“I’m not sure I like that idea.”
“I didn’t think you would, but they’re the best.”
“Irene’s going to have to make that call.”
“I agree. In the meantime we need this place secured. I don’t want anyone going in or out, including the local police.”
Rapp looked to Coleman. “Any ideas?”
“Well,” he rubbed his tired eyes, “having the JSOC boys guard an empty house is like asking a thoroughbred horse to plow a field. Besides, I’m sure they have ops they have to run tonight.” Coleman was about to say he could call Hubbard and get some grunts from the air base to come over and secure the place, but then he remembered Hubbard was missing. “I’ll make some calls. In the meantime, I’ll see if we can get the Rangers to keep an eye on things.”
Coleman got patched in to the ops boss back at Bagram and explained the situation. A solution was reached in less than sixty seconds. That was one of the nice things about JSOC. There was so much practical experience involving missions that on the surface were very similar, but in the details every one unique. The two Black Hawks that had delivered the assault team were standing by on the tarmac only a few miles away at the Jalalabad Air Base. JSOC had already arranged for three MRAPs to transport the assault team and their gear back to the airfield for linkup with their Black Hawks and transport back to Bagram. The interim solution was to have the Rangers close up their position on the house and run security until another force could be found to relieve them. Coleman also arranged to have their Little Bird come back in and pick them up for the return to Bagram. Five minutes after they were airborne, Coleman was asleep and Rapp was wide awake trying to understand what was gnawing at the edges of his memory.
At this juncture Kennedy was less concerned about maintaining absolute secrecy and more interested in getting results, so Hayek requested access to the Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facility at Bagram. Kennedy explained her situation to the base commander, a two-star from Idaho, who had been an extremely gracious host. One quick phone call from the CO and Hayek had complete access to the lab and any help that the staff could offer.
Hayek was impressed with the facility, which was run by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigative Command. As with all things to do with the Army they had turned the name into an acronym. Rather than call it the Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facility they called it JEFF. Hayek laid her evidence bags out on a stainless-steel table and double-checked that she had a backup for each sample. She then took the extra bags, placed them in a larger evidence bag and sealed them. If anything went wrong in the lab, she could rely on these samples and test them on familiar equipment back in the States. She had taken fingerprints and DNA samples from the two dead men. She turned those samples over to the lab’s latent-print examiners and DNA analysts and told them which databases to check them against. The two women smiled and reassured her that they had done this more times than either of them could count.
The officer in charge of the lab was a Major Archer. Hayek showed him the clear evidence bag with the damaged camera. “Do you have anyone on staff who could check and see if there are any useful images on this?”
The major wasn’t wearing gloves, so he made no attempt to touch the bag. “Yes, ma’am. We have an information technology analyst. This is just his kind of thing. I’ll be back in a second.”
When the major reappeared, he had a small black man with him who was wearing bulky black U.S. Army- issue eyeglasses. “Agent Hayek, this is Corporal Floyd. He’s one of our best. If there’s anything in there, he’ll find it.”
The corporal was wearing a white paper evidence suit. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves and without saying a word he held out his hands. Hayek gave him the bag and watched him hold the camera up to the light and look at it from several angles.
When he finally spoke he asked, “Do you have a power cord?”
Hayek could have kicked herself. She could see the cord still sitting on the floor. The thought of bringing it with her never crossed her mind. “Sorry… no cord.”
The corporal shrugged his small shoulders. “I should be able to find something. Canon cameras pretty much use the same power source.” He looked at the bottom and then moved to open the bag asking, “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead.”
He pulled the camcorder out of the bag and checked the SD card slot.
“No memory card,” Hayek pointed out the obvious. “Any chance we can find something on there.”
The corporal nodded. “This is a Canon VIXIA HF R30 SDHC. Comes with an eight-gigabyte internal flash drive. Three hours of high-def recording. If the Wi-Fi is still working, it’ll be a snap. If it isn’t I might have to take the flash drive out which will take some time.”
“How much?”
“Maybe a few hours.”
Hayek wasn’t happy. “Can’t you just hook it up to a TV and play it back?”
A small grin formed on the corporal’s lips. “If I had all the right cables and the thing wasn’t all busted up, yes, I could hook it up to a TV, but I don’t have those cables, so it might take a little while to get it running, but don’t worry, if there are any images on here I’ll retrieve them for you.”
The images-that’s what this was all about, and this young soldier, if he was able to retrieve them, was in for quite a shock. Hayek still hadn’t gotten used to this double life. She hadn’t bothered to give the officer in charge, or anyone else for that matter, her alias. There were times where she truly wondered whether she was cut out to be a Clandestine Service officer.
“Listen,” she said to the two men in a confidential tone, “the images on that thing are likely to be extremely disturbing. One of our Clandestine officers was kidnapped a few days ago and we think that camera might contain parts of his interrogation. No one can have access to those images. As soon as you get it working you need to stop.”
“Stop… doing what?” Floyd asked.
“Stop watching it. If my fears are correct, I don’t think I’m cleared to see and hear what’s on that drive, and I trust, Corporal, you don’t want to have to put yourself through a debriefing on this. It wouldn’t be pretty.”
“Fair enough. Let me see what I can do. The second I get it working, it’s all yours.”
Hayek turned her attention to the one thing she could get a fairly quick answer on. Every Clandestine Service officer serving overseas had a DNA sample on file at Langley and Hayek was in possession of Rickman’s. She looked at the six evidence bags that she had collected from the slurry of fluids underneath the hook where it was most likely that Rickman had been beaten. Blood would give her the best match. She took the cleanest sample and gave it to the DNA analyst. “Let’s start with this.”
Chapter 41
Kennedy yawned into the back of her hand and hoped no one back at Langley noticed. They were nearly an hour into the secure videoconference. The yawn wasn’t from boredom but fatigue. They had spent the majority of the briefing talking about life and death. The crisis seemed to have no end in sight. In fact it was expanding like some plague, hopping from population center to population center creating a kind of mini panic among people in the business, with one side running and the other sensing blood in the water.
The Pakistani foreign minister had been literally dragged from his house by the ISI with media recording every brutal moment. That visual alone had started a second exodus of lesser assets in Pakistan. Four midlevel spies had shown up at the embassy in Islamabad, despite being told not to do so. Three more had simply disappeared, and it was anyone’s guess if they had been picked up or were trying to flee on their own. None of these individuals were mentioned in the video posted on the Internet, but it didn’t matter. Once fear gripped the lonely mind of a spy, panic was already breathing down his neck.
The embassy in Islamabad reported that the ISI had stepped up their surveillance around the embassy and they were almost certain to have photographed the assets entering the embassy. It was only a matter of time
