Shakedown Page 3

  “The Americans and their Zionist whores still have lackeys working in our midst,” Kardar declared. “This should not surprise anyone who knows our history.”

  The security chief continued to stand at attention. Not daring to speak.

  Kardar was making a historical reference. Demonstrating his knowledge. In 1953 the United States and United Kingdom toppled Iran’s leader through a coup d’état after he’d threatened to nationalize the nation’s oil fields. To stabilize their puppet, the United States sent a handful of soldiers to create Iran’s secret police force. Among them was US Army major general Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf. He would later be credited with training virtually the entire first generation of SAVAK personnel. (His son later would be the commander of all forces during the Gulf War.)

  “The warehouse thefts revealed how many traitors still are rooted among us, serving their American and Zionist masters,” Kardar continued, his voice rising.

  Another reference. This one about the January 2018 burglary of a warehouse where all of Iran’s nuclear weapon research had been hidden from the West. Fifty thousand pages of important documents. A hundred and sixty-three discs, guarded inside thirty-two safes. Every safe broken into. Every record stolen. The thieves—Iranians working for Mossad.

  “I do not trust your people,” he sneered. “I only trust my Quds Force soldiers. I know they are loyal. Do you know why I am so certain of that?” He did not expect a reply. “Because I execute those who are not.”

  He stepped forward so that he was now inches from the terrified security chief’s face and whispered: “This woman will not be the only one to have her throat slit if these breaches continue. Now get out of my sight.”

  Five

  “Have you found them?” Garrett asked.

  Thomas Jefferson Kim, the founder and CEO of Intel-Eye-Check, one of the nation’s largest private cybersecurity firms, frowned.

  “Have some faith, brother. I broke into CERNET. Hacking into forty-six cameras in your neighborhood was easy.”

  “CERNET?” Garrett replied. “Speak English. And did you say forty-six cameras?”

  “China’s first internet service, and yes, forty-six cameras. They’re everywhere now. Doorbells. Backyards. You need to crawl out from under your rock, man.”

  “Show them to me.”

  Garrett stepped behind Kim, who was sitting at his cluttered desk, looking at three computer monitors.

  “This is from a rooftop camera outside your condo building,” Kim said, staring at the center screen. “Its backup files show the two attackers approaching your building.”

  Garrett examined the grainy images. The woman in a stocking hat and scarf, the man in a baseball cap and turned-up collar.

  “I can’t see their faces,” Garrett complained.

  “And you won’t. Not on any one of those forty-six cameras.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “They must’ve done what I did. Identified all forty-six and plotted their every step to hide themselves.”

  Kim pulled up multiple images on the two monitors on either side of the center one. None showed the killers’ faces.

  “They hacked into your condo’s security system too,” Kim continued. “Shut it down at just the right moment.”

  “The cops said it was a computer glitch.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  Kim pulled up a new image on the center screen. “This is from a condo’s hallway camera before the murder. Every hallway has one.”

  Garrett watched Nasya Radi leave his condo. Walk to a door. Try to slip an envelope under it.

  “That’s my condo,” Garrett said.

  “I know.”

  Unable to push the letter under, Radi drew a pistol and walked to the elevator.

  “Your neighbors always pack heat when they venture out?” Kim asked.

  “Pack heat? What’s that from? You need to come out from under your rock.”

  Kim tapped on his keyboard, and the center screen showed views from cameras located in the lobby. Radi emerged from the elevator. Walked directly to the wall of mailboxes. Removed two envelopes from inside his jacket. The camera became fuzzy, a mass of gray and white dots.

  “This is when they shut the cameras down remotely,” Kim said. “But there is one camera that recorded the entire murder. A tiny one in an ATM directly across the street from your entrance. You can’t see faces.”

  Kim clicked his wireless mouse, and a video clip appeared. Two fuzzy images of a couple assaulting Radi while he waited in front of the elevator.

  “Wait,” Garrett said. “Show me that tape of him putting letters into the mailbox.”

  Kim did.

  “There are two letters! He has two letters in his hand,” Garrett said. “He sent one to me. What’d he do with the other one?”

  “Hard to tell because they cut off the lobby cameras. He didn’t have it on him when they found the body. I hacked into the Arlington police department’s system and read the detective’s internal report. There’s no mention of either letter. They don’t know about yours.”

  “And the second one?”

  “I’m guessing he either dropped the second one into a mail slot, or the killers found it and took it.”

  Garrett walked to the windows that made up an entire wall of Kim’s spacious but cluttered office. “Since you’ve been busy hacking everyone else, can you hack into the postal service and find that letter, assuming he mailed it?”

  “Actually, it’s possible,” Kim said. “Every piece of mail in this area gets photographed while it’s being processed for delivery. What’d he write to you in that letter?”

  Garrett moved from the windows and plopped himself on a chair directly across from him. “I really don’t know. Except for his signature, everything in the letter is in Farsi.”

  “Easy enough. I have software that can translate it.”

  “Thanks, but I already got someone lined up.”

