Buch lesen: «Primary Command»

Jack Mars

Jack Mars is the USA Today bestselling author of the LUKE STONE thriller series, which includes seven books. He is also the author of the new FORGING OF LUKE STONE prequel series, comprising three books (and counting); and of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising six books (and counting).

Jack loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.Jackmarsauthor.com to join the email list, receive a free book, receive free giveaways, connect on Facebook and Twitter, and stay in touch!

Copyright © 2019 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright Getmilitaryphotos, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY JACK MARS

LUKE STONE THRILLER SERIES

ANY MEANS NECESSARY (Book #1)

OATH OF OFFICE (Book #2)

SITUATION ROOM (Book #3)

OPPOSE ANY FOE (Book #4)

PRESIDENT ELECT (Book #5)

OUR SACRED HONOR (Book #6)

HOUSE DIVIDED (Book #7)

FORGING OF LUKE STONE PREQUEL SERIES

PRIMARY TARGET (Book #1)

PRIMARY COMMAND (Book #2)

PRIMARY THREAT (Book #3)

AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER SERIES

AGENT ZERO (Book #1)

TARGET ZERO (Book #2)

HUNTING ZERO (Book #3)

TRAPPING ZERO (Book #4)

FILE ZERO (Book #5)

RECALL ZERO (Book #6)

CHAPTER ONE

June 25, 2005

1:45 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (5:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

130 Nautical Miles East-Southeast of Yalta

The Black Sea

“I’m sick of waiting,” the fat sub pilot said to Reed Smith. “Let’s do this already.”

Smith sat on the deck of the Aegean Explorer, a beat-up old fishing trawler that had been retrofitted for archaeological discovery. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette, drinking a can of Coke, and soaking up the warmth of the bright day, the dry salty feeling of the air, and the call of the seagulls that congregated in the sky around the boat.

The midday sun had crested above their heads and was now starting to creep to their west. The science crew was still inside the pilot house of the trawler, pretending to make calculations concerning the whereabouts of an ancient Greek trading vessel resting in the mud 350 meters below the surface of this beautiful blue sea.

All around them was wide open water, the waves shimmering in the sun.

“What’s the rush?” Smith said. He was still nursing a hangover from two nights before. The Aegean Explorer had been docked for several days in the Turkish port of Samsun. With nothing else to do, Smith had sampled the local nightlife.

Smith liked to live in airtight compartments. He could be out drinking and partying with prostitutes in a strange city, and never once think about the people in other places who would kill him if given a chance. He could sit on this deck, enjoying a smoke and the beauty of the waters surrounding him, and never once think about how, in a little while, he would be tapping into Russian communications cables one hundred stories below the surface of those waters. And living in compartments meant he didn’t enjoy people who were constantly thinking, anticipating, sifting through the contents of one compartment and putting them in another. People like this sub pilot.

“What kind of archaeology team dives in the middle of the afternoon?” the pilot said. “We should have gone down in the morning.”

Smith didn’t say a word. The answer should be obvious enough.

The Aegean Explorer worked the waters, not just of the Aegean, but also the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. By all appearances, the Explorer was looking for shipwrecks left behind by long-dead civilizations.

The Black Sea in particular was an excellent place to search for wrecks. The water here was anoxic, which meant that below 150 meters there was almost no oxygen. Sea life was sparse down there, and what little there was tended toward the anaerobic bacteria variety.

And what that meant was objects that fell to the sea floor were very well preserved. There were ships down there from the Middle Ages in which modern divers had found crew members still dressed in the clothes they were wearing when they died.

Reed Smith would like to see something like that. Of course, it would have to wait for another time. They weren’t here to dive a shipwreck.

The Aegean Explorer and its mission was a lie. Poseidon Research International, the organization that owned and manned the Aegean Explorer, was also a lie. Reed Smith was a lie. The truth was, every man on board this ship was either an employee of, an elite covert operator on loan to, or a freelancer temporarily hired by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Nereus crew, load up,” a flat voice said over the loudspeaker.

