The Last Man

Chapter 44
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

KENNEDY reviewed the final edited version for the eighth time. The assault on her conscience was not quite as bad as it had been on the first or second viewing. The impact had lessened a degree or two, which made her wonder how many times she'd have to watch it before she was completely desensitized to the horror. She knew that would never happen, but there was a part of her brain that wished it could be that simple.

The internal drive from the camcorder provided exactly two hours of footage. Two hours of the most brutal, dehumanizing violence Kennedy had ever witnessed, and she was not unaware that things like this happened. She had in fact seen similar tapes before. Saddam Hussein had tapes like this all over his palaces. Those tapes never required more than a minute or two of viewing as analysts sifted through them to see if there was any actionable intelligence. Kennedy was then brought individual snippets to view.

This time she had forced herself to watch the entire two hours. She'd done it on the flight back from Bagram. The morning after Hayek had shown them the video they received word that Hubbard's body had been discovered in a warehouse of an industrial park on the outskirts of Jalalabad. The cause of death was a single bullet to the head. Mike Nash had approached her midmorning and told her that she needed to get back to headquarters. Kennedy was reluctant, but Nash was forceful, telling her that with Rickman and Hubbard dead, the worst of the crisis had passed. She was needed back in D.C., where there would be a lot of important people asking questions. They all knew it would get ugly, and Kennedy knew Nash was right. She needed to be in Washington, so she left Nash behind to help Schneeman manage the cleanup.

Kennedy had been trained to accept the more difficult aspects of her job, but she was still human. Watching Rickman beg his captors to stop was one of the most heart-wrenching things she'd ever experienced. The ugly specter of the outcome hung over the entire thing. There was no surprise ending, no hope that SEALs or Delta Force commandos would burst into the room and gun down the two interrogators. She'd seen the ending first, which made watching it all that much harder. All the relief she'd felt knowing that her secrets were now safe with the death of Rickman quickly transformed into a crippling guilt that she'd found solace in the death of someone she was responsible for.

Rapp, as always, had been able to look right through her and know what she was thinking. Somewhere over Europe, in the middle of the night, Kennedy looked down the fuselage of the G550 and decided that everyone was either sleeping or trying to sleep. She decided it was time to watch the interrogation in its entirety. She opened her laptop and began watching Rickman's final two hours of life. She cried for most of it. Somewhere near the end Rapp came up on her left shoulder and closed her laptop. She took off her headphones.

He sat down across from her, leaned forward, and said, "Why are you doing this to yourself?"

Kennedy tried to compose herself, wiping her tears with the sleeve of her sweater. "I had to watch it. I need to know what he gave up."

Rapp shook his head in a slow, disapproving way. "That's not true and you know it. You can't make out half of what he says in a quiet room . . . up here forty thousand feet you might be able decipher twenty percent. The audio needs to be cleaned up, and that's what they're doing at Langley right now. By the time we land you'll have a detailed transcript of everything he said. Twenty-four hours after that you'll have a damage assessment from your top people, and we'll deal with it, but there is no reason to watch that other than to beat yourself up."

"Thomas always told me I needed to understand just how rough things could get in the field."

Thomas was Thomas Stansfield, Kennedy's mentor and her predecessor. Rapp thought highly of the man, but there were times where he wondered if Kennedy didn't try a little too hard to live up to Stansfield and his legend. "Being detached has never been a problem of yours. Don't beat yourself up over this. It's not your fault. It's no one's fault. It's just part of the job."

"It's a part I don't like."

"It's a part none of us like, but we move on." Rapp grabbed her hand and said, "Someone I respect told me once to take a little time to grieve and then get my shit together and get back in the game."

"Stan?"

Rapp nodded. The tough, no-nonsense Stan Hurley was famous for telling people to suck it up.

"And if I can't?"

"Then you go see our favorite shrink."

Now, Kennedy spun her chair and looked out across the tree-laden landscape of the Potomac River Valley. She hadn't made an appointment with Dr. Lewis yet, but she would have to. She was going to need some help sorting through all of this guilt and relief. The problem would be finding the time. Her schedule was booked solid with meetings that had been rescheduled because of the emergency trip to Afghanistan and fresh meetings with allies who wanted to discuss the fallout from Rickman. And then there was Congress. They wanted a briefing this afternoon, and Kennedy had a little surprise for them. Hayek's DNA samples from the torture room had brought in a match. One of the men in the video was Wafa Zadran, who had spent three years in Guantanamo. Several members of the Joint Intelligence Committee were harsh critics of the detention center in Cuba and had made a platform out of lecturing the CIA and the Pentagon that Gitmo was a recruiting tool for terrorists. This particular group of politicians fell into the dangerous mind-set that Islamic radicals thought, acted, and behaved like anyone else, and if you were simply nice to them they would be nice to you in return. In its mildest form, this type of thinking was naive, and in its harshest form it was extremely narcissistic. Either way, it was wrong and did nothing to help fight Islamic terrorism. Zadran was yet another example of their failed and short-sighted policy, but Kennedy knew these politicians all too well. They would never accept responsibility for what they'd done.

