Any Means Necessary: A Luke Stone Thriller (Book 1) (21 page)

“Ali, let me tell you something. We’re not actually holding you here. That’s the thing. You’re not under arrest. We couldn’t arrest you if we wanted to, you know that. We’ve got that leg iron on you for your own safety. These halls out here are crawling with violent criminals. Sometimes they get loose. Believe me, you’re safer in this room. But if you want to leave, you’re free to go at any time.”

Nassar seemed about to speak. He hesitated, maybe expecting a trick.

The cop raised a meaty hand. “Now let me tell you why leaving is a bad idea,” he said. “You’ve been involved in something. It’s something bad. You know that and I know that, so there’s no sense pretending. People tell me you blew up the White House. I don’t know if I believe that.”

“I didn’t do it,” Nassar said.

The cop pointed at him. “Right. That’s what I believe. I believe you didn’t do it. But it seems like maybe you know the people who did do it. And if I were those people right now, you know what I’d be looking to do? Clean up loose ends. A guy like you walks out that door, how long do you really think you’re going to live? Twelve hours, if you’re lucky? Personally, I doubt you’ll make it that long.”

Nassar stared at him.

“Your friends from the Iranian mission?” the cop said. He shook his head. “I don’t think they’re coming back for you. They lost four men today trying to get you to the airport. You’re a liability for them. You’re an embarrassment. If they do come back, I think it’s to put a bullet right here.”

The cop tapped Nassar on the forehead.

Nassar shook his head. “They weren’t involved. They have no reason to kill me.”

“Yeah. That’s what you told the guy from the FBI.” The cop referred to some notes on a clipboard. “You told him you were working for an agency of the U.S. government, something called Red Box. You don’t think the Iranian government would kill you if they knew you were working for the Americans? Come on, I think you’re a little smarter than that.”

Nassar’s eyes briefly widened.

The cop nodded. “Yep. You’re smart enough. You see it. You don’t have too many friends left, Ali.”

Luke thought back to that moment in the car. Cops were all around them. “I work for you,” Nassar said. Then he did say Red Box. Luke barely remembered it. He had jumped out of a helicopter. He had crashed the car. He had shot two men in the head only seconds before. He was as shaken up as anyone. At that moment, he almost couldn’t process what Nassar was telling him.

Now, as he watched, Nassar and the cop stared at each other for a long moment.

“I want to share something with you,” the cop said. “I know exactly what you’re going through. I have a younger brother. Maybe fifteen years ago, he gets involved in something, like you did. It was a mistake, like you made a mistake, and he got in over his head. Turns out he’s smuggling guns to the Irish Republican Army out of a bar up in the Bronx. I tell him Mikey, you’re stupid. You’re not Irish. You’re American. But by then, everybody’s on to him. He’s wanted by the American government. He’s wanted by the English government. And if his buddies in the IRA find him, they’re going to drop him in the river. They have to. What else are they gonna do, let him talk?”

A couple of cops in the observation room laughed. Luke glanced at them.

“This guy and his younger brothers,” one of the cops said. “My brother the rapist. My brother the arsonist. My brother the terrorist. You want to know the truth? He has three sisters, and they’re all older than he is.”

Inside the interrogation room, Ali Nassar said, “I think I’m in a bad position.”

The cop nodded. “I’d say you’re in a very bad position. But I can help you. You just have to tell me what’s going on.”

Nassar seemed to have come to a decision. He shook his head. “Red Box is not an agency. It’s a program, an operation. Operation Red Box. I didn’t know what it was for. I knew what they wanted me to do, and that was it. They wanted me to buy some drones from China. They told me to pay some jihadis, men who wanted to commit suicide for God. I made the payments from an offshore account they themselves set up for me. It wasn’t my account. I didn’t hire these men. I didn’t even know what they were going to do until two days ago.”

“You keep saying they, they, they,” the cop said. “Can you be a little more specific? Who are they?”

Ali Nassar sighed. “The Central Intelligence Agency. That’s who hired me. A man I know from your CIA.”

An almost silent gasp went through the room, and Luke felt a sharp jolt in his midsection. It felt like his body was impaled by a spike. He looked around at the men in the room with him. Everyone—cops, Homeland agents—
everyone
seemed puzzled. There was a low level buzz of muted conversation. The CIA hired Nassar to help attack the White House? The CIA?

