Читать книгу The Red Cell - André Le Gallo - Страница 5

When Steve Church drove out of his office’s underground parking onto 17th Street, Northwest, the sudden eruption of white fumes from a motorcycle in his rearview mirror awakened his operational awareness, which had been dulled by a year heading the White House’s Intelligence staff. As he headed south toward Constitution Avenue, he kept an eye on the two bikers, both in black leather, who were sharing a midsize Japanese motorcycle now two cars behind him. With a threatening roar, the bike moved up a car closer, straddling the white lane divider. At the same time, the driver lowered the black visor of his helmet like a knight preparing for battle, while his rider removed something from the bike’s saddle bag.

Feeling a growing sense of paranoia, Steve transferred his gun from the glove compartment to the map slot in the driver’s door. Having narrowly escaped from Iran a year before, carrying that country’s top-secret plans for a devastating cyber attack on the United States, Steve immediately assumed the bikers to be an Iranian hit team, unless of course they were peaceful commuters on their way home.

He turned right on Constitution and then made an immediate half-right onto Virginia Avenue, before a red light forced him to stop. The motorcycle pulled up next to him on the passenger side, just as the light turned green. Steve thought he heard a metallic clunk, but it was quickly overwhelmed by the bike’s roaring takeoff. He managed to keep close enough behind to see them turn right at the end of Virginia onto the Rock Creek Parkway, before he pulled into the gas station just beyond the Watergate West condominium tower.

As he rounded the car toward the gas pumps, he discovered the source of the sound he had heard a few minutes before. It was a round black box attached to his passenger door. He recognized it instantly as a limpet mine, an IED used by the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, the MEK, to assassinate their targets, most recently Iranian nuclear scientists. His first thought was to pull it off and hurl it across the street into a vacant lot. But just then a utility truck pulled up to the other side of the pump. Steve raced toward the vehicle and pulled the emerging driver, a ruddy-faced, forty-something man in white overalls, to the pavement, yelling, “Get down, get down!”

Although Steve’s heart was pounding and the adrenaline was flowing, his mind was on automatic; his instincts were in charge.

Before Steve could finish his warning, the device exploded.

The sound was deafening, but fortunately the mine was small enough its force projected mostly sideways into his car and did not ignite the gas pumps—though the interior was engulfed in flames, and the passenger door looked like it had been penetrated by a rocket-propelled grenade.

His ears ringing, Steve took a breath and checked that his new friend was okay. He quickly stood up and ran to the driver’s side of his car to retrieve the Glock. He managed to yank the door open and retrieve the gun before the fire could ignite its ammunition. Then, surrounded by stunned onlookers, he ran back to the other driver, who was now sitting up and shaking his head.

“I need to borrow your truck,” Steve said in a rush. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

He opened the door, which was labeled “Hansen Glass,” and jumped in. “Tell the police I’m going after those guys,” he called out, starting the engine and roaring away from his still-burning vehicle, just as the first sounds of sirens could be heard.

Steve had to think fast. He had seen the motorcycle heading up the parkway, but where to? Were they trying to get to the Pakistan Embassy on Connecticut Avenue? The Pakistanis handled Iranian affairs in the United States. Possibly, but the longer they stayed on the streets of the capital, the more likely they’d be picked up by surveillance video. The police would know where they were trying to hide.

No, he decided. They had probably looped up the ramp to the elevated Whitehurst Freeway and were going to try to thread the rush-hour traffic on Key Bridge to the George Washington Parkway, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. From there, they could reach the Beltway and make their escape on one of its many exits around the city—or even roll out of town completely, maybe seeking to end up at the Iranian Legation in New York.

He had another problem: His would-be assassins could snake through the rush-hour traffic on a two-wheeled motorcycle, while he was driving, he discovered, a truck carrying a six-by-nine-foot pane of glass, which was still in one piece, perhaps because it was on the side away from the explosion.

In a flash he cancelled his first plan of pursuing the bike by taking the ramp to the Whitehurst. Instead, he suddenly veered across the parkway onto the narrow ramp to K Street under the freeway. As he did, the truck’s GPS monotone voice warned, “You have made an incorrect turn. You have made an incorrect turn.” Steve grinned, shutting off the device and pushing the truck toward Wisconsin Avenue, turning right up the hill into the heart of Georgetown.

When he and Kella had been trying to reach the Iranian Gulf while on the run from Iranian security, he was the rabbit. Now, he was the hunter, but he didn’t equate his action—stealing Iranian plans to attack the United States—with this attempt on his life. He laid on his horn, doing his own bit of clumsy threading, trying to get down M Street to the point where the freeway ended and the men on the bike would be circling around the feeder lane to Key Bridge.

