“Colonel,” he says, in a voice that sounds like his insides have been hollowed out, “you want to know why I’ve brought you here.”
A nurse helps the secretary sit up.
“You’re here to testify,” the secretary says. “And, by God, you will or you’ll never leave here alive.”
Echevarria wrenches himself free of the nurse. He tells me the video crew has recorded his “last testament”—everything he knows about Salter and how Salter has generaled his way to tyranny: whom he’s eliminated, whom he’s co-opted; whom he’s cut deals with. I see the cameraman unload the finished disk and set it on top of a case. The secretary swings his legs over the side of the bed as if they were made of concrete.
“You did this to me, didn’t you? You or another of Salter’s murderers.”
He struggles to stand. I start forward, instinctively, to help him.
“Get away from me!”
The nurse helps Echevarria stand. I’m telling him I’ve done nothing; I don’t know what he’s talking about.
“Colonel, you’re either the world’s most accomplished liar—or the dumbest bastard I’ve ever met.”
The secretary stands and tears off his hospital gown, exposing his chest. His skin from neck to belly is livid with lesions and ulcers.
“What did you use? Some untraceable isotope? How did you get it into me—”
The secretary’s chest looks like hamburger. The nurse and the male FBI agent catch him before he falls. They settle him onto the edge of the bed. I’m repeating that I know nothing; I’m stunned to see what I’m seeing. The old man greets this with contempt.
“I know,” he says, “that I’m just a fat old fuck to you. But I flew F-15s in Desert Storm, goddamn you, and I don’t deserve to check out like this.”
Agocopian and the female agent cover me with weapons drawn. “Now talk, Colonel.” The soundman swings the boom over my head. “Tell what you know and what you did.”
There’s a principle they teach you in SERE School, for escape and evasion. It says Escape right away.
I spin toward Agocopian and hit him with the heel of my right hand as hard as I can under the cartilage of his nose. This is no martial arts move; it’s just a street shot. The agent drops like a bag of dirt. I tear the 9 mm out of his hand and dive laterally onto the floor. Two sharp bangs explode behind my back. I roll and twist, turning to fire back at the female agent.
At that instant, the main doors burst open. Into the room charge four armed men in booties, hairnets, and latex gloves. Two silenced shots drill the female and male agents. Right behind the four men comes Tim Hayward. Hayward sees me on the floor with the 9 mm. His expression is almost comical with shock and puzzlement. Agocopian, the nurse, and the camera crew have thrown their hands in the air. In seconds the operators have flung the whole bunch facedown and flex-cuffed them. Two more, carrying body bags, race into the room.
“Gent! What the fuck are you doing here?”
“What does it look like?”
I’m thinking as fast as I can. Half my brain is scrambling for some bullshit story to keep Hayward from doing to me what he just did to the female and male agents; the other half is desperately afraid for Ariel outside. Has Hayward’s team spotted her? Have they killed her already?
“You mean Klugh sent you here—”
“The fuckers snatched me.” I point to the camera, the lights, and the sound boom.
Adrenaline and surprise are keeping Hayward, for the moment, from seeing through me. “Help me then,” he says.
Two of his men have crossed to Echevarria. The secretary is blistering them with profanity. “I know you, Hayward, you’re a hero,” the secretary cries. “Why are you doing this?”
The old man shouts to Hayward and me that we should be killing Salter, not him. The operator beside the secretary opens a medical bag. Hayward nods. The medic spikes a syrette into Echevarria’s thigh, right through the hospital gown. The secretary convulses and spits blood.
Two men haul Echevarria to his feet. “There,” says Hayward, indicating a spot at the edge of the carpet, halfway between the bed and an adjacent bathroom. “So it looks like he was trying to get to the toilet.”
Hayward’s men start body-bagging the corpses. The rounds they have used are low-speed “pop-and-stops,” which shred inside the victim’s rib cage and leave no exit wounds, no blood, no mess. The team gets the others to their feet and starts herding them out. Two men sanitize the site and start policing up the documents and the camera gear.
“Chief,” the medic says to Hayward. “the fucker’s still breathing.”
