CALVERT ESTATE, LANGLEY
While the deputy director and Alex went off for a little confab, Caleb scanned the historic photographs in the main foyer, reminiscing over his time spent here as both student and guest lecturer to new CIA recruits. He stopped to admire a few photos of some of the handsome dogs that once lived here, being put through their paces on an obstacle course when the Calvert Estate was quite literally the CIA’s doghouse. Before it became a conference center, the Scattergood-Thorne residence had housed K-9s. The building and its adjacent property were effectively a kennel and training ground for dog teams. It was a lot less fancy then—some would say downright run-down—but Caleb had enjoyed getting to know the dogs and their handlers back then.
He headed to the kitchen to wrestle a coffee from the fancy machine, a little confused by the steps involved.
“Still preferring the old ways, I see.” The voice came at him from behind, and while he hadn’t heard it in forever, it still conjured a sour taste in his mouth, like a bad oyster. “I thought cowboy coffee was your thing.”
He finally got the pod oriented into the cuppy thing, closed the machine’s lid, and hit the button. The coffeemaker made some noise and began spilling out a frothy rendering of rich, black coffee from the spout below.
“It still is. I heard you died in a Bangkok hooker den,” Caleb said without looking up. He took his ceramic mug emblazoned with I’M NOT A CIA AGENT and added a hit of raw sugar.
“I think the PC term is comfort women.”
“Charming. But in your case, I’m sure you meant comfort girls.”
“I see you’re still the asshole I remember from back in the sandbox, Viking.”
“I tailor my approach to the audience, Hacksaw.” Caleb didn’t much appreciate that the man had used his CIA code name but felt no need to show his irritation beyond replying in kind. Instead, he sipped his java, which was hot, strong, and full of flavor. Even Terry Gault couldn’t ruin that. He turned to face the associate deputy director for operations of the Defense Intelligence Agency head-on. The man still wore the scars from flaming shrapnel he had caught across his face and forehead in Iraq. Or it might have been Syria. Either way, it was an improvement to his looks and hadn’t made his personality appreciably better or worse. “So, what are you doing here?” he asked. “You’re a little outside your AO, aren’t you? Last I checked, DIA was twenty miles downriver.” He pointed over Gault’s shoulder for effect.
“Nothing gets past you, Copeland. Let’s just say Langley still fits snugly within my area of operations these days.”
“Always the cunning linguist, Gault. And still nobody likes you.”
“You know what they say: keep your friends close and fuck everyone else.”
“And here I thought we might be on the same side.”
“Then you’re being naive, as always.”
Caleb walked past and leaned in. “Well, Hacksaw, catching up was great. I gotta go, but let’s do it again sometime.”
“You can’t still be harboring old grudges, can you?”
Caleb turned back, set his coffee down on the countertop, and squared himself to Gault. “Look, Terry,” he said, tucking his hands into his pockets, in part to restrain himself from punching him in the face. “Maybe you fooled a bunch of career administrators into giving you a lofty promotion at DIA, but clearly no one asked your team. Or me. So, no old grudges here—I just don’t like you.”
He was about to retrieve his coffee and perform a retrograde when Gault said, “Still pretending to be the Goody Two-shoes—”
“I was never that and never claimed to be, but at least I wasn’t a sick fuck who did what you and your team did.”
“What we did helped serve up Bin Laden and others like him.”
“You were never near OBL. You got good intel once, and even that was pure luck. If you take enough bad shots, sooner or later, you might hit something.”
“My team was effective.”
“Your team was out of control, and you, as its commander, single-handedly forced an administration into changing every US intel agency’s SOPs.”
“My techniques saved lives.”
“Your techniques almost always delivered faulty information and people died—theirs and ours.”
“Not always.”
“That’s a swell unit motto,” Caleb scoffed. “How many stars on the Memorial Wall over in the main building can be directly attributed to you and your team’s methods? Men and women lost their lives because of your ineptitude. Maybe we should just tack a note under the star of every hero you put into the ground acting on your bad intel: Sometimes we kill our own, but don’t worry … not always. I’m sure that touching explanatory footnote will make all the difference in the world to their grieving loved ones.”
“If only walls could talk, Viking … the things I’ve seen you do.”
Caleb never claimed to be perfect, and he’d always acted within the boundaries of, if not the actual rulebook, then its fuzzy margins. Whatever he did in the name of his fellow soldiers, special operators, and country, he did with an absence of malice or cruelty toward the enemy. His conscience and his humanity were intact. Same couldn’t be said of Hacksaw. The man had no boundaries. Zero.
“I asked why you’re here,” Caleb said.
“Yes, you did.” Gault offered nothing more than his continued emotionless stare.
“Okay, nice chatting with you,” said Caleb, walking away.
“See you around, Copeland—you and your ISA girlfriend.” Bile crept into Caleb’s throat. The muscles in his shoulders and arms strained within their confines. His palms itched as his fingers curled into a fist, nails biting flesh.
Caleb flipped him the bird as he headed for the stairs.
Knock, knock.
