Friendly Fire (8 page)

“That's complicated.”

“I imagine it is.”

Jonathan stood and joined Wolverine at the feet of the Virgin. “I told you that Stepahin was the focus of an op eleven years ago. Well, as it turns out, his killer—the kid's name is Ethan Falk—was Stepahin's victim. Ethan's father was our client. Stepahin ran away, and we didn't chase him because we had our PC.” He paused to let the details sink in, and for Irene's memory to be triggered. “You should remember the case. It was during the period of your transition into the directorship. That was a sex ring—”

“I remember it,” Irene snapped.

“We rescued Ethan before he could be sold,” Jonathan said. “When he was arrested for the murder—which he committed in a friggin' parking lot in front of countless witnesses—he tried to tell the story of this guy being his abuser, but of course—”

“There's no record of anything because you were the rescuer.” Irene was already ahead of him.

“Exactly,” Jonathan said. He lowered his voice. “If I can't figure out a way make Stepahin real again, this kid won't have a chance. This is a death penalty case.”

“It most definitely is,” Irene agreed. “I've dealt with the prosecutor down there before—a jackass named Petrelli. He goes for the death penalty on jaywalking cases. But the public keeps reelecting him.”

“So now you understand my dilemma,” Jonathan said.

“You killed people during that op, right?”

“Yep.”

“So stepping forward isn't an option.”

“Well, for me, maybe,” he joked, “but you know how Big Guy hates tight spaces.”

“And lethal injections.”

“Those, too.” Most of what Jonathan did carried a death penalty if he was ever caught, but that algebra worked for him. What was the point of living a safe life if endangered people went unprotected? “The stakes are as high as they've ever been for me personally, Wolfie. What can you do to help? I'll take anything you can give me.”

Something changed in Irene when he asked that question. Her demeanor relaxed, her features softened. “Let's go for a walk,” she said.

* * *

Avenues rarely crossed in Washington. Numbered streets ran north and south, and lettered streets ran east and west. Avenues, on the other hand, were granted the freedom to go wherever the hell they wanted to, and it just so happened that Rhode Island Avenue, where Saint Matthew's resided, lay only a couple hundred feet east of Connecticut Avenue. Irene led Jonathan down the stairs of the cathedral, and then made the right-hand turn onto Connecticut. This was a huge breach of security as far as Jonathan was concerned, and Irene's detail seemed to share his interpretation. And just in case the world wasn't paying close enough attention to the movements of the FBI director, they were tailed by a caravan of two massive armored SUVs.

“I need to breathe fresh air as I dig into the places where I'm about to go,” Irene said, answering Jonathan's question before he could ask it.

Her words tugged at Jonathan. He put his hand on her arm. “Hey, are you okay?”

She turned to look him in the eye. “If I could unlearn half the things I know, and un-see three-quarters of what I've seen since taking this job, I'd be one happy camper.”

“So, why did you re-up? You put in your ten years. You could've just walked away and lived off your retirement.”

“Because I love it,” she said. Then she smiled. “Color me a blind patriot.”

“That's exactly the reason why I like you so much,” Jonathan said.

“James Stepahin,” Irene said through a forced smile. She looked to the sky. “Not my finest hour, I'm afraid.” They walked together another ten paces. “We never knew him to be a sex offender.” More silence.

More, in fact, than Jonathan could tolerate. “We?”

“Okay, I,” Irene said. “The standard profile for a pedophile is a man who believes that his obsession with children—whether boys or girls—is a form of love. When they hug them or fondle them, or . . . worse, they think their actions are about compassion and caring. They don't see the violence in it.” As she spoke, she frequently looked skyward, as if searching for a source of strength.

She nodded to the approaching intersection. “We'll go Eighteenth Street and avoid the Circle.” The lunch crowd had thinned, but the early-departure bar crowd had started to form, making DuPont Circle a place to avoid. Certainly, the guys in the SUV would be happy.

“On the other end of the spectrum are the serial killers who victimize children just for the thrill of it, the release.”

