Trap the Devil

by Ben Coes

  • Kevin Rennie, senior senator from Connecticut

  • John Wrigley, junior senator from Arizona

  • Laura Touche, ambassador to Russia

  • Charles Bruner, deputy secretary of state

  King was lying on the floor. To his right, next to his head, was one stack of papers. To his left was an even higher stack. He was holding up a piece of paper and reading it.

  The door opened. One of King’s two deputies, Lewis Canfield, walked in. At first, he didn’t see King. Then he looked down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” asked Canfield.

  King continued to read.

  “Adrian?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m working.”

  “I meant, why are you lying on the floor?”

  “I fucked up my back. Got a problem with that?”

  “How’d you do that?”

  King moved the paper to the side and looked at Canfield.

  “Are you trying to annoy me?” he asked. “I get about one hour a day where I’m not in a meeting or on the phone and that’s right now and I’m reading. Now get the hell out unless you have something important to tell me.”

  “Charles Bruner is here.”

  “You don’t think you should’ve told me that when you walked in?”

  “Ah, let ’em wait a few minutes,” said Canfield. “The longer you make them wait, the more powerful they think you are.”

  King slowly shifted to his right side. He reached up and grabbed the edge of the desk and lifted himself to his knees, then stood.

  “You really are a nitwit, aren’t you?” said King. “Where’d you get that from, the Dummies Guide to Running the White House?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Okay, whatever. Send Bruner in.”

  * * *

  Adrian King had never liked Tim Lindsay, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t angry at what had happened in Paris. Having to deal with the selection of a new secretary of state was a nightmare, and he was in charge of it all.

  After Lindsay was killed, the phone calls started coming in as politicians, diplomats, and even a few corporate CEOs attempted to position themselves for consideration. King had received, at last count, more than one hundred calls on behalf of fifty-nine different individuals who wanted to be secretary of state.

  None of the calls or e-mails mattered. Rennie, Wrigley, and Touche were already on a special contingency list. King kept the same list for every cabinet member in case something ever happened, updated monthly with Dellenbaugh and kept locked in a safe in King’s office.

  King’s job was vetting them. This meant digging into each person’s background and trying to find anything that could come out later and embarrass the administration. It also meant making damn sure whoever it was could act in lockstep with Dellenbaugh’s decisions.

  That morning, King had spent three hours with Senator Kevin Rennie from Connecticut, the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rennie, King thought, was brilliant—a Stanford-educated intellectual with a patrician’s charm, who’d been elected to the Senate at age thirty-two.

  Bruner had been a late addition to the list, courtesy of Hector Calibrisi.

  There was a knock on the door and Bruner entered.

  “Adrian,” said Bruner, closing the door behind him.

  King was behind his desk, standing. He looked at Bruner with a blank expression.

  “Hi, Charles. Thanks for coming. Have a seat.”

  Bruner sat down in a leather side chair in front of King’s desk. He wore a brown double-breasted suit, a white handkerchief stuffed in the chest pocket. His full head of white hair was combed neatly back. He looked dashing, urbane, and above all sophisticated.

  Bruner looked around the office.

  “I’ve never been in the chief of staff’s office,” he said. “It’s nice.”

  King nodded.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” asked King.

  Bruner paused, then shrugged his shoulders. “I assume it has to do with Tim.”

  “That’s right.”

  Bruner was quiet. So was King. It was Bruner who finally spoke.

  “Beyond that, you’re going to have to give me a clue, Adrian.”

  “You’re on a short list to replace him,” said King.

  Bruner leaned back. “Really? Well, that’s certainly not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Not that. Maybe you wanted to run some names by me or something to that effect. I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t be the best choice.”

  King stepped around from behind his desk. He took a seat in the chair across from Bruner.

  “Are you saying you have no interest?” said King.

  “First of all, I should say I’m honored,” Bruner said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, thank the president. I’m vetting you.”

  “Adrian, let me start with the obvious. I’m too old to be secretary of state.”

