American Assassin

Chapter 23
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

THE Counter Terrorism Center was tucked away in the basement of the Old Headquarters Building at CIA. It was underfunded, understaffed, under decorated, underground, and pretty much isolated from all the major players in the building by both geography and attitude. Eight diligent souls worked there, and that was counting an overworked administrative assistant and Irene Kennedy, who was loosely attached to the group as an expert on all things Arab and Islamic.

Kennedy had spent her youth moving from one diplomatic post to the next, all of them in the Middle East and all of them save one in Arabic-speaking countries. Her father had diplomatic credentials but in fact worked for the CIA. Kennedy was reviewing a particularly bad translation that had been kicked downstairs by someone on the intel side of the building. The translation was so poorly done that Kennedy finally sat back and looked at her colleague Andrew Swanson. The tall, blond-haired Dartmouth grad was leaning against the wall of her cubicle tugging at his curly hair. He'd been up all night trying to make sense of the intercept.

"You keep pulling your hair like that and you'll go bald," Kennedy said without looking up.

Swanson pulled his hand away and tried to stand still. After a half minute he couldn't take it any longer and said, "The thing doesn't make any sense."

"That's because the translation is wrong." Kennedy scratched a few more notes in the margin.

"I knew it."

Kennedy closed the folder and tapped it with her pen. "I'm going to need the tape."

Swanson groaned in frustration. "Shit."

She looked at the designation on the folder. "What's the problem?"

"It's frickin' NSA."

"I see that."

"I'll be lucky if I get the tape before the Fourth of July."

Kennedy grabbed a Post-it note and wrote down a name and number. She stuck it to the front of the folder and handed the whole thing back to Swanson. "Call Kathy. Tell her I said she owes me and ask if she can messenger the tape over this afternoon."

"And if she tells me to get in line like everyone else?"

Kennedy's phone rang. She looked at the small, rectangular, monochrome screen and saw that it was Stansfield's extension. "She won't. I promise. Now run along and bug someone else. I need to take this." Kennedy grabbed the handset and said, "Good morning, sir."

"Good morning. Would you please come upstairs. There's something we need to discuss."

Kennedy instantly recognized the touch of intensity in her boss's voice. The average person would not have noticed, but she knew him so well that she was instantly alert. "I'll be right up." She hung up her phone, locked her desk, and started for the door. On the elevator ride up she reviewed the various operations that she was currently running or involved in. There were fourteen active operations that she was associated with to one degree or another. It could be any one of them, or something entirely new. She really hoped it wasn't anything new. She didn't know if her marriage could take much more of her job. She barely saw her husband as it was.

Kennedy passed through Stansfield's outer office. His assistant Meg was on the phone and motioned for her to go in. Kennedy entered and closed the door behind her. Stansfield was standing at the map table behind his desk reviewing a document. The corner office was devoid of any personal touch, with the exception of a family portrait of his wife and kids that he kept on his desk, and even that faced away from visitors. As Langley's top spy, he was very cognizant of those who collected information and ferreted out secrets. Kennedy had done some digging three years earlier and came up with a long list of medals, citations, ribbons, and awards that Stansfield had received dating back to World War II. Not a single one of them was displayed, either here or at home. Thomas Stansfield was an intensely private man.

"Please sit," he said without turning around. "There's tea on the table. Help yourself."

Kennedy went to the leather couch, opened the bamboo box, and selected a green tea. After tearing open the package she dropped the bag in a cup and filled it with steaming hot water. Stansfield crossed the office, a piece of paper in hand. He sat in the chair to Kennedy's right, slid the sheet of paper across the cherry-inlaid coffee table, and clasped his hands in front of him.

Kennedy stopped dunking the tea bag and looked at the very top edge of the sheet. As someone who was on the operations side of the business, she was intimately familiar with what she was looking at. It was a secure cable. These sheets came in all day long from U.S. Embassies and Consulates the world over. They were sent using some of the most secure and classified encryption software mathematicians could design. The designation across the top told her not only the sensitivity of the information but where it had originated. This particular place of paper had come from the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul. Kennedy swallowed hard as her eyes raced through the body of text. Hamdi Sharif was dead. Gunned down in a park across the street from his house.

