The Operative Read online

  Allison nodded and scrolled to it. She pressed the name, the phone rang, but the call went to voice mail. Allison put the phone away. Her dusty cheeks were tear-streaked.

  Kealey cupped her face reassuringly, then turned toward Pratt Street to the north. Beyond about halfway up the block the downtown skyline looked blurry and indistinct, as if it had been partially erased. Aside from the smeary glow of emergency lights—the fact that they had come on meant the main power was gone—and the scattered, ghostly forms of pedestrians, it was impossible to see anything clearly through the haze.

  “We need to keep ourselves from breathing in the fumes and dust,” he said.

  Allison reached into her purse and produced a floral silk scarf, yellow and violet chrysanthemums against a green background.

  “I’ve got this,” she said, handing it to him.

  Kealey took out his knife and cut the scarf up the center. He gave one half to Allison and wrapped his segment over his nose and mouth like a bandanna. He helped her do the same as people ran past them. He heard the sirens of emergency vehicles in the distance.

  Her cell phone beeped again. She looked at it.

  “Colin’s checking to see if I got his last post. Shit! I didn’t even think to answer him.”

  “It’s all right,” Kealey said. “Ask him where he is, any landmarks we should look for. Tell him to keep it up. We need his exact location.”

  She nodded, typed out her message, sent it. “Okay,” she said. “Done.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder, kept it there, felt her relax a little. As a young lieutenant with the 3rd SFG in Bosnia, he’d learned to read his men’s pressure gauges before leading them into peril. A certain amount of tension could keep you sharp, but too much and you became distracted. Allison seemed as steady as could be expected.

  Kealey looked north toward Charles, swiveled around, and looked west. The smoke was lighter on Conway Street and thickest over the rooftops several blocks to the northwest, where it was brewing up in a massive rooster tail, its dark fan-shaped crest spreading out almost directly overhead.

  “What do you know about the layout of the center?” he asked.

  “Not much,” she said, raising her voice to be heard through the scarf and the surrounding commotion. “It’s really two different buildings. The one right here on Charles is the original center.”

  “Where is the job fair being held?”

  “The newer one,” she said. “The main entrance is on Howard Street. It’s a busy part of town.”

  “Busy in what way?”

  “The warehouse on Eutaw borders on the Orioles’ ballpark,” she said. “There are shops on the main floor, offices, just a lot of things like that.”

  Kealey continued looking east, lowering his gaze to the long, ruler-straight building that cut off Conroy about a quarter mile up.

  “The sky bridge connected the Hilton Hotel to the convention center, right?”

  She nodded. “Across Howard, where the entrance is.”

  “We’ll never get in that way.”

  “There’s another walkway between the old and new parts of the center on Sharp Street, a smaller version of the sky bridge. It crosses Conway a block or so up, right past Old Otterbein.”

  “Past what?”

  “Otterbein’s a landmark church,” she said. “When you turn up Sharp, there are entrances to both buildings on either side of the street. The walkway runs above them.”

  Kealey tried to shut out the frenzied commotion around them. Charles was impassable, with vehicular traffic at a standstill all the way from Pratt Street and people moving between it. The first responders would already be establishing control of the remaining access points to the area. There was a time when his CIA credentials would have gotten him past whatever barriers they raised—but it had been years since he’d had any official connection to the Company, and the expired ID he’d never quite managed to clean out of his card holder wouldn’t bear scrutiny.

  He gazed up Conroy. While traffic there was also at a crawl, it hadn’t gotten nearly as bad as on Charles, probably because it wasn’t a crosstown artery. Nor did he see any police cars or firefighting vehicles shooting along it yet—for the same reason, he suspected. They would have gone directly to the scene of the explosion on Howard, then cordoned off the roads and sidewalks there around the center’s newer extension. The back and side approaches were the last that would be restricted—and therefore were his best shot at gaining entry.

  “We’ll take Conroy,” he said. “I’m going to need you to guide us as we get closer.” He gazed into her red, tearing eyes, then clutched her hand. “I’m glad you overruled me.”

  She offered the thinnest of smiles beneath the mask as they moved into the maelstrom.

  CHAPTER 4

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  The red and orange dahlias already clipped and in water, Jacob Edward Trask lifted one of the galvanized-steel flower containers that Robinson had filled and set out for him. He carefully checked that the water level wasn’t too high, then moved down the greenhouse aisle toward the gerberas. It would be another half hour or so before his visitor arrived from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, assuming light airport traffic on Interstate 20. That the roads would be clear seemed almost a given; everyone would be watching the news on whatever devices one watched the news these days. He was no longer sure.

  That’s part of the problem, the sixty-four-year-old man thought, his thin lips tightening. News comes from networks, from cable, from newspaper Web sites, from amateurs on the scene, from bloggers who turn fact into opinion, and then from other bloggers who transmit that opinion as fact. It’s the game of telephone with pathetic results.

