Predator One (6 page)

It’s so hard to decide how to think about it. When I first joined the DMS, I was appalled when Mr. Church used deception and carefully worded threats to psychologically coerce crucial information out of a suspect. Church broke the man.
As a result, we gained information that ultimately saved millions, perhaps billions, of lives.

Not too many months later, I needed to get a certain code from a man who was about to launch a series of designer pathogens that would have wiped out everyone who didn’t conform to a certain standard of acceptable “whiteness.” Again, billions would have died. He was an old man, and he was injured. However,
the clock was ticking down to boom time, and so I did what I had to do. The information he ultimately gave to me stopped that genocide.

So, how was this different?

I don’t really know if I can answer that question. A lot of what was being done to these prisoners was part of a fishing expedition. The prisoners were believed to have knowledge of imminent or long-range threats against America.
Due process was denied to them by the Patriot Act because the legal method can be used against itself. That’s something I understand, but on the whole I wouldn’t wipe my dog’s ass with the Patriot Act. It was quickly written and is poorly thought out, bad policy. People on both sides of the aisle should be working together a little more diligently to replace it with something smarter and saner.

This prison, the Resort, was illegal. No doubt. Any useful intelligence obtained was, in fact, saving lives. However, it was funneled through certain Agency channels for the career benefit of a select few.

Does that matter if the effect is still the saving of lives? Sure, but how much is something that still needs to be looked at.

Is the systematic and continual torture of prisoners justified
if they do, indeed, have guilty knowledge and if that information is crucial to saving lives?

That’s what had Bunny’s gut clenched. Mine, too. And Top’s. Standing there in that cell, with no one around but varying degrees of criminals, it was hard to pin your sympathies to the right wall.

I sighed and called it in. Church said that a medical team was on board the chopper.

“What about the staff?”
asked Bunny once I was off the call. He looked at the two men who had been interrogating bin Laden. They cowered against the wall in horrified silence.

“P-please!” said one of them, holding up his hands. Throughout our conversation, he’d been pretending to be a hole in the air. Like maybe he thought we’d forget about him. “Please … we were following orders to—”

“Really?” I said. “You’re going
with the ‘only following orders’ thing?”

They began protesting. Then begging.

Top drew his Snellig and darted them both.

“Thank you,” said Bunny.

Top shook his head slowly as he shoved his pistol into its holster. “I could have worked on my uncle’s farm. Getting fat and rich growing peaches.”

“Right now,” said Bunny, “that sounds like heaven.”

I nodded to the unconscious men. “Secure them.
They’ve got cells waiting for them back home.”

“Be mighty uncomfortable,” said Top. “Them tied up and all. No food or water. No bathroom runs.”

“You have a problem with that?” I asked.

He said, “Nope. Just noting it.”

We nodded to each other. Each of us aware of the conundrum’s souring our collective moods.

“Feeling the need to vent a little here, Boss,” said Bunny. “Might slash some tires
and break some windows.”

“Hooah,” Top said again.

“None of that goes outside of the mission protocols as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “Indulge yourself.”

We tapped back into the mission channel. “Tell the helo pilot to brew a fresh pot of high-test, and I don’t want to hear the word ‘decaf,’” I said. “Going to be a long night.”

Chapter Nine

The Capitol Building

Washington, D.C.

October 13, 1:15
A.M.

“Home, James.”

It was a running joke every time the president climbed into the back of the Beast, the presidential state car.

The driver, a sergeant in the White House Military Office, was actually named James. The driver grinned, as he always did, even though the joke was as stale as Christmas fruitcake. But the
basic rule was that the president’s jokes were always funny, even when they weren’t. The rule applied to any joke told by any president. As a result, a lot of former commanders in chief left office convinced that they were hilarious.

Being seen to visibly appreciate the joke was even more important tonight, because the man sharing the backseat with the president was Linden Brierly, director of
the Secret Service. Brierly, though not James’s boss, had unquestioned influence over all matters of security personnel.

