Collateral (Tier One #6)
: Part 2 – Chapter 9

PART II

You may be standing beside me, but there is a canyon between us.

—Vladimir Petrov

SCIF (Sensitive Compartmentalized Intelligence Facility)

Office of the Director of National Intelligence

McLean, Virginia

0855 Local Time

Kelso Jarvis, the Director of National Intelligence, resisted the urge to condescend.

But he wanted to . . . God, he wanted to.

“Ian, I’m going to say this as plainly as I can,” he said, keeping his voice measured and steady. “My concern is not about Amanda Allen’s interrogative acumen or professional competency. I simply do not trust Sylvie Bessonov. She is a Zeta. She was trained by Zhukov. We cannot and should not take her word at face value.”

He was alone in the SCIF for this call with Ember. Since the discovery and confirmation that his Deputy Director of Intelligence Integration, Catherine Morgan, was a Russian spy, Jarvis had ultracompartmentalized the flow of information inside his ranks. The Morgan infiltration, followed by the Zeta hit on Ember, had been a one-two punch that knocked him to the deck. Now he was operating with an overabundance of caution, something he’d eschewed his entire career. Micromanagement, control of information, second-guessing the motives and intentions of direct reports—these were the hallmarks of an insecure and ineffective leader.

And yet here he was, doing what he despised.

On the video monitor, he could see Ember’s Signals Chief and Interim Acting Director sweating—not from nerves but from the heat. An overtaxed air conditioner hummed loudly in the background. Ember’s present accommodations at MacDill Air Force Base were nothing to brag about. Truth be told, they’d moved from the penthouse to the outhouse. Where the previous Ember HQ had been a high-tech underground bunker worthy of James Bond, America’s premier counterterrorism black ops task force was now working out of a double-wide construction trailer on the Tier One compound. Completing the motif, a brownish-green mottled gecko casually climbed the wall behind Baldwin.

“With all due respect, sir, the intelligence Bessonov has provided has been one hundred percent accurate. She’s given us six names and six loci of operation, resulting in the successful neutralization of six Zeta operators. Now we’re in position to move on number seven,” Baldwin said, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “Statistically speaking, that makes Bessonov a golden outlier.”

Jarvis shifted his gaze to Munn, who was sitting beside the bespectacled genius. Where Baldwin was dressed in his signature tie and sport coat, Munn was wearing a truly obnoxious Hawaiian shirt. “Dan, what do you think?”

“I agree with Baldwin,” Munn said. “I’ve watched the recordings, sir, studied the way she interacts with Allen, and the girl is clearly broken. I know the Russians are tricky bastards, but there’s not the slightest indication she’s deceiving us. We are batting a thousand off Bessonov’s intel so far.”

Jarvis knitted his fingers together and squeezed just enough to subdue the resting tremor in his hands. He was taking medication now, which helped keep his symptoms under control, but some days it wasn’t enough. Today was one of those days. If he squeezed, he could shut the tremors down. It was exhausting, but he did it anyway because it made him feel like a SEAL.

Always fighting and always in the fight.

Since his Parkinson’s diagnosis, he’d made exercise a mandatory part of his daily routine—weights, core, and cardio—and the parts of him that had started to go soft since becoming DNI were resolidifying. Tremors and vertigo be damned, he was going to get back in fighting form if it killed him.

Jarvis was about to speak when Baldwin scooted to the left, making room for Amanda Allen at the table.

“Director Jarvis,” she greeted him as she stepped into the frame.

“Ms. Allen, we were just talking about the work you’re doing with Bessonov,” Jarvis said. “You’re harvesting some solid intelligence from her.”

“Thank you, sir,” Allen said. “She’s been incredibly forthcoming.”

“That’s what I understand,” he said, before pivoting. “Is she still dribbling out the names one at a time?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Have you pushed for more than one name?”

“I have . . . on multiple occasions.”

“And what happened?”

“She says the same thing each time.” Channeling Bessonov’s Russian accent, she added, “‘One cut at a time, please, Amanda, lest I bleed to death during the night.’”

Jarvis screwed up his face at this. “Has she threatened or hinted suicide?”

“Not overtly,” Allen said, “but she’s not in a good place—emotionally, that is.”

“Has she been subjected to enhanced interrogation?”

“No, sir. One hundred percent mind games. It was the CGI session with Malik that broke her,” Munn said, referring to an Ember ploy that had convinced Bessonov that she was watching one of her Zeta colleagues being brutally tortured and executed. Bessonov had believed it real and cracked under the pressure.

“Does she know the truth now?” Jarvis asked.

“No, sir,” Allen said, “we’ve maintained the ruse. And as you know, the real Malik is dead, so we see no reason to dissuade her of the fiction.”

“All right, well, let’s try to get more out of her during the next session. Step it up, Ms. Allen. I want operational details, communication protocols, and Zeta tradecraft methodologies. I want to know how Zhukov trains them to operate. I want to know how he trains them to think. And I want two names next time. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

A pounding on the door behind him usurped Jarvis’s attention. At the same time, text message alerts chimed on the video feed, prompting Baldwin and Munn to glance at their phones.

“Excuse me,” Jarvis said and scooted his chair back from the table. He opened the SCIF door and was greeted by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Commander Mike Casey. “You look like you just saw a ghost, Mike. Is there a problem?”