The Nereus was a tiny, bright yellow submarine—known in the trade as a submersible. Its cockpit was a perfectly round acrylic bubble. That bubble, as fragile as it appeared, would resist the pressure at a depth of a thousand meters—pressure one hundred times that at the surface.

Smith pitched his smoke into the water.

The two men moved toward the submersible. They were joined by a third man, a wiry, muscular guy in his twenties, with a deep scar on the left side of his face. He had a jarhead haircut. His eyes were razor sharp. He claimed to be a marine biologist named Eric Davis.

The kid had special ops written all over him. He had hardly spoken a word the entire time they’d been on the boat.

The bright yellow Nereus squatted on a metal platform. Looking like a friendly robot from a science fiction movie, it even had two black metal robot arms reaching from the front of it. A heavy crane loomed above from the deck of the trawler, ready to lift the Nereus into the water. Two men in orange jumpsuits waited to hook the Nereus to the thick cable that it would be suspended from.

Smith and his two crewmates mounted the stairs and climbed, one at a time, through the main hatch. The special ops kid went first, as he would sit in the back. Then the pilot went in.

Smith went in last, easing into his co-pilot chair. Directly in front of him were the controls to the robot arms. All around him was the clear bubble of the cockpit. He reached up and pulled the hatch shut behind him, turning the valve to seal and lock it.

He was shoulder to shoulder with the thick pilot, Bolger. The glass of the cockpit was not more than a foot from his face, and six inches from his right shoulder.

It was hot inside this orb, and getting hotter.

“Cozy,” Smith said, not enjoying the feeling any more than he had when he was in training for this. A claustrophobic wouldn’t last three minutes inside this thing.

“Get used to it,” the pilot said. “We’re going to be in here awhile.”

No sooner had Smith sealed the hatch than the Nereus lurched to life. The men had hooked it to the cable, and the crane lifted it toward the water. Smith looked behind them. One of the men in the orange jumpsuits was riding on the Nereus’s narrow outside deck. He held onto the cable with one thick-gloved hand.

In a moment, they were out over nothing, two stories in the air. The crane lowered them to the water, the green fishing trawler looming above them now. A Zodiac appeared with one man aboard, moving fast. The man on the outside deck busied himself releasing the cable straps and then stepped into the Zodiac.

A voice came over the radio. “Nereus, this is Aegean Explorer command. Initiate tests.”

“Roger,” the pilot said. “Initiating now.” The man had an array of controls in front of him. He pressed a button on top of the joystick he held in his hand. Then he began to flip switches, his meaty left hand moving from one to another in fast succession. His right hand stayed on the joystick. Cool, oxygenated air began to blow into the tiny module. Smith took a deep breath of it. It felt so nice on his sweaty face. He’d been starting to overheat there for a minute.

The pilot and radio voice exchanged information, talking back and forth as the sub rocked gently forward, then backward. The water bubbled and rose all around them. In a few seconds, the surface of the Black Sea was just above their heads. Smith and the man in the back remained quiet, letting the pilot do his thing. They were nothing if not complete professionals.

“Initiate silent running,” the voice said.

“Silent running,” the pilot said. “See you tonight.”

“Godspeed, Nereus.”

The pilot did something then that no civilian submersible pilot looking for a shipwreck would ever do. He switched the radio off. Then he switched his locator beacon off. His lifelines to the surface were cut.

Could the Aegean Explorer still see the Nereus on sonar? Sure. But the Explorer knew where the Nereus was. In a little while, even that wouldn’t be true. The Nereus was a tiny dot in a vast sea.

For all intents and purposes, the Nereus was gone.

Reed Smith took another deep breath. This must be the thirtieth time he had gone below the surface in one of these things, in training and in the real world, but he still couldn’t get over it. Just fifteen feet down and the sea became bright blue as the sunlight from the surface was scattered and absorbed. On the color spectrum, red was absorbed first, casting a blue patina over the undersea world.

