Wood hesitated and said, “Yes, one. Too bad. Quite the looker.”
Ballantine thought about Virginia and all that she had meant to him. He knew what had to be done, and he surprised himself when he felt a flutter in his chest. A symptom of sorrow? He had left those senses for dead a long time ago. Poor Virginia. He was stuck here with moronic Regina, and he wished there was something he could do, some way he could save Virginia. He understood, though, that the voice on the other end of the secure wireless connection would help Virginia meet an untimely death. She knew too much. Way too much.
“Are you there?” Wood asked.
“Yes, I am here,” Ballantine said.
“Good. For a moment I thought you were going soft on me.”
Ballantine lay back on his bed and rode the wave of sadness. “Never. I will take care of your problem.”
“Good. Now, do you have the operative? Rumor has it that you might.”
Ballantine hesitated. “Not at this time.”
“That’s a problem.”
“I know.”
“A big problem if he goes public.”
“I know. If he remembers.” Ballantine had seen the confusion on Garrett’s face. He seemed… different. “In which case you will have a problem.”
“Then we’re both screwed,” Wood said.
“I understand. I’m leaving tonight,” Ballantine said.
“You know you missed him,” Wood said.
“Missed who?”
“Matt Garrett. I put him there in your base camp, and he’s still alive. I delivered as you requested.”
“I know… I know. But he will be dead soon.”
Ballantine shut off his phone and closed his eyes. Yes, he would keep the fact of his possession of Zachary Garrett from his contact for now, primarily because he now had questions about the real identity of Ronnie Wood.
Or were there two, playing off each other?
He pressed his one free hand against the mattress and then paused. He heard voices.
Standing slowly, he remembered he had tucked his pistol between the mattress and box springs. Pain stymied him on his first attempt to remove the weapon from its ready position. Gritting his teeth, he used his opposite arm to secure the pistol. He moved quietly to his door, which was cracked slightly. Leaning forward, he listened intently. It was a woman’s voice, but not Regina’s.
He peered around the corner and saw an elderly woman holding a small poodle in one arm. What got Ballantine’s attention, though, was the newspaper she held in her opposite hand. He watched as Regina looked to where the woman was pointing at the newspaper. Then he saw Regina hold her hand to her mouth and begin to shudder.
Without hesitation, he walked from his bedroom door into the foyer of the home. “Good afternoon, ladies.”
Ballantine was practically catatonic as he pulled the trigger of his pistol exactly twice. Both women dropped to the floor with bullet wounds to the head, the poodle jumping nervously from its owner’s arms.
Where cell phones and e-mail ruled the day, Ballantine had already risked too much by trusting Regina. Her limited contact with her customers had been her undoing, and he had known it would only be a matter of time before he killed her.
Just to stop the yapping, Ballantine shot the poodle as well.
He walked back into his bedroom and kicked Zachary Garrett in the ribs. “Get up. We’re moving.”
Ballantine led the shackled Garrett to the barn, where they would wait for darkness.
CHAPTER 37
Frank Lantini stared at his satellite phone as he leaned back against a palm tree on the perimeter of Fort Sherman, Panama. Hundreds of thoughts cycling through his mind, he stuffed the phone in his shirt pocket and looked over the minor waves that lapped almost noiselessly against the sand. He could hear just a slight curl of the 12-inch breaker that rolled with a zipping sound into the shore. The bay beyond Fort Sherman was glassy smooth, the small breakers a function of the tide shifting. His Chris Craft was not far.
Lantini was a slight man who had served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force for many years, transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency as a brigadier general and, then upon retirement, was selected by President Davis as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had “seen combat,” as he referred to it, during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 as a lieutenant colonel. With the plethora of prisoners of war — called detainees in politically correct circles — Lantini was deployed from his soft assignment as a State Department Fellow in Foggy Bottom to Saudi Arabia to assist with the massive interrogation efforts. Not only did the Department of Defense and CIA have a need to question as many prisoners as possible, but they also needed to develop a database of those who had been captured. The general feeling was that the Middle East was going to be the center of attention for quite some time and that cataloguing the enemy prisoners of war might bear fruit as the region continued to unfurl from the rigidity of the Cold War.
Last year he had discreetly allied himself with Taiku Taikishi, a Japanese businessman, Bart Rathburn, a former assistant secretary of defense, and Bob Stone, the current secretary of defense. They had used the moniker Rolling Stones to provide cover to their conversations as they diverted forces and intelligence assets from the Iraq buildup to the Philippines in an erstwhile attempt to derail the single-minded drive toward Iraq. To a man, the Rolling Stones believed the country had veered away too quickly from Afghanistan and, more importantly, Islamic Extremism. Instead of focusing on crushing bin Laden and his thugs, the military found itself straddling the Middle East, without clear focus in either locale or on either enemy.
Lantini watched the harmless waves lap near his boots as he pulled on a Sol.
“Shitty beer,” he said to himself.
His mind spun back again to the video feed piped through the Predator drone that fateful December 2001 day. This time with more clarity. He could see Matt Garrett’s team well camouflaged in their white parkas as they nestled in the snow overlooking a nondescript Pakistani village nearly 15 kilometers from the Afghanistan border. Through Matt’s fiber optic snipercam he could pipe his sight picture up to the drone, which could relay back to whoever could access the downlink. The ultimate 8,000-mile screwdriver.
Lantini, as CIA Director, was the primary recipient of the feed.
And what he had seen was a short Egyptian man with a prayer callous on his forehead just above his spectacles directing a team of AK-47-toting Arabs carrying a wounded six-and-a-half-foot Arab with a gray beard.
He had invited Stone and Rathburn to join him by secure video-teleconference as they all watched the snipercam. Lantini knew that Colonel Jack Rampert from special operations and several in the White House Situation Room were also watching the feed. “Kill TV,” they had called it. The ultimate in reality television.
Garrett’s improper incursion into Pakistan had put the Rolling Stones on the horns of a dilemma. Do they let him kill al Qaeda senior leadership, whom Garrett clearly had in his sights? Or do they allow the transnational henchmen to go free, preserving their strategic flexibility?
“If he kills him,” Stone had said, “we can’t do jack shit about stopping the buildup for Iraq. It’s going to be tough as it is.”
“Takishi has an idea,” Rathburn had said. Meanwhile, Matt Garrett’s voice could be heard, a mere whisper through a small microphone 9,000 miles away, “Request kill chain.”
And so they had, in harried fashion, as Garrett laid his finger on the trigger of his sniper rifle, discussed the pros and cons of letting the operative take the shot.
Ultimately, they had determined that it was best to let al Qaeda live to fight another day so that they, the Rolling Stones, would stand a chance, however slight, of keeping the nation focused on Islamic extremism as opposed to whatever the causus belli in Iraq was purported to be.