Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

He dropped the money back into the box.

He wasn’t built to run.

By his calculations, he had thirty-six hours to accomplish his mission and return home. An hour from now, at approximately 0700 Eastern Standard Time, Admiral Lafever’s body would be discovered by his driver. He would find the house burgled, the admiral dead in his study, shot while confronting the thief. The police would arrive soon after. Word would hit Langley by nine. News of the murder would be hushed up until the director could verify all the facts and put together a plausible story. Palumbo was well aware that, despite his best efforts, no one would buy the burglary story.

It would be another three hours before an official declaration was made. Noon in D.C., six p.m. in Zurich. Inquiries would begin in earnest, Lafever’s agenda scoured, his closest associates questioned. At some point-probably not until late in the afternoon, or even tomorrow-Joe Leahy would come forward and mention the conversation he’d had with Palumbo in the cafeteria the day before. Palumbo’s interest in Lafever and Operation Mourning Dove would be duly noted. Still, there would be many similar threads to trace. A man did not get to be the deputy director of operations-the nation’s top spymaster, as it were-without having rivals, both inside the Agency and outside of it. In the event that the Agency phoned his home, Palumbo’s wife knew what to say. She would contact her husband on his cell phone and he would call back promptly. An interview with Palumbo would not be a priority.

At some point, though, the Virginia police department’s forensic squad would discover traces of Lafever’s brains in the backyard and realize that the body had been moved. Then things would get seriously crazy.

Thirty-six hours was the max.

Palumbo picked up a second large envelope from the box. This one was considerably heavier than the first. He opened it and slid the contents onto the table. The Walther PPK hadn’t been touched in three years. He checked the magazine and the slide, and was pleased to find it in perfect condition. The envelope also contained a silencer, but he didn’t think he’d need it today.

He closed the box, locked it, and rang for the banker.

Five minutes later, he was back on the street.

It was after two p.m. local time when he drove across the Limmatbrucke and headed into the bustling Seefeld district. His destination was a drab commercial building one block from the lakeside. Soldiers dressed in olive utilities and Kevlar vests, brandishing the regulation M16A1 machine gun of the United States Army, patrolled the street in front of Dufourstrasse 47, home to the American consulate. A pair of uniformed city police kept them company.

Three black Mercedes sedans crowded the sidewalk in front of the building. The cars all bore diplomatic plates with small American flags pasted to the upper right-hand corner. They were all the proof he needed to be certain that Major General John Austen, founder and director of the covert spy agency known as Division, was in the house.

Austen was a legend across all branches of the service. He had the record everyone aspired to. He was the hellraiser gone straight. Or, to use his own language, the Fallen Angel resurrected to stand at the right hand of the Lord; the Lord in this case being the president of the United States.

An honor graduate from the Air Force Academy class of 1967, Austen was trained as a jet pilot and sent to Vietnam, where he flew over 120 missions at the controls of an F-4 Phantom and shot down nine North Vietnamese MiGs. He came out of the war an ace, and a major before the age of thirty.

But there were chinks in his armor. When he wasn’t flying, he was carousing. Night after night, he led his band of merry fliers through Saigon’s depraved fleshpots, drinking to abandon and screwing everything in sight. They called themselves Austen’s Rangers, in honor of the marauding World War II force of similar name. There were rumors of drug use, too, of rape, and on one occasion, of murder. But the rumors were hushed up. No one wanted to dent, tarnish, or in any way damage the halo of a bona fide hero.

Then came 1979 and the Iranian hostage crisis. Austen was a natural for the team put together by Colonel Charlie Beckwith. An instructor and test pilot after the war, he transitioned to the massive Hercules C-130 transports that would ferry the commandos into the Iranian desert. For once, his luck didn’t hold. Horrifically burned in the accident that took eight servicemen’s lives, he came out of the desert a changed man. He denied retirement and fought himself back to health and a position as director of the newly created Special Operations Command situated at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. He attributed his survival to a miracle and gave over his life to Jesus Christ.

Instead of carousing, Austen ran Bible study and prayer meetings out of his home. Every Tuesday and Friday night, the Austen house on Orange Lane was filled with sinners, soldiers, and any officer seeking a more rapid path to promotion and glory. Austen quickly built a loyal-some said slavish-cadre of officers who spread out through the four branches of the service. They, too, called themselves Austen’s Rangers, but this time they preached the word of Christ and the ultra-hawkish political views of their founder and namesake. America was the city on the hill, the beacon of democracy for the entire world. And Israel was its closest ally, to be defended at all costs.

Austen’s rise was nothing short of meteoric. Full colonel at forty, brigadier general at forty-three, a second star coming before his forty-sixth birthday. He appeared alongside the nation’s most famous Evangelicals on Sunday morning television programs. He was called God’s warrior and Jesus’s pilot. He became the face of the religious right.

And then, his career seemed to stall. He never received a third star, or the divisional command that came with it. He stopped appearing on television. He took up residence in the Pentagon as head of a career morgue called the Defense Human Intelligence Agency, and all but fell off the face of the earth. But inside the armed forces, his presence was still felt. Hundreds of Austen’s Rangers had reached flag rank and were generals in the army and admirals in the navy. All were still devoted to John Austen.

It was then, Palumbo realized, that Austen must have started Division. He hadn’t fallen off the earth. To the contrary. He’d ascended to a more glorified place.

Palumbo drove another one hundred meters past the consulate. When he found an empty parking space, he told himself that fortune was smiling upon him. His fevered mind was anxious for any signs that he hadn’t risked his career and dismissed the needs of his wife and family for nothing. He grabbed the spot, then pulled his workbag onto his lap. In it were two cell phones, a Taser gun, and a cellular GSM intercept device disguised as a laptop computer. He activated the intercept device and tuned it to search frequencies for numbers beginning with a 455 prefix-the prefix assigned to phones issued by the United States embassy to its staff, both permanent and visiting. Fitting the earpiece, he jumped from conversation to conversation.

It hadn’t been difficult to track John Austen down. Like all good spies, Austen lived his cover. A major general and director of the Defense Human Intelligence Agency, his whereabouts were a matter of record at all times. A call from Palumbo’s office at the CIA to Austen’s office at the Pentagon had revealed that Austen was on a tour of Western European capitals in order to liaise with the military attachés under his supervision. Earlier in the week, he’d visited the embassy in Bern and made day trips to Paris and Rome. At two p.m. Friday afternoon, he was scheduled to visit the American consulate in Zurich. The fact that military attachés were not assigned to consulates seemed to have been overlooked by everyone other than Palumbo. He knew that Austen had come to Zurich for a specific reason, and that reason was the drone. He also knew that Austen was scheduled to fly back to the States early the next morning. It was what he planned to do with the intervening hours that terrified Palumbo.