Root and Branch

by Preston Fleming

But as she stepped through the doorway, Slattery caught sight of a shadow flitting across the wall. In an instant, three men seized her arms and legs from behind and threw her hard onto the bed. Once she was down, one of them pulled a bag over her head. Before she knew what was happening, he or another man forced open her mouth and shoved some kind of tube down her throat. In went a generous pour of something that burned as it went down. Then the tube came out and, as Slattery gagged and gasped for air, she recognized the smell and taste of whiskey. But it was too late to do something about it, or even think of doing so, because in the next moment she felt a sting on her thigh and, while the men held her in their vise-like grip, she drifted off to sleep.

  Nagy saw everything inside the target apartment through the Red Team’s body cameras. The target appeared to be an attractive middle-aged woman dressed in a satin nightgown. Nagy saw the team enter her apartment, make their way to the bedroom, jump her as she left the bathroom, and force her onto the bed. In the next instant, a team member shoved a tube down her throat and poured something in before jabbing her in the thigh with a syringe. As soon as her body went limp, the man squeezed the unconscious woman’s hand around a cut crystal glass in a manner apparently meant to leave fingerprints. Once this was done, he took what looked like a whiskey bottle from the nightstand, poured a small amount into the glass, swirled it around, and returned the glass and bottle to where they had been.

  At the same time, another team member arranged the inert woman’s limbs and bedclothes to make appear as if she had gone to sleep in a perfectly natural way. Then the third man emerged from the bathroom with a prescription medicine vial that he placed beside the whiskey glass. At last, when the entire setup was complete, the three men inspected the room to confirm that every detail was in order. Only then did they draw the blackout curtains to begin their search.

  Up until the moment the team left the woman on the bed and began arranging things to look as if she had died from an accidental overdose, Nagy had assumed this was just another abduction of a non-Muslim sympathizer who had aided the intifada. Only this time it was something else entirely. His mind reeled at what he’d seen. The woman in the satin nightgown had been suicided before his eyes and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. Or was there?

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Escape

  "And have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them."

  –Ephesians 5:11

  LATE AUGUST, ROSSLYN, VIRGINIA

  Roger Zorn rose early in his room at the Hyatt, ate a hasty room service breakfast and set off for his return engagement with Larry Lawless at Tetra headquarters. Traffic on the freeway was light, so he arrived in Crystal City early. But Jay Pankow was already waiting for him in the sixth floor reception room when he arrived.

  Pankow rose to his feet to greet his client, nearly spilling his coffee. As usual, the fussy little lawyer quivered with excess energy, and Zorn wondered why the man required caffeine at all. At the stroke of nine, the receptionist led her visitors down the hall to the same spacious conference room overlooking Reagan National Airport where they had met the previous day and where the immaculately suited Lawless, his general counsel and his chief financial officer regarded their visitors with a detached glare.

  The Tetra senior vice president wasted no time in opening the meeting.

  “I’ve spoken to our CEO, who has authorized me to present a revised offer,” Lawless began without emotion.

  “That’s good news,” Zorn replied. “What are the new terms?”

  “Tetra Corporation offers to purchase all the outstanding shares of Zorn Security and its subsidiaries in an all-stock deal, but with no lockup period, and at a new rate of exchange. Zorn shareholders would receive your original asking price of 0.6 shares of Tetra common stock for each share of Zorn stock, in a tax-free transaction. Which means that you would be free to sell as few or as many Tetra shares as you like immediately after the deal closes.”

  Zorn and Pankow exchanged surprised glances and Pankow nodded his approval. Zorn thought back to the visit he had received from Pat Craven the day before and wondered whether the DHS official had persuaded Tetra to sweeten its offer, or whether Tetra had sent him out to plead for more time.

  “Of course, I’d need to see the term sheet,” Zorn answered with a guarded smile, “but what you’ve described sounds to me as if it meets our requirements. With no lockup period, an all-stock deal would work for us.”

