Walton shook his head. “It’s only forty-eight hours since the Paris op went bad. That’s not time enough for all the facts to filter up. I’m thinking Peterson put the contract on Pope to prevent him consulting the president.”
“But he fucked up,” Steiner said. “It’s only a matter of time before we’re either recalled or disavowed.” He got back to his feet, ignoring the steaming cup of coffee. “Look, it’s obvious we backed the wrong horse. Senator Grieves’s little intel coup isn’t going to happen. The president pulled an end around and named Pope as director — which none of us saw coming. So the wishy-washy young Webb doesn’t matter anymore. Pope’s an entirely different animal. His nomination will absolutely be approved, and that bastard’s gonna run the Langley guillotine day and night until he’s cleaned out the entire agency.”
Walton sipped calmly from his coffee, peering over the rim of the cup. “So what are you saying?”
Steiner smirked. “I’m saying it’s time we sold our secrets to the Arab Emirates and got ourselves a change of venue, old buddy. A couple of million for what we know about the CIA is more than reasonable, and I don’t know about you, but I can live just fine on a million bucks.”
Walton sipped again. “You haven’t touched your coffee.”
Steiner picked up the cup, obligingly taking a sip. He retched instantly, dropping the cup and stumbling back against the counter, his face contorting horribly as he grabbed his throat, just managing to croak out “You fuck—!” before crashing to the floor, dead of cyanide poisoning.
Walton stepped over and stood looking down at the body, an ugly white drool oozing from the corner of Steiner’s mouth. “Sorry, old buddy, but two million goes twice as far as one, and I’ve put in too much time to spend my retirement living beneath my means.”
He went into the operations room and picked up a secure line, dialing a stateside telephone number from memory.
“Senator Steve Grieves’s office,” answered a young woman’s voice.
“This is Ben Walton. Put the senator on the phone.”
“Just a moment, sir.”
The senator came on the line a minute later, saying, “I hope you’re calling from a secure line.”
“Secure as they come,” Walton said. “Is it true what I heard about Pope? That he’s going to be named director?”
Grieves replied, “I guess bad news does travel fast.”
“Have you been in contact with Peterson?”
“Peterson knows better than to call me directly — as do you.”
“I’ve called to tell you that I’m out,” Walton said. “Don’t bother looking for me. You won’t find me. From here on, I think we should agree to keep each other’s secrets and leave it at that. What do you say, Senator?”
There was a slight pause at Grieves’s end. “I thought you’d want money.”
“I’m covered for cash,” Walton said. “Besides, this was never about money. It was about keeping the agency out of the hands of men like Webb and Pope. We tried, and we failed. That’s just how it goes.”
“What about Miller and Steiner?”
“Both dead. Miller was killed in the Med by the GRU, and I just found Steiner’s body here in Rome. Looks like cyanide. It could’ve been anybody. That’s why I’m getting out now — today — before it happens to me.”
“What about Peterson?” Grieves asked. “Can I trust him?”
Walton chuckled. “You can trust Ken Peterson about as far as you can throw him, but I wouldn’t worry too much. He’s extremely good at keeping his ass covered, which means yours is probably covered too. Besides, people don’t assassinate senators. It doesn’t look good on CNN.”
“Well, I guess this is good-bye and good luck then, Ben. You’re right. We tried.”
“One more thing before I go,” Walton said. “If Peterson asks you for help with Gil Shannon, I seriously suggest you give him whatever he asks for.”
26
Dokka Umarov sat around a smoky daytime campfire in a mountain forest, meeting with a group of commanders from the unrecognized Islamist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Even though the forty-nine-year-old Islamist militant enjoyed a certain amount of protection from “corporate” elements within the Russian government, he was careful never to remain in one place for very long. The Tenth Independent Spetsnaz Brigade of the Russian army wanted him dead, and it would stop at very little to take him out if it ever succeeded in nailing down his exact location long enough to coordinate an attack.
As the self-proclaimed emir of the unrecognized Caucasus Emirate, he was known to his Chechen supporters by his Arabized name: Dokka Abu Usman. To the Russian people, however, he was better known as “Russia’s Bin Laden,” owing to his many terrorist attacks against Russian civilians and Russian military targets. In 2014 he had even vowed to prevent the Sochi Olympic Games through acts of terror — an unrealized threat that was later regarded by many as a feeble attempt to draw additional Islamist militants to his cause.
Since then, he and his commanders had devised a more feasible strategy. They would blow up three separate pumping stations along the Georgian stretch of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a bold plan with three primary objectives:
Disabling the BTC would immediately disrupt Western economies by driving oil prices even higher than they already were. In addition, it would set the United States and Russian governments immediately at odds. For it was no secret that Russia was distressed by the fact that Western powers were enjoying unfettered access to oil fields beneath the Caspian Sea, and this was at least a partial reason for its 2008 invasion of Georgia via the Roki Tunnel, a three-thousand-yard underpass running beneath the North Caucasus Mountains. The third and most important objective of sabotaging the pipeline was to inspire an authentic insurgency, finally uniting Chechen Islamists under a single banner within the region.
Umarov had recently learned from his coconspirators inside the GRU — corporate men who desired renewed friction between Russia and the United States in order generate more military spending — that Spetsnaz operator Andrei Yeshevsky had been killed in Paris by the now-infamous Gil Shannon. Umarov knew of Shannon as the elite American sniper who had somehow managed to survive a coordinated Chechen — Al Qaeda attack on his Montana home the previous summer.
“What does this mean for us, Dokka?” asked Umarov’s second in command, Anzor Basayev. “Will we have Spetsnaz support if Kovalenko and his men are dead as well?”
“Kovalenko is still alive.” Umarov was Caucasian, light skinned with a long, deep beard. He always dressed in camouflage, much the way Bin Laden had chosen to dress, though Umarov was not an Arab and therefore never wore a turban.
“He’d better be,” said one of the Ichkeria commanders. “We’re going to need Spetsnaz operators. Our own men don’t have the necessary training to infiltrate the pumping stations.”
Unconcerned, Umarov drew patiently from a Russian cigarette, saying, “There are plenty of Zapad men available if we need them.”
The Special Battalion Zapad of western Chechnya was the sister battalion to the vaunted Chechen Vostok Battalion of Eastern Chechnya, which had been sent to the Crimean Peninsula in the aftermath of the Ukrainian Revolution in February 2014. Both battalions were Spetsnaz, and both were composed of ethnic Chechens, but the Zapad Battalion had recently been disbanded, with many of its operators “released” from the Russian army due to concerns over their loyalty to the Russian Federation. A large number of these former Spetsnaz men had since become like Japanese ronin: disavowed mercenaries, guns for hire.