  He noticed a framed photograph on Kim’s desk, barely visible because of the stacks of papers and reports that not only covered every inch of the desktop but threatened to cascade from it if slightly jarred. The mess reminded Garrett of arcade machines that he’d seen where players deposited quarters, hoping they would strike previously deposited coins in such a way that they would tumble into a hole where they could be claimed. He reached forward and carefully removed the picture.

  Kim said, “From Afghanistan.”

  Garrett snorted. “What? You don’t think I recognize the two of us and know where this was taken? I ain’t senile.”

  “That was right before I got hit and you saved my ass.”

  Garrett put the photo facedown on a jammed manila file folder close to the desk’s edge. “You’d’ve done the same for me.”

  “I would have tried, but you know me. I was a computer geek sent to win hearts and minds, not a SEAL.”

  Kim’s wife, Rose, interrupted them. “Conference call with Singapore in two minutes,” she announced. “Time for Garrett to step outside. I have some questions for him.”

  Kim chuckled. “You thought the cops were threatening when they interrogated you at gunpoint.”

  “Let’s go,” Rose ordered. “This call is important.” She led Garrett into Kim’s outer office.

  “Where you been?” she demanded. “You just disappeared from us.”

  “Out finding myself.”

  “You still look lost. In fact, you look like hell. Why haven’t you shaved?”

  “Beards are in fashion.”

  “You look like you’ve just come back from the dead, only you’re still in your coffin.”

  Rose slipped behind her desk. A second executive secretary usually sat adjacent to her, but that worker was at lunch. Garrett fell into a black leather and chrome chair.

  “You shouldn’t be out looking for yourself,” Rose continued. “You should be looking for a woman. Go to an island. Meet a beautiful girl. Get drunk. Relax. Enjoy life.”


  “Enjoying life and meeting women usually don’t mix for me.”

  Rose rolled her eyes. “Is that supposed to be funny? You have an old-man sense of humor. It’s why you’re not married. You need to find a woman who is smarter than you, like my husband did. It should be easy for you.”

  “Got one in mind?” he asked, and immediately regretted it.

  “Valerie Mayberry.”

  “What makes you think she’s smarter than me?”

  “She’s smarter, and she’s rich. When was the last time you spoke to her?”

  “She was still in rehab. A place in Connecticut.”

  Rose nodded at a Presidential Medal of Freedom displayed behind glass on the wall directly across from her, hanging above Garrett’s head. A photo of Kim posing along with Garrett and President Randle Fitzgerald was next to the award.

  Garrett followed her eyes. “What happened to your Picasso?”

  “Le Rêve—French for ‘the dream.’ Showing off the medal is better for business.”

  He nodded.

  “It wasn’t right,” she said, “that Mayberry didn’t get her medal at the White House with my husband and you.”

  “She was still in rehab.”

  “The president should’ve waited.”

  “I’m certain he presented her medal to her later. Probably in a private ceremony.”

  “It’s not the same,” Rose said. “I deserved a medal too. I saved you in the hospital when that man came to kill you. Without me, you’d be dead.”

  “I’ll give you mine the next time I stop by.”

  “You do that. I’ll put it next to my husband’s. You should thank me.”

  “Thank you,” he said with a smirk.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have saved you. When you disappeared in Russia—when they caught you and locked you up there—my husband told me to plan your funeral, remember?”

  “You’ve mentioned that—several times.”

  “I’d planned the best Korean funeral ever.”

  “Rose, I’m not Korean.”

  “Duh. A Korean man would have been married by your age.”

  “I’m only thirty-six,” he said.

  “Too old to be single.”

  “Tell me all the nice things you were planning to say about me at my Korean funeral.”

  “About you? Nothing. There’s no eulogy in Korean funerals. Mourners come and bow at your urn and then turn and speak words of comfort to grieving family members. Your parents are dead. You’re an only child, so they would be talking to my husband and me. Comforting us. Three hundred of our friends and customers were invited.”

  “Would I have even known anyone?”

  “Who cares? You’d be dead. Probably only Valerie Mayberry. Assuming she would come.”

  Kim joined them from his inner office.

  “I found the second letter—Radi mailed it moments before he was murdered. It was addressed to the Israeli embassy.”

  Six

  Because Garrett’s Norton Commando motorcycle had been manufactured specifically for motorcycle cops, motorists could still make out the word police in faded letters on the bike’s batwing-shaped fairing. Drivers who saw him approaching from behind immediately assumed he was an officer and slowed, making room for him to pass. That reaction never failed to make him grin.

  Garrett took the exit ramp from Route 7 onto the Dulles Access Road en route to DC. He glanced to his left and right and was reminded of why Kim had located the IEC headquarters at Tysons Corner. It was home to dozens of beltway bandits, federal contractors headquartered along the sixty-four-mile highway known as the Capital Beltway. Some were IEC rivals, others customers.

  Nearly a century earlier this patch of Northern Virginia landscape had been rural. A pair of mom-and-pop stores and a fruit stand owned by William Tyson at the joining of two roads that dated back to the Civil War had been replaced by high-rise condos, towering office buildings, and massive shopping centers. Tysons Corner Mall was billed as the largest covered shopping center ever built when it opened in 1968. Even more exclusive, Tysons Galleria Mall catered to the one-percenters. More than 55,000 shoppers every day came to gawk and buy. Foreigners were known to land at nearby Dulles International Airport, ride in limousines to the malls, and return home that same day with stuffed bags from Cartier, Gucci, Prada, Versace, and Ermenegildo Zegna.

