CHAPTER
44
ROBERT PULLER SAT in a seedy motel room next to a strip mall on Route 1 in south Alexandria staring at the beaten-down strip of carpet but not really seeing it.
Last night he had watched Niles Robinson’s brains being splattered on the wall at Union Station. He had worked with Robinson for several years at STRATCOM, first in Nebraska and then in Kansas. He had considered Robinson a friend. He had watched the man on the witness stand testifying against him. He had seen that his friend was mired in conflict over what he was doing.
While Puller had been sitting in the courtroom that day when Robinson was on the stand, his mind had visited Robinson’s office, going over everything in it. In the odd way his brain worked, once Puller saw something it always stayed with him, safely ensconced in a little corner of his gray matter.
In his mental meandering he had stopped at the photograph of Ian Robinson when he had been sick, head shaven and tubes running all over his frail body. Puller and Niles had talked often about the boy, his condition and dire prognosis. It had been heartbreaking, truly. And while he couldn’t agree with what Niles had done, he could understand why he had done it.
But now, while Ian would grow up, he would do so without his father.
And Puller was blaming himself for that. Robinson had been followed. Puller should have anticipated that possibility. Yet he had never envisioned that they would have killed the man in such a public place.
But he could do nothing for Robinson now. And what Robinson had told him was tantalizing. Some didn’t like the fact that Puller was being groomed for great things in the intelligence field. But could it be just that? Maybe Robinson didn’t know the whole story.
Ruining my career and putting me in prison just because you didn’t like me or were jealous? No, there had to be something else. And what did he mean by he “had tried to make it right”? How?
Puller lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling now instead of the threadbare carpet. He couldn’t make heads or tails of what Robinson had meant, so he moved on.
Puller had headed east because of a change in command at STRATCOM. Daughtrey was moved up and brought on. And then he was murdered. With the reassignment, other changes had taken place in the pecking order of command. Chiefly, Martin Able had gotten his fourth star and become head of the NSA. It was a plum assignment.
Yet maybe not so much now. The NSA was embroiled in controversy after the Snowden revelations. The former NSA operative had accused the agency of conduct that was unprecedented and that had cast a shadow over the whole intelligence community of the United States.
Puller had not been directly involved with the NSA during his time at STRATCOM, though the agencies worked closely together. But the revelations that had come out over the past year or so had not been related to a drastic sea change in how the NSA did its job. The recently publicized and now denounced tactics and surveillance had long been in place.
Many people would not have wanted those revelations to come out, but come out they still had. And that’s where Puller had made his miscalculation. He had suspected his old boss, Martin Able. That was why he had headed east. But this could have nothing to do with the issues at the NSA, and by extension, STRATCOM. He was sitting in a cell at the DB and had been for over two years. All during that time no one had bothered with him. No one.
And then recently a man had come into the prison with the task of killing him. There had to be a reason. And if he could just figure out that reason, he could by extrapolation figure out everything else.
So that brought him back to those people Robinson had mentioned, who did not want to see Puller move ahead and eventually land the top spot. That couldn’t have included Martin Able. He had been well on his way to heading the NSA. And he had clearly wanted Puller to succeed; his mentoring had shown that.
Now, Susan Reynolds had obviously been no fan of Puller’s and had conspired to do him in for money and perhaps a professional grudge. But she couldn’t be the leading force behind this. She didn’t have the position or brains.
At this point Puller’s thoughts turned elsewhere. To the gap that existed between Daughtrey, the one-star, and Able, the now four-star. When he had left STRATCOM, it had opened up the top spot there. A quick Google search had told Puller that an admiral had taken over Able’s job at STRATCOM. He had not been promoted internally, but had come in from another command. Below him at the leadership level was a three-star who was deputy commander, a chief of staff who was a two-star, and a command sergeant major who was the senior enlisted leader.
It didn’t stop there. There were also the HQ and component commanders, which was composed of a hodgepodge of three-stars, two-stars, and one-stars, rear admirals, colonels, majors, captains, and also civilians. It was a bewildering array of possible suspects, each of them doing the professional dance, hoping to move up in rank and power before the music stopped.
