Scott Roarke 03 - Executive Command (37 page)

The White House

Later

“It won’t work going through Paraguay,” Secretary of State Bob Huret explained to Morgan Taylor. Huret was still in the air over the Atlantic on his way back from briefing NATO partners in Europe. The president sent him to speak with America’s allies; to reassure them that the United States was not paralyzed by the attacks and that they should increase their security, but not feel alone and vulnerable.

Huret, a former international businessman, fluent in French, German, Spanish, and Mandarin, did his best to relieve anxiety abroad. Now he appraised the president on our relations with the Paraguayan government.

“The new regime is, what shall I say, cash rich. The cash comes from, let’s just say, dubious sources.”

“Dubious?” Taylor asked. “Dubious as in Ciudad del Este’s businesses?”

“Evans can probably answer with more authority, but yes. Twenty percent of Paraguay’s $9 billion gross domestic product comes from illegal trafficking. President Ruben deJuan is in the hip pocket of any number of the crime families.”

“Hold for a minute. I’ll get Jack on the line.”

Taylor made the request to Louise Swingle to patch the Director of National Intelligence in. It took less than the minute he told Huret.

“Jack?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Thanks for joining. I’ve got Bob Huret on from the air. We’re talking about our travel destination and el presidente.”

“Hi, Bob.”

“Hi, Jack.”

“Your thoughts?” the president asked.

“Well, he’s sure not my favorite,” Jack Evans quickly stated.

“Go on.”

“Liberal party on the face of it, but his ties with Hamas and Hezbollah were what got him up the food chain to the top.”

“Can he be trusted with any inside baseball?”

“Not if you want to keep it a secret.”

“Bob, are you in agreement?”

“One hundred percent, Mr. President. I’m sure you’ll tell me what this is all about in a few hours, but give him anything sensitive that might relate to his keepers, and rest assured, they’ll hear about it. We’ve had a cordial relationship, but since he took over two years ago, he’s not anyone I would ever expect to engage in any
normal
dialogue. Very guarded.”

“Jack?”

“There’s more that I can get into. As for a flyover, Bob’s nailed it.”

“Okay, gentlemen. Give me the next best neighbor. For the sake of this conversation, Bob, we need a friendly nation we can rely on or one where a little subtle arm-twisting will work. Your specialty.”

“On the Tri-Border there is, of course, Argentina and Brazil,” Huret explained. “I’m not the person to give you strategic information, just political ramifications. I’d have to defer to Jack.”

“No on Argentina. We’ll have easier access with stopovers in Brazil and a straight shot across the Paraná River,” Evans offered.

“How are we doing with Brazil, Bob?”

“That’s a touchy subject. We haven’t delivered on some promises, and Lydia Santiago is as shrewd a politico as they come.”

“Can she be trusted?” Taylor asked. It was probably the most important question so far.

No one jumped in.

“I need to know, gentlemen.”

“Let me put it this way, you can negotiate with her,” Huret stated.

“That may be enough. Okay, I have a thought about that and maybe the leverage that will work. When are you due to touch down, Bob?”

“In about three hours.”

“Get a good night’s sleep. You’ll need it. Not sure when your next one will come. Tomorrow I’ll run through my idea. Take the first crack at the call to Lydia. If she agrees, then I can follow up through the diplomatic route.

“We have to choreograph this with the Joint Chiefs. I’ll order up their plan based on this conversation right now.”

Roarke packed lightly. Toothbrush, underwear, socks, sweater, jeans, and three shirts. It was all laid out on the bed next to a black backpack.

“You can’t tell me where you’re going, can you?” Katie asked.

“No, I’m sorry, honey.”

“That’s the part that’s really hard for me.” She folded the last of his shirts. “Nothing for the cold?”

“Not this trip.” It was more information than he wished to share, but Katie was Katie. A smart attorney and an astute packer.

“Why do I feel this time will be more dangerous? That when I say good-bye, it will be for good?”

Roarke stopped. He turned to the love of his life. Tears came to his eyes, then to hers. The past few weeks had been very difficult for them. The pressure of their jobs, the upheaval in the country, and the complications with the Christine Slocum assignment amplified the level of stress. They needed to reconnect.

She stood up on her toes and kissed his tears. He did the same.

“This can wait ‘til the morning. We can’t.” He slid everything onto the floor. Roarke pivoted quickly, grabbed Katie’s hand, and pulled her to his bed.

