“We have complete privacy, I assure you,” Rubin stated. “Feel free to lay out this urgency of yours.”
“There are occasions I am required to report directly, in person, to either the President or the national security adviser.”
“I’m aware of that. As I’m aware you’re aware of who I am.”
“Then I assume you’ve heard about Amman.”
“The CIA Storm Tracking Station. Four operators and the team leader’s wife found shot dead. Lured from the embassy over what appears to have been a fabricated emergency regarding her husband.”
“Bad news travels fast.”
The Pink Man sighed. “Your point?”
“We’re looking at dead bodies of American intelligence operatives turning up all over the map—two incidents—or mishaps, as you put it—happening in less than a week.”
“You’re referring to Turkey.”
Brolinsky grunted. “Throw in two NSA and a CIA operative gunned down, same MO in Istanbul and Ankara, apparently—though nothing about him seems verifiable—the same military attaché who headed embassy security in Turkey vanishing off the face of the earth after both incidents. Well, it doesn’t take much to see a pattern emerging.”
Rubin chuckled. “So, you’re running around, armed with conspiracy theories, itching to tell senior White House officials, or the President himself, the sky is falling.”
“It’s beginning to shake out as more than a theory. He calls himself Locklin, but no one seems to know who he works for. You know the type, buried so deep off-the-books the man doesn’t even have a Social Security number. A freelancer owned and armed by various intelligence agencies to do the really dirty work. The ultimate deniable expendable. A little digging, a fact here, an educated guess there, a few matters are becoming clearer to me by the hour.”
Rubin laid on a patronizing tone. “Please, don’t waste my time with rumor and speculation. Please, tell me you have real hard intelligence to back you up—or I walk.”
“Contacts in and beyond the normal channels. Plus, maybe you’ve heard, we’re in the great new age of sharing information, mutual cooperation and so forth between various alphabet soup agencies. The gist of it, I’m being told the same ghost story where this Locklin is concerned.”
“Perhaps whatever you heard is just a story.”
“I suspect someone with major league clout, real close to the President, managed to land what amounts to little more than an assassin in the laps of both embassies to smoke out these operatives.”
“To what purpose?” Rubin asked.
Brolinsky paused, wondering how much he should tell this former NSA official. He decided to forge ahead. If he got the Pink Man talking, agitated, boxed him in a corner there was a chance to catch him a lie. And if that happened it would put him one step closer to confirming the bombshell of a dark nagging suspicion.
“Kill the messengers about to hurl open Pandora’s box. Some or all of whom either knew or were on the scent of that banned ordnance with delivery systems that left the country in question right before the Shock and Awe began,” he told Rubin. “A lot of nasty stuff, which, had it been buried in the sand or dumped in the Tigris or Euphrates, we would have known about it by now, since the general consensus among the science community is an ecological and environmental Bhopal meets Chernobyl would have swept the country in question, an invisible firestorm that might have struck down or driven out the Coalition forces.”
Rubin shook his head. “I’m not tracking how you equate this supposed Houdini act with recent events.” He glanced at his watch. “Kindly and quickly enlighten me.”
“Colonel James Braden, United States Special Forces, ran a black ops unit in Afghanistan. Fact—he lost five ops in an ambush by Taliban and al Qaeda fighters near the Afghan-Pakistani border. Nonconventional weapons were used in the fight, specifically VX. The way I heard it, he was one step behind netting the twenty-five-foot Saudi shark. Rumor—he liked the hands-on approach when interrogating prisoners. A few people in the loop privately confirmed his tactical techniques for Q and A, then later changed their story, all of whom shortly after disappeared. Instead of getting court-martialed and landing in prison for life the man damn near received a presidential citation. He was put in charge of Task Force Talon. Handpicked his own troops.”
He paused as the dancer finished her number to lukewarm applause, scanned faces for a sign of special interest aimed his way.
“I’m listening,” Rubin said, clearly getting impatient.
“Locklin’s description matches an operative, believed seen with Braden in Kurd-controlled Turkey right before a convoy suspected of hauling the last of the wicked stuff was hit by Braden, his Task Force Talon and Turk Special Forces. Rumor—Locklin was Braden’s inside eyes and ears to the mystery of the vanished ordnance. Suspicion—the Iraqis had help from our side smuggling the nasty stuff out of the country. Why? If I could raise the Storm Trackers from the dead I might find out. The word I get is that whatever they were smuggling into Turkey was there at the time of the hit, but is now nowhere to be found. Which leads me to Camp Triangle. I’m sure you’ve heard of it?”
“You would be wise to keep all of this to yourself,” Rubin said.
“Is that a threat?”
“Merely a suggestion.”
“In that case, stick your advice.” The scowl told him he’d struck a nerve, sure now the Pink Man had something to hide. He decided to torque up the heat and attitude.
“I know a chosen group of the worst of militants detained at Guantanamo Bay were rounded up in the dead of night and whisked off in a C-130 to this corner of Brazil that meets Paraguay and Argentina. It was a secret pact arranged by the White House in collusion with Brazil to let Camp Triangle come to life in this neck of jungle. I’m thinking to keep the natives with the big guns and the power down there quiet and cooperative, Congress passes a massive foreign aid package to Brazil, ostensibly to help the Brazilians combat crime, corruption, poverty—but I think both of us suspect into whose coffers all those billions will disappear.
“Now, I think the President was convinced by your buddies in the Special Countermeasure Task Force that the Triangle—a haven for drug and arms smugglers, international crime cartels, Hamas, al Qaeda and other Arab terror groups paying for safe refuge while planning operations—is a treasure trove of invaluable intelligence. That much truth they spoke. Word is, however, the Man was further swayed by reasons laid out to him about the basic necessity to spread the growing problem of housing captured fanatics in another but classified direction. Seems Task Force Talon was rounding up militants quicker than there was space at Gitmo to hold them. My sources inform me that some of the detainees removed from Gitmo—calling themselves the Warrior Sons of Islam—claim direct blood lines to some of the world’s most wanted terrorists, including a couple of household names.
“Now, a young Marine, rotated out of your classified detainee base, was en route to tell a very interesting story to the Justice Department about what’s going on down there in Camp Triangle, only he turned up dead in his vehicle, the victim of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”
Rubin didn’t blink. “And all of this related to White House leaks, how and why?”
“There’s more, unless you’re in a big rush to race out of here.”
Rubin gestured with his hand for Brolinsky to continue.
“Wolfe-Binder.”
“Never heard of it.”
He suspected Rubin was lying, but Brolinsky didn’t miss a beat. He pressed on. “There