Executive Power (5 page)

T
he silver-haired gentleman appeared to have his nose buried in the European edition of the London
Times.
A soft breeze blew across the water, seagulls played above and the lines slapped out their rhythmic notes on the tall mast of the sailboat. To all outward appearances, Alan Church looked to be enjoying retirement. First observations with such a man, though, were always a bit tricky. The seventy-one-year-old Brit had spent the majority of his years trying to give people the right first impression—or the wrong one, depending on how you looked at it.

Alan was a mechanical engineer by training, but even that was only half true. He spent his twenties and thirties working for a large British energy conglomerate, and again this was only part of the story. During that time he traveled to the world's smaller and poorer nations in an effort to bring them hydroelectric power. It seemed for those two decades that Alan could be found wherever things were the nastiest, usually in a country where the transition from one ruling group to another was taking place and not in a peaceful democratic way. Most of those halcyon days, as he now somewhat sarcastically called them, were spent on the continent of Africa.

In truth, his time on the Dark Continent was anything but tranquil. He was robbed, shot at, kidnapped, twice caught malaria and once caught yellow fever. It was after the second bout of malaria that the powers back in London decided that it was time for Alan to take a new job in international finance. He'd spilled blood and toiled for the Crown, or more precisely, Her Majesty's Secret Service, for almost two decades. He was placed, without having to interview for the position, at one of Britain's finest banks where he eventually ended up keeping an eye on the financial comings and goings of The House of Saud.

Officially, or unofficially, depending on how you looked at it, Alan Church never worked for MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service. To this day, if someone asked him the question he would laugh heartily and begin telling over-the-top tales of all the female spies he'd boffed in the service of the Crown. People who really knew him well, which weren't many, knew that there was a half-truth in almost everything Alan Church said.

Even now, as he sat on the deck of his sailboat, anchored just off the coast of the French Riviera, one had to look closely to see what Alan was really doing. At first glance he looked every bit the relaxed and retired gentleman casually perusing the newspaper as another day in paradise got under way, but upon closer inspection there were a few telltale signs that Alan had not entirely left the employ of his government. The first hint was a bit difficult to catch. It involved the unusual size of the radar dome that sat near the top of his mast and the odd-shaped antennae that sat next to it. The next sign that was a bit more obvious was that Alan wasn't really reading the paper.

Out of sight, but within reach, was a small control panel with an array of dials. Plugged into this control panel was an earpiece. Alan at first listened intently to the conversation that was taking place between the prince and his visitor, manipulating the various controls in an effort to boost the effectiveness of the directional microphone concealed at the top of his mast.

He had dropped anchor the morning before just off the port beam of the prince's massive yacht, placing one other boat between his and the prince's. Under orders from London, he'd been loosely shadowing the prince for over a week. He'd even gotten to know a few of the crew members in the process. The captain of the ship was a retired French naval officer, as was much of his crew. Like most mariners, they were friendly to other sailors. While picking up provisions back in San Remo, Alan found out the ship was headed for Monte Carlo and then on to Cannes, a very common trip for the big yachts. Alan let it be known that he was headed in the same direction, so they'd probably be bumping into each other along the way. Things had progressed now to the point where the crew knew him on sight and waved as they went back and forth to shore in their power launch.

Headquarters was famous for being skimpy with the information they gave to their people in the field. They'd told Alan only to follow, observe, record and report. They didn't tell him why they wanted him to baby-sit Prince Omar, but then again, they didn't really need to. Alan knew enough about the dysfunctional House of Saud to know what his government was interested in.

The conversation that was taking place on the big ship didn't appear to be what they were after, and the dashing young man who had arrived less than an hour ago didn't fit the profile of an Islamic fundamentalist. With this in mind Alan checked his dials one more time to make sure everything was being recorded and then he began to read his paper, only half listening to the conversation that was going on in his left ear.

With the sun quickly warming the cool morning air, Alan let out a yawn and crossed his left leg over his right. The voice of a woman drew his attention away from the paper and he looked across the water to see what was going on. From his vantage point all he could see were the tops of several heads, and then a blond beauty came into view near the back of one of the upper sundecks. Without warning she dropped her robe and stretched her pale arms above her head, revealing a very nice pair of breasts. Alan lunged for his binoculars, but by the time he got them up she was gone. He laughingly shook his head. He was slowing down in his old age.

He was still smiling as he went back to his paper, and then slowly, his face turned more serious. The conversation between the prince and his visitor had without warning gone from mundane to quite noteworthy. Alan checked again to make sure the equipment was recording and then he went back to feigning interest in the paper. Whoever this David was, he would have to get some photos of him when he climbed back on board the launch to return to shore. As the two men continued their discussion, Alan decided that London would be very interested indeed in his next report.

M
itch Rapp drove across the Key Bridge on his way to a meeting at the White House. His mood was tense and his patience short. He was not happy about what he'd learned this morning. The honeymoon was over. He'd been back in town for less than twenty-four hours and he was already looking to wring someone's neck. Ignoring his boss's orders, he'd left his bodyguard back at Langley and driven himself. He'd had some death threats lately, quite a few of them in fact, but despite the danger he needed some time alone to think before he met with the president. He'd promised himself that he wouldn't allow his new position of influence to be wasted.

The whole reason he had this new position was that his cover as a covert counterterrorism operative had been blown during his boss's confirmation hearing by a congressman who had no admiration for the Agency, and now every piece of crap from Boston to Baghdad knew who he was and what he looked like. His face had been broadcast across the airwaves. He was called America's first line of defense against terrorism. Virtually every newspaper in the country had reported his story and there had been several magazine covers. The entire thing was unnerving to him.