Alex listened as Kadeisha Thomas explained the genesis of ACCT, the Advance Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation Team headed by Caleb that fell within CIA Special Activities Center’s domain. Deputy Director Thomas interrupted herself to shout at the door. “Come in.”
Saved by the bell, thought Alex. She’d heard the ACCT spiel more times than she cared to count, but in deference to the deputy director, she had sat patiently throughout. All she really cared about were the missions, and since concluding the operation in Ukraine a few months back, there hadn’t been any more of those.
Caleb walked in carrying a steaming mug. After their recent gorging, Alex couldn’t imagine taking another bite or drink of anything for a week, but the smell of his fresh-brewed coffee set off her yearning, and she wiped drool from the corner of her mouth.
“Copeland,” said Thomas. “I was just getting to the part where I bring Martel up to speed on our situation.”
“How’d she take it?” he asked.
“I haven’t told her yet. That’s your job, Branch Chief.”
“Well, ma’am, you’re the deputy director of this agency, so why don’t you tell her?”
Alex looked at Thomas, who had stopped smiling.
“Come again?” she said.
The two women watched as Caleb closed the door behind him and walked to the window, letting out a deep sigh.
“If I didn’t know better, Mr. Copeland, I’d say you ran into our friend from DIA.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And can I assume that this is the reason for your sour disposition and lack of good judgment when addressing your superior?”
Caleb turned to her, his eyes narrow, his lips frozen in a pained expression. At last, he spoke. “I’m sorry, ma’am.” He looked at Alex. “We’ve been assigned to a joint task force.”
“What kind of task force?” asked Alex.
“One with the State Department and FBI,” he said.
Alex sensed their apprehension as they awaited her reaction. Not long ago, she had been one of the Bureau’s most promising special agents—until they had terminated her employment for the very thing for which she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Moore as well as the highest decoration awarded by France.
“If you’re waiting for me to throw a hissy fit like he did,” she said, thrusting her chin in Caleb’s direction, “it’s never going to happen.”
“Good,” said Thomas.
“What’s this task force about, and why are we joining it?” Alex asked.
“Well, we’re not exactly joining it,” Caleb said.
Thomas chimed in. “Oh, good Lord, Copeland. Get your head out of your ass and get to the point.”
Whatever demons Caleb was wrestling, he shook them off. “Yes, ma’am.” Straightening up, he put his mug down on the desk. “For a few months now, not just CIA but several other US and foreign intelligence agencies have been hearing a lot of the same rumblings that Russia is poised to move against NATO and that they’re behind major incidents of sabotage in Finland.”
“Why would they do that? It would be suicide,” said Alex.
Thomas nodded. “It would be, and yet it seems they are.”
“They would have a hard enough time against Finland even by itself, let alone if the rest of NATO came in under Article 5. Russian infantry and armor are heavily committed to Eastern Europe, to say nothing of their air force. Do they actually think they have the needed capacity for that?”
“Well, here we are, so you tell me,” Thomas replied.
“I wouldn’t have said this back when I was in Syria and elsewhere, but Russia’s military is not the powerhouse we thought it was,” she added.
“Suspicious events in Finland over the past twelve months all point to Russian involvement,” Caleb said. “Widespread blackouts, an uptick in targeted malware, chemical and oil spills at sea, hospitals and other infrastructure targeted with widespread denial-of-service and ransomware attacks. There’s also been organized unrest like what we saw before in the Baltic capitals—anti-government, mass skinhead-type violence, riots, that kind of thing—but in the past those events were isolated to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Now they’re happening across the Baltic Sea in Helsinki and throughout Finland.”
“Moscow denies involvement in any of it, of course,” said Thomas. “But as you know, denial is their modus operandi.”
“When you say it points back to Russia, do you mean Directorate 13 is behind it?”
“Either D13 or their parent GRU unit, Unit 29155,” said Caleb. “They’re still active. It might even be one of the other federal security services, like the SVR.”
She paused a moment to consider what he was saying. “I don’t buy it.”
“Why not? You’re the one who was all over D13 being the bad guys when we dealt with them the last time, even when no one else believed you.”
“But does it make sense that they would be working a major disruption op at the same time as the events in Paris were unfolding a few months back? Wouldn’t that risk exposing both operations in such a way that neither succeeded?”
“It would,” agreed Thomas. “But I don’t think I have to remind you that they’re specialists in that sort of nonsense, Alex. And by that, I mean they’re accustomed to being obvious and incompetent and bold enough not to care who knows it.”
Caleb added, “We also learned ex post facto that Paris was off the books. So arguably, it was the Paris op that was unauthorized and occurring behind D13’s officially sanctioned disruption game.”
“If that’s how it went down,” said Alex, “all the more reason a rogue colonel would have trouble pulling off something of that magnitude while working other high-risk ops. And he’s gone now. Directorate 13’s been decapitated. Neither the general who established it nor the colonel in charge are even alive anymore.”
“The latter thanks to you,” Thomas said.
She ignored the compliment. Or the statement of fact. Alex had a way of compartmentalizing her missions. The elimination of Colonel Gerasimov had been all in a day’s work, and General Tikhonov’s execution in Lubyanka was merely a data point that logically flowed after the others. Other than the satisfaction she felt at having successfully completed her assignment, she had no feelings one way or the other about the task she had performed.
