American Assassin (15 page)

CHAPTER
27

T
HANK
God,” Lewis announced upon seeing Stansfield enter the room. “I can’t spend another minute trying to talk sense into these two.”

With pure disappointment, Stansfield glared down the length of the table, first at Hurley, who was on the left, and then at Kennedy, who was directly across from him. They were both on their feet. “Sit,” he commanded. Kennedy sat. Hurley remained standing. “The first person who raises his voice is being sent to Yemen for the rest of his career.”

“You can’t send me anywhere,” Hurley snarled.

Stansfield directed his full attention to Hurley and communicated his resolve with an icy stare that silently communicated the fact that he could do a lot worse than sending his ungrateful ass to Yemen. Of the three, Hurley was the only one who had seen this look before. It had been nearly three decades ago but Hurley still remembered that his stupidity had almost cost him his life, and if it hadn’t been for Stansfield’s magnanimous attitude he would have died that day. Hurley slowly sank to his seat.

“Have I failed you two so poorly that it has come to this?” Stansfield said in a calm but disappointed voice. “You scream at each other like children trying to bully their way to victory.” He cocked his head in Kennedy’s direction. “I expect far more from you. What did I tell you about losing control of your emotions?”

“That it’s a weakness.”

“Correct. And how has it worked for you this evening … screaming at one of the most hotheaded men in all of our nation’s capital? Did your logic become more clear? Did your points carry more weight? Did you somehow persuade him to see things your way by shrieking at him like some wild banshee?”

Kennedy shook her head, her embarrassment complete.

Stansfield turned his icy gaze on Hurley. “And you … are you happy that you have succeeded in getting young Irene to finally sink to your depths?”

“That’s bullshit. She’s a grown woman. She can fight her own battles. I resent the fact that every time she doesn’t like what I’m doing she goes running to you.” Hurley pointed at him. “You know the rules as well as I do. I’m in charge in the field. What I say goes. I’m God and that too-smart-for-his-own-good college punk wandered so far off the reservation he’s lucky I don’t put a bullet in his head.”

“That’s our litmus test these days? When an operator doesn’t follow orders to the letter, we put a bullet in his head?”

“You know what I mean. He went way beyond his operational parameters. He basically threw them out and flew off the handle.”

“And succeeded. Let’s not forget that part.”

“Shit,” Hurley scoffed at the point. “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a blue moon.”

“This is how you would like to argue with me … by mixing squirrel and moon metaphors?”

“You know I’m right.”

“You are partially right, and you have also become an intolerable bully whom I’m not so sure I can keep around.”

“Say the word and I’ll resign. I’m sick of this bullshit.”

“And then what will you do, Stan?” The deputy director of operations leaned over and placed his hands on the table. “Become a full-blown alcoholic. Another bitter, discarded spy who closes himself off from an ungrateful citizenry. You’re already halfway there. You drink too much. You smoke too much. You piss and moan like some miserable woman who’s mad at her husband because she’s no longer young and beautiful. And there’s the meat of the problem, isn’t it, Stan?”

“What’s the meat of the problem?”

“I think you may have heard this before. He reminds you of yourself.”

“Who? The college puke?”

Stansfield nodded slowly. “And he might be better than you. That’s what really scares you.”

“That’s bullshit.”

Stansfield should have seen it sooner. He stood up abruptly and said, “So, your recommendation is that I cut him loose?”

“Absolutely. He’s too much of a loose cannon. Sooner or later he’s going to cause you a lot of problems.”

“And who do you have to replace him?”

Hurley waffled. “A couple of decent candidates.”

Stansfield looked to Lewis, who was at the head of the table. “Doctor?”

Lewis shook his head. “Neither of them have his skill set. Even if we worked with them for a year I don’t think they could match him.”

“That’s not true,” Hurley said, while looking as if he’d just taken a bite out of a lemon.

“Irene?” Stansfield asked.

She didn’t speak. Just shook her head.

Stansfield pondered the situation for a moment and then said, “Here is my problem. We are flying blind in Lebanon and Syria. The director and the president overruled me and sent Cummins in to negotiate for the release of that Texas businessman.” Stansfield stopped speaking for a second. He couldn’t get over the stupidity of that decision and all of the damage that had been done after Cummins himself had been taken hostage. “Our assets have been getting picked off one by one for the past six months. Our network, that we worked so carefully to rebuild, is now in shambles. This situation has to be turned around, and I need men in the field to do it. I need shooters on the ground. We’ve all spent enough time over there to know that weakness breeds contempt. That stops today. I want these guys looking over their shoulders wondering if they’re next. I want the leadership of Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah afraid to pop their heads out of their holes for fear that they might get those heads blown off. I want them on notice that if they’re going to grab one of our assets who is negotiating in good faith and torture him for months on end … dammit, we are going to come after them like crazed sons of bitches.” He turned his attention back to Hurley. “I don’t want to lose you, but I need this kid. He’s too good to just throw away. He knows how to take the initiative.”