It became bluer and darker as the sub sank through the depths.

“It’s beautiful,” Eric Davis said from behind them.

“Yes, it is,” the pilot said. “I never get tired of it.”

They dropped through the blue into deep, still darkness. It wasn’t complete, though. Smith knew that a small amount of light from the surface still reached them. This was the twilight layer. Below them, even deeper, was midnight.

The black enveloped them. The pilot didn’t turn his lights on, navigating with his instruments instead. Now there was nothing to see.

Smith allowed himself to drift. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then another. And another. He let the hangover take him. He had a job to do, but not yet. The pilot, Bolger, would tell him when his time came. Now he just floated in his mind. It was a pleasant sensation, listening to the hum of the engines and the occasional soft murmuring of the two men in the capsule with him, as they made small talk about one thing or another.

Time passed. Possibly a long time.

“Smith!” Bolger hissed. “Smith! Wake up.”

He spoke without opening his eyes. “I’m not asleep. Are we there yet?”

“No. We have a problem.”

Smith’s eyes popped open. He was surprised to see near total darkness everywhere around him. The only lights came from the red and green glow of the instrument panel. Problem was not a word he wanted to hear hundreds of meters below the surface of the Black Sea.

“What is it?”

Bolger’s stubby finger pointed at the sonar display. Something big was on there, maybe three kilometers to their northwest. If it wasn’t a blue whale, which it almost certainly was not, then it was a ship of some kind, probably a submarine. And there was only one country Smith knew of that operated real subs in these waters.

“Aw hell, why did you turn the sonar on?”

“I had a bad feeling,” Bolger said. “I wanted to make sure we were alone.”

“Well, clearly we’re not,” Smith said. “And you’re advertising our presence.”

Bolger shook his head. “They knew we were here.” He pointed at two much smaller dots, behind them to the south. He pointed at a similar dot ahead and just to their east, less than a kilometer out. “See these? Not good. They’re converging on our location.”

Smith ran a hand over his head. “Davis?”

“Not my department,” the man in the back said. “I’m here to rescue your asses and scuttle the sub in case of a system malfunction or pilot error. I’m in no position to engage an enemy from inside here. And at these depths I couldn’t open the hatch if I wanted to. Too much pressure.”

Smith nodded. “Yeah.” He looked at the pilot. “How far to the target?”

Bolger shook his head. “Too far.”

“Rendezvous spot?”

“Forget it.”

“Can we evade?”

Bolger shrugged. “In this? I guess we can try.”

“Take evasive action,” Smith nearly said, but he didn’t get the chance. Suddenly, a bright light came on directly in front of them. The effect in the tiny capsule was blinding.

“Turn it around,” Smith said, shielding his eyes. “Unfriendlies.”

The pilot sent the Nereus into an abrupt 360-degree spin. Before he could finish the maneuver, another blinding light came on behind them. They were surrounded, front and back, by submersibles like this one. Like this one, except Smith was familiar with the enemy submersibles. They’d been designed and built back in the 1960s, during the era of pocket calculators.

He nearly punched the screen in front of him. Dammit! None of this even took into account that large object further out there, probably a hunter-killer.

The mission, highly classified, was going to be a dead loss. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not even close. The worst of it was Reed Smith himself. He couldn’t be captured, not at any cost.

“Davis, options?”

“I can scuttle with the team inside here,” Davis said. “But personally, I’d rather let them have this hunk of junk and live to fight another day.”

Smith grunted. He couldn’t see a thing. And his only choices were to die inside this bubble, or… he didn’t want to think about the other choices.

Terrific. Whose idea was this again?

He reached down to his calf and opened the zipper on his cargo pants. There was a tiny, two-shot Derringer taped to his leg. It was his suicide gun. He ripped the tape off his calf, barely feeling it as the hair was torn away. He put the gun to his head and took a deep breath.

“What are you doing?” Bolger said, alarm rising in his voice. “You can’t fire that in here. You’ll blow a hole in this thing. We’re a thousand feet below the surface.”

