Countdown, p.5
Countdown, page 5
It’s a pleasant morning and Tom Cornwall decides he’ll take the long walk to work, even though he knows there’s a spotter or two out there, keeping him in view. He has a new job now, working for a start-up news organization here in Manhattan. About a year ago he was at loose ends, with Amy starting her new position with the CIA—part of him wants to laugh at the absurdity of that, his wife, his Amy, a field agent with the CIA—and after a book deal had fallen through, he was hunting hard for a new job.
And this one had practically fallen into his lap. Dylan Roper, who had once worked with Tom at the New York Times, had pitched him on it over lunch one afternoon at the Union Square Cafe. “There’s too many amateur voices, too much fake news, too much biased crap out there,” Dylan had said. “I’ve got some financing and I’m getting a crew together to get back to our journalism roots. Hard news, exclusives, fully sourced and backed up, with no agenda except reporting. Criterion News Service. You in?”
He waits at a crosswalk, crowded with other commuters on this beautiful Manhattan morning. After that offer and some long, grueling talks with Amy—“Oh, all right, then,” she had said—here he was, working for Criterion, and enjoying nearly every minute of it. It was good to get back to his old reporting days, and despite a harsh temper and a demanding editorial style, Dylan kept his word, providing the technical and monetary support to make the agency a player in the international news-media field.
The light changes.
Tom moves along with the crowd, wondering, as he does most mornings, what his wife is doing right at this moment.
Jeremy says, “You’re full of shite.”
“No, no I’m not,” I say. “The last briefing before we arrived here, we were told the place was clear of any terrorist groups or militia. But no, one group manages to pop up and go after you right after we complete our primary mission.”
“It happens.”
“Sure,” I say, getting cold up here on this exposed plateau, knowing I’ll freeze in place if we don’t get moving soon. “But why only you? If there had been an intelligence failure, why wasn’t another group chasing us Americans?”
“Amy…”
“When you got ambushed, you refused help. You didn’t want us coming back, you didn’t want us to respond, you didn’t even ask me if I could call in a drone or an airstrike. Nothing. And don’t take offense, Jeremy, but you surrendered. SAS men fight until they run out of bullets, then they use their knives, and if they don’t have knives, they use rocks or their bare hands. Why did you want to give up?”
His eyes are showing me something else—an internal struggle, some kind of debate going on—and finally he says, “Ollie and me…we had another mission. We were to be captured, then brought to a terrorist leader…one we were going to make every effort to kill.”
“Who is this guy?”
Jeremy’s face twists in anger and despair. “One who’s been quietly in the background, financing at arm’s length, one who’s smarter and more capable than anyone we’ve ever seen before. He’s got something big and deadly planned for May 29—the anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the forces of Islam nearly six centuries ago.”
“And he’s here, in these mountains?”
“For a brief moment, that’s all. This chap…he makes Osama bin Laden look like a kindergarten teacher, and he’s going to hit us hard in seven days, and we don’t know how or where. But we have a guess.”
“What’s the guess?” I ask.
“Paris,” he says. “Or New York.”
My beloveds, I think, oh, my Tom and Denise.
Tom Cornwall starts across the plaza leading to his place of work, still thinking how fortunate he is to be in Manhattan, to have a well-paying yet demanding job, and to have his daughter at his side, who has done so well in moving to the Big Apple.
But those little questions Denise asked back there still gnaw at him.
Why doesn’t Mom call? Or email?
Because, he thinks, she’s going up against very bad men who want to do very bad things to young girls and boys like you.
He looks up at the grand and tall building, here because other bad men had gone about their work without being bothered too much by intelligence agencies that acted like independent fiefdoms instead of departments focused on their citizens’ safety; that thought cooperating with one another was a bureaucratic betrayal of sorts; that lost sight of what their job was.
One World Trade Center, just a brisk walk from the open-pool tombs of its predecessor.
And he has a thought: Denise has yet to see where her father works, but Take Your Daughter to Work Day is soon, and that’d be a perfect time.
On May 29.
Chapter 14
“MAY 29 is a week away,” I tell Jeremy. “Let’s focus on today. Tell me you have a Plan C.”
“Of sorts,” he says, taking out a topo map, wincing from his cuts and bruises. The wind is starting to come up harder and I don’t like being out in the open like this. There are ridges, mountain peaks, and fissures all around us, and I have a thought of armed and angry men looking up at us with their own binoculars.
“Here,” he says, pointing to the map. I read the lines and squiggles, and he points to a tiny spot on the map and says, “Small village called Srar. About a four-hour trek if we start now. We should get there before sunset.”
“What, you have a cottage there?”
“No,” he says, folding up the map and putting it in his coat. “An old man with a taxi cab. Who can take us where we need to go.”
“Which is where?”
He looks around at the desolate rock-filled plateau.
“Anyplace but here.”
“Agreed,” I say.
Ernest Hollister is walking quickly down one of the numbered hallways in the depths of Langley when he stops in front of a small desk that has an armed Marine sitting at it, dressed in blue striped trousers and khaki shirt and necktie. Behind him is a thick, locked metal door with a variety of warning signs posted on it and a long metal handle.