“Initiative? That’s what you want to call it?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Stan, could you please get hold of your ego and hypocrisy and listen to me. This is bigger than you. We have a gaping hole in our operational abilities. A big nasty neighborhood in the Middle East that is breeding terrorists like rabbits, and we have nothing. I need to get back in there.”

“You’re calling me a hypocrite?”

“You have an extremely convenient short-term memory. Tell me, Stan, how many times in your first two years did you get yourself into trouble by ignoring orders or running off and launching your own operations?”

“It was a different time back then. We were given far more latitude.”

“And you still got in trouble.” Stansfield shook his head as if trying to reconcile an irreconcilable thought. “Does the truth matter to you at all, or do you just want to go round and round all night until you wear everyone down? You don’t remember all the times I had to go to bat for you and bail your ungrateful butt out of trouble, and now you’re coming down on this new kid as if you were some saint.”

Hurley started to speak, but Stansfield cut him off. “I’m not done. If the kid had screwed up, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He’d be gone. But he didn’t screw up, did he? He made all the right decisions. He took care of our problem and didn’t leave a speck of evidence and made it back here all on his own. He’s a natural and you want to throw him away.”

Hurley stubbornly shook his head.

Stansfield was done arguing with him. “Irene,” he said, turning his attention to Kennedy, “what about running him on his own? Break him off from the team. Let Stan and Richards work together.”

Hurley didn’t hear Kennedy’s answer because he was too busy reliving all the various times he’d landed in hot water with a station chief or someone back at Langley. There were too many to even begin counting. That was part of the reason why Stansfield and Charlie White had set him up as a freelancer almost twenty years ago. He’d worn out his welcome at every embassy from Helsinki to Pretoria. Simply put, he wasn’t good at following rules, so White and Stansfield had removed him from the system. They had gone to bat for him against Leslie Peterson, that Ivy league prick who wanted to gut the Clandestine Service and replace it with satellites. He liked to say, “Satellites don’t get caught breaking into embassies.” Yeah, well, satellites can’t seduce an ambassador’s secretary into working for the CIA or kill a man. At least not yet anyway. Hurley grudgingly saw the plain truth—that he was an ingrate.

“I can work with him,” Hurley announced. “And if I can’t, I’ll turn him back over to Irene, and she can run him.”

Stansfield was speechless for a moment. Kennedy and Lewis were thunderstruck.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Hurley grumbled. “No one hates these fuckers more than I do.”

CHAPTER
28
MOSCOW, RUSSIA

S
AYYED
stood just inside the glass doors. He looked through the frosted window as a gust of wind whipped up a cloud of dirty snow. It moved like a ghost through the dark night and caused a shiver to run up his already frigid backside. He did not like Moscow, had never liked Moscow, and would never like Moscow. Not in summer and definitely not in winter. His warm Mediterranean blood found it to be perhaps the most inhospitable place he had ever visited. He could practically feel his skin cracking.

With voyeuristic awe, he watched an abnormally round woman waddle by. She was wrapped from head to toe in the dark fur of some animal he couldn’t quite pinpoint. Why did these people live here? He would endure a hundred civil wars if he could avoid ever coming here again. A vehicle entered his field of vision from the left. The handler reached out and touched his elbow. He gestured to the waiting SUV and grunted the way big Russian men do.

Sayyed was fairly certain he’d smelled vodka on the man’s breath when he’d met him at the gate. That was another thing about these Russians, they all drank too much. Sayyed was not the kind of Muslim who ran around telling everyone what they could or couldn’t do. He enjoyed a glass of wine from time to time, but never in excess. They would want him to drink tonight. He knew it. He didn’t want to drink and he didn’t want to go outside, but he had no choice. He had been summoned, and his bosses in Damascus had eagerly offered him up. With great effort he clutched his long black coat around his neck and stepped into the cold Moscow night.

