First Team [First Team 01] Page 11

  “May be that I’m just paranoid,” said Ferguson. “But I think we’re being followed.”

  Their backup plan called for them to divert to the embassy, pick up more Marines, then drive out to a military field about seventy-five miles away. Ferg also had the option of driving straight out to the military field and calling for the C-12 to meet them there. He took out his sat phone and called Amanda, who was at the airport waiting for them.

  “You really should have showered with me,” he told her when she answered the phone.

  “Mr. Ferguson, where are you?”

  “My girlfriends call me Ferg.”

  “We were told you were en route.”

  “I think we have a tail. It’s an operation, at least two vehicles, one a panel truck, which doesn’t make me feel too good.”

  “Where are you now?”

  Ferguson had to ask the driver for the highway name. Amanda didn’t answer when he relayed it.

  “You around, Beautiful?” he asked. He saw the panel truck turn off behind them, but couldn’t tell what car was following them.

  “We think the Russians are watching the airport,” said Amanda, returning. “We’re checking.”

  “All right, let’s go over to plan B. We’ll drive right out to the second pickup,” said Ferg. “I think it’d be better if we had the security teams meet us en route.”

  “I agree,” said Amanda.

  “I knew you were easy.” Ferg glanced at the mirror, trying to make out if there was another car. The Marines were edgy in the back, and even the driver had checked his pistol, snugged into a shoulder holster beneath a sports coat. “Let me think on this a second. Keep the line open.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Guns over the com set.

  “People at the airport. Probably pissed that we didn’t choose Aeroflot.”

  “We going over to the field?”

  “Maybe. Let’s do another loop, what routine are we up to driver—C?”

  The driver nodded. They had worked out a series of streets to follow to lose trails without executing high-risk maneuvers.

  Assuming those were the Russians behind him, Ferguson realized they’d invested an awful lot of resources into the operation. Given that, they might have staked out the backup airfield as well—it was, after all, the next best choice, and pretty obvious.

  Back to the embassy then. Have a helo come in. Too bad they couldn’t just land the C-12 on the roof.

  “Hey, Beautiful, our airplane ready to go?” Ferguson asked Amanda.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Tell him to take off.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell him to take off. He’s going to pick us up.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. I have to talk to the driver and look at a map.”

  “Ferg—”

  “See, I told you I’d grow on you.”

  ~ * ~

  O

  nce they were sure the C-12 was in the air, the driver in the lead car pulled a sharp 180 on the highway they were driving on. As the others sped on, he rammed into the panel truck, taking out the only vehicle they’d spotted that could be carrying a sizable force of troops. Veering as he was sideswiped, the driver of the van tipped over his truck, smashing into an oncoming car. Meanwhile, the Mercedes with the prisoner and the van sped off the road back onto city streets, racing through a series of alleys and lots to a stretch of warehouses at the eastern edge of the industrial section.

  “You with us?” Ferg asked Amanda back at the airport. She was the only one whose radio could communicate with the pilot of the plane, which had taken off and was spinning back toward the edge of city.

  “We’re ready.”

  Ferg saw the plane overhead.

  “Do it,” he told the driver.

  The Marine slammed on the brakes as they turned the corner to Swvard Avenue, cutting off the station wagon following them. Ferg jumped from the truck as the Marines piled out in the back, brandishing weapons. The station wagon and a black Russian Lada behind it slammed to a halt; a large truck stopped behind them and men started coming out of the back. Someone got out of the Mercedes—a man in a yellow sports coat.

  “Ah, the FSB,” yelled Ferg over his com set as the Marines with him in the van piled out, weapons as obvious as they could make them. “Amanda, honey, you guys have a serious security problem at your end of the operation. You have to watch that pillow talk.”

  At the other end of the long, wide street, Rankin slammed against the prisoner as their car veered across the roadway, blocking off the path of traffic. He pushed to his left as Guns jumped from the car, brandishing his MP-5 at a small vehicle that had stopped twenty yards away, waving at the dazed driver to pull off into the lot on the left. Out of the car, Rankin grabbed the prisoner’s side and started pulling him along with Conners.

  The C-12 roared down onto the pavement, so close to Ferguson that it knocked him off his feet. It veered slightly to the right, then the left on the long roadway, bouncing in a pothole and nearly tilting too far forward before finally stopping. By the time Ferguson reached the door of the plane, Rankin and Conners were dragging their prisoner around the wing. Guns, taking up the rear, was coming on a dead ran.

  “Go, just go!” yelled Ferguson as he pushed Kiro into the airplane. “Get this thing up.”