Puller opened his laptop and went online. He studied the professional bios of each of these people, running his eye down the list again and again hoping that something would pop.
He had one critical time point.
The decision to kill me at DB. What happened to trigger that? It would have taken planning, say a couple of months to manage all the necessary details. The trigger for it could have come anytime before that, I just don’t know how long before it. But I have another critical point that might lead me in the right direction.
He hacked a secure database to search for Susan Reynolds’s internal and nonpublic c.v.
She had had many assignments over a government career spanning more than twenty-five years. Her academic background was spectacular and she held advanced degrees, despite being a young mother. She had worked herself up to a managerial position, though he doubted she had the horsepower or connections to get to the SES level before she retired, but she might. She had had stints overseas and had been in war zones. She had even served on interrogation teams in the field and was an expert on techniques to get information from people who did not want to provide it. Well, he could certainly see her tightening the thumbscrews on someone. And perhaps her affinity for weapons had helped her there. He went back further in her record. She had had stints in Eastern Europe and South Korea, among others. And, as she had mentioned when he was in her home, many years ago she had been part of a START verification team for nuclear arms reduction with the Soviet Union.
She had joined the WMD Center four months ago. Puller could have thought of five far more likely professional homes to which she could have been assigned.
So why WMD?
He looked up the leadership for the center. It wasn’t a military person. The current head was Donovan Carter, a civilian and an SES, or member of the elite senior executive service, which roughly paralleled the rank of general or admiral in the armed forces. And Puller knew that Carter also headed up the far larger DTRA, which held a very prominent position in keeping America safe from WMDs.
Puller knew Carter professionally. They had never worked directly together, but they had met on several occasions.
Carter had come on board at the center and DTRA at roughly the same time that Susan Reynolds had been assigned there. So they were at Fort Belvoir together. DTRA employed a lot of people, and Fort Belvoir was vast, and Reynolds was only a small component of this enterprise.
There’s another critical time component. They set me up and got rid of me at STRATCOM right before my next promotion.
He was slated to go from a major to lieutenant colonel. From there his trajectory was predictable in rank: colonel, one-star, two-star, and on up. What was unpredictable was the timing. There were standards for how long between promotions, including minimum time in a particular grade, training requirements for duty performance. And there were additional hurdles to jump for special promotions. This was meritocracy at its finest. And Puller had always been a fast riser, marked for the stars on his shoulders almost as soon as he had left the Air Force Academy at the top of his class, the second-ranked classmate far behind.
And then a possibility hit him.
As a lieutenant colonel at STRATCOM he was to be transferred to Bolling AFB in Washington, D.C., and assigned to the Joint Forces Central Command’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, or ISR, a component of STRATCOM.
Puller knew that all these acronyms would drive most civilians mad. But for most of his adult life it had been all he had known, becoming a language he could navigate as easily as he could recite the alphabet or know the order of medals and ribbons on the front of a uniform.
At ISR he would have been under the tutelage of a two-star. He also would have had a direct pipeline into the intelligence infrastructure of the United States by virtue of the NSA being only a short drive north into Maryland at Fort Meade.
Could it be possible?
He went back to take a look at Donovan Carter’s c.v. It didn’t take him long to find it. Two years ago to the week, Carter had been assigned to ISR.
Then he checked Susan Reynolds’s work history.
And then it all came together like embers finally igniting and producing a flame.
She had been assigned, along with Carter, to ISR. Now Carter was at the WMD Center and so was Reynolds.
So had they set him up so he wouldn’t get the promotion and be moved to Bolling, where he would have been working with Donovan Carter? If so, why? And who had taken his slot at Bolling?
Something crept out of a storage place in his brain and marched out in front of his eyes. He checked his laptop just to confirm that he was right. There was no room for mistakes now.
When he saw it come up on the screen the jigsaw pieces started to fit together even more precisely. Carter, Reynolds, and this person.
Puller’s slot at Bolling had been taken by a man who then held the rank of colonel. He had since been promoted to brigadier general. A few days ago his career and life had ended in Kansas.
His name was Timothy Daughtrey.