“I don't understand why you're telling me this,” Jonathan said.

“I'm answering your question,” Irene said. “Under the specialness of this circumstance, I'm breaking my personal rule about sharing shit that you don't need to know.”

His feathers appropriately singed, Jonathan backed off, committed to let her take her time and bear as much of her soul as she felt necessary.

“Both of those personality types—whether organized or disorganized—tend to be focused on their purpose. James Stepahin was apparently the rare exception. I didn't know that when I hired him.”

Chapter Eight

“Y
ou'll recall that the wreckage of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was still warm when I took on the job of director,” Irene explained as they crossed N Street, Northwest. “A lot of things needed doing that we didn't have the legal authority to do. I won't say we shredded the Constitution, but it got pretty heavily creased. The good news is that the folks at Langley took most of the heat, and God bless them, they never ratted us out.”

“About what?” Jonathan asked. So much for staying quiet and letting her talk.

“You remember those black site prisons the agency created all over the world?”

“I do.” He resisted the urge to tell her that he'd delivered more than a few of their occupants.

“Well, we had them here, too,” Irene said. “And I'll tell you right now that at the time, I was a big supporter of them. There were a lot more cells of bad guys here on U.S. soil than the press ever knew—even more than congressional overseers knew. Frankly, when the news broke about the foreign black sites, I was shocked that no one connected the dots domestically.”

“Do we still have them?”

She gave him a glare.

“Chalk that question up to stuff I have no need to know,” Jonathan said. Though he could name at least two off the top of his head. He just wanted to see how far this walking confession had weakened her walls. Answer: not a bit.

“Well, just as you helped to fill sites abroad, we needed similar help stateside, and that was one job for which we had no takers. Overseas, at the end of the day, SF and Agency people had cover back home if things went wrong. Here, that was not the case. I could not ask sworn agents to break the law, and if I tried and worked leaked out, it would have been a disaster.”

“So you turned to contractors,” Jonathan guessed aloud. Ahead and to the left, on the opposite side of the street, stood the beige-brick Federal-style town house that was the Albanian Embassy, situated unobtrusively next to a café that sported outdoor seating shaded by beer-sponsored umbrellas.

“Exactly. About that time, Mister James Stepahin was arrested for a drug infraction that barely cracked the floor of a felony. I don't remember precisely how his name came all the way up the ladder to my desk, but I recognized him from the heads-up you gave me after your rescue operation. It turned out that his job was to kidnap people.”

“For sex rings.”

“For the highest bidder,” Irene corrected. “And he was good at it. After he lawyered up, we made a deal. And as I explained before, it never occurred to me that a professional criminal and a child molester would be two sides of a single personality. Maybe I was rationalizing, but what's done is done.”

Jonathan of all people had no business casting stones at others whose best intentions had turned out to be misguided. If a book were to be written on the subject, it would be his autobiography.

“You might not like to hear this,” Irene continued, “but he was really, really good at what he did. He found the people we wanted him to, and he brought them in.”

“Was it wet work?” Jonathan asked, knowing that she would understand his question.

“Nope, not an assassin, though God forgive me, we have a few of those as well.” She gave him a friendly poke in the ribs with her elbow. “Don't be jealous now. You'll always be my favorite felon-contractor.”

He knew a joke when he heard it.

“Because Stepahin delivered everyone we asked for, Uncle Sam officially forgot that he was ever a criminal.”

“Is that when you scrubbed his file?”

Irene coughed out a bitter laugh. “I wish. All we did was expunge his criminal record. Stepahin did the rest. I always figured it had something to do with the frenzy over the black sites overseas. The media was calling for criminal prosecutions for the soldiers and contractors who staffed those sites, but thank God Darmond wasn't in the White House yet to give them up. If I were Stepahin at the time, though, I think I would have begun to feel awfully lonely and exposed.”

“Shouldn't he have?” It went unsaid that everything Jonathan did for Uncle Sam these days was done under a veil of one hundred percent deniability.

