The Asset (15 page)

“You're a real celebrity around here, aren't you?” one of the goons said snidely.

“Compared to you guys, I'm Brad fucking Pitt.”

Kennedy could feel his anger rising and wasn't sure how long he would be able to control it. They all sat around Glenn's desk. One of the cronies snatched Kennedy's work order from him and examined it, as if he knew what he was looking at. The other picked up the phone and called HRW, barking orders that Homeland needed a senior tech person from HRW to come to JFK as soon as possible to inspect an upgrade. The good news was that the person on the line at HRW verified that the upgrade was in the system, in keeping with what Best had told him earlier. But that was only going to hold them off so long.

Kennedy was racking his brain, trying to figure out a way to keep them from physically inspecting the gear, when Mitchell walked into the room, startling everyone.

“Need some gear,” he said apologetically.

He closed the office door behind him and opened a large tool case he
and Best had brought with them that day. Kennedy watched out of the corner of his eye. Mitchell was taking his time, stealing glances at Monty's men as he worked. Kennedy was relieved, figuring Juarez and his men must have schemed a way out.

“When did you first submit paperwork to DHS for your prototype grant?” one of Monty's men asked.

“A few months ago.”

“And you thought it required immediate implementation?”

“Do you know how large the human colon is?” Kennedy asked.

“What are you talking about?” the man asked.

“Five feet long and three inches in diameter. Now, if I were to keister that much Semtex or C4 and detonate it on a plane, do you think I could bring it down?”

“I don't know—”

“You bet your ass I could.”

Mitchell laughed out loud.

“Shut up!” Monty's crony yelled.

“But I could easily get it on a plane because these machines can't detect objects hidden in body cavities,” Kennedy continued, on a roll, “which is why, since we started using them, the international heroin trade has more than doubled.”

A piercing alarm went off—the kind that only sounded in the event of an attack
inside
the airport.

“Holy shit,” Kennedy said.

The cronies made calls on their mobile phones, shouting at the people on the other end of the line for answers. Mitchell made a call as well. Kennedy couldn't hear what he was saying, but it was a short conversation. As soon as he hung up, Mitchell pulled a power drill with a chrome socket on the end from out of his tool case and snapped it shut. While the cronies finished their calls, he made some adjustments on the power drill. Then the cronies jumped out of their chairs and headed for the door. Mitchell moved quickly, cutting them off.

“I think we'd better stay here,” Mitchell said.

“Get out of the way, idiot—”

Mitchell raised the power drill and pulled the trigger. With a pneumatic pop, a bullet ripped through the first crony's forehead and he crumpled to the floor. The other one stared at his partner in disbelief. When he
finally went for his gun, he took a bullet in the mouth and keeled over onto his dead partner. Mitchell pried the slugs from the wall behind them and shoved them into his toolbox.

“Let's go,” he said casually.

“You . . . Oh my God,” Kennedy stammered.

Mitchell grabbed his gear and moved Kennedy to the door.

“Now.”

Kennedy's mind was racing as he and Mitchell hurried out onto the concourse. He couldn't think clearly. All he wanted to do was run. He heard people screaming, and the two of them followed the sound until they saw a swarm of airport security officers and police near one of the gates. Tad Monty was there, shouting something. As soon as Kennedy got close enough, he could hear what he was saying.

“Get these people out of here!”

Then the crowd parted enough for Kennedy to see that Glenn had shot himself in the head and was lying on the floor near one of the gates with a .38 caliber revolver in his hand and a halo of blood on the carpet. A flight attendant covered in blood was screaming uncontrollably.

“Keep moving,” Mitchell said, and pulled him through the gathering crowd.

They ran through the concourse. Best picked them up in a maintenance golf cart and drove them to the closest exit. Juarez was waiting for them by the curb in an ambulance. They all jumped in and sped away with the lights and siren going. Kennedy felt like he was having a nervous breakdown. He had heard the term before, and used it jokingly, but now he knew what it really meant. His heart was racing so fast, he thought it was going to explode in his throat. He could only take shallow breaths and his stomach muscles were so tight he could barely exhale. His hands and feet were tingling and starting to go numb. The worst part was the emotional blitz tearing through his coping mechanisms and going right for the throat. Juarez's voice broke his panic.

“Kennedy!”

Kennedy looked at him in the rearview.

“Give him a bag. His lips are turning blue.”

“I didn't fucking sign up for this!” he bellowed into the back of Juarez's neck.

Mitchell looked at Kennedy like he might be another potential problem he'd need to take care of.

“Calm down,” Juarez said sternly.

“Fuck you! Why did you kill them? They're Homeland Security agents. They might be assholes but they're on our side!”

Juarez drove down a side street and Kennedy thought he was going to be the next to take a bullet in the head.

“Those two assholes were working with Lentz,” Juarez said, his voice surprisingly calm. “We've tracked them for three years, since he was in Cairo. They were part of the job.”

Kennedy recalled what Wes Bowman had said about Lentz infiltrating DHS and his head began to spin even faster.

“Why didn't you tell me?” he asked.

“We didn't know they were going to show up today so it never crossed my mind.”

“I can't believe this is happening,” Kennedy said, mostly to himself.

Best handed him a plastic bag.

“Breathe into this. You're hyperventilating,” Best said.

Kennedy did it and started to feel his feet under him again.

“Listen, man,” Juarez said, “we weren't expecting this to go down either, but it did and we dealt with it. I'm sorry, but it's like I told you, this is the job. You want to bury Lentz so he can't do something that will make 9/11 seem like a drive-by shooting? You have to be willing to do what
he's
willing to do—without hesitation. Otherwise, you end up like Glenn.”

