Line of Succession: A Thriller (2 page)

Brochures for European cycling vacations were magnetized to the fridge. Magazines were scattered on the coffee table. Bottles of limited production cabernet sat in a starter wine rack, and a digital picture frame on a bookshelf cycled slideshows of Carver and his partner, Agent Meagan O’Keefe, with aspiring politicos at black-tie events.

Like Lieutenant Flynn, Agent Carver had not slept in more than a day. He went to the ancient sink basin in the corner of the room where there was a black and white photograph of the home’s previous residents – or perhaps their grandparents – standing where he was now, filleting freshly caught trout.

He turned on the cold tap and splashed water onto his chiseled features. He squeezed anti-redness drops into each of his green eyes. The drops stung. He blinked the artificial tears away and looked into the mirror. His face was still tan despite having spent so much time in basements, surveillance posts and windowless offices during the past several weeks. Carver made a point to get out and run at least once a day, no matter how hot and sticky it was outside. A little sun on his face did wonders for his attitude.

A gray hair had sprouted on his otherwise black sideburns. He plucked it out, but neither the pain nor the cold water was enough to fight his drowsiness. He loosened his black necktie, popped in a piece of sugarless gum and dropped his lean 185-pound frame to the floor to rip off ten quick pushups. Screw caffeine. To hell with ginseng. Blood to the brain was all he needed.

He heard the row house’s squeaky back door, followed by two sets of footsteps on the floorboards above him. Carver reached for his SIG 9mm and levered a round into the chamber. It was probably just O’Keefe, but Carver took no chances. He was, after all, operating blind – the building’s security and surveillance systems were offline. Due to another round of crippling budget cuts, field house DC310 was on a 30-day waitlist for standard repairs.

Carver recognized Agent O’Keefe’s clip-clop gait on the hardwood and put his weapon away. They had been partners for almost two months now, and he already knew O’Keefe inside and out, down to the tiny mole on her slightly crooked right index finger, her left-leaning voting record and the way her allergy to watermelon made her lips go numb for an hour after eating it.

O’Keefe did the perfunctory secret knock – more of a cheesy joke between her and Carver than insurance against accidentally blowing each other’s brains out – and entered with the White House Chief of Staff, Julian Speers, behind her. Their clothes were soaked and they were tracking mud.

“
Working late again?” Carver said to his fictitious better half. “Dinner’s getting cold, honey.”

Carver helped O’Keefe with her coat. The roots of her shoulder-length strawberry-blonde hair were matted against her head and the drizzle had spotted her black-framed eyeglasses. Carver pulled a hanky from his suit jacket and offered it to her.

At 26, with an M.S. in applied mathematics from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern languages, O’Keefe was more than a decade younger than the 39-year-old Carver. Like many at the agency, she was a numbers geek originally hired to work in cryptology. And like every NSA employee, field work was officially outside her job description. Recruited specifically to conduct counter-terrorism surveillance and interpret intercepted transmissions, she had never received combat training, nor had she been formally issued a gun. The target practice she put in after hours, as well as the matching SIG 9mm she wore in a holster around her left ankle, was at Carver’s insistence. He needed to know his partner could back him up in a jam.

Speers had dark circles under his doughy eyes and he was sucking on a grape-flavored lollipop. “Thanks for the wakeup call,” the Chief of Staff snapped, rubbing his hands through his damp, overgrown haircut. He’d missed two buttons on his white oxford shirt and his dress socks were different shades of black. Then he spotted Flynn through the observation glass. “What the hell?” he hissed, pushing past Carver to get a look at the naked prisoner. He’d seen that face on TV. He pulled the lollipop from his mouth. “Tell me that’s not the missing officer they’re showing on CNN every fifteen minutes.”

Flynn was indeed the missing officer. The previous evening, Carver and O’Keefe had snatched him in the Fort Bragg Officer’s Club parking lot. They had sedated him, thrown him into the trunk of their sedan and driven him back to the field house for questioning. It had been by far the most violent event of Agent O’Keefe’s young career. For Agent Carver, who had been with the CIA for several years before his sudden transfer, it was just another day at the office.

“
Don’t worry,” Carver said. “Once the Army finds out what he’s done, they won’t even want him back.”

Speers’ cheeks flushed crimson. “You’re not CIA anymore,” he snarled. “How am I supposed to explain this?”

Carver and Speers had first met in the Chief’s Eisenhower Building office some two months earlier, on the morning of June 17
^th
. Within three minutes, Speers had effectively ended Agent Carver’s illustrious career at the CIA.

It had not been the homecoming that Carver was expecting. For the past several weeks, he had been in pursuit of an ex-Pakistani intelligence agent that had entered the U.S. on a student visa. The man suddenly left his chemistry program at the University of Mississippi mid-semester and fled the state.

The agency spotted him near El Paso, abruptly lost him, and then picked up the trail again near Laughlin, where the Pakistani spent two nights in a motel with an American-born Allied Jihad sympathizer. By that time, Carver had also arrived in Nevada, but he wasn’t in a position to make an arrest. The Pakistani had committed no crime, and he still had time to return to the university before he could be legally deported.

The Pakistani and the sympathizer settled into a trailer park near Creech Air Force base about 35 miles north of Las Vegas. They lived off baked beans, white bread and five-a-day prayers. They spent the rest of the time hitting every 12-step program in the northern Las Vegas suburbs.

It didn’t take long for Carver to surmise what the pair was doing there. Creech was home to America’s unmanned aircraft program, where hundreds of Air Force pilots reported to virtual cockpits to fly Predator drones around the clock, attacking militants in the field with nearly supernatural weaponry in theatres as far away as Afghanistan. The war had been on for years. But unlike their counterparts deployed overseas, they would then return to the air-conditioned safety of their families and living rooms.

