Delphi Initiative Read online

  The landing was just as hospitable, being more of a controlled crash in a narrow landing field just outside the city. They’d had to walk over a mile through a knee-deep, gator-filled swamp, then to a dirt road before being loaded in the back of a commercial laundry truck. Tommy was at the peak of his frustration and about to ask to be dropped at the next hotel, when the sun came up and they were backed into this building on the south side of the city.

  As exhausted as he was, he still couldn’t take his eyes off the television. From everything he could see, the country was under attack. The Virgin Island assault wasn’t unique. There had been several like it across the country, across the globe even. The screen flashed with updates of attacks from California to New York, everything from attacks on supermarkets and gas stations to larger assaults on power plants and police stations. Anywhere Americans lived, they’d been attacked. But this wasn’t an invasion. These weren’t attacks from a hostile force or an elaborate terrorist organization. This was domestic terror, or at least it was being reported as such.

  Along with the killing, there were also plenty of thwarted attacks as the FBI worked overtime to stop what the media was calling an “American war on decency.” Tommy shook his head, wondering where the media came up with this shit. How do they suddenly put labels on everything? How are they always so quick to categorize and pick sides? He listened to a grey-bearded announcer on one of the cable news networks, reporting calls for the President and most of his cabinet to resign, as the names of attacked cities scrolled on a bar below the image. The bloodletting was still in progress, and the talking heads were already making it political.

  “You need to let me call in,” Tanya said, turning his head from the screen. “I can get us help.”

  Tommy shook his head no. “You heard Chocolate and Spicy over there,” he said, pointing to a sofa where the two big men who had facilitated his escape were now snoring away. They had been there since shortly after arriving, the men dead on their feet after pulling the operation to extract him from the islands in just the nick of time. They’d stripped their gear and fell hard into the dirty sofa.

  Tommy looked hard at Tanya. She wasn’t a field agent; she was just a glorified staffer assigned to babysit his ass and deliver messages. To be honest with himself, he didn’t even know much about her, but having spent nearly the last year with her, he knew she wasn’t an operator. This was over her head. For her to have any chance at all, he needed to get her someplace safe and convince her to stay there. He had to find a way to explain how much danger she was in. “They hit your office along with my apartment. They were planning to kill you and me.”

  She went to argue with him but before she could, he put up his hand and sighed. “They couldn’t afford an alibi; you can confirm where I was, and what I was doing. You call into your office, and they will know we both made it off the island. They’ll have a team target us.”

  “You don’t know who did this. They might be as worried as we are.”

  Tommy shook his head again. “We can’t take the chance, we have to hold tight.”

  The woman wasn’t convinced. She shook her head and held firm. “Maybe Natalia could get a message through,” she argued. “If the President is really in trouble, they’ll need me back in D.C.—they’ll need to know what we know.”

  Tommy frowned. Natalia had left earlier. She said to get breakfast, but he knew the woman would be checking in to back brief Colonel O’Connell on what had happened. He looked at Tanya and could see the desperation on her face. She wasn’t like him; she had a life back home, a life away from all of this. Even an apartment in the Capital, and officially, she was part of the White House Intelligence Team. She was right. If the President was in trouble, they would need the information she had.

  He smiled and nodded. “Maybe. We’ll ask her, we can figure something out.”

  A large brick of a phone with a fat blue display on its side vibrated on the table beside him, and Tommy reached for it. Natalia had placed it there before she left and told him she would check in with him every hour. He looked at his watch; she was running late. He knew what the phone was. The technical name was Genii, and he’d seen them used before on operations in Europe.

  The plug-in piggyback device disabled the phone’s microphone and GPS. Instead of transmitting voice transmission, it sent binary information in packets of data as sound that could only be unpacked and decrypted by the matched receiver’s phone. The GPS receiver would bounce and send random locations from hundreds to even thousands of miles away.

  The system worked well, but it wasn’t foolproof. Even with high-level encryption, the geeks at the National Security Agency would eventually be able to grab the packets of data over the grid, piece it back together, and listen to the recording. But until then, most eavesdropping systems would think the phone call was nothing more than a fax machine or a dial-up ATM modem.

  He looked at the display flashing unknown and flipped it open. He pressed it to his ear without speaking.

  “Before you say anything, know that this line is only nominal. They won’t know where you live, but we have to assume it’s being put on the shelf, so watch where you leave your keys.”

  Even though the voice had been over modulated to sound almost robotic, Tommy immediately knew it was his old friend and now benefactor, retired Air Force Colonel James O’Connell, owner and CEO of one of the largest military contractors in the nation. Since Tommy had started his second career as an off-the-books paramilitary, the Colonel had become a provider of clandestine assistance. Not out of charity, of course. The Colonel had set Tommy up with a very expensive and very discreet account that was careful to bill the government and reimburse O’Connell Transportation for all at cost, plus contract.

