Back Blast

63

Jordan Mayes arrived at Langley at eight in the morning and then, after dropping off his coat and briefcase on the seventh floor, he attended a few meetings he had scheduled with staffers who were working through the weekend. Just after noon he took the elevator down to four to visit the Violator TOC. He was surprised to find Brewer out of the office. But he’d just poured himself a cup of coffee when she entered, briefcase and travel mug in hand.

She looked like she had just changed into fresh clothes. Mayes wasn’t a particularly kind man, although working his entire career next to a frosty personality like Denny Carmichael made him appear that way sometimes. But still, he found himself pleased to know Brewer had scheduled a break to rest and attend to herself.

“Hope you had a chance to recharge your batteries,” he said as he held up the pot to refill Brewer’s cup.

But she shook her head and took him to the side of the room. “Actually, sir, I’ve been up all night. Most of it here. I had a change of clothes in my office, but I haven’t been home in over forty-eight hours.”

Mayes was about to order her to leave the TOC for four hours to go home and catch some sleep in a real bed, but she took him by the arm and led him even farther away from the group. “Sir, I’m glad you are here. I need you to see something.”

For the next five minutes Brewer showed Mayes a collection of images from all the Violator sightings of the past week. Specifically, these images were of a group of Middle Eastern — looking men who showed up either during or just after several of the sightings.

“What made you look for these men in the first place?”

“Dakota, the JSOC operative. He and his team had noticed these unknown subjects at multiple locations.”

Mayes was as confused by this as Brewer, and he told her so, but he got the impression she did not believe him. When he asked her for her conclusions as to who these individuals were, she seemed to weigh each word carefully before it came out of her mouth.

“My conclusion is, either someone working here in the TOC, or someone in a leadership role who has access to real-time TOC analysis, is sending this proxy force out into the field to assist with the Violator operation.”

Mayes said, “That leaves someone in this room”—he looked around and counted twelve analysts and technicians, all of whom he had known for some time—“including yourself, myself… and Denny, of course.”

Suzanne Brewer agreed. “I recognize the fact I might not be read into everything going on, but I can’t help but think some of my concerns earlier in the week that I was missing part of the puzzle might make a little more sense now.”

“You thought Gentry did not shoot Babbitt or Ohlhauser, and you thought Gentry had been injured somewhere other than in Chevy Chase.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jordan Mayes was confused, and didn’t know what to make of all this, and this made him feel both impotent and angry. He took it out on his subordinate. “Well, Suzanne, what do you want me to say? These images are indeed troubling, but I don’t have the answers for you. I can assure you Denny and I aren’t running these personalities ourselves. If your operation here is tainted, you need to get a handle on it posthaste. We have enough problems without a group of unknowns shadowing our movements.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and Mayes saw in her face she wished she hadn’t brought it up at all.

He returned to his office and had just sat down when he received a call from one of the electronic intelligence technicians he’d assigned to the Catherine King operation the evening before.

“Mayes.”

“Sir, it’s Kevin Morvay calling from the fifth floor, Signals Intelligence. You asked us to notify you if we found anything of interest in the e-mail of Andrew Shoal at the Post?”

“I’m listening.”

“Uh… would it be possible for you to come up to my cubicle? I think you should see this in person, and I don’t really want to forward it.”

Court did not leave Glen St. Mary immediately after seeing his father. Instead he drove into the woods behind his old high school, parked his Bronco, and slept for over three hours. He woke just after noon, feeling surprisingly good, and then he made his way back to I-10, which would take him west to I-95.

He’d only driven a few minutes when he saw the sign for the Econo Lodge just off the road in Macclenny. On a whim he pulled off the interstate, then rolled into the parking lot. He checked the tags on every car in the lot, looking for D.C., Virginia, or even Maryland plates. These would either be CIA or feds, down here hunting for him. His father had hinted that the area was crawling with people who didn’t belong, so Court expected to see cars belonging to the surveillance members.

But he saw nothing at all other than local vehicles, and a few from nearby Georgia.

It was the middle of the day, so he wondered if all the CIA vehicles were now deployed out on the streets. With a shrug he started to head back to the interstate, but then he noticed a Travelodge Suites, just across from the Econo Lodge. It looked dead over there — only a dozen or so vehicles were in sight — but he drove over anyway and began checking license plates on the cars parked at the small two-story property.

In the front of the building he saw no cars with tags that aroused suspicion; so he turned around the side of the building and headed into the back. Immediately he was surprised by the number of vehicles. While only a dozen cars had been parked out front, there were twice that number in back.

Court passed them by, careful to keep the bill of his ball cap low.

He thought there was a good chance he would find Virginia plates, making it likely they were CIA, but instead he found tags from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Four more vehicles, all large sixteen-passenger vans, were parked at the end of the row, and all four had North Carolina tags.

North Carolina? The first thing that came to mind was Fort Bragg, home of JSOC. Court couldn’t really picture thirty or forty Delta Force or SEAL Team 6 shooters rolling down in a bunch of passenger vans, but he couldn’t rule it out.

Curious, but just barely, Court committed two of these tags to memory as he passed, then he returned to the street.

He drove back to the Econo Lodge and parked. Then he pulled out his smartphone. He surfed the web to a site that offered registration information about license plate numbers to anyone who paid a ten-dollar fee.

Court pulled out one of his prepaid credit cards and typed in some numbers, then he put in the first tag number.

The page thought for nearly a minute, then it spit out a few lines of information.

The car was registered to a corporate fleet in Perquimans County, North Carolina.

Court’s blood ran cold.

Harvey Point was in Perquimans County.