He started what they both needed—a long, passionate kiss that, for now, erased her fear and his thoughts of the days to come. The kiss melted into a clinging hug. Then their fingers moved in concert on each other’s buttons and fasteners.

Soon they were both naked and needing the closeness that they foolishly let slip away.

Katie’s hands found him and she smiled inches from his face. “Oooo, you’re ready.”

“So ready,” he responded in a voice and twitch she immediately felt.

His fingers discovered that she was as well.

Katie kissed him deeply as he explored her wetness and she continued to feel him swell to her touch. Her heart was beating faster. His body was tingling, and she proposed a question that excited him even more.

“Top or bottom, Scott?”

“Oh,” he sighed rolling onto the side of her exquisite body.

“I love you come-pletely,” she said with completely intentional emphasis.

At that instant, in one swift motion, he reached under her, rolled her over and on top of him.

“Top and right now.”

“Now,” she gasped, looking down at the two of them as he disappeared inside of her, filling her with passion and desire. She wanted
now
to last forever.

Scott Roarke had the exact same thought.

And together their word for the night was “Now!”

Naval Air Station Ocean

Virginia Beach, Virginia

4 February

“Roarke, how would you describe your physical state?”

Scott Roarke wasn’t an equal to the Navy SEALs. But he was as fit as a Secret Service agent gets, maybe more.

“Good shape, sir. Healthy. I work out.” For a moment Christine came to mind. As quickly as she did, she was gone.

“You won’t have to be looking over your shoulder for me.”

“Then good to have you here lieutenant,” Commander B.D. Coons replied, noting Roarke’s old rank.

Here
was ST6’s home base in Virginia Beach. Never formally acknowledged, of course.

“By the way, we’re a little less formal. No need for all the sir stuff. We try to blend in. Short, tall, not so super-sized. We’re not auditioning for the WWF. We’ve got our job, and the fewer people who know it, the better.”

To the average person, Coons would look fit, but not a member of the nation’s most elite and lethal fighting force. His hair wasn’t stereotypically military. He wore a brown T-shirt and loose matching khakis and boots. Roarke figured him to be five-eleven and about two hundred pounds, but he hid his muscle and zero body fat.

Though he had an open personality, Roarke knew that all of Coons’s niceties would be switched off well before stepping into the kill zone. His job was to distinguish friend from foe, dispatch the enemy without a second thought, and bring everyone back alive.

“Come on, I’ll show you around,” Coons offered. “You can preview the objective right on the base.”

Roarke reached for his backpack.

“Forget your gear. It’ll catch up with you tonight. After you’ve run the course.”

Roarke was tagging along to report to the president, but he would take his orders from B.D. He figured the B and D were Coons’s first and middle names, but the letters also seemed to say he was someone who could Beat Death.

SEAL Team 6, or DEVGRU, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, operated outside military protocol. They were all “black” operatives, working at the highest level of classification and well outside the boundaries of international law. Their unit is shrouded in such secrecy that even the Pentagon won’t confirm that it’s housed at Navy Air Station Oceana.

Even the girlfriends and spouses of DEVGRU rarely heard much about their men’s work, assignments, or deployment. And when the team returned, as they did after taking out Osama bin Laden, there were no welcome-home parades.

They blended into the more than 14,600 military personnel and 2,000 civilians at Oceana, and on any given day they could be training anywhere at the 5,916-acre station.

Today, it was at a remote section of the facility where walls of a building had been quickly erected and scaffolding provided multilevel floor access.

“Let your imagine fill in the brick and mortar, Roarke.” Coons brought his jeep to a stop. “There’s the target. Welcome to Casa del Zuma, an armed mansion on the footprint of the Paraná Country Club in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. Memorize every square inch of it. You’ll be taking it with your eyes closed before we leave this base.”

Roarke was impressed. The team had constructed a replica of Ibrahim Haddad’s stronghold from satellite photographs. The grounds included a fifteen-foot high wall covering what appeared to be about a seven-thousand-square foot property. In the center, protected by another inner wall of equal height, was a four-story tiered structure, with either a master bedroom or command center at the top. There were also sentry posts throughout the layout, both within the first walled area and the inner wall.

“Looks like it would make perfect pickings for a drone, but we’ve been ordered to seize the computers like Pakistan.” Roarke got the reference. “I gather that POTUS wants to know what’s on them. That’s mission critical.”