“There’s been an attack in Kiev. The treaty delegation was targeted. Vice President Tenet, Ukrainian President Zinovenko, and Russian Prime Minister Vavilov were targeted. Preliminary reporting indicates they’re all dead,” a grey-faced Casey said.

“Fuck,” Jarvis said, and the adrenaline dump that followed sent lightning into his veins. He jogged back to the conference table.

“We just heard,” Munn said on the livestream. “I’m terminating SAD’s current tasking and pulling them back to the airport. We’ll be ready to go wherever you need us in ninety minutes.”

“Check,” Jarvis said and dragged his index finger across his throat. The feed went black, and he turned to his deputy. “Is POTUS secure?”

“Yes,” Casey said. “He’s in the Situation Room along with SecDef, Secretary of State Baker, General McMillan, and the National Security Advisor.”

“And Petra?”

“She’s in the NCTC ops center with Buckingham,” he said.

“Good,” Jarvis said. She’ll be safe there.

“The President is requesting you at the Situation Room,” Casey said, quickstepping to catch up with Jarvis, who was already moving down the corridor with speed. “Your motorcade is ready.”

Jarvis stopped abruptly in his tracks. A mental street map of the route from ODNI to the White House formed in his mind. Potential ambush locations appeared as bright red dots. Born of paranoia or prudence, he could not be sure, but it didn’t matter. Arkady Zhukov was in his head now.

“What?” Casey said, stopping beside him.

Jarvis executed an about-face and marched back to the SCIF. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“Sir?” his deputy said, trotting at his side.

“I’ve been in a motorcade that got ambushed. It didn’t go so well,” Jarvis said, stopping at the SCIF door. He pressed his thumb on the biometric security reader. When it flashed green, he entered his six-digit code. “Until we have a better handle on what the hell is going on, we’re not going anywhere.”

Casey nodded, but hesitated at the threshold.

“From now on, where I go, you go,” Jarvis said and waved the former submarine skipper into the room. The only person on his staff fully read into his health status, Task Force Ember operations, and the weeds of the Russian threat was his Chief of Staff, Petra Felsk. Time would tell if Zeta was behind this attack on the Vice President, but Jarvis didn’t have the luxury of time. Petra was stuck at the National Counterterrorism Center and he needed a second set of eyes and ears to back him up. The stakes were too high to fly solo. “Consider yourself officially read in,” he said, making the unilateral decision.

“Yes, sir.” Casey stepped into the SCIF, and shut the door behind him. “You want me to drive?” he asked, gesturing to the computer workstation.

Jarvis nodded and Casey slid into the seat. With deft and swift competency, Casey established a secure conference channel with the Situation Room and sent the video feed to a large monitor on the opposite wall. A young man in a Marine uniform appeared on the screen. He looked back and forth between Casey and Jarvis, then said, “Stand by for the President.”

The screen flickered and the image refreshed to a camera feed looking down the length of the massive table in the large conference room, which was packed with the most important and powerful people in the United States government and military. Jarvis knew all of them.

“Director Jarvis,” President Warner said from where he stood at the head of the table. “Where the hell have you been?”

“In a SCIF, sir,” Jarvis replied.

“Are you up to speed, DNI?” Warner fired back.

“Getting there, sir.”

“It’s been confirmed, the Vice President is dead,” the President said. “I’ve just ordered SecDef to go to DEFCON Three.”

Jarvis glanced at Casey and watched the color drain from the other man’s face. The defense readiness condition was an alert system developed in the late 1950s by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, with the perceived nuclear threat from Russia playing a driving role. In the current incarnation, the system prescribed five levels of military readiness that corresponded to the severity and imminent nature of a threat to the nation. DEFCON 5 was normal military peacetime readiness; DEFCON 1 implied maximum readiness in preparation for nuclear war. DEFCON 3, which Warner had just set, was the highest Jarvis had seen in his thirty years of service, and he’d only seen it once before, on 9/11 after the towers fell.

“I’m not prepared to make a statement yet, but it is being drafted as we speak. I will address the nation at sixteen hundred hours . . .”

While the President talked, Casey powered on a second monitor and established a secure conference channel with the NCTC ops center. Next, he pulled up CNN and BBC on mute on a third monitor. Jarvis glanced at the second monitor as a grim-faced Reggie Buckingham appeared with Petra standing beside him.

“. . . Preliminary reports indicate that the attack was carried out by right-wing Ukrainian ultranationalists protesting the Donbas treaty, but that has not been confirmed and no specific group has claimed responsibility. I need ironclad confirmation of who is responsible for this, DNI, and I’m putting that responsibility on you.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” Jarvis said, meeting Warner’s gaze over the live feed.

“Is the team that investigated the sabotage and sinking of that LNG ship in Klaipeda anywhere near Kiev?”

Jarvis resisted the urge to cringe at the President’s mention of Ember. Most of the people in the Situation Room were not read into Ember’s file, let alone its existence. It was the one asset in Jarvis’s arsenal that never appeared in his daily intelligence brief. “Yes, sir. That group is in the neighborhood.”

“Mobilize them,” Warner said, wagging his index finger at the screen. “Find out whose fingerprints are on this, and then God have mercy on my soul for what happens after.”

Sᴇarch the FindNovel.net website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.