  Without a word, the Tetra general counsel opened a manila file folder and handed a term sheet to each person at the table. Zorn and Pankow each reviewed the sheet, point by point, until at last Zorn looked up.

  “I think we have the makings of a deal here,” he said, rising to reach across the table and shake Lawless’s hand. “I’ll send a copy of this to Walter when I get back to the office. But I doubt he or the board would have any serious objections to what’s written here. Jay, would you work with Larry and his team to prepare closing documents?”

  “With pleasure,” Pankow answered, baring his teeth in a friendly grin for the first time since entering the room.

  “Once again, we extend our invitation for you to head up our European management team, Roger,” Lawless went on, sounding like a kindly uncle who had just pulled a shiny toy out of his pocket. He laid both hands on the table and tilted his chair back with a satisfied expression. “And we’re prepared to retain all your current staff as Tetra employees, if they so choose.”

  Zorn raised an eyebrow and smiled.

  “If you don’t mind, Larry, I’d like some time to address your offer to keep me on. I think my wife may be counting on my early retirement.”

  “Of course, of course,” the Tetra executive answered. “Take all the time you need. I’ll put you in contact with our Brussels office whenever you’re ready.”

  “How soon do you expect we might be able to close the deal?” Pankow jumped in.

  “It depends on how fast we receive the necessary government clearances and approvals,” the Tetra CFO answered. “Sixty to ninety days would be my guess.”

  “During which time we should all observe a moratorium on speaking to the media,” the general counsel added.

  “Not that any of us would talk to them, anyway,” Lawless added, meeting Zorn’s eyes with a meaningful look. “Wouldn’t you agree, Roger?”

  “Absolutely. My lips are sealed.”

  “For now,” Zorn thought to himself.

  As soon as he emerged from Tetra Corp’s underground parking lot, Zorn pulled his car to the curb and dialed Walter Lang’s number in Toulouse, where it was late afternoon.

  “Walter? It’s Roger.”

  “Good afternoon, Roger,” Lang replied in a cheerful voice. “How are the talks going today? Are we merging?”

  “I believe we are. Lawless came back today and agreed to a stock-for-stock deal at our original asking price, with no lockup period. I have a term sheet and will scan you a copy the moment I’m back in the office.

  “Magnificent work, Roger! I’m most eager to see it,” Lang answered in a voice even more buoyant than before. “When can we expect you back in France?”

  “I need to wrap up a couple more details here, but I intend to return in a day or two. Shall we schedule a board meeting for early next week?”

  “Definitely. Everyone here will be delighted. Your father would be proud of you.”

  “Speaking of Papa,” Zorn added as an afterthought. “Something else he wrote about Algeria hit me yesterday and won’t leave me alone. Perhaps you could help me with it.”

  Lang’s voice took on a bemused tone.

  “I don’t know, Roger. That was a long time ago. But ask and I’ll do my best.”

  “You and Papa were both in Algiers during the crises of ’58 and ‘61, weren’t you?”

  “We were.”

  “Well, Papa’s version of events is that the Paris establishment set out to defeat the Muslim insurgents, but was unwilling to soil its ha
nds. So it fobbed off the dirty work on the paratroopers and denounced them for it afterward. Would that be accurate?”

  “More or less,” Lang said in a guarded tone. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because in Algeria, our paratroopers resorted to torture and summary executions. In America, private contractors, mainly veterans of the Iraqi and Afghan wars, drop jihadists from airplanes and send others to far-off deserts to be hunted by drones.”

  “I don’t see your point.”

  “It’s this, Walter. Which side would you choose if it were 1958 all over again? The power elites, or the fighting men?”

  “Your father and I chose the latter, of course. And, we paid dearly for it. You ask if I would do it again?”

  The phone went quiet. For a moment Zorn wondered if Lang was still on the line.

  “The question is not an easy one,” the older man went on. “Even today, I am pained by what we did. Some nights I see the faces of those I killed. And it troubles me to think I might face them again in the next life.”

  “I understand. But do you believe you did the right thing?”

