Andrew Britton - The Operative

The mood of the evening tourists in the park, and of the people in the hotel lobby, was one of somnambulism. Not disbelief. Americans knew what terrorists were capable of. That the bad guys had gotten through again, however, was still a blow. Even the cabdriver was silent and listening to the radio.

Jon Harper was sitting in the hospital’s main waiting room on Twenty-Third Street, NW. Someone with Harper’s connections and stature would certainly have been offered a private office to wait in. But someone of Harper’s personal stature would not have accepted special treatment. Which was why Kealey knew exactly where to find him.

Harper was slumped in a plastic seat, staring at his lap. The CIA official didn’t look up until Kealey was on top of him.

Harper didn’t say anything at first. He smiled weakly, then rose and put his arms around his colleague.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” Harper said.

“I made ’em pay,” Kealey said into the man’s ear.

He felt Harper’s grip tighten. “Thanks for what you did, buddy. Thank you.”

Kealey didn’t respond. It wasn’t a moment for words.

“Allison all right?” Harper asked, taking a step back.

“Yeah. Her nephew, too. He was lucky.”

Harper’s face was tight, fighting something more than tears. He cleared his briefcase from the adjoining seat, and Kealey sat. He looked around. The room was crowded, but not packed. It would be hours before the overflow from Baltimore began arriving.

“I heard,” Harper began, then choked, started again. “I heard some doctors talking. Seems that until the air force gives an all clear on medevac pilots, some of the injured are being brought here via hospital boat.”

Washington, D.C., had an automatic lockdown protocol in the event of a terrorist attack. The airways were closed, and incoming vehicular traffic was severely restricted. The perpetrators would expect a loosening of flyover regulations for medical aircraft. If they had compromised a pilot of one of these aircraft, how better to hit the nation’s capital?

“I can’t imagine that Ninety-five is real crowded in this direction,” Kealey said. “People will stay put or get the hell out of town.”

“I heard they still need the ambulances up there,” Harper said. “They’re finding people in the rubble.”

Kealey wondered if there had been further collapses since he’d been ferried away, weakened structures collapsing at the convention center, maybe more in the hotel. That was what happened after the World Trade Center attacks when, late in the afternoon, the weakened and burning 7 World Trade Center collapsed and slid onto the rubble.

Harper didn’t ask about the meeting. He knew that Kealey wouldn’t tell him anything in public.

“What’s the latest with Julie?” Kealey asked.

Harper shrugged helplessly. “She’s in surgery. Bone fragments on the brain. They told me that’ll be about five hours. When they can, they have to cut open her leg and close the flaps where her fingers used to be…”

He stopped again, on the verge of losing it.

Kealey sat still, giving him time and space and also picking through his own thoughts. He had called the attack a beachhead, and to a man-even Andrews-the president’s other advisors had cautioned Brenneman that there was no evidence of that. Kealey agreed. Nonetheless, the kind of training the commandos had had did not come from a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan. The weapons were new and, worse, current. They hadn’t been captured from fallen Russian or American soldiers. And the strike was complex, with more moving parts than September 11 or any other attack. No group put that kind of effort into an operation, then failed to take credit for it.

Unless they weren’t through.

It was flimsy, Kealey had to admit, but it wasn’t what the Company classified as an “unreasonable assumption,” the kind of spitballing agents did when they were looking for links in disparate enemy activity and chatter, overlapping names, places, timing, or objectives that might signal the coming together of a plan.

“When the hell does it end?” Harper asked.

“It will, Jon.”

“How? When?”

“Like the cavalry used to say out West, ‘When the renegades are taken or destroyed.’ ”

“It’s not the same,” Harper said. “The Indians had nowhere to go. We boxed them in and cut them down. This is like playing goddamn Whac-a-Mole with the whole damn world.”

“Not really,” Kealey replied. “You take out enough Osamas, you Tomahawk missile enough cars with top terror brass, and eventually the movement runs out of gas.”

“Jesus, Ryan. Do you really believe that?”

“I do.”

Harper shook his head dejectedly. “We do that, these killers just go on the Internet and recruit more.”

“They try,” Kealey said. “You remember that white paper Allison worked on?”

Harper thought for a moment and then actually chuckled. “You mean Project Pond Scum?”

“That’s the one. A small amount of algae is unavoidable, but after you skim the pond, you can keep most of it from coming back.”

“Algae doesn’t communicate via the Internet.”

“You obviously didn’t pay attention to what three million bucks and sixteen months told us,” Kealey said. “I had a long plane flight to South Africa to read it. Whether it’s terror or porn, yes, the Internet allows people to communicate and find kindred souls. But it doesn’t increase their ranks at the rate they’re being thinned by arrests and death.”

“Right, and that was what? Three years ago? We’ve got kids growing up with a sense of virtual community, a sense of video-game invulnerability, and an aggressive tribal mentality because of all that. Their minds calcify into something hardcore, into small agile pockets of twisted little sociopaths. I don’t share your optimism. I see packs that are tougher to track and destroy.”

“You’ve gotten too close to the daily intel briefings,” Kealey said quietly. “When I’ve been abroad, I see mothers who still don’t want to see their kids blow themselves up. And I see kids who mostly want Nikes and PlayStations.”

“Not the kids in hate schools in Yemen and Somalia,” Harper said.

Kealey chuckled. “Hell, Jon. When did you ever pay attention to anything your teacher said?”

Harper considered that. He shrugged, sighed, and deflated.

“Having a vision is one thing, but getting shot at opens your eyes,” Kealey said. “For all the righteous indignation and out-of-the-box heroics, where would the Libyan rebels have been without NATO? For that matter, how long would the French Resistance have survived without D-day?”

And he wondered if that was what didn’t sit right today, the sense he got from the attackers and their materiel that there was a supply line, a logistical support system. What bothered him almost as much as the feeling was now knowing, whether he was frustrated or relieved, that none of this was his responsibility.

“You’re probably knocked out,” Harper said. “You also need a shower. You smell of firefight and Situation Room.”

Kealey smiled. He was about to remark, “Hey, the ladies really go for it” when he thought of Julie and bit it off. “Yeah,” he said instead.

Kealey rose. So did Harper. They hugged again, and the deputy director thanked him once more for everything. He was still struggling to hold it together.

“Call me if you hear anything,” Kealey told him. “Or even if you don’t and just want to talk.”

Harper promised that he would.

Kealey left and got in the cab, which was still sitting at the curb.

“Hope you don’t mind me spying on you,” the driver said. “Saw you go in, figured you might not be long.” He poked a thumb at the radio. “Nobody calling to go anywhere tonight, and Union Station was dead.”