Leaving with Haddad was not.

“What do we know about the inside layout?” Roarke asked.

“We’re working on that. Radar imagery and some intel on the ground will tell us a great deal. But we’ll have to feel our way as we go.”

Intel on the ground meant D’Angelo. Roarke didn’t offer up the name any more than Coons did.

“We’ll be getting remote eyes in a few hours through some pretty cool gear from our asset. Then we’ll assess the location of threats minute-by-minute.”

Coons’s face was already changing; Roarke’s attitude as well.

Ciudad del Este

D’Angelo walked the grounds with a modified Canon 5D Mark III that wasn’t sold in any retail or online store. It was modified to toggle between two drives with three fast taps on a locking apparatus. This allowed him to sight and take typical tourist pictures, which were stored on a regular Sun Disk USB 16GB flash drive, and other critical shots snapped from his hip which went to an embedded 84GB drive that could be erased onboard or remotely. He was careful not to venture too close to Casa del Zuma, but he didn’t avoid it either. He appeared to be just another visiting photographer in sandals, shorts, and a loose button-down shirt.

The country club was filled with luxury minicastles, expensive shops, and a beautiful golf course. The property houses a number of hotels, Casa Blanca the most beautiful. That’s where he booked a suite.

The CIA operative heard motors of tree-mounted cameras as they panned and tilted to follow his walk. He made a mental note of where they were to mark them on a map he would later e-mail to command with his surveillance photographs.

Security tightened as he approached Casa del Zuma. But he continued his self-guided tour, politely nodding to others who strolled the grounds. All the while, D’Angelo gauged where the blind spots would be and where he would soon place some unique monitoring devices of his own. He’d accomplish that on another walk in a few hours with the sun at its highest and Haddad’s men at their hottest, desperate to stay out of the sun.

He took it all at a leisurely pace. Following his walk, D’Angelo went through the Mediterranean-designed lobby of the Casa Blanca, out to the pool where he had a Tequila Sunrise, and did what most tourism executives would do. He reviewed the pictures on his camera—only the ones on the standard smart stick. Forty minutes later, D’Angelo returned to his villa and e-mailed the other images to Langley.

The White House

The president’s impromptu speech outside the White House gate had done the impossible. The streets were quiet. But Morgan Taylor knew this couldn’t last. The network
noise
channels reported the calm by the hour with the hopeful expectation that they’d have more interesting video soon.

“Like walking on egg shells, Mr. President,” Chief of Staff Bernstein proposed during a meeting break in the Oval Office. “It won’t take long to break them. And then you’re going to get slammed for not initiating martial law. Both parties. Both barrels.”

“Bernsie, they would have come after me if I had already. What did Harry Truman say, ‘
If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog
.’”

“Actually, with all due respect, Mr. President, it’s credited to Truman, but etymologists would take you to task on that.”

“Come on. It’s pure Truman.”

“Truman reinvented on stage. For a play. Not for real.”

“Then who gets the damned credit?”

“Quite a few people, in fact,” Bernsie explained. “It’s been attributed to Carl Icahn when he was chairman of U.S. Steel. Also, Selig Robinson, a Truman cohort; Donald Devine in the Reagan administration. But even Devine couldn’t recall where he heard it—maybe a line in
Give ‘em Hell, Harry.
There was even a variation uttered by Gordon Gekko.”

“Who?”

“Gordon Gekko. Michael Douglas’s character in
Wall Street.
The movie.”

“How in hell do you know so much about one fucking made-up quote?”

“I’m your chief of staff. You pay me to know. After all, I wouldn’t want you to go public with something so obviously wrong and then get nibbled to death by twenty-five million tweeters.”

John Bernstein was right about that. Twitter had the power in 140 characters or less to boost an unknown to national prominence or contribute to regime change in Third World countries.

The wrong message could mean a national viral shift in public opinion as it became zeitgeist. Taylor acknowledged that such messaging, no matter how insignificant, would one day unseat a president. Not over a misquote of Truman, but it could happen over something equally insignificant.

“Suppose I’ll have to come up with some original homilies for
my
autobiography. What about you?” Taylor asked. “How will you judge me, old friend? What will you recall when you decide to leave and walk into a million dollar advance? The juicier the better.”

Of course John Bernstein had considered the question himself. But this was the first time the president personally posed it. He’d probably leave a year before Taylor’s second term was over so he could market himself as a talking head on Fox News or MSNBC prior to any book publication.

