A typical grimy oyster boat, a Chesapeake deadrise—describing the hard chine or angle of the bottom built for stability—with a plumb bow, forward doghouse, and long open stern, was working closer to the beach, dragging for oysters. The single oysterman was reeling in the sharp-toothed dredge that dislodged the oysters from their beds and scooped them into a steel mesh basket by the bushelfuls. Bennett and Scott didn’t know enough to notice that the oysterman was not emptying his dredge, but rather was just casting up and down the beach without result, about half a mile from the Lyman. Alex Larson didn’t notice either, because he had already hooked a thirty-inch striper that probably went fifteen pounds, and was intent on bringing in another one. Something else. None of them noticed what an instinctive sailor would have marked in the sky by late morning: the weather.
Heated by the sun, moisture from the Gulf of Mexico was rising over the bay into the atmosphere, where it collided with a stream of cold air, eventually spreading out to create the anvil top of a storm cell. As water built up in the thunderhead, it began to rain, and the temperature variants created wind shears of sixty knots, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Neither Alex Larson nor the agents in the RIB recognized that the thunderhead was building into a classic squall. The rest of the sky was blue, and the surface of the bay was riffled by a mild chop. The oyster boat incongruously kept up its nondredging, marginally closer to the Lyman. Then it happened. From the surface of the bay, the black lowering clouds with slanting rain bands were preceded by a sick gust of hot air, followed by the white froth of torrential rain moving across the water like a visible shock wave. The first sheet of horizontal rain and gale-force wind heeled the Lyman over as a tremendous clap of thunder tore the sky apart and a bolt of lightning lanced into the water beside the boat, the shaft surrounded by green plasma. Larson balanced precariously on the runabout, which was rolling from gunwale to gunwale, as he threw on a rain slicker from the locker. The rain stung his face like needles, and the insane wind got up inside the jacket until he could zip it. He dropped his rod on the deck, and he held on to the side rail, deafened by thunder, wondering if the Lyman would roll all the way over to turn turtle. The wind dropped for a beat, then came roaring back stronger than before, shifting ninety degrees, making the Lyman roll so far over that she shipped a bathtub’s worth of slate-gray water. Two more of those and his precious antique would sink from under him. He tried inching toward the forward stanchion to get to the wheel, to start the outboard and get her bow into the wind where she’d settle down and where her nose-up attitude would let the self-bailing bilges get the seawater out of her, but he couldn’t let go. The damn hull was still rolling, and Larson’s face was slapped by sea spray at each downward roll. He looked with amazement as a rubber glove rose out of the foaming water, then another, to grasp the side rail and pull violently down with the next roll. Larson was tilted so far forward that the gunwale banged his knees and he catapulted into the water. The salt stung his eyes—his glasses had flown off—and he felt his clothes and boots filling with water, and he knew he had to shuck off his boots, get out of his slicker, and kick to the surface. Bennett and Scott would be alongside to haul him into the RIB, bail out the Lyman, and tow her home. Instead he felt the rubber glove grasp him by the collar of his rain gear, turn him upside down, and begin pulling him deeper, where the water was colder, and where the stripers eyed the fluorescent lures dangled by men in cockleshell boats up there in the sunlight. Alex Larson did not think of Vladimir Putin as his breath gave out and he swallowed seawater.
* * *
* * *
Like their protectee, the agents in the RIB saw the squall line too late. They watched from about two hundred yards away as the Lyman was overtaken by a curtain of rain, obscuring it completely. The lightning and thunder were incessant. Scott had already pushed the throttles forward to get the RIB closer to the Lyman to steady her and help their chief. A large wave broke over the snub nose of the unsinkable inflatable, but they still shipped green water that cascaded down the vessel and around the steering console, knocking both of them off their feet. With no one at the wheel, the RIB careened in an insane circle just as the wind shifted ninety degrees and partially lifted the rubber hull, almost flipping it airborne and upside down. Both agents hung on to the straps along the pontoons while the RIB at full power continued to pound into the waves in wild crazy eights. Bennett finally got to the wheel, reduced power, and tried to get his bearings. With the sheeting rain and the spray, visibility was less than twenty feet. With no landmarks, and no shoreline visible, both agents were disoriented and didn’t know where the DCIA’s boat was. They checked the radar and saw a speck that could have been the Lyman and raced to it in the stinging rain to find instead a crab-pot buoy that had broken loose and was bobbing in the waves. They still had no idea which way the Lyman lay—they might as well have been in midocean and racing around could take them farther away. After ten more minutes, the squall passed, and as the last of the fat drops pattered on the rubber hull of the RIB, the sun came out. Half a mile in the distance, the Lyman’s white hull was visible through the water mist that still clung to the surface.
The agents raced up to the Lyman, which was still rolling madly, the fishing rod and reel sliding on the deck. There is nothing as ominous as an empty boat drifting on the water, mute testimony of a soul reclaimed by the sea. As a frantic Bennett radioed the Coast Guard, then called the security-duty office at Headquarters, Scott at full speed started a grid search downwind for any sign of the DCIA, who they knew did not wear a life jacket. They had been out of visual sight of the Lyman for approximately nineteen minutes, and there was no other boat within a mile of them. The foul weather had even driven the oyster boat into harbor. What followed was the usual two days of Coast Guard daylight searches by helicopters and crash boats, concentrating on the lower bay, based on the estimated time of the accident and the prevailing ebb tide. Alex Larson’s body was finally found on the third day, facedown on a sandbar off Race Hog Point on Pone Island, about fifty miles south of Kent Island. The FBI investigated the incident with the Coast Guard, and both concluded that the DCIA had drowned as a result of the boating accident.
When official news of the accident was released, President Putin, against the advice of Anton Gorelikov, called the US president to express his sympathy at the loss of a dedicated professional, a committed public servant, and a man of honor. The Slavic mordancy in Putin’s comments was lost on POTUS, who already was considering candidates to fill the DCIA position. As Gorelikov had presciently predicted, VADM Rowland was on the president’s short list of DCIA nominees. All that toadying to POTUS’s vanity had paid off. She was an outsider, a brainy woman, and someone who believed in diplomatic solutions with coalition partners, rather than resorting to armed conflict at the drop of a hat. He looked to Admiral Rowland to continue the reforms within CIA in diversity, promotion quotas, and, frankly, fewer dirty tricks that only antagonized foreign governments.
At Langley, relevant branches in the Operations Directorate tasked Russian and counterterrorist sources to determine whether there were any known plots to harm the Director. Not even DIVA had heard anything in the Kremlin, and she sent her condolences via a Moscow Station officer to Benford, who was inconsolable.
Simon confided to Forsyth that he suspected the Russians had engineered the boating accident, which was nothing less than a political assassination ordered by Putin. Benford summoned Hearsey to ask him about short-range drones that could be fitted with an explosive payload, or aerosolized biological compounds, or even with a single 2.75-inch rocket. Maybe an infiltrated operator could fly a drone close enough to catch Putin outside during a fishing or hunting trip and avenge the DCIA. Hearsey looked at the floor without saying anything until Forsyth told Benford to stop hallucinating and to concentrate on their more immediate problem: vetting the White House’s three nominee candidates for DCIA, a triumvirate of progressive Washington insiders, none of whom was well-disposed to the Agency.