He turned the corner and spotted a break room equipped with a refrigerator. “How about you? Have your people been able to dig anything up?”
“Not much. Apparently they found a mention of similar attacks from a Jewish doctor who ran to Africa during World War II.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I doubt it, but we’re trying to get confirmation and track down his last known location in Uganda.”
“Any speculation from him that there was something behind the behavior beyond the obvious? A biological or chemical agent?”
“Not yet, but our people just found this thread. They’ll keep pulling on it. If there’s anything there, they’ll find it.”
Smith slipped into the break room and opened the fridge, reaching for a couple of Cokes before spotting a six-pack of beer at the back.
“Call me when you finish the debriefing,” Klein continued. “Don’t worry about how late it is. I want to be kept in the loop.”
“I’ll catch you on my way back to the airport.”
The line went dead and he exchanged two beers for a ten-dollar bill from his wallet. Just what the doctor ordered.
A bottle opener was a tougher find, but he managed to pry the caps off with the edge of the counter before heading back down the hall. He needed to do better — to get Rivera to focus. The question was how.
Smith was older and supposedly wiser, but he wasn’t sure he’d react any differently if their positions were reversed. He’d watched people die of their wounds while he tried desperately to save them; he’d stood helplessly by as the woman he loved succumbed to a virus created by a madman. And he’d knowingly sent men and women into fights that seemed unwinnable.
You never really learned to deal with it. The best you could do was push it away every night so that you could get a few hours of sleep free of the ghosts.
He opened the door to the conference room, holding the beers up in front of him like the prize they were. “I found—”
He fell silent when Rivera looked up from the sidearm lying on the table in front of him.
Smith let go of the bottles and was already sliding across the table when they shattered on the floor. His reaction was faster than most men half his age could ever hope to match. But Rivera wasn’t most men.
The SEAL snatched up the gun and shoved it beneath his chin, squeezing the trigger just as Smith reached him.
The bullet tore the top of his skull off and they both went crashing to the floor in a spray of blood and brain matter.
Smith’s immediate reaction was to check for a pulse, but there was clearly no point. Instead, he fell back against the wall and began slamming his head repeatedly into it.
He’d completely blown it. He’d been so focused on what he was doing, so mired in his own preconceptions, he’d ignored the signals that seemed so obvious now.
The young man’s blood continued to flow, running along the floor until it began to pool around Smith’s foot. There was always something you remembered from situations like this — something that, no matter how many years went by, you could never shake. This time he knew it would be the smell of that damn beer.
15
When Drake entered, Brandon Gazenga was already there shuffling nervously through the papers on his lap.
“Good morning, sir.”
Drake nodded and sat, breaking the seal on a folder stamped DCI’s Eyes Only and flipping through the contents. “Is it completely done?”
“Yes, sir. I consider that a final draft. It’s just waiting for you and Dave to sign off.”
Gazenga’s parents had come over on the boat from Congo when he was only six, immediately becoming a shining example of the American dream. His father had gone into the restaurant business, starting as a dishwasher and ending up the owner of a café chain serving cuisine from his home continent.
Despite their commitment to their new home, Brandon’s parents had never let him forget where he came from. He spoke Kituba fluently and while growing up had spent at least a month a year with his cousins in Kinshasa.
That, combined with a degree in international studies from Yale, had made him an obvious target for recruitment by the CIA. And since that recruitment, he had performed admirably — becoming one of the agency’s top central African analysts despite his relative youth.
Those qualifications alone, though, wouldn’t have been enough for Drake to include him in the off-the-books operation he’d undertaken. In the end, it was Gazenga’s personality profile that made him so perfect.
The young man still had one foot in an extremely hierarchical culture and had spent his life serving a powerful father whose recent death left him adrift. Even better, his time in poverty-stricken Kinshasa had given him a deep gratitude toward America for the opportunities it had provided. All these things combined to make him extremely susceptible to manipulation by authority figures.
“So you’re confident that it’s going to satisfy the president and his people?”
Gazenga made a subtle swipe at the sweat forming along his hairline. “I think I’ve put the best possible arguments forward, sir. Beyond the video, all anyone has regarding Bahame’s raids is legend and unreliable reports from survivors. I covered that in the first few paragraphs, highlighting the level of superstition and the discrepancies in eyewitness reports. The rest is mainly the opinions of psychologists and descriptions of similar phenomena throughout history with a focus on Pol Pot’s ability to brainwash children into perpetrating genocide in Cambodia. I sum up with a description of pertinent rituals known in Africa, including ritualized cutting and the painting of warriors with cow’s blood before going into battle.”
“What about the Iranians?”
“That’s obviously not included in the report we’re going to deliver, but I put the information at the back of your copy in the format of a Q&A. I’ve gone through every piece of information the intelligence community has connecting the Iranians to Bahame and recommended responses in the event the president is aware of the association and asks questions. Frankly, it wasn’t too difficult. The intel is pretty tenuous at this point.”
Drake skimmed the Iranian section for a moment and then tossed the file on his desk. “Another excellent job, Brandon. It’s what I’ve come to expect from you.”
Gazenga’s smile had a slightly queasy edge to it, and he took another swipe at his forehead. “Thank you, sir.”
Drake looked over his reading glasses and scowled, mindful of the importance of maintaining his role as a replacement for the father who had been lost. “Is there a problem?”
Fear flashed briefly in the young man’s eyes. “No, sir. Why would there be?”
“Because this is a tough assignment. About as tough as they get. But that’s the job we’re stuck with. Castilla is a damn fine man, but he’s a politician. I’d already been working in intelligence for fifteen years when he decided to leave his law firm and run for local office. We’re the experts, and to some extent we have to protect the country from the revolving door of Congress and the White House.”
“Yes, sir, I understand.” His voice had a comforting force to it, but there was still something audible in the background. Doubt.
“You’ve seen the same things I have, Brandon: the military and intelligence communities getting more and more politicized and bureaucratic. Constant grandstanding and posturing by the people who are supposed to be leading us. A deficit that’s pushing us into another collapse. This country is on life support, and as much as I hate to admit it, the energy coming out of the Middle East is our blood supply. Without it, this country dies.”