He was almost there, having resorted to confronting oncoming traffic, narrowly missing pedestrians, and at one point swerving onto the sidewalk, when … there they were! By the barest stroke of luck, the combination of crawling traffic and their misjudgment that they had nailed Steve had kept them within reach.

Not for long, however. They must have guessed it was Steve doing the daredevil maneuvers in the truck, because as soon as the rear rider spotted him, he whacked the driver on the helmet; they took off across the bridge and zipped down the ramp to the G.W. Parkway.

By now, Steve’s adrenaline was pumping full bore. He risked some hairbreadth misses, as he floored the truck down the middle of the bridge, nearly sideswiping two cars on the far side, slicing across lanes to get to the parkway entrance.

Another thought: Would they try to shake him by taking Spout Run off to the left?

Again, no. They knew now they had failed in their mission. They would need to report to their superiors as quickly as possible and not risk capture. They had to be heading to New York.

The chase was on. Despite the hour, parkway traffic was moving along well, and Steve in the truck was losing ground. In just a few minutes they sped past the Route 123 exit that led to CIA headquarters. Years before, Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani gunman, had killed two intelligence officers and wounded three others, all of them lined up to enter the compound at Langley. Steve, speeding in and out of lanes as if the fate of the world depended on delivering a pane of glass, tried to catch up as much as he could. Fortunately, none of the other drivers tried to challenge him or block his progress, even though trucks were prohibited on the parkway.

Still focusing intensely on the road ahead, he managed to pull his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and call Jonathan Spencer, the FBI liaison on the White House staff, to have him contact the U.S. Park Police, plus authorities in Virginia and Maryland. “The first actionable intelligence to come from the White House since the Brits burned the place down in 1812,” Spencer replied.

“Since the Iranians don’t have an embassy in Washington,” Steve added, “I assume these guys are heading to their New York mission. But I could be wrong. I’m going to try to catch them on the Beltway. You probably want to look out for them there.”

He had been so intent on catching the bike guys he hadn’t once checked his speedometer. When he glanced down, what he saw shocked him: 90 miles an hour!

What must these commuters be thinking? An emergency window replacement?

He continued blasting his horn and weaving lanes, when he spotted the bikers again, about a quarter-mile ahead, veering off the parkway onto the Beltway. That’s when he heard the siren. A Park Police cruiser was surging in his rear view mirror, lights flashing.

Steve wasn’t about to be stopped, close as he was to the bike, which was roaring toward the American Legion Bridge over the Potomac, with the truck and now the police cruiser in hot pursuit. The driver stayed on course, head down, but his back-seat colleague was clearly agitated and shouting at his companion every few seconds. After failing to get a reaction from him, he plunged a hand in his jacket.

As Steve drew closer, the police car suddenly passed him, coming abreast of the bikers. Just then, the back rider fired at the cruiser, which immediately slowed and dropped directly behind the shooter.

“Think you’ve figured this out, officer?” Steve muttered to himself.

He had just begun to wonder if, after this much commotion, the police had dispatched only one vehicle, when a second cruiser appeared on his right on the highway’s shoulder. This one, he saw, contained two officers, with the passenger leaning out the open window behind the driver and training a shotgun on … him!

Reflexively, Steve slammed on the brakes, and as the truck dropped back the armed officer spotted the bike passenger about to fire at him. The cruiser’s driver must have spotted him, too, because the car swerved sharply to the left and bumped the motorcycle against the Jersey barrier separating the Beltway loops. The impact sent the shooter over the barrier and directly into the path of a semi-trailer, while driver and bike ricocheted off the wall and under the wheels of the cruiser.

Steve screeched the truck to a stop, while the hundreds of drivers approaching the scene took frantic evasive actions, some successful, some resulting in smashed fenders and crumpled bumpers.

In a few moments, traffic had ground to a halt in both directions, surrounding the two dead men, the police, and Steve, sitting in the truck and staring at the miraculously unbroken pane of glass still attached to its side.

“We could be in the galley of a submarine,” Kristen said to her chief, as she patted her black flapper style curls. She and Tom Nortsen, a white-haired man in a gray suit, were sitting in the cafeteria of the old executive building next to the White House, having arrived early for a meeting with the director of the White House intelligence staff, Steve Church. Kristen, a very junior CIA officer on the Iranian desk, was thrilled and she savored the moment, trying to absorb her environment. Early on in her training at the Farm, she had put in a request that one of her interims be with the Near East Division. Nortsen, according to his reputation, took good care of the trainees assigned to him.

“White House staffs keep getting bigger and bigger but their offices have to get smaller and smaller. If you ever get assigned here later in your career, you would be lucky to have your own desk.”