At least most of them did. Although the battles took place far from the threat of enemy fire, the pilots’ power and responsibilities were nearly God-like. Pinned-down units in the field relied on them to spot enemy ambushes miles above the earth and destroy hostile militants in pitch-black darkness. Villagers planting roadside bombs had to be snuffed out while in the act. Attacks on remote bases had to be repelled with unforgiving vengeance. And there were the inevitable civilian casualties. Mothers, out of their minds with grief, trying to find a child’s right arm in a pile of rubble. All of it caught on camera in high-definition. All of it available for replay.

It didn’t take long before a drone pilot with shattered nerves wandered into an AA meeting in a North Las Vegas church basement. As the 32-year-old Captain stood, introduced himself and began sharing the horrors of his occupation, the sympathizer sat in the corner, studying the prey that had suddenly flown into his web.

By 2 a.m., the pilot was gagged and bound in a van on his way to Mexico. The Pakistani planned to torture the pilot and extract information that might help insurgents in the Afpak mountains evade the deadly drone attacks. When he was no longer useful, they would toss his body in a ditch and cover him with calcium oxide powder so that the bloodhounds would never find him.

But Agent Carver, who, like the Pakistani, had never in his life had a drink, had also been present at the AA meeting. Now he was in a chopper high over the desert. It had taken a great deal of trust in his team to allow the pilot to be abducted. He had to allow the operation to play out a little longer. If there were other Jihadists in the area, Carver wanted to know about them.

Near Barstow, the Pakistani decided that the risk in smuggling the pilot into Mexico was too great. He called an audible and broke into an abandoned warehouse to begin the interrogation. Carver’s team moved in. Within the hour, the Pakistani and the sympathizer were on their way to a classified detention center halfway across the world, and the pilot was on his way to a hospital to be treated for shock.

Carver’s team celebrated with a night on the town in Sin City that tested their immune system for days to come.

Not Carver. He didn’t like to party. Instead, he rewarded himself with eight hours of uninterrupted sleep in a quiet Ramada Inn outside the city. The next evening he hitched a redeye aboard a cargo plane bound for Langley AFB. It was there on the tarmac that he was met by a pair of uniformed Secret Service officers, sent by Speers to bring him to the White House.

Twenty-five minutes later he entered the Eisenhower Building, adjacent to the West Wing, where Speers sat behind a massive mahogany desk. The Secret Service agent shut the office door behind Carver and stood outside in the hallway.

Speers stood, leaned across the desktop and shook Carver’s hand.

“
The great Agent Carver,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”

“
I guess news travels fast.”

Speers sat and rubbed his Van Dyke goatee. “News?”

“
The operation in Nevada,” Carver said. “I assumed that’s why you called me here.”

Speers gestured for Carver to sit. Carver did, but not before angling his chair toward the corner. He never sat with his back to a door.

Speers seemed amused. “So you think you’re here to get a medal? Is that it?”

The glow of victory that had surrounded Agent Carver suddenly evaporated. He folded himself into the low-slung chair and scanned the Chief’s desktop for a clue as to the purpose of the visit. The desk was bare except for a small computer, some empty candy wrappers near the desk phone and two manila folders.

“
I apologize,” Speers said. “I only get briefed on the big ops.”

Jackass, Carver thought. As if the abduction of a drone pilot on American soil wasn’t huge. He crossed his legs and felt a bead of sweat forming on his brow. The air conditioners in the ancient building were no match for the hundred-degree weather outside.

“
We’re going to be joined by someone from NSA momentarily,” Speers said.

“
May I ask why?”

“
You’ve both been chosen for a special assignment.”

Carver didn’t like the sound of this. He had been in the CIA long enough to know that the White House communicated its needs directly to the agency directors. They didn’t just go pulling in field operatives fresh off a mission without going through the chain of command.

“
You’ll need to sign some paperwork.” Speers opened a manila folder containing some documents bearing the Presidential letterhead. He plucked one of the docs from the pile and pushed it across the desk. Carver scanned the first paragraph. It was a letter of resignation from the CIA.

Carver found himself suddenly out of breath. “You want me to resign?”

“
What I want is what the President wants.”

“
What exactly is it that the President wants? Does he want me in the Secret Service? The DIA?
What
?”

Speers sighed. He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a purple lollipop, and offered it to Carver, who refused the candy.

The intercom buzzed. Speers pressed the button and grunted into it. A pleasant voice chirped back on the other side. “Meagan O’Keefe from NSA is here to see you.”

“
Send her in.”

O’Keefe entered, wearing a navy suit that flattered her bust. She looked as bewildered as Carver felt. He stood, reached for her hand and shook it firmly. “Blake Carver, CIA.”

“
Meagan O’Keefe. NSA.”

The Chief of Staff did not stand. He smiled and motioned for O’Keefe to sit in the remaining chair. He opened the second folder on his desk and presented it to her. The form on top contained her letter of resignation from the National Security Agency. She let out a small gasp.

“
There, there,” Speers said. “Neither of you should be upset. This is a kind of promotion.”

“
A kind of promotion or an
actual
promotion?” O’Keefe said.

“
Well, you’ll work for me, which means the White House. But not officially. Officially speaking, you’ll be on your own.”

Now Speers scratched his overgrown beard and peered at Lieutenant Flynn through the observation glass. “The investigation was supposed to focus on Ulysses,” Speers said.

He referred to Ulysses USA, a private security contractor that, by the DOD’s own estimates, now made up a full third of the U.S. military presence around the world. Ulysses had been founded by a former Blackwater exec during the second Iraq war. In addition to the Department of Defense, Ulysses counted several multinational corporations as clients. Ulysses USA stock – its ticker symbol was UUSA – was trading at $119 per share.