Breach of Protocol Read online

  The email contained a name, home and business address, cell phone number, and photograph of a soon-to-be-deceased target. He tore open a padded manila envelope that had previously been delivered, and withdrew vial number two. He held the vial to the light and stared at the contents. At the bottom sat a clear glass bead similar to the one he had left at the scene of the Stephen Latent assassination. It, too, was oblong in shape, yet no larger than a pea. Inside the bead was a tiny object embedded into the center of the glass.

  Upon examination, Rafael found the object to be different from the one contained in vial number one. He shook his head, then pulled out his phone to begin searching for the next available flight to Louisiana.

  9

  TALES OF J. EDGAR

  John F. Kennedy International Airport

  “Agent Zucker,” Jana said. “Can we slow down? I’ve got a headache from this lump on my head. My God, you Secret Service people walk fast enough to be running.”

  Zucker’s eyes continued darting from one side of the airport terminal to the other as he and the other agents scanned for any irregularities.

  “Zucker?” There was no response. “All right, all right, I’ll let you do your job, as stupid as it may be.”

  The agent glanced at her from the corner of his eye.

  “I didn’t mean your job was stupid. I meant what I said earlier. There’s no need to protect me. It’s crazy. Waseem Jarrah does not want me dead. He wants me alive so he can watch me squirm as he attempts to carry out whatever he has planned. Believe me. I think I’m starting to get inside his head.”

  When she again received no response, Jana continued the one-sided conversation.

  “Where are we going, anyway? Baggage claim is in the other direction.” As the group continued speed-walking through the terminal, Jana looked through the massive wall of glass and out onto the tarmac. Bright, midday sun rolled through the windows like a sheet of glowing water. At the end of a gangway sat a Gulfstream 6 jet. Compared to the size of the neighboring Delta 737 and a Lufthansa Airbus A320, the corporate jet looked like a child’s toy.

  “We’re not headed to baggage claim, Agent Baker,” Zucker replied.

  “Another flight? But I’m supposed to report to the New York field office. It’s over that way,” she said as she pointed toward the Manhattan skyline.

  “Orders, ma’am.” He extended an arm, leading Jana into the gangway to board the Gulfstream.

  “Orders. When do I get to give some orders? And, hey, what about my luggage? I’ve got a backpack with all my stuff in it.”

  “Already on board the plane, ma’am. This way, please.”

  “Already on board? How did you get my luggage on the plane already?”

  As Jana, Zucker, and the other Secret Service agents boarded the jet, the engines revved in preparation for departure. Jana took a seat and noticed all the window shades were closed.

  “I’ve been on this plane before. This is Bureau. I was on it with Director Latent.” She paused and thought about how Stephen Latent’s body was probably on a cold slab at the coroner’s office, and it gave her pause. Before her throat could tighten, she lifted the window shade to look at anything that might distract her.

  Zucker lunged forward and yanked it down.

  “Please don’t do that. Security. I’ll ask you to switch seats now, ma’am.”

  “Well, you boys are thorough, I must say.” As Jana switched to another seat, the plane began to push back. “No, seriously. How is it that my luggage is already on board?”

  Agent Zucker let out a long exhale, and the tension in his shoulders seemed to abate.

  “I would think that you, being Bureau, would know that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The stories about J. Edgar Hoover? When he was director of the FBI, and would visit a field office, two FBI agents from that office would be expected to drive him from the plane to his hotel. The roads in that town would be blocked off, like we do today for the president. And when Hoover arrived at his hotel, he expected his luggage to be in his room.”

  “Okay,” she said, “so one of the agents driving him would grab the luggage out of the trunk and run them upstairs. It’s an arrogant thing for him to require, but how hard is that?”

  “You’ve never heard these stories, have you? He never allowed his luggage to be in the car with them as they sped through town. Two separate agents had to grab the luggage out of the plane and rush it to the hotel before he arrived. The problem being, Hoover would depart the airport first, and the second car of agents didn’t have the benefit of driving through blocked-off roads.”

