Jordan Mayes looked at her, then he dropped his head into his hands, doubling over in the seat. “He’ll kill me, too.”
“Carmichael? Don’t be ridiculous. Odds are it was Violator who killed Shoal. He was out looking for more evidence in the assassinations.”
“Bullshit. I doubt Gentry has killed anybody this week. Sure, Brandywine Street and the Easy Market, those were him. The rest were either Hightower or the Saudis.” He looked at Suzanne, terror in his eyes. “It’s all a big wall of fun-house mirrors, Suzanne. Denny is controlling it all, but it’s gotten too big for him to manage. He’ll have to kill me to protect himself now.”
Suzanne still didn’t believe there was any chance Denny Carmichael would kill Jordan Mayes, and she told him so.
“You don’t know everything I know, Suzanne.”
“You just told me. Or have you forgotten?”
“What I just told you barely scratches the surface of what’s been going on.”
Suzanne Brewer slowed her BMW, and then she pulled into a convenience store right before the on-ramp onto the George Washington Parkway. Here she bought Mayes a large black coffee.
Five minutes later the two of them sat parked under a streetlight in the parking lot at Fort Marcy Park, just off the parkway. There wasn’t a single other vehicle in sight.
“I want you to tell me everything, Jordan.”
“You aren’t cleared for everything.”
“If you really feel Carmichael might come after you, does it scare you that you are the only one who knows?”
This sank in a moment. Mayes took a gulp of molten coffee. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But then we go to Justice with this. I’m not going down on a sinking ship.”
Suzanne said, “And neither am I. If what you tell me warrants it, you’re damn right we’re going to DOJ.”
Mayes nodded, relaxed markedly, and said, “Do you know anything about Operation BACK BLAST?”
Suzanne Brewer shook her head. “Never heard of it.”
So Jordan Mayes told her.
66
Suzanne Brewer looked at her hands folded in her lap, and she realized they were shaking. Perspiration formed on her temples, and her mouth was dry.
She and Mayes were still sitting in her BMW in Fort Marcy Park. Blustery rain pelted the side of her car now, and the light from the streetlamp above them was at times blotted out with the movement of the tree branches. Mayes had been talking for most of the past hour, but not all of it had been productive. On the contrary, eighty percent of what Mayes said had been, as far as Brewer was concerned, the ramblings of an inebriated man who, for the first time in his life, felt free to let years of suspicion flow about his superior. He’d produced a flask filled with scotch, and it loosened his lips even more. He needed to talk, so she let him, but after she learned about Operation BACK BLAST and Denny’s involvement with the Saudis here in the U.S., she had stopped listening, and she had begun thinking about what she would do next.
The information she possessed could certainly put Denny Carmichael in prison, and it could conceivably destroy CIA clandestine ops. But it was even bigger than that, as far as she was concerned. Once she got over the shock of it all, she realized this was a watershed moment in her career, in her life. The decision she made now, right this minute, would set the course for her future.
Mayes looked her up and down through eyes at half mast. “Right now you are at the point I found myself in this afternoon. I’d asked for an answer, and when I got it, I really wished I didn’t know. Now we both know, so now we have to end this. I am friends with Juan Ferreria, the deputy director of the FBI, we can go to his place in Tysons right now, wake him up, and get the ball rolling with DOJ.”
Suzanne hesitated. “I think we need to think carefully about our next move.”
“What do you mean? We said we’d take this to Justice.”
But Suzanne wasn’t thinking about justice, duty, or even right and wrong. She was thinking about leverage. In her meteoric career she would never have more power than she had at this moment. She didn’t want to dispel that power by telling the FBI what she knew.
She didn’t want to destroy the CIA.
She wanted to run the CIA.
Suzanne started her car and pulled back out onto the George Washington Parkway, heading in the direction of Tysons Corner. There was some traffic out at midnight, but she was able to move along at the speed limit. She would play along with Jordan, just to buy some time, but she would spend the fifteen-minute-long drive trying to talk him out of revealing anything to the Department of Justice until they knew exactly what they were doing.
She said, “You and I need to make sure we won’t get caught up in the fallout of all this.”
“We are the ones going to the feds. I’m not worried about getting indicted. I’m worried about getting killed!”
Suzanne said, “In light of this information, I agree Denny is compromised, and I agree he might become desperate. But I don’t think you have any reason to worry.”
“Yeah?” Mayes said, clearly not buying what she was selling. “Why is that?”
She pulled into the right lane. Her BMW hummed along at sixty miles an hour without any effort at all. On her left a motorcycle with a passenger riding behind the driver kept pace with her. It was an unusual sight in the heavy rain, but she was focused on the road ahead and on the man sitting to her right.
She said, “Think about it, Jordan. You two have worked together forever. Say what you want about Denny Carmichael, but he’s a pragmatist. He knows he needs friends in that building right now, and you have shown yourself to be a faithful—”
Suzanne Brewer noticed new movement on her left now, out her driver-side window. Through the rainfall she saw the motorcycle encroaching into her lane. At first she thought he’d just drifted over to the right accidentally, but it took less than a second for her to realize that the passenger’s arm was outstretched, towards her window.
In his hand was a gun, pointed nearly at contact distance with the glass inches from her head.
She only had time to tap her brake pedal, barely slowing the vehicle, before the flash of light assaulted her eyes and the pound of a gunshot rocked her eardrums. Her windshield exploded in her face, and to her right she heard the passenger-side window shatter.
She felt the glass in her hair, blood at her hairline and on her left cheek. Somehow she kept her BMW on the road, so she stomped on the gas now, and the six-cylinder engine accelerated.
She had the wherewithal to drop her right hand from the wheel and punch a button on the center console of the vehicle, shifting the BMW into Sport Mode. Her head slammed back into the headrest as the car launched forward, her suspension stiffened and improved markedly. Her luxury sedan was now a sports car, racing ahead and surprising the assassins on the motorcycle with its power.
She centered her car on the white dashes on the road and weaved right between a pair of vehicles taking up the two lanes in front of her, and then she jacked back to the left, pulling in front of the motorcycle as it went left around the car in the left lane. The bike was forced to brake to avoid rear-ending her, but when she looked in her rearview she saw two more bikes race past the first. Both of them had riders on back as well, and she knew this was far from over.
The sound of their engines came through the shattered window by her face, along with the cool rain.
For the first time since the gunshot she looked over to Jordan Mayes. He hadn’t made a noise, so she expected to find him slumped over in his seat dead, but instead he just held his hand against the lower part of his face. Blood dripped through his fingers.
“How bad is it?” she asked.