Full Black

CHAPTER 17

Robert Ashford sensed his phone was going to ring before it actually did. It wasn’t any grand feat of clairvoyance on his part, though. He’d been expecting the call most of the day. In fact, he should have been the one initiating it.

Considering how the Los Angeles operation appeared to have gone sideways, he probably also should have taken the day off to monitor things from a secure location. But that was exactly why he had come in to work. On the remote chance that things went bad in L.A., he needed to be able to maintain as much plausible deniability as possible.

Dismissing his staff from around the small conference table, the barrel-chested man in his early sixties with steel-gray hair and a flat, broad nose unwound the earbuds from around his cell phone. He was one of the deans of British intelligence, and those who worked under Ashford were used to his secretive and sometimes enigmatic nature. They saw him as “old school,” an espionage legend who had cut his teeth in the Cold War and who continued to play his cards very close to his vest.

From his perfectly knotted tie, neatly manicured nails, and gleaming cufflinks, to the mirror-fine polish of his shoes and knifelike creases in his trousers, he cut the gallant figure of an aging British gentleman.

He had been with Britain’s domestic intelligence service for more than thirty years. MI5 was responsible for national security, counterterrorism, and counterespionage within the United Kingdom. It was similar to America’s FBI and was often confused with its sister organization, MI6, which was like the American CIA.

Ashford’s staff also knew that he had personal relationships with many in the royal family, as well as leading figures in the British business world. No sooner had they exited and closed the door to his office than the speculation began about what powerful figure he was most likely speaking to. Little would they suspect that he wasn’t doing any of the talking.

“What’s going on, Robert?” James Standing demanded. “This was supposed to be a simple undertaking. In fact, what was that stupid cockney expression you used with me? Bright and breezy?”

Though Standing was speaking on the encrypted phone that Ashford had provided for him, he had been cautioned to speak in code and be as roundabout as possible when discussing things. The United Kingdom hosted two enormous listening posts that fed emails, text messages, and cell phone calls into the Americans’ NSA listening program, Echelon. Every electronic communication in the United Kingdom, be it over the Internet, a cellular network, or a telephone line, was harvested and a copy kept on permanent storage at one of the NSA’s massive server farms. It was always better to be safe than sorry, and Ashford always assumed someone was listening in.

“There has obviously been some sort of hiccup,” said the MI5 man.

“Hiccup?” replied Standing back in Manhattan. “You Brits are amazing. I think fuckup would be a more apropos term. Wouldn’t you?”

Ashford didn’t bother responding. There were times when Standing really got under his skin.

“Are you still there?” asked the billionaire.

“Yes. I’m still here.”

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

The MI5 man pinched the bridge of his nose. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to tell me what happened,” replied Standing. “I want to know how we went from bright and breezy to all screwed up.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have access to that information right now. The sources we’d normally reach out to in a situation like this are not answering their phones.”

“Don’t give me that we bullshit, Robert. You need to get to the bottom of this. Right now. Do you understand me? Only some of the bread got baked. What’s more, the bakers seemed to have been very badly burned.”

Ashford felt a migraine coming on. Before his staff meeting, he’d been flipping back and forth among several American news feeds. He’d been able to assemble a limited picture of what was happening, but there were still too many blanks that needed to be filled in. He had called his contact in Los Angeles, but the number was no longer in service. He had gone dark. Ashford was not pleased.

The Russians were normally very good at this type of work. In fact, the MI5 man had paid a lot extra to use former Spetsnaz operatives. It was a bit like using a sledgehammer in lieu of a fly swatter, but Standing had a bottomless well of cash, and he wanted the cleanest of clean, the most untraceable of hits.

Each weapon was only to be fired once and then gotten rid of. The hitters were then supposed to be taken to a hotel near LAX to fly back to Russia the next morning. The good thing about hiring Spetsnaz operatives was that on the outside chance something got screwed up and they were caught, they would never, ever speak. Escrow accounts had been set up for each of the hitters, and news of their arrest would trigger an automatic payment to their designated beneficiary and annual payments would continue to be made for every year they remained in prison. It was referred to in Russian as an annuity of silence.

The fact that the operation appeared to have been foiled didn’t make any sense. The targets had been three American civilians with no bodyguards or security presence whatsoever. They had neither military nor law enforcement backgrounds. It should have been one of the easiest contracts ever. But somewhere something had gotten screwed up.

“Kitchen fires are very dangerous things,” continued Standing. “They have a way of spreading.”

Ashford didn’t exactly know how to interpret that remark. Was Standing worried about Salomon coming after him? “You’ve got plenty of fire extinguishers,” the MI5 man replied, referring to the billionaire’s personal security detail. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“That’s the problem with fires. You may think you have it under control, but then suddenly it explodes and it’s all around you. Those kinds of fires get lots of news coverage. No one likes fires, but those are the fires I like the least.”

“I understand.”

“Just in case,” Standing asserted, “let me be perfectly clear. If I start smelling smoke, I am going to be very upset.”

“Believe me, I’m just as upset as you are.”

“Then get this handled. Immediately.”

“I’m working on it,” replied Ashford.

“You’ll want to do better than that,” said Standing. “This one could have a very big impact on your career.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Check the box,” ordered the billionaire who then terminated the call.

The box referred to the email account Ashford and Standing shared. It was an additional form of clandestine communication that allowed them to communicate without actually sending any messages over the web. They conversed by leaving messages for each other in the account’s draft folder.

Rising up from the conference table, Robert Ashford walked to his desk and sat down in front of his computer to log in through a cleansed, difficult-to-track server on the Isle of Man. He knew that whatever was waiting in the draft folder wouldn’t be good news. When he opened the message from Standing he immediately realized how much trouble he was in.

He had been careful, but apparently not careful enough. He scrolled through picture after picture of himself in Yemen. They showed him arriving at the apartment building and then atop the roof unpacking the RPG.

The very last picture in the series turned out not to be a picture at all, but a video. Though he knew what that would show as well, he still clicked on it. Instantly, he was sorry he had.

The video showed Ashford firing the RPG and then leaving the building, but several minutes of footage followed. It focused on the carnage the RPG had wrought: the twisted wreckage of the burning car that had been targeted, as well as the dead, dying, and wounded in the street. Before the video ended, it panned the cafe across from where the car had been parked. There, Robert Ashford saw a quick glimpse of a non-Arab face and knew exactly who it was.

It was the man who had captured Aazim Aleem, had stuffed him in the trunk of that white Toyota Corolla, and had driven him to the cafe to be given up to the CIA. The threat from Standing left no room for confusion.

Ashford’s migraine flared. He reached into his desk drawer for the bottle of painkillers, but then stopped. He’d have to work through the pain. He couldn’t afford to have his brain muddled.

He’d made a mistake trusting Standing. Actually, that wasn’t correct. He had never truly trusted the billionaire. He’d trusted their commitment to a shared cause, but he shouldn’t have overlooked Standing’s self-preservation instinct.

Ashford leaned back in his chair, shut his eyes, and massaged his temples with the heels of his hands. He was in a dangerous box and would have to chart a very careful course. Injecting Scot Harvath, the man from the cafe, into the game had just raised the stakes to a new level.