Tom Clancy Support and Defend

8

Dominic Caruso rolled slowly and gingerly out of his bed and pulled himself up to his feet with the aid of a belt he’d wrapped around his bedpost for just that purpose. He walked on legs that felt lethargic from lying prone for an extended period of time, and the bright bulb in his bathroom made his head pound.

Since arriving home he’d climbed out of bed only a few times to answer nature’s call or to grab a water bottle or some canned food from his kitchen. Adara Sherman had called him just hours after she dropped him off at his place; she offered to come by with some groceries because she knew Dom wouldn’t have anything fresh in his condo. Dom thanked her for the call, but he told her his next-door neighbor was running errands for him right then.

It wasn’t true. Dom just didn’t feel like having any visitors. Yesterday afternoon he got up and moved around a little more. He took the elevator downstairs to the tiny market in his building, and he came back up to his place with two plastic bags full of canned food, yogurt, sodas, and beer.

He picked at a can of tuna and another of peaches in sugary syrup, drank a beer, and went back to bed.

Dom was determined to do something productive today, despite the aches and pains. He started his shower, then took the bandages off his chest and forearm. He stood there with his sore body pressed up against the cold tile next to the shower for several minutes, until finally he stepped into the water.

The hot spray stung his wounds, but it went a long way toward making him feel human again. After the shower, he changed the bandages on his forearm, drank coffee, and went into his living room. He had all the lights off in his place now because the lights added to his headache, so he sat in the dark with his laptop on his couch and spent the early part of the morning reading everything he could find online about the attack in India. Much had been written on the subject, but the vast majority of it was sensationalized, editorialized, or simply conjecture, and so much of it — he knew because he had been there and seen it firsthand — was dead wrong.

He had to turn his computer off after an hour or so. The images from the event and the speculation about it only forced his brain to relive everything that happened, to experience again the moment as a virtual after-action report.

With this “hot wash” Dom inevitably analyzed his own actions in the most critical way possible. He told himself now he should have gone upstairs with Yacoby from the beginning, covering the stairwell and keeping the other attackers downstairs instead of splitting their access points. He should have dispatched the poorly trained attackers in the kitchen more quickly than he had. He should have anticipated that the terrorist with the knife in his chest would not have died quickly, and therefore remained a threat.

There were a lot of things he could have done differently, and now, as he sat on his couch in his fifth-floor D.C. condo, he wished he’d done them all.

The more Dom thought it over, the more certain he became of one thing.

He had failed Arik and his family.

The death of Dom’s twin brother, Brian, played out in his mind in much the same way. He’d spent the intervening years dissecting every aspect of the event, judging himself to be responsible. He could have been faster, if not in the gunfight itself then at least in his treatment of Brian’s gunshot wound. He could have saved him.

Dom knew he had done his best, but both in Libya and in India, his best just hadn’t cut it.

At a little after nine he shook the images and anguish out of his mind long enough to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee, his third of the morning. He’d just lowered himself back down to his sofa with his laptop when his phone chirped. He looked down and saw it was Adara Sherman calling, no doubt checking up on him again. He let the call roll to his voice mail.

Soon after this, his doorbell rang. The chime made his head throb. He rolled his eyes, thinking it must have been Sherman, which would mean she was efficient as hell in her efforts, though he expected nothing less. But when he opened the door to the bright hallway, standing in front of him was a fit-looking man in a suit and tie under a trench coat, wearing a perfect part in his dark hair. He was taller than Dom by several inches, with big round shoulders that his coat could not conceal. The man said, “How ya doin’, Dominic?”

Dom knew this man, though he hadn’t seen him in several years. “It’s Albright, right?”

Darren Albright nodded. “That’s right. Good memory. I’m impressed.” They shook hands.

“It has been a while.” Dom’s mind began racing. He remembered Albright from Quantico, the FBI training academy. To the best of Caruso’s recollection, he’d been a cop for several years before joining the FBI, and was several years older than Dom.

“Special agent?”

“Supervisory special agent, for what it’s worth.” Dom was impressed, he had obviously played his cards right at the Bureau.

What in God’s name is this guy doing here?

Albright said, “Good to see you.” He stood there a moment, obviously waiting to be invited in.

