Threat Zero Page 14

  He studied the city. Bright lights everywhere except one location to his two o’clock, which he figured to be northeast given his axis of advance. The darker area intrigued him. Park? Historic area?

  Something medieval?

  Harwood had studied the Caucasus only in relation to his combat actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and accordingly only knew that they were a secular, modern government that was almost ninety percent Shi’a Muslim. How they pulled off that feat, he would never know, but he assumed it was similar to the Balkans where the Muslims had been exposed to the liberties of freedom. The extremism of their religious beliefs had been dampened by the exposure to capitalism and democracy.

  He quickened his pace along the beach until he popped up again on the boardwalk, still uninhabited at almost 5 A.M. The activity was picking up, though. The street now had protective fencing on either side and was humming with a not yet steady flow of fast-moving cars and Vespas, the European cross between a moped and a motorcycle.

  To his right he saw the center of the dark area framed by bright lights on either side. A modern European hotel rose into the sky five stories high with rounded turrets of luxury rooms overlooking the sea on each corner. The darkened structure looked like a watchtower and it was ancient. Perhaps medieval?

  Harwood lowered himself and studied the boardwalk and beach. The water was close to the bulwark and the farther east he went, the less beach he had to work with. The boardwalk was starting to have a few scattered wanderers appear. He needed to make a decision. With nothing more to go on than instinct, he hurried across the expansive boardwalk and then through a brightly lit tunnel with blue backlighting. The tube was a passageway over the now rushing traffic as the sun nosed over the vast Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan too far in the distance to see any land.

  He passed a couple of slow walkers and then took the steps down to the wide sidewalk and was staring at a watchtower. He swung to the left and entered the grounds of what was an old city downtown. It had been preserved. Brown bricks and well-manicured trees and shrubs held in stark contrast to the machinery of a functioning metropolitan downtown. Restaurant owners lifted protective steel doors and flipped closed signs to open. The scent of bread baking wafted into the air. Cars buzzed behind him.

  He saw a woman standing in the shadows of the tower. Long, dark hair fell off her black shirt. She was wearing olive cargo pants and boots. Too far away to positively identify if she was Hinojosa, but she fit the basic contours.

  Above him to the right, a window scraped open on the top turret balcony of the fancy hotel, no more than fifty meters away. He turned toward the noise. Saw a face peering directly at him.

  The muzzle of a rifle appeared.

  Harwood ran into the darkened recesses of the old city, feeling the hot jet wash of a missed shot.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sloane Brookes piloted her boat into the north channel of Tangier Island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay just below the Maryland-Virginia border. She idled, reversed, and slipped to the right, threw her bumpers over, and then shut the engine as she tied the fore and aft lines to the cleats on the pier.

  Normally, she would have one of her ship captains take her, but not today. Jeremy Jessup had strict rules about who was allowed onto his property and when they were allowed. He made an exception for Brookes because she stood a good chance to be president and he wanted to help her, that much she knew.

  It was almost 10 P.M. and the nighttime ride had been unnerving as she remembered the “red, right, returning” rules of ship captains and navigated the shallow waters around Tangier. Jessup’s house was on the north island and situated on the channel. Ingress and egress was relatively easy and she’d made this trip a few times before. In many respects, Jessup was the key to so much of her success in the past and Brookes knew that he would be crucial to her future in politics.

  She breathed in the musty smell of the shallow tidal waters and listened to the sounds of nature. Water lapping the shores, crickets in harmony, and bullfrogs croaking. She walked up the wooden pier toward his house and Jessup stepped outside, easing the screen door against the frame. He watched her approach, then looked over her shoulder.

  “Everything’s shut down. Thanks for coming so late,” he said. Jessup had blond-red hair and a full beard of the same color. He wore a partially buttoned short-sleeve surfer’s shirt, board shorts, and OluKai sandals. He stood a few inches over six feet, which made him barely taller than Brookes.

  “Well, I try to play by your rules as long as you play by mine,” Brookes said.

  “I think we’re good to go on that one.”

  He turned around and walked inside of the wooden house on stilts. He had fresh, raw oysters laid out on ice and a bottle of wine.

  “Is this a date?” Brookes laughed.

  “No. She just left,” Jessup countered.

  Brookes paused, looked around, saw nothing that indicated someone else had been there. No second used wineglass. No second snack plate.

  “I’m joking,” Jessup said. “You drove a long way. You like oysters and this is your favorite wine.”

  “I’ve never told you either of those things,” Brookes said.

  “Seriously?”

  She paused. Jessup was the American version of Julian Assange. He lived in the deep web and was a special government employee on the FBI, CIA, and Director of National Intelligence payrolls. If they needed something hacked, he could do it, and often did. His presence on Tangier Island, surrounded by salt water, sometimes wreaked havoc on his systems, but he preferred being remote and isolated, Brookes assumed.

  “So you’ve been spying on me?”

  “I’m protecting you as a confidential informant. Isn’t that how it works nowadays?”

  She smiled. “Good one.”

  Brookes sat on one of the barstools along the kitchen counter and slurped down a couple of oysters while Jessup opened the bottle of Stags’ Leap Chardonnay and poured two glasses.