  “No, you really don’t understand. Back then, the rebels spread misery and death wherever they went. I don’t see how we could have stopped them except how we did.”

  Zorn swallowed hard.

  “And what about the 1958 army coup? Do you regret rising up against the Fourth Republic and forcing a new constitution?”

  “For that I have no regrets at all. Again, for the army it was a matter of survival.”

  “Are you saying then that the ends justify the means?”

  “Yes. But not all the means. And not all the time,” the chairman qualified. “In Algeria, we set out to fight a clean war. But whenever we met cruelty with humanity, our troops died like flies. The enemy often seemed to kill and mutilate for the sheer pleasure of it. Where we shed bitter tears over a fallen comrade, they threw away fighters as we discarded cigarette butts. In the end, because the enemy understood no language other than their own cries of agony, that was the language we spoke to them. Throughout the war, brutality was the only method that ever moved the rebels to observe even basic standards of decency. In terrorizing our enemies, we became no better than they, but our methods succeeded. And we lived.”

  “Yes, Papa has said much the same of those times. But, Walter, answer me this: where is the limit to barbarity when you claim to defend civilization?”

  A long pause followed before the old man replied.

  “When you were a child, Roger, your father told me that he often prayed you would never have to do for America what he and I did for France. But history shows that every country will resort to brutality when circumstances demand it. Now it is America’s turn, its coming of age, its loss of innocence, so to speak. Perhaps yours, as well.”

  On his return to the office, Zorn stopped at the receptionist’s desk.

  “Is Brandon in?”

  “He certainly is, sir,” the bright-eyed young woman replied.

  “Please have him come see me.”

  Two minutes later, Brandon Choe appeared at Zorn’s office.

  “Close the door and take a seat, Brandon,” Zorn instructed without looking up from his computer screen.

  “How did the meeting go?” Choe asked, leaning back in his chair with legs crossed.

  “Which meeting?”

  “The one this morning at Tetra,” Choe replied with a puzzled look, as if surprised by the question.

  “How did you know I was at Tetra?”

  “Pat Craven mentioned it to me last night. He thought I might be going with you.”

  “And what else did Pat tell you about the meeting?”

  “He expected Tetra to sweeten their offer. So what happened? Did they?”

  “Never mind that,” Zorn replied, his voice suddenly grown cold. “I called you to talk about something else. Now, Brandon, I realize that you and Pat have known each other since your days on the House Intel Committee staff. And I know that Pat thinks very highly of you. But I’m concerned that you two may have grown too close.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because somehow Pat learned that I had ordered notice letters to terminate our ESM contracts. The only people who were supposed to know about that were Jay Pankow and I.”

  “You forgot Walter. He’s the one who told me.”

  “But Walter and Pat don’t talk to one another. So it comes back to you. Did you tell Pat about the letters?”

  A long silence followed while Choe weighed his response.

  “I don’t remember,” Choe answered, biting his lower lip. “I suppose I might have let it slip somehow.”

  “So what else might you have let slip to Pat? Or to the folks at Tetra?”

  “Nothing,” Choe replied with sudden firmness, his face clouding over. “I’m perfectly capable of protecting confidential information, thank you.”

  “Capable, yes. But willing? Tell me, did you ever mention to Pat that you thought I was hitting on Margaret Slattery, or that the two of us might be an item?”

  Choe hesitated.

  “Geez, that was a while ago. I really don’t recall.”

  “All right, Brandon. I don’t need a Triage hookup to know you’re not telling me the truth. So, regardless of whatever you may have done for the company in the past, you no longer enjoy my trust. And I’m going to let you go. The only question is whether to deny you a recommendation and sue you for breach of contract. And that depends on your coming clean with me. So tell me, has Pat Craven or Tetra been paying you under the table to steal company secrets? Or do they have some kind of dirt on you?”

  Zorn could see the panic in his subordinate’s eyes. The accusations had come too quickly for him to cook up plausible denials. His best hope was damage control.