Luke’s entire world spun beneath him. It felt true; Luke could always tell if someone was lying, and Nassar wasn’t. Either the CIA hired him, or he genuinely believed that they did. Luke, reeling, wondered if it could be true. If so, he would have to look at everyone around him differently. Who would he be able to trust?

“It was a year ago,” Nassar said. “He visited me at my hotel room in London. At first, he called it Operation Red Box. Then, a month later he came to me and told me he made an error, it wasn’t Operation Red Box. We must never speak of Operation Red Box again. We must never even say the words. But I remembered it. I’m sure that is the name, but I don’t know what it means. So if you want to learn about Operation Red Box, don’t ask me anything. Ask your CIA Director instead.”

“Who’s got this guy?” Luke said. “Is someone taking custody?”

One of the men from Homeland Security raised his hand. “When the NYPD is done with him, they’re going to release him to us.”

Luke nodded. “Good. Hang on to him.”

He started walking toward the door.

“Where are you going?” one of the men said.

Luke didn’t even turn around.

“I’m going back to Washington. I need to talk to someone.”

8:33 p.m.

Washington, DC

The man wouldn’t meet him until nightfall.

Luke waited alone on a wooded path by the shore of the Potomac River. The sun had just set, but no light was visible. A thick, cold fog had rolled in off the water sometime earlier. It swirled around him. No one could see him. He could be anyone in here. He could be a dead man. He could have ceased to exist. He could be the last person left on Earth. It was a good feeling.

He had raced back here to Washington, only to end up waiting. He was past exhausted, and with so much at stake, the waiting bothered him. The man always made him wait. Always had, always would.

Luke had talked to Ed Newsam on the phone ten minutes before. Newsam was in the hospital. Jacob and Rachel had managed to crash land the chopper in the middle of an empty Little League baseball field. Newsam’s hip was cracked, and he had been strafed pretty good with bullets, but he was going to be fine. It would take more than an Uzi to kill a man like Newsam. Still, he was out of commission, and the thought of that worried Luke just a bit.

There was a lot more to do.

“Quite a day you’ve had,” a voice said.

Luke looked up. A tall elderly man in a long leather coat stood nearby, walking a small gray and brown dog. The man’s hair was so white it almost seemed to glow in the just settled darkness. He didn’t face Luke directly, but came closer and sat at the far end of the bench. He lowered himself to the bench slowly and with some difficulty. Then he patted the little dog with thin hands. A biscuit appeared in one of those hands like a magic trick, and the man fed it to the dog. He smiled at his own sleight of hand.

“Nice dog,” Luke said. “What breed would you call that?”

“Mutt,” the man said. “I think he must be half rat. I got him from the shelter. He was twenty-four hours from the gas chamber. How could I go to a breeder when there are so many lost souls on death row? It’s unconscionable.”

“What can I call you?” Luke said.

“Paul is good,” the man said.

That was funny. Paul, Wes, Steve, the man always went by some nondescript name. When Luke was young, the name had been Henry, or Hank. He was the man without a name, the man without a country. What could you say about someone who was a Cold War spy, who sold his own country’s secrets to the Soviets, then turned around and sold the Soviets’ secrets to the British and the Israelis? And that was the little Luke knew about. There was probably a lot more.

One thing you might say is he was lucky to be alive. Another thing is that it was amazing he could choose to live in Washington, DC, now, right under the very noses of people who would be happy to kill him or put him away forever. But perhaps betrayal had an expiration date. After a certain amount of time had passed, maybe no one cared anymore. Maybe all the people who once cared were dead.

Luke nodded. “Okay, Paul. Thanks for coming. I want to tell you that I met with a man this afternoon. Up in New York.”

The old man laughed. “Oh my, yes. I heard all about it. I gather you dropped in on him somewhat uninvited. Dropped out of the sky, in fact.”

Luke stared into the fog. It was as thick as soup.

“He said some things I don’t understand.”

“Being smart is not the same as being quick-witted,” the man said. “Some people, as clever as they may be, are still slow in the uptake.”

“Or maybe I understand what he said, I just don’t believe it.”

