“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” Owen Lomax said. He was an assistant director in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination and Planning, and he smiled with benign curiosity as if he couldn’t think of a single reason why the director of CROSSWIND sat across from his desk this morning.
Caparelli returned the director’s friendly smile, hiding his own true intent as thoroughly as he knew Lomax did. That was part of the role he had to play today, because of Detective Matt Caidin.
At five this morning, Caparelli had received a call from Caidin and everything had changed. The echo of Laura, all that she had been, had finally remembered what had happened to her, and that was the end of it. Manifestations never recurred after realizing what they were. The legends all said so; empirical evidence confirmed it.
With no possibility of obtaining further information from Laura about Borodin or his plans here, Caparelli had no choice but to do what he had told Sam Arlo he wouldn’t: play a more dangerous game by reaching out to the Department of Homeland Security and requesting its assistance, without revealing any of CROSSWIND’s secrets. Remote viewing would remain an effective weapon in the arsenal of intelligence gathering only as long as potential enemies refused to believe it existed.
* * *
As a matter of policy, CROSSWIND was an SCI compartment within the National Security Agency. The initials stood for Sensitive Compartmentalized Intelligence—information that not only required a recipient to have the proper security clearance, but also a justified and adjudicated need to know. More than that, CROSSWIND’s “product” was further classified as not just SCI, but ECI: Exceptionally Controlled Information. Even CROSSWIND’s budget was “waived,” which meant no mention of it appeared in the “black budgets” prepared for congressional committees, where all secret programs that didn’t appear in the public record were required by law to be listed for the purposes of oversight.
All this contributed to the reality that CROSSWIND was, to all intents and purposes, a wholly independent agency, invisible to Congress, and answerable only to the president.
In situations where intelligence gathered by remote viewing was to be used strictly within the National Security Agency, CROSSWIND’s reports were classified internally as “human intelligence,” called HUMINT, and presumed to have been obtained by traditional spycraft. No further explanation of how the intelligence had been gathered was required.
In other situations, when CROSSWIND intelligence needed to be passed on to another government intelligence agency, Caparelli reported it to the director of the NSA. Alone among the 30,000 employees of the agency, the director was fully briefed on CROSSWIND’s methods. When the director in turn passed that intelligence on to the directors of other agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, it was at such a high level that in most cases no attribution was required.
Occasionally, though, there were times when CROSSWIND intelligence needed to be acted on so quickly there was no opportunity for going through the protective but lengthy official channels. In those situations, Caparelli was authorized to take direct action, provided CROSSWIND’s methods remained undisclosed.
That much was known to Homeland, which made the department eager to absorb the apparently independent agency into itself, just as it had so many others.
Caparelli was determined to never let that happen. His concern was that if CROSSWIND ever came under Homeland’s control, then within weeks, if not days, the reality of remote viewing would become known to tens of thousands of government agents and analysts. At that point, keeping that truth from spreading beyond them to the nation’s enemies would become impossible.
Just as those enemies today knew enough from other intelligence leaks to avoid unencrypted satellite phones and timed their movements to the passage of spy satellites, inevitably they would establish electromagnetic safeguards to protect themselves from perceivers. CROSSWIND would become a curious footnote in history, its technology and techniques relegated to the National Cryptologic Museum, its perceivers reduced to experimental subjects at best, sideshow freaks at worst.
As a professional, and a patriot, Caparelli had made the survival of CROSSWIND as a fully independent agency his priority. He owed it to the people who had dedicated their careers and their lives to CROSSWIND’s mission. He owed it to his niece. He owed it to the country. He knew that simply by walking through Owen Lomax’s door, he was putting all that at risk.
This wasn’t the first time Caparelli had taken the Homeland tiger by the tail. A year ago, when official channels would have been too slow, CROSSWIND needed to disguise the source of vital intelligence its perceivers had obtained through remote viewing. To accomplish that, they had used Homeland Security to unknowingly participate in what the NSA innocuously termed the “parallel construction” of evidence.
