The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 19

  “I’m so sorry to startle you, Fatso. And it’s been ages. How are you?” She moved forward and held her arms out for a hug.

  Fatso obliged eagerly, but was still obviously disoriented by Sam’s sudden appearance in his study.

  “So you were just in the neighborhood and thought you’d break in?” Minton laughed. “You government types think you own everything.”

  “If the shoe fits,” Sam said, grateful for his warm reception despite her having startled him nearly to death.

  “Actually, I barged in on you because of those annoying government types,” she said. “I was hoping I could have a conversation with you.”

  32

  “Fredericks, I can actually feel the change in gravity when you walk by,” Quinn said. “You really gotta lay off the ho-ho’s.”

  Quinn clapped his boss on the back as he took his seat at the kitchen table in the Caracas safe house. It wasn’t a house as much as an apartment, and its position twenty-five floors up a thirty-floor high-rise meant that its air conditioner, which came off the assembly line no earlier than 1987, had to work extra hard to expel the late evening heat.

  It wasn’t doing a great job, and Fredericks’ corpulent face glistened. He flipped Quinn the bird, revealing soggy armpits. “Case in point,” Quinn said. “You’re sweating like a gay Republican.”

  Fredericks waved him off. “Not everyone can be a steroid-gobbling freak, Quinn. Where’s our freshman? I wanted him here for this.”

  “Not my day to watch him, Bill.” Really, it wasn’t. Quinn had stopped tailing Kittredge the afternoon prior, handing the duty over to another Agency guy Quinn had never met. “But it looks like you had the blind watch the stupid. How come you haven’t been fired yet?”

  Fredericks ignored Quinn’s barbs as the room continued to fill with Agency players.

  Quinn recognized none of them, which always made him nervous. The CIA was a big place, on paper, but just like everything else in life, it worked on personal relationships. Quinn didn’t trust anyone he didn’t know, and a roomful of unknown players in his op made him uneasy.

  And this particular operation was too large and high-profile to take any chances, which Quinn had earlier observed to Fredericks in a typically undiplomatic fashion. Fredericks had assured him that they weren’t taking any chances, and that Quinn didn’t know anybody on the Operation Syphilis team because, up until a few days ago, Quinn had been on the B-Team. Touché.

  Fredericks had a way of putting people in their place, and Quinn was still a bit stung. Hence the fat jokes.

  As the last of the attendees appeared, Fredericks turned on a radio, tuned to some horrific mariachi station, to drown out their conversation. Perhaps the horrendous music would be enough to defeat an unsophisticated adversary’s surveillance equipment, though there wasn’t much evidence to suggest that the Venezuelan Special Service was anything but a modern state security apparatus, to the extent that any second-world power possessed such an animal.

  “So, welcome,” Fredericks began. “No introductions yet, for obvious reasons, but I’ve arranged private meetings afterwards between the parties who need to have more detailed conversations. And, as always, no questions. The shitheads in DC have already decided what you can and can’t know about this op, so there’s no use trying to get me in trouble by asking for more.” A few chuckles sounded around the table.

  Quinn looked at the faces, tuning Fredericks’ voice out. It was an unlikely crowd, comprised of Fredericks, who could have starred in a bad gangster movie, a frumpy middle-aged woman, a guy in a three-piece suit who looked like a banker, a sixty-ish fossil with thick glasses and an even thicker German accent, and three twenty-somethings in jeans and t-shirts. And one hot chick, a petite blonde that Quinn couldn’t stop looking at.

  “Don’t let me interrupt your sexual fantasy, Quinn,” Fredericks said. Quinn felt himself blush, a human response that seemed not to fit an assassin’s image, and the attractive girl smiled coyly.

  “As I was saying before I was so rudely ignored,” Fredericks continued, “the op has four phases. Phase one is what I like to call ‘getting our shit together.’” Fredericks made quotation marks in the air, and Quinn rolled his eyes, drawing another smile from the hottie across the table.