  Tommy grinned, listening to the modulated yet friendly voice; the Colonel knew his tradecraft. What the man was saying was the line was secure, couldn’t be traced, but probably recorded, so stay away from key words on the very remote chance that someone would record the analog tones and convert them back to digital to be encoded and later indexed to pull up the call. Without positive search data, the call would just vanish into one of millions being recorded at the very moment.

  “I understand,” he whispered, hearing his own voice in the same broken tones.

  “I talked with our mutual friend. The situation is understood. I’m looking to get you out of there as soon as possible, but it’s going to take some time and rubber. The all-non-essential-air-travel order is in place. The airports are closed.”

  “What’s happening?” Tommy asked.

  There was a long pause. He knew the Colonel was probably trying to find a way to say it in a way that would confuse the NSA bots. He eventually sighed and just came out with it. “If you have been watching the news, there have been attacks from coast to coast and overseas.”

  “Who is doing it?” Tommy said. He really wanted to ask how he was involved and why he was being dragged into it, but at this point he didn’t dare.

  “We don’t know, but the attackers are all current or former military, no known or only very loose affiliations to each other.”

  “Yeah, like me. What the fuck?” Tommy didn’t really expect an answer and was already cursing himself for losing his temper.

  There was a long pause. “War, chaos, all of it—this seems to have been by design,” the man said, no longer avoiding key words. “There are victims, and we know who the targets are, but we don’t know why. Someone is trying to shut you and everyone like you down.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tommy said, but already the answers were buzzing in his head. Someone wanted to get him out of the way, make him a wanted man, or make him dead. But why the others? Tommy had heard a news story about some halfwit assholes killing people at shopping malls and convenience stores. His mind took another beat then came back; the rest were added intentionally to cloud the waters. The other attacks the ones stopped, and the ones where the perpetrators were killed were the real targets.

  “You still there?”

  He heard the voice and put his focus back on the phone. “I’m here, just trying to figure this all out. The Syrians couldn’t have put this together, and the French wouldn’t have the balls. This isn’t about me.”

  “It looks like someone is organizing a coup d'état against the current administration.”

  “All this to take out a President?” Tommy laughed. “They have to know the military won’t stand for it.”

  “The Secretary of Defense is dead. As are most of the Joint Chiefs.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “This is not being reported yet, but they are calling it an insider attack. There was an explosion in a defense council meeting. They said a Marine officer, an aide, brought in a case of HMX, it went off just as they were briefing the Secretary of Defense on the Navy Yard attack.”

  “That’s not possible. You can’t get HMX past the sniffers at the doors. You just can’t.”

  “I’m sorry, but they insist that’s what happened. They have video of the guard bringing the case through an underground garage and into the meeting. With everything else that’s going on, they were distracted.”

  “You know that’s bullshit, right? If it was, in fact, HMX in a case, all the evidence would be vaporized. It would be impossible to know where it came from, and if they were that distracted how did they manage to close an investigation in record time? Whoever filed this report is lying—in fact, they are probably in on it.”

  “You know what, right now none of that matters. We just need to get you out of there. Somewhere safe. We can figure out the rest later.”

  “No, I’m coming in. I need to get to Washington.”

  “You can’t. The city is in lockdown. You’d never get in, and we don’t even know what’s going on yet.”

  “I have a friend that needs to check in,” Tommy said. He was growing exhausted from the conversation.

  “I’m aware of the situation. And I have to say, her situation is no better than yours. She was reported dead about twelve hours ago.”

  “Dead with no body, obviously.”

  “Even better—guess who the prime suspect is?”

  Tommy sighed. “They work fast, don’t they?”

  “Listen to me and listen close; take your friend and get off the grid. You know the protocol—G plus six, no more than five, you got it?”

  “G plus six for five,” Tommy said, making a mental note of the numbers. “I understand.”

  “God speed, Tommy.” And the line went dead.

  He sat silently for a minute. Then he took a pen and wrote the characters G, 6, 5 on the inside of his wrist. The exercise was more for muscle memory. He’d have the digits stored in his brain once he’d looked at it a dozen times. He was going dark, and they would be on the run.

  The contact protocol was unique to Tommy and the Colonel, something they’d come up with over a scotch years ago. Their previous arrangement was 3, A, 6, 10… Tuesday at 0700 for ten minutes.

  Now, the omission of the first number told him his check-in would be daily instead of a defined day of the week. G was the seventh letter of the alphabet, plus six was thirteen. His contact time would be at 1300 daily, and he would leave his phone on for no more than five minutes to avoid detection.

  He looked over at Tanya, who shot him an inquisitive look. Her face edged from anxious to the angry. Tommy knew that she wanted answers, and he wanted to give them to her, but he wasn’t sure how to do it.

  Before he could speak, the back door opened, and Natalia walked in. She was carrying a pair of black backpacks and a leather satchel. She dropped the packs by the door then moved to the table. Tommy eyed the bags; he could tell they weren’t anything she’d gone out and grabbed especially for them. They were safe house mission packs, probably kept in the vault and would be topped off with traditional get-out-of-Dodge essentials.