The bite of the cold wind snatched at his ears and cheeks. His eyes filled with tears, and he could have sworn the hair in his nose had turned to icicles in under a second. He opened his mouth narrowly to catch a breath, but his teeth ached from the subzero temperature, so he lowered his head and shuffled toward the car. He’d learned that the hard way on the last trip. You never ran on a Moscow sidewalk in winter. No matter how cold it was. You shuffled. Half skating. Half walking.

It wasn’t until he was in the backseat that he realized he was sitting in a brand new Range Rover. Apparently capitalism had been very good to the SVR, the KGB’s bastard offspring. The man who had fetched him from the gate tossed Sayyed’s suitcase in back and jumped in the front passenger seat.

“I take it you don’t like the cold?” a voice asked in decent yet accented English.

Sayyed had his head shoved so far down into his jacket that he hadn’t noticed the diminutive man sitting next to him. “How do you people live here?”

The man smiled, popped a shiny cigarette case, and offered one to his guest. Sayyed grabbed one. Anything that would provide a scintilla of warmth was to be taken advantage of. After he’d taken a few long drags and had stopped shivering, Sayyed sat back and said, “I do not think we have met before.”

“No, we have not. I am Nikolai Shvets.”

Sayyed offered his hand, “I am Assef.”

“I know,” the boyish-looking man replied with a smile.

“I take it you work for Mikhail?”

“Yes. The deputy director is a very busy man. He will be joining us later.”

That was fine by Sayyed. Mikhail Ivanov, the deputy director of Directorate S, was not someone he looked forward to dealing with. Sayyed had done everything in his power to get out of the trip, and then to delay it when he was told he had no choice. Two days ago Ivanov had called his boss at the General Security Directorate in Damascus and told General Hammoud he would consider it a personal insult if Assef Sayyed was not in Moscow by week’s end. The last the general had heard, the meeting had already been scheduled. He was not a happy man, and he made sure Sayyed understood just how unhappy he was.

“The deputy director is very much looking forward to speaking with you. He has been talking about it for some time.”

Sayyed couldn’t pretend happiness over seeing the old spider, so he said, “it’s too bad you did not travel to Damascus. It is very nice there this time of year.”

“I would imagine.” The man glanced over his shoulder and looked out the back window. “Your Mediterranean blood is too thin for our Moscow winters.”

The boy man made idle conversation as they worked their way around one of the ring roads that circled the big metropolis. Sayyed barely glanced out the window even though it was his habit to be constantly alert for surveillance. It wouldn’t matter in this iceberg of a city at this time of night. Street lights and headlights were amplified by the white snow, blinding him every time he tried to see where they were. This truly was a miserable place. No wonder communism had failed. How could any form of government succeed if everyone was depressed?

They finally stopped in front of a hotel in the heart of old Moscow. A doorman in a massive black fur hat and red wool coat with two rows of shiny brass buttons yanked open the door, and Sayyed felt a blast of cold air hit his ankles. With a second doorman shuffling along with him, he walked through the front door of the hotel and did not stop. Cold air was still whistling through the doors and he wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Eight steps into the lobby he found himself drawn in the direction of heat and then finally spied a roaring fire on the far side of the lobby. He actually smiled and shuffled over, his brain not realizing the lobby was ice free.

“What do you think?”

Sayyed parked his backside directly in front of the flames. He took in the opulent lobby and nodded. It was much nicer than the dump he had stayed in the last time he was here. “Very nice.”

“It has just reopened. It is Hotel Baltschug. Very historic. Very expensive.” Shvets left out the fact that his boss owned a piece of the hotel. He owned a piece of most things in Moscow these days. At least the nice things. A group of Russian, Austrian, and Swiss businessmen had purchased the hotel just after the collapse and had tried to renovate. After a year of getting turned down for permits and dealing with theft and workers’ not showing up, one of the Russians went to Ivanov for help. The problems disappeared almost overnight. All they had to do in return was sign over 10 percent of the hotel.

Sayyed did not want to leave the fire, but he had to get ready for dinner. He was finally convinced to move when they informed him that his room had two fireplaces that were both lit and waiting for him. The room was as nice as the lobby, with gilded plaster and hand-painted murals on the ceiling, tapestries on the walls, and a commanding view of the Kremlin and Red Square. It was fit for a pasha.

That was when it hit him. Ivanov the spider never did anything nice unless he wanted something in return, and he was being extremely nice. Sayyed took a steaming-hot shower and wondered what the man was after. He’d heard stories lately that the SVR was worse than the KGB. That once they sank their talons into you, they owned you for the rest of your life. He suddenly longed for the bombed-out rubble of Beirut. There, he was a lion. Here, he could end up being someone’s lunch.