The Persona Protocol

Chapter 45 The Traitor

The Mustang was parked outside an apartment building on a tree-lined street in Washington’s north-western quarter. It attracted no attention from passers-by; indeed, there was an almost identical vehicle a few spaces away. If a search was under way for the black Ford, it had yet to reach this part of the capital.

Adam lowered his window and, after checking that nobody was watching, casually dropped Harper’s phone down a drain. ‘I hope you got everything you needed from it,’ said Bianca.

‘I did.’ He had memorised a select few of the phone’s hundreds of contact numbers. ‘Now they won’t be able to use it to track us.’

‘Is that why you got me to chuck my phone?’ He had made Bianca dispose of it earlier in the day. ‘Great. Now I’ll have to re-download all my apps.’

‘I’m glad you’ve got your priorities straight, Dr Childs.’ There was an acerbic disapproval in his voice that immediately reminded her of Harper. ‘Sorry,’ he added, more normally. ‘I meant Bianca.’

‘So, you’ve definitely got Harper’s persona in your head. What does he know? What’s he hiding?’

‘A lot.’ Flashes of the Director of National Intelligence’s memories had already come to Adam. Harper had forty years of dark military and political secrets stored in his mind. ‘But I’m not going to tell you what.’

She gave him a hurt look. ‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re highly classified, and even though I’m on the run, I’m still an American intelligence officer. I took an oath, and I intend to honour it.’ He considered that. ‘The spirit of it, at least. The letter, I’ve kinda broken.’

‘Just slightly. So what can you tell me? Why did Harper push you so hard to join the Persona Project?’

‘Because he knew Kiddrick and Roger could wipe my memory.’

‘And why was that so important to him?’

‘Because…’ Adam fell silent as the answers came to him, one thought calling up a memory, which in turn opened up another, and another, a domino effect of conspiracy. He slumped back in the seat. ‘My God.’

‘What is it?’

‘Harper…’ Adam began, barely able to believe what he was discovering. ‘Harper was behind it all.’

‘All of what?’

Harper’s persona resisted, desperate to keep the secret, but he pushed the words out. ‘The bombing in Islamabad — the Secretary of State’s assassination. He was behind it!’

Bianca’s eyes widened in shock. ‘You mean — he’s working with al-Qaeda?’

‘No, not at all,’ Adam replied, shaking his head. ‘They’re a threat to American interests — he wants them all exterminated. But he’s willing to use them to help achieve his own goals. Giving Qasid the Secretary’s itinerary was supposed to be a set-up so we could take out a major al-Qaeda cell. But Harper was setting me up.’

‘How?’

‘He changed the fake itinerary for the real one. He wanted them to kill Sandra Easton.’

Bianca was confused. ‘Why would he do that? What would he gain from it?’

‘Two things. Firstly, she was a political opponent. The Pentagon and the State Department have always been rivals, and Easton had been doing a good job of pushing her agenda with the President. Harper detested her. And secondly, al-Qaeda killing such a high-profile target meant that the War on Terror would be reignited.’

‘How could anyone possibly want that?’

‘They would if it meant expanding their power base. Billions of dollars more for the US intelligence community and the Pentagon — more special-ops units, more drones, more satellites, more surveillance systems. As the Director of National Intelligence, Harper is effectively in charge of all of it. The Secretary’s assassination showed that there’s still a major threat against America — and he’s been given the extra money and manpower to deal with it.’

‘You mean… Harper did all that just to get more power for himself?’ said Bianca, incredulous.

‘It’s not like that at all,’ Adam snapped. ‘It’s about protecting America — by reminding everyone that there are forces out there who will stop at nothing to destroy our way of life! I did what needed to be done to make that threat clear—’ He stopped abruptly, realising what he had said. ‘Harper did what had — what he thought had to be done.’

‘He actually believes that paranoid crap?’

‘It’s not crap,’ he said sharply. ‘And that’s not Harper talking, that’s me. I’ve been in the heads of these people — like al-Rais. He doesn’t just want to destroy America, he wants to tear down the whole of Western civilisation and replace it with an Islamic theocracy. His ultimate goal is basically the Taliban as a model for global government. Is that something you want?’