Caruso shuffled.

The FBI special agent said, “Can I have a few minutes of your time?”

“Sure.” Shit.

They stepped back into the condo and Dom flipped on a couple lights. He looked around at his disheveled place. The only company he ever had around here was female: usually brief intense flings whom he would bring over to impress with a bottle of wine and a beautifully cooked Italian meal. In these instances he usually had plenty of time to make his place presentable.

In the day he’d been home from India, on the other hand, romance had been the last thing on his mind, and his condo looked the worse for it. “Sorry about the place,” was all he could say.

“It’s no problem. I was a bachelor myself until last year.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dom said, feigning interest in his old classmate’s love life. “Congrats.”

“Thanks. Got a baby on the way in August.”

“Awesome.” He thought of Dar and Moshe, and he steered the conversation in another direction in hopes the images would drift away. “So, you got the field office here in D.C.? That’s a hell of a good deal. I got Alabama as a first office of assignment.”

“I know you did. That thing you did down in Birmingham, punching the ticket of that child killer. That was a righteous piece of work. I told myself I’d buy you a whiskey the next time I saw you.”

Caruso stood in the middle of his living room. “It’s nine fifteen in the morning. I’m guessing that’s not why you’re here.”

The big man shook his head. “No, it’s not, but I’d settle for a cup of that coffee I smell.”

A minute later the two men sat in Dom’s kitchen at a table adorned with a months’ worth of unopened mail and unread newspapers.

They sipped coffee, or, more accurately, Albright sipped coffee while Caruso sat anxiously behind his undisturbed cup, doing his best to feign nonchalance.

Albright tracked back to something Caruso had said earlier. “Actually, I’m not at the D.C. office. I got assigned Houston right out of the Academy. Hot as hell, all the time.”

Caruso said, “Before the Academy, you were a cop, weren’t you? SWAT from some local PD force?”

“Yeah. Saint Louis.”

Dom said, “I’m surprised you didn’t go for HRT.” HRT was the FBI’s vaunted Hostage Rescue Team, the top tactical officers in federal law enforcement.

“I did. Unfortunately, I busted my foot in a training accident. It’s okay now, but it knocked me out of HRT. After three years at the office in Houston I was assigned back up here to CID.”

If Dom had been concerned about the fact an FBI special agent had come calling on him, now he was doubly so. What the hell was a “G” from their Counterintelligence Division doing in his apartment?

Nothing good, he was certain.

“CID?” Dom said. “Interesting work?”

Albright replied, “Has its moments. Like now, for example. I have a few questions about what happened the other day in India. Do you mind?”

Dom rubbed his forehead. He’d been more concerned Albright would be here to ask some questions about The Campus. Although a few well-connected senior members of the FBI and other organizations knew the existence of Dom’s off-the-books employer, Albright wouldn’t be on this select list.

The fact that Dom was in India, on the other hand, could easily be known to the FBI at large. He relaxed a touch, but still remained on guard as to what he could and could not say. “Yeah. Okay.”

“I heard you got a concussion.”

“Just a mild one.”

“How do you feel?”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

Dom was nervous, and he could see that Albright was aware of it. Albright said, “You were over there training in Krav Maga with Colonel Arik Yacoby, ex of the IDF?”

Dom shrugged. He didn’t know where Albright was getting his information. “That and some other PT stuff. I didn’t even know he was a colonel. I did a little yoga with his wife, too.”

“Yoga.” Albright raised his eyebrows. The incredulity on his face was obvious.

“Yeah.”

The FBI agent nodded, not taking his eyes from Caruso to write anything down.

“You seem edgy, Dom.”

“Not at all.”

“No?”

“You must be misreading my confusion about your presence in my kitchen.”

Albright sipped. “Fair enough. Let me help you, then. I’ll lay my cards on the table. This morning, when I was in the office before heading over here to interview you, I got a call from Anthony Rivalto. You know who that is, don’t you?”

“Yeah. He’s the director of the NYC field office.”

Albright cocked his head. “That was years ago. Now he’s the deputy director of CID.”

“Your boss, then.”

“My boss’s boss, but yeah. He called me directly to let me know to tread lightly with you. I can talk to you, ask you if you want to volunteer anything, but you have some sort of force field around you that precludes me from digging too hard.”

