William Tyree: Line of Succession

Doheny’s vision flickered and then flashed white as a single.50 caliber rifle shot vaporized his brain stem. He was clinically dead before his forehead came to rest against the steering wheel.

Moments later, a Polaris off-roader came from the tree line, driven by a pale man with a pockmarked face and a clean-shaven head. He wore night-vision goggles and a black track suit and carried the.50 caliber rifle on a strap across his shoulders. His name was Chris Abrams.

The little four-wheel vehicle towed a lightweight trailer that jounced over rocks and mud as it sidled up alongside the Humvee. Chris Abrams leapt out of the Polaris and secured the area, his movements downright sprightly for a six-foot-six 34-year-old who’d been living with HIV for ten years. He put the rifle down, picked up a tiny video camera, and began recording as he briefly inspected Doheny’s body. He set the still-running camera on the hood as he pulled his night-vision goggles off, revealing a pair of red-rimmed, hazel eyes with dilated pupils. He unwrapped a protein bar and shoved it into his mouth, chewing as he transferred the cargo — twenty shoulder-mounted Stinger missiles weighing thirty-six pounds each — into the trailer.

When Abrams was done, he covered the trailer, then placed C4 explosive under the Humvee’s gas tank and set the timer for twelve minutes. Although he had eaten two full dinners totaling 3,000 calories, and had additional snacks, he was still ravenous. He opened a package of beef jerky and devoured it as he drove the back roads to the transfer point. By the time the explosion lit up the night sky, the Stinger missiles were safely aboard a TV repair truck en route to a warehouse in Frederick County, Maryland. There, Abrams would be able to snatch a couple hours’ sleep and a hearty breakfast before meeting his crew for the next leg of the mission.

THREE DAYS LATER

Washington D.C.

Sunday, 4:45 a.m.

Blake Carver watched his prisoner, United States Army Lieutenant James Flynn, through a two-way mirror. Flynn knelt, blindfolded, with his hands cuffed behind him. His uniform lay in a heap in the corner, and the officer’s fluorescent-lit skin had taken on a slight bluish hue.

“I want a lawyer,” Flynn repeated in a raspy voice that crackled over the observation room’s monitors. “I know you can hear me. I got my rights.”

This was good. Flynn was about to cross an important psychological milestone. He was about to lose control of his emotions for the first time in twenty two hours of captivity. Carver had not been an interrogator by trade at the CIA, but he had logged more than 300 hours in rooms just like this in six countries. He had learned some things about breaking points and how to achieve them. Now he waited patiently, watching Flynn from behind the reflective mirror. Ten seconds later, the Lieutenant suddenly began screaming at the top of his lungs. “Where am I? Where am I? What day is it? Talk to me!”

It was Sunday morning, before dawn. Agent Carver was holding Flynn in the basement of Field House DC310, a two-level 1850s brownstone on a leafy Georgetown residential street. The National Security Agency had acquired the home seven years earlier to spy on the Central African Republic Embassy, which had been located in a decaying mansion across the street. The upstairs bedrooms were outfitted with observation posts with night vision scopes and directional microphones that could penetrate twelve inches of solid concrete at up to one hundred yards. The field house’s communication hardware had been completely replaced with equipment dedicated to NSA’s private Ethernet. Though the original surveillance operation had produced nothing of value, the home had been retained by the White House as an urban outpost of sorts, where sensitive investigations could operate at a safe distance from the prying eyes of the Defense Department brass.

The home’s ground floor was an elaborate facade for the fictional couple in residence, Ethan and Melissa Danforth. Carver had employed several aliases during his 16-year intelligence career, and he had been using Ethan Danforth for only a few weeks. The mythical Danforth had an MBA from George Washington University and an office on K Street, where he and his wife ran a small consulting firm called FutureK. The firm had verifiable clients — all dummy businesses — and a young receptionist named Madison who did not ask too many questions.

Brochures for European cycling vacations were magnetized to the fridge. Magazines were scattered on the coffee table. Bottles of limited production cabernet sat in a starter wine rack, and a digital picture frame on a bookshelf cycled slideshows of Carver and his partner, Agent Meagan O’Keefe, with aspiring politicos at black-tie events.

Like Lieutenant Flynn, Agent Carver had not slept in more than a day. He went to the ancient sink basin in the corner of the room where there was a black and white photograph of the home’s previous residents — or perhaps their grandparents — standing where he was now, filleting freshly caught trout.

He turned on the cold tap and splashed water onto his chiseled features. He squeezed anti-redness drops into each of his green eyes. The drops stung. He blinked the artificial tears away and looked into the mirror. His face was still tan despite having spent so much time in basements, surveillance posts and windowless offices during the past several weeks. Carver made a point to get out and run at least once a day, no matter how hot and sticky it was outside. A little sun on his face did wonders for his attitude.

A gray hair had sprouted on his otherwise black sideburns. He plucked it out, but neither the pain nor the cold water was enough to fight his drowsiness. He loosened his black necktie, popped in a piece of sugarless gum and dropped his lean 185-pound frame to the floor to rip off ten quick pushups. Screw caffeine. To hell with ginseng. Blood to the brain was all he needed.

He heard the row house’s squeaky back door, followed by two sets of footsteps on the floorboards above him. Carver reached for his SIG 9mm and levered a round into the chamber. It was probably just O’Keefe, but Carver took no chances. He was, after all, operating blind — the building’s security and surveillance systems were offline. Due to another round of crippling budget cuts, field house DC310 was on a 30-day waitlist for standard repairs.

Carver recognized Agent O’Keefe’s clip-clop gait on the hardwood and put his weapon away. They had been partners for almost two months now, and he already knew O’Keefe inside and out, down to the tiny mole on her slightly crooked right index finger, her left-leaning voting record and the way her allergy to watermelon made her lips go numb for an hour after eating it.

O’Keefe did the perfunctory secret knock — more of a cheesy joke between her and Carver than insurance against accidentally blowing each other’s brains out — and entered with the White House Chief of Staff, Julian Speers, behind her. Their clothes were soaked and they were tracking mud.

“Working late again?” Carver said to his fictitious better half. “Dinner’s getting cold, honey.”

Carver helped O’Keefe with her coat. The roots of her shoulder-length strawberry-blonde hair were matted against her head and the drizzle had spotted her black-framed eyeglasses. Carver pulled a hanky from his suit jacket and offered it to her.

At 26, with an M.S. in applied mathematics from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern languages, O’Keefe was more than a decade younger than the 39-year-old Carver. Like many at the agency, she was a numbers geek originally hired to work in cryptology. And like every NSA employee, field work was officially outside her job description. Recruited specifically to conduct counter-terrorism surveillance and interpret intercepted transmissions, she had never received combat training, nor had she been formally issued a gun. The target practice she put in after hours, as well as the matching SIG 9mm she wore in a holster around her left ankle, was at Carver’s insistence. He needed to know his partner could back him up in a jam.