So, the driver, Leonard Allyn James, chuckled at the joke and waited until the senior motorcade NCO gave the go signal. The long line of vehicles switched on their red and blue flashers and the procession pulled away from the Capitol for the six-minute drive to the White House.

The Beast was a heavily armored Chevrolet Kodiak–based, Cadillac-badged limousine. It was referred to in most official documents as Cadillac One or Limousine One but called the Beast by everyone in the presidential motorcade.

Another running joke was that the motorcade was longer than the route between the two buildings. Most often there were forty-five cars in the procession, with one or two
dummy versions of the presidential state car. All for a drive of one-point-seven miles. For what would otherwise be a nice stretch of the legs.

In the back, the president rubbed his eyes and sank wearily into the cushions.

“Long night,” said Brierly.

“Long damn night,” agreed the president.

The third person in their conversational cluster nodded, but added, “Good night’s work, though.”

Alice
Houston, the White House chief of staff, somehow managed to look fresh and alert despite this being the middle of the night. Everyone else who had spent the last fourteen hours hammering away at the budget bill looked wasted. The elderly congressman from West Virginia had drifted off to sleep five times and had to be shaken vigorously to give his opinion on alterations in a bill that would keep
the lights on in government facilities across America. Later today, the House would receive the bill and vote on it, hopefully in time to beat the midnight shutdown.

“I think we have something we can all live with,” said the president. It was not the first time he’d said that. Not the tenth. They all repeated it like a mantra. In truth, the bill was a pale shadow of the one they’d tried to pass.
The original bill, drafted by a close supporter of the administration, took several hard stances that were fiscally sound. They were also politically indefensible. They required the kind of bipartisan cooperation that only ever happened in heartwarming and naive political comedies. That bill assumed that the phrase “in the best interest of the American people” meant just that.

“I wish we could
have taken Donald’s suggestion,” muttered the president.

Donald Crisp was a junior senator whose idealism was dying a quick death in Washington. His suggestion, intended only as sarcasm, was that all further discussion of the merits of the bill be conducted only after every person in the room had been hooked up to lie detectors. That was a riff on a Jimmy Fallon bit about how cool it would be
if the participants in political debates were hooked up to polygraphs. A nice idea, but it would cause armed insurrection on Capitol Hill.

Everyone in the room tonight had laughed. A lot.

Even Donald Crisp.

Now, in the car, the chuckles were less jovial. There was more evident regret that the world did not, and never would, spin in that direction.

“Can’t wait to see what the press does with
the bill,” continued the president.

“I don’t think it will be too bad,” said Brierly. “Nobody wants to see the government shut down. Again.”

“Sure they do, Linden,” said Houston. “News is news is news. And it’s pretty quiet out there.” She gestured to indicate the world as a whole. With the war in Afghanistan more or less over and things in the Middle East simmering on a moderately low boil,
the big story had become the impending shutdown. With a bill that was all compromise, the pundits would have to feed on something, which meant that they would milk the bill—and the participation of the key players—for as much sustenance as they could. “Once the ‘shutdown averted’ headlines have their fifteen minutes, then they’re going to go snipe hunting in D.C.”

“That might be an imperfect
metaphor,” murmured the president.

Houston opened her mouth to reply, but the car suddenly jerked to a halt with such abrupt force that they were pitched forward against their seat belts.

Brierly punched the intercom. “James—what’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“No threat, sir,” said James. “The brakes locked up.”

The whole motorcade screeched to a stop. Doors opened and sergeants swarmed the
Beast. Most of them had guns drawn.

Brierly turned in his seat. “Mr. President, are you okay?”

“Yes, yes, sure. No problem,” said the president, waving him off. He unbuckled his seat belt and reached a hand toward Houston. “Alice—?”

Houston was flustered, but she nodded. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“James,” growled Brierly, “talk to me.”

“Must be a malfunction. Hold on, I think I—.”

Then the car
suddenly lurched forward, snapping them back against the cushions. The president had been half turned toward Houston, and Brierly had been leaning in toward him, but the jolt bounced them together. Brierly’s forehead struck the president’s cheek with a meaty crack.