  “Follow me,” he said, carrying the glasses between his fingers in one hand and the bottle in the other.

  Brookes grabbed the tray of oysters and carried them onto the screened porch. The sounds of nature carried through the mesh and Jessup turned on some music that competed. On the porch was a high top table and bar with two barstools. He placed the wine and glasses on the high top and sat on one of the stools as she chose the other, sliding the oysters onto the table. Jessup walked behind the bar and brought his Ethernet-connected MacBook to the table, opened it, and began talking.

  “These four screens show you everything you need to know. Top right is Team Valid in Baku going after the Reaper. Top left is the president’s briefer sitting at home in his study shitting razor blades. He’s a weak sister and we need to do something about him. Bottom left is your buddy from the CIA Josh Henry. He too is in his study up late at night. Maybe he’s looking at us, who knows? Well, actually, I know. He’s not. He’s watching porn. Trannies. Different strokes. And the last box at the bottom right is the president. He’s tweeting, it seems.”

  She studied the live video and wondered, “I thought Team Valid was a done deal?”

  “Well, they dumped Harwood, Samuelson’s buddy. But he survived. Thankfully, we’ve got a tracker in his rucksack. I’ve hacked into the Baku security systems and am tracking through Interpol. He’s got an APB on him and he’s not going anywhere if they don’t get him first. Azerbaijan has their secret police on the case and has assured us discretion.”

  “Too many people involved,” Brookes muttered.

  “Just look at Crossfire Hurricane. Shit. Over a hundred people involved and they almost pulled it off.”

  “‘Almost’ being the operative word,” Brookes said. She leaned back and grabbed her wineglass, took a sip, thought, and then took another sip. Harwood had dashed into the black hole of the old city of Baku. “Remind me why I care about this guy? He wasn’t even a factor before. How did he get involved?” She pointed at the quadrant that had shown Ha
rwood.

  “He knows Samuelson. Samuelson knew Carly Masters. Carly Masters figured you out and confided in Samuelson. We don’t know what Samuelson may have told him.”

  She nodded. “Huh. The Reaper. Army Ranger trying to be famous like all the Navy SEALs. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Well, he’s a pretty driven guy and he has enough shade in his background to make him good for the Sultan and Perza killings. Allows us to leave Stone and Weathers out of it.”

  “But we needed him captured by the Iranians. Wasn’t that the idea? After the Sultan and Perza problems were handled, of course.”

  “Yes. Those were the instructions. American Ranger captured in Iran. Almost certainly the Iranian government would go public with it and then the president would be on the bubble having to both explain what had taken place and try to deal with the hostage situation.”

  Brookes’s phone chimed.

  “President has tweeted again, it seems,” she said. She had a special ring tone to alert her every time the president tweeted to his over fifty million followers. “Here it is. ‘We must denounce the brutal and savage murder by Islamic terrorists of my cabinet family members. They illegally infiltrated this country to commit these crimes. I’m closely watching the investigation and will take appropriate action ASAP. Please pray for the families.’ It took him twenty-four hours plus to send that out. Wonder why?”

  “Probably has to balance what he can say with what he wants to say.”

  They watched the quadrant showing the president. He put down his phone and walked into his chief of staff’s office. They chatted briefly.

  “They both look exhausted,” Brookes said, visualizing herself in the Oval Office.

  “Secretary Masters’s daughter is dead. The cabinet members’ families have been slaughtered.”

  “Led by a mentally disturbed former Army Ranger who was angry at the Veterans Administration and Carly Masters, who had recently rebuffed his advances,” she said.

  “Precisely.”

  “And all of that seems to be taking hold, correct?”

  “So far it looks good. We fed some info to Maximus Anon who seems to be nibbling at it.”

  “Thought we shut him down?” she asked.

  “Twitter shut him down for a few weeks, but the outcry is pretty overwhelming. I always plant a sentence or fact in their tweet stream that is no shit classified, which allows us to suppress them longer. Under the previous administration they’d be arrested, but not so much today.”

  “Huh,” she muttered. “Never thought of that. Just knew you guys were doing what needed to be done.”

  “Well, we are good,” Jessup said. “You pay for the best; you get the best.”

  “No mistakes,” she said.

  Jessup looked offended, then ignored her comment.

  “Back to this. The Sultan that they have in custody is pleading ignorance, which of course is very authentic. Claims he was just here for a business meeting. FBI is being hard on him, but he’s got nothing to give.”

  “Okay, so what’s next?”

  “You met with Henry this morning. He’s talking to his man at the FBI, who will make sure everything is good on our end.”

  “Okay. Sounds good. We’re on track then,” she said. After a pause she tapped the screen where the briefer was lamenting in his home study. “Can you blow that up?”

  “Sure.” He pressed a button that enlarged the quadrant to display on the entire screen. “What are you looking for?”

  “That’s my MacBook that Masters stole.” The silver MacBook Pro had a miniaturized Better with Brookes campaign bumper sticker centered above the Apple logo. A quarter of the laptop was visible beneath a leather satchel that lay open. The letters B-e-t-t were visible. No question it was hers.