  Garrett didn’t care about any of this. He was indifferent to much that defined the nation’s capital, and yet the idea of returning to his childhood Arkansas never entered his mind. Washington, DC, held a hypnotic grip on him, and on most others who’d abandoned their midwestern roots. Call it Potomac fever. Call it whatever you want. It is difficult to describe until you feel its pull. Events seem more important in the nation’s capital. In New York, Wall Street does the talking. Money rules. In Los Angeles it’s Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The allure of fame. Striking it rich. Washington, DC, offers a different siren’s call. Power draws many to its flame. Anyone could become someone here. With enough hard work, enough ambition—you could be Lincoln rising from a log cabin, Carter coming from a peanut farm. A black boy abandoned by his African father becoming president. Or so everyone believes.

  There is another motivation besides fame and the lust for power. Public service. Doing something that matters. Being something more than you can be. Rare but not as rare as many believe. That was what had a hold on Brett Garrett. He had been seduced as a teen by a military jingle: Be all that you can be. That coupled with a deeply held belief—some would call it naive—that America was better than any other nation. His country’s principles mattered. An example for the world. It needed protection.

  Garrett had risked his life in Afghanistan, Russia, and Africa. In doing so, he’d found purpose. Freedom. Democracy. Brotherhood. Devotion. He was a true believer, cut from old-fashioned heartland beliefs. That enabled him to look beyond the frivolous spending, the lust for power, and the chicanery of politics to see—not what was, but what should be.

  The government had trained Garrett to kill, and he was good at it. For reasons that he didn’t understand, it did not bother him. Self-rationalization, perhaps. To him, each killing was justified. Valerie Mayberry had viewed it differently, as a character flaw on his part. It was an issue that remained between them.

  Garrett stayed in the left lane on the Dulles Access Road heading toward Interstate 66, which would guide him into the District. The chilly autumn air felt good against his cheeks.

  A van appeared behind him. White. Ford Transit. Blue lettering on its front: Fix-It Plumbing. Maryland plates. Its driver accelerated. He was aiming at Garrett.

  Garrett cut into the slower-moving right lane just in time. Instead of shooting by him, the van braked. Slowed. A tinted window lowered. A pistol barrel.

  Garrett jerked farther to his right, sending the Norton onto the highway’s shoulder while turning its throttle, putting a Toyota Tacoma truck between him and the gunman in the left lane.

  Phew! Phew! Phew! The sound of gunfire was muffled inside Garrett’s helmet. But he’d heard enough gunshots to identify the sounds. A slug popped through the Tacoma’s window, barely missing its driver. That driver panicked. Hit the brakes. Instinctively swerved right, barely missing Garrett, who shot forward to avoid being clipped.

  With the Toyota Tacoma now out of his way, the van’s driver shifted from the left to the right lane to be closer to Garrett. The Norton’s 828 cc engine erupted as the 420-pound bike, with a top speed of 115 mph, rushed forward.

  Leaning from the passenger window, the gunman fired again but missed. Garrett was now trapped on the shoulder. A steady line of vehicles kept him from swerving back onto the highway. On his right was a barrier wall.

  The van’s driver tried to follow Garrett on the shoulder but quickly realized that his vehicle was too wide. He decided to change course, pulling left into that faster-moving lane, but soon found himself frustrated by its gradually slowing traffic.

  The van’s dri
ver honked at a red Chevy Cruze directly in front of him. It had nowhere to go. Refusing to slow down, the van swung onto the highway’s left shoulder but not before clipping the Chevy’s rear bumper, hitting it with such force that the compact was shoved into the right lane, where it collided with an older Mercedes-Benz. The lighter-weight Chevy crumpled, and its gas tank ruptured. Within seconds, sparks from the crash had ignited the fuel. Black plumes. Fire engulfing the car. Good Samaritans stopped, abandoning their vehicles to help.

  The van and Garrett were now on opposite sides of the highway separated by two lanes, but that didn’t keep the van’s gunman from continuing to fire across the vehicles between them. Garrett lowered his chest against the Norton’s fuel tank.

  The chaser and the chased reached the junction where the Dulles Access Road merged onto I-66. Pop, pop, pop. It wasn’t gunfire. It was the van striking the side mirrors of vehicles on its right. The shoulder had narrowed, and the van was now running a gauntlet between slow-moving cars on the right and a chain link fence on the left. That fence kept motorists from entering the median, home to a Washington Metro subway line.

  The gap on both shoulders widened slightly and the van and Garrett sped up. Fifty, sixty, seventy-five miles per hour.

  The gunman reached from the passenger side window, grasped the edge of the van’s roof rack, and pulled himself up, rolling between two extension ladders tied to the chrome rack. From that higher perch, he could look over the stalled lanes of traffic that separated him from Garrett. He fired.