’m driving as far as Dijon. I can take you there.”
The drive had taken nine hours, through the late evening, past midnight, and now dawn approached. The truck driver was an older man, in his fifties, who rambled on for several hours about politics. Finally he put on the radio, a replay of a football match between Lyons and Paris, and then, when that was over, the news. Romy listened to the radio to see if there was any mention of the murders. There was not. Would there be? It was a private hospital, the best, she’d been told by Dr. Courtemanche. A triple homicide would not be good for business. Yes, she was sure they would keep it quiet, at least long enough for her to get away.
She tried not to think about the horrible crimes she’d committed. Unconsciously, she rubbed her hands on the seat, as if they were still covered in blood. The only way to rid her mind of the terrible thoughts and guilt was to think about her husband, Kyrie. That was even worse.
Your husband is a monster.
Who was he speaking to? Who is Charles?
She searched her memory for anyone named Charles.
Were they serious? Had she really heard them discuss killing these people? The president of the United States?
You must tell someone.
But who could she tell? He worked for the government. Anyone she told wouldn’t believe her. They would simply ask Kyrie himself.
“She’s insane,” he would say. “I had to put her in an institution.”
And then they would find out what she’d done.
There was nobody she could tell. Even if she did know someone, she had no proof.