Back Blast

54

The fallout from the previous day’s article in the Washington Post had been immediate and intense. The D.C. assassination story was the lead news item all over the USA, after all, and Catherine King’s piece had been the first and only one to provide something that looked, to the layman anyway, like an explanation as to what was going on. That Catherine herself remained wholly unconvinced she was reporting much more than official government spin had been irrelevant to America, even though she tried to relay her misgivings in her article as clearly as possible without pissing off the managing editor of her paper.

She’d been careful to throw in a disclaimer, even going so far as to say much of her information came from unnamed CIA sources who were government employees with their own version of events. Still, despite this proviso, as far as Catherine was concerned, the only thing she’d done this week was scratch the surface on a huge story, then get a completely bullshit version of events from a key player who had his own ax to grind.

And then she reported the false version.

She felt dirty.

Many times in Catherine King’s illustrious thirty-year journalistic career she’d landed a big story ahead of her peers, and each time it happened it played out much the same way. Forced into a victory lap by her paper, she was paraded around other media venues like a trophy.

And today had been just this sort of event for her. She’d done two segments each on CNN and Fox, and one each on CBS, ABC, and NBC. She’d fielded calls from her colleagues at the wire services and National Public Radio, each time talking about what she knew about a madman on the streets of Washington killing two of our nation’s Intelligence officials.

And through it all Catherine saw herself as a phony, because she knew she was profiting off a version of events that was probably far from accurate.

Between each interview, however, often while sitting in a makeup chair, she worked her phone, pumping and prodding all her contacts in the U.S. intelligence community, trying her best to get more information about what the hell was going on over at Langley. She had over fifty feelers out, and she would have had more, but her exhausting schedule of media appearances kept her from doing as much as she would have liked.

In contrast to Catherine, twenty-eight-year-old Andy Shoal was having a hell of a good time. He’d been given the night off of his evening duties as a cops reporter so he could spend the daytime hours in studios and on the phone, making a dizzying series of local and secondary radio and cable shows, talking about how he and his “partner” Catherine King had stumbled onto a terrorist assassin being hunted by the CIA on America’s streets. He talked about the Washington Highlands shoot-out, about Chevy Chase, Dupont Circle, and Columbia Heights, and he made it out like he was Bernstein to King’s Woodward.

In each interview he hinted there were more big revelations to come about the assassin only known as Jeff Duncan, but at this point he was pretty much relying on his senior colleague to make that happen.

Catherine did have a couple of potential leads. She had been checking her e-mail just before seven this morning, filtering through the messages she could put off till this whirlwind of publicity passed and trashing the items from the usual suspects of nut jobs who sent her long missives any time she posted an article. During this morning’s scroll through her messages she held on to five e-mails that looked like they needed her direct attention. Three were from intelligence community contacts of hers offering context about her most recent article, although none of them promised very much. Indeed, they looked more like people trying to get on her bandwagon this week by getting mentioned in a follow-up article, and less like people who had significant information to offer.

The other two e-mails were from unknowns. One claimed to have intelligence about the people killed on Brandywine Street, insisting they were not, as she and Andy had reported, Aryan Brotherhood drug dealers, but rather NSA technicians operating some sort of illegal domestic listening post.

This sounded like complete nonsense to Catherine, but the sender of the e-mail seemed intelligent enough. She decided she’d feel him out with a few follow-up questions before deciding whether or not to set up a phone interview.

The fifth potentially promising e-mail to arrive this morning, however, had her especially curious. It came from an address that looked randomly generated — all numbers and letters — and the sender’s message was both specific and compelling.

The sender of this e-mail knew Carmichael’s name, which meant he might well have been an Agency employee, although this was out in open sources if one knew exactly where to look.

But what most interested King about the message was the sender’s understanding of the protocol of the tradecraft she used when interviewing sources in the clandestine world. Asking for general nonclassified information was exactly how she would initiate a conversation with someone claiming to work in a top secret position, and getting specifics about the event under investigation was her way of establishing relevance.

She decided quickly that “A friend” warranted an immediate response.

Below the message were a phone number and a URL link, and when Catherine clicked on the link it took her to a secure mobile messaging service called RedPhone. This told her the sender knew his stuff, as RedPhone was one of only a very few off-the-shelf communications systems available that were, at least according to the experts she’d spoken to, completely secure.

