C
HAPTER
44
N
atasha parked her car at the sharp elbow of a residential road that bordered the arboretum. Beyond a couple of old concrete barriers to the east was a dark, abandoned lane. She got out of the car, surveyed the street once more for any trailing police cars, hopped over the barrier, and ran down the road, into the darkness and away from civilization. She spotted the chopper about three hundred feet away, and even with it on the ground she could see its beams, brilliant in the twilight. She could hear the rotor from where she was, too, powered up and ready for takeoff. She looked back, half expecting to see Morgan’s headlights behind her. But no; everything was dark.
As she approached the chopper, she saw a man standing in front of it, facing her. In the half light, she could just make out his facial features. It was a beefy man with greasy black hair and bulging eyes. Roland Vinson.
“What is going on here?” she demanded, shouting over the roar of the motor and blades of the helicopter.
“Change of plans, sweetheart,” he shouted back.
She reached for her weapon, but he was faster. He aimed the sleek black silencer at her chest and fired twice. She collapsed, her legs splayed at awkward angles. She gasped, and then her breathing settled into a labored wheeze. Her lungs, she realized, were filling with blood. She tried to get up, but it was as though there were a heavy rock on her chest. Her mind was already far away. It felt as though to move a finger would take all her strength. Vinson walked toward her until his feet, huge in ugly crocodile shoes, were planted next to her head. He aimed right between her eyes.
“It’s too bad I gotta mess up such a pretty face.”
She kept her eyes firmly on him, defiantly. If he was killing her, she would make her death her own and stare down the barrel of the gun that did it. She fought through the haze. She wanted to be fully conscious for it.
But it didn’t come. There were gunshots, and before she knew it, Vinson looked up and retreated toward the chopper, shooting back at an unknown target. She lay there languishing as the firefight raged around her. She was enveloped in a whirlwind as the chopper took off. Her blond hair whipped across her face. The miasma of death was setting in now, and everything seemed distant. The shooting continued as the rotors slowly faded into the distance. Then there was silence.
Her eyes flicked upward, and through the haze she saw Cobra standing over her in the twilight. The world was far away now, as if she was underwater and sinking deeper.
Not yet
, she thought.
One more thing
. It took all her willpower to move her trembling hand into the secret pocket in her pants and to drag out with her weak fingers the small object. She closed her palm around it. Then she forced her laboring lungs to say one last word, in a weak wheeze.
“Andr . . .”
The name of her brother died on her lips, and the world went dark.
Morgan knelt over T’s lifeless body as Conley approached and asked, “Is there any chance you saw who was on that helicopter?”
Morgan shook his head distractedly. He was looking at her face, contorted with pain. Her beautiful sky-blue eyes still retained their wild intensity, even in death. He shut them gently and looked at her in the quickly fading light. As much as he could never forgive her for what she had done, their enmity seemed not to matter as much now that she was dead. Instead, he felt a strange camaraderie with her, as if she hadn’t been hunting him, but rather, as if it was still that first night at the ball; as if she hadn’t been told a lie and had lived her life without bitterness and had had no score to settle with him; as if they had remained friends to the end, and resentment had not turned her into a cynical, amoral, rogue agent. In silence he honored her as the friend she once was and the great warrior that she had been to the end. He took her hand in his one last time and was surprised to find that there was something nested in it.
He gently pried apart her fingers and found a small, featureless black metallic chip. He held it up to Conley. “You know what this is?” Conley shook his head. Whatever it was, it might be important. Morgan slipped it into his pocket.
“Lowry,” Morgan said. “Lowry, come in.” He got no response.
“I guess we’re out of range,” said Conley. “Come on. Let’s get back.”
They walked briskly back up the dark road and got into the GTO.
“What now?” asked Conley.
“We regroup,” said Morgan, starting the engine and rolling out. “T may be dead, but Nickerson isn’t. There’s still a mole in the CIA. They’re still arming Afghan insurgents.”
“Cobra,” Conley cut in softly.
Morgan continued. “. . . and for all we know, they’re going to try to kill Senator McKay again, and I’m betting they’re going to go for the quick and dirty kill this time.”
“Cobra,” Conley repeated, “Morgan. Maybe it’s time for us to cut our losses and leave. Take Jenny and Alex and get out of the country. Find a nice, quiet place to retire.”
“And what? Let them get away with it?”
“They already have, Morgan. The Agency wants to kill us. Nobody else is going to believe our word. There’s just two of us against all of them.”
“Then we keep fighting, Conley. We keep coming at them until we win.”
“Or until we die, Morgan? Is that it?”
Morgan didn’t answer because their discussion was cut short. Three squad cars turned onto the street they were on, tires squealing and lights flashing.
“Shit!” Morgan downshifted to second gear, and with a twist of the wheel the car turned a complete 180, rubber burning on asphalt. They tore off in the opposite direction, away from the approaching squad cars. Almost immediately, four more turned onto the street ahead of them. Morgan tromped the gas pedal.
“Cobra, what are you doing?” Conley exclaimed.
“We’re going to get past them!”
The cars ahead massed rapidly, blocking the road ahead. Morgan accelerated.
“Cobra!”
“We’ll plow through if we have to. We can make it!”
“No, Cobra, we can’t!”
“
We can make it through!
”
“Cobra! We can’t! Let it go!”
Gritting his teeth, Morgan pulled the hand brake and stopped the car with a controlled spin. The cars that had been chasing them closed in a circle around them. At least a dozen policemen scrambled out and took cover behind their cars, guns aimed at Morgan and Conley.
“Get out of the vehicle with your hands up!”
They were completely surrounded. There was nothing to do but surrender.