  It was another component of the continuing fragmentation of America. Disinformation and misinformation were an extension of the misbegotten hyphenates—the African-Americans, the Muslim-Americans, the Gay-Americans, and the latest absurdity, the Single-Mom-Americans. Nearly one hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt had warned about the carving of the nation. “A hyphenated American is not an American at all,” he’d said. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

  Dressed in a gray sweat suit, the tall, lanky, still-athletic man continued to move down the line. Reaching the trays of potted daisies, Trask began clipping them with his floral shears, cutting the stems at an angle to give them more surface area for water absorption. He would place each flower in the container, one at a time, after pinching the dead cuttings off their stems. Then he would give them to the executive housekeeper to have them displayed around the mansion, where he could see them and be comforted by them. They were like children, except that they didn’t fight over the estate.

  Trask enjoyed his horticulture, particularly at dusk, when the wafting fragrance was at its peak. And especially now, when his mind was consumed with all that needed to be done. The physical activity and sensory input helped him to relax, to forget the awesome burden he had taken on.

  He smiled inside when he thought back to all the times he had heard himself referred to as a dabbler, a dilettante. That had not happened so much in recent years. There was a benefit to seeing one’s youth recede farther and farther. On the one hand there was wisdom accrued and insights formed. On the other, the insatiable paparazzi, who had once fixated on him, had long since moved on to newer, younger heirs, men and women who knew how to play the media rather than duck it. That was not a skill he had ever mastered. His methods had been pointlessly confrontational, since only that fed the beast.

  Even his own child was largely immune. Industrialists’ heirs were out of favor, along with the scions of tobacco, steel, and auto-industry families. They were toxic by association, too twentieth century, too American. While U.S. consumers were still passively fixated on young celebrities in rehab for drugs or drink or sex or food addictions, the international gossip trade wanted to know about the youthful tech titans, not from Si
licon Valley, but from Japan’s Fukuoka City and India’s Bangalore. They wanted more about the “green teens,” the youthful champions of clean energy in Birdsville, Queensland, and Jesmond, British Columbia. Outside of the United States, visionaries were the new idols. Other nations were producing the next generation of Fords and Carnegies, of Jobses and Gateses. Their lives were followed and actively emulated.

  They were on track to shape the future.

  While we are marginalized, he thought, our carcass picked apart by speculators and gloaters, by the third-world mouths we continue to feed and protect to maturity so they can spit in our eye.

  The glass door opened silently behind him. Trask knew it from the faint whisper of cool air that brushed his neck. He also knew, without turning, the angel-light tread of his valet, Peter Robinson.

  “Sir?” said Robinson.

  “She’s here?” Trask asked without turning.

  “Yes, sir,” the young man replied.

  “Take her to the sunroom. I’ll be there when I am ready.”

  “Yes, sir.” There was a catch in his voice.

  “Mr. Robinson, what’s the latest on Baltimore?”

  “The situation is still very chaotic,” Robinson replied. He seemed pleased to have been asked, allowed to react. “No one seems to know whether this is an isolated incident or part of a larger-scale event. Homeland Security has promised a press conference at seven p.m.”

  “Thank you,” Trask said. “It’s horrible, but we will survive this, Mr. Robinson.”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied.

  The door shut, and Trask placed the daisy he’d just clipped into the container. He’d never thought he would treat such delicate things with care. As a boy, he would take pleasure in kicking up the moist soil in his mother’s garden, unearthing the thin, spirally roots of the freshly planted flowers of the month. He’d hated how she bragged about them. Her hands never even touched the dirt. It was always the gardener. Never her. That was his small way of getting back, taking some of her unearned credit away. Too bad the dog had to take the fall.

  Setting the shears on a towel-covered tray at the end of the aisle, he walked to the small locker beside the door. He changed into a leisure suit, then paused to mop the perspiration from his face and brush back his full head of gray hair. He checked his appearance in the mirror before closing the locker and heading out.

  You never cared how you looked until there was no one around to take pictures, he thought ironically. Yet it wasn’t vanity that drove him. This was no different than the maestro who tugged the hem of his swallowtail jacket before heading onstage or the on-deck batter checking his helmet. He was preparing to put something in motion. Every man in every field had a moment of reflection, of self-examination, before setting out. The physical manifestation of that was just an excuse to pause, to steel oneself.

  He was ready. Great events were about to transpire. History was not just going to be made.

  It was going to be directed.

  It was with rage and a sickening sense of déjà vu that Jessica Muloni watched the events in Baltimore play out on the large flat-screen TV. It reminded her—as it would anyone of a certain age—of the attacks on September 11, 2001.

  She had been newly arrived in Washington then, recently graduated with a master’s degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she had been recruited to work at the CIA. She was outside at Langley, having arrived at the office later than usual, when she heard the distant explosion at the Pentagon, saw the black smoke curling upward.

  Those attacks in New York and Washington were many things, but most of all they were a bookmark. Thereafter, like so many other people, whenever she heard a siren or smelled tart smoke that lodged in the throat—even at a barbecue or passing a car fire on the highway—the entire event came back.

  As it did now.

  No one knew yet whether these new attacks were homegrown or the efforts of a foreign network, whether they were an isolated occurrence or the first part of a wave. Just like on September 11, Langley and the White House and the Capitol and other buildings were evacuated, because no one was sure what was happening.

