Nine o’clock on the dot. 2100 hours. Punctual as ever.
The Dark Lord crossed the barroom and put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Glad to see you could make it, boys.”
And then he was gone, moving toward an empty booth at the back of the pub. Thomas put out a hand toward his glass, tilting it back with a sudden, brusque motion. The rum slid down his throat, warming him against the coldness within.
It wasn’t going to be enough. He drained the glass and set it back down on the bar, following after Kranemeyer.
Party’s over.
She wasn’t sleeping. Harry knew it from the moment he walked into the room, but he closed the door with all the care he would have shown if she’d been sound asleep.
He shifted the AK-47 to his right hand and sat down quietly in the recliner. The rifle had been chosen from the weapons in the vehicle after a moment’s careful consideration. The motorcyclists had been wearing body armor.
He could barely make out Carol’s form in the darkness, laying there on the bed, wrapped up in the sleeping bag they’d brought from the safehouse.
Laying there awake. He could tell by her breathing — he’d had a lifetime of listening to people sleep. Not all of them had woken back up.
Harry leaned back in the recliner, letting the assault rifle rest across his lap. It was cold in the house, bitterly cold, but there was no way around it, with the utilities cut to the house. The bi-level, like so many houses built in the mid-90s, had been built with no thought of any heat source aside from electric. It hadn’t been until near the end of the Obama administration, when utility rates had skyrocketed, that people had started to reconsider.
Cold. Yeah, that’s where he was. Out in the cold. He’d known it from the moment he had seen his picture splashed across Rhoda Stevens’ TV screen along with the Bureau’s APB. A bad picture, blurry even…but that life was forever over. His days on the run were only beginning.
Harry rose to his feet, a slightly sardonic smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He ran a gloved hand over the receiver of the Kalashnikov, feeling cold gunmetal through the neoprene fabric. Perhaps he’d always known that it would come to this.
One thing that inevitably resulted in social awkwardness among spies was a universal desire to sit facing the door. It was a mark of their respect for the older man that Thomas and Tex gave Bernard Kranemeyer that seat.
Respect, and to the extent that such men gave it, their trust. He’d been through enough hell to earn it.
Thomas was on his second Dark and Stormy by the time the DCS got to the point of the meeting. Taking a small HP netbook out of the satchel at his side, he set it on the table and booted it up.
Once he had the thing running, he withdrew a hand from his coat pocket and inserted a USB thumb drive into the side port of the small computer. Another moment, and a file from the thumb drive filled the screen.
“Is that what I think it is?” Tex asked, his dark eyes narrowing into obsidian daggers as he glared across the table at Kranemeyer.
The director’s mouth reshaped itself into a tight-lipped smile.
“I thought about stuffing them down the front of my boxers, but,” he shrugged, “file theft has come a long way since the days of Sandy Berger.”
“Why don’t we start with what this file is and what it’s doing outside Agency walls,” Thomas interjected, licking the last of the rum off his lips. He suddenly wasn’t thirsty.
Kranemeyer sighed. “You probably heard that I received a call from Nichols shortly after he went rogue this morning.”
A nod from both men. “During the call, Nichols used the emergency code Free fall.”
Thomas exchanged a look with his partner. “Never heard of it.”
“That’s what Lasker said too,” the DCS nodded. “Before your time.”
He cleared his throat. “It was late November of 2000 — things were heating up in the West Bank.” A snort of disgust. “Scratch that — when do things ever cool down over in that godforsaken piece of real estate?”
A cheer went up from the crowd playing darts at one end of the bar and Kranemeyer’s eyes swept the room. No visible threats. “David Lay was in his third year as the Agency’s Station Chief Tel Aviv, which meant Operation RUMBLEWAY was under his operational control. I was still in the military, but wound up attached to Langley’s Operations Directorate for the duration of the mission.”
He gestured to the screen. “These are the mission files for RUMBLEWAY. Nichols met me on the ground at Ben Gurion and briefed me on our way into the embassy. He struck me as little more than a kid, but as it turned out…he already had nearly a year of black ops experience under his belt. He knew the languages, he knew the culture, and he knew the players in the region. Word in the field was that he was the second coming of Lawrence of Arabia. In the days before 9/11, no one knew the region better than Nichols, and no one had his respect for the people and their faith. Time was, I wondered if he was a Muslim himself. As it turned out, that wasn’t accurate.”
“What was the purpose of RUMBLEWAY?” Tex interrupted quietly.
“It was just after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The NSA had traced a transfer of money from the PLO to the families of the suicide bombers. Nothing unusual there, but they dug deeper — found out that a member of the PLO had run support for the operation, working with bin Laden. An odd marriage that, but that’s terrorism for you.”
An ironic chuckle escaped the lips of the DCS as he leaned back in his chair. “He’d been on Mossad’s radar for nearly twenty years — they’d tried to take him out in ’93, but the Clinton administration got wind of it and pressured Rabin to rescind the kill order. The dirtbag — I’ll call him Yusuf — was Arafat’s cousin.”
The rattle of gunfire over the cranked-up TV speakers nearly drowned out the sound of the key in the front door. Nearly, but not quite.
Nasir Khalidi looked up from his videogame controller in time to see his brother push the door open. When he glanced back at the screen, his character was lying dead on the ground, felled by a sniper’s bullet.
Jamal’s face bore an all-too familiar look of righteous disapproval. “The time you waste with that thing…”
A chuckle escaped Nasir’s lips as he tapped the reload button. “It’s a nice way to wind down after eight hours hanging onto the back of a truck.”
Five seconds, he thought. Wait for it.
It was more like ten, this time. Then, Jamal’s voice from the kitchenette, in an oft-repeated, “Nice way to wind down? A tool of imperialism, you mean.” His brother popped back out of the kitchenette like a rabbit out of its hole and stood there watching him, his arms folded. “You do know that the American government uses these — these games, as you call them, to train their crusaders, to condition them to kill our brothers in the house of Islam.”
Nasir shrugged, taking another sip from his Mountain Dew. “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”
“If that’s the way I want to look at it!”
“Relax,” Nasir replied, hitting the POWER button to shut off both the TV and the video game console. It was going to be one of those nights. “You’ve lost your sense of humor, my brother. What’s happened to you?”