“Get him up again.”
While they lift Echevarria, I get to the camera case and snatch the disk. I jam it into my shorts.
Hayward supports the secretary upright over the hardwood floor, then drops him with a skull-cracking crash. Echevarria’s eyelids flutter; his chest convulses. A final fall of fluid spills from his lungs.
“There he goes,” says an operator.
The medic kneels, setting two fingers alongside the old man’s carotid. He nods to Hayward. Hayward checks his watch. “Sixty-five seconds.”
We’re outside, in the service alley behind the house. Operators are shoving the flex-cuffed captives into two vans. The vans peel away. An operator in booties sprays the pavement with methyl chloride. I glance over Hayward’s shoulder toward the street. Ariel stands in the shadows. Hayward comes up beside me.
“This is some fucked-up shit, ain’t it, Gent? If my guys had been five seconds later, we’d be zipping you in a B-bag too!” A black sedan pulls up to collect him. “You should have had backup. A team should have been covering you.” Hayward is already speed-dialing. “Somebody’s ass is gonna pay.”
He asks again if I’m okay.
“I am now, Tim.”
Hayward raps me on the shoulder. “Get outa Dodge, dude. We’ve had enough fuckups for one night.”
25
A PATRIOT
SIX MINUTES HAVE PASSED. Ariel’s dash clock reads 2:32. I’m keeping to the speed limit on Pennsylvania Avenue approaching Washington Circle when I see a dark sedan coming up fast in the rearview. I’ve told Ariel everything. She’s downloading the camera disk into her tablet, ready to send it to her editors in Paris.
Here comes Hayward behind me. It has not taken him long to see through my bullshit. I punch the gas and speed into the circle. The sedan accelerates right behind. I turn south, hard and squealing, onto Twenty-third Street.
“Ariel,” I say as calmly as I can. “Take the wheel.”
She sees me cock the 9 mm.
“Gent, what the—”
We roar down Twenty-third Street toward the Lincoln Memorial. The sedan kicks on its brights; blinding dazzle fills our cockpit. I grab Ariel’s left hand and plant it on the steering wheel just as the sedan rams its prow against our rear bumper and shoves with all its power. Our car lurches wildly. Ariel is flung backward into the seat; the wheel spins. Ahead I see sidewalk and concrete construction barricades. I grab the wheel and jam it back into Ariel’s hand.
“Drive!”
I’m half-out the driver’s window, facing rearward. I can see Hayward’s buzz-cut in the sedan’s passenger seat.
“Help!” Ariel is screaming. “Help, anyone!”
She jams the accelerator through the floorboard. We’re bombing down Navy Hill, past the State Department. I get off two shots that ricochet harmlessly off Hayward’s windshield. The sedan locks onto us again. It’s got vertical push-bars on its front bumper, like state patrol cars. It shoves. Our car fishtails right; its front wheels hit the curb. I’m slung into the cabin post; my head smashes into the outboard mirror.
We’re under elms. Ariel is screaming. Our tires are on grass. Over Ariel’s shoulder I see a wall of timber and then we hit.
Both airbags inflate with a bang, but I hear Ariel’s skull hit the windshield anyway. She has unbuckled her passenger-side seat belt to take the wheel; the crash over the curb
has flung her between both bags. The horn blares; the alarm screams. I’m tumbling end over end on the grass. Hayward’s sedan slaloms past on the pavement, braking furiously.
I’m on my feet, scrambling toward Ariel’s door. Ariel’s body lies broken between the two limp airbags, face-down in the floorwell with her bare legs splayed grotesquely and her neck snapped like a doll’s.
Here comes Hayward and the other man. I roll under the car.
“Watch his weapon!” “Take him from both sides!”
My only advantage is I know they won’t shoot; their game is to make this look like a car accident.
I’m scanning for legs when I hear liquid being sluiced. Gas. I roll madly out from under. A baseball bat swishes half an inch above my skull. I roll onto my back and pull the trigger. The slug catches Hayward directly beneath the solar plexus; his mass blows backward and up as if he had been kicked by a mule. Hayward still hasn’t hit the ground before I’m on my knees scanning for the second man.