  Conners crawled over Kiro into the C-12; on his haunches, he pulled the prisoner up and pushed him toward one of the two military crewmen. Belatedly, he realized that the soldier had a gun at his belt. Conners jumped up and pushed his way between the prisoner and the man; even with his prisoner handcuffed, blindfolded, and doped up, Conners knew better than to take a chance he might get the gun.

  Rankin jumped in. The plane started to move. The door slapped shut, then flew open. Guns’s head appeared in the doorway, followed by Ferguson’s.

  The plane was already lifting off the ground. As they struggled to close the door, Guns suddenly slipped and for a split second felt as if he were going out headfirst.

  Ferg grabbed him, hauling him back as the plane lifted, then tilted over on its wing, sending them sprawling inside.

  “That’s another one you owe me, Marine,” the CIA officer told his team member.

  The door slammed, then opened, then slammed again as the pilot banked hard over the abandoned factory, narrowly missing a chain-link fence before finally stabilizing and heading southwestward.

  Ferguson went over to one of the windows, looking down on the scene they had just left. The Marines had jumped back into the van and were speeding off. There were a dozen troops standing near the truck behind the Mercedes; at the head of the knot was the man in the yellow jacket.

  “Doesn’t have much taste in clothes,” said Ferg. “But otherwise he knows his business.”

  ~ * ~

  ~ * ~

  1

  THE WHITE HOUSE—TWO DAYS LATER

  Corrine Alston checked her watch as she finished with the last of her e-mail, trying to decide whether she’d sneak out for a “normal” lunch or just send for a sandwich. Finally, she got up and took her pocket-book, slipped her Blackberry communicator inside, and went to the outer office to tell her secretary, Teri Fleming, she’d be gone for a while. Teri gave her an all-hold wave.

  “He wants to see you,” said Teri. “Just buzzed.”

  “All right.” Corrine pulled down her suit jacket, then took out her compact to do a quick makeup check. “Anything new with your son?”

  “Pitch meeting tomorrow. He’s hopeful,” said the secretary. Teri’s son Billy was in LA trying to make good as a screenwriter, and his various adventures were often the subject of small talk between the two women. Teri probably knew his schedule as well as Corrine’s, and she knew Corrine’s exceedingly well.

  “I’ll sneak down for lunch when we’re done,” said Corrine.

  “You have the DEC people at one.”

  “Hold them if I’m late.”

  “You will be,” sa
id Teri. “It’s nearly one now.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Corrine. She stepped out of the office, turned right, then nodded at the Secret Service man in the hallway ahead. Her destination—the president’s office—was only two doors from her own. She stopped, rapped perfunctorily on the doorjamb, and pushed in.

  In the four months that Jonathon McCarthy had served as president, the faint lines Corrine had noticed on his forehead during the campaign had furrowed deeper. At times of tension they formed trenches in his forehead and just then they looked like river channels, belying his quick smile.

  A Southerner by heritage and inclination—according to his campaign biography his forebears had stepped on Georgian soil as indentured servants in 1710— McCarthy retained the style and grace of the well-to-do family he had been born into and rose as Corrine entered the room.

  “Miss Alston, I’m glad you could join us,” he said.

  He didn’t bother introducing the others, as Corrine not only knew them but had helped vet most of them when the president was considering whom to appoint to his administration. Next to the president’s desk sat Defense Secretary Larry Stich, his green sweater clashing with his gray suit and red tie. To his right was the national security advisor, Marty Green. The CIA director, Thomas Parnelles, was sitting in a chair at the other side of the room, his hands in a tent over his nose, partially obscuring the jagged scar on his cheek that reminded anyone who met him that he had worked his way up from the field.

  “How was the play?” asked the president.

  “It was very good,” Corrine answered, taken by surprise.

  “Et tu, Brute?” joked the president, his drawl striking an odd note with Shakespeare’s pigeon Latin.

  “Actually, it was Richard II,” said Corrine.

  “When I was a king, my flatterers were but subjects; being now a subject, I have here a king for my flatterer.”

  “Very good,” said Corrine. While her father had made his money backing movies, classical theater was his first love, and Corrine had seen or read all of Shakespeare’s major plays by the time she was in grade school. Her mother, however, had been an actress, and carefully steered her daughter’s interests toward “more useful arts.”

  “I played Richard in college,” McCarthy explained to the others. He laughed. “That doesn’t go out of this room now, gentlemen. I can count on Miss Alston’s discretion as she’s my attorney, but you all are subject to question. If it gets out, there will be lie detectors in your future.”

  McCarthy used the lie detector line about once a week, but the others laughed anyway.

  The president leaned back in his chair, furling his arms in front of his chest as he always did when he changed the subject to something serious.

  “We have a bit of a knot I’d like your advice on, Miss Alston. It’s somewhat delicate, as of course you appreciate.”