  “Yes, they recovered it from Samuelson’s apartment.”

  “Why didn’t they give it back to me instead of this pinhead?”

  “Stone had it and Deke Bronson shook him down before the establishment of Team Valid.”

  “I love it when you talk passive voice,” Brookes said.

  “You don’t want me talking active voice here, because you know who established Team Valid.”

  “I do. And we’re good. I just want my Mac returned to me. That’s all.”

  “I’ve checked and there’s nothing on there that you have to worry about. I deleted everything that could possibly be an issue for you. Most of it was in the iCloud. I was able to remotely enter your MacBook, also. I’d let them think they have leverage over you and play their game. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “Says the man who lives in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.”

  “You have to admit there’s a certain charm to these rather Spartan digs.”

  “No. Actually, I don’t. I don’t see the charm other than being able to dig your own oysters, but who wants to do that?”

  “Well, I do. And I’ve already moved the monthly stipend from your bank account to mine. We should really vacation in the Caymans sometime.”

  “Is that a pass, Jeremy?” she asked.

  “Think of it more as an invitation. I live a decent life. I’m counting on you to become president so I can get some fancy title. I know you’ll be off-limits then, so I thought I’d throw an invite out now. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  “I’m flattered,” she said. And she was. He had been entirely professional and helpful as she navigated the conspiratorial waters of tipping the scale in her favor for this next run. She needed an edge and Jessup was proving that he was reliable. She found him handsome in a rugged way. The beard didn’t do much for her, but she could probably convince him to shave.

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” she said with a smile.

  She pushed back, placed a hand on his shoulder, then turned and walked out the door.

  On the trip back to her Reedville estate, she navigated the waters using the GPS in her Riva 63 Virtus boat until she was nudging into her boathouse. On the trip she thought about Jessup. He was a close confidant. Had helped her win her Virginia Senate campaign. Had a long history of Democratic politics in his family. His father had served as the chief of staff to three different Democratic governors and Jessup himself had been the chief of staff to the Virginia Senator Brookes replaced after he had retired due to some accusations of sexual misconduct. Jessup had nearly completed the full six years with her, but had stepped aside to help prepare her presidential run.

  They’d come close, losing by the slimmest of margins. Jessup, a natural at mining the deep and dark webs, had stepped aside as campaign chairman and actually took over the role of digital marketing, a euphemism for plying the fertile fields of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and media outlets in an effort to sway the all-important independent vote. Every poll had showed her leading Smart by two to four percent until the last few days, and even then, no poll showed her losing.

  Jessup had done all he could, legal and perhaps illegal, to swing the vote. She had told him not to give her the details and just do what needed to be done. With the aftershocks of Operation Crossfire Hurricane and the unveiling of the corruption of the FBI, CIA, and DNI, she had to tiptoe lightly. But still, she counted on the people believing that lightning indeed couldn’t strike twice in the same spot, that the necessary checks and balances had been put in place. Also, she needed those assets to help her, yet she wanted to keep a firewall between her and them. That was where Jessup came in handy. He was constantly scrubbing her emails, cleaning her cloud, moving money, illicit or not, and managing practically her entire estate. She paid him one hundred thousand dollars per month and figured that $1.2 million a year wasn’t chump change. Wasn’t going to make anyone rich, she thought, but a solid salary in this day and age.

  She walked along the flagstone path from the boathouse as she checked her phone, watching the president’s tweet get retweeted and liked thousands of times over. She had to admit that it was an effective way of pole-vaulting over the media, which was u
nreliable at best. Even as a Democrat she was feeling the pendulum swing against her in the wake of the blowback from mainstream media collusion and convictions after the bungled campaign spying operation.

  She absently wondered if she’d had a spy in her camp, having worked her way through everyone associated with her campaign and coming up empty every time. No, it was a one-sided deal. People wanted her to win. She had come close and she would win this time, no question.

  As she approached her back deck, she felt a presence move swiftly alongside her. She retrieved her Ruger and spun as she aimed it directly at Ravenswood.

  “Hey, hey!” Ravenswood said, holding up his hands in mock surrender.

  “Fucking, Chip, don’t ever do that again!”

  “We need to talk. Did you see this?”

  He lifted his phone that was open to a tweet stream from someone called BluePillProgress2020.

  #Breaking An inside source with knowledge of the Camp David Ambush states that President Smart has assigned a black ops team to kill the families of the suspected terrorists. A member of Team Valid is active duty Army Ranger Vick Harwood. #TeamValid #ValidTarget #ImmoralAct

  “Twitter? That’s what you’ve got for me? Where are CBS, NBC, ABC, and everyone else? This should be breaking wide open,” Brookes said.

  “They’ve all got it. Both Harwood and the president are now exposed. This is like kindling. A one-off spark that will start the fire.”

  She looked onto the river a hundred yards beyond her sloping manicured lawn with giant oaks and maples. That was about right. At least he had used finesse. Then she thought about Jessup and wondered if he did it or if Ravenswood had followed through as she had instructed him. He was certainly capable. This was all part of the plan, which she wasn’t supposed to know about.