C
HAPTER
45
F
or nearly an hour Morgan and Conley sat handcuffed in a stationary squad car, guarded by two shotgun-wielding cops, while other officers talked among themselves and made phone calls. There seemed to be some confusion about what to do with them. With nothing really to be done, the two sat tight and waited.
Eventually, a conclusion was reached, and about half of the police cars dispersed, while the rest of the force remained to guard them. Finally, a small caravan of black town cars pulled up alongside them, and from the lead car emerged the weasel, Harold Kline, looking smug.
“These boys are ours, Sergeant,” he said, presenting a piece of paper to the officer in charge. “That little document means they’re under our purview. Your discretion in this matter is both appreciated and absolutely mandatory.”
The police sergeant looked at him with an expression that said, “
What a jack-off!
” But he talked to some of his fellow officers, pointing at the two captives. Morgan and Conley were yanked out of the car and recuffed behind their backs with the CIA’s high-security restraints.
“You fellas going to behave?” said Kline.
“Where are you taking us?” demanded Morgan.
“You’ll find out,” said Kline. Then he addressed the agents. “Load them up. I want them in separate cars, in full shackles. Keep your guns out of their reach, and watch their hands! The last thing you want to do is underestimate them.”
They led Morgan to one of the cars, and once inside they cuffed his ankles. There was an agent on either side of him, and he was instructed not to move. The cuffs dug into his back uncomfortably.
As the car began moving, he wondered where he would end up. They wouldn’t bring formal charges against him, not with everything he knew from his past missions. There was a lot of dirty laundry that nobody wanted aired.
Plus, there was plenty the CIA could do if they wanted to make him disappear, and the fact that he lived mostly off the grid would only make that easier for them. Would they ship him off to a secret prison in the Middle East? Or would he be the victim of an unfortunate “accident“? And, most of all, what would happen to Jenny and Alex now? But as they drove, it became abundantly clear where they were going.
The car came to a stop sometime later at CIA Headquarters. They yanked him out the door. Conley was brought out of his car just a few feet away from him, being escorted, like him, by two men.
The procession walked into the building, and even though it was a Saturday night, the place was still fully manned, with suits walking in and out. Whatever time it was, it was always noon somewhere in the world.
Morgan saw a small group of people standing and facing them and realized that among them was Jeffrey Boyle, looking stiff and official, flanked by several security officers.
“Gentlemen, kindly detain him,” Boyle said calmly. Morgan braced himself for rough treatment. But to his surprise, they surrounded Kline, two of them with weapons drawn.
“What the hell is going on here, Jeffrey?” Kline demanded.
One of the officers handcuffed him and patted him down.
“You are being charged with conspiracy to commit murder, for the attempted assassination of Senator Lana McKay,” said Boyle.
“What? Is this some kind of joke?” asked Kline, perplexed and indignant. “I had nothing to do with that! On what evidence are you arresting me?”
“It’s all here, page after page, the record of your electronic communications with the operative implicated in an assassination attempt,” said Boyle. “All of which point to your direct involvement in the planning and execution of the attempt on Senator McKay’s life.”
Kline’s eyes widened, and the color drained from his face. “I don’t know what those documents are. It’s a frame job! A dirty frame job! Jeffrey, you have to believe me!”
“Spare us,” said Boyle dispassionately. “You’ll have an opportunity to defend yourself in court. Now, take this traitor away.”
They escorted Kline, still protesting his innocence, out of the building. Boyle’s attention turned to Morgan.
“Seems like I owe you an apology. You were right all along: there was a mole in the CIA, working right under our noses. I was a fool not to see it. But it became increasingly clear to me that something didn’t add up, so I had Kline investigated. And you were right.”
Morgan regarded him with undisguised animosity.
“In light of these developments, I consider your hostile actions entirely justified.” He looked at Conley. “The same goes for you, Cougar. You can’t imagine how happy I was to discover you were alive.”
Then, addressing their guards, Boyle said, “Please release them from their handcuffs.” He turned back to Morgan and Conley. “Your names will be cleared. If you wish, Cougar, you will be reinstated as an operative, pending an investigation of the events of the past two weeks. We will also choose to overlook the involvement of a certain Mr. Lowry, who is already inside being debriefed. Fair?”
Morgan walked up close to him and spoke in a menacing whisper. “You sent an assassin after me and my family. That’s not something I’m going to forgive and forget.”
“I sincerely hope you will put yourself in my shoes one day and change your mind about that. But I am truly sorry, Cobra. I hesitated to believe that there was a mole, because I did not want to believe that such a grave breach had happened on my watch. It was my mistake, and I openly admit that.”
Morgan swung his fist and let him know what he thought of Boyle’s apology, and his point hit the director right in the jaw. Morgan was tackled to the floor and restrained by four agents.
“Let him go,” said Boyle, touching his jaw tenderly. “That was a freebie, Cobra, because I happen to be in an apologetic mood. I recommend that you don’t try it again.”
Morgan glowered at him. As Boyle’s eyes then focused somewhere behind him, Morgan turned around to see that a lean and muscular woman, dressed professionally and with a no-nonsense, close-cropped haircut, had just walked in from outside.
“Ah, Julia, just in time,” said Boyle. “Cobra, this is Julia Carr. She was Kline’s second-in-command at the NCS. Julia, it seems you just got a battlefield promotion. You’ll be taking over Kline’s duties provisionally as Deputy Director, effective immediately.”
“Is that why I was called in? What happened to Harold?”
“You will be filled in on everything shortly. Now please ensure that these two gentlemen are debriefed.”
Julia Carr nodded.
“Gentlemen,” she said, and the three of them walked together into the bowels of the CIA.