  “Once you’re all settled in to your respective accommodations, we’ll begin the surveillance phase in earnest. Spotters, scopes, video cameras, parabolic mikes, the whole nine.”

  “Isn’t that going to be tough to pull off? It isn’t like that stuff is common around here,” one of the twenty-somethings asked.

  “Yeah, not optimum, as the bureaucrats say,” Fredericks said. “But it’s pretty high profile, as you can imagine, which means I have to send a bunch of bullshit back home before they’ll green-light us.”

  “Pussies,” the girl said. Quinn was certain that he was falling in love.

  “Anyway,” Fredericks continued, “that’s probably three or four days, all told, before the go-team gets here and we execute. So it’s going to be a big pain in the ass for those three or four days, and you’re going to have to play dress-up, like, sixteen times a day to keep the surveillance presence fresh and unrecognizable. Which reminds me, make sure to check your wardrobes and supplies when you get to your safe houses. It should all be pre-positioned, but let me know right away if the admin people screwed anything up.”

  “Weapons?” the frumpy lady asked.

  “Also at your safe houses.”

  “Gear?” Another of the twenty-somethings.

  “You know what I’m going to tell you, right? It’s all at the safe houses already, give me a call if anything’s missing, please fucking try to pay attention.” The kid who’d asked the question slumped into his chair, and Quinn chuckled at Fredericks’ Tourette’s-like outburst. Fredericks wasn’t famous for his patience.

  “So, contingencies,” Fredericks continued. “If you think they made you, or even if you have the slightest inkling that you might have been compromised, go to the collection point and wait. On even numbered dates, the collection point is the National Parthenon.”

  “Pantheon,” Quinn corrected.

  Fredericks looked confused.

  “It’s the National Pantheon,” Quinn repeated. “Not the Parthenon. That’s in Greece.”

  “Right. Whatever.” Sniggers around the table, which Fredericks ignored. “And on odd days, go to the Caracas Cathedral. The magic number is nine. It will be an embassy puke picking you up, so don’t cock it up. If they say ‘six,’ Quinn, what will you say?”

  Quinn rolled his eyes. “Three.”

  “Yep. You see how he did that?” Fredericks looked directly at the twenty-somethings. They also nodded, somewhat annoyed at Fredericks’ patronizing condescension.

  “What if they say ‘fourteen’?” Fredericks asked.

  “Five,” the frumpy-looking lady said, with obvious aggravation. “I think we’re pretty well versed in our addition and subtraction rules.”

  Fredericks reddened. “You guys think I’m a pain in the ass with this stuff, but I have a few stories about guys who honked up their meeting codes and never got picked up, except by the Russkies and the Hajjis. They didn’t make it home for dinner. So you’d better know that stuff cold, even when your brain is mush and you’re ready to piss yourself because you’re scared.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk, Gipper,” Quinn quipped.

  “You’re welcome. You get the first shift, sweetheart. Starts at midnight.” Fredericks smiled at Quinn, who raised the bird in response.

  33

  Sam smiled at Fatso Minton. “I’m sorry again to barge in on you like this,” she said. “If I promise not to get too nosy, would you mind talking a little shop with me?”

  “It’s the least I could do,” Minton said, “seeing as you went through all the trouble to show up in my house unannounced. Really, you’re lucky I still have a crush on you. Otherwise, I’d have sent my attack pug after you.”

  Sam laughed.
“Brock sends his best.”

  “That bastard! What is he up to these days? Still in the Air Force, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but I think the bloom’s off the rose. He’s been at a desk for a few years, and it’s making him perpetually cranky.”

  “Yep,” Minton said. “It’s the great bait-and-switch. One day, you wake up and figure out that they’ve turned you into a bureaucrat. He should’ve taken me up on the job offer. He’d still be flying jets if he had.”

  “I think he regrets not having done that,” Sam said. “But I don’t think he has much interest in the places you guys spend all of your time.”