The media spectacle his career had become went against everything he knew. Most of his life since the age of twenty-two had been a secret. Not even his brother had known that he worked for the CIA. Now, because of all the publicity before he even hit forty, he had been unceremoniously retired from the field, brought in from the cold and given a new job and a new title to go with it. He was now special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence on counterterrorism.

Terrorism had finally reached out and touched America, and her citizens were finally waking up to the fact that there were people out there who hated them, zealots who wanted to see the Great Satan toppled. The president and Rapp's boss, Director Irene Kennedy, had given him a mandate. In addition to working in conjunction with the Agency's counterterrorism center, they asked him to thoroughly study the nation's counterterrorism capabilities and come up with a recommendation on how to streamline operations and improve defenses. Rapp's first response had been to tell the president to start focusing on offense. So far the president had shown no signs of following that advice.

Kennedy, knowing Rapp better than anyone, admonished him to keep his temper and tongue in check. She told him to look at the study as a fact-finding mission. The ass-kicking would come later when he gave his report to the president and the National Security Council. That was when he could vent and let the truth be told, and Irene Kennedy knew better than anyone that the truth did need to be told.

If Rapp had learned anything during his lengthy study of America's counterterrorism efforts, it was that there were too many meetings. Too many meetings that accomplished nothing, and more often than not, created more red tape and hassles for the people who were on the front lines doing the important work. The meetings were a colossal waste of energy and resources. They never started on time and they always ran over, and that was the least of their problems. Now that he was on the inside, after spending more than a decade abroad working covertly for the CIA, he could see why so many in Washington thought the Agency had dropped the ball.

The Agency had become the antithesis of what Colonel Wild Bill Donovan, its founder, had designed it to be. It was a risk-averse haven for bureaucrats to put in their time so they could retire and collect their pensions. Sensitivity training and diversity workshops had taken priority over recruiting case officers with foreign language skills who had the chutzpah it took to run covert ops.

Thanks to Aldrich Ames, the FBI had been invited to join the Agency's Counter Intelligence Center. The brothers in dark suits had eviscerated the ranks of Langley's few remaining good case officers, for the simple reason that too many of the men and women in the directorate of operations were mavericks. Never mind that mavericks, independent thinkers, were exactly who Wild Bill Donovan and President Roosevelt had in mind when they started the Office of Strategic Services at the onset of World War II. Donovan and Roosevelt understood that you didn't hire decent, respectable, risk-averse family men to spy on the enemy. You hired risk-takers who were willing to put their lives on the line to get a piece of information that might make the difference. It was not a business for the meek, buttoned-up type. It was a business for daredevils who liked to gamble.

Signal and photographic intelligence now replaced eyes and ears on the ground. The billion-dollar satellites and ground intercept and relay stations were clean. They couldn't embarrass you the way a turned case officer could. They didn't bleed, they couldn't be kidnapped, they didn't lie and Congress loved them. The bright glossy photographs of terrorist training camps and scratchy audio intercepts of our enemies plotting to strike gave them great satisfaction.

The politicians marveled at America's technological superiority. There was one big problem, though; the enemy knew they were being watched and listened to, and went to great lengths to hide what they were doing from the big prying eyes and ears in the sky.

Everyone in Washington knew this, but it didn't stop groups like the State Department from pushing for more signal intelligence. The alternative was putting real men and women in the field and that could be very messy. Uncontrollable CIA case officers were a constant source of irritation for the State Department. They snooped around host countries, tended to drink too much, tried to recruit agents and generally behaved in a way that no gentleman or lady from Foggy Bottom would endorse. Even worse, if they got caught, the host country would expel innocent State Department employees along with the offending CIA case officer and the whole affair would upset the delicate dance of diplomacy.

The CIA had become just another Washington bureaucracy. A money-sucking black hole of political correctness. In short, the CIA was a reflection of the times and its political leaders. Now Rapp truly understood why Director Stansfield had done what he did. The recently deceased director of the Agency had fought hard to insulate the CIA from the political whims of Capitol Hill, but it was a Herculean task that no one man could perform. Seeing the winds of change approaching, Stansfield had created a covert counterterrorism unit known as the Orion Team. The group's mission was to operate in the dark and take the battle to the terrorists. Mitch Rapp had been the tip of that spear for the better part of a decade. He'd killed more men for his country than he could count, and he had come close to losing his own life more times than he dared to remember.

For the last several years he'd seriously considered getting out. Instinctively, he knew that one of these times, no matter how good he was, the breaks wouldn't go his way and he'd end up dead. The decision to make the move was finalized when he'd met Anna Rielly. She was only the second woman he'd ever loved, and the first had been a long time ago. Soon after meeting her he knew she was the one. It was time to get out of the killing business and get on with a normal life.

That had all been before the towers and the Pentagon were hit. Now he wasn't so sure. An anger burned inside him. He knew the face of the enemy better than perhaps anyone in the country. It was the hideous face of Islamic fanaticism. It had taken all the restraint he could muster to not get on a plane and go over to Afghanistan. Kennedy had convinced him not to. He was too important. She needed him right at her side, using his language skills and contacts in the region to run down leads and try to figure out what had happened.

Kennedy had vision, just like her mentor. She could see the goals of the competing agencies and interests in Washington and maneuver her way through the minefield. She knew that in the wake of 9/11 the politicians on the Hill would try to pin the whole thing on the CIA. Never mind that begining with the Church Hearings in the mid-seventies, it was the politicians who had pulled the CIA out of the spying business.

Then, in the eighties, it was the politicians again who told the CIA to break off any association with nefarious individuals, ignoring the fact that to catch the bad guys you actually had to talk to them and their associates from time to time. But the politicians on the Hill didn't want to hear any of it. The CIA either had to bat a thousand or get out of the hood. So ultimately, the politicians got exactly what they wanted. They created an agency that was afraid to take risks.