  She tossed a set of car keys on the metal tabletop. “There is a blue SUV out back.”

  Tommy looked down at the keys with the Jeep logo on the tag, and then up at the woman. “I take it we are leaving then?”

  Natalia shook her head. “Only you two. And you should do it quick. We are okay for the moment, but shit is about to cut loose at the seams. I saw a lot of cops on the interstate.” The woman pointed toward the backpacks. “Grabbed you some extra clothes for the bags, thrift store shit, nothing fancy. There is cash in the satchel, along with your new identity papers.”

  Tanya stood from the table. “Wait—exactly what the hell is going on? What do you mean ‘new papers’?”

  Grinning, Natalia looked at the woman and then back at Tommy. “It was my understanding that you spoke to the Colonel.”

  Tommy nodded.

  “And she doesn’t know?”

  “Know what?” Tanya scowled.

  Natalia laughed and shook her head. “Well, for starters, hunny, you’re dead. Your boyfriend here killed you last night just before he shot up half the island.”

  Tommy put a palm over his eyes while Tanya shook her head.

  “I need a phone,” she demanded

  “Bad idea. Being dead is good for you right now; it means nobody is out there trying to kill you yet. I would say that you’ve lucked out.” Natalia softened her tone. “But the ruse won’t last for long. They will soon know you escaped the island and, depending on who did this, they may know about the aircraft headed to Miami during the assault. Even if they don’t, we should assume that they do. You two need to get out of here.”

  Tanya still shook her head but had turned back to the others; Tommy could see she was in shock. He asked Natalia, “Where do we go?”

  “No, I don’t want to know that,” Natalia answered sternly. “The Colonel was explicit that we don’t talk about that. Just grab your packs and go, and please make it quick. I have places to be myself.” She went to step away then looked back at Tommy. “If you need me again, contact the Colonel. He will know how to find me.”

  Chapter Ten

  Colonel James O’Connell ended the call and unplugged the Genii devices from the side of the contract-free mobile phone. He placed the phone in a top drawer of his desk then rotated his chair and placed the Genii in his shirt pocket. It would normally go in the wall safe, but with Tommy stateside, he wanted the device close in case he needed it. He looked at a shelf on the far side of the room. At the top of it was a photo of his wife and son.

  After his family had died, James Junior in a faraway war and his wife of cancer, he’d been alone and had resigned himself to a lonely and boring death. Even with a successful business, he found little spark in his life. Well, that was until Tommy reignited a fire inside him, and even if he was just living vicariously through the young man, it made him feel like he was a part of something greater than just a job. And as misplaced as it might be, working with Tommy brought him a connection to his son.

  Before he could close the desk drawer, there was a buzzing sound from the kitchen’s intercom. He paused and listened intently. James lived alone in a large home on the west side of Great Falls in the Washington DC area. Even though alone, a housekeeper was on the grounds during most of the day. He looked at his watch. He knew Maria would be working today; she was probably in the kitchen, wondering what he wanted for breakfast. He could hear her speaking. The woman tended to shout down the hall even though she knew the old man couldn’t hear her. He ignored the shouts and soon heard the footfalls in the hallway outside his door. There was a soft knock.

  “Mr. O’Connell, there is a gentleman at the gate for you,” she said. “It’s Cole Wallace,” she continued before O’Connell could ask who it was.

  James tightened his brow. Cole was his contact at the FBI. He’d been a family friend since high school, where they played on the same football team before James had chosen the Air Force Academy and Cole, the University of Michigan.

  He tried to think of why Cole would be at his driveway gate and why he hadn’t called first. Cole had tipped him off to Tommy’s dilemma, and they’d agreed to keep their distance until things had cooled off.

  “Please, Maria, let him in,” James said, closing the desk drawer and standing.

  He moved close to a window that overlooked his front yard and driveway and watched as a black Chevy Suburban moved up the blacktop. He passed to a coat rack and put on his jacket as he continued toward the kitchen. Normally, guests would arrive at the front door, but Cole always made his way up the back steps and into the rear of the home. James moved through wide alcove decorated with family photos and stepped into the spacious kitchen. Maria had already set a tray of white mugs and a coffee pot on a granite island. James thanked her as she left the room.

  He heard the back door open and Cole’s shoes clicking on the stone tile floors. The man passed through the entryway and shook his head as he entered the kitchen.

  “James, we’ve got problems. I need you to grab your things so I can get you out of here.”

  James laughed and shook his head. He moved to the serving set and poured a cup of coffee. “Please, have a coffee and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Cole’s jaw tightened. He looked back over his shoulder nervously then checked the time on his wristwatch. “Seriously, James, you have about five minutes to pack a bag, and we need to get the hell out of here. If you want to skip the bag, that works even better—but either way, we need to be moving.”

  The old man took a step back. “What’s happening? Is this about my young friend in the islands?”