Chapter 12
The Las Vegas sun hit my eyes like a strobe light as soon as we left the rental garage at Harry Reid International Airport,
the glare causing me to squint. I gave our GPS a second or two to catch up, then exited the airport. After a few turns we
were on the Vegas Strip, with garish casinos rising out of the desert floor on both sides of the street.
Jennifer said, “This place looks different every time I come here.”
I agreed, but I wasn’t really a good barometer to judge the difference. It’s not like I was visiting every six months. Honestly,
I wasn’t much of a “Vegas” type guy. For one, I didn’t like to gamble, and for another, the entire place reeked of desperation.
Visiting the SHOT show every couple of years was about my limit for Sin City, but I hadn’t picked this destination. The Oversight
Council had, because Mosby and Elizabeth Ellington had decided to stop here on their RV vacation across America, and as the
last people to see Sheriff Marley alive, they were my first step in hunting the Ghost.
Knuckles and Brett had willingly said they’d take the punishment of going to Vegas, but I’d sent them to Utah to see what
they could find. I wasn’t counting on much, since very few in the sheriff’s department were read-on to the Ghost’s incarceration.
In fact, very few in the whole of the United States government knew about his existence.
When Project Prometheus was formed after 9/11, its sole purpose was the killing or capturing of terrorist threats deemed outside the scope of the traditional intelligence or direct-action elements of the United States arsenal—whether due to political complications, United States Code, or the lack of specific capabilities.
Originally, the mission itself was the end state for the Taskforce, as any terrorists we captured could simply be filtered into the steady stream headed to Guantánamo Bay.
That worked fine up until GITMO became a target of worldwide outrage, which caused the US to quit using it for future detainees.
After the US shifted gears, the Taskforce was left with a dilemma: What do we do with folks we captured?
We couldn’t very well turn them over to the Justice Department, as trying to explain how we’d captured them or present any
evidence of their criminality would expose Taskforce operations.
We’d considered going “black site lite,” operating our own detention centers in foreign countries much like the CIA had in
the early days after 9/11, but that was also discarded, as we didn’t have the global reach, connections, and backing that
the CIA had, and attempting to do so was asking—once again—for a compromise of the Taskforce. We’d seen the roasting the CIA
had received for their black sites.
We’d finally decided to use untapped assets we had inside the United States, leveraging handpicked veterans of special operations.
The United States has a wealth of special operations folks who have left the service and are now in both the public and private
sector doing everything from teaching school to selling insurance. Quite a few are in law enforcement.
After doing a scrub of service records like we were validating a recruit for Taskforce selection, we reached out to a select
few with the requisite security clearances who we believed would help without asking too many questions as to why. The idea
was to stash the terrorist in a jail that was run by the special operations veteran, leveraging the infrastructure already
in place for life support. Sprinkled throughout rural areas all over the United States, we called the network of jails the
Cloud.
The name was a play on the computer use of the term, but instead of storing pictures or text messages, we’d “store” the terrorist in a place where nobody on the outside would ever look. Only those with the correct “password”—namely members of Project Prometheus—would even know they existed.
The Utah jail was one such Cloud node, this location dedicated to a terrorist I’d captured years ago. How he’d managed to
escape was still a mystery, but I learned as soon as I’d arrived in Washington, DC, that the Oversight Council wasn’t really
worried about the how. They were only concerned about the possible repercussions to their careers, now that he had.
After Wolffe’s call, we’d immediately stopped the exercise in Charleston, pulling in the candidates and closing out the various
safe houses. Wolffe had already launched a private aircraft to pick us up by the time we’d talked, which told me how big an
issue he considered the Ghost’s disappearance. Within six hours of the phone call we were walking into the sensitive compartmented
information facility—or SCIF—on the fourth floor of Blaisdell Consulting, the cover name on the headquarters building for
Project Prometheus.
Wolffe was seated at the head of a polished conference room table facing a far wall with a gigantic television screen. He
saw us at the door and motioned us to the side, off camera. We took a seat along the wall, and I saw a similar conference
room table on the screen, this one surrounded by the members of the Oversight Council, with the president of the United States
at the head.
He alone appeared calm, with the rest of the members taking turns rotating the panic knob to eleven. Amanda Croft, the secretary
of state, was speaking when we entered, and she was in rare form.
“I have repeatedly said this whole ‘Cloud’ construct was a recipe for disaster. It was only a matter of time before it was
discovered. The CIA learned that through their black site program right after 9/11. Secret prisons never stay secret.”
The director of the CIA, Kerry Bostwick, piped up, saying, “What the hell was the alternative? I suppose we could have just
put a bullet in their heads after interrogation. That would have saved us some risk, but come on, just because the Taskforce
is extrajudicial doesn’t mean we’re sanctioning flat-out murder.”
She spat back, “That will be open to interpretation when this spills out in the press and we’re all standing in front of a judge defending our actions.”
Mark Oglethorpe, the secretary of defense—or secretary of war, depending on what day it was—said, “The Cloud wasn’t exposed
by a leak. This isn’t due to our methods or infrastructure.”
The president’s national security advisor, Alexander Palmer, threw up his hands and said, “For God’s sake, a damn detainee
escaped! I’d say that points to an infrastructure flaw somewhere!”
