Viking Bay (9 page)

12
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Kay returned to the Callahan Group's K Street headquarters the next day and began working with Anna Mercer, Sylvia Sorenson, and Eli Dolan on the pitch she'd be giving to Ara Khan.

Sylvia's role was to make sure that Kay had a basic understanding of Afghan law as it applied to mining and mineral rights. Kay didn't have to know all the legal ins and outs. She just had to know enough that if Ara said that what Callahan wanted to do couldn't be done legally, Kay would be able to say:
Well, I think it can because . . .
Kay was also surprised that when Sylvia talked about the law, she didn't act like the shy introvert Kay had met in Callahan's conference room. She was very articulate and very sure of herself. She even snapped once at Eli when he disagreed with something she said.

The biggest surprise to Kay, however, was Anna Mercer. Sylvia was good with facts, and so was Eli. Eli was able to tell her how the mining operation would be accomplished, how much money could be made, and what would be needed in terms of infrastructure.
But Mercer was better at
selling
: how to present information in the most compelling way, how to frame arguments in a manner that would be best suited to Ara Khan's personality. Mercer would pretend to be Ara and would toss out the kind of questions and objections she expected Ara to make, and then would coach Kay on how to respond. Mercer may not have been the most likable person Kay had ever known, but she was very bright.

While having martinis with Eli the night before, Kay had not only learned about the Swiss connection, she'd also learned more about the
people she worked with. When she'd asked him about himself and his coworkers, he said he'd be happy to tell her everything that was already a matter of public record but couldn't say anything about what they had done for Callahan.

She found out that what Callahan had told her about his background the first time Kay met him was true. He'd graduated from Notre Dame's ROTC program and, thanks to some family connections and a lot of luck, ended up spending two years at the Pentagon as a lackey on the staff of an assistant secretary of defense. The assistant secretary took note of him, and after he moved to the CIA, and after Callahan completed his military obligation, Callahan joined him at Langley. Callahan then spent the next twenty years at the CIA, and while he was there, he was engaged in covert operations and mission planning and had the opportunity to mingle with various luminaries at the White House and the Pentagon. He quit the CIA, moving back to the Pentagon to work for the secretary of defense for a couple of years, then over to the White House as a deputy to the president's national security advisor, where he apparently impressed George W. Bush.

Sylvia's story was somewhat similar to Callahan's in that she also began her career in the military, in her case the navy. According to Eli, Sylvia had been raised in an Appalachian coal-mining hamlet and had been dirt poor—like barely-able-to-afford-shoes poor. She enlisted with the navy after graduating from high school and fortunately the navy recognized her intelligence, sent her to college, then law school. It took her ten years to become an officer and lawyer, and then she was obligated to give the navy ten more years of her life. “She was a JAG lawyer,” Eli said, “and held the rank of commander. Callahan met her when she was stationed at the Pentagon.”

“She doesn't seem like the type that would work for Callahan,” Kay had said.

“Sylvia's incredibly bright,” Eli said. “She doesn't have the personality to be a litigator, but no one knows the law like her and nobody can
learn the law faster than her. And she's not a field agent—she hardly ever leaves the office on K Street—so working for Callahan in a lot of ways isn't much different than working for a law firm.”

“Yeah, but
why
would she work for Callahan? Why didn't she just stay in the navy or sign on with a normal law firm?”

“She works for Callahan because he pays her extremely well. She's making three times as much as she was making as a navy commander and she probably knows she'd never make partner in a big firm. And she needs the money because of her mother. Her mom, who's been living with her for almost a decade, has had every disease known to man and it's cost Sylvia a bundle to pay for her medications and nurses to take care of her.”

“What about Mercer?” Kay had asked.

Anna Mercer, Eli said, began her career in the State Department, then moved over to the CIA looking for adventure, and someplace along the way attached herself to Callahan's coattails. She followed along behind Callahan as his assistant when he moved over to the Pentagon, and then came with him when he formed the Callahan Group.

“Anna's a bit bitter, however,” Dolan said.

“Why's that?” Kay had asked.

“Because she's figured out that she's never going to be anything more than Callahan's number two, and now that bothers her. She thought at some point someone would recognize that she was just as capable as Callahan, if not more so, and she'd be given a job where she wasn't a deputy to anyone. She's mentioned to me several times that if she'd stayed on at State when Hillary was there, she's positive that Hillary would have been impressed with her and, with Hillary's backing, she could have been the next secretary. Or something.”

