Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
Once he stepped out of Reagan National Airport, he slid his coat on over his blue blazer and pulled a tie from the front pocket of his trousers.
He’d pre-tied it on the plane, planned on just putting it under his collar and tightening it upon his arrival here, but before he got it over his thick neck, three SUVs stopped directly in front of him.
The back door of the Lincoln Navigator in the center of the trio opened, while the two Chevy Suburbans rumbled, one in front of the Nav, the other just behind.
Just a couple of years earlier, Hanley himself would have been in that Navigator or one like it, but now he hurriedly shoved his tie back into his pocket and climbed inside, a guest in the vehicle.
There in the backseat waiting on him were one man and one woman. William “Trey” Watkins, deputy director for operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Angela Lacy, a senior operations officer in the CIA who worked closely on special projects for the DDO.
Hanley looked back and forth between the two of them, then out the window at the light snow falling in the predawn on this early December morning.
The vehicle rolled away from the arrivals lane, heading towards the exit to the airport; the other two SUVs maintained their positions in front of and behind it.
Matt Hanley just sat there a moment waiting for someone to speak.
When no one did, he addressed DDO Watkins.
“When you set me up as an off-book shop, you made it pretty clear that you and I would not be meeting in person.”
“And yet here we are,” Watkins replied gruffly. “That give you any kind of a tip-off to how much shit is coming your way this morning?”
After another protracted silence, Hanley quipped, “If you guys are bundling me off to a black site, I might have overdressed.”
Lacy looked uncomfortable. Watkins just looked pissed.
Watkins said, “We are debriefing Caprice right now at the embassy in San Jose. She’s surprisingly uninjured, considering the carnage that took place just a few hours ago. When does Violator get back?”
“He’s in the air, in U.S. airspace but a few hours from touchdown. I haven’t seen him, but I texted with him briefly on Signal, just after he dropped Caprice at the embassy. I’ll talk with him on Signal this afternoon, meet with him tomorrow.”
The DDO rubbed his face now. “That whole fucking thing went to hell down there, didn’t it? Just like multiple other intelligence community ops in the past two months.”
Hanley just said, “My guy did not fuck up in Nicaragua.”
“Caprice said he killed two MSS officers who were not posing an immediate threat. That’s one hell of an international incident, in my book.”
“He didn’t know they were MSS.”
“And if he didn’t fucking shoot them dead while hiding in the jungle, he never would have known.
The Chinese could have denied involvement, we could have denied knowing this was a Chinese operation, and life could have continued on without a shooting war between the CIA and the Ministry of State Security. ”
“C’mon, Trey, this isn’t going to start a shoot—”
“You don’t know what this is going to do!” Watkins shouted back.
Hanley sighed. “I spent ten years in Special Forces, I ran the Agency’s Special Activities Division. Then I was DDO, same as you. But I wasn’t there, in Nicaragua, so I’m not going to second-guess my agent.”
He continued. “You, Trey, on the other hand, spent zero seconds doing anything operational—for the military, for the Agency, for the local police of wherever the hell you grew up—and you weren’t there in Nicaragua last night, either.
Nevertheless, here you are, trying to second-guess Violator and his actions.
“I don’t get to make the call on whether or not he fucked up, and neither do you.”
Watkins took a few slow breaths, obviously to calm himself down. “I’m not here to dress you or your man down for Nicaragua. I’m not going to think about Nicaragua again.”
“Well, someone clearly leaked that extraction plan, so you better be thinking about Nicaragua.”
“I know someone leaked it. Someone up here. Managua station isn’t the problem. Langley is. That is my focus.”
Hanley said, “You know, for sure, that the compromise came from inside the house?”
Lacy answered this. “It’s been happening for the last nearly three months. Ops have been blown that couldn’t have been blown at the sharp edge; they were blown in Washington. We don’t know where or how.”
Watkins added, “The problem is, the FBI is making the same claim. State is making the same claim. JSOC had a cell blown a couple weeks ago in Nigeria. Delta Force had to slip out of their safe house just minutes before it was raided by a company of government troops. Nobody outside of JSOC knew where that safe house was.”
Hanley thought a moment. “If everyone in the IC is getting hit, then that sounds like an executive branch compromise of some sort. Somebody that’s privy to that diverse a set of intelligence.”
Watkins said, “Thought of that, of course, but the granularity doesn’t lend itself to an executive branch leak. Code words, frequencies, logistics. Our enemies seem to have just what they need, just when they need it.”
“And by ‘enemies,’ you mean the Chinese?”
Watkins shook his head. “No. Last night, two Chinese got smoked by your boy. But we don’t know the leak went through China.
Could have gone through Nicaragua. In Tunis, there was no hint of Chinese involvement; ditto Addis Ababa.
I mean, yeah, China is active in Africa, Central America, pretty much everywhere, but other than the two shooters Violator killed last night, we can’t say the Chinese are directly involved in the intelligence leak. ”
Hanley thought about it a moment. “The ODNI would have knowledge of all operations and might have a more detailed understanding of how they would be carried out.”
To this, Lacy said, “One of our working theories is this might be someone at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So far, the DNI herself has started an investigation, but she hasn’t found any interrelation to the compromises.”
“If there is no interrelation to the compromises, then maybe you are looking at multiple compromises.”