The desk has a telephone, a fingerprint scanner about the size of a tissue box, and an old-fashioned, leather-bound journal with lined pages.
“Sir,” the Marine says.
Ernest presents his CIA identification, the Marine carefully writes down his name and service number—there’s a piece of cardboard blocking the previous names so even in-house CIA personnel can’t read upside down and see who has preceded them—and then the Marine hands back the identification.
“If you will, sir,” the Marine says, gesturing to the fingerprint scanner.
Ernest is in a hurry. He doesn’t want to put up with this triple-top-secret nonsense, but he also knows he needs to get into that room as soon as possible. Earlier he had read a transcript provided by the Agency’s Beirut station of recent communications with Amy Cornwall, before she went dark. The message was short and unsatisfying: Yes, she knew she had missed the rendezvous. Yes, she knew she was disobeying orders. Yes, but she had done it for a good reason.
What good reason?
And that’s when the communications had ended.
He places his four fingers against the glass scanner. There’s a brief flash of green light and the Marine says, “Very good, sir.”
He stands up, goes to the door, and unlocks it with a key attached to his belt by a chain. It does look silly and over-the-top, but three years ago a CIA officer had tried to push the process—had tried to get into a room like this without the necessary authorization—and the Marine guard on duty had shot him.
Grasping the handle, the Marine opens the door, and Ernest brushes past him without saying a word.
But the Marine says, “When you need to exit, sir, just toggle the request switch. It’s the green square to the right of the keyboard.”
The room is small, almost claustrophobic.
The door closes behind him and Ernest sits down at a small table, with a keyboard and a square box with a lit green square in the center. There are three chairs, and Ernest is sitting at the head of the table. At the other end of the table is the wall and a large rectangular video screen.
There are six such rooms that Ernest knows of in Langley. Called “bubble rooms,” each is constructed as a room-within-a-room, ensuring that no possible surveillance system could penetrate what is discussed within. Even so, the rooms are swept on an irregular schedule to make sure no recording devices ever get hidden.
Ernest types on the keyboard and the video screen comes alight. A green dot of light means he’s being seen at the other end of this encrypted signal, then the screen snaps into focus.
Before him are two sweaty, tired, bearded men: Santiago Sanchez and Jordan Langlois, sitting in a similar bubble room aboard the USS Wasp, an amphibious assault ship on station off the northern coast of Lebanon. It contains more than 2,000 Marines, constantly prepared to go somewhere and kick the shit out of folks who either need it or deserve it.
“Langlois,” Ernest says. “What the hell happened?”
There’s a brief wait as the signal gets scrambled, bounced off a satellite, then unscrambled at the other end on the Wasp, and Ernest looks with disapproval at the two men. Greasy hair, dirty skin, beards…when Ernest was in the field during his tour in Iraq, he always made sure his troops were cleaned up and looked sharp, no matter the weather or the fighting.
Langlois says, “We were about one minute away from getting exfilled by a Night Stalker when Cornwall ordered us away. She wanted to rescue the SAS guys.”
“And what did you do?”
Sanchez says, “She was in command. We followed her orders.”
“Did you locate the SAS men?”
Langlois says, “We did, in a farmhouse we knew was used by both Hezbollah smugglers and al-Qaeda as a way station.” A crackle of static. The video screen flickers, then comes back into focus. “…was dead. Windsor was alive. There was a brief action, we got Windsor and departed. Then Windsor called in…an air asset under contract to MI6.”
Ernest pauses, “Then where the hell is Cornwall? And Windsor?”
He wonders if the delay between the two stations is lengthening, because neither Langlois nor Sanchez replies. Langlois looks to Sanchez and says, “Windsor turned back as the helicopter was taking off. Cornwall jumped off to join him.”
Ernest says, “Jesus Christ…did either of you know they were going to do that?”
“No,” Langlois says.
“No,” Sanchez says.
“Did you try to make radio contact as you were leaving the site?”
“We did, but no success,” Sanchez says.
“Did…Cornwall or Windsor exhibit any inappropriate activity or communications with each other?”
Again, pauses from the two ex-Marines.
“No,” Sanchez says.
“No, not at all,” Langlois says.
“Very well, that’s all,” Ernest says. “When you return stateside, we’ll have a more extensive debrief.”
He reaches forward and slams the video-disconnect button so hard the plastic case flies into the air.
In the bubble room aboard the USS Wasp, Jordan Langlois looks over at Santiago Sanchez. The green dot of light on top of the video screen, indicating a live connection to an identical screen in Langley, is now off.
But both men know better than to say anything in front of the supposedly dead video screen.
They move their chairs so their backs face the screen.
Quietly Langlois says, “What a prick.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s been a few hours. What are you thinking, Sanny?”
“Dunno. Jeremy went rogue—and Amy went rogue with him, at the last minute. Must be something important, something big. What are you thinking, Jordan?”
“I could go for a cheeseburger.”
“Christ, yes.”
After leaving the bubble room and returning to his floor, Ernest quickly walks to the outside office just next to his own quarters. To Tyler Pope he says, “That news-media leak I was discussing earlier. Remember?”