There was a soft knock on the door and then a woman in her midfifties entered. It was Betty Walner, the CIA's director of the Office of Public Affairs. "Everything is ready. Do I have your authorization to release the clip?"

The clip was their solution to the stampede of panicked agents and assets. Chuck O'Brien, the director of the National Clandestine Service, had advocated the idea. As O'Brien put it, "Dead men don't tell secrets. This will put an end to it."

Kennedy was averse to the idea at first. The CIA didn't like making sensitive things public, and this was about as sensitive as it could get. Her mind had been pretty much made up for her when the terrorists decided to release a second edited clip of Rickman's beating. It became obvious that they were going to try to milk Rickman's interrogation to make it seem as if he was still alive. O'Brien's idea became the toaster in the bathwater. Release the clip of Rickman's death and short-circuit the entire game. There was also a serious opportunity to embarrass the Taliban by showing the execution of the two interrogators by one of their own. It would make them look like rank amateurs.

"Yes, the White House signed off on it," Kennedy said, reaching for her cup of tea.

"I've already received more than a few requests for interviews with you."

"I'm too busy right now."

"I know you are, but you're going to need to make some statements. First about Rickman and Hubbard and their service to our country. You have to do that."

Kennedy nodded. "I will at some point."

"It needs to be today."

Kennedy didn't take it personally. Walner was just trying to do her job. "I'll have something prepared by the end of the day."

"And it would really help if you'd do a sit-down with a half dozen or so reporters."

"Off the record?"

Walner shook her head. "Not on this one, Irene. It's too big. Have you had time to read the papers today?"

"No."

"The hawks on the Hill are screaming bloody murder over the reintegration program in Afghanistan and all the green-on-blue violence. They're laying all the blame on the White House, and you're stuck in the middle. Five at the most and they'll have you in a committee room with cameras and they'll be asking anything they want. Your best chance is to start shaping your message right now."

Kennedy looked down the length of her office at the small hallway that connected her office to the deputy director's office. Stofer was leading a group of her top advisors her way. She didn't have the energy to deal with the media right now and she wanted to hear what her advisors had to say. "Stop back in a few hours with a plan and we'll review it," she said to Walner.

Walner left and Kennedy got up with her cup of tea and moved over to the seating area, which was composed of one long couch with its back to the window, a rectangular, glass coffee table, and four chairs, two across from the couch and one at each end of the coffee table. Kennedy took her normal seat and set her cup of tea on the table. "So where do we stand?" she asked her advisers.

The director of the Clandestine Service looked at Stofer and then Rapp and cleared his throat. "Irene, none of us are taking this well. It sucks, but all things considered, Rick dying is not a bad outcome. I know it sounds harsh, but it's the reality of our business."

"So this is your glass-is-half-full pep talk?"

O'Brien looked a bit sheepish. "I'm not proud of it, but if that's the way you want to look at, that's fine with me." He nervously twisted the gold band on his wedding-ring finger and added, "It could have been a hundred times worse."

Kennedy took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "Sometimes it doesn't feel that way."

"Remember Buckley?" O'Brien said in an ominous tone. Bill Buckley was the CIA's station chief in Beirut who was kidnapped by Hezbollah in 1984.

Kennedy remembered Buckley. He was a friend of her parents. After his kidnapping and subsequent torture, his interrogators beat information out of him until they'd discovered his entire network of spies and assets. One by one those people simply disappeared or were found dead. The disaster crippled the CIA for more than a decade in the region. "I imagine we've all spent a good deal of time thinking about Bill this week." She looked at her tea for a moment and admitted, "You're right, it could have been a lot worse, but somehow that doesn't make me feel very good right now."

"I hate to sound harsh," O'Brien said in his deep voice, "but Rick probably welcomed this. After what he went through . . ." O'Brien shook his head. "I wouldn't want to see my worst enemy have to endure that."