“And if I’m looking at multiple compromises popping up around the same time,” Watkins said, “I am not inclined to see this as a coincidence. It’s some player with the ability to cause leaks all across the intelligence community.”
Hanley sat up straighter. “You’re talking about someone high up the food chain in the American IC passing this intelligence.”
“That’s the worst-case scenario. It’s also starting to look more and more plausible.”
Lacy said, “What do you think, Matt?”
He considered this a moment. “Who knew the location of the extraction in Nicaragua last night?”
“Almost no one.”
“Almost no one in the IC means fifty, one hundred people.”
Watkins shrugged. “It’s a bureaucracy. What are you going to do?”
“You need a list. You need to not rule anyone out. You need to investigate this.”
Watkins said, “So now I’ll circle back to the beginning of this conversation. I don’t trust anyone I work with.”
“The director of the CIA included?”
“I’ve discussed this with Director Phillips, of course. He just told me to figure out what the problem was and to tie it off. He doesn’t understand the magnitude; he just doesn’t want the fallout to affect him.”
“Yeah, well, the fallout almost cost Violator his life.”
After a pause and a look from Lacy, Watkins said, “I do have concerns about Gauntlet Group. They are everywhere in the IC these days. They aren’t supposed to be seeing anything that would have caused these operations to go off the rails like they did, but if you want to talk about commonalities, every single one of the seventeen departments in the IC has Gauntlet contractors doing some work with them.
Security, IT, transpo, comms, hardware, whatever. This is new, and this is a problem.”
“Gauntlet employees are vetted,” Hanley countered.
“Once upon a time, Matt, Denny Carmichael was vetted.”
Denny Carmichael had been a former deputy director for operations of the CIA, and he’d been dirty. Hanley himself had been involved in bringing him down.
After a moment, Hanley said, “I get your point.”
Watkins said, “I am going to use you and your assets to find where the problem lies, and I’m going to use you and your assets to put an end to this…whatever it is.”
“Okay,” Hanley said, but his voice sounded dubious. He cocked his head as something occurred to him. “What aren’t you guys telling me?”
Angela asked, “What do you mean?”
To Watkins, Matt said, “You stood me and my team up as an off-book program right around the time this shit started happening. That makes me wonder if you knew this was coming somehow, or if you were setting me and my men up to take the fall for it.”
Watkins barked an angry laugh. “A setup? You don’t think I’d swing by the neck, same as you, if I was caught setting you up in an off-book program?”
“But…but you knew it was coming. You knew there was some sort of compromise of U.S. intelligence, and that’s why you needed a small group you could trust, a small group you could run outside the infrastructure.”
Watkins shrugged now. “There have been signs that I was losing hold of secrets, that there was a leak somewhere in the U.S. intelligence community. And then there were signs that the leak was bigger than my building.”
Watkins took a long breath. “Know this, Matt. I can do a lot to protect you. But I can’t protect your assets. They kick in a door in D.C. and put a bullet into a U.S. citizen’s brain, and then they get caught by the cops…there’s not a damn thing I can do for them.”
“My guys understand. They’ll do their jobs. But frankly, Trey, if I were you, I’d be more worried about the cesspool of D.C. sucking you in than I’d be worried about Violator or Hightower or anybody else on my team getting caught by five-oh.”
“Believe me, I am,” Watkins said, and then he asked, “What resources do you need to help me?”
“Jim Pace.” Pace was a former CIA Special Activities Division paramilitary officer who had moved into a role at the Agency as a case officer. Hanley had worked with the man for years, and he understood his worth.
“What about him?” Watkins asked.
“He’s proven himself as an investigator. Have him looking into this, give him carte blanche, tell him to report to Lacy here.” Hanley continued, “You know about us, Angela Lacy knows about us. Pace can know about us; I don’t want anyone else involved. Lacy can talk to me.”
Trey Watkins said, “Agreed. Angela will be your cutout to Jim Pace and his investigation. How soon till Hightower is back with you and ready?”
“He won’t be operational for another week, but I’ll get him back here and brief him when I brief the other assets tomorrow. I don’t need him to run and gun, just to sit and listen.”
“Good. I’ll get Pace working on this exclusively, and we’ll keep you informed via Lacy.
Brief your boys about what might be coming down the pike, because I have a funny feeling that when we identify whoever or whatever is compromising our operations, we’re going to find a bad actor right here in America, and I am not going to get the FBI involved. ”
Watkins added. “We’ll deal with it ourselves. I’ll have you and your boys kill the son of a bitch, whoever it turns out to be.”
Matt smiled a little, gave a nod. “Spoken like a man who’s finally seen the light.”
“I’ve seen the dark, Matt.”
“Same thing.”
Five minutes later the Navigator pulled up to the departures lane at Reagan National Airport.
Hanley got out and headed inside, ready to get on his 8:20 a.m. return flight to Norfolk.
He had to get his team together quickly, and he had to keep them as far away from the real apparatus of the U.S. intelligence community as possible.
Last night Gentry barely had any dealings with the CIA; he’d only been connected to the Agency via the physical extraction of the agent.
But that small connection to the IC had nearly cost him his life.
Hanley told himself he’d stay away from everyone and everything in the community other than Lacy and Watkins, and he’d let Jim Pace figure out where the leak was coming from.
And then Hanley and his men would go and plug it.
When your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
Hanley’s only tool was a couple of assassins.
He would plug the leak by killing the leaker, whoever that turned out to be.