Inside Out

109

McLean, Virginia

Ten o'clock in the morning found Fifteen in the basement of his house sitting on his sleek Italian leather couch, his feet on a matching ottoman. The cigarette smoke swarming around him caught the flickering light cast by his television set, which was showing a nine-ball championship between two female opponents. He knew that the Asian champion, his favorite, would win, because he had watched the tape at least a dozen times. Now, like never before, knowing the outcome of the contest was comforting.

His frown deepened as his eyes moved from the champion-to-be leaning over the pool table to make a shot on the three ball to the coffee table where an ashtray, piled high with butts and ash, kept company with a vase filled with an explosion of silk flowers. The table was also littered with newspapers detailing the explosion in Manhattan and the intelligence reports on the New Orleans fiasco.

Herman Hoffman had passed on to all of his people the belief that they were untouchable, because the organization had been designed to be both too valuable an asset to the government and too dangerous to screw with. Now that invulnerability was ancient history-a blood-splattered myth.

Since he had met with his liaison at the CIA two hours earlier, Fifteen had been sitting alone in his basement weighing his options, smoldering over the mistake he had made. He cringed at the memory of the smug, sawed-off CIA lackey who had passed on the CIA director's threats, knowing that Fifteen didn't dare do more than sit silently and take the man's insults, one by one, nodding all the while like a shell-shocked imbecile. A month ago no one would have dared confront him, much less dictate to him.

Blame it on ego. Herman's and his.

Herman had set the failure in motion, but Fifteen had blown it all with the deputy in New York by playing games instead of just taking care of the business. All he'd had to do was leave Massey there paralyzed and set the explosives for ten or twenty minutes, instead of toying with him. He had put the deputy into a sealed building with no way out, knowing that he would eventually open that refrigerator if only to scrounge some food. Fifteen had someone stay in the neighborhood until after the bomb went off, to ensure it did. The detonator was set for twenty seconds, not even enough time for Massey to piss his pants. How could he have escaped and ended up in the basement? It wasn't possible, but obviously it had been too possible. It was so damned unnecessary. He had known better, but he had given in to his own stupid arrogance.

Fifteen still couldn't believe that of the eight heavily armed cutouts who had tried to kill Massey on two occasions, he had killed six of them. In total, of the hundreds of rounds they had fired at him, the best killers on earth had managed to put a grand total of one bullet into the deputy's leg. And Fred Archer was dead-all that grooming wasted.

He had honestly believed that it couldn't get any worse, that he had fixed everything Herman had screwed up-had total control of the situation at every turn. Massey's death in that building would have sealed the blame, divided it between Greg Nations and Massey. Manelli's and Russo's deaths and the retrieval of the GPS from that computer would have insured that everything was settled, that the cutouts were out of peril. But that was not to be. Every time he thought he had everything back on track, there was Massey tossing another crowbar into the gears and him running to put it right.

Using information Massey and Fletcher Reed had collected, the director of the USMS, Richard Shapiro, had effectively derailed their dark ops train. Shapiro had the CIA by the nuts, and the agency had reacted by threatening to cancel Fifteen's organization's operating license, cut his ties to intelligence, and even throw Fifteen to a congressional oversight committee. The last threat was a bluff. There was no way the CIA could afford to have the cutout cells made public. But there could be a private reckoning-a bullet in the ear, a knife in the jugular, a heart attack, or perhaps a sans- parachute halo jump into the Atlantic.

Shapiro had somehow gotten his hands on the Global Fifty GPS from Sean Devlin's computer, and unbelievably, knew what it was, how it was used, and that the CIA owned the technology. He said he could prove that Archer's evidence against Greg Nations was fraudulent. Massey had told Shapiro everything he'd learned about Herman Hoffman and Fifteen, and about the existence of the cutout cells.

Fletcher Reed's computer printouts were a map to the members of the cells. And there was the matter of the fingerprint cards from Rook, which matched those of four long-dead soldiers whom Reed identified. Fifteen was still sure he could have gotten all of Shapiro's evidence back if the CIA would have let him-an action they had expressly forbidden.

Fifteen looked back up to the tournament on television. The Asian player had a beautiful, lithe body and coldly calculating eyes.

Shapiro had offered a compromise the CIA had accepted. In return for holding back his evidence, Shapiro had wanted very little. He asked for WITSEC to be cleared, Gregory Nations to be exonerated, and the cutouts to refrain from any further hostilities against Winter Massey and Sean Devlin. He suggested that the FBI might arrest a Russian Mafia leader-they had one named Dobrensky they decided was perfect-who would be linked to the dead cutouts, men who would still be identified as Russian mercenaries. Dobrensky would be tried for conspiring with Manelli to furnish the talent to kill the protected witness. Attorney General Katlin would get a nice show trial and everything would be tied up with a big red bow for the American public. To explain how the mercenaries found Rook Island and the WITSEC airplane, it had been decided that Avery Whitehead, a bachelor nobody was particularly attached to, was to play the money-corrupted villain who had sold the intelligence on the WITSEC locations to Manelli.

Fifteen knew that the compromise would work to everyone's satisfaction. The organization would stay in business, with Fifteen overseeing the cells, although the CIA would have tighter controls on the organization-the inevitable consequence of Rook Island and Ward Field. Fifteen suspected that Herman had done everything he had done, knowing that it would alter, if not destroy, the organization he had fathered, the thing he had owned and couldn't stand to see survive him.

The catch in this all-the thing that had Fifteen worried-was the realization that if Lewis completed his assignment, the deal was off and Shapiro's revelations would create apocalyptic repercussions. The fact was that Fifteen couldn't contact Lewis, his last cutout in the field. Before the CIA had informed him of the developments, Fifteen had already ordered Lewis to complete his assignment at any and all costs.

He remembered something his father had once told him: “You learn from your mistakes only if you survive them.” Herman hadn't, but maybe he still would.

His only hope was to dispatch a team to New Orleans and pray they would find Lewis and stop him before his success made them both dead men. He lifted the telephone receiver and dialed.