  Minton laughed. “Like Dayton?”

  “Yes, without a doubt,” Sam said with a smile. “But also the third-world garden spots.”

  “Yeah, but the fun more than makes up for the geography,” Minton said. “And the cash ain’t bad, either.”

  Sam nodded. “I was admiring your place as I was breaking in. It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

  “Thank you,” Fatso said. “Mostly Deenie’s work, of course. She’s visiting her sister, which is probably a good thing – if she’d seen you sneaking in the house, I’d never have been able to convince her I wasn’t having an affair.”

  Another affair, Sam thought. Fidelity wasn’t exactly a strong suit, if Brock’s recollection was accurate. And she wasn’t sure how Minton pulled the wool, either. He was kind of gangly and a little bit ugly in the face.

  Maybe it’s the personality that does them in, she thought. Or maybe he goes for fat chicks with low standards.

  She followed Minton’s gesture and took a seat in a plush leather chair, and he took his place opposite her, an expensive coffee table between them. “Drink?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, thanks.” She began her interview, which was most artfully done when it didn’t feel like an interview at all. Sam was terrific at turning such meetings into friendly and extremely productive conversations.

  It was actually fairly easy. She usually began with an innocuous topic, such as sports or the weather, to get the subject used to talking. Then she’d move to questions that asked for the subject’s opinions on various things. These questions were deceptively personal, because they forced the subject to reveal something of themselves in their answers.

  Then, only after a solid rapport developed, which sometimes took an hour or longer, Sam would slowly move into more sensitive topics.

  It helped that Fatso wasn’t shy. She emerged from his house two hours later, just before ten p.m., with a head full of interesting details.

  Fatso had indeed overlapped with Brock at Spangdahlem Air Base, in the Eifel region of Germany. It was Fatso’s last assignment, as he put in his papers to separate from the Air Force in 1998. He knew all that remained as he got older was more email and more meetings, the gristle of endless layers of middle management in large organizations the world over, and Fatso wanted nothing to do with it.

  People viewed the pre-9/11 world as delightfully simple, but the reality was quite the opposite, and Fatso’s time in the 52nd Fighter Wing, the pointy end of the American spear and one of the closest US air units to any Middle Eastern trouble, had shown him that the world was continually at war.

  He smelled opportunity, and he started Executive Strategies even before he had officially separated from the Air Force.

  It was ever so slightly illegal, but it wasn’t Fatso’s idea to start his new business before his separation from the Air Force. He had simply made a few inquiries into whether a special air service, the kind that provided special-needs transportation like Air America had provided during the Vietnam war, might be a useful thing to have. By the time he left Germany, Fatso had a fat federal contract in hand.

  He called all of his flying buddies, and a few of them got out of the Air Force to join Fatso’s Flying Circus, as he affectionately called his new enterprise. Brock had elected to stay on his promising career track in the Air Force, but Sam knew he secretly wished he’d joined Fatso when he had the chance.

  Fatso soon expanded from simple transportation of paramilitary goods and people into far more active areas. He was able to parlay his huge profits into an ever-expanding fleet of foreign-built light attack aircraft, which allowed the American CIA and other agencies to apply direct military force in any region of choice while leaving the US government with plausible deniability of any involvement whatsoever.

  It was a truly elegant solution for the dozens of small wars that the US started, and sometimes finished, without any public knowledge or debate. Because Fatso and his men were contractors, and not military members, there was no requirement for the Executive Branch to report anything to Congress whenever they sent Fatso and his guys to raise hell in some third-world country.

  It became clear to Sam during their lengthy conversation that Fatso was a true believer. He felt that while his company had been involved in a number of what he termed “blowback situations,” where things hadn’t gone nearly as neatly as planned, he and his guys had nevertheless spared countless American lives by averting much larger and costlier conflicts.

