The Last Man

Chapter 41
KENNEDY yawned into the back of her hand and hoped no one back at Langley noticed. They were nearly an hour into the secure videoconference. The yawn wasn't from boredom but from fatigue. They had spent the majority of the briefing talking about life and death. The crisis seemed to have no end in sight. In fact, it was expanding like some plague, hopping from population center to population center, creating a kind of minipanic among people in the business, with one side running and the other sensing blood in the water.

The Pakistani foreign minister had been literally dragged from his house by the ISI with the media recording every brutal moment. That visual alone had started a second exodus of lesser assets in Pakistan. Four midlevel spies had shown up at the embassy in Islamabad, despite being told not to do so. Three more had simply disappeared, and it was anyone's guess if they had been picked up or were trying to flee on their own. None of these individuals were mentioned in the video posted on the Internet, but it didn't matter. Once fear gripped the lonely mind of a spy, panic was already breathing down his neck.

The embassy in Islamabad reported that the ISI had stepped up their surveillance around the embassy and they were almost certain to have photographed the assets entering the embassy. It was only a matter of time before an official protest was filed and the Pakistanis started tossing Americans out of their country. On top of that, Kennedy would still have to deal with the fools who had ignored their handlers and fled to the embassy seeking asylum. The Pakistani government would demand that those individuals be turned over, and considering the current climate, Kennedy would be left with little alternative. How many of them would live was impossible to guess, but they would all be brutally tortured. And this was just Pakistan. The deputy director of the Clandestine Service and his staff had just delivered a devastating report.

Thirteen assets, not counting the five in Pakistan, had jumped the reservation. Five had landed on the doorsteps of American embassies throughout Europe, and their handlers were working feverishly to get them to return to their lives before anyone noticed, but so far none of them were willing. Of the remaining eight, they had no idea if they'd been arrested or were making a run for the nearest border and the safety of America. Kennedy's network of spies was crumbling with each tick of the clock, and they were only in the infancy of this crisis. She wondered how many of these brave individuals understood what she knew, that Rickman had only just begun telling secrets. The video was just the first installment of a plague that would cripple the CIA.

As she looked at the faces around the conference table, and the ones on the large screen relaying the image from Langley, she wondered how many of these people understood what was at stake. They were all smart, or they wouldn't have risen to such important posts, but there was a learning curve during a catastrophe. It was extremely easy to be myopic. There were specific tasks that needed to be performed and more than a few people were afraid to look up and see just how bad things could get. Kennedy couldn't afford to bury her head in a bunch of files. It was her job to steer this ship away from the shoals, and right now she was beginning to wonder if it was possible.

"You okay?"

Kennedy turned to look at Rapp, who was studying her with his dark eyes. There were times, like now, when that gaze unnerved her. She swore he could look into a person's soul and smell fear.

Proving her point, he said, "I know this looks hopeless right now, but we'll catch a break sooner or later."

"I wish I shared your confidence."

He leaned in even closer. "Right now it's all about damage control. The bleeding will eventually stop, and when it does, we're just going to have to bust our butt to get back in the game."

Right now Kennedy didn't feel like the bleeding would ever stop, and if it did, she wasn't so sure she would have a job. Looking at Rapp, it occurred to her that she still hadn't talked to him about Gould. There were obviously still some memory issues or she was pretty certain he would have brought it up. More than likely he would have demanded to see him. Maybe she could ask Coleman to go over it with him before Dr. Lewis arrived in the morning. At least Gould was cooperating. Nash was meticulously rebuilding the last four years of the man's life, with special attention paid to his financial transactions and employers. Kennedy found it hard to swallow that it had been purely coincidental that Gould had been hired for the second time in four years to kill Rapp. And then there was Wilson. The Clandestine Service was by necessity an organization staffed with people who were the opposite of Dudley Do-Right. Rapp had done plenty of business with banks specializing in secrecy, from Switzerland to Cyprus, to Gibraltar, and all the way to Singapore, all of it authorized by Kennedy. The question was, how did Wilson find out, and who had wanted him to find out?

The door to the conference room was yanked open and Sydney Hayek entered, out of breath and carrying a laptop. Kennedy's assistant, Eugene, was on her heels.

"I'm sorry to barge in like this," Hayek announced, "but I found something that I thought you'd all want to see immediately." Hayek followed Eugene to a console full of electronics at the far end of the room. She handed him the laptop and he connected several cables and then switched one of the flat-screen monitors over to the laptop feed. Eugene handed her a remote and left the room, closing the soundproof door on his way out. Even though he was Kennedy's personal assistant, he knew he didn't have the clearance to see everything.

Hayek took a brief moment to gather herself, looking around the table at Kennedy, Rapp, Schneeman, and Nash, and then at the larger gathering on the screen. "You're all aware of the house we found in Jalalabad. It turns out we have a DNA match for Joe Rickman."

"I heard that room was a mess," Nash said. "How sure are you that it's a match?"

Hayek rocked her head from side to side, not sure where she should begin, so she just started. "I'm one hundred percent sure. The DNA match is ninety-nine-point-nine percent, but we have other evidence." She looked at Kennedy. "There was a camcorder in the basement. It was smashed and the memory card was missing. This type of camera, however, also has an internal flash drive." The questions started in earnest, but she raised her voice and her hands and talked over everyone. "I want to caution everyone that this is extremely graphic. There are at least two hours of footage and we will be analyzing it for months to come, but I wanted to show you one thing that everyone needs to see before we get into the rest of it."

Hayek hit the Play button and started the video. The flat-screen showed the same image as the one that had gone viral. A bloodied, battered, and shirtless Rickman hung from the ceiling, his hands stretched above his head. His torso was covered with red welts. Both eyes were swollen shut and, from the unnatural angle of his mouth, it looked like his jaw was broken. The two men were beating him senseless, taking turns so they could conserve their energy. As the video continued, they began striking him in the groin with rubber hoses, and then Rickman's body convulsed and he coughed up a glob of blood. The hooded men continued their onslaught for another dozen seconds and then seemed to sense that something was wrong.

They stopped hitting Rickman and lifted his swollen chin. As soon as the shorter man let go of Rickman's chin his head dropped lifelessly to rest on his chest. The two men began arguing in Pashto and then they pulled their masks up to reveal their faces. It was obvious they were panicked while they started to check for a pulse. A third man entered the picture, a blur as he passed the camera. He ignored the two men and put his fingers to Rickman's neck. It seemed like an eternity as the man continued to search for a pulse, going back and forth between Rickman's neck and his wrists. Eventually the man placed an ear over Rickman's bloody chest. After what seemed like an eternity, he stepped away from Rickman and the two men began to defend themselves.

The third man began screaming at them and then pulled a pistol. There was more arguing and then the third man, who still had his mask on, started pumping rounds into the taller of the two men. When he was done with him he turned the pistol on the other man and kept firing until his pistol was empty. The man then turned, marched straight for the camera, swung at it with his pistol, and the screen went black.

There was nothing but stunned silence. Kennedy's mind was trying to process what she had just seen, torn between horror and sadness and relief and a deep personal revulsion over the fact that she was comforted by the knowledge that one of her top people was dead. In a matter of seconds her mind ran the gamut, processing the violence, the tragedy, and the calculation that while Joe Rickman's final days on this planet were as awful as one could imagine, he had been spared months of cruel, unthinkable torture. There was a rationalization at work - one man was dead, but countless others would avoid the gallows. With a wave of relief, Kennedy realized her network of spies was safe, and in the same time and space she hated herself for coming to that conclusion without mourning for Rickman.