The Survivor

CHAPTER 34

Black clouds blanketed the sky, producing heavy drops that roared against Irene Kennedy’s armored SUV. Her driver slowed further on the curving gravel road, leaning over the wheel to better see through the overwhelmed wipers. It seemed fitting somehow.

Kennedy stared out the window at the deluge but didn’t really register it. The Swiss authorities and Interpol were currently descending on what had been Leo Obrecht’s mansion, cataloging damage, identifying bodies, and collecting evidence. An army of European financial regulators had locked down his bank and were starting the process of unraveling what would likely become the largest and most sophisticated criminal financing operation in history.

Her people were quietly leaking fabricated evidence that would lead to the conclusion that Obrecht had gotten in over his head and provoked the wrath of Louis Gould. There were no guarantees, though. It was a mess of epic proportions. Just like Joe Rickman intended.

Her driver rolled to a stop alongside the farmhouse, getting as close as he could to the steps. The features of the man looking down from the covered porch were obscured by the rain, and for a brief moment Kennedy felt the breath catch in her chest. She allowed the fantasy to play at the edges of her mind for a moment, but she knew it wasn’t Stan Hurley. It never would be again.

Her door was pulled opened and she ducked beneath the umbrella held by her driver.

“Where’s Mitch?” she asked Mike Nash as he moved to open the door for her.

“No one knows.”

A flash of anger interrupted her grief, but she knew there was no point to it. Rapp would reappear when he wanted to. Not a moment before.

“What about…” Her voice lost its strength for a moment. “What about Stan?”

“We have him,” Nash said, leading her inside. “No need to worry.”

“I want to see him.”

“There’s nothing to see, Irene. He’s dead.”

“I know he’s dead,” she snapped. “Just take me to him.”

Nash let out a long breath and led her into the kitchen. There was a walk-in freezer set into the back wall, installed in case they ever needed to feed a large security team. He pointed to it.

“Seriously, Irene. I don’t see the—”

“Open it.”

Nash would never be able to understand what she was feeling. He and Hurley had been close, but she had known the man since she was a little girl. Even after she’d become his boss, he’d always seemed bigger than life to her. Incorruptible. Unwavering. And indestructible. Her intellect told her that he was gone but the child who still lived somewhere inside her couldn’t believe that the man she’d known as Uncle Stan was dead.

Nash reached for the freezer’s handle but then hesitated. “There’s something I should probably—”

“Just open it, Mike!” The intensity of her anger surprised her, but he wasn’t its target. She was angry with herself. Hurley had died trying to clean up her mess, and now she could feel herself losing her nerve. She’d approved his involvement in the Obrecht operation knowing he was old and sick. The least she could do was face him.

Nash pulled back the heavy steel door and she stepped inside, her eyes taking a moment to adjust to the lower light. When they did, she found herself unable to move. She’d prepared herself. But not for this.

“That’s what I wanted to warn you about, Irene. We laid him out next to the steaks, but for some reason it really bothered Scott. So this is what we figured out.”

Hurley was sitting in a chair with a drink in one hand and a cigarette frozen between the fingers of the other. Ice had collected on his eyebrows, hanging down over closed eyes. His suit jacket had been pulled closed to the degree practical but the bloodstained shirt beneath was still visible.

Nash draped a blanket over her shoulders, but she didn’t acknowledge it.

“I’ll give you a minute,” he said, and she heard his footsteps retreat back into the kitchen. For some reason, she could feel neither the cold nor the weight of the blanket. Other than Hurley sitting in front of her, all she could sense was the buzz of the overhead light and the hum of the refrigeration unit.

Her father had been a CIA operative and most of her youth was spent in the Middle East. She’d been no older than six when she’d first met Stan Hurley. He’d come through Baghdad for what she now knew was an extraction in Libya. When her father had been killed in Beirut, his old friend Hurley had done his best to step in. He’d called when he could, made sure she had enough money, and convinced her to pursue her PhD. It had been him who had convinced her to apply to the Agency and he had watched over her career until she became director.

