Walsh stammered, “What would be the charges?”
“For starters, wire fraud. There’s a grand theft in there somewhere, and we’ll see what else we might be looking at. I’m not charging you at this minute. It’s an investigation. What I’m doing is giving you a fair chance to help yourself.”
Cheryl said, “Derek, I think you should probably keep quiet. You need an attorney.”
Tonya Stratford calmly turned her head and said to Cheryl, “You need to leave.”
“Derek needs representation.”
“Are you an attorney?”
“No.”
“Then get out.” She added a “Now” in a flat tone.
For some reason, Walsh felt the overwhelming need to speak to either Mike Rosenberg or Bill Shepherd. He felt like his friends would know what to say and make him feel better. If they had gotten him through the marines, they could certainly handle a couple of FBI types. But he didn’t have his friends. Walsh was alone with the two FBI agents. He knew they could hear his stomach rumble as he considered vomiting. He just didn’t think it would help.
Michael Rosenberg sat in the media room watching ten TVs at the same time. This section at the CIA headquarters in Langley monitored news reports and sifted them into usable intelligence. Their duty overlapped with the National Security Agency, but they rarely shared information. Watching the news was a good tactic and resource. Why not let guys like Anderson Cooper or Shepard Smith do the work for you? Each of the big networks had correspondents and news crews all across the world. The problem was that CNN tended to focus on the most video-friendly of issues and ignore any with real substance.
Two TVs in the corner, 55-inch Samsung high-definition units, played the political talk shows from MSNBC and some of the Fox panel shows. The analyst who tracked these shows did it to get a pulse of what the American people were worried about. Or at least what some of the commentators thought the American people should be worried about.
Rosenberg liked watching the shows when he had a chance and hearing everyone’s view. His time in the military had taught him the importance of seeing the big picture. He didn’t understand how the different networks decided to hire people. But today it didn’t matter because he was only watching a New York channel and CNN as they covered a rising tide of violence and unrest that had started in the financial district of Wall Street and spread across the entire city.
At first it appeared to be just the Stand Up to Wall Street group. An FBI report had indicated that this new group was largely leftovers from Occupy Wall Street. Neither seemed to have a cohesive message or any respected spokesman. As far as Rosenberg could tell they just wanted a reason not to work or pay their own way. He had seen them up close when he visited his friend “Tubby” Walsh in New York. They were a surly group who didn’t seem interested in civil interaction. They were clearly the ones who’d started this by trashing a couple of police cars and then spread general mayhem with rocks and bottles.
About an hour ago someone had dropped a hand grenade at the entrance to one of the subway stations and killed eleven people. A few minutes after that, on the other side of the city, gunmen fired fourteen shots into a bus, killing an elderly woman and wounding two children. Somehow it didn’t feel all that random to Rosenberg.
He was afraid this all fell in with the new tactic of lone assailant terrorists. They all seemed to be vaguely connected to the group ISIS; at least that’s how the media portrayed it. There had been three beheadings in the last two weeks. One in Chicago, one in Kansas City, and the last a schoolteacher in Denver.
In Los Angeles, a ritual severing of the hands of four men accused of being thieves had caused a huge reaction from the Latino population. The men all survived and told the tale of a Muslim shopkeeper who had branded them shoplifters. The next thing they knew, a van with three masked men had scooped them up, and a few minutes later they were left to bleed on the sidewalk.
The final piece of the puzzle, as far as Rosenberg was concerned, was the attacks on tourist attractions across the country. The Liberty Bell, the Atlanta Aquarium, and the Lincoln Memorial had all seen violence in the past week. It made him think of a couple of attacks his unit had suffered in Afghanistan. At least his friends were there to help. Now, even though he still worked for the U.S. government, Rosenberg felt all alone as he watched the world disintegrate.
Rosenberg recognized it was one thing to study trends in terrorism, or even watch it on newscasts, and it was another to experience it firsthand. He had seen the results in a couple of the cities in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the closest he ever came was in their forward operating base outside the village of Landigal in Afghanistan. The marines would venture out to strike at insurgents deep in the heart of the Korengal Valley and pull back to the base for resupply. The longer they were there, the more they worked with the local population. His unit even provided protection to the UN medical personnel who vaccinated everyone in the vicinity.
But one evening, in the middle of the base, during a lull in the fighting that had lasted more than two months, when no one was expecting it, trouble had started. Rosenberg was just coming out of the small mess tent with Bill Shepherd at his side and Ron Jackson telling them the story about his football prowess in college. No one bothered to remind Ron that he had told the story before, always with a different, more spectacular ending.
The first sound of gunfire was so close it shocked them all into statues. As always, it was Jackson’s measured response that got them moving. He immediately pushed the others to the side and started to look for a weapon.
Shepherd was ready to act that moment and pulled the sidearm he had in a flap holster on his right hip.
Rosenberg, as always, assessed the situation. There were two very young Afghans who had gotten hold of M-4 rifles. The fact that they weren’t using AK-47s meant that they had already been inside the compound and were probably trusted by someone. Rosenberg knew these attacks from supposed allies had happened at other bases, but it was still startling to be in the middle of one.
He saw his friend Derek Walsh coming from the side of the supply depot he was responsible for. He was running toward the sound of gunfire and had an M-4 in his hands. Rosenberg considered shouting a warning that he was about to run up on the two shooters, but just then a third man, dressed as a traditional Afghan, wearing a giant backpack, started running toward the command post from the other side of the supply tent. A suicide bomber would cause havoc.
Then Rosenberg was shocked when he saw the man run past Walsh just as they both reached the front of the supply tent. Walsh reached up without hesitation and grabbed hold of the pack. The rail-thin Afghan’s momentum and Walsh’s sheer size jerked the pack from the man’s back and sent Walsh tumbling to the ground.
Return fire from someone near the front of the command post cut all three intruders down instantly.
Walsh sat on the ground holding the pack in one hand and the M-4 raised up looking for more targets in the other. It was the most heroic thing Rosenberg had ever seen anyone do. And he was glad the man who did it was his friend.
At the CIA, on the TV farthest from him, Rosenberg could see that the violence was having a serious effect on the stock market. It had drifted lower over the past week and now, just after eleven o’clock in the morning, it was in absolute freefall. The word “crash” came to his mind.
He wondered how his friend Derek Walsh was handling it.
Major Bill Shepherd was watching the international news as he pulled out a few reports and got a handle on who was on leave and who was at the base. The marine detachment there was used for several tasks. Mainly the Special Forces unit trained with the smaller NATO countries like Estonia and Hungary. They taught the local soldiers how to use certain portable weapons and gauged what kind of use they would be in a real conflict. Aside from Germany, France, and England, no one would be a great help in a large-scale conflict, but on a limited basis, the smaller countries had some decent fighters.