Blowback, page 4
That was probably a cool thing to do during the Cold War, but ever since 1993—when a terrorist shot up a line of cars waiting on Route 123 to turn into CIA headquarters and killing two CIA employees and wounding three others—the rules had changed.
Noa finds a corner table that is cluttered with half-empty glasses and crumpled napkins. She sits down, back to the wall, and he does the same.
He sits quietly with her for a long few seconds and says, “Well?”
“Well, what?” she says sharply. “You were so damn chatty this morning, I thought I’d let you go first. You suddenly shy all the time?”
Liam takes a swallow of his beer. “What to say?” He checks the crowd, knowing from training and instinct how to converse out in public, without letting classified details slip out. “The boss made good points. I liked what he had to say. You … you sounded like he was about to set up reeducation camps or something like that.”
Noa frowns, runs a finger around the edge of the glass. “Remember your first real day at work? In the Bubble? We took an oath about defending the Constitution. Not the president of the United States.”
“He’s making it legal. That’s good enough for me.”
“He’s stretching it, and you know it.”
Liam says, “There’s an opportunity here for both of us to make an impact, to really hit some bad guys where it counts.”
“So pretend we’re in the Army, just salute smartly, and go up that hill?”
“No, as Agency employees, we say ‘yes, sir,’ and follow his instructions. The Agency works for the president. I don’t have a problem with that.”
Noa stays quiet. Liam takes in the faces of the government employees and contractors, crowded around the tavern’s square bar and tables, talking in small groups, seeing lots of smiles and laughter, but also seeing the quiet ones. They were the ones with haunted eyes, either just home from abroad with fresh, bloody memories, or just left their offices, the burden of looming deadly threats still fresh in their minds.
Liam says, “Last year I was in the Middle East. Country in the middle of a civil war. Keeping watch on things. A couple of folks of interest wandered into this house we were observing. Checked them using our facial recognition software … two solid hits on … guys of interest. With long histories, you know? We sent word up the line, and the word came back. Leave them alone. Negotiations were in a delicate stage. They left later, and they were responsible for … some stuff. Deadly and horrific stuff.”
He finishes his beer. “You know what? Negotiations are always in a delicate stage. Screw it. And if you don’t want to take the job, Noa, don’t. I plan to do it, and with great professionalism and enthusiasm.”
She picks up her drink and lowers it. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Liam.”
“Didn’t think I was.”
“Six or seven months ago, I was in Cambridge,” Noa says.
“The one here or the one over there?”
“The one here,” she says. A loud burst of laughter pauses Noa for a second, and when it quiets down, she continues, “I was assigned liaison to an FBI task force, running surveillance on a foreign intelligence cell working out of Cambridge.”
Liam says, “Were they on the city council?”
For a moment it looks like Noa is considering a smile. “No, it was a husband-and-wife team, and their neighbors were another husband-and-wife team. They all had jobs in various defense firms out on Route 128. I was getting briefed by the lead FBI agent and I asked how long they had been here. Three years … can you believe it? Three goddamn years … I asked, well, when are you planning to take them out? The FBI guy just laughed at me. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘They’re money in the bank. We keep them happy, let them do their work, and if there ever comes a time when one of you folks gets captured overseas, we use them for an exchange.’”
Liam stays quiet, sensing she wants to say more.
She does.
“Get that?” she says. “We were letting those four spies steal our most advanced military technological developments, just because one day, someday, they could be used as poker chips. Meanwhile, our enemies get advanced targeting technology, software, and weapons systems schematics without being bothered. We weren’t thinking about the now, about damage they’re doing every damn day, week, and month. Once again, we were being played for suckers for some possible future goal.”
Noa finishes off her drink, holds up the glass like she’s examining it. “Me, turning this down? Not a chance in the world. I just want to go into it with clear eyes and an understanding of the rewards and the possible risks. Truth be told, I like being picked out by Barrett.”
