True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(29)
“Or I’m accident-prone on top of having paranoid delusions,” he said.
“So that’s it. They win. We run and hide.”
Ian nodded. “And we hope they never find us.”
“That’s no life.”
“It’s better than death,” he said.
“Welcome to fucking Millersburg.”
Langley, Virginia. July 19. 4:47 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
The situation room at the Central Intelligence Agency wasn’t nearly as high-tech as the one at Blackthorn’s headquarters. The concept and general layout were the same but the equipment was older and placed in consoles that looked like they dated back to the Cold War. Where Blackthorn had a media wall, the CIA had a collection of monitors that reminded Cross of a sports bar.
He was greeted like an old friend by the agents in the room, their reaction falling just short of applause, probably because of the cold expression on Healy’s face. Manning the command console was Norman Kelton, who’d been Cross’ right hand for years but was too fiercely loyal to the agency to join him at Blackthorn. Now Kelton had his old job. Kelton never ran an operation without a pipe in his mouth and he had one today. Cross suspected that eating, drinking, and cunnilingus were the only things Kelton did without the pipe.
Kelton rose from his creaking leather office chair. “Hey, Will, did you come back for your chair?”
Cross shook his old friend’s hand. “You can keep it, Norm.”
Kelton gestured to the array of screens on the wall. “Your boys are in position and moving in.”
The center screen displayed a satellite camera view that showed infrared images of several figures moving through a field toward a farmhouse from multiple directions. Two heat signatures were visible in the farmhouse. A satellite was the one toy that Blackthorn didn’t have.
Healy was irritated by what he saw. “You had your people on the ground in Belgium before you walked into the Senate chamber.”
“You say that like preparation is a bad thing,” Cross said.
“Do the Belgians know anything about this operation?”
“We’ll send them a fruit basket once we have Ayoub Darwish and Habib Ebrahimi under interrogation in our safe house in France.” Cross didn’t bother to disguise his irritation. He turned to Kelton. “Why aren’t I seeing clear visuals from the helmet cams? It’s just static.”
“Bad uplink. Could be a hundred reasons for it,” Kelton said. “But I’d bet it’s because your high-end tech is incompatible with our Reagan-era satellites.”
His bet was wrong. The reason was that the signal from the helmet cameras was being intentionally distorted at the source. Cross didn’t want the CIA seeing anything clearly since the entire scene was staged. This was going to be a radio play accompanied by some entertaining graphics.
Being back here again, for the first time since he’d left several years ago, made him realize that he should’ve walked away from the CIA a lot sooner than he did. He’d stayed at the CIA through several presidential administrations, and the various agency directors, as an anonymous, essential cog in the machine because he loved the game of espionage and the global stakes. He believed that America’s strength as a superpower depended on the decisions it made economically, militarily, and diplomatically. The success of those decisions depended on the quality of information gathered by the government’s intelligence agencies.
There had always been big money to be made in corporate espionage or private security but he hadn’t been interested. He’d overseen operations to topple governments, assassinate dictators, infiltrate foreign spy networks, kidnap terrorists, and sabotage enemy weapons systems. He couldn’t get excited about protecting some high-flying CEO, stealing the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken, or sabotaging the launch of a new smartphone. The corporate stakes were mostly financial and rarely lethal. Nobody would kill for the design of the new Camry or die to keep it secret. So where was the fun or challenge in that?
But all that changed after 9/11. That was when the Pentagon began outsourcing some of their all-out war against terror to the private sector. Blackthorn had come to him then, dangling a big salary and stock options in front of him but he’d stayed at the CIA to fight for God and country. Then came the public backlash against the CIA’s secret prisons, enhanced interrogation techniques, eavesdropping on Americans, and extraordinary renditions of terrorists from foreign soil. The aftermath brought budget cuts, increased operational and financial oversight from politicians, and the untenable demand that the agency respect the individual privacy of Americans and the sovereignty of other nations. The politicians were crippling the CIA and, by extension, endangering the country. That was when Cross decided to join Blackthorn. He saw an opportunity for Blackthorn in the restrictions being placed on the agency. Not just to make money, but to gain something much more valuable.
The old adage that “knowledge is power” had never been more accurate than it was today. Thanks to Cross, Blackthorn was on the cusp of controlling the nation’s intelligence gathering. That meant that essentially Blackthorn would be deciding what the government knew about anything. And when that happened, not only would Cross be rich—he’d be pulling the strings on the president and, by extension, the US government, making them dance on the world stage any way he wanted.