“Can you tell me anything about Steve Church before we go up?” Kristen asked.

“He is in his mid-thirties, grew up overseas wherever his father’s CIA assignments took the family,” Nortsen replied, taking a sip of his coffee. “International relations, wrestling and rifle teams at Lehigh. A master’s degree from Brussels when his father was chief of station there. Then NATO headquarters, also in Brussels, sent him to open an office in Moldova. Two years later, he designed a counter-proliferation exercise for the U.S. Air Force in South Korea while working for West Gate International, a large defense contractor with CIA connections.”

“Wow, you seem to know him pretty well. But I meant what about his CIA connection? He seems to have done a lot considering he’s not even a CIA officer.”

“I know his father, Marshall, a lot better. Marshall retired from the CIA, but he formed his own company, and now he is more involved in intelligence operations than ever through his Red Cell. But we better head up,” Nortsen said as he looked at his watch and finished his coffee.

As they headed to the elevator, he asked, “But what about you? Why did you join the CIA?”

“Well, I had a choice. Most of my classmates at Johns Hopkins went to work for oil companies in the Middle East. Money or do something for my country? Plus, the excitement, of course. And I wanted to meet interesting people who also wanted to make a difference.”

“Well, you came to the right place. Although not everyone in the agency likes him because he is not a CIA staffer, Steve is one of the more interesting people you are likely to meet. Several intelligence awards in return for saving the lives of thousands of people in the Middle East and our country’s cyber infrastructure.”

Steve Church’s office was next to the National Security Council on the third floor. As advertised, it was modest in size and the several chairs that had been brought in for this meeting made it appear even smaller. Kristen was surprised high-ranking officials were squeezed into so many cubbyholes. She supposed proximity to power made up for the lack of space.

They were among the first to arrive and Nortsen introduced Kristen. “Always happy to meet one of Tom’s protégés,” Church said. “I believe trainees usually spend a couple of months at an overseas station before their permanent assignment. Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know yet,” Kristen said.”

“We’re going to lose her to the European Division,” Nortsen interjected, “but I’ll make sure we get her back.”

The room quickly filled up with officials from other intelligence community organizations and Steve gave the group a quick summary of the previous day’s excitement. Kristen looked around the room sizing up the individuals at the center of American intelligence but her eyes rested on the speaker. Steve stood about six feet one, was fit-looking, had short brown hair, brown eyes, and an easy smile. He exuded confidence, vitality, and the sense any goal was within his grasp. Trust, she decided; she trusted him. And he wasn’t bad-looking, either in an unselfconscious way.

“How do we know those two guys were Iranians?” someone who identified himself as Defense Intelligence Agency asked.

“Interesting question,” Steve replied. “Mary Margaret, do you want to take that one?”“About a week ago, we at NSA intercepted an Iranian message, which in hindsight should have warned us this hit team was in the Washington area,” a well-dressed, blonde, middle-aged woman said. “Its target, which they referred to as Satan’s Spy, we now know was Steve. However, the message was not processed quickly enough. And it only makes complete sense after the fact.”

“Satan’s Spy?” an Army colonel asked.

“When we were making a run for the coast with Iranian security close behind, my name was outted to the Iranian media and they gave me a nickname,” Steve said with a grin.

According to Kristen’s office colleagues, the other half of the “we” was Church’s partner and girlfriend, Kella Hastings, a French girl with a bizarre background. Born of a North African desert tribe and later adopted by an American diplomat and his French wife, Steve and Kella had met at a diplomatic reception in Paris. They later had been recruited by the agency to gather operational intelligence on a radical Muslim leader, whom Steve had met while studying in Brussels. They had eventually stopped the Jihadist from pulverizing several Middle East capitals with a captured Israeli space gun in an effort to turn the clock back to the time of the Caliphate. Kristen wondered if Kella was still in the picture.

Kristen’s conjectures were interrupted when Vice President Harry Baxter, a bald, heavy-set man, entered the room.

“You get yourself in the damndest situations, Steve,” said Baxter. “And now that you’ve killed them both, we can’t interrogate them.”

“Iranians are notoriously bad drivers, Mr. Vice President,” Steve said. “They killed themselves. But I agree they would have been a source of valuable intelligence. They were obviously members of the Quds Force, Iran’s equivalent of SMERSH, the old Soviet assassination unit.”

Kristen knew Baxter was said to often act like a bull in a china shop but was also a man who got things done.

“I spoke to CIA director LaFont this morning,” Baxter said. “She’s going to initiate a Covert Finding. We need to get more aggressive with these thugs who come to our country to kill our officials.”

“A lethal finding?” Steve asked.

“You bet your ass. Are there any other kinds?” Baxter chuckled.

Steve smiled. “Game on.”