It was after lunch when the headache started. He was hosting an honor cordon to welcome Poland’s Minister of National Defense to the Pentagon for a series of meetings on the Ballistic Missile Defense System. Putin was pushing his luck in the Ukraine and the Baltics were starting to get nervous. The new European Inteceptor Site was planned for construction in Poland in 2018 and the Poles wanted to chew the fat about it in DC.
Now, he was being handed two cell phones at once. Waiting for the left hand was Davis Faulkner, the Director of the CIA. On the other hand was an in-coming call from Alex Reeve, his daughter.
“Alex — hi, it’s Dad,” he said, warm but weary. Before she could reply he spoke up again. “Darling, could you please give me a second?”
He hated pushing her along, but she knew the deal.
“Davis, what gives?”
“It’s about Wade, Jack.”
Brooke sighed. Morton Wade. The tech guru who had gone AWOL after the Great Recession. Rumor had it he’d hooked up with a crazy bunch of former cartel members and was up to no good south of the border. “What about him?”
“We picked up his trail south of the Rio Grande.”
“Mexico, huh?”
“Sure. Apparently, he has some business interests down there.”
“He sure doesn’t have any up here,” Brooke said.
Davis ignored the quip. Brooke knew he would. “Jack, we have very little on this, but one of our guys in Lahore… a little naked asset we keep in the shadows — he says someone’s on the market for a WMD of some description.”
“Of some description,” Brooke shook his head. “That’s real helpful, Davis. You got anything more exciting for me?”
“Sure,” he said flatly. “Whatever it is, it’s got a price tag of fifty million dollars.”
Brooke didn’t like the sound of where this was going. “Fifty million US?”
He heard the sound of Faulkner exhaling his famous cigar smoke. “Uh-huh.”
“We know where Wade is in Mexico?”
The gaps in between the two men’s sentences were starting to get longer and tenser.
“Not exactly. Spends half his time in the jungle. Some say his base is a coffee plantation but we’re not even sure if it exists. The Beltway scuttlebutt has it that he’s trying to get hold of something pretty nasty, Jack, and we don’t know anything — not even what it is or where it’s headed.”
Brooke was unruffled. “Who else knows?”
“President Grant. Me. You. Maybe some others.”
“We need a team down there, Davis.”
“Mexicans won’t like it.” More smoke. Faulkner was a Robusto man and Brooke could almost smell the Cohiba smoke drifting through the tiny speaker.
“Too bad. I’m sending Kim Taylor and Doyle. I’ve seen them under pressure and they’re good.”
“Send Camacho as well. They could use him.”
“Jack Camacho?”
“Sure.”
“Thought he was teaching down at Camp Swampy?”
“Best agent I ever knew. Bomb disposal skills too.”
“Joint BDS-CIA, huh? Okay, fine. Leave it to me — and say goodbye to that cigar for me.”
Brooke cut the call and switched hands.
“Alex — sorry, darling.”
“Sure.”
“Everything okay?”
“I need your help, Dad.”
Brooke straightened up in his seat. This was unexpected. Alex had never forgiven him for leaving her mother, and they had rarely spoken in the intervening years. She was fiercely independent and had been a quality CIA agent before the attack in Colombia. He knew how hard it would be to ask him for help. And yet now she was doing just that.
“Anything… you know that.”
“We’ve been keeping surveillance on Morton Wade.”
This held no surprise for Brooke. Any intel group worth its salt in the region would be all over Wade like honey on a hot biscuit, and he knew ECHO had a habit of punching above their weight. “You and me both, darling. What’s the problem?”
“He killed some of our people, Dad.”
Brooke’s face soured. “He what?”
“It was some kind of execution in the jungle. We got a live video feed until he cut it. Dad?”
“That son of a bitch! What the hell is he thinking?”
“It gets worse… before our assets were murdered they sent back some information.”
“What sort of information?”
As he spoke, the motorcade pulled up to the airport.
“Missing people.”
“And you need some more muscle?”
“Yes.”
“Just so happens I’m onto Wade myself and I’m sending a team down.”
Brooke ended his call as airport security was rushing his party through the departure lounge and across the air-bridge to his waiting plane. Thank God his daughter was on the island with Eden. The old English politician might be a cranky, mysterious old bastard, but he was a respected former Army officer and a good man, and while the CIA sure knew where Elysium was, it was a secret to pretty much the rest of the world. That was a calming thought in a shit-storm of a day that was just getting worse and worse with every hour.
Now, as the aircraft was taxiing to the runway, he opened his cell phone and made the hundredth call of the day to one of his two special assistants, working late as usual back at the Pentagon. He spoke into the phone for a few moments: “I’m sending you the details of some agents. We’re putting together a mission for them and they need to be on a plane an hour ago… Thanks, Jena.”
He cut the call and turned to the staffer.
She looked at him and offered a tired smile.
He tried to return the smile. “You find those Tylenol?”
She held out her hand to reveal the two tiny tablets. In her other hand she held a bottle of mineral water, but before he could take them another staffer approached with his hand cupped over yet another cell phone.
“The Mexican Secretary of National Defense, Mr Secretary. Says it’s urgent.”
Brooke nodded unhappily and took the phone.
Yeah. A shit-storm of a day that was just getting worse and worse with every hour.
CHAPTER SIX
Viktor Sobotka stepped out of Santa Fe airport and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He stuffed it haphazardly back into his pocket and cursed this place. So early in the morning, and already it was as hot as hell in New Mexico today and he was having trouble handling it. His Czech homeland had some fierce summers, but nothing like when the south-easterly blew the hot air up over the Chihuahua Desert.
He checked his trusty weather app on the iPhone and sighed when he saw they had revised the night-time low to thirty-two degrees Celsius. Another night soaked in sweat, he thought with dismay, but then he remembered the day he had ahead of him and a smile spread across his face. He’d just flown back into the state after a conference in New York, but now he was going home. Today was his wife’s birthday and he had a party to attend.
After an arduous trek across the car park, he climbed into his Nissan and switched on the engine. A few moments later he sighed in relief as he redirected the dashboard vents and felt the conditioned air blowing on his face. He felt the cool current ruffling his hair as he cranked it onto full and pulled out of the car park the same way he had done for countless times after academic conferences and business trips all over the world.
Except this time was different.
This time they were waiting for him, and they got him at the second bend in the road as it snaked away from the airport. One woman and a man, both armed, standing in front of a GMC Vandura, guns pointed at him. He knew it was a carjacking. They were a serious problem in many parts of Mexico, but not up here in America.