Rapp didn't know if it was his head injury or if he'd always thought like this, but he was not comfortable with all of the emotions that everyone was wearing on their sleeves. This was CIA, and more precisely, the Clandestine Service. The department was filled with badasses from every branch of the military. They were the risk takers, the ones who were sent in to do the dirty work. You could try to soften torture and call it enhanced interrogation measures, but Rapp had used more than enhanced interrogation measures and so had Rickman. It was the world they lived in. It sucked that Rickman had to endure that kind of abuse, but they were professionals. There was also something else bothering Rapp that he couldn't put his finger on. It was a feeling that something wasn't right, that things didn't add up.

"How's your head?"

Rapp looked up to see Kennedy studying him. He felt fine, just a little tired. "Not bad."

Her gaze narrowed and she said, "You looked like you were in pain."

"No . . . just thinking about something." Rapp leaned forward and brought his hands together, and then, deflecting Kennedy, asked, "So where are we with this idiot from the FBI?"

"You'll be interested to know that Scott saw him take a little ride with our old friend Senator Ferris last night."

"Do we have audio?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Do I need to worry about this guy?"

Kennedy shook her head. "He has a meeting this morning with Director Miller. We've already discussed the matter and Miller assures me Agent Wilson will no longer be a problem."

"Good," Rapp said, and then, changing gears, asked, "And the transcript? I heard Rick threw them a curveball or two."

Stofer opened a black leather briefing folder. "That's right. He tossed out a few names . . . the names of people who as far as I know do not work for us."

"Who?" Kennedy asked.

Stofer adjusted his reading glasses and said, "Aleksei Garin, SVR Directorate S." He whistled. "That's going to be a tough one to swallow."

"I'm not sure anyone over there has the balls to confront Aleksei. He's not afraid to put bullets in people's heads."

Everyone agreed and then Stofer said, "Shahram Jafari, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization. Another tough one to swallow, but they're so damn paranoid they might make Jafari's life miserable - at least for a while. They'll be turning themselves inside out trying to find out if Jafari is a traitor. The last one isn't so clean. He identified Nadeem Ashan with the ISI. He doesn't work for us per se, but we consider him a valuable ally."

"Why would Rick throw Ashan's name in the mix?" Rapp asked.

O'Brien poured himself a cup of coffee and said, "It could have been the first name that popped into his head. Anything to stop the pain. You know how it goes."

Rapp did, but Rickman was smarter than that. He would have had a prearranged list in his head. "We should look into Rick's relationship with Ashan. See if there's anything there."

"We're already on it," Stofer said.

The main door to the office opened and Stan Hurley entered. "Sorry I'm late. What did I miss?"

Rapp looked at his mentor as he moved across the large office with his smooth amble. For a seventy-plus-year-old with terminal cancer he sure didn't act like it. Hurley's gait was the only thing about him that was smooth. He was a hard man, with hard edges, a hard personality, and a craggy disposition. This was the first time Rapp had seen him since learning he had cancer. For a split second he was about to stand to greet Hurley, maybe even give him a hug, but the reaction lost steam as quickly as it had come on. Hurley wasn't a hugger. He didn't like people touching him. He called it an institutional hazard. So instead Rapp gave him a short nod of recognition.

Kennedy and Stofer quickly filled Hurley in on what he'd missed. When they were done, O'Brien filled the dead air by saying, "Irene, Betty wants me to say some things to the press. A few comments about Rick and Hub and their sacrifice."

Kennedy nodded slowly. "That'd be nice. Thank you."

No one spoke for a long moment and eventually all eyes turned to Rapp, who was clutching and unclutching his hands as if he were doing some new-age stress reduction exercise. Stofer spoke first, "Mitch, what's wrong?"

Rapp wasn't sure this was the time, but he knew it was better to speak his mind now. "I'm sorry to spoil the party here, but something's not right."

"What's not right?" Kennedy asked.

"We're all breathing a big sigh of relief when I can't shake the feeling that we're being set up."

"I'm not sure I follow," O'Brien said. "Rick's dead."

Rapp wasn't prepared to refute that point, but neither was he convinced that Rickman was no longer of this world. "I was at the safe house," Rapp said, remembering the four dead bodyguards. "It was an extremely precise takedown. The kind of op we'd be proud of," he said, looking at Hurley. "A state-of-the-art security system taken offline without our watchers at Langley having any idea, four bullets, four dead bodyguards, and not a shot more . . . all suppressed. The safe is opened, not cracked, and Rick's laptop, files, cash, and God only knows what else goes missing. And not a witness to any of it."

"I'm not sure I follow, either," Stofer said earnestly.