As usual, they were more concerned with their political careers and placing blame than they were about the actual problem
set. I let them continue bickering and caught Wolffe’s eye, mouthing, On mute?
He nodded, saying, “Yeah, they can’t hear anything, but they can see, so stay off the camera.”
I chuckled and said, “Why’d you call us up here if you’re afraid they’ll see us?”
He said, “Nobody’s asked for you yet, but I haven’t weighed in. It’s coming.”
I said, “What the hell happened? How’d the Ghost escape?”
“We don’t know yet. The sheriff in Utah was simply conducting a transfer, taking him to a new location, and their vehicle
was ambushed. A couple of civilians found him bleeding out, but no sign of the Ghost.”
I said, “Bob Marley?”
“Yeah,” he paused, then said, “Did you know him?”
I shook my head, saying, “Not really. He was Ranger. An old first-batt guy. I met him briefly when I used the Ghost for that
operation in Mexico a few years ago. We knew some of the same people. He was a good man. What happened? Why the transfer?”
“Well, it turns out Sheriff Marley was retiring. He was hanging up his spurs, and after that happened, we were going to lose
our ability to utilize his jail and authority for the Cloud. He gave us plenty of notice, and we developed another Cloud node.
It wasn’t ready yet, but he was going to transfer the detainee to a waystation at Mercury, Nevada. The Ghost was going to
be held there for a month or two before moving to his final destination.”
“Mercury? As in Groom Lake?”
Mercury and Groom Lake were part of the Nevada Test Site, a highly classified piece of desert known to the public as the mystical
Area 51. It was a good choice, as there was so much classified and strange shit going on there from every three-letter agency
in the US that it would be easy to sneak in and out. Nobody at that location asked any questions about any activity that occurred.
He said, “Yeah. It was an overnight trip from Utah. About six hours to transfer, a night in Vegas for Marley, then he’d head
home. Should have been a clean and easy in-and-out.”
“So who hit them?”
“At this point, we have no idea. The police in Utah are at a loss. The only lead they have is a retired couple who found the
vehicle. It was on fire and Marley was bleeding out on the ground. The Ghost was gone.”
“What do they think happened?”
“They’re considering all possibilities. The retired couple said a group of bikers raced by them just before they found the
burning truck. There’s a constant fight against marijuana patches and meth labs in the national forests, so it could have
been a vendetta against Marley and nothing to do with the Ghost.”
Knuckles said, “Was the hit on a high-speed avenue of approach? Like an interstate? Or on the road going to the Ghost detention
site?”
“No. It was about an hour away, inside the mountains.”
“So how’d they ambush Marley?”
“What do you mean?”
Knuckles looked at me, and I knew where he was headed. He said, “They had to know he was traveling that way, and that trip couldn’t have been a pattern of life of his, something he did daily.”
Wolffe thought about that, and I asked the obvious question, “Who knew about the transfer?”
He said, “Only the Taskforce.”
Wolffe took Knuckles’ theory to its logical conclusion, “You think there’s a leak inside the Taskforce?”
Knuckles said, “I think these guys knew Marley would be on that specific road on that specific night, and if what you’re saying is true, the only ones who would have known that were Taskforce personnel.”
“Maybe it was just a target of opportunity. Maybe they ran into Marley on that road accidentally, and what happened, happened.”
I said, “Maybe, but if so, why isn’t there another body at the site? Where’s the Ghost? You think a meth-head biker gang is
going to let a witness live when they’re killing cops?”
Wolffe glanced at the screen and said, “Hang on. It looks like President Hannister’s had enough of the blame game.”
I turned to the screen in time to hear the president say, “Let’s leave the recriminations for later and deal with solving
the problem. The immediate question is the Ghost. Do we release everything we have on the escapee to law enforcement?”
Kerry said, “Sir, that’s asking for trouble. Nobody from Justice is read-on to the Taskforce.”
Because the Taskforce itself worked outside the bounds of United States Code, at its formation it had been determined that
the attorney general of the United States would never be an Oversight Council member. The president had decided it would be
unseemly for someone whose primary job was to faithfully execute the laws of the country acting as a member of a council doing
precisely the opposite.
Palmer said, “We could get him into the system somehow. We can get Justice to play ball. We feed him from CIA, saying they
had a threat vector and he’s now inside the United States.”
Exasperated, Kerry said, “It doesn’t work that way. Are we just going to give them a photo? We don’t even know his real name,
and we don’t have any current intelligence to backstop a ploy like that. Where’s he supposedly from? How come nobody in the
entire intelligence community has heard anything about him at all? He’s not on a single threat tree anywhere, and we’re supposed
to interject into the system that an expert assassin has magically entered the United States and is on the loose? That’s asking
for a compromise of the Taskforce.”
Amanda Croft said, “What do you propose? Let him kill someone first so the FBI can figure out there’s a threat? Let him go out in a blaze of glory as a lone wolf, with the civilian deaths just collateral damage to protect the Taskforce?”
Kerry whipped his head to her and said, “Of course not. It’s not a binary choice.”
Wolffe grinned and said, “Good old Kerry. Here it comes.”
I said, “What?”
“You.”