  “That’s not just arrogant,” Jana said as the plane accelerated down the runway, “that’s pompous. Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Fort Meade, Maryland, ma’am.”

  “NSA? Why are we going to The Box?”

  “Homeland Security set up a joint task force there. It looks like Congress is going to merge all of us even further under one umbrella. Since CIA headquarters was destroyed, Fort Meade is shaping up to be the location of the new combined agency.”

  “Man, I have been out of circulation for a while. I go away for a couple of months and everything goes to hell.”

  10

  A SCOUTING MISSION

  Saint Tammany Parish, just north of New Orleans, Louisiana

  The administration building of the Saint Tammany Parish Sheriff was larger than Rafael had pictured. The modern, two-story complex sported a tall, glass-lined lobby entrance with an adjoining jail. The outer walls of the jail itself were smooth cement which melded into the glass structure with ease. The property sat nestled among residential neighborhoods and was bordered by Louisiana Interstate 12, a six-laner that ran the northern border of Lake Pontchartrain, just north of New Orleans.

  In the morning darkness, Rafael strapped a sharpened pair of tree-climbing spikes onto each foot. He then ascended the seventy-foot-tall pine tree by jamming the spike on one foot into the tree, then the other, the effect similar to climbing a ladder. The tree sat on the property of a local golf course, on the opposite side of I-12 from the sheriff’s office.

  Once he was at the highest point, Rafael could see only two obstacles that sat between his chosen firing position and the intended target. The first was the highway itself. The interstate was not very wide, but even at this time of morning was traveled by a large number of eighteen-wheel tractor trailers. Since he would be firing from ground level, a passing truck could obscure visibility of the target.

  The other groundlevel obstruction was a twenty-foot-tall noise barrier wall that lined this stretch of highway.

  From his perch near the top of the pine tree, Rafael considered the possibilities. The shot was only about one hundred meters, mere child’s play in the world of a veteran sniper. But since his employer specifically demanded the assassination take place at precisely 2:16 p.m. EST, the stakes were higher. A kill shot delivered at exactly that time would result in a 100 percent pay bonus, a bonus Rafael intended to earn.

  He had worked for several employers over the years, and in the two dozen hits he had successfully performed, never had such a request been made. The time requirement added a new level of complexity to the already dangerous task.

  In the earlier assignment to assassinate FBI Director Stephen Latent, the distance to target was also minuscule compared to his skill level. And he had to admit that he had been lucky with the timing. Latent had been scheduled to finish his speech at 2:00 p.m. and was to head to another speaking engagement across town. That gave him just enough time to finish his speech and traverse the sprawling convention center. As it happened, he pushed the double doors open and walked into his death at exactly 2:16 p.m.

  Here in Louisiana, and anywhere an assignment of this nature was to be carried out, the one thing of paramount importance to Rafael was his ability to evade the area after the hit. Since the Zastava M07 rifle would be fitted with a silencer, he had little fear of his location’s bei
ng detected. And in the broad daylight, no one would notice the flash from the muzzle.

  His previous surveillances of this area afforded him one particularly interesting piece of information. The target, Sheriff Will Chalmette, worked the afternoon shift. That afforded the sheriff the ability to speak with deputies finishing the morning shift, and, later, those on the graveyard shift as they came in to the office. The afternoon shift officially started at 1:00 p.m. central time, 2:00 p.m. eastern.

  The sheriff began his day by arriving about thirty minutes early. Then, around 1:00 p.m., he would assemble his officers and give them an update. And just as officers prepared to go on patrol, Chalmette would do one thing of particular interest to Rafael. He would go outside and talk with officers as they pumped fuel into their squad cars.