He gestured at the bubble all around them.

Smith shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

Suddenly, the special ops kid was behind him. The kid wriggled like a thick snake. He had Smith’s wrist in a powerful grip. How did he move so fast in such a tight space? For a moment, they grunted and wrestled, barely able to move. The kid’s forearm was around Smith’s throat. He banged Smith’s hand against the console.

“Drop it!” he screamed. “Drop the gun!”

Now the gun was gone. Smith pushed down with his legs and wrenched himself backward, trying to shake the kid off of him.

“You don’t know who I am.”

“Stop!” the pilot shouted. “Stop fighting! You’re hitting the controls.”

Smith managed to slip out of his seat, but now the kid was on top of him. The kid was strong, immensely strong, and he forced Reed down between the seat and the edge of the sub. He wedged Reed in there and pushed him into a ball. The kid was on top of him now, breathing heavily. His coffee breath was in Reed Smith’s ear.

“I can kill you, okay?” the kid said. “I can kill you. If that’s what we need to do, okay. But you can’t fire the gun in here. Me and the other guy want to live.”

“I got big problems,” Reed said. “If they question me… If they torture me…”

“I know,” the kid said. “I get it.”

He paused, his breath coming in harsh rasps.

“Do you want me to kill you? I’ll do it. It’s up to you.”

Reed thought about it. The gun would have made it easy. Nothing to think about. One quick pull of the trigger, and then… whatever was next. But he enjoyed this life. He didn’t want to die now. It was possible that he might slip the noose on this. They might not discover his identity. They might not torture him.

This could all be a simple matter of the Russians confiscating a high-tech sub, and then doing a prisoner swap without asking a lot of questions. Maybe.

His breathing started to calm down. He never should have been here in the first place. Yes, he knew how to tap into communications cables. Yes, he had undersea experience. Yes, he was a smooth operator. But…

The inside of the sub was still bathed in bright, blinding light. They had just given the Russians quite a show in here.

That in itself was going to be worth a few questions.

But Reed Smith wanted to live.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Don’t kill me. Just let me up. I’m not going to do anything.”

The kid began to push himself up. It took a moment. The space in the sub was so tight, they were like two people knocked down and dying in the crush of the crowds at Mecca. It was hard to get untangled.

In a few minutes, Reed Smith was back in his seat. He had made his decision. He hoped it turned out to be the right one.

“Turn the radio on,” he said to Bolger. “Let’s see what these jokers have to say.”

CHAPTER TWO

10:15 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

The Situation Room

The White House, Washington, DC

“It seems that it was a poorly designed mission,” an aide said. “The issue here is plausible deniability.”

David Barrett, nearly six feet, six inches tall, stared down at the man. The aide was blond with thinning hair, a touch overweight, in a suit that was too big at the shoulders and too small around the midsection. The man’s name was Jepsum. It was an unfortunate name for an unfortunate man. Barrett didn’t like men who were shorter than six feet, and he didn’t like men who didn’t keep themselves in shape.

Barrett and Jepsum moved quickly through the hallways of the West Wing, toward the elevator that would take them down to the Situation Room.

“Yes?” Barrett said, growing impatient. “Plausible deniability?”

Jepsum shook his head. “Right. We don’t have any.”

A phalanx of people strode with Barrett, ahead of him, behind him, all around him—aides, interns, Secret Service men, staff of various kinds. Once again, and as always, he had no idea who half these people were. They were a tangled mass of humanity, zooming along, and he stood a head taller than nearly all of them. The shortest of them could be a different species from him altogether.

Short people frustrated Barrett to no end, and more so every day. David Barrett, the president of the United States, had come back to work too soon.

Only six weeks had passed since his daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped by terrorists and then recovered by American commandos in one of the most daring covert operations in recent memory. He’d had a breakdown during the crisis. He had stopped functioning in his role, and who could blame him? Afterward, he had been wrung out, exhausted, and so relieved Elizabeth was safe that he didn’t have the words to fully express it.