She already had RedPhone on her mobile, ready to use any time a source demanded it, so she opened it up and typed in the number.

She sent a text first, asking a few follow-up questions, and she received a reply within seconds. When she was satisfied the other party was, in fact, familiar with the workings of the CIA and not just some kid in Cincinnati wasting her time, she called the number.

A man answered with a relaxed and pleasant enough voice, but the conversation was stilted, chiefly because it was clear the person on the other end did not want to be talking on the phone at all. She asked him two questions about the chain of command on a CIA Special Activities Ground Branch support unit, and he answered both with ease, even giving her information she didn’t know, but could readily accept as accurate.

She then offered to meet in a public place with the former CIA technician, and the man on the other end agreed, but as he did so he told her something that made her blood run cold.

“We’ll have to be very careful. I’m not supposed to be talking to you, and Denny Carmichael is having you followed.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Last night I saw your tail when you came home.”

“How do you know where I live?”

“There is an article about you on a local health and fitness website. It says you never miss Thursday night yoga in Georgetown.” He paused. “And you didn’t.”

She knew the article. It had seemed harmless enough when she gave the interview a few months back, but now she realized how foolish she had been. “You followed me from yoga?”

“Just for a bit. I wasn’t the only one. You can assume that is still the case.” The man spent the next five minutes giving her a dizzying array of instructions. How to initiate her surveillance detection route, what trains to get on and off of, where to rent a car without using a credit card, and other means by which to shake the tail he claimed was on her.

He also told her she needed to fight the urge to look for her followers, because that would only ensure they took more care to stay invisible.

The man set a meeting for two p.m. at a restaurant in Union Station that specialized in salads, and then he hung up.

She looked at all the notes she’d written down about the route to take for the meeting to come. This wasn’t the strangest bit of tradecraft she’d employed to meet with a source, but it was truly one of the most ingenious. Even though she was always suspicious to the point of being doubtful about any new source — so few of them panned out into anything worthwhile — the fact that this man knew his tradecraft down cold like this made her more optimistic than usual.

Catherine sat for a CNN live interview during the lunch hour and then immediately headed to the street to catch a cab. Following the mysterious man’s instructions, she went by her bank to withdraw some cash, then headed to a metro station and took the subway to Petworth. From here she walked to a car repair shop, where they rented her a beat-up Honda Civic in exchange for two hundred dollars, plus a one-thousand-dollar cash deposit. She was made to show her ID to a man who made a copy of it, but he did not put it into any computer system, so there was no electronic record of the transaction.

The car smelled old and moldy, but the engine fired right up. She put her purse in the passenger’s seat and then, almost as an afterthought, she pulled her six-million-volt stun gun from her purse and wedged it between the passenger’s seat and the center console.

First-time clandestine meetings with CIA employees were usually the same. The man would want to make certain she wasn’t making audio or video recordings of the proceedings. He’d ask to check her phone and to look through her purse, and the sight of the stun gun had turned off more than one contact. It wasn’t worth the hassle, she decided, so she just pulled it out now while she was thinking about it.

Catherine drove to the station and parked her rented Civic on the roof of the parking garage on 1st Street NE, then she climbed out into the sunny afternoon. She still had twenty minutes before the meet, so she thought she’d employ her own tradecraft by walking around the station to make sure no one was following her. But as soon as she turned to close her door, she felt a presence close, right at her side. Thinking she had accidentally stepped in front of someone passing between cars, she tried to move out of the way, but the figure slipped between her and her car door. She looked up to see a man wearing a hoodie and dark sunglasses, but before she could even focus on his face he took the keys from her hand, quickly but gently. He pressed the button to unlock the passenger’s door and walked her by the arm around to the front passenger’s seat.

As he did this he only said one thing to her, but he said it over and over, in a tone that was both quiet yet commanding. “Look straight ahead, not at my face. Look straight ahead, not at my face. Look straight ahead, not at my face.”

She complied, and she didn’t call out for help only because he seemed so matter-of-fact and sure of his actions. Before she even had time to feel scared she found herself sitting in the passenger seat of her rental.

The lump in her throat grew as the man sat down behind the wheel. She looked up at him but he said the same sentence once again, and she complied instinctively, turning to look straight ahead. As she did this she asked, “What is happening?”

“You are fine. You are safe. Don’t worry. These are standard operational security measures.”

He adjusted the seat and the car rolled forward while, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man adjusting the rearview mirror to match his height.