  But there was one difference between 2001 and today. Now Muloni was an agent and she had a mission. And it was clear that her mission was suddenly more significant, more urgent, than it had been when she left D.C. ninety minutes before.

  She turned from the TV at the gate and headed to the baggage claim area to rent a car. There must be no record of her destination; indeed, only her supervisor and Jacob Trask knew about it.

  She had read numerous files on the reclusive billionaire. A profligate for the first decades of his life, spending exorbitant amounts on cars, boats, and turning his home into a fortress. The perfect place to stay out of the spotlight and the perfect excuse not to leave his home office. If there needed to be a gala or benefit, it could be hosted at his estate, where after an hour he could tuck himself safely away in one of his hiding rooms.

  Trask was a master of hiding out, something he’d perfected in his teen years. The day Trask got his driver’s license in 1965, he uncharacteristically got the courage to ask his boarding school crush, Kathleen, to the drive-in to see The Beach Girls and the Monster, a beach murder mystery starring Jon Hall and Sue Casey. Halfway through the opening credits Kathleen noticed Christopher Andrews. The most athletic, the most likely to succeed and, apparently, the most likely to take whatever he wanted. Kathleen made up some excuse—Trask couldn’t recall it, or maybe he pushed it out of his mind—as he watched her toss her thick golden hair over her shoulder and slide into the front seat of Christopher’s ’64 Morgan Plus Four Plus. Trask finished the movie solo. Seventeen years later he introduced the extremely rare ’64 Morgan Plus Four Plus to his personal collection.

  Things changed for Trask upon the unexpected death of his father, Clark Trask. According to the files on Trask, it was the discovery of a cache of letters written by his grandfather, Foster Trask, that had turned the young man around: his father was the beneficiary of shrewd, if contemptible, dealings his own father had enjoyed with the Nazis. Foster Trask was a junk man–turned–antique dealer who had buyers in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Morocco. During the final days of the Third Reich, he had set up a small bank to channel mountains of cash from German institutions—concealed in Spanish chests, Louis XV dressers, and other pieces—to banks in South America ... for a 10 percent fee, of course. The German expatriates benefited and the Trask family benefited, though young Clark was given all the credit.

  Not only was Jacob Trask humiliated by his family’s close association with Hitler’s top advisors, but he was liberated by the revelation that his father was not the wunderkind investor he had pretended to be, but a front for the secret dealings of his own father. Since that discovery, Jacob Trask had used his resources to stand up for America, first against the Japanese takeover in the 1980s—when he bought an interest in every publicly traded company that mattered—then against the Saudi buying spree in the 1990s, during which he outbid the Saudis for property and corporations wherever possible, and now against the slow Chinese influx of capital. Muloni was particularly impressed as she considered what a remarkable mind Jacob Trask must possess to have foreseen that a mission like this would be necessary.

  Muloni had been an active participant in the war on terror for her entire career, but now she would be on the front lines. She had a sense of being somewhat in control, which set her apart from other anxious passengers and airport workers who were looking into one another’s eyes, searching for anything foreign or dangerous.

  She stopped as she entered the main terminal, looked around for a driver with a card that had her host’s name. She saw none.

  After a moment of scanning the busy hall, Muloni noticed a liveried older woman approaching.

  “I was afraid you had missed the flight,” she said.

  “Sorry. No ... I was watching the news at the gate.”

  “Tragic. Just so tragic.” />
  Muloni nodded.

  “I’m Liz,” the driver said.

  “Happy to meet you.”

  “Do you have any luggage, ma’am?” the driver asked.

  “I don’t,” she replied.

  “Will you follow me, then?” She smiled.

  Muloni nodded. It was a nice smile, woman to woman, probably warmer than most new arrivals got. It was probably more than most of her passengers would have noticed. It didn’t unnerve Muloni, and it shouldn’t have surprised her that her host would have given her driver a photograph to identify the pickup. A name scrawled on a piece of cardboard was not the style of Jacob Trask.

  There was no small talk. The silver-haired driver moved purposefully through the crowd; she was only about five foot two, but she had a no-nonsense stride. There was a spotless white stretch limousine at the curb, with a uniformed officer with Airport Security Services standing beside it. He wasn’t ticketing the vehicle or waiting for it to be towed. He was there so it wouldn’t be.

  When the driver came through the automatic doors, the big man tipped his cap and walked away.

  Clout, Muloni thought. A barrage of synonyms followed involuntarily. Influence, sway, wealth, control.

  Power.

  The democrat in her recoiled slightly at the thought of one man getting special treatment. But the child of a lower-middle-class home enjoyed being around it. The higher she’d risen in the CIA, the more she’d been exposed to privilege and the more she liked it. Like the reason she was here. It wasn’t just to give her a bit of control in a disordered world. It was to be part of something important, something special.

  Muloni stepped into the car, filled with a feeling that was closer to resolve than to optimism.

  But today that was enough.

  CHAPTER 5

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  Jostling through knots of confused, terrified pedestrians about a quarter mile west of the garage, Kealey and Allison saw the church a short distance ahead, its white-domed bell tower rising above Conway.