‘Of course it’s not,’ she replied. ‘But al-Qaeda wouldn’t have been able to kill the Secretary if Harper hadn’t given them the information in the first place. He was using you as an agent provocateur!’

He shook his head again, more sadly. ‘And I didn’t even know it.’

‘If you didn’t know, why did he still want to wipe your memory? You couldn’t have been a threat to him.’

‘Risk minimisation,’ he said, following another rippling chain of memories. ‘I’d read the documents I gave to Qasid. Harper thought there was a chance I might put two and two together and realise they were real, not fakes. He couldn’t allow that.’

‘Not to be morbid, but if he was willing to go that far to get what he wanted, why didn’t he just have you killed?’

A cold shiver ran down Adam’s spine. ‘He considered it. That’s why John Baxter was in Pakistan. If I realised the truth, he’d been ordered to kill me.’

‘Baxter?’ gasped Bianca. ‘You mean — all the time he was working with you at STS, he was really keeping watch on you?’

‘Yes. And he was still under the same orders, even after my memory was erased. If I remembered what had happened, he’d take me out. Quietly, though — he would have made it look like an accident.’ Another memory made his eyebrows rise in dismay. ‘That’s what happened to the CIA officer I was working with in Pakistan! He didn’t die in the bombing. He worked it out — but made the mistake of telling Harper directly. Baxter killed him.’

‘It’s a good thing you didn’t work it out at the time, then.’

‘I should have done. I had all the information, but… I wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘You can’t blame yourself for that.’

‘I suppose not.’ He stared morosely through the windscreen. ‘You know what’s funny? In a twisted way, I mean. Harper actually thought that my not figuring it out made me the perfect candidate to replace Tony. One of Kiddrick’s theories about why Tony had his breakdown was that he was too strong-willed, that he was subconsciously resisting the persona imprints. But I was a good soldier who followed orders and didn’t ask questions… and I was broken. I wanted to forget who I was.’

An image from Harper’s mind came to him, as disconcerting as the similar one from Qasid’s memories: himself, as seen through the eyes of another. But the quiet confidence of the agent on a mission was gone. This Adam Gray was a shattered wreck, crippled by loss and guilt. The only thing keeping him from a complete breakdown was his sense of duty.

And Harper had taken advantage, filled with contempt for the younger man’s emotional weakness even as he saw the potential to make use of it. Persona… That puffed-up little prick Kiddrick claimed he could wipe a man’s mind, and condition him not to think about it. Two birds with one stone — reactivate a promising project, and make sure that Gray never puts the pieces together. I could assign Baxter to keep an eye on him…

So events had been set in motion. Harper had ‘persuaded’ Adam to join STS, and Kiddrick and Albion had erased his memories — without ever being told the complete story, just enough to convince them that his mental injuries had been sustained on a mission of the highest secrecy, and that he should never be allowed to remember it. For his own emotional protection.

The procedure had worked. More effectively than either doctor expected. As they had explained to Harper, the trauma they were trying to delete was intimately linked to countless other memories… and the process had wiped them all away. Albion was uneasy about it, but Kiddrick had been positively crowing. Their new agent was an empty vessel, perfectly primed to take on the other personas that would allow him to complete his missions.

And I was safe… except that idiot Kiddrick had made a recording of Gray’s original persona without telling me!

‘Adam?’ He blinked as Bianca gently touched his arm, emerging from the Admiral’s thoughts back into the real world.

‘Yeah, I’m here, I’m fine. I was just… just seeing things from Harper’s side.’

She bit her lip. ‘He’s not trying to take control, is he?’

He knew she was worried about what had happened in the Cube, when his despair had almost allowed Qasid’s persona to overcome him. ‘No. Absolutely not. I won’t let him. That bastard used me. He took literally everything from me and tried to turn me into some kind of — clockwork soldier.’ Bitterness and anger coloured his words. ‘Wind me up and watch me go.’

‘Well, nobody’s telling you what to do now. Except yourself. So what are you going to do?’