“Of course he should have. That's why you guys get the big bucks. And as I said before, I was shocked that the domestic sites were never revealed. Anyway, one day, he just ceased to exist. No birth records, no anything. Just poof.”

“Did you ever try to trace him down?”

Irene wrinkled her nose as she shook her head. “Nah. What would be the point? The post-nine-eleven frenzy was calming down by then, and he'd done everything we'd asked him to do. Deep inside, I think I figured maybe he'd earned an anonymous retirement.” She drilled him with a glare. “So have you, you know.”

Jonathan chuckled. “I'm living the dream.” They turned right onto Massachusetts Avenue, and Jonathan glanced over his shoulder to see if the security guys were still there. He'd been in their spot enough times to feel sorry for them. If they'd fallen back, he'd have waited for them, but they were right where they were supposed to be.

“Do you really mean that?” Irene asked. “Living the dream?”

Jonathan scowled. “I did when I said it, but that look in your eye makes me want to take it back.”

“Perhaps you just know me too well,” she said.

“Are you going to make me ask? And before you answer, how in the world does Uzbekistan rate a cooler building than Albania?” Just ahead, the Uzbek embassy looked like an old-money mansion, with a sculptured edifice and a circular driveway in front.

“Open the index of things I don't give a crap about,” Irene said. “You'll find that one there.”

Jonathan laughed. Irene's no-bullshit persona vastly magnified her inherent hotness as a woman.

“Okay, here's the deal,” Irene said. “In recent weeks, we've heard a lot of chatter over the scary channels. Have you ever heard of al-Amin? It means ‘the trustworthy.'”

“No. But it sounds jihadist.”

Irene explained, “They're the current crop of terrorists to grow out of the Muddled East. One group on a list that keeps getting bigger. Building on the success of the Mexican model of terror-funding, al-Amin's revenue stream comes largely through ransoms paid for high-profile kidnappings. The basic theme is that you pay to get your loved one back, or you get to watch a video on the Internet of his head being sawed off with a butter knife.”

Jonathan inhaled sharply. He'd seen too many such videos, and in each case, wished that he could un-see them.

“The thing with al-Amin, from everything we can figure out, is that they're pissed that the US government still won't bargain for hostages.”

“Except we do,” Jonathan corrected. “In fact, we just did.”

“Moving on,” Irene said, “the backchannel chatter leads us to believe that al-Amin may be on the verge of forcing our hand. We believe that they're planning to target high-value assets here on American soil.”

Something fluttered in Jonathan's gut. “You mean, like kidnapping a congressman's daughter?”

“Something very much like that,” Irene confirmed. “The plan, as far as we can tell, is to target a subject, snatch him—or her—and then boogey them off to the Sandbox. It's entirely possible that embassies are cooperating with the bad guys, but we cannot confirm that as yet. What we
have
been able to confirm from multiple assets is that the targets will be elected officials—either themselves or their loved ones. Actually, until your op down on I-95, we thought it was exclusively the actual elected officials. Now it seems that they've cast a wider net.”

Jonathan thought it through as they strolled toward the embassies of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and Peru. Up ahead, on the other side of Seventeenth Street, he could see the flag of the Philippines flying above their embassy as well. But he doubted that they would walk that far.

“You're thinking that Stepahin was here as part of that plot, don't you? Al-whatever.”

“Al-Amin,” Irene said. “What would you think if you were in my pumps?”

The phrasing made Jonathan laugh. “I would think that the thing that looks like a duck and quacks like a duck might very well not be a sparrow.”

“Bingo. The stars aligned too closely to be a purely random event. I've seen the reports coming out of Prince William County, and while the news media will likely never get the information to report it, those guys you killed in the motel room—we can drop the
hypothetical
trope, right?—were in fact part of an al-Amin cell. To have Stepahin in the same sphere at the same time tells me that he was planning some kind of operation. Hell, for all I know, there are five hundred thirty-five separate assault teams—one for every member of Congress. Now, throw in the cabinet and the Supremes, and that's a lot of people to frighten and then guard.”