The entire mob moved into the elevator, packing themselves inside like sardines into a can. Two Secret Service men had entered the elevator with them. They were tall men, one black and one white. The heads of Barrett and his protectors loomed over everyone else in the car like statues on Easter Island.

Jepsum was still looking up at him, his eyes so earnest he almost seemed like a baby seal. “…and their embassy won’t even acknowledge our communications. After the fiasco at the United Nations last month, I don’t think we can anticipate much cooperation.”

Barrett couldn’t follow Jepsum, but whatever he was saying, it lacked forcefulness. Didn’t the president have stronger men than this at his disposal?

Everyone was talking at once. Before Elizabeth was kidnapped, Barrett would often go on one of his legendary tirades just to get people to shut up. But now? He just allowed the whole mess of them to ramble, the noise from the chattering coming to him like a form of nonsensical music. He let it wash over him.

Barrett had been back on the job for five weeks already, and the time had passed in a blur. He had fired his chief of staff, Lawrence Keller, in the aftermath of the kidnapping. Keller was another short stack—five foot ten at best—and Barrett had come to suspect that Keller was disloyal to him. He had no evidence of this, and couldn’t even quite remember why he believed it, but he thought it best to get rid of Keller anyway.

Except now, Barrett was without Keller’s smooth gray calm and ruthless efficiency. With Keller gone, Barrett felt unmoored, at loose ends, unable to make sense of the onslaught of crises and mini-disasters and just plain information he was bombarded with on a daily basis.

David Barrett was beginning to think he was having another breakdown. He had trouble sleeping. Trouble? He could barely sleep at all. Sometimes, when he was alone, he would start hyperventilating. A few times, late at night, he had found himself locked in his private bathroom, silently weeping.

He thought he might like to enter therapy, but when you were president of the United States, engaging with a shrink was not an option. If the newspapers got hold of it, and the cable talk shows… he didn’t want to think about that.

It would be the end, to put it mildly.

The elevator opened into the egg-shaped Situation Room. It was modern, like the flight deck of a TV spaceship. It was designed for maximum use of space—large screens embedded in the walls every couple of feet, and a giant projection screen on the far wall at the end of the table.

Except for Barrett’s own seat, every plush leather seat at the table was already occupied—overweight men in suits, thin and ramrod-straight military men in uniform. A tall man in a dress uniform stood at the far head of the table.

Height. It was reassuring somehow. David Barrett was tall, and for most of his life he had been supremely confident. This man preparing to run the meeting would also be confident. In fact, he exuded confidence, and command. This man, this four-star general…

Richard Stark.

Barrett remembered that he didn’t care much for Richard Stark. But right now, he didn’t care much for anyone. And Stark worked at the Pentagon. Maybe the general could shed some light on this latest mysterious setback.

“Settle down,” Stark said, as the crowd the elevator had just expelled moved toward their seats.

“People! Settle down. The president is here.”

The room went quiet. A few people continued to murmur, but even that died out quickly.

David Barrett sat down in his high-backed chair.

“Okay, Richard,” he said. “Never mind the preliminaries. Never mind the history lesson. We’ve heard it all before. Just tell me what in God’s name is going on.”

Stark slipped a pair of black reading glasses onto his face and looked down at the sheets of paper in his hand. He took a deep breath and sighed.

On screens around the room, a body of water appeared.

“What you’re seeing on the screens is the Black Sea,” the general said. “As far as we can tell, about two hours ago, a small, three-man submersible owned by an American company called Poseidon Research was operating deep below the surface, in international waters more than one hundred miles southeast of the Crimean resort of Yalta. It appears to have been intercepted and seized by elements of the Russian Navy. The stated mission of the sub was to find and mark the location of an ancient Greek trading vessel believed to have gone down in those waters nearly twenty-five hundred years ago.”

President Barrett stared at the general. He took a breath. That didn’t seem bad at all. What was all the hubbub about?