“You’ll have to work harder to give me some real dirt. As a president you’re pretty boring. I’d have to make up smack. Nothing titillating. Hell, you’re going to make for a boring read.”

“There’s still time.”

“I’m counting on it,” Bernsie said with a chuckle that made his belly bounce. Then his mood changed. “Morgan,” he said very personally, “you’re a man of convictions. A decision maker who bucks political wisdom. It’s probably how you flew your F-18s. You followed a prescribed flight plan when you had to, and hit your targets with conviction, relying on your experience and judgment. Not sure how that sells books, but it sure makes me proud to be working with you.”

“Thank you, Bernsie. Ultimately, I feel some moral authority in this bizarre second term. I can be president of the United States rather than the president of one political party. It’s what diminished everyone from Clinton on. Four years, eight years, you’re beaten down by the opposition most days. The leadership scrambles to deliver counter punches. I suppose I have the luxury of saying fuck you to partisan politics. And you can quote me on that!”

“Finally something to work with,” Bernsie joked. And there’s always the Lodge campaign and election. The last-minute huddling on succession. Lamden’s departure, bless his heart. Elliott Strong’s radio broadcast and coup. And how you jumped into the cockpit of Air Force One. Christ, the more I think about it, this would make a helluva movie!” Bernsie exclaimed.

“See, you have something good to work with after all. Now let’s see if I can help spice up your middle chapters. Call the press room and schedule me for an hour from now. Then get me Gregory at NBC. I have an idea,” Morgan Taylor said with a crooked smile.

The White House East Room

The same day

“I’ll be short and sweet. Then I’ll take your questions,” the president began. He wore his classic blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. The requisite American flag was on his left lapel. His tone before the pool cameras and microphones was even. His voice was clear, authoritative, and measured.

“Americans have demonstrated a unity of spirit unknown in recent years. The United States has shown the world that we are a nation of people who stand up to adversity at home. When, under attack, we come together. We become stronger rather than weaker. We help our neighbors, and we survive.

“No enemy of the people will bring us down. Not now. Not ever. I am proud of the way our citizens have shown extraordinary courage despite the threats of death and the loss of friends and family. I am proud of you.

“And so, I continue to urge you to stay home. Be safe. Do not take to the streets. Trust in the might of the United States armed forces. We will find the terrorist behind the evil act. We will bring him to justice.”

The emphasis made it clear the speech was over. Now Morgan Taylor would create a masterful diversion. The members of the Fourth Estate shouted to get recognized.

Taylor pointed to the NBC anchor. “Mr. Gregory?”

“Mr. President, you maintain that you will find the terrorist behind the poisonings that have brought much of American life to a standstill. Have you actually identified who he is and where he is hiding?”

It was a total set up, played perfectly, although the talent didn’t know it.

“I’m sorry, as you can well understand, for the sake of national security, I can’t get into specifics,” the president stated. “However…”

Everyone held on that one word.

“We have narrowed our search to the islands of Indonesia; home to other terrorist groups. That’s all I can say.”

At this point, the other reporters shot their hands up and shouted questions that would send everyone with a camera, a microphone, or an opinion running in the wrong direction.

Most of all, Morgan Taylor hoped his deceit would lead Ibrahim Haddad to lower his guard, even just a little.

It wasn’t the first time a sitting president used television to lie.

Ciudad del Este

While the president was tricking the world, Vinnie D’Angelo was on his second stroll through the Paraná Country Club property.

Less than a hundred yards from Casa del Zuma, he cut across an undeveloped, wooded area, photographing scenes for a brochure and Web site that would never exist.

He heard laughter from the nearby villa. Boisterous, victorious laughter; a mocking tone with the air of superiority. D’Angelo felt that if it continued for another hour the revelry might even drown out the evening’s symphonic cacophony of the frogs and cicadas.

Indeed, it was getting late, but the sun was in the perfect place for D’Angelo to approach Casa del Zuma. The cameras and guards would be looking in his direction, but directly into the setting sun.

Barely fifty yards from the mansion, the CIA agent tripped over a log and fell hard on the ground. It was quite a performance; completely believable. With his back to the cameras, D’Angelo simultaneously rubbed his ankle with one hand, and flipped his backpack he carried forward with the other.

Using his body as a shield to block any observing eyes, D’Angelo reached into his pack and removed the items he brought along.