Something in the hypothesis wasn't working for Jonathan. “Let's stipulate that you're right,” he said. “We'll assume for the sake of argument that Stepahin— professional bad guy—was here for nefarious purposes. How on God's half-acre does a coffee shop kid take out a trained asset?”

“From everything I've read, the kid cold-cocked him,” Irene said. “Stepahin had let his guard down, and why wouldn't he? Who's going to be afraid of a coffee shop kid?”

Another bell rang in Jonathan's head. “You seem to know a lot about this case”

Irene pointed ahead and to the right. “Let's go back down Seventeenth,” she said, proving Jonathan correct: they weren't going to make it as far as the Philippines. “While we didn't know he still existed until Mother Hen sent me the name, we're trying a forensic effort to figure out what he was up to.” Irene gave him a knowing smirk. Now that they were on their way back to the cathedral, their meeting was likely coming to an end. “I cannot afford to have a record of any of this,” she said. “Those renditions back in the day were simply too dirty. The whole reason we used criminals in the first place was to prevent a record from ever being established. I sure as hell don't want one established now.”

And there it was. Wolverine had played her hand perfectly. “You're hiring me, aren't you?” Jonathan asked.

“Can you think of a more motivated contractor?” She gave him her most demure smile.

Jonathan bowed his head, silently acknowledging that he'd been had. “Okay, boss,” he said, “what exactly do you want me to do?”

“I want you to find out why Stepahin was here, what he was doing.”

“Is this al-Amin group affiliated with al Qaeda?”

“Who knows? Anymore, it matters less and less. Boko Haram affiliated with ISIL, ISIL affiliated with al Qaeda, who's joined at one level with the Taliban. They all stand for the same murder, so I personally don't get lost in the distinctions. And I don't think they'll prove to be all that relevant to you.”

“What about the guys we offed at the Sleeping Genie Motel? You said they were al . . . Amini. Is that even how you say it?”

“I have no idea how they say it. I said they were affiliated. That doesn't necessarily mean they were believers. This wasn't their first kidnapping.”

Jonathan scowled.

She did the eyebrow thing again, indicating that he was being dense.

“Ah,” Jonathan said. “Previous contractors?”

“Bingo. Born and bred in the USA,” Irene said. “Which makes Stepahin all the more interesting. If I'm right, then al-Amin isn't depending on zealots to accomplish their goals. They're using local talent pursuing a very capitalistic agenda.”

Jonathan laughed at the absurdity. “Doesn't matter who triggers the body count so long as the body count happens.” They'd barely made the turn onto Connecticut Avenue for a second time when Jonathan started to recap the conversation in his head. “So, let's be clear,” he said. “You want me to poke around and find out why James Stepahin resurfaced. I'm going to need a back door to some difficult-to-access files. The kind of files that you don't like to show people.”

Irene nudged him with an elbow. “If you need it, you can have it.”

Jonathan thought through the logistics. Finding an unknown among the unknown was a monumental undertaking.

“Do what you have to do,” Irene said. “But I cannot overstate how on your own you will be if this somehow goes public. I'll hang you out to dry like a laundry sheet.”

The harshness of Wolverine's words startled him. Not the content—the rules were the rules—but the vehemence with which she stated them.

“This Stepahin stuff is a real source of shame for you, isn't it?” Jonathan kept his tone soft.

“Beyond any words I can use to describe it,” Irene said. “But such is the nature of the job I signed on for. Twice.”

Jonathan returned her elbow-nudge. If a van hadn't been following them, he might have offered a hug. Or probably not. Theirs was a complicated relationship. Always all-business, but always something more. He'd volunteered more than once to take a bullet for her, and he sensed that he was about to do it again.

“Don't you dare feel sorry for me,” Irene said, as if reading his mind. “No one thrust this bullshit onto me. I'm here of my own free will.”

Jonathan raised his hands in playful surrender.

“This thing with Ethan Falk,” Irene continued. Her tone was softer, and she'd slowed her pace. “That's not your responsibility. You gave him his freedom, and he chose to kill a man. Those are two entirely different transactions. Your obligations are fulfilled.”