Divide and Conquer o-7 Read online

  He parked the van in an alley near the hospital. Then he pulled a packet of dental floss from his pocket. He rubbed it deeply between two teeth until his mouth filled with blood. Then he spat on the floor, dashboard, and seat cushion. It was the fastest way to draw blood. It also left no scars, in case anyone decided to stop him and check for wounds. He did not need a lot of blood. Just traces for the forensics people to find. When he was finished with that, he slipped a plastic mircochip in the gas tank. Then he replaced the cap.

  When he was finished dressing the van, the Harpooner took the backpack containing the Zed-4 phone and left. When the authorities found the vehicle, they would also find evidence inside tying it to the Iranians in the boat. That would include their fingerprints on the wheel, glove compartment, and handles. They would assume that one or more of the men got away. The blood would suggest that he was injured. The police would waste time looking through hospital records for a possible perpetrator.

  The Harpooner would return to Moscow. Then he would leave Russia and permit himself a rest. Possibly a vacation in some country where he had never committed terrorism. Some place where they would not be looking out for him.

  Some place where he could sit back and read the newspapers.

  Enjoy once again the impact his art had had on the world.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Washington, D.C.

  Monday, 11:11 P.M.

  Paul Hood was concerned, confused, and tired.

  Bob Herbert had just spoken with Stephen Viens of the National Reconnaissance Office. Viens was working late to catch up on paperwork that had collected during his absence. While Viens was there, an NRO satellite had recorded an explosion in the Caspian Sea. He had called Herbert, who wanted to know if anything unusual had happened in the region. Then Herbert called Paul Hood.

  “According to our files, the coordinates of the explosion match those of Iran’s Majidi-2 oil rig,” Herbert said.

  “Could it have been an accident?” Hood asked.

  “We’re checking that now,” Herbert said. “We’ve got some faint radio signals coming from the rig, which means there may be survivors.”

  “May be?”

  “A lot of those rigs have automatic beacons to signal rescue craft in the area,” Herbert said. “That may be what we’re hearing. The audio keeps breaking up, so we can’t tell if it’s a recording.”

  “Understood,” Hood said. “Bob, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Fenwick goes to the Iranian mission, and then an Iranian rig is attacked.”

  “I know,” Herbert said. “I tried to call him, but there was no answer. I’m wondering if the NSA knew about this attack, and Fenwick took intelligence to the mission in New York.”

  “If Fenwick had intel, wouldn’t Iran have tried to prevent the attack?” Hood asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Herbert told Hood. “Teheran has been itching for a reason to establish a stronger military presence in the Caspian Sea. An attack by Azerbaijan could give them that reason. It’s no different than historians who say that Franklin Roosevelt allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked so we’d have a reason to get into World War Two.”

  “But then why all the deception with the president?” Hood asked.

  “Plausible deniability?” Herbert replied. “The president has been getting misinformation.”

  “Yes, but Jack Fenwick would not undertake something of this magnitude on his own,” Hood said.

  “Why not?” Herbert asked. “Ollie North ran an uberoperation during Iran-Centra—”

  “A military officer might have the balls for that but not Jack Fenwick,” Hood said. “I had a look at his dossier. The guy is Mr. Support Systems. He’s instituted backup systems for backup systems at the NSA. Got congress to jack up the budget fifteen percent for next year. The CIA only got an eight percent bump and we got six.”

  “Impressive.”

  “Yeah,” Hood said. “And he just doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy to take this kind of chance. Not without backup.”

  “So?” Herbert said. “Maybe he’s got it.”

  Shit, Hood thought. Maybe he does.

  “Think about it,” Herbert went on. “He got double the increases everyone else got. Who has that kind of sway with congress? Not President Lawrence, that’s for sure. He’s not conservative enough for the budget group.”

  “No, he’s not,” Hood agreed. “Bob, find out if Matt can get into Fenwick’s phone records and calendar. See who he might have talked to and met with over the past few days and weeks.”