He’s running. I try to sight but he’s too far away. I don’t even fire. The man dives into the sedan; the car screams away.
A bus stops; I lurch aboard, bloody and reeking of cordite and gasoline. The driver doesn’t make a peep.
I’m speed-dialing A.D. when the bus passes the Lincoln Memorial. The illuminated columns look grand in the night, enshrining the Great Emancipator. Goddamit, I love this fucking country.
I get my wife’s voice mail.
“Pick up, baby! Ariel’s dead. Pick up!”
She does. I tell her to meet me at a spot by the river. I tell her in code. “Lose whoever tails you. And be ready to run.”
At the river, I give A.D. the disk.
“Here’s your Pulitzer, baby.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Salter.”
26
THE BLESSING OF THE GODS
NEXT EVENING, THE AMENDMENT to the Emergency Powers Act passes. I get the news over the phone from Jack Stettenpohl. I’m in Fort Erie, Ontario. “I did something stupid, Jack. And I’m gonna do something more.”
Jack knows everything of course.
“Gent, where the hell are you?”
It has taken me two stolen cars and one ferry to get north of the border.
“I want to talk to Salter.”
“Impossible.”
It takes sixty seconds to tell Jack my side. Now, I say, tell me yours—and tell me the truth.
I hear my old friend take a breath. “Gent,” he says, “there’s nothing on the news about your friend Ariel or about Hayward. And there won’t be. Ever.” He promises me that nothing will happen to A.D.
“Where is she?”
“Safe. She called me.”
My old friend tells me I have to come in. It’s not too late.
I tell him I’ve got something to do first.
“Jack, I want you to take care of two things for me.”
First, I tell him, retrieve Ariel’s body. I know he can do it. Get in touch with her family in France. See that her remains get home in a manner that’s worthy of her.
Jack promises. “What’s the second?”
“Get me in to Salter.”
“Can’t be done.”
You’re a man-killer, Jack says. Even empty-handed, you’re too dangerous. Klugh and Dainty won’t let you without fifty feet of the man.
“I’ll come unarmed. I’ll show up naked. Klugh can stick both his fists up my ass.”
“Gent, tell me where you are.”
“I’ll phone you.”
I’m in Halifax when Salter and Maggie get married. The Annapolis Chapel ceremony is carried live on all four networks plus twelve cable news channels, as well as every gossip, celebrity, and polito-tainment site on the Web. It’s the biggest public matrimonial, says Trump/CNN, since Elizabeth and Prince Philip in 1956.
I’m waiting, moment by moment, for the video I gave A.D. to break in. When it doesn’t appear, I start worrying for her. Did someone get to her? The only secure way to reach her is by cupcake, accessing our shared database.
I text:
R U OK?
Yes, R U?
Did U file the story?
Why?
My phone rings. It’s A.D. in the clear.
She starts explaining that to run the story will accomplish nothing. The American people want Salter. Nothing anyone can do or say …
“Don’t shit me, darling. I know, with you, it’s not lack of guts or ambition.”
A.D. goes silent.
“Gent,” she says. “It’s over.”
Now it’s my turn to draw up.
“You’re with them,” I say.
“Give it up, baby. It’s over.”
I ask my wife if she means the republic or us.
“Both.”
I watch Salter and Maggie’s wedding on my handheld in the freezing Canadian rain, hunkered under a camouflage hunter’s poncho in a sniper’s hide I’ve scraped out of a wooded mound overlooking the motel I’ve checked into but have not set foot inside except to wire the door and windows of my room with motion and thermal sensors (both bought, no problem, at a hardware store three towns to the south) and a baby video monitor (from Target half a mile down the highway).
Whoever’s after me will catch up in a matter of hours and will be real-timing me from a satellite minutes after that. I’m under cover, armed with a used Remington 750 deer rifle, bought at a local gun fair (a $900 weapon for a hundred and a quarter cash) and registered via the counterfeit Canadian passport that Force Insertion provided me to get into Egypt when I first recruited el-Masri. I’ve zeroed the scope on the beach, targeting clamshells at 150 yards.