Kennedy rubbed her forehead. She had known Mitch wasn't going to be able to accept this. Nothing could ever be this simple. Stofer, for his part, was too reverential toward Rapp. Having come up on the analytical side, he had seen many of his predecessors manage the clandestine side of the business with condescension. Stofer worked extra hard to make sure the operatives felt that they were being heard. "You agree," Kennedy said, "that Rick is dead?"

Rapp took a moment and then said, "I'm not sure."

O'Brien moaned, "Come on, Mitch, it's not that complicated. He dies right on the tape. You can see the panic on the faces of the two goons when they realize what they've done. The anger in the third guy's voice when he can't find a pulse."

"Yeah . . . I know," Rapp said, almost sounding as if he doubted himself.

"And then the third guy executes the other two. We know that was real because you guys found the bodies in the exact same position as they were last seen on the video."

"But we don't have Rick's body."

"Doesn't surprise me one bit," O'Brien said with total confidence. "They're trying to act like he's still alive. They're going to do a slow drip, releasing snippets of the interrogation, only they don't know we have the entire thing, because the idiots took the SD card and didn't know the camera had an internal flash drive."

Rapp wasn't so sure, but he stuck with what he knew. "Someone, or more likely several men, hit the safe house, and they were extremely precise in their shots. Rick is then taken only a few hundred yards to another house, presumably by the same guys. The interrogation begins and a few days into it Rick dies. The third guy, who is obviously in charge, gets upset and empties a fifteen-round magazine into these two goons who screwed up."

"And your point is?" O'Brien asked as if all of this made perfect sense.

"We're shooters," Rapp said, waving his thumb back and forth between Hurley and himself. "If we had hit that safe house it would have been no different. One shot in each guy's head. If we'd brought Scott along with his guys, there would have been some double taps . . . but my point is there's always a pattern. Good shooters are disciplined shooters. It doesn't matter how mad we get, we don't empty magazines into people just because we're pissed off."

All eyes moved to Hurley to assess what he thought. He ran his finger along his dry lips and nodded. "He has a point."

"I think this could be an exception," O'Brien said. "Going through what they went through to get Rick and then having him die after they'd broken him, but had only scratched the surface." O'Brien thought of himself in the same situation. "I might lose my focus for a second or two."

"Let my try it this way. The people who hit the safe house were pros. The two goons who beat up Rick were not pros. You can see it in the way they move. The third guy," Rapp shook his head, "he's a different story. When I watch him on the video I can't help but think he's putting on an act for the camera."

"That's a bit of a stretch, Mitch," Kennedy said.

"It might be, but have you guys heard about the ballistics from the safe house?" They all shook their heads no, so Rapp continued. "Three of the bodyguards were shot in the center of the forehead with nine-millimeter rounds. All of them were on the first floor. The fourth guard was shot in the back of the head with a .45 caliber round. He was on the second floor moving toward the stairs, probably responding to the commotion downstairs. Rick's personal sidearm was a Kimber .45."

"I heard some rumblings about this," O'Brien said in obvious disagreement. "I think the fourth guard was the inside guy and Rick found out at the last minute and shot him."

"And the security system getting bypassed?"

"The bodyguards had the codes to arm and disarm it."

"But, they didn't have the codes to take it off-line. To shut the whole thing down, cameras and all . . . only Rick could have done something like that, or Marcus. Not a bunch of clowns from the Taliban."

"They lived with Rick," Kennedy said. "It would be entirely plausible for one of them to pick up on the codes."

"Okay, how about the safe?" Rapp said. "It was opened without any coercion. Sid checked it out. There was blood all over the hallway on the second floor but not a speck on the safe. She makes a very strong point that the safe was opened by someone who had not been injured. At first I assumed Rick just wasn't very tough, they put a gun to his head, and he opened the safe. Well, if you believe everything you see in that video we find out he's pretty damn tough. They would have had to slap him silly to get him to open that safe and there would have been some blood."

"I don't know, Mitch," Stofer said, shaking his head. "It's pretty thin."

"I know it is, but you guys, come on . . . think about this for a minute. Put your covert ops hats on and think about how we plan stuff. The lengths we go to, to lay down deceptions to make something look a certain way when our main objective is something entirely different."

Kennedy was all for open discussion, but this type of thinking was what led to the old puzzle palace mentality where every other person in the building was a mole. "Are you trying to say Rick was in on this? That he orchestrated his own kidnapping and then endured that horrific beating and that he's still alive?"

Rapp knew how preposterous it sounded, but he couldn't shake the feeling that there was some piece of information that he couldn't access that would explain his suspicions. He stood and walked over to the window. "I'm not sure what I think."

