Adrenaline (55 page)

Look how far we’ve come since the early days, the Watcher thought. A tremendous lesson could be learned from a tremendous failure. They were unbloodied and unbowed. “You will note that we lost our main CIA contact. He was killed in action by Capra. We have since lost two other low-level contacts I… recruited inside the CIA. They’ve been arrested. Fortunately we did not deal face-to-face with them, and they cannot betray us.”

“So right now, we have no eyes inside the CIA?” the Banker asked.

“We have an eye or two that never blinks.” He smiled. Let them know he still had information feeds inside the agency, but not exactly what kinds. “I do not know if they can see as well, or as far.” The Watcher cleared his throat. He could have shared a file two inches thick on Sam Capra’s life with his compatriots, but he’d decided not to play up the man’s importance. “We do, however, have leverage over Sam Capra. We have his infant child.”

“Children,” sniffed the Banker. She was a Chinese woman, petite, thin, with a lovely face that could have sold cosmetics by the tonnage. She made a frown, as though the word held a sourness.

“Control,” countered the General.

“Control of a puppet with no strings for us to pull. While we have control over his kid, there’s no way the CIA will let him close to any information that is useful to us,” the Diplomat said. He spoke with a deep baritone, a South African accent, hands tented before his face. “I say we kill him. Show that we cannot be defied.”

“Sam Capra,” the Watcher said, “doesn’t know that our group has steered him from six years ago, that we have guided his life as surely as a hand on a rudder. We made him into what he is, not the CIA. The setback with his wife was… unfortunate. But he only knows us as a name that means nothing, a vague threat. He doesn’t know who we are, he doesn’t know how we came to be.”

“He has damaged us like no one else has,” the General said. “I truly prefer that he be dead.”

“We should not be killing CIA agents unless absolutely necessary,” the Historian said. He was a heavy-set Russian, head shaved bald, muscles thick under the black of his tailored suit. “It provokes attention. It is bad for business. He’s no longer with the CIA, he is useless to us. He cannot hurt us. He cannot find us. He dies at our hand, the CIA will be coming to investigate.”

“I agree,” several of the others murmured. The Watcher scanned their faces, taking the temperature of their reactions. The Banker stared at him and he nodded at her and said, “You have a thought to share?”

“Yes. You wanted us to finance your ability to spy on very specific people. I want to know how much of that ability has been compromised by this failure.”

“The whole reason we were able to attempt a project of this scale was because of me. Because I have made it easy for us to access information that is critically damaging to some of the most vitally placed people in the world and use it to force them to do what we need. We had a failure. It doesn’t change the fact that I—I mean we—now own several people in key positions in government and business around the world.”

“So. You want to mount another project, using your
resources.” The Banker’s tone mocked him. In another time he would have slapped her across the face, torn her silk suit from her body, taught her who was master. His jaw quavered. Those days were done. Instead he nodded gravely. “Yes. But first I want to clean up the mess that Sam Capra made for us, but I want you to understand why it’s a risk.”

The Banker nodded.

“We had an asset in Amsterdam, a computer hacker who had helped me with infiltrating the laptops of our targets so that we had a free view of the classified information that came into their systems. Nic ten Boom. He’s dead, killed by Capra. There is a loose end there that we have only now discovered.”

“What? Who?” the General asked.

“A young Chinese graduate student, a computer hacker named Jin Ming, was present at a shootout in a Rotterdam machinists’ shop that was owned by the smuggling ring we used in Amsterdam. He was Nic ten Boom’s hacking assistant, if you will. Ming is in the hospital, recovering from his wounds.”

“The assistant may know nothing.”

“He may not. I would very much like to know if he is going to be a problem. We know that Nic ten Boom was most ambitious.” He had to be careful here. “In checking my own computer’s logs, I found out that ten Boom was trying to learn more about us, and about our organization when he died. We hired him to spy
for
us, but he was starting to spy
on
us.”

“Then I’m glad he’s dead, and you should hire with a more careful eye,” the Banker said.

“Nic was attracted by success. He wanted to move up
the ladder.” The Watcher shrugged. “He didn’t seem to realize we require success before promotion.”

“Kids today are lazy,” the General said.

“Everyone else involved in the Amsterdam operation is dead, either killed by Capra or by one of our people, Edward, who sought to minimize our risks by eliminating those who could identify him. Edward is dead.”

There was no sentimentality about the death of a hireling.

“I did not know until now that this young man, Ming, was alive. He was grabbed by the CIA from an Internet café, then we assume Ming gave them the Rotterdam address. They took him in when they raided our smuggling operation and Ming was shot. Apparently both our side and the CIA left him for dead. He is an Amsterdam hospital, under police guard.”

“So have him killed.” The Banker gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “I can assure you, if there is a surfeit of anything in the world, it’s Chinese grad students.”

“I will. But why I’ve told you all this is because it’s all part of a bigger picture. We have shaped Sam Capra, over the years, like he was made of clay. And I don’t intend to let that wheel stop spinning until he is molded in just the way we need. The time has come. I have thought of a way in which Mr. Capra can be invaluable to us.”

“Because we have his child,” the Banker said. “You just got a new pawn on your chessboard, darling.” She actually smiled at him.