Kennedy approached and put a hand on his arm. “Goodbye, Stan.”

When she finally walked out of the freezer, Nash was sitting at the kitchen table. He stood, a sincere expression of concern on his face. Despite being a former Recon marine with more combat commendations than she could be bothered to count, there was a certain gentleness about him. It was most visible when he was around his family but it came out at times like this, too. She and Rapp saw it as weakness — despite his impeccable ops record, but now she wondered if she’d rushed to judgment. He was a difficult man to dislike and that could be a very powerful weapon in their business. Sometimes more powerful than the gun.

“Are you all right, Irene?”

She wasn’t sure. Handling stress was part of the job, but even she had limits. Rickman’s files were still out there, Leo Obrecht was scheduled to be buried later that week, and she was responsible for the death of her oldest friend.

Nash seemed to read her mind. “It would have destroyed him if you hadn’t sent him, Irene. If you lost confidence in him. Take it from me, this is better.”

She nodded numbly. “What happened, Mike?”

“Gould. Obrecht’s people were expecting them.”

“How? We had Gould. There was no way for him to communicate.”

Nash slid a newspaper across the table and tapped a want ad circled in highlighter. “This newspaper was the only information he got from the outside while we were holding him. Our guys went over it with a fine-tooth comb and found this. It basically outlines the plan. There are similar messages in periodicals and websites worldwide.”

“How did Obrecht die? Was it Mitch?”

Nash shook his head. “Looks like one of his guards.”

It was what she was afraid of. This went higher than the Swiss banker. Someone had gotten to his security team and given instructions that Obrecht was not to fall into the hands of the CIA.

It had been a mistake to send Gould. She’d underestimated his mental instability. As she had Rickman’s. Now was not the time to start questioning her own judgment, but she could feel doubt creeping in. How could it not?

Again, Nash seemed to be able to hear her thoughts. “Sometimes you just have to roll the dice, Irene. Mitch agreed with you that this was our best shot to get to Obrecht and shut down Rickman’s machine. We all did.”

She leaned back in her chair and tried to work through what was happening. Obrecht would never talk but at least his death provided confirmation that someone was pulling his strings. Someone very well informed and very well funded.

Once again she came back to Pakistan and the ISI. The simple answer was that it was one of Durrani’s deputies covering his tracks. But with a new operations director in place, would anyone in the S Wing have sufficient support to pull off something like this? The answer was as clear as it was terrifying: not without Ahmed Taj’s blessing.

“Has there been any progress on the lawyer angle?” she asked.

There was no hard evidence that Rickman would use a law firm to release the information he possessed, but the more she considered it, the more the theory made sense. Terrorists and criminals could be useful, but reliability wasn’t one of their more prominent qualities. No, if you needed something done confidentially and efficiently, a lawyer was the most straightforward solution.

“Nothing yet,” Nash said. “Marcus is working with the NSA on it. Their ability to crunch data is almost unlimited now that they have DaisyChain up and running at their Utah facility. If anything unusual happens at a law firm anywhere in the world and anyone so much as tweets about it, we’ll know.”

DaisyChain was a quiet — though in this case entirely legal — system that scoured the Internet twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It cataloged every news organization website, online magazine, blog, and government site worldwide. Then it translated the pages into English and used artificial intelligence to analyze the information based on whatever search parameters were put into the system.

She’d authorized soliciting the NSA’s help but wasn’t particularly happy about their involvement. They had an incredible infrastructure in place for this kind of investigation, but the organization had been too much in the spotlight lately. The kind of technology they used was just coming into its own, and they were a bit like a toddler with a new toy. If that toy was a chain saw.

“Then it’s a waiting game,” she said. “We sit here until another one of Rick’s videos is released and another one of our operatives is compromised or killed.”

Nash nodded. “For now, I’m afraid so.”