CROSSWIND perceivers had, through remote viewing, discovered details of a domestic terrorist plot to attack a liquid natural gas production plant near Dallas. It was vital for that intelligence to be given to the FBI, but equally as important to hide the details of how the information was obtained.
Caparelli had contacted Lomax, asked for his department’s assistance in correlating surveillance satellite imagery with ground-truth photography of the same sites, taken at the same time. It was a standard method of measuring the effectiveness of various types of camouflage. Caparelli had led Lomax to believe that the exercise might result in obtaining new observation techniques from the mysterious CROSSWIND.
As orchestrated by Caparelli, the area his agents staked out while CROSSWIND satellites supposedly observed from orbit just happened to include the remote ranch house where the plotters were assembling their explosive-packed vehicles.
The Department of Homeland Security, whose agents had therefore accidently but honestly stumbled upon the plot, took full credit for preventing the attack. But though he couldn’t prove it, Owen Lomax knew he and his department had been expertly used.
Over the next few days, his request to be told the source of the original intelligence had moved up the chain of command to the Oval Office, where it had been rebuffed. Ever since the Dallas operation, he had set his sights on CROSSWIND and, so far, Caparelli had been able to resist Lomax’s methodical plan to bring all government intelligence resources under DHS guidance. Lomax maintained it was a logical, efficient, and cost-effective way to ensure all vital intelligence could be shared quickly, without facing the roadblocks of petty rivalries, and without costly duplication of resources.
Caparelli understood the ideals that drove Lomax, but in no way believed they could withstand the reality of having a specialized, independent operation like CROSSWIND controlled by a bloated bureaucracy with more than 200,000 employees. As far as Caparelli was concerned, it was an arrangement that could only make sense to an organization that had failed to see the irony in choosing as its new headquarters what used to be the country’s largest psychiatric hospital.
* * *
Now, in a small, windowless office in the newly renovated St. Elizabeths Hospital compound housing the DHS, Caparelli put a thick, red-covered file on Lomax’s desk. “We’re both on the same side, Director. Everything my people have is in the file. Nothing held back.”
Across the desk, Lomax gave Caparelli a measuring look; he knew a lie when he heard one. But this wasn’t the time for confrontation. Not yet.
Caparelli waited patiently as Lomax initialed the file, broke the seals. His actions were precise, almost delicate for such a large man, all muscle as far as Caparelli could tell, too large for the confines of his generic civil service office. The desk was an inexpensive black plastic slab with chromed metal legs. The carpet squares were thin, with a mottled gray pattern designed to hide soil and wear. The walls were an off-white textured panel of some kind, held in place by glossy plastic strips. The room felt as if it might have been constructed specifically for this meeting, and perhaps it had. As much as the DHS wanted access to the secrets of everyone else, it revealed as few of its own as possible.
Among the limited amount of nongeneric content in the office was what Caparelli took to be Lomax’s personal photographs, hung beside the standard-issue portraits of the president, vice-president, and secretary of the department. The other photos in thin black frames were of Marines in desert camouflage, in country, by a burned-out tank, on a Humvee, in a mess tent. Lomax was in each picture, big grin, cold eyes. His head was shaved back then as it was now, black scalp glistening in the desert heat, but the thick mustache he had today was new. On a bookcase filled with cryptically titled binders was a last personal item: a folded burial flag in a triangular presentation case. Caparelli didn’t ask.
Lomax flipped through the file until he came to the photographs from the warehouse outside Santa Fe. Caparelli watched carefully, didn’t detect any reaction to the carnage.
“Interesting blast damage.” Lomax might have been talking about the weather.
“Not an explosion.”
“That’s what I mean. Bodies torn up. Nothing else is.” Lomax picked up one of the glossy prints to examine it more closely. “Hmm. The intact bodies here were shot.”
“Two state police officers and three forensic specialists. A few hours after the initial killings. Nine-millimeter rounds.”
Lomax put the pictures down, laid a large hand over the file. “You have a theory?”
“Details are in the file. Bottom line, we believe two teams of terrorists are on US soil. Came in through a drug tunnel from Mexico, heading northeast.”