Dom did not respond.

“You have connections, is what I am saying.”

Still nothing from the dark-haired man across from Albright at the kitchen table.

“Of course at first I figured it was just because your uncle is the president. That ought to be good for the white glove treatment. But I looked into you, to see what you were doing, where you were assigned, any news about you at all.” Albright held his empty hands up. “Nothing. After Birmingham, you went black. To the dark side, I mean.”

“The dark side?”

“You’re FBI still, I got that confirmed through personnel. But only on paper. In real life you’re some kind of spook. I know you aren’t CIA proper, or at least nothing anyone wants to fess up to. I guess you could be seconded to one of the other intelligence agencies, or maybe you are affiliated with the military somehow, but I know you didn’t serve in uniform yourself. You might be with some secret spook fusion cell, but I don’t expect you to confirm any of this. Anyway, AD Rivalto basically said that if I walked in here and saw a tactical nuke on your kitchen counter I couldn’t do jack squat about it.”

Dom gestured to the one appliance on his small kitchen counter. “For the record, that’s a juicer. I’d prove it, but it’s broken.”

Albright didn’t smile. “I know the drill. I’ve been working around here for five years. I’ve run into a fair number of guys who couldn’t say shit about what they were doing, who they worked for. I just wait for the dreaded wink and nod from my higher-ups, and then I move on.”

“And the call from AD Rivalto was the wink and the nod?”

“It was. Still, you and I are buds from way back, so I told Rivalto I’d drop in on you for a cup of coffee and a chat, and I’d stay within bounds.”

Dom said, “And here we are.” He played with the bandage on his arm absentmindedly. He and Albright had never been friends. Just classmates.

Albright asked, “Did you notice any surveillance on Yacoby or yourself when you were in India? Anything out of the ordinary at all?”

This was more comfortable territory for Caruso than talking about himself. He said, “My guess is the Palestinians were using a local for intel. Someone who blended in. They were traveling in a dairy truck that I’d seen around the town a few times in the weeks before. I know the Indians are looking into that.”

“I heard you killed three of the tangos.”

Dom replied with, “It’s the four that slipped by me that really count.”

Albright still wasn’t writing anything down. Dom noticed this because special agents normally don’t interview a subject involved in an investigation without writing up an FD-302, an official form, and to do this they need to keep some sort of record of the conversation. Dom found the absence of a pen and paper comforting, although he wasn’t about to let his guard down.

“Colonel Yacoby didn’t say anything to you about any enemies in the U.S., did he?”

This surprised Caruso. “In the U.S.? No.”

“Any enemies at all? Anywhere?”

“No, although it was obvious he was ex-IDF. You do that for a while and you piss some people off. Especially Palestinians.”

“Yeah, I imagine so. Good guy, this Yacoby?”

“Good? No, he was more than that. He was a great man with a great family.”

Albright nodded, drummed his fingers on the kitchen table while he thought about his next question.

Caruso furrowed his eyebrows. “I’ve got to ask. Why is U.S. counterintelligence involved in this? What, exactly, are you investigating?”

Albright put his cup down. “A leak.”

“A leak?”

“Yep. A digital breach. Arik Yacoby’s name and location were on a CIA file that was part of a cache of documents improperly downloaded from a terminal in the Eisenhower Building a few months back.”

“What kind of files?”

“The file with Yacoby’s name on it was an after-action report about the IDF raid on the Turkish freighter in the Gaza flotilla a couple years back. Classified TS. It named him as the leader of the team that fast roped down to the deck and killed the Al-Qassam operatives. Another file made reference to the fact the colonel was now living in Paravur.”

“Are you suggesting someone in the U.S. government ratted out Yacoby’s name and location to the terrorists?” Caruso all but shouted the question.

“Take it easy. We don’t know that. We know his name was in the files, and we know someone brought up the files on a terminal on the third floor of the Eisenhower Building, which is where the National Security Council staff works. Whoever downloaded the data obfuscated things in the system so we can’t tell who did it. We don’t know, as of yet, anyway, if they communicated the contents of the files to anyone, much less to the Palestinian terrorists.”