  “Tim was seventy. You’re seventy-four.”

  “I would say Tim was too old, too. I’m not trying to criticize him.”

  “I don’t give a damn if you criticize him,” said King. “Lindsay was a pacifist, in my opinion.”

  Bruner grinned. “I heard you had a direct style.”

  “What do you think happened?” asked King.

  Bruner shrugged nonchalantly.

  “I don’t know. The manner in which it happened doesn’t seem to fit with the notion that terrorists did it. As for this individual, Dewey Andreas, that seems equally hard to fathom.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s a patriot,” said Bruner. “But I don’t need to tell you that.”

  King said nothing.

  “What do you think happened?” asked Bruner. “You’re a former prosecutor. I assume you’ve investigated murders.”

  “I don’t know what happened, but we’re going to find out.”

  King flipped through the file on his lap.

  “You went to the State Department after the CIA,” he said. “Why?”

  “I wanted a more peaceful life,” said Bruner. “My daughter was killed. It affected me. It still does.”

  “You were director of operations. What’d they call it then?” said King.

  “Director of the National Clandestine Service.”

  “Young too. Right there with William Casey.”

  Bruner nodded.

  “Yes. But titles didn’t mean a great deal to me. I wanted a different kind of life. We bought a farm in Maryland. We rebuilt ourselves after losing … Molly.”

  King held up a piece of paper. “You submitted your resignation. You were going to retire.”

  Bruner paused.

  “After my daughter died, I had a very hard time. Bill Casey convinced me to remain in government,” he said.

  “But Consular Operations?” said King. “Forgive me for saying this, but it’s a backwater. Processing passports and various other important but boring things. Going from Casey’s inner circle to Consular Operations must have been like trading in a Maserati for a station wagon.”

  Bruner smiled.

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  Inside the Oval Office, Calibrisi, Polk, and President Dellenbaugh watched King’s slow taking apart of Bruner on a screen set up on the president’s desk. The camera was behind the grizzly’s eye, and it offered a clear view of the chief of staff’s office.

  “He’s pretty good,” said Polk.

  Dellenbaugh was silent, arms crossed, a hard look on his face.

  Calibrisi had come up with the strategy. Put Bruner on the short list, bring him into the White House, then ask him about Order 6. If he was involved with Order 6, they needed to see his reaction. They needed to ask him bluntly: What was going on in Toronto? In Paris? But do it at the White House, his guard down, his judgment perhaps skewed by the flattery of being considered by the president for
secretary of state.

  They needed to see his reaction.

  “He’s very good,” said Calibrisi. “He ran the clandestine service, just like you, Bill. But he’s lying.”

  “He hasn’t asked him yet.”

  “I’m just saying, he turned the interrogation back onto Adrian. He inserted his daughter and took control. Which means he’s acting. He knows something.”

  * * *

  “So, if you were secretary of state, what would be your top priority?” said King.

  Bruner caught King’s look and understood then. They were watching.

  Bruner knew they added his name to the list for this specific purpose. He knew it even before King asked the innocuous question. But he saw it in King’s eyes.

  He found the camera a moment later: a pinhead-size shimmer of silver in the photo of the bear.

  He knew what was coming. He didn’t want to do what he was about to do. But he had to.

  “My priorities would be set by the president,” said Bruner. “I would view myself as a servant to the foreign policy agenda as set out by the president, duly elected by the American people.”

  “In 1983, a month before you moved from Langley to Foggy Bottom, a covert program was opened up,” said King. “It was called Order Six. A joint program between the CIA and the State Department.”

  “Yes,” said Bruner, nodding. “I remember. What would you like to know about it?”

  68

  L’AUBERGE CHEZ FRANÇOIS

  GREAT FALLS, VIRGINIA

  Flaherty arrived at the restaurant at 5 P.M., thirty minutes early. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a coffee while carefully scanning the restaurant for agents who might have been sent ahead of Follett, the young NSA analyst Flaherty was meeting with.