“Target?”
“That’s why I’ve come to you.”
“Their affiliation?”
“Russian.”
That got a reaction: puzzled surprise. “Russian what? Gangsters? Involved with the Mexican cartels?”
“We believe they’re former or current military.”
Lomax sat back in his government-issue swivel chair, making it squeak in protest. “Russians aren’t above aiding terrorist organizations with intel, matériel, instructors … But active agents here? Seems too provocative, even for their president.”
“Might help if we knew what they were after.”
Lomax flashed him a tight smile, as cold as they were in the photos on the wall. His war hadn’t ended. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t your organization the one with magical intel-gathering expertise?”
“We don’t conduct domestic operations,” Caparelli lied.
Lomax didn’t challenge him. “So if I understand you”—he patted the thick file—“instead of roping us into a fake ‘assessment’ operation like last year in Dallas, now you’re just magnanimously passing on to DHS news of terrorist cells operating on home soil, without providing any source or verification. And in return you want us to tell you their target.”
“We share the same mission.”
Lomax gave him a thoughtful look, and Caparelli could tell their match was about to begin in earnest. “I need something else, Agent. How many are there? What weapons? What the hell tore up those people if not an explosive? And, well, how the hell do you know what you know?”
Caparelli was prepared. Philosophical differences aside, Lomax was a reasonable man. “What I can say is, we believe there are fewer than ten people involved. Weaponry could be whatever they could hand-carry through a drug tunnel. What killed those people … Something chemical? Something mechanical? We’ve never seen anything like it before. Don’t even have a hypothesis.”
The two men stared at each other for long moments. It was obvious Lomax wasn’t convinced.
“You asked,” Caparelli said finally. “I answered. Is there a target of opportunity in the direction they’re heading?”
“America is a target-rich environment. Shopping malls. Passenger trains. Office buildings. You have to give me more to go on.”
“If they planned on striking soft civilian targets, they would’ve acted by now. So we believe they have a specific target. They’re heading northeast. To DC? Manhattan? Is there anything that speaks to a terrorist opportunity at this particular time, instead of last week or next month?”
“Maybe they’re going to go to ground. Hide out for a year.”
“Then they wouldn’t have left the bodies to be discovered and draw our attention. They’re planning something soon. Not worried about being tracked, just keeping a few steps ahead of us. What about the Joint Anti-terrorism Conference? Starts in four days.”
Lomax rolled his head side to side, to crack his neck. “Well, now, that is an obvious target. The elected leaders of fifteen nations coming together to form a new coalition to fight terrorism around the globe, complete with their senior military and intelligence personnel.” Lomax shook his head. “But when you think of the repercussions of attacking that gathering, where’s the upside in sending the world’s economy crashing into a black hole when all fingers are going to be pointed at the one country not invited? Russia.
“Besides, the site’s the Greenbrier, in the middle of wide-open country. Terrorists would need an armored division to get anywhere near it. And we’d still stop them with Hellfire drones before they reached the first perimeter.”
“What else?”
Lomax glanced over at his trophy photos. “The conference is bringing a boatload of foreign leaders and dignitaries over here. The British prime minister’s addressing a joint session of the House and Senate the day before the summit starts. That puts almost every elected official we have in the same place at the same time. That’d be bad for us, for Britain, not so much for the rest of the world.
“Then, the president’s speaking to the United Nations General Assembly the day after the summit ends, and the Russians will be there. But again, no upside to an attack on the entire UN. Terrorists would be killing friends as well as enemies.
“Anyway, DC and Manhattan will be locked down as tight as the Greenbrier. Nothing will drive in and out. Nothing will fly anywhere near any of those three sites.”
“Then there has to be something else. A not-so-obvious target.”
Lomax didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. “A target that the Russians would want to take out even at the risk of starting a war with every other country in the world.”
“Read the file,” Caparelli said. “You’ll know everything we know.”
Lomax smiled. “Oh, I doubt that. But I’ll read it. And I’ll send a watch alert for ten Russian terrorists to our teams. Best I can do for now. Until I know more.” Lomax stood. The meeting was over. “Any idea when that will be?”