Caruso was barely listening. The Eisenhower Building was less than a half-mile from where he now sat in his kitchen in Logan Circle. His blood boiled as he considered the possibility that someone in his town, in his government, had been involved in the killing of the Yacoby family. He wanted to leap out of his chair, to grab the Smith & Wesson pistol on the top of his bookshelf by the door and storm down Vermont Avenue to demand answers.

Instead, other than a slight flexing of the muscles in his jaw, he showed no evidence of the depth of his emotions. “What are you doing to find the traitor?”

“We’ve whittled it down to thirty or forty people who had access and opportunity. Starting the narrow-scope polygraphs tomorrow. I’ll do secondary interviews if anyone flags after they get boxed.”

“What else?” Dom was challenging Albright now, almost accusatory, but Albright let it go.

“We’ve got some computer forensic people on it, trying to cut that number down a little more by digging into the skills set necessary to pull off the breach.”

“That’s it?”

Albright leaned back and crossed his arms. He was the one under interrogation now. “I’ve run leak cases before. When we do find the culprit, odds are we’ll learn the leak wasn’t executed with malice aforethought. Instead, we’ll find some system administrator who cut corners because he wanted to leave early for the weekend, so he used unauthorized means to move some data around without going through protocol, then covered it up after the fact. If not that, it will be a well-meaning dolt who screwed up and moved the wrong files onto the file server portion of the server, and then they made it out into circulation without his or her knowledge.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, Caruso, that I expect to learn that the intel slipped out negligently, maybe even purposefully, but not maliciously. The chance there is a mole in the government working for Palestinian terrorists is next to nil.”

Albright saw this was doing nothing to calm the fiery man sitting across from him.

“Having said all that, I take this shit seriously. Whatever the reason for the unauthorized access, it happened, and I’m going to find out why.”

Caruso said, “You’d be doing me a hell of a favor by giving me a call if you learn anything after the polys.”

“Sorry, Dom. It’s a need-to-know kind of thing.” Albright stood up from the kitchen table.

Caruso stood up as well, only faster. “I need to know.”

“You making this personal?”

Dom shook his head. “Of course not. Shit doesn’t get personal with me. I’m just asking for a little professional courtesy. I am FBI, after all.”

“On paper.”

“In the flesh.”

“Right. If you are working on some sort of fusion cell within the CIA, which I suspect you are, you know they can make a formal request for information. There are channels.” Dom shook his head. “It’s just me, Darren. It’s just me asking you.”

Albright seemed to consider this while he walked back through the living room. At the front door he turned around. “All right. You have my word. I’ll give you a shout if something turns up with this, but only if you promise me you’ll let me and my team do the work.”

“You got it. Thanks.”

The men shook hands and Albright said, “In the meantime, here’s a little advice. You need to take it easy for a while. The dark side can get along without you for a few weeks. No offense, but you look like shit.”

Albright stepped out into the hall, and Dom shut the door behind him.

“I wish everyone would stop telling me to take it easy.”

Dom reached Gerry Hendley at his seaside home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he went from time to time to get away from the pressures of Hendley Associates, The Campus, and Washington, D.C., in general. Dom reported his contact and conversation with FBI special agent Darren Albright, which both he and Gerry, after some discussion, determined to be both good news and bad for The Campus. Yes, Gerry agreed, it was good news that the leak that exposed Arik Yacoby to the Palestinians didn’t look like it had anything to do with Dominic Caruso or The Campus. But now the FBI at large was aware of and interested in Dominic. This could, and probably would, draw more attention to him than usual, even if it was only that he was witness to a crime. Already Albright had dropped in, who’s to say as the investigation into the leaked documents progressed that more Feds with more questions wouldn’t dig deeper into the day-to-day life of Dominic Caruso?

Gerry decided Dominic needed to continue his hiatus from all Campus activity and contact with the rest of the team. It was just temporary, he insisted to his frustrated operations officer.

Hendley ended the conversation by soliciting from Dominic a promise to continue to take it easy and recover from his injuries.

Dominic wasn’t happy, but he saw no alternative to Gerry’s logic, so he reluctantly agreed. “What else am I gonna do, boss?”

He hung up his phone and reached for the television remote, hoping he could find something to take his mind off of everything going on, because he knew he didn’t possess the personality type to sit on his ass for very long.