"Is my memory falling me," Stansfield said, "or was I misinformed about the operational timetable?"

Kennedy read the cable again and went over the dates in her head. Finally, she looked up at her boss and said, "To the best of my knowledge Stan and Richards aren't even in the country."

"Where are they?"

"Greece."

Stansfield sat back and ran his right hand over his black-and-blue-striped tie. "Where is Rapp?"

"In-country."

He thought about that for a second. "When did he arrive?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"You're sure."

She nodded. "He checked in last night and then again this morning."

"His time or ours?"

"It would have been around midnight our time."

Stansfield looked out the window for a moment and then removed his black glasses. He set them on his lap and rubbed his eyes. Jumping to conclusions wouldn't do him any good. Anything, of course, was possible when it came to a character like Sharif. He had made more than a few enemies over the years, but the notion that two separate camps had decided to go after him at the exact same time was a tough one to swallow.

Before Stansfield could say what was on his mind, his office door burst open. Max Powers, the Near East chief, strolled in without offering an apology. "Big news."

"What now?" Stansfield asked.

"Our favorite arms dealer is no longer with us."

Out of the corner of his eye Stansfield saw Kennedy withdraw the secure cable and fold it in half. "Which arms dealer would you be referring to?"

"Sharif, that fat Turk," Powers said with a satisfied grin. "Someone blew his head off in Istanbul this morning."

"His entire head?" Kennedy asked, taking the comment literally.

"The back of it at least." Powers placed the palm of his right hand on the back of his head and tapped his bald spot several times. "I have a good source who works for Turkish NIO. Says someone plugged him up close. One in the heart and they're not sure how many in the face, but more than one. Right here." Powers tapped the space at the top of his nose between his eyes. "Tight grouping. Very professional. Blew the back of his head off."

NIO was Turkey's National Intelligence Organization. "Do they have any idea who carried it out?" Kennedy asked.

"Not a clue, but the rumor mill is already working overtime."

"Candidates?" Stansfield asked.

"Usual suspects ... Jews, Frogs, Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, and us, of course."

"Russians?"

"My guy said they were thick as thieves. Also said he got a call from your old friend at KGB."

"You mean SVR," Kennedy reminded him of the Russian Intelligence service's new name.

"Yeah, but, he referred to them as KGB. Same a*sholes as before. Just a new name."

"What did Mikhail want?" Stansfield asked, referring to Mikhail Ivanov, the deputy director of Directorate S, perhaps the most ruthless outfit in the espionage business.

"Not happy," Powers said with an emphatic shake of his head. "I guess he made some pretty heavy demands."

"Such as."

"He wants to know who did it, and he expects full cooperation. Said he's going to make life very hard for anyone who doesn't cooperate fully. Pushy bastard."

"Any witnesses?" Kennedy asked.

"Not one," Powers said with a grin. He looked at his watch. "The Turk's been dead for five hours. It looks like it was professional. Five hours means the guy who pulled the trigger is long gone. They're screwed."

"Guy?" Kennedy asked.

Powers shrugged. "Just my guess. No offense, but it's pretty much an exclusively all-men's club.

Kennedy smiled to let him know she wasn't offended.

Stansfield asked, "Your source ... he's good?"

"Great. Very dialed in."

"Loyalties?"

"To the almighty dollar, but he prefers to do business with people he likes. We can trust him."

"Keep me posted. I want to know what Mikhail is up to. If he starts swinging his velvet hammer, we might be able to win over a few more hearts in Ankara."

"Good idea."

"Anything else?"

"I'll have my gang put together a full workup for you."

"Thank you." Stansfield looked to the door, letting Powers know he wanted to get back to his meeting with Kennedy.

As soon as the Near East chief was gone, Kennedy was on her feet. She made a beeline for Stansfield's desk and grabbed the handset of his secure phone. She started punching in numbers, pausing for prompts and then hitting more numbers. After an interminable twenty seconds she accessed the voicemail. Kennedy listened intently to Rapp's brief coded message and then slowly hung up the phone.

Stansfield twirled his glasses in his right hand and asked, "Well?"

Kennedy nodded, cleared her throat, and said in near disbelief, "It was him."