“Yes, sir,” Tyler says. “A news tip that a contract force working on its own has lost a team working in Lebanon. You told me to release it in…” He glances up at the clock. “In about nine hours.”
Ernest says, “Do it now.”
He opens the door, turns, and says, “But before that, try Horace Evans again.”
Tyler says, “I’ve tried three times before, sir.”
“Do it again,” Ernest says. “I need to know just what the hell they’re doing over there in Lebanon. And if we can’t get the information from Horace, try any other asset we have in that part of the world.”
He goes into his office, closes the door—no slamming the door in public, so that no gossip or rumors ever spread about one’s temperament—and goes to his desk, staring at the phone.
Ernest’s supervisor is Malcolm Rooney, his division commander from Iraq. Ernest recalls the meetings and briefings he had with General Rooney before taking the job, and how adamant the general was about what Ernest could do for him and the Company once the proper time came.
Still, he waits.
And Ernest doesn’t have to wait long.
After ringing for permission, Tyler comes back into his office, looking concerned, and says, “We might have a lead on what that Brit is doing—and perhaps why Amy Cornwall is now with him.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone we’ve known for years,” Tyler says. “Code name BROKER. He was believed to be in that area of northern Lebanon…and Beirut tells us they hear MI6 has been after him for quite a while. But there’s a complication, sir.”
“Always is. What is it?”
“BROKER belongs to us as a confidential asset,” says Tyler. “He’s on Langley’s payroll.”
Chapter 15
WE KEEP up a steady pace as we descend the trail, heading to the village Jeremy says is our destination. As we move along and at times when we take a break, Jeremy tells me a tale that belongs around a campfire in the deep dark woods of Maine on Halloween night, not out here in the open in these rugged mountains.
At one point I take off my tan-colored boots, wincing, and Jeremy says, “Feet hurting?”
“You know it,” I say. “I’m dreaming of getting home and relaxing in some Birkenstocks.”
He raises an eyebrow. “What, you take a size fifty or thereabouts?”
I say a naughty word and add, “No, a thirty-eight, you clueless male.”
He laughs, and I take a moment to pry open the heel of the boot and remove a small, plastic-covered photo of a man and a young girl, both smiling, wearing swimsuits during a lake vacation in Maine, and both belonging to me. I slip the photo of Tom and Denise back into my boot, knowing I’m breaking regulations by carrying something so personal. But breaking rules is part of my roguish charm—or so I’d like to believe. And seeing that photo of my precious ones improves my mood, so I consider it part of my necessary gear.
Jeremy leans against a boulder, takes a swig of water, and changes the subject as I lace up my boots. “For a while now, we’ve been looking for Rashad Hussain, a wealthy Arab and committed terrorist who’s smart, tough, and very, very patient. He’s not part of the Saudi royal family or any of their clans, but he’s devout and wealthy—and very much under the radar.”
Jeremy hands me his bottle and I take a long sip of the lukewarm water. My feet still ache something fierce. I’m cold and hungry. And that damn elastic bandage around my torso, crushing my breasts, feels like it could go deeper at any moment and slice me in half.
“I’ve never heard of him,” I say.
He glances down the trail and then back up it, his MP5 submachine gun across his lap.
“That’s because he’s very, very good,” Jeremy says. “He works through cutouts and more cutouts. He doesn’t care about publicity, about making statements or rambling video denunciations. He’s not looking to attract recruits or followers. All he cares about are results. And he also doesn’t care about ramming cars into pedestrians, or car bombs, or guys wearing explosive sneakers. He has a grander vision than that.”
I’m feeling even more chilled as I return the near-empty water bottle to Jeremy. “Go on.”
“Your 9/11,” he says, putting the water bottle away in his rucksack. “A lot of time has passed. It’s now history, nearly forgotten. But when it happened, it was something so brutal, so out-of-the-blue, so.…defining that it shook up the world order. And even though a large portion of your population was thirsting for revenge, to settle accounts, other voices were heard as well. Appeasers. Deniers. Saying we had brought it upon ourselves. They were ready to surrender and give up before the Twin Tower wreckage had cooled off.”
“That’s not what I recall,” I say.
He scratches at his beard. “Those voices were drowned out, of course. The attack was too raw. But now? Rashad isn’t looking for something that’s been done before. Through bits and pieces, word of mouth, a few intercepts, we know he’s looking to do something spectacular on the twenty-ninth of May, something that will make your 9/11 look like a dustbin fire, something either in Paris or New York. When that happens, those other voices will rise again, taking blame for the West’s actions, pushing to disengage from the Muslim world, to allow their caliphate to be reestablished over the blood and bodies of tens of thousands of innocents. And…”
Jeremy viciously kicks at a nearby stone with his booted right foot, sending the rock tumbling down a ravine. “And Oliver and I, we had an opportunity to stop it—right here in these bloody mountains. As chance would have it, the little task force that runs our joint hunting trips in the field had two targets from the Philippines traveling in this area at the same time we knew Rashad was nearby with a militia group. Bribes were paid, assurances were made, and as you rightly noted…we got captured on purpose. We were to be brought to this group, to Rashad—and we were going to kill him.”