His response was immediate. ‘I’m going to bring that son of a bitch down. Tell people what he did — and make him pay for it.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know yet.’ A cold smile. ‘But he does.’

The answer was already in his mind. All he had to do to find it was think. What is Gordon Harper’s worst fear? How can he be exposed?

Harper knew. And now, despite his persona’s attempts to deny him, Adam did too.

He sat in silence for a long moment, absorbing the flood of information and images and feelings. A name and face jumped out: Alan Sternberg, the National Security Adviser. A rival — and a threat. The nightmare scenario for Harper was Sternberg discovering the truth about the events in Pakistan. There would be no bargaining, no deals, no quiet cover-ups. Sternberg would destroy him without hesitation if he ever had the opportunity.

Was there a way to give him that opportunity?

Yes.

Adam felt Harper rage in protest inside him, but he pushed the DNI’s fury down and started the car. ‘Where are we going?’ Bianca asked.

He smiled. ‘A hardware store.’

She was surprised. ‘Why?’

The smile widened. ‘To solve Levon’s puzzle.’

‘Sir,’ said one of the Secret Service agents, listening to a message through his earpiece. ‘A Mr Baxter just arrived. He says you asked to see him.’

‘Let him in,’ Harper ordered. He irritably waved away another agent still fussing about him. The cut on his forehead had been bandaged and he had been given some painkillers, but refused to take them, wanting to keep his mind sharp.

Gray knew everything he did. That meant Gray also knew how to expose him. Even though he had done what he did solely to protect America’s interests, he knew that the snivelling left-wing parasites infesting Washington would not accept that as justification. If they learned about it, they would twist it in the media to bring him down in a howling witch-hunt of a kind not seen since the trial of Oliver North. He would be accused of treason; every past decision second-guessed, every black operation under his watch dragged into the light. A disaster for American intelligence — no, a disaster for America.

As a patriot, he would do whatever it took to stop that from happening.

At the back of his mind for the past ten months had been the concern that something might emerge that could destroy him. The risk was minimal — he had taken every possible precaution, from the deletion of incriminating files at the small end of the scale all the way up to Gray’s mind-wipe and the elimination of his CIA contact in Islamabad. But there were some things that even the Director of National Intelligence could not simply erase from the record.

One of those was foremost in his thoughts right now — which meant, he was sure, that it was also foremost in Gray’s. It would not be easy for the rogue agent to obtain. He had seen the facility for himself; security through obscurity was backed up by security through physical barriers — and beyond them, physical force. But if anyone could do it…

‘Admiral!’ A familiar voice caught his attention. He looked round, seeing Baxter hurrying into the kitchen. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Harper replied with irritation. He addressed the Secret Service agents. ‘All right! The situation’s under control. Go back to your duties.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’ the first agent asked. ‘If there’s been a security breach, we should—’

‘You’ve got your orders, agent,’ he snapped. ‘Is my car here yet?’ After summoning Baxter, he had called back his chauffeur.

‘Yes, sir. It just got here.’

‘Good. Take its driver to wherever he needs to be. Mr Baxter will handle everything from now on.’

The agents were clearly unhappy about surrendering authority, but had little choice except to follow his orders. They filed out.

Baxter regarded the PERSONA equipment with grim dismay. ‘Did Gray use the machine on you?’

‘I don’t know — I don’t remember,’ Harper replied. ‘Which means I have to assume that he did, and then wiped my memory.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ the former Marine muttered. He went to the table, staring at the gear upon it… then with a snarl threw the PERSONA device to the hard floor. The screen broke loose and skittered across the tiles. He was about to do the same to the recorder unit — then his eyes widened as he saw what was inside. ‘Sir — Gray’s disk! It’s still in the recorder.’ He pulled out the memory module and held it up.

‘Why would he leave it behind?’ Harper wondered, before the answer came to him. Of course — as soon as Gray had been imprinted with his memories, he knew that the secondary alarm hadn’t been deactivated and had to make a hurried departure before the Secret Service arrived. So he had been forced to abandon something vital… ‘Destroy it.’ Baxter gave him a look of puzzlement. ‘Smash it! Now!’