  “Sure,” he said. “But it’s going to be tough to draw any conclusions from that. The NSA head meets with practically everyone.”

  “Exactly,” Hood said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “If Fenwick were part of a black-ops situation, he would probably meet with his team away from the office. Maybe by seeing who he stopped meeting with, officially, we can figure out who he’s been seeing on the sly.”

  “Nice one, Paul,” Herbert said. “I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

  “But that isn’t what has me worried,” Hood went on. The phone beeped. “Excuse me, Bob. Would you bring Mike up to date on this?”

  “Will do,” Herbert said.

  Hood switched lines. Sergei Orlov was on the other end.

  “Paul,” Orlov said, “good news. We have your man.”

  “What do you mean you have him?” Hood asked. The Russian operative was only supposed to keep an eye on him.

  “Our operative arrived in time to save him from joining his comrades,” Orlov said. “The assassin was dispatched and left in the hospital room. Your man was taken from the hospital to another location. He is there now.”

  “General, I don’t know what to say,” Hood told him. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you is good enough,” Orlov said. “But what do we do now? Can he help us get the Harpooner?”

  “I hope so,” Hood told him. “The Harpooner must still be there. Otherwise, he would not have had to draw these people out and assassinate them. General, did you hear what happened in the Caspian?”

  “Yes,” Orlov said. “An Iranian oil rig was destroyed. The Azerbaijanis are probably going to be blamed, whether they did it or not. Do you know anything more about it?”

  “Not yet,” Hood said. “But the operative you saved might. If the Harpooner’s behind this attack, we need to know. Can you arrange for the American agent to call me here?”

  “Yes,” Orlov said.

  Hood thanked him and said he would wait by the phone.

  Orlov was correct. Suspicion would fall on Azerbaijan. They were the ones who disputed Iran’s presence in that region of the sea. They were the ones who had the most to gain. But the Harpooner had done most of his work for Middle Eastern nations. What if Azerbaijan wasn’t behind the attack? What if another nation was trying to make it seem that way?

  Hood got back on the phone with Herbert. He also patched in Mike Rodgers and briefed them both. When he was finished, there was a short silence.

  “Frankly, I’m stumped,” Herbert said. “We need more intel.”

  “I agree,” Hood said. “But we may have more intel than we think.”

  “What do you mean?” Herbert asked.

  “I mean we’ve got the NSA working with Iran,” Hood said. “We have a president who was kept out of the loop by the NSA. We have a terrorist who works with Iran taking out CIA agents in Azerbaijan. We have an attack on an Iranian oil installation off the coast of Azerbaijan. There’s a lot of information there. Maybe we’re not putting it together in the right way.”

  “Paul, do we know who in the CIA first found out the Harpooner was in Baku?” Rodgers asked.

  “No,” Hood said. “Good point.”

  “I’ll get someone to find that out ASAP,” Herbert said.

  Hood and Rodgers waited while Herbert made the call. Hood sat there trying to make sense of the facts, but it still was not coming together. Concerned, confused, and tired. It w
as a bad combination, especially for a man in his forties. He used to be able to pull allnighters without a problem. Not anymore.

  Herbert got back on. “I’ve got someone calling the director’s office, Code Red-One,” he said. “We’ll have the information soon.”

  Code Red-One signified an imminent emergency to national interest. Despite the competitiveness between the agencies, CRls were generally not denied.

  “Thanks,” Hood said.

  “Paul, do you know the story about the Man Who Never Was?” Rodgers asked.

  “The World War Two story? I read the book in high school,” Hood said. “He was part of the disinformation campaign during World War Two.”

  “Correct,” Rodgers said. “A British intelligence group took the body of a homeless man, created a false identity for it, and planted papers on the body that said the Allies would invade Greece, not Sicily. The body was left where the Germans would find it. This helped divert Axis forces from Sicily. I mention this because a key player in the operation was a British general named Howard Tower. He was key in the sense that he was also fed misinformation.”