“What was it?”

“Operation Red Box,” Luke said. “That’s what he told me.”

The old man said nothing. He looked straight ahead. A moment ago, his hands had been stroking the dog. Now they had stopped.

Luke went on. “He said to ask the CIA Director about it. Well, I don’t have access to the CIA Director. But I do have access to you.”

The man’s mouth opened, then closed again.

“Tell me,” Luke said.

The man looked straight at Luke for the first time. His face was like wrinkled parchment. His eyes were deep set and pale blue. They were eyes that still knew secrets. They were eyes without pity.

“I haven’t heard those words in a long while,” he said. “I wouldn’t recommend you say them again. Never know who’s listening, even in a place like this.”

“All right.”

“I imagine you asked him a question to elicit that phrase. What was the question?”

“I asked him,” Luke said, “who he was working for.”

A long sigh came from the old man. It sounded like the air going slowly out of a tire, all the way, until there was nothing left. Abruptly, the man stood up. He moved quickly, and without the apparent frailty of a few moments before.

“It’s been interesting talking with you,” the man said. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

The gun appeared in Luke’s hand as if by magic, a better trick than the dog biscuit. It was a different gun from the one he had held earlier that day. This one had an eight-inch silencer attached to the end of the barrel. It was longer than the gun itself. Luke casually pointed the gun at the man’s belly.

“You know this silencer?” he said. “It’s called the Illusion. It’s new, and you’ve been out of the game for a while, so maybe you don’t. Suffice to say that it works really, really well. A night like this one, with all this fog? The gun will go off, and it’ll sound like somebody sneezed. Not a loud sneeze. A quiet sneeze, like someone might do at the ballet.” He smiled. “We get all the best toys at SRT.”

A ghost of a smile passed over the man’s lips. “I always enjoy our meetings.”

“Tell me,” Luke said again.

The man shrugged. “You should go home to your lovely wife and handsome young son. This is a situation that doesn’t concern you. Even if it did, there wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it.”

“What is Operation Red Box?”

The old man seemed to wince at the name.

Luke waited a few seconds, but the man didn’t seem ready to speak. “Give me one reason not to pull this trigger.”

The man blinked. “Kill me,” he said slowly, “and you won’t have me as the source you need on future cases.”

Luke shook his head. “There are no future cases,” he said. “If this one isn’t solved, there is no future for any of us.”

Luke scowled. “What is Operation Red Box?”

The man shook his head. “You’re in way too deep. You’ve become a danger to yourself and others, and the worst part is you don’t even know it. I won’t say the words. But the operation you mention is one designed for expedited Presidential succession. It’s for when a President has to be removed from office, but there’s no time to wait for the next election cycle.”

“They were threatening to impeach the President this morning,” Luke said. “It was on the radio.” The statement felt odd as soon as he said it. Impeaching the President and terrorists blowing up the White House… the two items didn’t fit together. Luke was beyond tired. It was hard to make sense of things.

“Faster than impeachment,” Paul said. “And more certain. Think abrupt change. Think 1963. It’s an operation reserved for when the President’s loyalty is no longer unquestioned. It’s also for when events are too large, or too sensitive, for the man in office. It’s for times that demand action.”

“Who decides this?” Luke said.

Paul shrugged. He smiled again. “The people in charge decide.”

Luke stared at him.

“Tell me you don’t know who’s really in charge,” Paul said, “and I will start to wonder about your mother’s relationship to the milkman.” 

The old man stared at him. There was a wild sort of light in the man’s eyes. To Luke, he looked like a carnival barker, or a conman with the traveling medicine show. The man smiled. There was no humor in it.

“You saw the White House blow up today, did you not?”

Luke nodded. “I was there.”

“Of course you were. Where else would you be at a time like that? Did it look like a drone strike to you? Or did it look like something else? Think back. Perhaps it looked more like a series of detonations, bombs that were planted inside the building, maybe days or weeks ago?”

In his mind’s eye, Luke saw the explosions again, an entire line of them, moving from the West Wing, along the Colonnade, to the Residence. A huge explosion tore the Residence to pieces, throwing a massive chunk of it high into the air. He felt the shockwave again, the one that had threatened to knock their helicopter out of the sky.