Liam picks up his empty tavern mug, clinks it against Noa’s empty glass. “Me, too. We just got our hunting license from the boss. Let’s go hunting.”
Noa clinks it in return, puts her glass down. “Yes, let’s go hunting. But remember this, Liam.”
“What’s that?”
Noa says, “One of these days, the game wardens are going to find out what we’re doing, and there’ll be hell to pay.”
CHAPTER 14
SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA
TWO WEEKS AFTER that late-night meeting at Tuckerman Roadhouse outside of Langley, Virginia, Liam Grey is sitting in the front passenger seat of an orange-and-white van parked a few short meters away from a one-story concrete building with armored doors and narrow windows in an office park just outside of Saint Petersburg.
The building’s flat roof holds a number of satellite dishes and from a small substation heavy power cables run to its west side. Similar concrete buildings are scattered around this office park, the pavement cracked and bumpy, but the vehicles parked in front of the target building are sleek and new, reflecting the status of their owners.
Sitting next to him in the driver’s seat is Boyd Morris, an operator from the CIA’s Special Activities Division and a former member of the Army’s Delta Force. He’s slim, with blond hair and a charming smile, who looks like he would fall over in a stiff wind, but Liam knows from experience in the field just how hard he is behind that skinny body and sweet smile.
“Well?” Boyd asks, holding a clipboard up to his face, like he’s checking directions or a business order.
“Looks okay from here,” Liam says.
“Yeah.”
It’s a sweet sunny day in April, and traffic roars along the near E-20 highway. The landscape is flat, with lots of brush and pine trees surrounding this quiet-looking office park. Hard to believe that more than eighty years ago, German Army units came racing along these same roads on their way to nearby Saint Petersburg—then known as Leningrad—in their task to conquer or starve the city and kill millions.
History, Liam thinks. This nation is bloody with it.
He also thinks of how utterly alone they are. In the Army you had communications, contingency plans, and Air Force and other airborne assets one radio message away to save your ass if you got in trouble. That all changed when he joined the Agency, of course, but most times, there was an out. You were under some form of diplomatic protection or you were someplace where, if captured, you’d eventually be traded in some future spy swap.
But not now.
They were alone, in enemy territory, going in heavy, with no cavalry over the horizon, ready to ride in to rescue them.
Liam shifts in his seat. The president ordered him here, and that is good enough.
Boyd says, “Funny how something so important is stuck out in the middle of the sticks, no razor wire, no guard towers.”
“Hiding in plain sight,” Liam says.
Boyd grins. “Gee, you Company fellas know all of the tricks of the trade, don’t you?”
“You’d think,” he says.
Liam waits, looks at his watch.
Sixty seconds to go.
In that unimpressive concrete structure before them, adjacent to a scrapyard, a gas station, three other warehouses, and a line of old green-and-white Avtobus vehicles—their tires missing—from the Saint Petersburg transit system, is a facility operated by the GRU, Russian Military Intelligence.
The military personnel inside that building belong to the GRU’s Twelfth Directorate, responsible for Information Warfare and more than a decade of cyberattacks and news bots spreading lies and disinformation without consequence.
Until today.
Liam recalls what he told his crew last night, in an Agency safe house in Imatra, Finland, less than ten miles from the Russian border and just over a two-hour drive away from Saint Petersburg.
The military personnel in that building all have blood on their hands, Liam said. They’ve been responsible for disrupting elections, taking down governments, and stealing millions of dollars. They’ve taken the lead crippling the internet whenever they feel like it, and their internet postings have fostered tribal and ethnic cleansing resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, all to fulfill their government’s strategic goals.
He checks his watch.
Time.
He calls behind him, “Tommy, do your work!”
“Roger that,” comes a male voice from the rear, the cargo space back there hidden by a taut black curtain.
A handful of seconds passes.
“Done,” Tommy says. “No phone service going in and out of that building, electronic door locks disabled, as well as their surveillance equipment.”
