Ньют Гингрич - Collusion

“I sent you to Ukraine to keep you out of the public eye and what do you do?” Kim said, completely unaware of what had just happened. “Senator Stone called State this morning. You got any idea what my embassy contracts are worth?”

“What’d you expect?”

“There’s an old Korean expression—‘It is a world where people will cut off your nose and eat it if you close your eyes.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

“Then why didn’t you say it’s a dog-eat-dog world? And in this scenario, who’s the dog eating?”

“All subtlety is lost on you.”

Garrett was Kim’s employee, but they didn’t act like it. Their roles had been reversed when they first met in Asadabad, Afghanistan, near the eastern Pakistan border. Kim had been fresh meat, a computer geek sent by the Navy as part of a “reconstruction team.” Most Americans didn’t realize the Navy had people in-country. They thought they were only aboard ships. Kim’s job was winning the hearts and minds of a fledgling Afghan provincial government. Garrett’s job was killing Islamic jihadists. Both were good at what they did. Three months in, an ambush. IEDs. RPGs. Garrett dragged a wounded Kim to safety. His injuries were his ticket home. A Purple Heart. An honorable discharge. Within a year, he’d become Washington’s newest cybersecurity wunderkind. Gobbling up other Beltway bandits with juicy government contracts, expanding into the ex-military security guard business at embassies. U.S. Marines were there to destroy all classified information if under local attack. State had protective details assigned for each ambassador and top aides. But the first line of defense outside the embassy grounds was the host country—only, dialing 911 didn’t do much good in nations hostile to the U.S. That’s where Kim’s private ex-military force plugged the gap. Civilian warriors. Modern-day mercenaries. Recent world tensions had made that gap much wider and much more lucrative. At thirty-two, Kim had become a multimillionaire running a global company from his Tysons Corner sanctuary. Brett Garrett had taken a much different path after their stint together. After Cameroon, it had been Kim who’d rescued him when he’d become an untouchable.

“Senator Stone is a vengeful—” Kim cut short his own sentence as he smashed his palm against the SUV’s horn at a driver who’d cut him off.

Garrett chuckled. “Seriously. You need a driver.”

“Don’t be that guy. He cut me off.”

“Just saying, with all your money—and stop crying about Stone. You knew about him and me, but you hired me anyway.”

“It sucks to be you. My lawyers will deal with Stone and State. Kiev might actually be good for future business.”

Kim honked at another motorist, this one for moving too slow. He swerved around the car and let loose with a string of Korean words. The other driver raised his third finger.

“You’re not doing much to change ethnic stereotypes,” Garrett said.

“Time is money, and there’s a guest waiting in my office. FBI special agent Valerie Mayberry. My secretary told her to come at three o’clock, but she showed up at two.”

“Why? The bureau, agency, and State already greeted me at the gate.”

Kim shrugged. “She knew I was picking you up. Said she needed to speak privately to you. ASAP.”

“Did it ever cross your mind that I might not want to speak to her? ASAP?”

“Play nice. I’ve got contracts with the bureau, too. Besides, you are single and lonely and don’t have any friends except for me, and she’s attractive.”

“You’ve already met her? And you’re my boss, not my friend.”

“Looked her up. Twenty-eight, no Facebook page, no LinkedIn, actually little public on social media.”

“For a cyber expert, that’s pretty weak.”

“Which is my point. Someone’s cleaned up after her.”

“Undercover?”

“My guess.”

“Okay, let’s not drag this out. If you didn’t meet her and she’s not on Facebook and she’s working undercover, how do you know what she looks like?”

“A photo. She’s pungbuhan and a widow. ”

“Wealthy.”

“Your Korean is getting better.”

“ Neoui sumgyeol-i agchwiga nanda .”

Kim laughed and hit the steering wheel with his palm at Garrett’s bungled mispronunciation. “I believe you just told me my breath smelled bad.”

“Then my Korean is getting better. A widow?”

“A photo at her husband’s funeral posted by a friend.”

“That’s the photo? You saw a picture of a widow at a funeral, and you thought she looked hot? You need treatment.”

Kim chuckled. “Her husband was a magazine reporter who got himself killed in the White Mountains.”

“A real reporter or agency?”

“C’mon, you know CIA rules prohibit their employees from posing as reporters.”

Garrett grunted.

Kim said, “He was a legit journalist and an unlucky one. He talked his way onto a supply helo making a delivery in the mountains. Wrong day. Wrong flight. A green on blue. Afghan commando, who we’d trained, blew an entire Sea Knight to pieces with a vest. Unlucky bastard.”

“A Sea Knight?” Garrett said. “You sure. I thought we dumped them years ago.”

“I tell you about this reporter being blown to pieces, and you’re concerned about the helo? You’re the one who needs treatment.”

Kim drove his Mercedes onto State Route 7. A mile later, he entered a side street that dead-ended at an eleven-story steel-and-glass building bearing the letters IEC. Kim entered an underground parking garage protected by a steel door. His parking spot was marked: THOMAS JEFFERSON KIM, PRESIDENT, INTEL-EYE-CHECK.

“Delivered safe and sound,” Kim announced proudly. “You can apologize now about my driving.”

“Intel-Eye-Check is a really stupid name,” Garrett said, unbuckling his seat belt.

An office can say much about its occupant. From her seat on a chrome-rimmed white leather couch inside IEC president Thomas Jefferson Kim’s outer office, Valerie Mayberry gazed at the only piece of artwork hanging on the room’s bone-white walls. A 1932 Pablo Picasso painting. Le Rêve , French for “The Dream.” Why had Kim chosen it? If an original, it cost at least $60 million. Showing off? Insecure? Or could he simply like the painting? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

“The Picasso,” she said aloud to the two Korean women seated across from her behind matching chrome-and-glass desks. “A limited print?”

“No,” the one to Mayberry’s right answered. “My husband doesn’t buy imitations.”

“Your husband,” Mayberry replied and instantly thought about Noah. They could never have worked together. She was persnickety, left-brained. He was disorganized and said whatever thought popped into his head. She was nagged by worries. He didn’t fret about anything. They had filled the holes in each other’s personalities, creating a better-balanced person. At least most times.

Her mind continued to wander. Her decision to join the FBI had not pleased her parents, which made it more appealing to her. Earning money had never interested her, largely because she had never been without it. She had initially flirted with becoming a psychiatrist. However, the idea of listening to the worried well complain about not having friends, or their third marriage breakup, bored her. Dealing with schizophrenia was more of a neurological issue than a personality one. Forensic psychiatry held limited appeal. Most prisoners had the same cookie-cutter backgrounds—childhood trauma, drugs or alcohol addictions driving their criminal activity, or simply antisocial disorders such as narcissism mixed with a lack of empathy. Working in the spy-versus-spy game was much more challenging. It required understanding human behavior, trickery, and intellect. She enjoyed wandering in what poet T. S. Eliot described as a “wilderness of mirrors.” She’d studied the life of James Jesus Angleton, the legendary American spy hunter who’d overseen counterintelligence operations for twenty years during the Cold War. It had been Angleton who’d looked for hidden meanings in the KGB’s actions, suspecting everyone, always searching for that unidentified inside man, the double agent, the ultimate traitor. His paranoia had paralyzed the agency, ruined careers, and ultimately condemned him as a mole hunter who’d stared too long into the abyss and had been swallowed up by it.