Catherine’s hands began shaking once they were moving and the reality of what was happening began to catch up. She got the feeling that she must have looked at this man at some point when he came up to her, but now she had not the faintest recollection of what he looked like.

“You are the man from the phone?”

“Yes.”

“But I said I wanted to meet in public.”

“Sorry. My rules today. You wearing a wire?”

“No.”

“What about a GPS tracker?”

“What? No. Why would I?”

He pulled out of the parking garage and turned right.

She said, “I… I didn’t see your face. I swear to God.”

“I know.” His reply was confident. He sounded so… normal.

“People know where I am right now.”

It wasn’t true, and he had to have sensed that, but his reply did not contradict her.

“I’m not going to do anything to harm you. I promise.”

Catherine said nothing, but she shifted in her seat slightly, and while she did so, her hands clutched her purse. The man behind the wheel reached over, took the purse from her, and then gently placed it behind him on the rear floorboard.

She did not protest.

They drove in silence for a full minute, heading north. Catherine kept her eyes straight ahead, her jittery hands on her knees. Finally she said, “You said you were ex-Agency. Was that true?”

“Yes.”

“And you know the man they are looking for?”

After a slight pause he said, “I am the man they are looking for.”

She closed her eyes hard. Furious with herself for not suspecting this from the beginning.

Her eyes reopened, and then her left hand slid back into the tight space between the center console and the seat. She started to turn to him to see if he was looking her way. But just as she began to look up he said, “Eyes out front.”

She locked her eyes forward, but her fingertips walked their way back a little farther, to the item wedged tight between the seat and the console.

While she did this Catherine asked, “What do you want?”

“The same as you, I guess. Information. Answers.”

“Answers? If you are who you say you are, you are going to have a lot more answers than me.”

“Don’t be so sure. I haven’t had the opportunity to interview a bunch of CIA execs on background.”

Catherine corrected him. “Just one.”

“Carmichael.”

Despite herself she nodded a little.

“Had a feeling.”

Catherine’s hand found what it was looking for. The plastic grip of her heavy stun gun.

Her kidnapper turned the vehicle off North Carolina Avenue and onto Lincoln Road NE.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“I’d like to just drive around for a bit, if that’s okay with you. We can talk.”

“Sure,” she said, doing her best to force calm into her voice. In fact, her racing heart beat faster by the second, and she steeled herself for what she was about to do.

And her mind raced along with her heart. When was the last time she had charged the stun gun? The packaging claimed the batteries would hold a full charge for six months. Had she even touched the device in that time? Yes, now she remembered. She charged the gun in early January, less than four months earlier. It should be ready to go.

Although she’d never used the weapon on another person, according to the packaging, it was quite simple to employ. One touch to the skin of the man beside her, ideally in the neck or low back near the spine, would fully incapacitate him for a minute or more.

Catherine tried to appear as nonchalant as possible. “Your name isn’t really Jeff Duncan, is it?”

“What do you think?”

“No. What should I call you?”

“Call me Six.”

Her breath quickened. This confirmed him as the man in Washington Highlands. She said, “The house on Brandywine Street. There was a number six left there.” That had not been reported. The man said nothing. “Was that so the CIA would know you were here?”

“They already knew I was here. It was to show them I wasn’t running.” A pause. “Not anymore.”

They approached a four-way stop. He said, “If you try to bail, I’ll just stop you. Understood?”

Her thumb flipped up the security cap over the stun gun’s actuator. Thinking quickly, she said, “Bail? I’m fifty-four. I’m not sure I ever knew how to bail. But even if I did, those days are firmly behind me.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the man chuckle at this, as if he was completely comfortable snatching an innocent woman off the street.

A large black work truck rolled up to the intersection on the left of the old Civic.

Catherine squeezed the handle of the stun gun so hard it hurt. Her thumb hovered over the red actuator.

Six started to pull forward, but the work truck on the left began rolling out of turn, so he was forced to brake abruptly.

Catherine took her opportunity. In one motion she lifted the device up, spun towards the man behind the wheel, and plunged the metal tips into the right side of his throat, which, due to the black hoodie, was the only exposed skin showing around her kidnapper’s neck.

She pressed the button and an electric clicking sound filled the air. It seemed impossibly loud and violent here in the small cabin of the Honda Civic.

The man behind the wheel cried out as six million volts coursed through his body.