Quickly he typed in the second tag number and found it was registered to the same fleet. These were CIA vehicles, Court had no doubt, and they’d come from the Point. Court only knew two ground unit divisions of the CIA that were permanently billeted at the Point. One was the Special Activities Division; they had a Ground Branch installation there. The other was the Autonomous Asset Program.

Matt Hanley had told him Ground Branch was not involved in the hunt for him. That left AAP. Court wondered if Denny had them taking part in the hunt.

Court all but burned rubber getting back on I-10. He had a mission now, a place to go. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off, but he had every intention of infiltrating Harvey Point and going back to where it all began.

Jordan Mayes drove alone through the gates of Alexandria Eight. He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere without his bodyguards, but he’d slipped out without letting the security logistics office know, and he’d taken his own car, which had been parked in the lot at Langley for the past week.

Here at the safe house he stopped halfway up the driveway, showed his credos to the guard force positioned there, and then continued on to the front door. He climbed out of his car, pulled out a briefcase, and walked into the building. In the large great hall he was checked and wanded and his briefcase was opened and looked through, and then he walked alone up to the second-floor south wing doorway.

He crossed the wide and high south wing hall into the large conference room, made a right, and entered the narrow hallway there. This led him past the bathroom on his left, and then, also on his left, the stairs up to the attic. Beyond this Mayes found DeRenzi and two other security officers standing in the open doorway to Denny’s office. The men parted with a nod to let the second-in-command of the National Clandestine Service through, and then Mayes found Denny sitting at a table by the window and working on a laptop.

Denny looked up. “What is it?”

Mayes said nothing.

Carmichael looked to the security team. “DeRenzi. Step out.”

“Yes, sir.” The three men left and shut the door behind them.

“Talk.”

Mayes walked over to the table, and he stood over Carmichael. “Your attempts to play this entire hand so close to your vest that even I don’t know what you are doing have failed you, Denny.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning this.” Mayes opened his briefcase, took out an iPad, turned it on, and offered it to Denny. Confused, Carmichael took it.

Carmichael saw a film waiting to run, so he tapped the “play” icon with the tip of his finger.

It was the video Andy Shoal had obtained from the woman working in the sandwich shop that morning.

Carmichael watched the entire video without comment and without emotion. When it was over, he simply handed the device back.

“Where did you get it?”

“Out of the e-mail account of Andrew Shoal, the Washington Post reporter. It came from an account belonging to a woman who works at a fast-food restaurant in Dupont Circle. So far Shoal hasn’t sent it anywhere else. I had the tech alter the coding of the video, corrupt it, which just means if he tries to send it now it won’t play. But he’s seen it, he obviously gave some import to what he saw there, and the woman who recorded it presumably still has it on her mobile device.”

Carmichael looked out the window. “What do you think you see there, Mayes?”

Mayes couldn’t believe the question. “Obviously, Denny, it shows a bunch of wounded cops who I seriously doubt are cops. One of these men looks like he probably died within minutes. Nothing like this was reported by Metro D.C. If this gets out, the press will—”

Carmichael shouted, tension in his voice, “It won’t get out!”

“Tell me what is going on, Denny.”

The older man rubbed his face in his hands a moment. After some delay he nodded, looked back to Mayes, and softly said a name.

“Al-Kazaz.”

Mayes cocked his head. “The Saudi intel chief? I know you are old acquaintances. What does this have to do with him? These are his men?”

“You might say, for purposes of the Violator operation… these are my men.”

Jordan Mayes started to sit down in a chair at the table, but it was as if his knees gave out suddenly near the end of the movement. He dropped roughly into the chair.

“Mother of God.”

Over the next thirty minutes, Denny Carmichael told Jordan Mayes everything about Gentry and the Saudi relationship to him.

Not just their service in the Violator hunt — but everything.

When Carmichael finished, his second-in-command looked out the window to the southwest. A thick bank of clouds grew low, gray, and ominous, approaching like a wall closing in on Washington, D.C. After a moment Mayes just said, “Jesus Christ, Denny.”

Carmichael kept his eyes on Mayes’s face. “Of course, you see the problem here.”

Mayes nodded distractedly. Then, “Of course I do. Why didn’t you—”

Carmichael interrupted. “Anything I did or did not do is all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? Could I have managed this better from the beginning? Absolutely. I acknowledge that. But you see I had to make a series of on-the-fly critical decisions. Some I got right. A great many, as a matter of fact, but they have been eclipsed in importance by the very few decisions I got wrong.”

He shrugged. “And here we are today. You are now in the fold, and I need to know that I can count on you for the good of the future of this Agency.”

Mayes finally looked away from the window and towards his superior. “You just told me all this so I would know the stakes.”

“I just told you because you asked me to tell you.”

“Bullshit. If I turn and walk away, you’ll send Hightower or someone else to term me.”

Carmichael’s face was impassive. “Of course not. Jordan. That’s ludicrous. We’ve been together for twenty-five years.”

“We have… and that’s the first time you’ve ever called me Jordan.” He stood and headed for the door on shaky legs.

Carmichael followed him. “You walk out on this and you know what this will do to the Clandestine Service. You have to see this through now. Court Gentry must die, because if he reveals what he knows, our human intelligence operations will be set back a generation.”

Mayes thought about everything Carmichael had just told him. It was true. Right or wrong — and right now this all seemed so fucking wrong — Gentry had to be terminated. If not, Carmichael’s assertion that CIA covert HUMINT would suffer for a generation seemed, if anything, like an understatement.

He said, “This is a lot to take in, Denny. I just need to go home. I just need to think.”

Carmichael’s severe face hardened even more. Mayes had never seen colder eyes in his life.

Carmichael said, “Think all you want, Mayes. But do your thinking alone, and in silence.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and he left through the door to the narrow hallway, passing DeRenzi and his men without a word.