The Power of Three

by J C Ryan

  When the man answered the phone with a surly expletive, Usama drew on his full dignity to advance his attack.

  “You must do something about these attacks your government is mounting against us, my friend, or you will find yourself short of goods.” His cold delivery, he’d found, worked better on Americans than the shouting and curses that kept his countrymen in line.

  He continued. “In the past thirty hours or so, half of our stockpiles have been wiped out.”

  6

  Manhattan, NY, NY June 21, 2014, 2 am

  WINSTON REGINALD HATHAWAY woke from the deep sleep of the righteous to the obnoxious sound of his cell phone ringing. Two things surprised him about it. First, that he’d been sleeping so soundly. Not at all righteous, he had no right to sleep well, and he usually didn’t. Which made it all the more annoying that someone had disturbed him at the ungodly hour of 2:00 a.m.

  “What,” he demanded. What he heard swept the last vestiges of sleep from his brain and caused him to sit straight up in his opulent bed. He smacked the sleepy woman next to him on her bare bottom and gestured for her to get out. Then he turned his attention back to his caller.

  “What do you mean, wiped out? All of it?” He listened and swore viciously. “I’ll take care of it. Yes, now.” He listened to the answer and fought down the anger that wasn’t good for his blood pressure, according to his doctor. “You’ll remember to whom you’re speaking. I said I’d take care of it. Now, what you’d better do is get more security on those warehouses. I won’t hear any more excuses from you.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he jabbed the icon on the screen with an angry pointer finger. He missed the old landline phones. It was so much more gratifying to slam down an old-fashioned receiver to signify rage than merely pushing a button. He looked on his nightstand for something to throw at a wall, but the only available object was a Faberge egg, and as enraged as he was, it was too expensive to consider throwing.

  Instead, he took a moment, remembered his doctor’s advice, and attempted to center himself. He mustered the calm he needed to get out of bed, pull on a smoking jacket of silky satin, and pad to his bathroom, where he placed a tiny nitroglycerin pill under his tongue.

  Before returning to his bedside to make his next call, he glanced in the mirror and smirked at his youthful image. Not bad, he thought, for an old duffer of sixty-something.

  Hathaway, ‘Winnie’ to his friends, actually believed his own legend, which was the mark of a great con artist. His home, his bank account, his wardrobe, and even his accent proclaimed him ‘old money’ in the rarefied environs of New York’s nouveau riche social circles. By carefully avoiding the real scions of old money, he’d clawed his way up the ladder of wealth and respectability despite his humble beginnings.

  Hathaway’s real name, long lost to time and expensive eradication, was Joe Fink. Not Joseph. Joe. He’d spent his formative years in orphanages and foster homes, and he’d learned to bully back when other kids bullied him about his name. In the streets of the poor neighborhoods where he’d been housed, ‘fink’ meant snitch. And snitches died. However, Joe was one tough cookie and his mission in life, since a very tender age, was to get to the top, by any means.

  At first, he headed in the wrong direction, thinking violence, stealing, and robbery would get him to the top, but by the age of eighteen, with a juvenile record longer than he was tall, he’d committed his first adult felony and landed in prison. There, the good-looking youth, in return for favors he’d never spoken of or cared to remember after his release, had turned his life in another direction. He learned from a much older felon with an upper-class British accent the fine art of the con. Fink was released at the age of twenty-one and had never looked back. His upbringing might have been deficient, but there was nothing wrong with his mind.

  He went through several changes of identity while pulling off more and more sophisticated scams, finally achieving a semblance of respectability. By the age of thirty, he’d married wife number one, the first of three, a former Miss Georgia and the heiress to a minor fortune. His philosophy was that it is not your fault if your dad is poor, but it definitely was if your father-in-law was poor. Her untimely death in an auto accident fueled his rise to fortune. His second wife, the love of his life, died while giving birth to their second child. He married the nanny, with a watertight prenup in place, only a few months later, simply to save her salary. By then, he had all the money he needed, though he never felt he had financial security until he’d become a major importer of Afghani heroin.

  How he escaped with his life when he muscled into his status as supplier to the Mob, no one could explain, and no one who was alive knew to ask. To the world, he was a man of leisure, overseeing his own fortune and that of his late wife in trust for his two adorable children. The nanny was wise enough to get the message when he started treating her like dirt, and when the children were in their late teens, divorced him and moved on. So, he became the most eligible bachelor in New York, and a playboy. His social circle loved him, foibles and all. Sixty was the new forty, so his age would have been no hindrance, even if he hadn’t had several plastic surgeries to disguise it along with his previous identity. And what he lacked in looks and youth the money made up for.

  To the Mob, he was the sole source of Afghani heroin and a major source of cocaine product from South America. His customers would not be pleased when they learned their supply had been jeopardized by an unannounced American operation targeting the warehouses at its source. He had to nip that in the bud.

  Neither of them knew it at the time, but that phone call had been the first salvo in the war between Winston Reginald Hathaway and Rex Dalton.

