They’d come into the agency at the same time. But Buck had risen quicker and higher. There were a lot of reasons for that, Calibrisi knew, but the main one was that he was a good agent. An athlete; political, smart, strategic, multi-talented. And the truth is, he was one of the best wet-work killers the CIA had ever had, and that didn’t just mean he was a good trigger man. He designed bold operations. As a leader, he inspired loyalty; backed up his men when they made mistakes; gave credit when credit was due. He was tough. He never asked anyone to do something he wasn’t willing to do himself.
Yes, he’d learned a lot from Buck. He knew he wouldn’t be half the agent he was were it not for what Buck had taught him over the years. But Calibrisi also knew he was about to kill Jessica Tanzer—if he hadn’t done so already.
In the basement garage, Calibrisi flagged a motor pool car, gave the agent Jessica’s address.
“Put the bluebird on,” said Calibrisi. “
And
drive like a fucking maniac, you hear?”
The car peeled out and bumped onto Pennsylvania, went right.
Calibrisi tried both of Jessica’s numbers again. Still nothing.
“Fuck!”
he yelled.
Think, Hector. Think.
He stared down at his cell phone. Buck had saved his life once. He shook his head at the memory. He’d been sent to London with Buck and two others on a kill team. The target was a German, a man named Stauffer, an executive at a large German electronics manufacturer. Stauffer had been selling nuclear weapons parts—trigger components specifically—to Pakistan. The agency had decided to simply get rid of Stauffer, rather than make big deal of it. Calibrisi didn’t know why, didn’t ask, it wasn’t his job. His job was to kill Stauffer.
It had been around midnight. An apartment in Mayfair, high floor. Infiltration had occurred two days prior to Stauffer’s arrival. The team was a floor above the German, in an apartment directly overhead, owned
by a Saudi prince who was away, and who didn’t know they were coming, nor afterward that they’d ever even been there. A Buck touch. He called them “short-term rentals,” technically against agency standard operating practices but seamless, invisible, the way he liked it.
Calibrisi had gone down to Stauffer’s floor via the fire stairs at the appointed time. Entered by picking the lock, shut the door behind him. It would’ve been Calibrisi’s fourth termination. He had moved through Stauffer’s dark apartment, silenced Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum out in front of him, leather gloves, sweat pouring down his head beneath the ski mask. He’d gotten to the bedroom door.
A floor above, at that very moment, through the pinhole nightscope the team had drilled into Stauffer’s bedroom ceiling, they’d seen Stauffer, weapon out, waiting next to his bed, ready to kill Calibrisi when he entered.
Calibrisi had felt the slight vibration in his pocket just as he reached his gloved hand toward the brass doorknob. Those were the days before comm buds in your ear. He’d stopped in his tracks, in the darkness, looked down, seen the two words that were Buck’s signal to abort.
The apartment, the pinhole, everything; it had all been Buck’s planning, his ideas. Even the two words. The two words Buck was known for, which every agent who’d worked with Buck knew meant. The two words that, more than a quarter century ago, saved a young agent’s life.
Calibrisi picked up his phone.
Buck calmly pushed Jessica’s bedroom door open. The sound of the shower, of water pouring down, created a soft din through the bedroom.
He glanced down at her clothing on the ground, on the bed, as he walked. He stepped slowly toward the bathroom. He felt his heart again, quickening now, calm but quickening. His mouth opened, his nostrils flared slightly. He crossed the soft, beautiful carpet, his eyes on the white bathroom door, now ajar. The steam from the shower clouded the edge of the bedroom.
The sound of the shower, so soft.
He reached the door, stopped, paused, then lifted his left hand. He
placed it against the door. The leather of his fingertips left a pair of dots in the steamed dew on the wood, dots that would be impossible to dust or even to pick up chemical trace from, as the gloves were designed above all else to prevent this. He began to push the door in.
Then he felt the vibration.