  Flaherty didn’t know where the eavesdroppers and hackers from the NSA had found Order 6, but the mere fact that Follett called was significant. The fact that it had been a phone call requesting an interview versus an outright abduction showed that they had little or no hard information. That the call was from a clearly midlevel person at NSA was further proof as to the government’s cluelessness. The agencies were getting closer, no doubt, but they needed to be kept in the dark for only one more day.

  One day.

  Flaherty wasn’t worried. NSA had no sentries at the restaurant, Follett sounded young and inexperienced, and most important, Flaherty knew more about deception than almost anybody else on earth. Many of Flaherty’s methods for spotting and avoiding detection, methods he pioneered while at the CIA, were still taught to young agents.

  Still, he felt uneasy.

  He saw Follett enter. He looked about thirty, with a big dirty-blond Afro, glasses, and a scholarly-looking face. Flaherty remained seated and watched as Follett looked around the room, searching for him. When he finally saw Flaherty, Follett smiled and nodded.

  “Andrew,” said Follett as he approached, hand extended. “Zach Follett. Nice to meet you, sir. Thanks for coming.”

  Flaherty shook his hand but said nothing.

  A hostess approached. “Here for an early dinner, gentlemen?”

  “Just drinks,” said Flaherty. “A booth, if its available.”

  The hostess led Flaherty and Follett to a table in the far corner of the restaurant. After they were seated, Flaherty cut to the chase.

  “So,” he said, “what do you want?”

  Flaherty was aggressive, staking out a hard wall in the conversation.

  “As I mentioned,” Follett said, “I want to ask you about Order Six.”

  “What about it?”

  “What was it? I mean, what was in the order?”

  Mistake number one, Flaherty thought. Revealing he doesn’t know what Order 6 even means. Kopitar may have sanitized it, but Follett shouldn’t have let on to the fact that they hadn’t found anything. There was always the chance Kopitar missed something. Unless Follett was using some of the new NSA interrogation tactics, trying to manipulate Flaherty by leading him down a tree of seemingly innocuous, even naïve, questions.

  “There were many orders, Zach,” said Flaherty.

  “I was able to piece together the fact that Order Six had a two-hundred-million-dollar annual budget its first three years,” said Follett. “Then the program disappeared. It was buried inside the State Department.”

  Flaherty nodded nonchalantly.

  “That could very well be,” he said. “There were a number of orders.”

  “I was reading somewhere that the orders were usually three digits, like Order 521. These usually came from line-level deputies. The double-digit orders were more important, usually assigned by the director of operations. I think it was called the Clandestine Service when you were there.”

  “Yes,” said Flaherty, now realizing Follett was better prepared than he had anticipated. “That’s what they called it.”

  “And the single-digit orders were from the director himself,” Follett continued. “This order—Order Six—would have come from Director Casey, I believe. In fact, it would have come exactly one week before Mr. Bruner left for the State Department. You, at that point, were Bruner’s deputy, according to various records. I believe you were made interim head of the Clandestine Service after Mr. Bruner moved to State.”

  Flaherty shifted ever so slightly, despite the fact that he knew he shouldn’t, that shifting was the first indicator of anxiety in an interrogation. Anxiety correlated directly to dishonesty, according to multiple clinical trials Flaherty himself had overseen. Yet he had shifted.

  “That’s right.”

  “It was the only order issued under William Casey, I believe,” said Follett. “As head of NCS, I would think this would have been somewhat of a milestone.”

  “Yes.”

  “So do you remember Order Six, Andrew?” Follett said innocently, leaning back, a hint of violence in his gaze.

  “I think I remember it. Since you mentioned it. It was a long time ago.”

  “Why is an extant CIA program still utilizing a communications satellite? I mean, how did you guys even afford it?”

  Follett let it sink in.

  “Afford?” Flaherty said calmly. “There are so many government expenditures, Zach. I don’t remember any specific satellites, but there were many.”