He did not like her changing his metaphor. “You have to seize what advantages you can,” the Watcher said. He felt the tension in his chest begin to loosen. At any moment any of the others would have been in their rights to call a vote on his life. They hadn’t.

“The CIA will never trust him while we have his child. Ever,” the General said.

“Oh, I know. I intend to take full advantage of that. It’s not like there’s a surplus of highly trained CIA operatives on the market. And most of them would never consider working for us.”

“But he will,” the Banker said.

The Watcher nodded. “Yes. He will.” He was going to get to live another day, he decided.

When a beautiful woman asks for his help, ex-CIA agent Sam Capra
becomes caught in a battle with the most dangerous enemy ever—a man who owns
the people who run the world…

Please turn this page

for a sneak peek at

Downfall
.

Coming in July 2013

Wednesday, November 3, afternoon

San Francisco, California

T
HE SIMPLEST BEGINNINGS
can unravel a life. A family. A world.

In this case, chewing gum.

Diana Keene reached into her mom’s ugly new purse in the middle of their argument to snatch a slice of spearmint. She saw three cell phones hidden at the bottom of the purse.

One pink, one blue, one green. Cheap models she’d never seen before, not like the smartphone Mom kept glued to her side at all times, befitting a public relations executive.

“And since you’ll be running the company while I’m gone,” Mom was saying, her back to her daughter while she stuffed a sweater into her luggage, “no sauntering into the office at nine, Diana. Be there by seven thirty. Give yourself time to scan the news feeds from the East Coast.”

Diana grabbed the gum, stepped away from the purse, and considered whether or not to confront her mother in her little white lie. She decided to dance around the edges.

“I don’t think it’s healthy to go without a cell phone for two weeks.” Diana crossed her arms, staring at her mother’s back. She unwrapped the gum, slid the stick into her mouth. “What if I need you?”

“You’ll survive.” Her mother Janice zipped up her small suitcase, turned to face her daughter with a smile.

“What if a client throws a fit? Or I do something wrong?”

“Deal with it. You’ll survive.” Janice straightened up and smiled at her daughter.

“Mom—what if I need—” and then Diana broke off, ashamed. She stared past her mother’s shoulder, out at the stunning view of San Francisco Bay, the hump of Alcatraz, the distant stretch of the Golden Gate. It was a cloudless day, the early haze burned away, the blue of the sky bright.
Need what? Need you to keep running my life for me?

“Need money?” Mom, as she often did, finished the sentence for her but misinterpreted what she meant. “Diana, you’re a grown woman with a good job. You can survive for two weeks without any”—and here Mom did her air quotes, bending her fingers—“emergency loans.”

“You’re right.”
Why are you lying to me, Mom?
she thought. “Where is this no-contact retreat again?”

“New Mexico.”

“And I have no way to contact you—none at all?”
Like on these three cheap phones?

“Cell phones are forbidden. You could call the lodge and leave a message, I suppose,” Janice said, but in a tone that made it clear that she didn’t want her Bikram yoga or her bird-watching or her organic lunch interrupted. “The whole point is to get away from the world, sweetheart.”

Mom stuck with the lie, and Diana felt her stomach twist. “This just isn’t like you, withdrawing so completely from the world. And from your work. And from me.”

“Yes, I’m a workaholic, sweetheart, and it’s made me tired and sick. I’m ready for a break, and I’m ready for you to be fine with it.”

Diana thought,
Confront her with the lie. And then she knows you snooped in her purse like a kid would, and you’re twenty-three, not thirteen, and… maybe Mom has a good reason.
She thought of the hours her mother had worked, everything she’d done for Diana. In the car. She’d ask her about the phones in the car.

“I’m ready.”

Diana jingled her keys. “Fine, let’s go.”

Mom’s town house was the entire top floor of the building. They took the elevator down and walked across the building’s small lawn (a rarity in San Francisco), through the heavy metal gate to Green Street. Diana put her mother’s bag in the back of the Jaguar that Janice had bought her for her last birthday. Diana drove out of the lovely neighborhood of Russian Hill. Janice talked about what needed to be done at work while she was gone: account reviews, pitching stories on clients to the leading business publications, preparing for client product launches in January. Diana kept waiting for her mom to stop lying.

They were ten minutes from the airport and Diana said, “Why are you taking three, yes three, cell phones to a place that forbids them?”

Her mother looked straight ahead and said, “So when they confiscate one, I’ll have extras hidden away.”

Diana laughed. “You troublemaker. Give me the numbers and I’ll call you or text you.”

“No. Don’t call me.” She looked out the window. “Just let me go do what I need to do and don’t call me.”

Her tone was far too serious. “Mom…”

“Do not call me, Diana, and frankly, I don’t appreciate you rooting around in my purse. Stay out of my business.”

The words were like knives, sharp, and to Diana’s ears not like Mom.

The drive turned into a painful silence as Diana took the exit for the airport.

“I don’t want this to be our good-bye, honey,” Janice said.

“Are you really going on this retreat?” Diana pulled up to the curbside drop-off.

“Of course I am.” Steel returned to Mom’s voice. “I’ll see you in two weeks. Maybe sooner if I get bored.” Janice leaned over and gave Diana a kiss on the cheek, a awkward sideways hug.

You’re still lying to me
, Diana thought.
I don’t believe you.