The car stopped and oscillated on its springs. The siren blared on and off. The headlights cycled from running lights to driving
lights to high beams to off, and then through the same pattern. Door locks popped up, then down, then up.

“Jesus Christ!” cried the president, reeling back, a hand clamped to his cheek.

“What’s happening?” shrieked Houston, terrified.

“Goddamn it, James!” snarled Brierly. Then he yelled into his cuff mike, calling for a medic.

The car jerked forward again, and once more Brierly and the president
collided. The president snapped a hand out to fend off a second collision and accidentally struck Brierly’s mouth. Blood erupted from the director’s mashed lips.

“The onboard computer’s going crazy,” bellowed James. “I can’t turn it off.”

The doors of the Beast were whipped open and hands reached in, closed around the president, and pulled him out. He was immediately surrounded and, in a run-walk,
taken to a second car. Two WHMA sergeants piled into the Beast. One released Houston from her belt and began guiding her to the doorway; another slid in beside Brierly, whose lower face was painted with blood. James was pulled out of the driver’s seat.

The car jerked forward again. And again, throwing Brierly and the sergeant to the floor. The edge of the door clipped Houston’s ankle and tripped
her, and as she fell, she dragged her escort down.

Then the lights switched off, the horn stopped blaring, and the Beast’s engine growled down to silence.

WHMO sergeants and Secret Service agents assigned to the motorcade pointed guns in a dozen useless directions, including at the car itself. One agent took a risk and leaned quickly in to throw the car into park. But it already was. When he
turned, confused, he saw James hold out the keys.

Four heavily armored cars peeled off into a smaller motorcade and whisked the president away. The rest of the vehicles and all of the remaining agents stared at the car, uncertain about what had just happened. The driver had put the car in park, turned off the engine, and removed the key. However, the car had still jerked forward, and its engine
had run for several seconds after that.

Linden Brierly, holding a compress to his torn lips, expressed the thought that was on everyone’s mind.

“What the hell—?”

Chapter Ten

The Resort

208 Nautical Miles West of Chile

October 13, 1:23
A.M.

“I uploaded a lot of data to MindReader already,” I told my guys. “Do the same with any computer you see. If bin Laden told them anything about what the Kings have running, maybe it’ll be on the drives.”

“You think that’s likely?” asked Bunny. “It’s my impression that the assholes in the splinter cell were still
more or less on our side, just going about it the wrong way. If they caught wind of anything, there’s a dozen ways to slip that info to us.”

Top shook his head. “You more trusting than I remember, Farm Boy. I think you been hit in the head too many times.”

We left it at that. Everyone went about their jobs.

The lab building was mine. I placed Bug’s uplink doodads into the USB ports of every
computer I could find. MindReader gobbled up all of their data.

“Geez,” said Bug, “there’s a lot of stuff here. A lot of eyes-only and above-top-secret files. Encrypted, but that won’t be a problem.”

“Let me know if you get anything on the Kings.”

“There might be, but you know the Agency. They have code names for everything. They might have reams of stuff hidden under some name we won’t recognize.
I’m seeing files labeled Dora the Explorer, Getaway Weekend, Cinco de Mayo, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. These guys are hilarious.”

“Yeah, I’m laughing my balls off. Pull it apart.”

“Sure, just know it’ll take time. Nikki’s doing a simultaneous pattern-and-keyword search as this stuff comes in.”

While that process ran its course, I scouted around for anything else of use. Except for the computers
and some personnel records, there wasn’t anything lying around with the word “Evidence” stenciled on it. These guys were careful. Had to keep looking, though. Found a porn stash in one guy’s desk. DVDs with cover images of Asian girls who looked way too young to be in the kind of horror show they were in. Some of those kids couldn’t have been older than ten or twelve. Disks were from some
illegal pirating group in Malaysia. I found the name of the person who sat at that desk and matched it to the sleeping prisoners. The guy with the kiddie porn was a big slice of white bread with lots of tough-guy tattoos. I kicked him in the balls. Real damn hard.