Liam says, “It’s a go, Boyd.”
“Roger that,” he says, starting up the van’s engine, shifting it into Drive, and then speeds a hundred yards or so to the front parking lot of the GRU installation. Boyd parks the van as close as he can to the front door. He gets out, and so does Liam.
Working calmly yet efficiently, they go to the rear of the van, which Boyd unlocks. He takes out a two-wheeled dolly, and with Liam’s help, loads up three black, hard plastic containers, ignoring what else is in the rear of the van. Boyd pushes the loaded dolly up the narrow concrete path and Liam joins him, holding a clipboard with some shipping documents fastened to it.
He and Boyd are both wearing, among other items, black trousers and short jackets with black hems and orange shoulders, marking the work uniforms of TNT Express, the largest domestic shipper in Russia. Black baseball caps with the orange-and-white TNT logo are on their heads, the van also painted with the same TNT logo.
Underneath the jackets are ballistic vests, not a typical part of the TNT dress code.
Boyd stops and Liam goes up, clipboard in hand, and rings the doorbell, ignoring the signs in Cyrillic lettering saying NO ADMITTANCE, KEEP OUT, and PROPERTY UNDER SURVEILLANCE.
Once more.
And once more.
Boyd says, “I bet they’re distracted in there.”
“I bet you’re right,” Liam says, pounding the metal door with his fist, calling out in Russian, “Hey, anybody in there?”
He turns the doorknob.
It freely moves.
He looks to Boyd, raises an eyebrow, and then the door abruptly opens, with a young man, wearing jeans and a black turtleneck shirt, with shoulder holster, pistol, and one pissed-off look on his face.
In Russian he says, “You clowns, you’ve got the wrong address.”
“Sorry, sir,” Liam replies. “We’re here to make a delivery of twenty keyboards to Popov Associates.”
A curse from the GRU man, who says, “Morons, that building is over there.”
He breaks his concentration for a moment, pointing over Liam’s shoulders to another squat building in the distance, and Liam takes out a 9mm Beretta pistol from a concealed waist holster and shoots him in the forehead.
CHAPTER 15
ONCE LIAM DRAGS the body of the dead GRU man aside, Boyd pushes the dolly in, and the rear of the van reopens. Four other men—also wearing TNT Express gear—run up the entranceway, unlimbering their weapons. Each has been assigned a quadrant of the building, and thanks to a host of three-letter agencies that are part of the American intelligence apparatus, they have a perfect layout of the building’s interior.
The four highly experienced operators race by Boyd and Liam as the two of them get to work, opening the hard plastic storage containers on the tiled floor. From the building’s interior they hear muffled shots, a few shouts and cries, and within two minutes, one operator—Ferris Walton—comes out into the lobby and says, “All targets down and accounted for. You two are good to go.”
From each plastic container, Liam and Boyd pick up a black satchel with a carrying strap, make their way down a narrow corridor. Open doors reveal desks and computer terminals and dead GRU men. Liam doesn’t spare them a glance.
He’s got a job to do, with little time to get it done.
Another operator—Mike Cooper—waves them through the heavy metal door he’s holding open. “All clear in here, guys.”
He and Boyd enter a dark, cool, air-conditioned room. In banked rows on metal shelves, computer equipment blinks with red-and-blue indicator lights. The rows go on as far as the eye can see. In a desk chair before a computer terminal, an older GRU man with a closely trimmed black beard sits calmly, eyes open, a bloody, round hole in his forehead.
He and Boyd unzip the black satchels, start removing timed thermite charges—black plastic cases about the size of a paperback book—and go down the line of computer servers, placing each charge in a strategic location. When the timers later click to zero, the temperature in this large concrete room will approach that of the surface of the sun, and Liam wants to be as far away as possible when that happens.
“Looks good,” Boyd says.
“Got that.”
He takes the lead up the corridor, thinking through the next steps and he abruptly holds up his hand.
Boyd stops.
