In a twisted and gut-wrenching way, it all made perfect sense, but Sam couldn’t bring herself to believe it. She grilled Hayward mercilessly, her bullshit detectors on full alert, her eyes boring through his, looking for any signs of deception. If he was manipulating her, she ultimately decided, he was the best she’d ever seen. She felt certain she was getting all the facts as he knew them, which were earth-shattering.
Tariq Ezzat, member of the Doberman group, object of her team’s ill-fated operation in the park, the man whose wild gunshot killed a five-year-old girl, was also a CIA agent. A CIA agent embedded in a terrorist organization, operating on American turf. Sam shook her head. Now that’s a scandal worthy of a fucking indictment.
She had more questions than he could possibly have answers. Had Ezzat gone rogue? Slipped out of the control of his Agency handler? Why hadn’t the Agency stepped in to put the brakes on Homeland’s op against him? Was there some deeper play going on? Or didn’t the Agency pay enough attention to their joes to know that Ezzat had gotten sideways with the Homeland counterespionage team?
Further, if he was already on the Agency payroll, why the hell did Ezzat resist arrest? It would have been drop-dead easy for him to straighten out the situation with a single phone call. Ezzat would have been freed in a matter of hours if an Agency rep had shown up with a hand receipt. Interagency cooperation and all that. There was absolutely no need for Ezzat to go berserk, draw a gun, turn it into a tragedy.
Sarah Beth didn’t need to die.
The hollowness returned to Sam’s chest and her eyes burned. Her preoccupation with the Doberman safe house in Cagliari had relegated the miserable situation at home to a distant corner of her mind, but thoughts of the little girl and her bereaved family had come crashing back with a vengeance.
With the sorrow and self-doubt came anxiety and worry. How the hell would she clear her name? Each minute she remained a fugitive made it that much harder to convince people of her innocence.
“Who was running Ezzat?” Sam asked.
“Hard to say,” Hayward said. “That’s not the kind of thing people talk much about.”
“Then how did you know about Ezzat in the first place?”
Hayward explained that his CIA team worked the acquisition end—using force and influence and good old-fashioned theft to obtain valuable goods to sell or exploit, such as the ChemEspaña formula. Ezzat, Hayward explained, was on the finance end, laundering money and moving it around. There wasn’t much interaction between them—operational security demanded it—but occasional crosstalk was unavoidable.
“You can’t be serious,” Sam said. “You have a money laundering division at CIA?”
“Of course not,” Hayward said. “We just have people who need to launder money. It’s easier and safer to do that using someone else’s existing network than to establish your own.”
Sam sat in stunned silence. The whole Doberman thing somehow had Agency stink on it. The CIA was using the jihadis’ financial network to move money around under the table. It meant that Homeland and CIA were actively working against each other at some level.
If she’d had any lingering doubts about who might have been behind the break-in at her home, they were now erased. It also now seemed certain that Avery Martinson, the fat slimeball of a former CIA case officer who’d surprised her in Izmir with the surveillance picture of Brock, had been on an Agency errand.
The question, again, was why? Why would the CIA try to intimidate a disgraced and suspended Homeland agent, already reeling from a tragic death that happened on her watch? She had been thoroughly out of the game, in no shape and of no mind to push further into the Doberman situation, which she now knew had been unfolding under CIA auspices. Why would CIA rope her back in?
She thought of the roadside assault against the Libyan police officers that had allowed her to escape. She recalled the American accent she could have sworn she heard in one attacker’s voice as he yelled, “Allahu Akhbar.” Was that an Agency op, too? If so, what could their motive possibly have been? She sensed the beginnings of an insight, inchoate and foggy, tickling her brain. The thought was not yet mature enough for her to wrap words around it, but it felt huge and important just the same.
She looked out the window. Kirksman’s flight plan from Europe to the US had taken the great-circle route, the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, which took them a long way north. The sea below them looked deathly cold. There was no land in sight. It deepened her sense of isolation and smallness.
That was really the problem, wasn’t it? Isolation and smallness. The entire government seemed to be against her. The Justice Department had sought and won an indictment. Senator Oren Stanley had thrown his full weight into a trial-by-media campaign. Her bosses at Homeland had offered nothing in her defense. She had a few people on her side, but nobody who could move the needle in her favor. Wouldn’t it be terrific to turn the tables a bit?
She chuckled at the absurdity of the thought. Nobody could ruin a person as thoroughly as the feds. She’d seen it a dozen times. There was really no defense against a well-executed federal onslaught. They rarely sentenced anyone to death but they could sure as hell make a person wish he was dead. Nobody was immune. Not even the system’s own members. Especially not insiders, and more so if they happened to cause public embarrassment of any sort.
She looked across the aisle at Hayward. Exhaustion had overcome him, and his head lolled forward. She felt something for him, she realized. He was attractive, but it wasn’t that. Despite his current affiliations, despite his egregious mistakes, despite the wantonness that had seemed to characterize a good portion of his adult life, Sam admired his courage. You couldn’t argue that the man had stones. In the end, he had put himself on the line to do the right thing.
It had a tragic quality to it, like there was only one way for the thing to play out and only the details were in question. How would they catch him? How would they kill him? Before or after they killed Joao and the girl?
She shook her head. She wished she could help him, but she had problems of her own. She had no idea what lay ahead, but she knew it was going to require every bit of her courage and tenacity.
An idea struck. It’s time to turn the tables. Time to put the feds on the defensive. She sat up straight in her seat, her mind whirring, thinking through the branches and sequels of the plan that was beginning to take shape. The grogginess and fatigue started to leave her. She sensed opportunity, but she also sensed danger. There was a tiny shred of optimism welling up, but it was wrapped in a thick layer of doubt and fear and worry.
One simple idea: if people knew who Tariq Ezzat really was and what really happened in the park, the uproar would be deafening. She had a notion of how to get the word out, but it entailed quite a bit of risk. Would it work? She had no idea. But she knew it would be worth a try.
She looked out the window. Newfoundland, that frigid slice of the Arctic stapled on a cosmic whim to North America, was visible in the distance. There wasn’t much time left. They would be landing in just a few short hours. Every minute suddenly counted.
She unbuckled, nudged Hayward awake, and motioned for him to follow her to the cockpit.
She was going to need a little help.