Black List

CHAPTER 29

VIRGINIA

Reed Carlton wanted to avoid the D.C. area at all costs, and that included Georgetown. There were just too many cameras. He had risked it once to load Tommy’s dead drop and set up their first meeting, but that was enough. Banks agreed with him.

Banks suggested that they communicate via the classified section of the Washington Post until they could develop drops outside the city. It was an old espionage tactic that would allow them to fly beneath the radar. All they would need was a debit card purchased with cash at any drugstore, grocery, or Walmart. The only drawback was the lag time from when the ad was placed to when it actually showed up online.

Carlton explained to Banks how classifieds worked on the Internet. Thankfully, the older man was well versed enough in the Web that they were able to set up a system quickly.

The best way to hide their communications was to go to Craigslist where they selected two crowded but not obvious source cities. Outgoing messages were disguised as ads on the Oakland list and responses were posted on Tampa’s. This way, there was no billing trail. And while their communication wasn’t exactly instantaneous, it was about as close to real time as they could get in exchange for such a low-level risk of being intercepted.

Twenty-four hours after setting everything up, Banks placed a coded ad on the Oakland Craigslist, requesting a meeting as soon as possible. Carlton responded through an ad of his own on the Tampa list, and a few hours later, they were seated at a late-night restaurant outside Fredericksburg.

“You’ve got big troubles, my boy,” Tommy said after the waitress had poured their coffees and walked away. “Your office has been locked up tighter than a bank vault.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s been sealed and they have guards on it.”

“Who does?” said Carlton.

Banks raised his coffee cup and took a sip. “FBI, but it feels like CIA.”

“So this is payback from them.”

“It’s suspicious, I’ll give you that. I reached out to a whole bunch of my Agency contacts and not a single one of them would talk to me. Not one.”

“So what does that tell you?”

“It tells me,” replied Banks, “that something pretty serious is afoot.”

“Yup.”

“But just because nobody wanted to talk to me didn’t mean I rolled over and gave up. Somebody, somewhere in the chain, scared the hell out of everyone and ordered them to play dumb. That’s some pretty serious pressure, so I decided to apply a little pressure of my own.”

Carlton studied the man sitting across from him. “I love you, Tommy. You Hoover’d somebody, didn’t you?” Much like storied FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, Thomas Banks had been rumored to have developed dossiers over the years on Agency higher-ups he didn’t care for. He wasn’t a blackmailer per se. The files in his mind were only for insurance, to be played like cards if and when he ever needed to accomplish an honest objective while a dishonest obstacle sat in his path.

“It’s probably better you don’t know the details, but yeah, I pulled a file I have on somebody there and I played it. It’s some pretty bad stuff from the 1970s. I don’t know what the statute of limitations is, but it’s enough to cause him a whole mess of problems and hold up his pension, not to mention the PR nightmare it’d be for the seventh floor.”

“I appreciate your doing this for me.”

“Don’t thank me,” Banks replied. “The guy’s a weasel. He deserves it. The problem is that he didn’t give me very much.”

“One step at a time. I’m all ears. What’d you get?”

“The Agency can’t go after American citizens on American soil. That’s why the domestic legwork has fallen to the FBI. The real momentum behind this thing, though, seems to be coming from somewhere else. Someplace pretty clandestine with a lot of power.”

“More clandestine than the Agency? What are we talking about? The Director of National Intelligence?”

“Whoever it is, they’re the ones who appear to have built the case against you.”

“Me?” replied Carlton. “What are you talking about?”

“Actually, it’s not just you. It’s multiple players in your organization.”

“My ops division, you mean?”

“My guy wouldn’t say.”

“What’s their case? What do they think they have?”

Banks again raised his coffee cup for a sip, but this time stopped partway. “Treason,” he replied, half whispering the word.

Carlton was stunned. “Treason? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s insane.”

“I agree, and I could tell just by the look on my guy’s face that he didn’t believe it either.”

“Is he someone I know?”

Banks set his coffee cup on the Formica table. “Like I said, it’s better if you don’t know the details.”

Carlton understood and, leaning back in the booth, pulled his cup and saucer toward him. “So, what specifically is the charge? What is it we’ve allegedly done?”

“That’s what I’m still trying to find out. The minute anyone hears the word treason, it’s like a toxic chemical spill just happened. Everyone takes a giant step back. Nobody wants to go anywhere near it. Get too close and it could affect you too.”

“There’s more to this. Somebody can’t just accuse us of treason and put a hit on all of us. There has to be due process.”

“You and I both know we’ve been carrying out extrajudicial activities since the birth of this nation.”

“Against foreign enemies of the state,” said Carlton, “not American citizens.”

Banks shrugged. “A few Americans have also been helped on to their just rewards over the years.”

“True, but very, very few, and there’s always been a review process.”

“How do we know there wasn’t one this time?”

Carlton looked at him. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Not at all. I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

“But there’s no way any panel could come to the conclusion that I, or any of the people that work for me, could even be capable of treason.”

Banks shook his head. “You really do need to be retrained. Take your emotion out of this.”

“Do you know how many of my people, exceptional people, exceptional patriots, were murdered?”

“Yes, I do, and I’d be angry as hell too, but I’d lock it away somewhere and save it until I figured out what the hell was going on. Because if I didn’t, it’d probably get me killed.”

The older man let his words hang in the air for a moment as he took another sip of coffee. “You’re smart, Peaches,” he finally said. “Smarter than I ever was, but you’re going to need every last ounce of cunning you can muster to get yourself out of this.

“You’ve been labeled a traitor by your own government, and based on whatever evidence they have, they found the threat so compelling that it called for your immediate termination. I don’t see how anything could ever get more serious than that. So you can be pissed off all you want after this thing has been laid to rest and we’ve found a way out to the other side of it.”

Slowly, Reed Carlton nodded.

“Now that we seem to know who is out to get you, we need to winnow down the how and the why,” said Banks. “If we can reverse-engineer this thing, we may be able to get you your life back.”

“It won’t bring my operators back,” Carlton replied. Though he kept checking the Net for messages on the dating sites they used for emergency messages, there hadn’t been one. He knew they were dead.

“No, it won’t bring your men back. But once we have this thing figured out, that’s when I’m going to stand back and let you take your anger out of that box. That’s when you make sure that every last person involved in this pays. I don’t care who it is, even if this goes all the way to the Oval Office itself.”