"Mitch, I think you're way out on a limb here." O'Brien was shaking his head in disagreement.

Rapp turned to face the big Irishman. "Have you read Sid's preliminary report?"

"No."

"Read it. Study the photos from the safe house. Look at the precision. Put yourself in the shoes of the people that were trying to get their hands on Rick. It was perfect."

"I'm not saying it wasn't," O'Brien said, refusing to see things Rapp's way.

"Now look at the other part of this. The same group of professionals f*ck up, kill Rick, and then kill each other."

"That's what we saw on the tape. It's pretty hard to argue with."

"It sure is. The same cool customers that took down our safe house go completely mental just a few days later and manage to capture it on a camcorder and leave it behind for us to find."

"Heat of the moment. Not everyone thinks as clearly as you do in pressure situations."

"And some people are devious as all hell," Rapp said. "We're seeing what we're seeing because we want to. The alternative is f*cking horrible. Rick is still alive and he's spilling the family jewels." Rapp moved back to his chair and said, "Can any of you honestly tell me that you weren't relieved when you saw Rick die in that clip?"

They all shook their heads.

"Our lives got significantly easier."

"Mitch," Stofer said, "I kind of see your point, but these terrorists aren't always the sharpest tools in the shed. That they screwed up and their failure benefited our larger strategic goals doesn't mean we're being duped."

"I know," Rapp said, "but I can't shake the feeling that we're not out of the woods. We need to take a top-to-bottom look at this. We need to figure out what happened to all of the money Rick was spreading around. Where the hell is his laptop, and do we have any idea what was on it? And the whole time we're looking we'd better be asking ourselves one question."

"What's that?" Kennedy said.

"What if they wanted us to find that camcorder?"

"Oh, come on." It was O'Brien. "This is so thin."

Kennedy had her eyes on Hurley. She could tell he was taking a trip down memory lane, accessing his large database of real-life experiences. "Stan, what are you thinking?"

Hurley didn't hear the question right away. His mind was elsewhere, thinking about the way the game used to be played. "I think Mitch might have a point . . . then again he could be totally wrong, but we can't afford not to explore it."

"I'm not sure we can afford to explore it," O'Brien said. "The harsh truth is that Rick is dead and a lot of people want him to stay that way."

Hurley started to grumble the way he did when he was about to get angry. After saying a few things to himself he said, "So our new protocol on shit like this is to stick our heads in the sand? That's one of the dumbest f*cking things I've ever heard."

An outsider would be left to think that O'Brien would be wounded by Hurley's harsh words, but they'd all worked with him so long they didn't take the rebukes personally.

"Take this thing back to the beginning," Hurley said, "and it looks like we were being played. I don't think the Taliban are sophisticated enough to have done this. They may have played a role . . . provided some manpower, they may have even taken down the safe house, but they sure as hell didn't hire Gould. Whoever was behind this moved pieces around the chessboard like the Soviets used to do. They knew Mitch enough that they could dangle that information in front of him about the dog and he'd jump on it. They had to have been monitoring Hubbard, because minutes after he told Mitch where the vet's office was, they put Gould into play and called in their corrupt police general to clean up the mess. That's not the Taliban. Way too complicated."

Stofer looked confused. "Are you saying the Russians are behind this?"

Hurley shrugged. He hadn't thought that specifically, but anything was possible. "I don't know who's behind it, but whoever it is, is one devious bastard. They set this thing up and played us. I'm inclined to agree with Mitch. Anyone who goes to that much trouble doesn't leave the bodies and camera for us to find unless they want us to find them."

Kennedy felt another headache coming, and it wasn't because she was mad at Hurley and Rapp, it was because she knew they were right. They had been suckered into thinking they had dodged a bullet. O'Brien started to argue with Hurley and Rapp. Kennedy stood and walked back to her desk. None of them noticed. She opened her top left drawer and grabbed a bottle of Tylenol. She tapped out two little red pills into her hand and washed them down with a drink of water.

"Gentlemen," she said. They ignored her, so she raised her voice until they all stopped talking and turned their heads in her direction. "We need his body. Until then we are going to work on the assumption that he is alive." She saw O'Brien start to open his mouth and her hand shot out like a traffic cop's. "Our official stance is that he's dead. But unofficially, we are going to start digging, if for no other reason than to find out which intelligence agency was behind this."

Rapp stood, feeling full of energy for the first time since he'd woken up in the hospital. He buttoned his suit coat and said, "And when we find out who was behind this?"

"We will send them a very personal message."