“Our source on this has dried up.”
Caparelli could see Lomax didn’t believe that, either. But then, he wouldn’t have believed what Caparelli’s source had been. So that didn’t matter.
What did matter was that as much as Lomax wanted to take the reins of CROSSWIND, Caparelli had successfully maneuvered the DHS into providing on-the-ground resources as CROSSWIND’s perceivers redoubled their efforts to locate Borodin by other means.
To Caparelli, that meant Homeland and CROSSWIND were doing what Lomax wanted them to do: working together. In a perfect world, Lomax would take that as a win. But as he left the director’s office, Caparelli knew their game wouldn’t end that easily.
* * *
The moment the door closed behind Caparelli, Lomax jabbed the white button on his desk phone. “You heard all that?”
Over the intercom, the response was immediate. “Lima Charlie.” The phrase meant loud and clear. Agent Rick Ames and Lomax had served together, still used Marine jargon.
A moment later, the side door opened and Ames entered. He was Secret Service liaison to Operations Coordination, the Secret Service having been swept up by DHS on Day One. He was a smaller man than Lomax, but not by much. Despite their positions in two different civilian organizations, they were still Marines, always would be.
“So what’s your theory?” Lomax asked.
Ames leaned against the wall, arms folded. “I think he told us what he knows, but he don’t know squat. Sure doesn’t know about our prisoner, that’s for certain.”
Lomax agreed. He checked his watch. Less than an hour ago, a Russian female had landed at Andrews Air Force Base aboard a DHS Gulfstream V, in chains. Last night outside Colorado Springs, she had murdered a physician who had been under surveillance in a prescription drug investigation. Such a happy accident.
* * *
Under normal procedures, it might have taken days for the Russian female to be identified and come to the attention of the DHS through Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another of its subsumed agencies. But in this case, local police had discovered her amputated right hand, wounded in a manner local medical authorities couldn’t classify. That triggered a Chemical-Biological-Nuclear Threat Alert that had flashed through the chain of command in minutes. Less than an hour later, the woman’s photograph and fingerprints had been processed by the department’s Automated Biometric Identification System, which noted her most recent entry into the country four days ago at JFK International Airport. The system also called up a prior entry, two years earlier, with the same biometric signature, but a different name. That had triggered another automated threat alert.
Again without human intervention, the woman’s biometrics had been flashed to four other specialized databases, including ones at the Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA. But her positive ID had come through within minutes from the fourth database: the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Biometric Processing Unit at Fort Meade. The end result was that within eighty-seven minutes of the CBN Threat Alert, Owen Lomax had a new operation to coordinate at the DHS: find out why a Russian army major was in the US with false documents and a bizarrely mangled and amputated right hand.
Caparelli’s phone call a few hours later had been like a gift from heaven, as were the photographs he’d provided of the mutilated bodies at the warehouse crime scene.
That was the power of coordination, Lomax knew. With one central source to which all data flowed, the ability to assemble those pieces into a coherent whole was greatly enhanced. Before consolidation, too many uncommunicative intelligence agencies had been the proverbial blind men clutching their own particular piece of the elephant, no one possessing a clear grasp of the nature of the beast.
Lomax knew that Caparelli didn’t share his vision for the unification of the nation’s intelligence operations. What the source of that resistance was, Lomax didn’t know, though he accepted that Caparelli was sincere in somehow thinking it was for the best. That would make the coming confrontation between them more difficult, Lomax knew. But that confrontation was inevitable, and after today, it was imminent. Whatever else was going on here, once the Russian terrorists were dealt with and the security of the country was assured, Lomax considered CROSSWIND and its secrets to be his primary target.
* * *
Not every part of the old St. Elizabeths Hospital campus had been repurposed into offices. A small section of one historic building maintained the facility’s original legacy and had been renovated to become a state-of-the-art infirmary and extended-care facility. The infirmary was for the treatment of department personnel with work-related wounds and injuries, as well as for the rehabilitation of interrogated prisoners. The extended-care facility, similar to those maintained by the other intelligence agencies, was for the safe confinement of former employees who both knew too much and suffered from dementia. Here, all the caregivers had security clearances, so it was no longer necessary to drug or isolate those who had secrets yet were no longer capable of honoring their secrecy oaths.