  The local parish could only afford to have a single gas pump at the station, so Sheriff Chalmette had ample opportunity to speak with several officers each day as they fueled up. It was during this time that Rafael had the best opportunity. His intention was to drop Will Chalmette into a pool of his own blood and brain matter at exactly 1:16 p.m. Central Time. Then he’d make his escape through the golf course onto adjoining neighborhood streets. Being separated from the sheriff’s office by an interstate and a twenty-foot-tall sound barrier wall would make his escape all too easy.

  Then the only hard part of this whole job began—the job of cutting a circular hole into the sound-barrier wall from which he would fire his weapon. Rafael descended the tree and began his preparations.

  11

  HOMECOMING

  Headquarters of the National Security Agency, aka, ‘The Box.’ Fort Meade, Maryland.

  As Jana walked into the vast operations center, she spotted Cade on the far side leaning over the desk of an analyst nicknamed “Knuckles,” a kid so young his face barely produced peach fuzz. They had not seen each other since she began her trek across Spain two months prior, and she double-stepped toward him.

  But as they went to embrace, she was pounced upon by her sixty-pound service dog, a caramel-colored Lab, Australian Shepherd mix. The force knocked her to the ground and she was greeted with a full face pasting.

  “Coconut! My God, dog. Yes, yes, I’m glad to see you too,” she laughed. “Man, that hurt. I know, I know, boy.”

  As Jana lay on her back, the dog stood atop her and continued licking her face.

  “It’s okay, boy. Oh, listen to him groan at me. He can’t decide if he’s glad to see me or mad that I went away for so long.”

  “Come on, boy,” Cade said as he pulled the dog off. “Yes, it’s okay, she’s back. Let her up, you knucklehead.”

  Jana stood and hugged Cade.

  “Man, you go away for a while and everything falls apart.”

  “Yeah, good to see you too,” he said.

  “I guess Coconut is mad because I didn’t take him on the trail with me.”

  “I’m mad because you didn’t take me on the trail with you.”

  “I’m sorry. I did miss you though.”

  “Yeah? Well Coconut was worried. He wanted to be there for you in case the PTSD flared up again.”

  Jana paused, knowing the Spanish secret service must have told US authorities about her being hospitalized, but chose to blow past it. “Oh, Coconut wanted to be there? Don’t you mean you wanted to be there?”

  A warm hand touched Jana’s shoulder.

  “Miss Baker.” It was Uncle Bill. “It sure is good to see you.”

  “Bill! Oh, Bill. I’m so sorry about Director Latent. I know you and he go all the way back to Georgetown together.”

  Uncle Bill had aged in the time Jana had been gone. The toll of organizing a new, combined CIA-FBI-NSA, and the loss of his closest friend, Stephen Latent, had caused a deepening in the gray of his hair and cavernous beard.

  His eyes found the floor.

  Jana wanted to lighten the moment. “You still eat those bright orange peanut butter crackers, I see,” she said as she picked a tiny orange crumb from Bill’s beard.

  “Losing Stevie was more than I thought I could bear. But when he died, you lost something very special, too. He was like a father to you.”

  “He was, but I still have you, Bill.”

  “Ha! I’m more like a grandfather.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “You look . . . different,” Bill said as he stared into her eyes. “You look like something settled inside you. I’ll tell you again what I told you before you took your leave of absence. Find who you are and what makes you sing, then chase it. And when you catch it, don’t let it go.”

  He looked at Cade and drew a mental line between the young couple.

  She looked at Cade and knew what Uncle Bill meant.

  “I’ll leave you two lovebirds to catch up. Go down to the commissary and get something to eat. But after that, let’s talk about this phone call you got from the world’s most wanted terrorist, shall we?”