  “For what reason?” Hood asked.

  “General Tower’s communiques were intercepted by the Germans,” Rodgers said. “British Intelligence saw to that.”

  “I’m missing something here,” Herbert said. “Why are we talking about World War Two?”

  “When Tower learned what had happened, he put a gun barrel in his ear and pulled the trigger,” Rodgers said.

  “Because he was used?” Hood asked.

  “No,” Rodgers said, “because he thought he’d screwed up.”

  “I’m still not getting this,” Herbert admitted.

  “Paul, you said the president was pretty upset when you spoke with him,” Rodgers went on. “And when you met with the First Lady, she described a man who sounded like he was having a breakdown.”

  “Right,” Hood said.

  “That may not mean anything,” Herbert said. “He’s president of the United States. The job has a way of aging people.”

  “Hold on, Bob. Mike may be onto something,” Hood said. There was something gnawing at Hood’s stomach. Something that was getting worse the more he thought about it. “The president did not look tired when I saw him. He looked disturbed.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Herbert said. “He was being kept out of the loop and made an apparent faux pas about the UN. He was embarrassed.”

  “But there’s another component to this,” Hood told him. “There’s the cumulative psychological impact of disinformation. What if plausible deniability and bureaucratic confusion aren’t the reasons the president was misled? What if there’s another reason?”

  “Such as?” Herbert asked.

  “What if disinformation isn’t the end but the means?” Hood said. “What if someone is trying to convince Lawrence that he’s losing his grip?”

  “You mean, what if someone is trying to gaslight the president of the United States?” Herbert declared.

  “Yes,” Hood replied.

  “Well, it’s going to take a lot of convincing before I buy that,” Herbert said. “For one thing, anyone who tried that would never get away with it. There are too many people around the president—”

  “Bob, we already decided that this is something Jack Fenwick would not, probably could not, do on his own,” Hood said.

  “Yes, but to make it work, he’d need a small army of people who were very close to the president,” Herbert said.

  “Who?” Hood asked. “The chief of staff?”

  “For one,” Herbert said. “He’s privy to most of the same briefings the president receives.”

  “Okay,” Hood said. “Gable’s already on my list of unreliables. Who else? Who would be absolutely necessary for a plan like this to work?”

  Before Herbert could answer, his phone beeped. He answered the call and was back in less than a minute.

  “Don’t tell me, ‘I told you so,’ ” Herbert said.

  “Why?” Hood asked.

  “A high-level official at the CIA in Washington got the intel about the Harpooner from the NSA,” Herbert told them. “The NSA didn’t have anyone in Baku, so they notified the CIA. The CIA sent David Battat.”

  “Whom the Harpooner knew just where to find,” Rodgers said. “Instead of killing him, the Harpooner poisoned him somehow. And then Battat was used to bring out Moore and Thomas at the hospital.”

  “Apparently,” Herbert said.

  “Paul, you asked a question a moment ago,” Rodgers said. “You wanted to know who else would be necessary for a psy-ops maneuver to work against the president. That’s a good question, but it’s not the first one we need to answer.”

  “No?” Hood said. “What is?”

  “Who would benefit the most from the mental incapacitation of the president?” Rodgers asked. “And at the same time, who would be in a perfect position to help make some of the disinformation happen?”

  Hood’s stomach was growling now. The answer was obvious.

  The vice president of the United States.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Washington, D.C.

  Monday, 11:24 P.M.

  Vice President Charles Cotten was in the ground-floor sitting room of the vice presidential residence. The mansion was located on the sprawling Massachusetts Avenue grounds of the United States Naval Observatory. It was a twenty-minute drive from here to the vice president’s two offices: one in the White House and the other in the neighboring Old Executive Office Building. It was just a short walk from the mansion to the National Cathedral. Lately, Cotten had been spending more time than usual at the cathedral.