“Monty,” Kennedy said. “Won't he think we did it?”

“The slugs we put in those boys were a ballistic match to Glenn's gun,” Mitchell said. “Juarez told me what to dial in when we were in the TSA office with Monty's men.”

He showed Kennedy the power drill. It had an LCD screen on the side with a menu of gun names. The name was Smith & Wesson Model 586, 4 Inch Barrel, .38 S&W Special.

“This unit can dial in hundreds of different types of firearms. This is Glenn's gun down to the manufacturing date. Everything about the bullet impact will pass forensics. Only thing that won't is the bullet, because we can't match the specific barrel grooves.”

“Which is why you took them. So, the plan was to frame Glenn?” Kennedy asked, incredulous.

“Glenn was a stroke of luck,” Juarez said. “We were going to dispose of
those gentlemen a different way, but Glenn decided to eat a bullet, so we took advantage of it. Disgruntled employee murder-suicide, et cetera.”

Kennedy felt sick. He hated Glenn, but Jesus.

“For what it's worth, you did a great job back there,” Juarez said.

“What?” Kennedy asked.

“You did a great job,” Best said, slapping him on the back.

“Touch and go there for a minute, but you manned up,” Mitchell said. “Kept your cool with those pricks coming down on you. Helped us get our work done. This is where I get off.”

Juarez pulled over behind a black SUV that was idling.

“See you on the next,” Mitchell said.

He shook hands with Juarez and Best and tried to shake hands with Kennedy but Kennedy was lost in thought, reliving the scene with Glenn lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood with the flight attendant screaming endlessly. Mitchell got out and took off in the black SUV.

“Where's he going?” Kennedy asked listlessly, just registering Mitchell's exit.

“Shangri-la,” Best joked. “Or another shitty gig, whichever comes first.”

Juarez drove away and looked at Kennedy in the rearview until he looked back.

“Like it or not, brother,” Juarez said, as if he could read Kennedy's thoughts, “you're one of us now.”

T
wo days before Kennedy was
getting his come-to-Jesus at JFK, Lambert was waiting in the reception area of one of Malaysia's largest aircraft parts manufacturers. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his suit jacket was drenched with putrid rain. Prior to his final stop here in Kuala Lumpur, he had been all over Asia, visiting the aviation industry's highest-echelon companies, using the cover of a global sourcing rep from a domestic air carrier in the United States. Alia gave him a tidy expense account that greased the wheels and fast-tracked him to access the top brass at each company.

After a few five-figure bar tabs, the drunken executives, easily distracted by the professional charms of high-dollar escorts, were the perfect marks for tech theft. Key cards, mobile phones, laptops, notebooks, smart watches—all the things they relied on to run their companies—were the keys to their data kingdoms. And that's where Nuri came in. She had dispatched her minions to shadow the corporate entourages and gather the goods from sticky-fingered escorts in Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, Chiang Mai, and Singapore. Within a few days, she had root access to all of their internal networks. The problem was, when Lambert and a team of analysts at Langley pored over the data, they found
nothing
irregular in five years of transactions.

The Malaysian company he had gone to see that day was clean too,
with the exception of an insignificant blip Lambert was reluctant to even peg as an anomaly. A third-party vendor, an avionics company that the larger Malaysian firm was preparing to acquire, was late on delivering a shipment of parts to its would-be suitor. This was common for those types of companies, run by engineers pushing to develop patented products and get them to market first in hopes of finding larger corporate buyers. Along the way, their financials were almost always a nightmare for corporate controllers to sift through in advance of mergers and acquisitions, and they had a hard time keeping up product supply for growing demand—which was why they sought
acquisition in the first place.

Normally, Lambert wouldn't have given a damn about details like that, but if Lentz was savvy enough in that industry, he might know about the quirky intricacies of smaller companies and use them to his advantage. If he wanted critical aircraft parts, he would have been smart to acquire them from those firms, as they were always eager to sell to just about anyone to keep their balance sheets attractive, and they tended to dance around regulations. Even at long-shot status, this made the blip worthy of scrutiny. He and Alia decided to work a different angle and have him come in as a representative of potential investors. Alia backed it up with banking documentation showing funds in place contingent upon a review of the company's financials. This made Lambert an instant VIP, and he was able to pull all the information he needed on contracts, personnel, supply chain, and manufacturing figures.

He suffered the swampy heat to get back to the Hilton and check out the documents in his air-conditioned room with a burger and a six-man squad of Budweisers. Other than a lot of bad math, there was nothing in the company's financials that leaped out at him as suspicious. But because their productivity had been consistent over the past several quarters, it was definitely odd that they had a sudden drop in inventory on a part that had regularly been in surplus. The tech was something he'd never seen before, so he called Leo, one of his golf buddies at Boeing. Leo was a top engineer there who padded his Christmas fund with a few CIA consultant dollars from time to time. It was 10:00
P.M
. in Kuala Lumpur so he was able to catch Leo as he was starting work in Chicago at 8:00
A.M.

“It's actually a neat little piece of communications gear that connects tower and autopilot systems with proprietary code transmissions based on binary—”

“Jesus, Leo, quit stroking your beard and give me the bar stool version.” Lambert moaned.

“You're always so goddamned cranky when you're in Asia. Is it the sweats or the shits this time?”

“What are you, my third ex-wife? Both, as usual.”

“You need to drop a few Michelins there, Tommy Boy.”