  12

  RECOIL

  2106 Margon Court, Slidell Golf and Country Club, Saint Tammany Parish

  Rafael stood nude in the huge walk-in closet in front of a full length mirror, looked at the blood covering his hands, then began to laugh. At first his laughter was low and uncommitted. But as he found blood splattered across his face and torso, his laughter deepened until it was out of his control, almost maniacal. He fell to the floor and rolled onto his back as blood smeared onto the light-colored carpeting. After a few minutes, he stood and took a cursory glance at the expanse of the closet’s contents. “You Americans have no dress sense,” he said, shaking his head. He walked to the double vanity of the adjoining bathroom and rinsed his hands in the sink, then stepped into the shower. Once he had sufficiently washed the thick dark blood from his skin, he toweled dry and walked back into the closet and dressed in a pair of checkered slacks, a white golf shirt and Stetson hat, then looked back in the mirror. Rafael looked more like pro golfer Greg Norman than a sexual deviant hired to carry out another assassination.

  He walked into the bedroom and smiled at the body of a once beautiful young woman tied to the kingsize bed. “How nice it was to make your acquaintance. Perhaps we can do it again some time?” Blood covered the sheets and walls but Rafael took little notice of the mess.

  He walked into the kitchen and removed a set of keys from a hook. “A change of vehicles is in order,” he said. On the side of the key fob was a logo that read “Porsche.” He walked into the garage, put a golf bag in the rear hatch of the car, then started the engine. He closed his eyes and listened as the engine roared. “So much more to my liking than that piece of shit I’ve been driving.” Rafael left the vehicle he had arrived in and was on his way to his next assignment.

  There weren’t many golfers on the course in the sweltering 1:00 p.m. weekday heat as he made his way to the fairway of hole number eight with a golf bag over his shoulder. The hole was a 362-yard dogleg that ran along the sound-barrier wall bordering Interstate 12. With no one on the tee box behind him, he ambled off the fairway and into the trees through a thick area of briers until reaching the wall and the four-inch circular hole he had cut the previous day.

  From the golf bag, he withdrew two separate rifle components and set them down. He then pulled out a short folding stool that flipped into place, affording him a stable base on which to sit when firing.

  The weapon assembled, he positioned the golf bag just in front of the chair, about four feet from the hole in the wall. He leaned the rifle across the top of the golf bag and peered through the scope. Being positioned a few feet away from the wall would prevent the rifle barrel from being spotted by a passing motorist.

  The view of the fueling station in front of the sheriff’s office on the opposite side of the freeway was excellent. But the opening in the wall was narrow. It was like trying to peer through a length of pipe, then shoot through it.

  Cars barreled down the highway, flanked by the occasional tractor trailer. Eighteen-wheel trucks provided a challenge R
afael knew he could not completely prevent. On his side of the wall there was no way to see one approaching.

  In his current position, the line-of-fire was just high enough for the bullet to sail over the tops of passing cars. But if a tractor-trailer happened by at just the right moment, the bullet would slam into it. It was an unavoidable contingency, and the increased risk excited him.

  He watched through the scope as deputies congregated around the fuel depot in front of the sheriff’s office, preparing for their afternoon shifts. Then, from out of the glass doors of the administration building walked the sheriff.

  Right on time. Rafael thought it odd that in Saint Tammany Parish the sheriff did not wear a uniform typical of a law enforcement professional. Instead, he looked more like an attorney headed to litigate a case. But it was him, all right.

  Rafael steadied his breathing, then glanced at his watch. 1:15 p.m. One minute to go.

  In the heat and high humidity, beads of sweat eased onto his forehead as mosquitoes congregated around his face and neck, and buzzed in his ears. The sound reminded him of a band saw chewing through wood. It was a distraction, but one he had dealt with before. He lined up the scope’s reticle on the forehead of the sheriff, a man who had no idea he was about to die. His breathing slowed further, which calmed the pounding of his heart.

  At 1:16 p.m., the precise moment he was to carry out his assignment, his digital watch chimed once.

  Rafael exhaled in one long breath and held it. During this forced pause, when his diaphragm and breathing muscles relaxed, he applied half a pound of pressure onto the rifle’s trigger. When the silenced rifle discharged, it bolted into his shoulder. For a moment, his vision was obscured with the flash of the muzzle.