“And how about you?”

“My story's pretty typical, too,” Eli said. “I got the usual Harvard MBA . . .”

He said this like every third person on the planet had one.

“. . . hired on at Goldman, did quite well there, then when Hank Paulson and a bunch of other Goldman people went down to Treasury to help out after the financial meltdown, I tagged along. After Treasury, I spent a little time over at the OMB, and working there . . .”

Kay had finally looked up the OMB: It stood for the Office of Management and Budget. According to OMB's website its core mission was
to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch—
whatever the hell that meant. As near as Kay could figure, the OMB helped the president develop a budget and then spend the money. She also learned that when Dolan said he spent “a little time over at OMB” he actually meant he ran the organization for a year.

“. . . I learned quite a bit more about how money gets moved around in Washington, which is what made me attractive to Callahan.”

“How'd you meet him?” Kay asked.

“I can't get into that. All I can say is that he needed somebody like me for a specific job one time, told me about himself and what the Callahan Group does, and I agreed to help him.” He hesitated before he added, “It almost makes me blush to say this, but I wanted to give back to my country. My family has been very fortunate, and so have I, and since I never enlisted in the military, I decided to join him. The other reason I signed on with him is, quite frankly, it sounded like fun—and it has been.”

Fun?
Maybe figuring out a way to get lithium out of a place like Afghanistan and putting a guy like Sahid Khan in a position of power so he could be controlled by the U.S. government was his idea of fun, but it certainly wasn't Kay's idea of fun. She remembered one time in Florida when she was part of a team sent into the Everglades to bust a guy with a meth lab protected by pit bulls and guarded by idiots with assault rifles—now,
that
had been fun. It was like the difference between a man who liked chess and a woman who liked . . . well, hockey.

She asked him one last question about himself, deep into her
second martini: “Are you married? I mean, I can see you're not wearing a ring, but . . .”

Kay's last long-term relationship, which had gone on for over a year, had been with a married man—an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego. In some ways, before Jessica moved in with her, she preferred affairs with married men, as they tended not to be particularly clingy and rarely wanted to marry her. Kay had been married once, for eight months when she was twenty-three, and had no desire to get married again. After Jessica started living with her, however, she didn't feel right about sleeping with some other woman's husband—she couldn't say why this was so, but that's the way it was—and she stopped seeing the assistant U.S. attorney.

The fact was, her sex life was in the toilet and it was a situation she needed to rectify. She didn't feel comfortable bringing men home for one-night stands—not with Jessica sleeping in the next room—and in the short time they'd been living in D.C., she hadn't met anyone that she thought would be anything more than a one-night stand.

Eli Dolan, however, might be a whole different story. He intrigued her. He was smart and funny and incredibly good-looking—and rich. He was a
catch
, as her late mother used to say.

In answer to her question about being married, Eli said, “No, I'm not married. I was married for about five years to a girl I met in college—my parents adored her—but we went our separate ways.”

“Why?” Kay asked.

Dolan hesitated. “I guess, to be completely honest, after we'd been married for a while I found out she just wasn't that interesting to be with and I couldn't see myself spending the rest of my life with her.”

Hmm
. Kay didn't know how she felt about that answer.

After all the personal stuff was out of the way, he told her about the Swiss connection, and to hear Dolan tell the story, what he'd done was quite simple, although it didn't sound simple at all to Kay.

“We obviously need a mining company to get the lithium out of the
ground, but like Callahan told you, we wanted to be able to control the company. Our objective is to stockpile lithium, not to turn a profit. We also didn't want to use a U.S. company, because of anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan. The company we finally decided to use is an old Swiss company called Glardon Mining. It has experience with international mining, mostly in Africa, and good engineers. But the main reason we selected Glardon was because it was vulnerable.

“The company was founded by a man named Gustav Glardon and has been around for seventy years. Gustav's son, Ernst, now runs it. Unfortunately for Glardon's employees, Ernst is an idiot who has run the business into the ground. Not only that, he's also an incompetent crook who's been embezzling from his own company. In the last six months, the Callahan Group acquired the controlling interest in Glardon and I've sat down with Ernst and explained to him that he's now working for me and if he doesn't do what I tell him, he'll spend several years in a Swiss prison.

“It was easy,” Dolan concluded.