  “They never paid me a dime,” Choe insisted, maintaining eye contact with his boss and pressing his lips into a thin line. “All they did was help me out of a tight spot once.”

  “What kind of tight spot?”

  “Do you remember that time when I had to leave work early for a court appearance about a speeding ticket? And you made some remark about my driving a Porsche?”

  “I do,” Zorn replied, maintaining a poker face.

  “Well, the girl riding with me when we were stopped was only sixteen. And an undocumented immigrant. So a couple of days later I got a visit from a plainclothes guy waving a badge from ICE. On a hunch, DHS investigators had checked my travel records and noticed that I’d been to places like Thailand and the Philippines, where there’s a lot of sex tourism. And somehow they got wind of the fact that I’d failed a lifestyle polygraph when I was working on the Hill.”

  “Let me guess. More underage girls?”

  “They couldn’t prove it,” Choe replied in a defensive tone, “or that I’d done anything illegal. But the ICE agent noticed I was a DHS contractor and had listed Pat Craven as a reference. So he asked if Pat would vouch for me. Anyway, the next day Pat called and offered to make the whole thing go away. After that, I guess he thought he owned me.”

  Zorn tilted his chair forward and laid both palms on the desk.

  “All right, Brandon. Here’s what we’re going to do. By noon today, I want you to put on my desk a list of every Zorn Security secret you’ve ever let slip to Pat Craven or anyone else at DHS or Tetra. Attach the list to your letter of resignation. If the list is good, I’ll accept your resignation and send you away with a lukewarm reference. But, either way, empty your desk and turn in your security badge by noon. Do we have an understanding?”

  A look of relief spread across Choe’s face.

  “Absolutely, boss. I can’t begin to tell you what a load this takes off my shoulders.”

  “Glad to hear it, Brandon. And good luck with your new job at Tetra Corp.”

  Though it wasn’t yet lunch hour, midtown traffic in Washington was already gridlocked. By the time Zorn reached the parking garage at the Farragut West Metro Station, it w
as five minutes before noon. He walked as fast as he could along Seventeenth Street to the Eisenhower EOB visitor’s entrance, where he passed through a metal detector before checking in at the visitor’s desk.

  “I’m here for a noon meeting with Nelson Blackburn,” he began, still short of breath, before stating his name and handing over his U.S. passport for identification.

  “Thank you, Mr. Zorn,” the middle-aged receptionist replied, handing over a visitor’s pass. “I’ll have someone show you up right away.”

  The receptionist swiveled around in her chair and gestured to a smartly dressed young woman who appeared to be a junior aide or research staffer.

  “Ellen, you’re going to the second floor, aren’t you? Would you be so kind as to show Mr. Zorn to Nelson Blackburn’s office?”

  “Certainly,” the young aide replied with an obliging smile. “Please come this way.”

  When they reached Blackburn’s office, he wasn’t there, but his administrative assistant, Brenda, a tall brunette in her early thirties, took Zorn in tow and led him to a nearby conference room. It was a narrow, windowless space into which an oval table and ten chairs had been crammed.

  “Don’t worry,” Brenda assured him. “Nelson knows you’re coming. I imagine he’ll be back in a minute or two.”

  “I expect Margaret Slattery to join us,” Zorn answered. “Do you know if she’s on her way?”

  “Just a moment. I’ll check.”

  She disappeared and came back a few minutes later.

  “Miss Slattery is not at her desk. If you like, I’ll have her paged.”

  “Please do.”

  Alone in the conference room once again, Zorn opened his briefcase and removed three manila folders, each of which contained copies of photos and reports from his visit to Niger. He opened one folder and began leafing through the photos to refresh his memory when Nelson Blackburn entered the room.

  Zorn recognized him at once. Just as at Middleburg, Blackburn wore the wrinkled blue suit, open-neck white shirt and scuffed loafers that Slattery had said were his trademark. Though the White House advisor was sixty-one, he looked several years older than Zorn’s sixty-four, likely the result of rich food, late hours and physical inactivity.