FRIDAY
57
New York – Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan
Much later, when we’d talk about it, I’d often get asked if I saw the “white light” or some kind of tunnel. To everybody’s disappointment and contrary to what Alami had told me many of his patients had experienced in those hours and days when they were technically-in the traditional, loose sense of the word-dead, I could only say I didn’t see anything like that. No lighted tunnel, no angel to guide me, no heaven either. It was simply the deepest sleep I’d ever had. Twenty-seven hours of it, I was told.
I didn’t hear the panicked shouts between Deutsch, Kurt and Gigi at the apartment after I lost consciousness. I didn’t remember or feel the ten minutes of relentless chest compressions Deutsch gave me or any of the six defibrillator shocks the paramedics hit me with before resuming the CPR as they rushed me to NewYork-Presbyterian. I have no memory of everything Alami and his team did to me during those long hours: shoving the hose down my throat to intubate me, cutting into my veins to siphon out my blood, cool it down and re-oxygenate it, hitting me with more shocks, injecting me with all kinds of intravenous drugs and plugging various monitors into me to bring me back to life. But they did. Those brilliant, dedicated human beings-my real-life angels, I guess-all of them brought me back, and I’ll forever be grateful and humbled by their actions.
The first thing I became aware of was the blurred face of Tess hovering over me. Deutsch had driven up and escorted her out of the house, past the FBI and local cops who were watching it, saying she needed to ask her some things down at Federal Plaza. Tess later told me my fingers had twitched unexpectedly and she’d jumped out of her seat by the bed and looked down on my face, willing me to wake up. Within seconds, other familiar faces came into focus: Kurt and Gigi, someone I eventually remembered to be Alami, and some other people I didn’t know but who I’d soon realize were doctors and nurses. They all had faces intensely contorted by worry and relief, which confused me. It would take me a while to understand what was going on. I couldn’t remember what happened, I didn’t even know what I was doing in the hospital. I couldn’t speak because of the tube down my throat, and when I tried writing out a question, I was shocked to see my penmanship looking far more like that of a toddler than my own.
I spent most of that second night asleep again. The next morning, Tess wasn’t around. It was too risky to have her come down here on her own or to have Deutsch bring her over again. Instead, Deutsch had promised to keep her appraised using Viber VOIP calls to Kim’s laptop, which wouldn’t be picked up by any taps on Tess or Kim’s phones. Still, one thing helped make up for her absence: they took out the tracheal tube they’d shoved down my throat. I could speak again-more of a croak, really, but still. It was a huge relief.
Deutsch came by early, long before going into work. She, Kurt, and Gigi filled me in on what had happened, starting with Deutsch’s surprise at seeing the couple shouting to her from deeper inside the loft space and finding a guy dressed entirely in green leather and a striking-looking but bruised redhead struggling to work their way free of flex-cuffs.
In the heat of the moment, Deutsch had made a couple of quick decisions to keep me off the radar. She’d asked Gigi to call in the emergency services and say Kurt had had a heart attack. When a couple of cops who’d been part of the aborted SWAT raid had taken an interest as they wheeled me into the ambulance, she’d used her FBI creds to defuse their interest and say it was an unrelated matter, some random guy in the building who’d had one hamburger too many. At the hospital, she’d also used her shield to register me under a false name, saying it was a matter of national security, two words that wield huge power these days.
The downside of her decisions was that my shooter’s body had remained in Gigi’s apartment and Deutsch couldn’t call it in, get the body taken to the coroner’s lab and trigger an investigation into finding out who he was. It wasn’t a great loss, in that I didn’t think he would show up on any of our databanks. I imagined he was part of that same invisible group of spooks that officially didn’t exist. It was a problem for Gigi and Kurt, though, because it wouldn’t be long before the busted door to the lobby would attract attention, as would the one to Gigi’s apartment. Deutsch had made Kurt drag the shooter’s body away from its highly visible position and hide him in the bedroom to avoid letting the paramedics spot him. The people who sent him-Corrigan and his CIA ally or allies-had to know where he was when he went missing, and if they hadn’t done it already, they’d soon have someone there to find out why he’d gone dark. Deutsch didn’t know if that had happened already, since she wasn’t about to go asking and they weren’t about to announce it. Either way, Gigi and Kurt would be the obvious candidates to finger for his death, if his body ever made it into the system, but so far Deutsch had seen no sign of it. Perhaps they’d make his body disappear and that would be the end of it. Deutsch was still struggling to figure out what she could do to defuse things for them if things got heated, without landing behind bars herself.
For the time being, though, what was clear was that Gigi’s apartment was off limits. She had checked herself and Kurt into a small hotel close to the hospital using a fake ID. Gigi had planned for the day she’d need to hit the eject button and get out of there quickly, and while the paramedics were busy working on me, she’d hit the kill switch she’d built into her systems and purged them. Anything of importance, though, was still contained in a four terabyte hard drive the size of a paperback novel and accessible by her beefy laptop, both of which were still in her possession.
Which was critical to me because the next day, a message would land on her laptop, a message that would finally break down the walls of secrecy that I’d been bashing my head against for months.
Someone responded to the anonymous posting Gigi and Kurt had uploaded onto Daland’s darknet site.
And we were game on again.
58
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Edward Tomblin had been through major crises before. He’d been shot, even tortured, and he’d had field ops go bad on him. The worst were two occasions when he and Roos had been undercover on foreign soil and had contacts sell them out, one for material gain while they were in Sudan, and the other under torture in Nicaragua. Both times, they’d had to exfiltrate themselves out of hostile territory with only the thinnest of margins separating them from extreme unpleasantness.
Tomblin was never fazed by crisis. Like his old partner Roos, he had the reputation as one of the calmest tacticians in the business, a man who could face down calamities with a sang-froid that bordered on unsettling.
He wasn’t calm now. Not after one of his inner circle of trusted OSINT geeks had informed him that portraits of him and someone else-who Tomblin knew to be Roos, even before the Open-Source Intelligence analyst had messaged him a copy of the drawings-had popped up on an underground darknet marketplace, offering a reward for anyone who could identify them.
Tomblin hadn’t been out in the field for years. As the current head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, physical danger wasn’t on his radar, not any more. He’d done his time, and he now left the dirty business up to others. Sure, he still had to negotiate tricky political situations himself and maneuver to keep certain secrets from threatening his career. But physical threats? A thing of the past-until now.
This was different.
This was a left-field attack from an unhinged, obsessed man who possessed a highly dangerous skill set and seemed like he’d never give up. And for the first time since the crisis started, Tomblin wasn’t only worried about the possibility of exposure and prison time. He was worried about his life.