  Washington DC

  IT WAS 2:15 a.m. when a certain senior senator from Georgia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, received the irate call from Winnie Hathaway.

  “Why the hell didn’t you warn me about the operation?” Hathaway shouted without the courtesy of a greeting.

  The Senator, a man of seventy-eight years who had a bourbon habit, at first thought he’d forgotten an appointment for some kind of surgery. It took a moment for him to clear his head of the bourbon-induced sleep and age-induced fog. The voice kept shouting, until he finally found his own.

  “Who is this?”

  After a few minutes of confusion, the Senator was wide awake and equally enraged. “I don’t know a damn thing about it. I’ll have that rascal’s head on a platter.”

  “Don’t bother serving him up, just get it fixed, pronto,” Hathaway ordered, forgetting for a moment to adopt his genteel accent.

  Hathaway was able to order the Senator to do anything he needed, thanks to a little scam he’d pulled back in his Georgia days. The Senator’s mental state had been deteriorating for a few years, and when Hathaway realized the Senator didn’t recognize him for the person he’d been back then, he took full advantage by blackmailing him.

  As the son-in-law of the Senator’s best friend, Hathaway – under another name – had made an indiscretion go away that would have ended the Senator’s career in that conservative state. The Senator, however, never knew that the indiscretion had been engineered by the helpful young man, to serve his own purposes. He’d felt betrayed when Hathaway in his current incarnation had called and told him how to keep the indiscretion a secret. Though he’d long since lost track of the son-in-law after his friend’s daughter was killed in that car accident, he hadn’t expected the man to reveal his secret. Southern gentlemen just didn’t do that.

  Now the Senator and Hathaway had a relationship much like the nuclear standoff between the US and Russia, known as mutually assured destruction. Both would thrive as long as they didn’t push the buttons to start an attack on each other — it helped to keep the peace. The senator knew and colluded in the source of Hathaway’s income, and Hathaway knew his deepest, most shameful secret. If they each kept the other’s secret, they’d both prosper. They both acknowledged it without saying it and indeed th
ey prospered.

  The Senator knew he was losing his grip. Alzheimer’s ran in his family, and he strongly suspected he’d soon succumb to it. But while he had even half his former vigor, he was driven to wield the power his long tenure in the halls of government had given him. One of the many powers he wielded was that of control of the Director of the CIA. He made the call.

  7

  George Bush Center, CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 2010

  THE CURRENT CIA Director, Bruce Carson, had been in the saddle for a little over four years. He had grey hair, smallish watery eyes, a pale complexion, a croaky, almost cartoon character-like voice, and a predominant interest in furthering himself.

  Carson was a political appointee, just like all his predecessors over the past seventy-plus years. However, it had become clear to expert observers – both within the Company, as they referred to the CIA, and outside it – that the appointees over the last fifteen years or more had trended more to the politically adept than to qualified spymasters.

  Carson had never been in the field as an agent. He’d joined the CIA directly out of college, meeting the minimum requirements as an analyst for European affairs, specifically France. He wrote lackluster reports, kept his head down in a crisis, and attended social events to rub shoulders with the upper levels. Everything expected of a career bureaucrat with his sights fixed on the top of the food chain. It worked. Decades later, he was considered an experienced administrator and a safe bet for a President who had bigger battles to fight.

  The President definitely didn’t want an aggressive CIA Director who would want to take the fight to the enemy. He wanted a fellow internationalist and hater of the CIA to be their Director. Some of the main reasons the President got into office in the first place were his promises to end the Afghan and Iraqi wars, stop treating Russia as an enemy, and repair America’s image on the world stage. That was apart from his promises to end global warming and replace fossil and coal fuel with clean energy sources.

  The president would not admit that the CIA and most of the US intelligence community had become so bogged down in red tape and risk-averse bureaucracy, political correctness, and cultural sensitivity that they could not function. Political strife and division when it came to every aspect of American society, including protection of the homeland, rendered the intelligence community all but powerless to assure the safety of the citizenry.

  This state of affairs was not all of the president’s making. The rot had been building up for decades, but the president certainly contributed to it, just like his predecessors, by not even making an attempt to fix a dysfunctional system.

  Top tier CIA officials were more concerned about being politically correct always, securing their own positions, and moving up the food chain, than about supporting their field operatives. The latter were understaffed, ill-equipped, unsupported, and poorly managed.

  Yet, the vast majority of the American public was oblivious as to just how unsafe they really were. Over time, the people became disillusioned with the entire political system, and became insensitive to it, distancing themselves from what was going on and escaped it all by indulging in the abundance of pleasure and entertainment available to them.

  Just like Roman times when the satirist, Juvenal, wrote about the same phenomena 2,000 years ago, “Panis et circenses, bread and circuses. Two things only the people anxiously desire - bread and circuses.”

