“What did I do?” were Murdock’s first words.
“Nothing this time,” Mac replied. “Or at least nothing I know about. You’ve got a heartbeat to get a shower and into some khakis, then I have to run you over to Group. The Skipper’s over there waiting for you, pissing up his toenails.”
“And why is the Skipper pissing up his toenails?”
“Because he doesn’t know what this is all about either.”
“Great.”
MacKenzie gunned the engine and pulled out. “Did you get a chance to shoot?” he asked.
Murdock nodded. “What do you think of the Mark 23?”
“It shoots like a dream, but it’s a heavy beast.”
“A head shot is a head shot,” MacKenzie said heatedly. “So why not stay with the 9-millimeter? And if you’ve just got to have a.45, why not buy the Glock 21 off the shelf? With the fluted firing pin, it’s the only pistol in the world you can fire coming out of the water without having to break suction in the chamber. And for all the frigging money they’re going to waste on it, how often do you use a pistol anyway?”
“How do you really feel about it, Mac?”
MacKenzie chuckled. “You mean I never told you that opinions are like assholes, everyone has one?”
“Maybe once or twice.”
MacKenzie got Murdock showered and changed, and deposited him outside the headquarters of Naval Special Warfare Group One.
“You’re not coming in?” said Murdock.
“Wasn’t invited.”
The Team Command Master Chief not invited? “What the hell?”
“Get in there,” said MacKenzie. “And good luck.” He drove off.
Murdock quickly found himself in the secure conference room, which was theoretically shielded from electronic surveillance.
Besides himself, there were only three other SEALs there. That might have been reassuring, except that one was Rear Admiral Raymond, the commander of Naval Special Warfare and the boss of all the SEALS. He was joined by Commodore Harkins, the boss of all the SEALs on the West Coast. The man Jaybird and Doc had attempted to introduce to the camel. And Commander Masciarelli, Murdock’s boss.
There were four CIA officers, two of whom Murdock had worked with while planning the Port Sudan op. The other two looked very senior, very high up.
Finally there were two guys who just had to be cops of one variety or another. But Feds, because they dressed like IBM salesmen.
Admiral Raymond was regarded in the community as a real-deal SEAL who still went out and did PT with his SEAL platoons. He’d picked up flag rank by accomplishing the missions during the Gulf War and not killing any SEALs in the process, something his predecessors hadn’t managed to do in either Panama or Grenada. He greeted Murdock with a warm handshake. “A hell of a job in Port Sudan, Blake. And you make sure you tell all your boys I said so.”
Murdock had never met the man before, but he immediately felt like going out and killing someone for him. “Thank you, sir, I’ll be sure to.”
Commodore Harkins, on the other hand, was widely regarded as just another staff pony. He gave Murdock a stiff handshake, and said, “Nice to meet you, Lieutenant.”
“Good to meet you, sir,” Murdock replied formally.
Commander Masciarelli, a little unhinged by the unusual circumstances and the presence of all the brass, shot Murdock a somewhat frantic look that said sit the fuck down and keep quiet.
The admiral gave the CIA men a nod that he was ready. Don Stroh, who had worked with Murdock on Port Sudan, stood up and moved to the podium at the front of the room.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m Don Stroh from the Central Intelligence Agency Covert Action Staff. This briefing is classified Top Secret Cable Crane. Need to know does not extend beyond this room without the personal authorization of the Director of Central Intelligence.”
Jeez, Murdock thought. He knew the code word classification didn’t mean anything in itself — some computer had vomited it up at random. What was important was that he was sitting in on it in the midst of all the brass.
Then Stroh froze him in place with his next words. “For the benefit of Lieutenant Murdock, who missed the preliminary meeting, I’ll introduce everyone.” He gestured to his CIA cohorts. “Mr. Hamilton Whitbread is the Director of Covert Action Staff. Mr. Gene Berlinger is the Director of Special Activities Operations. You know Paul Kohler.”
The first two were big boys, thought Murdock, almost deputy director level — Special Operations and Covert Action, the people he’d been working for lately. Kohler had worked with Stroh on Port Sudan.
“And from the Secret Service, Deputy Director Jim Capezzi and Special Agent Dennis Flaherty.”
The Secret Service? Murdock couldn’t figure it out. Unless maybe some bad guys were planning to kill the President and needed to be taken out. His palms started itching again.
Then Stroh said, “Since this briefing is directly related to Operation Granite Ghost, Lieutenant Murdock’s raid on Port Sudan, I’d like to begin by extending him the Agency’s congratulations on a job well done. Video and document analysis, along with communications intercepts, confirmed that the target four-man cell was accounted for in the villa, along with a number of significant high-level personnel of the group involved. The adversary has no idea what happened, or even if any non-Sudanese external force was responsible. From other documents recovered, preliminary indications are that the raid derailed at least five other future terrorist operations. Well done, Blake.”
To Murdock’s utter embarrassment, Stroh began clapping, and everyone else in the room must have felt they had to join in.
Stroh continued. “Since our main focus today is the money recovered by Lieutenant Murdock in the Sudan, I’ll let Denny Flaherty give us the background.”
Murdock knew it. He just knew that damned three million was going to come back and bite him in the ass one day. That was why he kept the receipt in his safety deposit box. Let them try what they wanted. He was covered. He’d tell the admiral that himself.
This small-scale internal emotional episode was cut off by Special Agent Flaherty, a beefy Irishman with a pronounced Boston accent. Boston College, Boston College Law School, Murdock thought.
Flaherty wasn’t much for bullshitting around. He clicked on a slide projector to display a blowup of a one-hundred-dollar bill. “Gentlemen,” he stated, “the entire three million dollars discovered in Port Sudan was counterfeit.”
That stunned Blake Murdock, since he’d personally counted the money at least three times and it had all seemed genuine to him.
“Are you familiar with the Supernote?” Flaherty asked.
Murdock looked around. Everyone else was looking at him, so he shook his head no.
“In 1992,” said Flaherty, “two Lebanese-born drug traffickers got caught trying to bring three tons of hashish from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon through Boston Harbor. They were looking at thirty years mandatory, so they asked the federal prosecutor if he’d be interested in high-quality hundred-dollar counterfeits being printed in Lebanon. He was. They turned the bills over, and the U.S. Attorney passed them on to Secret Service.
“These bills,” said Flaherty, “were close to perfect. Our top technical analyst, who had examined every counterfeit ever produced, called them genuine. On a second viewing, he picked out three tiny imperfections which are now our only way of identifying this note, which we named the Supernote. It’s also been called the Super 100.”
Murdock checked around the room. Everyone else was just listening dispassionately.
Flaherty continued. “The Federal Reserve uses some extremely sensitive scanners to screen all the currency that comes through each of the twelve Fed Banks. The black ink on our notes is magnetic, and the scanners read the magnetic field down the center line of the portrait. The scanners are so precise that a thousand genuine hundred-dollar bills are rejected for every one that’s later found to be a counterfeit. Gentlemen, the Supernote passes right through the scanners.