Peter Kirsanow - Target Omega

A math prodigy, Olivia attended Stanford and had been a physics major until taking an elective course in international strategy taught by Brandt. Brandt instantly recognized her intelligence and plucked her from the physics department, setting her on the path of geopolitics. Blind from birth, he had remained unaware of her stunning looks for years, until the accumulated weight of appreciative remarks by envious colleagues made it plain that his assistant’s brains were rivaled by her beauty.

“I am living my life. This is precisely the life I choose to live,” Olivia replied. “Besides, it’s not as if I don’t see any men.”

“Olivia, seeing them as they pass you getting off the Metro doesn’t count. I mean going out to dinner, maybe a Nats game.” Brandt turned a palm up, a gesture that prompted Arlo to rest his head on his master’s knee and nuzzle his leg.

“Professor, look, I’ve been here for less than two months. Give it some time.”

“Whatever came of that introduction Carole Tunney made to that TV anchor, the one that makes every story sound like the first moon landing?”

“They’re all like that.”

“Well?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but he’s an idiot.”

Brandt decided to drop the subject. Forming relationships had never been easy for Olivia. Some men were too intimidated by Olivia’s looks to even talk to her. That, combined with Olivia’s painful shyness, resulted in a social life that consisted primarily of the receptions following speaking engagements at colleges and think tanks. “Anyway, thanks for dropping by on short notice. I just want to go over a couple of things that I need addressed rather quickly.” Brandt placed a slippered foot on Arlo’s back and slid it back and forth.

“How’s the president doing?” Olivia inquired.

“Checked into Walter Reed after I met with him. No jokes, please. He’s a bit fatigued, as you might imagine.”

Olivia was new to Washington, but she wasn’t naïve. The president of the United States didn’t just check into Walter Reed on a Saturday afternoon because he was a little tired. He must be suffering, at bare minimum, from fairly pronounced exhaustion. She did not, however, press Brandt for details, but rather moved on to the draft UN resolution.

“Where do you want to begin with the resolution?”

“Let’s put that aside for a moment,” Brandt said. “It’s going to pass, not as a formal resolution that we could veto but probably as something else, and there’s nothing we can do about it. His strategic options are limited. None of them painless.”

“It might still be helpful if I give you my observations on the players behind the draft resolution.”

Brandt nodded. If his protégé thought something worth mentioning, it usually was. “Go ahead, Liv.”

“Well, the usual factions developed; France made a show of being reasonable and unbiased before throwing Israel overboard; Muslim nations were intransigent; African nations moved as a bloc. But in the last few days a pattern began to develop. Any tweaks to the condemnation language were the joint work of Russia and Iran. Not Iran and Syria, or Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but Russia and Iran.”

Brandt shrugged. “We’ve seen that on some other matters.”

“True, but not to this degree. The Iranians haven’t made a move all week without the Russians. Their envoys were joined at the hip the last two days.”

Brandt tilted his head slightly. “So what do you make of it?”

“Perhaps nothing. But I get the strong sense that the Russians have dual objectives here.”

“You’ve worked with me long enough to know I suspect the Russians always have dual objectives, if not triple or quadruple objectives. The trick is figuring out the one that’s most important to them. Any theories?”

Olivia shook her head. “Inchoate. I was hoping you might have some.”

Brandt took his foot off Arlo’s head and thought for several seconds. “Right now all I’ve got is gut instinct and bits of seemingly unrelated information. They may, in fact, remain unrelated. But there’s one piece that seems odd. It may be wholly unconnected to anything going on in the Middle East or UN. In fact, it probably is. But the timing’s curious.”

Olivia wasn’t used to Brandt being so opaque. “Timing of what?”

“Late this afternoon, just before you called me at the White House, we — the president and I — were informed that at least seven American special operators have been assassinated in the last twenty-four hours, all in the D.C. metro area. That in itself is, to put it mildly, alarming. Apparently, these men were extremely good at what they do. Getting to one or two of them would be difficult. Killing seven in one day would be nearly impossible.”

“What is it exactly, that they do?”

“That’s part of what I asked you here for. I wasn’t even aware of this team prior to today. Apparently, the information about the team and its mission is ‘compartmentalized,’ and I wasn’t in the compartment, at least not yet.” Brandt tilted his head as if contemplating an absurdity. “I suppose it’s partially a function of my being on the job for only seven weeks.”

“You don’t know anything about the team’s purpose?”

“Nothing beyond what the president told me this afternoon after he got the news from DCI Scanlon. From what I understand, this is a select unit charged with preventing the proliferation of WMD.”

“I take it they don’t do it by means of diplomacy,” Olivia said.

Brandt placed a foot atop Arlo’s head again. “Correct. They do it by direct action.”

“Isn’t there some overlap? DEVGRU is trained to deal with loose nukes. Delta also has a WMD disposal element.”

Arlo groaned contentedly as Brandt rubbed the dog’s head. “Not really. Any overlap is strictly around the edges. This team’s sole mission is to act as a counter-WMD task force. A strike force. Some of them were SEALs or Delta. Possibly SAD. They were handpicked to serve in the unit because they had unique capabilities and, to be trite, they were identified as the best of the best.”

“Then who could’ve possibly taken them out?”

“Indeed. Even the KGB in its heyday probably couldn’t have pulled this off, at least not without significant logistical support that would be very difficult to conceal. And the KGB scrupulously avoided killing Americans on American soil. Even the vaunted Mossad couldn’t kill all of the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre in a single day.”

“Who had operational authority over the team?”

“I can’t be sure. They were formed as a unit under the Joint Special Operations Command and, I think, occasionally detailed to the CIA. But I bet you won’t find them in the CIA’s budget, or the DIA’s, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m not even sure the team has — had — a name.”

Olivia was mystified as to what, if anything, this had to do with the draft resolution. The assassination of an elite team of special operators — no matter how astonishing — had no bearing on what would happen in New York at the beginning of the week.

“I assume you’ll tell me in your own time how the UN resolution and the assassinations are related.” It was a declaration, not a question. “In the meantime, what do you need me to do?”

For his part, Brandt sometimes understood Olivia better than she understood herself. He suspected that without being fully conscious of it yet, she already was beginning to sense the direction in which he was going, and might even get there before him.

“The leader of the team hasn’t been accounted for. Everyone else is dead. Naturally, he’s now the prime suspect,” Brandt said.