None that she consciously acknowledged anyway.
“Don’t be so sure,” cautioned Caleb. “The GRU is the most highly funded of the security services. Now that Yevgeny Prigozhin has been eliminated, it’s even more critical that a new leader rise to fill the void left by the Wagner Group in Europe and Africa. Someone has to fill that void. The GRU and its generals are that somebody.”
“What about the attack on the megayacht the other night?”
“What about it?” asked Thomas.
“Are we any closer to figuring out who did it and why?”
“Alex, it’s not our business.”
“Until it is.”
“And right now, it isn’t,” Thomas said sternly. “The attack was carried out by a band of Afghan mercenaries.”
“Which means somebody paid them.”
“That’s what mercenaries means,” said Thomas.
“So there’s no nexus between them and the Russians?”
“That’s for the French police and Interpol to find out, and you are neither the French police nor Interpol. Other than being an involved party, you’re not involved at all, if you catch my meaning, Martel. You are a contract employee. More precisely, a global response staff special agent and subject-matter expert with the Central Intelligence Agency, not the French police or Interpol.”
“But what if there is a connection to whatever is happening in Finland? Maybe it was the Russians, but maybe it wasn’t. Is that something the CIA is looking into, ma’am? Finland’s NATO ambassador was aboard Aurora, so isn’t that enough of a reason for us to, if not suspect, then at least not rule out the possibility the target was the ambassador? Or even Madame Clicquot herself, who had arranged the meeting for a reason we don’t yet understand?”
“That’s a lot of don’t knows and what-ifs, Alex.”
“I’m just exploring theories, ma’am. That’s what we do, isn’t it—collect and disseminate?”
“And analyze, yes. And right now, the analysis is thin.”
Thomas studied her. Alex shifted uncomfortably in her seat, again feeling like she was waiting for some adjudication from her high school vice principal.
“Request permission to speak freely, ma’am—”
“Oh, Alex, you’re not in the fucking Army anymore. Speak your mind, girl.”
“The attack on Aurora failed. Celeste and Valtteri are still alive. The wrong people died. Lots of them. That means somebody must be seriously pissed off that a shitload of money went down the drain on a failed op.” She paused to size Thomas up before she went on. Thomas studied her with a grim expression as Alex continued her appeal. “I owe a debt to Madame Clicquot to protect her. She and her boyfriend are in danger. I need to go back to liaise with French police while the investigation is ongoing. Then, when we know more—”
“And when exactly will that be?”
“Maybe a couple of days…”
Thomas waited a beat before responding. “Martel, let me make this as simple and as plain as I can.” Her Alabama accent was now in full flower. “There is no way on God’s green earth that the C-I-A”—she deliberately enunciated each letter of the acronym—“will permit one of its own, contract or otherwise, to assume the role of an investigator from one of our other myriad agencies, F-B-fucking-I included, ’cause that’s what you’re asking me to approve. You feel me, Special Agent?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She didn’t.
“So, you’re going to have to suck on the bitter pill of a joint task force while Caleb here deals with his old friend.”
“What?” Caleb had been leaning against a radiator on the wall but flew to attention. “We have to work with that prick?”
“Not work with, work for. The Defense Intelligence Agency has been brought into this, and as the senior member of the task force, Deputy Director Gault is in charge.”
“Whose cockamamie idea was that? How is this a DIA-led task force? Show me the military component that suggests DIA is in charge. Shouldn’t Homeland or State be taking point?”
She cut him off with a raised hand before he could protest further. “Not another word, Copeland, or I’ll post you to mucking out kennels on the other side of the compound, seeing how much you love dogs.”
He sunk back against the radiator.
“Back to this task force then,” Alex said, still seething a little inside but content to let her frustration simmer until she came up with a better plan. The deputy director didn’t seem receptive to alternative work strategies at this point. “What’s its purpose again?”
“The chatter we were hearing had always only involved Finland, never the United States directly—except in the context of a NATO ally being threatened, bringing the possibility of an Article 5 intervention into play, as you noted earlier. And for the past several months, these issues, which we and several of our allies have tied to Russian adventurism, have been raised quietly at the United Nations, only recently being elevated to the attention of the Security Council. Technically, we had only a peripheral involvement.” She paused.
Alex filled in the silence. “What changed?”
“It seems the Russian bear isn’t content to rattle its saber at our friends the Finns. Now we’re hearing about threats to high-ranking US officials. CIA and FBI are on it, as is just about every Washington agency with a three-letter acronym. But it’s this small task force, compartmentalized and limited to its present membership, that is tasked with diving deeper and acting as a clearinghouse for information collected and analyzed by the other teams. Personal feelings aside, Alex, it’s a feather in your cap. Take that shit seriously.”
Just then, Thomas’s phone rang. She answered it and listened intently to the caller.
“Is the director aware?” she asked. Then, “Yes, I’ll take care of it. We’ll be right there.” She stood from the desk.
“What is it?” Caleb asked.
“It seems the Russians are making a move. Follow me.”
“Where we going?” asked Alex.
“The West Wing.”