The sun is shining at Annapolis when Salter and Maggie exit the chapel, pelted by blizzards of rice and photographed by a galaxy of video and cell cameras, paparazzi, helicopters, and waterborne telephoto lenses.
Salter has returned to the States, says the news, for a flying seventy-two hours, primarily to take Mrs. Cole as his bride, but also to coordinate in person with the prez and the Pentagon his triumphal repatriation twenty-one days hence—and to reassure those who have bet their futures on him that he is for real and all is well. Short as this trip may be, it still produces ecstatic mob scenes everywhere Salter goes. The change of site for the wedding—from the National Cathedral, as originally planned, to the less pretentious and more military-respectful chapel at the Naval Academy—has elevated even higher the couple’s, and Salter’s, stature. I’m watching Anderson Cooper from my shooter’s nest when the newsman comments on the symbolism of the union.
By wedding Margaret Cole, widow of the president who sacked him over the 2022 nuclear facedown with China, General Salter receives, if not the formal pardon of his countrymen, then at least the implicit benediction of those who had condemned him before. Marrying the former first lady puts Salter on a par with the president in the firmament of stature and celebrity.
I try to shut off the wedding but the damn thing is everywhere, including the ads and pop-ups bracketing every phone and search app. Fox/BBC’s Martin Bashir remarks on the political brilliance of the Naval Academy venue.
The Annapolis symbolism represents the conventional military embracing its prodigal son, himself a Naval Academy grad—and his reengagement with the establishment in return. This takes the curse off Salter’s mercenary past and present. Then there’s the long-lost love angle. Gossip-show and femme-journo outlets are playing over and over the legend (which is perhaps even true) that Maggie Cole spurned Salter when he proposed to her as a young midshipman because he had chosen glam-deprived Marine infantry as his specialty rather than the dress-white naval service that more aptly suited Maggie’s pretensions as a young Bryn Mawr society filly. Now forty years later, says the symbolism, the mature Margaret has seen the light. She recognizes that she—and by extension the nation—needs a champion on horseback, a man with cojones, a jarhead general.
The marriage is more than that. It’s the benediction of t
he gods. By granting him her hand, Margaret Rucker Cole—America’s Lady Liberty—forgives Salter’s excesses (and even revels in them) and takes him to her bosom. Even the honeymoon becomes a statement: Salter and Maggie don’t take one. Instead Salter returns straight to work—to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, to the Caspian Basin and then to Kurdistan, seeking to conclude even more oil and gas deals, in concert with Russia and China, so as to further secure the nation’s energy future. The act demonstrates that Salter is husband and savior now not only to his bride, but to the nation.
27
TRUST NO ONE
NO KILLER TEAM SHOWS up at my Halifax motel. Instead a van scans the site, passing without stopping. Its electronics pick up my motion and thermal sensors. At least that’s my surmise, monitoring traffic minute by minute from my sniper’s nest. My phone vibrates midafternoon. It’s Jack. Conrad the pilot will pick me up in a G-5 at the Supermarine hangar at Stanfield International and take me to Mosul nonstop. Jack gives me his word that I’ll be safe.
Will I?
My voice mail has two recent messages from A.D. Both urge me to come home. It’s a creepy feeling, hearing the woman you love try to set you up for elimination. Who can I trust? Not Chris. He’s a good man but he’s picked his horse. Jack, for sure, has priorities that don’t include my longevity. My old teammates—Chutes, Q, Junk, Mac, Tony—love me still, I know. But the world has turned upside down and they have to turn with it. Who’s left?
El-Masri.
That’s why I’ve insisted on Mosul.
What do I expect there?
Klugh will kill me, or Dainty or someone in Salter’s praetorian guard. I don’t care. All I want is to get my minute.
My minute to speak in my own voice for the first time in my life.
28
AL SALIM
EL-MASRI MEETS ME IN Mosul, on the Tigris in northern Iraq. The Egyptian has quit Salter. He is living out of a truck. His brothers, Jake and Harry, are with him.