For now, the Kalnikova woman was being held in a secure infirmary suite as a medical patient. Whether she would later need treatment as an interrogated prisoner would depend on the outcome of her first meeting with Lomax and Ames.
* * *
The infirmary’s senior physician was Darryl Mars. He waited for the DHS director and Secret Service agent outside Kalnikova’s suite. Mars was a former Air Force flight surgeon, tall, imposing, and always gave the impression there was someplace else he’d rather be.
“Have you determined the cause of her injury?” Lomax asked. The three men knew each other. There was no need for pleasantries or small talk on their particular battlefield.
Mars used a tablet to show Lomax and Ames X-ray images of the prisoner’s amputated hand and severed wrist. “It’s nothing chemical, biological, or nuclear,” the doctor said. “So, nothing contagious or dangerous for you to be around.”
Lomax couldn’t make sense of the images. He could see the ulna and radius bones of the woman’s forearm were intact to the wrist. But in the images of the hand, it was difficult to identify any specific bone, other than a few phalanges that were recognizable, though not in the normal positions of fingers and thumb. The X-ray images were further confused by solid white splinters—metal of some kind, but not typical shrapnel.
“Was the hand crushed?” Ames seemed to be having the same trouble reading the images as Lomax.
“The bones and tissue show signs of a similar type of compression trauma,” Mars said. “But in that case, we’d expect the hand to be flattened, as if it had been, I don’t know, placed in a vise. That’s not the case here. Plus the condition of the embedded metal and plastic fragments is totally baffling.” He tapped the screen to display a straightforward photograph of a Beretta semiautomatic pistol. Lomax IDed it as a Px4 Storm. An effective personal weapon, though he preferred his Sig. Both used 9 mm ammunition. The same used to kill the police and forensics technicians outside of Santa Fe.
“You’re looking at pieces of this model of handgun,” Mars said. “It’s the sort of trauma we might see if she had been in close contact with an explosive device while holding the gun, and the blast shattered it and drove the fragments into the hand but…” Mars hesitated, as if knowing how foolish he was about to appear.
But Lomax already knew what the doctor was about to say, spared him the necessity. “She sustained no blast damage.”
Mars narrowed his pale eyes at Lomax. “You know what caused this?”
“No. But I’ve seen it before.” Lomax nodded to Ames. “Let’s do this.”
Mars refrained from asking any more questions. In this profession, everyone had secrets.
* * *
Kalnikova was floating peacefully, her burning hand a bad dream she had had once, and could barely remember.
It was the pain medication, she knew. She suspected the dose she’d been given was far more than medically necessary. Questions were coming, and she knew they’d be serious, because no one had asked her any yet.
“Sofia Kalnikova?”
The name sounded familiar, then she realized two men were standing by her bed. The room was so unremittingly bright, they were little more than black shadows. But she blinked her dry eyes a few more times, and slowly they came into focus.
She wanted to laugh when she saw how typical they looked: soldiers pretending to be in business suits. CIA, she guessed. Or some other kind of spy. But her throat was as dry as her eyes.
“Where is this?” Her voice was raspy. She had been given her first shot of a painkiller just before getting into an ambulance for a ride to an air station. She had a vague recollection of being helped onto a small jet, and then only flashes of a short flight, another ambulance, and then waking in this hospital.
“You’re in the United States.” The shadow that spoke to her was the larger of the two men, the black one with the mustache. Very Stalin, she thought, then tried to laugh again. “Illegally,” he added.
Kalnikova concentrated. “I would like to contact Russian embassy.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
She coughed to clear her throat, and the other shadow did something at the side of her bed, held a small cup of ice to her lips. She reached to hold the cup herself, then was startled to realize she was in restraints. Her left hand, and the thickly wrapped stump of her right wrist, both.
“This is necessary?” she asked.