  Praying.

  An aide knocked and entered. The woman told the vice president that his car was ready. The vice president thanked her and rose from the leather armchair. He entered the dark, wood-paneled hallway and headed toward the front door. Upstairs, Cotten’s wife and children were asleep.

  My wife and children. They were words Cotten never thought would be part of his life. When he was a senator from New York, Cotten had been the ultimate lady’s man. A new, gorgeous date to every function. The press referred to these younger women as “Cotten candy.” There were regular jokes about what went on below the Cotten belt. Then he met Marsha Arnell at a Museum of Modern Art fund-raiser in Manhattan, and everything changed. Marsha was twenty-seven, eleven years his junior. She was a painter and an art historian. She was telling a group of guests about late-twentieth-century art and how the work of commercial artists like Frank Frazetta, James Bama, and Rich Corben defined a new American vision: the power of the human form and face blended with landscapes from dream and fantasy. Cotten was hypnotized by the young woman’s voice, her ideas, and her vital and optimistic view of America.

  They were married four months later.

  For nearly ten years, Marsha and their twin girls had been the foundation of Charles Cotten’s life. They were his focus, his heart, and their future was never far from his thoughts.

  They were the reason the vice president had conceived of this plan. To preserve America for his family.

  The fact was, the United States was at risk. Not just from terrorist attacks, though more and more those were becoming a very real threat. The danger facing the United States was that it was on the verge of becoming irrelevant. Our military could destroy the world many times over. But other nations knew that we would never do that, so they did not fear us. Our economy was relatively strong. But so were the economies of many other nations and alliances. The Eurodollar was strong, and the new South American League and their SAL currency was growing in power and influence. Central America and Mexico were talking about a new confederacy. Canada was being tempted to join the European economy. Those unions, those nations, did not face the kind of suspicion and resentment that greeted America the world over. The reason? America was a giant everyone wanted to see brought down. Not destroyed; they needed us too much for international policing. They simply wanted u
s humbled and humiliated. We were a meddling thug to our enemies and an overbearing big brother to our supposed allies.

  These were not concerns that bothered other nations during times of international depression or world war. It was all right to invade France to free the French of Hitler. But it was not okay to fly over France to bomb Libya, the home of a different despot. It was all right to maintain a military presence in Saudi Arabia to protect the nation from Saddam Hussein. But it was not all right to fly jets from Riyadh to protect American troops in the region.

  We were not respected, and we were not feared. That had to change. And it had to change long before Michael Lawrence was scheduled to leave the White House in three years. That would be too late to act.

  The problem had not been caused by Michael Lawrence. He was simply the latest bearer of the torch of arrogant isolationism. When he was in the Senate, Cotten had felt that there needed to be a United States that was better integrated with the world. The one that Teddy Roosevelt had described. The one that carried a big stick and was not afraid to use it. But also one that knew how to speak softly. An America that knew how to use and exert diplomacy and economic pressure. One that had the resolve to use quiet assassination and blackmail instead of mounting very public and unpopular miniwars.

  When the senator was tapped to share a ticket with presidential candidate Michael Lawrence, Cotten accepted. The public liked Lawrence’s “I’m for the people” slogan and style, his perception as a man who had come back from the political wilderness to serve them. But he had wanted to balance his relatively up-front and independent manner with someone who knew how to work the back rooms of Congress and the corridors of power abroad.

  Cotten left the mansion and slid into the car. The driver shut the door for him. They rolled into the dark, still night. Cotten’s soul was on fire. He was not going to enjoy what he and his allies were about to do. He remembered when he had first approached them and others individually. Seemingly casual remarks were dropped. If they were ignored, he let the subject drop. If not, he pursued it with more pointed remarks. Cotten realized that was what it must be like for a married man to ask a woman to have an affair. Go too far with the wrong individual, and everything could be lost.