Don Pendleton: Devil's Bargain

Barbara Price took the couch. Her back to the wall, she could watch the foyer, the main hall leading to the bedroom, alert to any sound the two of them weren’t alone. The Stony Man mission controller caught Geller throwing her a funny look, then the code breaker shrugged, claimed the chair he obviously arranged for his guest directly across the coffee table. Before he turned around his laptop and aluminum briefcase, Price spotted the Beretta 92-F resting on folders stamped Classified. That a lifelong deskbound super-cryptographer—who, to her knowledge, had never heard a shot fired in anger—would arm himself, tossed more fuel onto the fire of nagging suspicion. Was he afraid for his own life, trailed by shadow gunmen ready to silence him, aware of his meeting a former NSA mission controller to which he was prepared to divulge classified intelligence? If that was the case, she knew she had just been tossed into the equation.

Aware it could go to hell at any moment, she watched her former colleague pour a drink from the bottle of Dewar’s, the cigarettes a new vice, ashtray overflowing with gnawed butts. Impatient, she waited while he swallowed his tranquilizer, topped up another round, fired up a cigarette with a silver lighter. Clearly, whatever was eating Geller, the booze and chain-smoking weren’t calming the storm. Professional that he was, though, she was grateful he skipped any trip down memory lane, awkward questions about what she’d been doing since leaving the agency. Or did he suspect something in regard to her missing years? she wondered. Was this a fishing expedition? If so, why? She might have worked for the most supersecret, high-tech, intelligence-gathering, black-ops group on the planet, but there was one absolute truth she knew existed in all the covert world. Only death—or the threat of death—ever truly kept a secret. And the longer she sat in Geller’s sweat and agitation, the more disturbed she grew.

If he didn’t know about the existence of Stony Man Farm outright, did he think he knew something about the Sensitive Operations Group? Then again, he could be clueless. She told herself to keep an open mind but proceed with all due caution. Truth number two—only those individuals with iron principles, she knew, feet planted in a solid base of integrity, never really changed, no matter how many years down the road. Max Geller, in her mind, had always been a question mark, and he had changed, for the worse, she suspected. Genius he might be, but she was aware of his duplicitous streak. Word around the agency had been that Geller was responsible for the careers of several promising cryptographers ending abruptly as he backstabbed his way up the pecking order. Now, like then, Price kept up her guard.

Down to business, rifling through a Classified packet, Geller fanned out six eight-by-eleven black-and-white pictures, rattled off each name. “Alpha Deep Six. What do you know about them?”

“Deep-cover black ops. I heard they were the best wet work specialists the CIA and the NSA ever cut loose,” Price told him. “Beyond that, I confess to having very little idea what they were actually involved in—other than rumor.”

“Such as?”

“They went renegade. And I heard they were dead.”

“What do you know about ‘slush funds’?”

“Ready cash for black ops.”

Geller worked on his smoke, bit his lip, appeared to dredge up the courage to continue or choose his words carefully. “Numbered accounts. They were created by the Department of Defense, which—very few people know—own entire banks, just to keep these slush funds secret from both the public and Congress. Manhattan, Switzerland, Frankfurt, Qatar, Tokyo, the numbers special ops could access in these banks were—are—staggering, so I’ve heard. In order to bypass normal channels, à la DOD going before a Senate subcommittee with its hand out, the slush funds were originally dollars siphoned from inflated military contracts. They were created for special or black ops to purchase arms, large and small, buy informants, even create and mobilize small paramilitary armies in whichever country our side felt should be working with a little more fervor toward our own interests— ‘them’ doing what ‘we’ want—but that’s not all the money was used for. Anyway, I’ll get to that.

“Okay, altogether, between the CIA and the agency, the slush funds totaled about twenty million, U.S. value, with a conversion system in place to switch to whatever currency was required. Of course, there were firewalls built into the system. An operative could only withdraw up to a hundred thousand in any six-month period, and the directors had to know in advance how much, and what it was being used for. Each time a withdrawal was made, access codes were changed in an attempt to circumvent repeated withdrawals or outright theft. They failed, miserably.”

Geller had a way of lapsing into stretched silences that struck Price as dramatic, irritating, but she waited him out.

“Alpha Deep Six found a hacker. Before DOD, the CIA or the NSA knew it, they cleaned out the bank. It was a theft so embarrassing that only a few people knew about it, and they were sworn to secrecy, mind you, under the penalty of termination—and I don’t mean a pink slip on your desk at the end of the day’s business. Conventional wisdom at the time thought this heist was supposed to be Alpha’s retirement fund, but it turned out they had no intention of whiling away their golden years on a beach in Tahiti. Shortly after the cyber-heist, they were allegedly killed, supposedly in a doublecross by field commanders who knew about the heist ahead of time—and what they were intending to do following the electronic bank job.”

Geller shook his head. “Who knows, maybe a few of them grew a patriotic conscience, I couldn’t say. Those in charge of handling ADS, I do know, ran for cover, basically denied everything, but the firestorm was already sweeping through the ranks on both sides of the tracks, bodies of CIA and NSA agents who had them smelled out turning up all over the globe, even here at home. As for Alpha, allegedly their remains were found in burned-out compounds, one outside Damascus, one in northern Sudan, during two ostensibly botched raids on Muslim terrorist strongholds. And the hacker? He was found in a Zurich hotel suite, two months later, sans legs and arms, and a few other body parts, one of which was shoved in his mouth. Supposedly what remained of Alpha Deep Six was identified by CIA and NSA forensics teams. Question is, how could they use DNA testing on dust?”

Price had a feeling where Geller was headed. “A cover-up.”

“So one would gather.”

“You keep saying ‘allegedly,’ ‘supposedly.’ You’re not implying…”

Geller took a deep drag from his smoke. “Alpha Deep Six is back from the dead.”

Price narrowed her gaze at Geller. “How’s that?”

“Their violent demise was carefully orchestrated, and by their own hand. They knew the end was coming, so they arranged their deaths, and their resurrections. I’m surprised you never heard even a rumor about this.”

Price saw another red flag. Geller, she sensed, was doing an end run before getting to the point. Was he acting? Digging to try to discover what she knew about Alpha Deep Six? She decided it best to listen, no matter how much Geller blathered on, danced before dropping whatever his bomb.

“Well?”

“If I did,” she said, “I shrugged them off as wild gossip by lower-tier operatives with more time and imagination on their hands than substantive work to perform. Geller, what does all this have to do with the current threat to our nation’s transportation network by Red Crescent terrorists?”

“I’m getting there, bear with me. By the way, is the smoke bothering you?”