13
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When Alpha called Bravo and said they needed to talk privately, Bravo knew Alpha's name, because they'd spoken before when the Callahan Group was investigating companies to provide security for the mining operation. Bravo was surprised, of course, by the meeting place, but agreed without complaint. Bravo needed the money too much to argue with a potential client, no matter how strange the client's demands might seem.

Meeting with Finley hadn't been dangerous. Finley's only weapon was his mind, and he wasn't physically impressive. Had it been necessary to dispatch Finley, Alpha had no doubt that would have been possible, even easy. Bravo was a different story. Bravo was a trained killer.

And where Finley had been motivated by arrogance and the technical challenge of the job, Bravo could only be swayed with money. And if Bravo had a conscience, which seemed unlikely, he might report Alpha to Callahan. A more likely possibility was that Bravo would demand a bigger slice of the pie and he might even think, considering his role in the operation, that he was in charge and Alpha was working for him instead of the other way around.

All Alpha knew for sure was that if Bravo didn't agree to cooperate, he'd have to be killed. Bravo couldn't leave the meeting place knowing Alpha's plan. But killing the man was not going to be easy. Alpha had no practical experience when it came to murder, whereas Bravo had a lifetime's worth of experience and there was no doubt, considering his profession, that he would come to the meeting armed. To make matters worse, if it became necessary to kill him, then it would
also be necessary to deal with the logistics of committing a capital crime: making sure no evidence was left behind, that no witnesses existed, and figuring out what to do with the body.

It was with all these considerations in mind that Alpha chose the meeting place: a five-hundred-acre state forest near Strasburg, Virginia, with the ominous-sounding name of Devil's Backbone. The forest was about halfway between Bravo's company in West Virginia and Washington, D.C., and therefore convenient for both parties. The main reason Alpha selected the place, however, was that it was a research forest, not open to the general public, and one particular campsite was especially isolated. Devil's Backbone was, in other words, a good place to murder a man and dispose of his corpse.

—

ALPHA ARRIVED AT
the campsite an hour early; it wouldn't do for Bravo to get there first. The campsite was surrounded by trees, the small clearing for pitching a tent was overgrown with brush, and there was nothing else there but a fire pit covered with a rusty barbecue grate and a dilapidated, wooden picnic table. It didn't appear as if the site had been used in years, and it was unlikely that anyone would decide to use it today—or so Alpha hoped. When Bravo arrived, Alpha, as planned, was already sitting at the picnic table and the gun was in Alpha's lap, obscured by the top of the table.

Bravo was in excellent physical condition, and he moved with the grace of a large, powerful feline as he walked toward the table. He sat directly across from Alpha as expected. The gun in Alpha's lap was a Heckler & Koch P30 9mm pistol equipped with a silencer, and, if necessary, Alpha would fire under the table, never showing the gun. If the first shot didn't kill Bravo, the next one would.

Like with Finley, Alpha began with a discussion of Bravo's abysmal financial situation. He immediately became angry that his privacy had been invaded—although almost all the data was a matter of public
record. Alpha knew what really angered him was that he was a proud man and humiliated by his circumstances.

Alpha's whole argument boiled down to that old saying:
Which would you prefer? A bird in the hand or two in the bush?
It was really that simple. If Bravo's company was awarded the security contract, and
if things went as Callahan planned, the company would eventually make a lot of money—the important words being
if
and
eventually
. The problem was that there was no guarantee that Callahan would succeed and
eventually
could be two or three years down the road.

Alpha pointed out that even if Callahan was successful, it was going to be a long time before the mining operation actually started—and during that time, Bravo's company would have nothing to protect and, therefore, no large amounts of money coming in. Furthermore, it was always possible that the boys in Kabul would manage to screw everything up and the security contract could be given to somebody else, in which case Bravo would be left out in the cold. The last thing Alpha told him was that the money from the security contract would go to his company—not him personally—and it would be visible to the gnomes at the IRS. The taxman would never see the money Alpha gave him.

So which did he prefer: the bird in hand or the two in the bush?

It actually didn't take him very long to make up his mind—no more than ten minutes. He was a man used to making decisions, and Alpha had been sure before sitting down with him that the bloodshed wouldn't bother him. He'd killed before and in large numbers. Killing, after all, had been his job. He was moved by the money; the amount Alpha was offering was simply too much for him to pass up.

After he made his decision, they began to talk about the details of how to execute the plan—and Alpha relaxed and put the gun back in a pocket. Bravo actually proved to be quite helpful; he was an experienced tactician, not merely a
killer.