  It was in this political environment that some of those in the security community, who really understood the threat against not only the US, but the entire free world, realized they could no longer sit by and watch how their countries were committing suicide. They understood they had to do something. Their solution was to launch various top-secret initiatives, some of which established small, highly efficient, highly secret hands-on intelligence units consisting of highly trained professionals to take the fight to the enemies of the United States.

  The politicians were not consulted about this. They would not want to know about it – they needed plausible deniability – a politician’s creed — like the three wise monkeys. I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything, and I didn’t say anything.

  CRC was one of those secret units, consisting of a small group of former spies and spy masters, a psychologist or two, and an undisclosed number of field agents. A few of the top people at the CIA, at the directorate level, knew about their existence, because they used them to get jobs done that the rest would or could not do.

  Director Carson was not in the group who took the initiative to protect America. Instead, he was in the group who adhered to the insight of the three wise monkeys.

  Carson had risen through the ranks of the Company by doing exactly what those reformers so despised: trying everything in his power to be always politically correct.

  UPON TAKING OFFICE, he had to be briefed about the organization’s various operations, past and present. Inevitably the briefing had to cover outsourcing. In other words, work undertaken on behalf of the CIA by private contractors. He was okay with outsourcing tasks such as building maintenance, paint jobs, repairs, food catering, gardening, and the like to properly vetted private contractors. However, when the briefing eventually got to outsourcing to top-secret contractors undertaking top-secret missions on behalf of the CIA, such as CRC, Carson nearly succumbed to a heart attack.

  If he’d had enough hands he would have, in typical wise monkey style, covered his ears, eyes, and mouth simultaneously.

  As it was, he had only two and used them to cover his ears, “Stop! Right there, right now,” he shouted.

  Sarah Brittle, the Deputy Director National Clandestine Service (NCS), the lady who had the unfortunate privilege of briefing the new Director, stopped talking and turned her gaze from the PowerPoint presentation on her laptop screen to Director Carson. Seeing him with his hands over his ears she immediately knew, they had a problem to deal with. Fortunately, she had not divulged too much at that stage.

  Carson had learned a few things in his years of accommodating and placating superiors. That’s how he got to where he was. Now he was in charge of the CIA, but he had higher ambitions. A Cabinet position next and from there, the White House someday? After all George H. W. Bush sat in this chair once and later became President.

  However, the fact remained, despite his current position, he still had superiors to please before he would reach the top of the ladder. He was not convinced that outsourcing intractable issues to private contractors would keep him in the good books of his superiors. Especially if he kept the information from them.

  It took the combined effort of Sarah Brittle and the division head of the Counter Intelligence Center to persuade the Director to not immediately issue an embargo against the use of private contractors.

  Very gently, and slowly the three of them took the Director on a guided ‘sightseeing tour’ of the western world’s and America’s security dilemmas. At the end of their tour, which lasted a little over a week, they covered not only the covert operations conducted by private contractors, but also gave him an apolitical view of the real state of the union in terms of its security.

  At the end of it, they were certain, the man would not have a good night’s sleep in a very long time.

  Finally, reality managed to take precedence over the Director’s political dreams, and he agreed not to shut the private contractors down, but he insisted on being kept informed, and he wanted to meet the CEOs of all of them. By now the Director also realized that the whole concept of plausible deniability was just phantasm for him. He would never be able to claim it if any of those outsourced operations went south. He also had the predicament whether to break the news to the Director of National Intelligence, his superior.

  JOHN BRANDT, LIKE all the other CEOs of private contractors working for the CIA, had gone to meet with Carson and made sure he gave away as little as possible. Contrary to Carson, Brandt, the Old Man, as his underlings called him, when he was not within earshot, was a former warri
or of the Cold War era. An experienced spook with more missions under his belt than the Director had citations on his wall. He knew how this game was played. So, he managed to make Carson understand that CRC was a highly effective unit, could get things done without the Congressional oversight that plagued and hindered the CIA, NSA, and other agencies, and that CRC was his – Carson’s – to wield as necessary.

  Brandt was also a man who called a spade a spade, so he didn’t hesitate to tell Carson to go and perform an anatomically impossible sexual act on himself, when the latter demanded Brandt provide a list of the names of his agents.

  Carson was visibly shocked and enraged at what he thought was insubordination, until he remembered Brandt was not his subordinate.

  Brandt saw Carson’s fleeting rage and poured a bit of water on the fire, “It’s better you don’t know. You might just have some plausible deniability this way.” Brandt knew those words were always music to the ears of ambitious politicians and officeholders.

  Carson backed off.

  Carson had tried again to get more information out of Brandt. “Tell me about your best agent.”

  “In some circles he’s known as the Ghost,” Brandt had said. “I prefer to keep him that way, a ghost, nameless. It’s part of the reason he is so efficient.”

  “Tell me about some of his exploits, then,” Carson said.

  Brandt saw no harm in regaling his host with some of Rex Dalton’s old missions, minus certain details that would have allowed Carson to put two and two together. At the end of the account, Carson backed off and Brandt thought he’d enlisted the Director to the cause.