  “The satellite uses a heretofore nonexistent frequency,” continued Follett, a baffled look on his face. “I’m not sure I even understand the mathematics behind the frequency, and I have a Ph.D. in math. It was used in Toronto the day of the mosque murders and from inside the Hotel George Cinq five minutes after Secretary of State Lindsay was assassinated.”

  Follett paused. Flaherty saw the waitress approaching and subtly held up his hand, turning her away.

  “Order Six was an early attempt to infiltrate Islamist extremist groups,” said Flaherty, lying. “Collaboration between State Department diplomats and in-theater Agency personnel. It didn’t work. I was the one who shut it down. I don’t know why the satellite is still functional. It wasn’t my decision, but the assumption all along was that it would be transferred somewhere within the Agency. As for the frequency, you’re talking to someone who barely understands how to get his e-mail.”

  “Can I ask you about your time as Berlin chief of station?” said Follett.

  “If you must.”

  * * *

  Nathaniel waited until the parking lot was full. He climbed out of the car and moved down several aisles. He came to the black Mercedes. He looked around, making sure no one was looking, then went down on the ground, flipped onto his back, and moved beneath the car. The S550 was a complicated vehicle. Cutting its brakes was largely a technical exercise, versus the old-fashioned method of simply snipping the brake lines, though he did that too. He was under the car for almost eight minutes. When he finished, he looked across the parking lot, seeing no one.

  Nathaniel climbed into his car, a blue Mustang, and drove quickly away.

  69

  NORTH OF BESANÇON


  FRANCE

  The lights were dimmed in the train car, allowing passengers to sleep. The man beside Dewey was snoring lightly, his head resting on a down jacket that he was using as a pillow.

  Dewey tapped his ear twice.

  “Belfort is the next stop,” he whispered. “I’m going to get her.”

  “What are you going to do?” said Tacoma. “Just shoot the guards?”

  “No, not yet, anyway. I want to see where she is. According to Beauxchamps, she’s up there, but before I start shooting people, I want to be sure.”

  “How are you going to do that?” said Katie.

  “I don’t know.”

  Dewey unzipped the bag at his feet. He pulled a handgun from where he’d tucked it, inside his pants along his right leg. He unscrewed the silencer and stuck it in the bag, then found the shell he’d packed—black, all-weather—along with a pair of gloves. He tucked the gloves, a ski mask, and the gun into a pocket. He glanced back at Beauxchamps, nodding ever so slightly.

  He grabbed the walking stick and moved slowly, stooping, toward the front of the car.

  Dewey knew he had to get inside the first-class car. He also knew that to get to her, he needed to determine her precise location. He might have to kill the two guards, but that was a last resort. He needed another way.

  Dewey placed the walking stick on the shelf above the ski rack and went into the bathroom on the right, locking the door. He untied the shell and put it on. He then reached to the paper towel dispenser, popping the top where a pile of towels was stacked. He removed his glasses and put them on top of the towels. He pulled the gun from his pocket and put it next to the glasses, then shut the top.

  Dewey zipped up the shell and pulled the black ski mask over his head. He looked at himself in the mirror. It was like looking at a phantom, his eyes the only thing human, their blue standing out from a veil of black.

  He unlocked the door but left it shut. He had to move quickly now. He put on the gloves, then slid the window open. The sound was loud as cold air and snow rushed in. Dewey put one foot on the bottom edge of the opening and climbed up, sticking his head out, then his hand, reaching up above the window for something to grab on to. He found a slat of steel that ran along the edge of the roof. He held tightly to it as he climbed out, pressing his chest against the side of the train, gripping the steel slat for dear life as a hurricane of snow and wind ripped against him. Dewey backed both feet into the open air, so that he was now dangling along the side of the fast-moving train. With his left foot, he kicked at the small round red handle on the window, missing a few times, then nailing it, closing the window. He hoisted himself up, kicking his left leg over the slat and pulling himself onto the roof as wind and snow blinded him.