He reached down. He flipped the cell open. As he read the two words on the small screen, the shock of the message struck his central nervous system like a live wire, nearly dropping him to his knees.
POWER DOWN
.
KKB WORLDWIDE HEADQUARTERS
FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
Igor Karlove stared at the computer screen, bleary-eyed. He had left his office twice in eighteen hours, both times to go to the bathroom.
Suddenly, the scrolling letters came to a halt and the computer beeped. He leaned forward.
“There we go,” he said. He hit the print button, waited for the paper to spit out, then walked with the readout out of his office, down the hall into the trading floor.
“What do we have?” asked Essinger, who was seated at the center table, feet up.
“I have a list,” replied Karlove, holding out the piece of paper. “What this list represents are the one hundred most active traders within the energy complex, per your specs. I won’t bore you with the details of how I built the force-rank algorithm but suffice it to say it’s pretty fucking brilliant; activity was spread out across a massive number of entities in virtually every country on earth.”
Essinger grabbed it, started reading, eyes intent on the paper.
“So what are we supposed to do with this?” asked Essinger. “Top ten are all well-known firms. I can’t imagine—”
“Right, so here’s what I did next,” interrupted Karlove. “I went through all hundred of these, got rid of the ones I knew well, figuring obviously established managers like Paulson, Baupost, et cetera, aren’t going to be involved in something like this. That took it down to about thirty firms. Then I looked for patterns. Same buildings. Law firms. Dates of establishment. That sort of thing. The pattern that was most interesting was legal. I am guessing whoever did this probably isn’t using Cravath, right? I looked at who was using firms out of weird places, Mauritius, Cayman, that sort of thing. There was one firm, PBX, out of Hong Kong, that used a firm out of Guernsey Island, off the UK. PBX was, by the way, ninety-ninth on the list of top one hundred traders. But when I ran the Guernsey domicile back against the entire data set, that’s when something interesting occurred. All of the sudden, it captured a ton of smaller stuff, in different accounts, that were variants on PBX. PBX alone had more than forty different legal entities they ran trades through. In aggregate, PBX’s trading activity would’ve made it the sixth most active trader in the time period leading up to the attacks. I found two other managers with legal out of Guernsey. In fact, all three used the same law firm, Debenshire McGreeley.”
“Who the fuck is Debenshire McGreeley?” asked Essinger.
“Doesn’t matter. The point is, that became an organizing principle. Once we had them in the picture, it was relatively easy. I was able to find the biggest traders by, in effect, building up around who used Debenshire McGreeley. Here’s what we have.”
Karlove handed another piece of paper to Essinger.
“PBX, Passwood-Regent, Kallivar,” said Karlove. “Those funds all had by far the most extensive financial activity within the energy complex. In fact, virtually all of their trades occurred on the same day, just a couple of days before Capitana and Savage.”
“Where are they?”
“PBX, Hong Kong. Passwood-Regent, London. Kallivar, Wall Street.”
“Who prime-brokered these guys?”
“Spread out.”
“Can we find out information about these firms?”
“Already did. All three are shuttered. As of two days ago.”
“Holy shit,” said Essinger. “I was actually kidding when I said this might work.”
“It gets better,” said Karlove, sitting down next to Essinger. “I hacked into the law firm’s server.”
“You what?” asked Essinger, incredulous. “Igor, that’s serious shit. If they caught you—”
“Chill, Josh. I was invisible. Besides, I thought we were hunting terrorists.”
“I didn’t say break the law.”
“Well, too late. Do you want to hear what I found or should I just go turn myself in?”
“Yes, of course.”
“It was easy. Like taking candy from a baby. I was inside their servers in about half an hour.”
“The world is waiting, Igor.”
“All three funds have one fiduciary. Guess where he’s based?”
“Igor—”
“New York City. Guess who it is?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“So have you. You went to Wharton with him.”
“My God,” said Essinger. “It’s Doug Berber, isn’t it? No, wait. Kramer Colasito. I always knew—”
“Stick to your day job, Josh,” interrupted Karlove. “It’s Alexander Fortuna.”