Baxter dropped the disk to the floor and stamped on it, grinding it under his heel. The plastic shell cracked and split, exposing densely packed microcircuitry. Another blow and it broke in half, silicon splinters scattering.

Harper regarded the destruction, satisfied. ‘There are only two pieces of evidence against me, and that was one of them. As for the other one… come on. We need to get to Suitland.’

He marched for the door, Baxter hurrying to catch up. ‘Why?’

‘Because,’ said Harper, grim-faced, ‘there’s a federal secure data storage facility there. It’s the only place Gray can get proof about what happened in Pakistan.’

Shock crossed Baxter’s craggy face. ‘You told me all the files had been destroyed!’

‘They have. But there’s something that’s impossible to delete — the activity logs.’ Seeing Baxter’s blank look, he explained: ‘Every time a file is created, accessed, edited or deleted on the USIC network, the system notes it in a log — along with the identity of the person who did it, and the terminal they used. It’s a security measure: if the same login is used in two different locations at the same time, say, the computer raises an alarm.’

‘So how does that prove anything?’

‘Because,’ growled Harper, ‘it shows that I personally accessed and altered the file that was given to Gray to pass on to al-Qaeda — Easton’s itinerary.’

They exited the house. Baxter’s black Suburban was parked nearby, blue lights flashing. Behind it was the empty Cadillac. ‘But the actual file was deleted, wasn’t it?’ said Baxter.

‘It doesn’t matter. The logs establish a chain of contact between me and Gray immediately prior to his mission in Islamabad. If Gray gets hold of them and passes them on to the wrong person, we’re finished. Even without the files, the logs provide enough evidence to start an investigation. And there are plenty of hard-nosed little bastards who’ve been waiting for the chance to attack me.’

‘People like Sternberg?’

‘He’s top of the list, yes.’ Harper spotted someone in the SUV. ‘Who’s your driver?’

‘Reed.’

‘Is he trustworthy?’

‘You can trust all my men, sir.’

‘Good. You drive my car, and tell him to clear the way for us. Oh, and I need a phone.’ Baxter went to the Suburban and issued instructions, returning with Reed’s cell phone and giving it to Harper. The two men got into the Cadillac, the DNI taking the back seat. The vehicles set off. ‘Are your teams still in the field?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get them there too. I want Gray and Childs dead before the cops or anyone else get involved.’

‘On it.’ Baxter took out his phone, and was about to dial a number when it rang. He answered it. ‘Baxter. Yes? Okay, hold on. The Admiral’s here with me.’ He put it on speaker. ‘Sir, you should hear this.’

‘We got a hit on Dr Childs’ credit card,’ said the man at the other end of the line. ‘It was used at a hardware superstore in Brentwood.’

‘How long ago?’ Harper demanded. Brentwood was in eastern DC, some five miles north-west of Suitland. If Gray was going there, he had a considerable head start.

‘About fifteen minutes.’

‘Why wasn’t I told immediately?’ asked Baxter.

‘You ordered us to get a list of anything Dr Childs or Agent Gray bought. The manager was uncooperative and wouldn’t give it to us without a warrant. We had to wait for a FISC judge to issue one.’

‘Well?’ said Harper impatiently. ‘What did they buy?’

‘I’ve got the list here, sir. It’s, uh… odd.’

‘Just read it out!’

‘Yes, sir. The card was used to buy a compressed air cylinder, a pressure relief valve, an inner tube, a six-foot length of PVC pipe, a hundred feet of rope, a light fitting, five pounds of lead shot, some air hose, a bicycle pump, a roll of duct tape and, ah… two footballs.’

Harper and Baxter exchanged bewildered looks in the mirror. ‘Footballs?’ the latter asked.

‘Yes, sir. American footballs, not soccer.’

‘Okay,’ said Harper in acknowledgement. ‘If there’s any further activity on their cards, inform us immediately.’

‘Footballs?’ echoed Baxter as he closed the line. ‘What the hell do they want with two footballs?’