  Corrine set her jaw, willing all emotion from her face. She called it full lawyer mode, and had learned to do it when, after graduating summa cum laude from an accelerated program, she’d come to congress as a staff lawyer for the House Appropriations Committee. Within a year she had moved over to Defense, and shortly after that went to work with the Intelligence Committee. Still only twenty-six, she no longer needed the set-jaw scowl to get others to take her seriously, but it was by now habit.

  Parnelles began speaking, talking in his usual clipped sentences about a combined CIA/Special Forces operation investigating the possible disappearance of nuclear waste in the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan. The tangled trail of the operation had led to Chechnya, where the operation happened to come across a militant with connections to both al-Qaida and a lesser-known militant organization called Allah’s Fist. In the course of their work, the CIA realized that the subject had also caused the murder of several American citizens in an attack on a shopping mall in Syracuse, New York, twelve months before. They had kidnapped him and taken him to Guantanamo.

  “Let me suggest that you’re using the wrong word,” said Corrine sharply. “I don’t believe you’d wish to characterize legal actions authorized by the U.S. government as ‘kidnapping.’ The word you’re looking for is ‘apprehend.’ Such actions have lengthy precedent and are legally recognized. And I’m sure that’s what occurred here.”

  Parnelles gave her the sort of smile a father might give a five-year-old who’d just lectured him on not smoking, then continued. The man was being held at the detention facility on Guantanamo under heavy guard. They suspected he had important information about a plot involving a hazardous waste bomb that might be targeted for the U.S.

  Corrine realized what the dilemma was without the CIA director having to spell it out—they wanted to put him on trial for the mall attack, but were afraid of messing up the case by interrogating him improperly.

  During his campaign, McCarthy had advocated using the criminal justice system to prosecute terrorists rather than the military tribunal system favored by his predecessors. In McCarthy’s view—and Corrine concurred—the entire point of fighting terrorists was to preserve American traditions, freedoms, and institutions. The legal system provided plenty of tools to prosecute such murderers. In Corrine’s opinion, terrorists were not enemy combatants—that status implied a certain dignity and righteousness that they clearly did not deserve.

  “What do you think, Miss Alston?” McCarthy asked her when Parnelles finished.

  “Should I speak as a citizen, or as the president’s private counsel?” she asked.

  “Both,” said the president.

  “As a citizen, I think you should tear the bastard’s balls off.”

  The president laughed.

  “However, speaking as a lawyer, if you want to try him in federal or state court, you have to consider carefully how you deal with him. I would think it appropriate to consult with the Department of Justice.”

  “We’ve followed their guidelines,” said Parnelles. “This is new ground.”

  “If you’re going to ask about torture,” said Corrine, “that’s not my area.”

  Parnelles glanced at the president.

  “Not torture,” said McCarthy.

  “We have a drug,” said Parnelles. “It’s a kind of ultimate lie detector test. We would use it in conjunction with the interrogation, so we’d be better able to judge how valid the information is.”

  “I can’t give an opinion on something like that off the top of my head,” Corrine told him.

  “Is that because you think it’s something we wouldn’t want to hear?” asked McCarthy.

  He’d become adept at reading her hesitations over the past two years; she had joined his campaign as an intelligence advisor and quickly become an all-around confidante, eventually leaving her Senate post to help him full-time. McCarthy had called her in, as he usually did, not simply because he valued her opinion but because it wouldn’t be shared with anyone else. And if her opinion was something he had to ultimately disregard, no newspaper would ever start a story: Despite receiving legal advice to the contrary…

  “There’s a possibility of a gray area,” Corrine said, still hedging. “A voluntary submission—”

  “It wouldn’t be voluntary,” said Parnelles.

  “Few things in life truly are,” said the president.

  “There are legal theories in both directions,” said Corrine.

  “Stop speaking as a lawyer, dear,” said McCarthy. He could see clearly which way she was leaning, but the others, less familiar with her, couldn’t.

  “I wouldn’t use the procedure, then put him on trial,” Corrine said, pausing as she selected the neutral “procedure” rather than a word that might be more accurate but loaded, like “brainwashing.” “Anything that violates a defendant’s right against self-incrimination is going to be a very big problem. Isolation, stress, and duress— even those techniques can be called into question.”

  “What if the information isn’t used at the trial?” asked Defense Secretary Stich.

 
“You might not, but the defense will if they find out. I would. Even if it’s not directly related to the case, it complicates matters. Even if it didn’t provide grounds for an appeal,” she added, turning to the president, “the political fallout would be unseemly.”

  “The information might be vital,” said Parnelles.

  “Then do it. But forget about prosecuting him in the States. Use a military tribunal if you have to.”