88 TWENTY-FOURTH STREET, N.W.
GEORGETOWN
Jessica finished rinsing her hair, stepped from the shower, and wrapped herself in the big towel. She heard sirens coming from somewhere close by but didn’t give it a second thought until, as she stepped into her bedroom, the front door crashed open downstairs and the sound of shouting echoed up the stairs.
“Police!”
Still wrapped in her towel, she hurried out of her bedroom and looked down from the top of the stairs as uniformed Georgetown police officers stormed into the house, weapons out.
“What the hell is going on?” she said.
The policemen moved into Jessica’s town house. A tall officer stepped across the threshold, looked up.
“Jessica, Bill Baker, Georgetown Police. Hector Calibrisi sent us here.”
She heard her phone beeping. Turned, moved to the bedroom, then the bathroom. She flipped it open.
“What—”
“Oh, thank God,” said Calibrisi.
Within half an hour, an FBI forensics team had scoured Jessica’s town house. They found a cut phone line, but nothing else.
Calibrisi and Jessica rode back to FBI headquarters together. Despite having explained his suspicions, based on the images of Buck wearing the leather gloves, he couldn’t stop apologizing. He escorted her to the roof of the FBI building, where a Black Hawk VH-60N was waiting to fly her to New York City.
“Please, Hector,” Jessica said loudly, above the growing din of the chopper getting ready to take off. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. Better safe than sorry, right?”
“Yeah,” Calibrisi said, smiling, although he knew he’d been right. He stared at Jessica as she climbed into the helicopter and sat down. Snow had started to fall.
Suddenly, inside the chopper, Jessica’s phone beeped.
“Tanzer.”
“Director, this is CENCOM. Can you hold please for Joshua Essinger from KKB.”
“Go ahead.”
“Hi, Jessica?” said Essinger. “This is Joshua Essinger. I work with Ted—”
“Do you have something?” she asked.
“Yes. We may have found the terrorist.”
Buck had run now for more than a mile. He’d disposed of his gloves in two separate trash cans along the way. At the front entrance to Georgetown University, he stopped. He looked around, saw no one. He went to a blue VW Jetta, slammed the butt of his Glock into the glass, shattering it. He opened the door, then started the car. He sped down M Street. He needed to move, and move quickly. The game was over. His neck was now hours away from the gallows.
Calibrisi.
He must be the one running the mole hunt, Buck realized.
He had to think. He had to outthink.
He hit the green button on his cell. The phone started to ring.
“Calibrisi,” said the voice.
“Hi, Hector,” said Buck. “Mind telling me what that was all about?”
Buck waited. The phone was silent.
“Hi, Vic,” he said. “I thought you might call.”
“You did?” said Buck. He took Key Bridge at more than seventy miles per hour, despite the snow that had begun to fall. “We both know what those words mean. Exactly what mission should I abort?”
“I know, Vic,” said Calibrisi.
“You know what exactly?”
“There’s nobody else,” said Calibrisi. “Nobody it could be.”
Buck saw the entrance to the Jefferson Davis Highway. He took the Jetta into the passing lane, got on the Jefferson Davis, pushed the accelerator to the ground. He would be in Alexandria in a matter of minutes, then his house. Five minutes inside was all he needed, and then he would be gone forever.
“Tell me what exactly you’re accusing me of, Hector.”
“Madradora.”
Buck paused. He saw an Alexandria trooper ahead. He slowed down, passed the trooper. After another quarter mile, he sped up.
“Madradora?” said Buck. “Okay. Forgive me. It takes me a while to catch up to you sometimes. It always did.”
“Cut the shit.”
“You cut the shit, asshole,” said Buck, indignant. “You’re accusing me of being a fucking spy? Me? I have given my life to this country. You are a goddamn son of a bitch if you think I would betray this country. Look at my bank account. How dare you.”