“For who you are, for what you’ve done, this is like a luxury vacation,” the mustache man said. “It can get a lot worse. And it will.”
She knew what was coming. Drew in a deep breath, tried to fight back the cobwebs of whatever they had pumped into her. “Unless…?”
“Full cooperation.”
The vagueness of that statement told her the Americans were fishing. That gave her some leverage. She needed to know how much.
“In what matter?” she asked.
“Why’d you kill Dr. Roberta Long?”
More fishing, she thought. If this were a murder investigation, she’d still be in Colorado Springs, being questioned by local police.
“Was accident.” She slurred her speech, as if the medication had more of an effect than it did. She tried moving any part of her missing right hand and succeeded in making her wrist throb with dull pain. She needed her edge back.
“Audio recording doesn’t support that.”
“I’m very tired.”
She saw the two men exchange a look, but her vision was blurred and she couldn’t see what passed between them.
“What happened to your hand?”
Interesting. Could that be the reason she was being questioned by these men? They recognized the type of wound it was? Or, perhaps, they couldn’t.
“Is not obvious?” Kalnikova asked. She would not be the first to give up information.
The big man loomed over her, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. She closed her eyes, instead, as if drifting off in a drug haze. But she focused her thoughts on picturing and naming all the pieces of an AK-47 as she stripped it and reassembled it in her mind’s eye.
“This is what’s obvious,” he said. “Nine people are dead. The doctor you suffocated. Two police officers and three technicians shot with the same bullets used by the gun that came apart in your hand. And a three-person video crew with the same type of wounds you have.
“So,” the man concluded, “what I need to know is, am I going to charge you as a Russian national who accidently killed a drug dealer, which means you’d be sent back to Russia to serve your sentence, or am I going to charge you as a terrorist who’s slaughtered nine innocent Americans, which means life in an isolation cell in a supermax prison? You see my dilemma?”
Kalnikova opened her eyes, felt clarity return to her. Not the clarity of her military training, but of a chess game: pure strategy.
“You are offering me deal,” she said.
“I said what I said. It’s your turn to talk.”
She ignored him. “You are offering this deal so early for one of two reasons. The first, you are desperate. The second, you have no intention keeping deal. You do not look desperate.”
Kalnikova saw the men exchange another look, and the smaller one, who had given her the ice, started for the door.
“We’ll figure out what happened to your hand without your help,” the man with the mustache said.
“No doubt you will,” she agreed.
The smaller man left, shut the door behind him.
The big man who remained stepped closer to her bed, put his hands on the safety railing, as if she could go anywhere while restrained.
“You’re tough, Major. I get that.”
There was something about the way he said her rank, the first time it had been mentioned. “You are soldier,” she said.
“Marine.”
Kalnikova nodded. “Officer?”
“Major.”
She smiled. “We are equal then. You say, ‘Brothers in arms.’ Lucky happenstance, yes?”
“Not quite equal. You’re my prisoner.”
Kalnikova blinked again, and her vision cleared finally, to show her the steady gaze of the man by her bed.
She stared at him, judging him. “Not prisoner,” she said. “Partner.”
His expression didn’t change, and he didn’t look away. “How so?”
“We have same mission.”
“That would be?”
“The man responsible for … hurting those people. For what happened to my hand … I was sent to stop him.”
It was nothing she saw, but she felt the connection that suddenly sprang up between them. Warhounds catching the scent of prey. The promise of action. What is a man like this doing in a business suit? she asked herself.
“Who is he? Why is he here?”
“Why? I don’t know. The people who sent me, they don’t know. Who he is, that I do know.”
“The condition of the bodies, your wound … Does the person you’re after have a new type of weapon?”
Kalnikova knew it would be best to save that information until the very end, and even then, the less she revealed, the better. She saw that the man understood it would be useless to ask for more from her. The details of their partnership had to be established first. But he couldn’t resist another question. “Do you know where he is? Where he’s going?”
Kalnikova moved her queen to check. “I have way to track him.” She closed her eyes, ready to drift off to sleep. “Partner.”