Doesn’t say anything but raises an eyebrow.
In a soft voice, Liam says, “Heard something. From that door.”
Boyd steps forward, pistol in hand.
The door has a sign in blue, showing a stick figure of a woman and the English letters WC. Water closet.
And the Cyrillic letters for toilet.
Boyd nods to Liam and he nods back.
Liam grabs the door, spins the knob, hurls it open.
A cry from inside.
A young blond woman, wearing a dark-green uniform shirt and black skirt, sitting on the dirty tan tile floor, hunched up against a toilet, weeping, hands held up.
“Shit,” Liam says.
CHAPTER 16
BOYD SAYS, “WHAT the hell are we going to do, Liam?”
Liam doesn’t reply.
Running out of time.
Take her prisoner?
Take her out of the building and release her later?
Or …
“Liam?” Boyd again says, urgently.
The young woman moves quickly, dropping her right arm, going behind her back, emerging with a small pistol.
Liam shoots her twice in the chest.
“Damn,” Boyd whispers.
“Back to work,” Liam says.
He closes the bathroom door.
Resumes his fast walk to the lobby, where the other four team members are placing hard drives, thumb drives, and collected documents into the hard plastic storage containers, snapping the covers shut.
“Heard two shots back there,” Tommy Pulaski says.
Boyd says, “Nothing to worry about. Let’s haul ass.”
From the other side of his waist, Liam pulls out a smaller pistol and charred notebook, drops them near the door. The operators help him and Boyd load up the containers, and they go out in a quick line to the van.
The four operators slip inside the rear of the TNT Express–disguised van and assist Liam and Boyd in returning the dolly and storage cases into the rear.
The doors are slammed.
Boyd goes to the left.
Liam goes to the right.
Both get into the van, and before Liam gets his seat belt fastened, Boyd starts up the van and in less than a minute, they are back onto the E-20 highway.
Liam doesn’t say anything and neither does Boyd.
The mission is still underway and won’t be finished until they and the gear are out of Russia.
Boyd says, “About that woman soldier …”
“Yeah?” Liam asks.
“What would you have done if she hadn’t pulled a piece on us?”
A kilometer passes.
Liam says, “Boyd?”
“Yeah?”
“Never ask me that, ever again.”
Two more kilometers pass and Liam’s cell phone chimes.
What the hell, he thinks, digging it out of his jacket. This is a CIA-supplied burner phone, only to be used among the crew and with the CIA station back in the American embassy in Helsinki, and only in an emergency.
Nobody should be texting him.
Liam calls up the screen.
The incoming phone number says BLOCKED.
But there’s a one-line message:
GOOD JOB. SIERRA.
Boyd is still focused on their driving.
“What is it?” he asks. “Some car warranty company from Moscow checking in on you?”
Liam puts his phone away.
Sierra is the Secret Service code name for President Barrett.
“Our boss just said good job,” Liam says.
Boyd looks at him with amazement. “Barrett? How the hell does he know already?”
Liam says, “Former head of the Agency and Secretary of Defense, he’s still got friends and assets in high places.”
Boyd says, “Nice to know, but I don’t want him looking over our shoulders if we screw up.”
Liam says, “Simple solution to that.”
“What?”
He folds his arms. “We can’t screw up. Ever.”
CHAPTER 17
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later they are relaxing in another CIA safe house, this one near the town of Puntala, Finland, northeast of where they had started yesterday morning. Liam thinks “house” is stretching it, since their quarters is an old log home. A fire is burning in the fireplace to cut through the damp, and Liam finally unwinds, drinking a can of Karhu beer. Back outside of Saint Petersburg, he and the crew had driven about a half hour before getting to another industrial park, where the van was stripped of the interior and the fake exterior and left behind a building with keys in it. They had scattered in returning to Finland, either taking a bus or a rental car, and after rendezvousing here, the captured hard drives and files were brought to the CIA station in the American embassy in Helsinki.