  Sam didn’t share his optimistic appraisal of the efficacy of the many low-intensity conflicts in America’s recent history. Fatso had hinted at a few places where Executive Strategies may or may not be involved, and those places were all net exporters of some natural resource. It was usually oil, but sometimes precious metals or rare earth elements, useful to the cell phone and computer industries.

  Fatso spoke often of helping to ensure “energy and economic security,” which Sam translated into a more bare-knuckled term: empire.

  But she had kept her cynicism to herself. She was there to absorb, and, hopefully, to figure out why she and Brock had ended up in the middle of what had turned into a giant mess.

  It was an important data point that Fatso was a true patriot, as far as she could tell. He had put his money and his life where his mouth was.

  Sure, it paid him extremely well, but he still flew combat missions in shitholes, and the bullets were very real. She felt that, in his heart, Fatso believed he continued to serve the greater good of the United States of America.

  So she didn’t know what to expect when she brought up the names Everett Cooper and John Abrams, two people she was sure were on the Executive Strategies payroll with apparent Venezuelan ties.

  Fatso didn’t confirm that ES employed either Cooper or Abrams, citing privacy and security, but neither did he flinch. In fact, Sam got the impression that while Fatso was speaking the words, his head was nodding up and down, as if to tell Sam without actually telling her that he had employed both men.

  She pressed him for more detail about how foreign funding might be involved in Executive Strategies’ operations, expecting him to dodge the question, but he surprised her with his forthrightness. “Uncle Sugar likes to launder his money before he gives it to me. Keeps things out of the news.” She asked him about Venezuela in particular, and he shrugged. “The payments could have been routed through anywhere,” he had said.

  Her next question had surprised Fatso: was Brock on his payroll? “You should know! Aren’t you two living together?” Fatso had asked in response, but Sam pressed him for a straight answer.

  “I sure as hell wish Brock was with us,” he eventually said. “I tried probably five different times over the years to get him to jump the fence and join us. But he never would. I think he never liked the idea in the first place. He never really was a joiner, you know.”

  Sam agreed. It’s one of the reasons she loved him as wildly as she did. Brock always did his own thinking. Thinking of him had brought painful barbs to her heart, but she had to understand the extent of Brock’s involvement.

  One last agenda item: Arturo Dibiaso. Fatso gave her the same spiel, about privacy and all that, but shook his head this time. The message was clear: there’s no Dibiaso on the Executive Services payroll, at least to Fatso’s knowledge.

  Interesting.

  She left Fatso’s
house convinced that Brock and Executive Strategies were not in league together. She was undecided about whether Executive Strategies was involved in any anti-American activity, though it would certainly have surprised her, given Fatso’s idealistic approach to the dirty work he and his compatriots performed at the behest of the US government.

  It was obviously possible that Fatso’s overarching ideology was profit, and that he was therefore open to doing shady work for foreign thugs in addition to doing shady work for American thugs, but she doubted that was the case. It would have been bad long-term strategy. Sooner or later, the Agency would figure it out, and that would be the end of Executive Strategies.

  She also decided to provisionally believe Fatso’s claim that there was no Arturo Dibiaso on the ES payroll, at least until she uncovered evidence to the contrary. Dibiaso was Homeland’s remaining link to Brock, which made Dibiaso Priority Numero Uno for Sam, so she was disappointed not to have learned more about him.

  In the end, she had spent a very long day chasing after what appeared to be a dead-end lead. But even dead ends taught you something, she knew, and a part of her was relieved to learn that Brock wasn’t involved in Fatso’s world. It meant that there wasn’t another lie between them, and that made her feel better about having invested her heart and her life into her relationship with Brock.

  Unfortunately, it also meant that she wasn’t any closer to figuring out who was barking up her tree, or why.

  And Brock had still lied to her about Arturo Dibiaso. She got angry at him again as she thought about it, gripped the steering wheel tightly as she felt herself descending into the familiar emotional vortex, and drove eastward into the darkness, fighting tears once again.

  She held imaginary conversations with Brock, in which she gave him a piece of her mind in no uncertain terms.