A civilian submarine was doing archaeological exploration in international waters. The Russians were rebuilding their strength after a disastrous fifteen years or so, and they wanted the Black Sea to be their own private lake again. So they got irritated and overstepped. All right. Lodge a complaint with the embassy and get the scientists back. Maybe even get the sub back, too. It was all a misunderstanding.

“Forgive me, General, but this sounds like something for the diplomats to work out. I appreciate being kept informed of developments like this, but it seems like it’s going to be easy to skip the crisis on this one. Can’t we just have the ambassador—”

“Sir,” Stark said. “I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

It instantly annoyed Barrett that Stark would interrupt him in front of a room full of people. “Okay,” he said. “But this better be good.”

Stark shook his head and sighed again. “Mr. President, Poseidon Research International is a company funded and run by the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s a front operation. The submersible in question, Nereus, was masquerading as a civilian research vessel. In fact, it was on a classified mission under the aegis of both the CIA Special Operations Group and the Joint Special Operations Command. The three men captured include a civilian with high-level security clearances, a CIA special agent, and a Navy SEAL.”

For the first time in more than a month, David Barrett felt an old familiar sensation rising within him. Anger. It was a feeling he enjoyed. They sent a submarine on a spy mission in the Black Sea? Barrett didn’t need the map on the screen to know the geopolitics involved.

“Richard, pardon my French, but what in the hell were we doing with a spy submarine in the Black Sea? Do we want to have a war with the Russians? The Black Sea is their backyard.”

“Sir, with all respect intended, those are international waters open to navigation, and we intend to keep them that way.”

Barrett shook his head. Of course we did. “What was the sub doing there?”

The general coughed. “It was on a mission to tap into Russian communications cables at the bottom of the Black Sea. As you know, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians lease the old Soviet naval port at Sebastopol from the Ukrainians. That port was the mainstay of the Soviet fleet in the region, and serves the same purpose for the Russian Navy. As you can imagine, the arrangement is an awkward one.

“Russian telephone lines and computer-based communications cables run across Ukrainian territory in Crimea to the border with Russia. Meanwhile, tensions have been rising between Russia and Georgia, just to the south of there. We are concerned a war could break out, if not now, then in the near future.

“Georgia is very friendly with us, and we’d like for both them and Ukraine to join the NATO alliance one day. Until they do join NATO, they are vulnerable to a Russian attack. Recently, the Russians laid communications cables along the sea floor from Sebastopol to Sochi, completely circumventing the cables that run across Crimea.

“The mission of the Nereus was to find the location of those cables, and if possible, tap into them. If the Russians decide to attack Georgia, the fleet at Sebastopol is going to know in advance. We’re going to want to know that, too.”

Stark paused.

“And the mission was a total failure,” David Barrett said.

General Stark didn’t fight it.

“Yes, sir. It was.”

Barrett had to give him credit for that. A lot of times, these guys came in here and tried to spin shit into gold right in front of his eyes. Well, Barrett wasn’t having it anymore, and Stark got a couple of points for not even trying.

“Unfortunately, sir, the failure of the mission is not really the major issue we’re facing. The issue we need to deal with at this time is that the Russians have not acknowledged they’ve taken the sub. They also refuse to respond to our inquiries as to its whereabouts, or to the conditions faced by the men who were on board. At the moment, we’re not even sure if those men are alive or dead.”

“Do we know for a fact that they took the sub?”

Stark nodded. “Yes, we do. The sub is outfitted with a radio locator beacon, which has been turned off. But it is also outfitted with a tiny computer chip that broadcasts its location to the satellite global positioning system. The chip only works when the sub is at the surface. The Russians appear not to have detected it yet. It’s embedded deep within the mechanical systems. They will have to take the entire sub apart, or destroy it, to render the chip inoperable. In the meantime, we know they’ve raised the sub to the surface, and have taken it to a small port several miles south of Sochi, near the border with the former Soviet state of Georgia.”

“And the men?” Barrett said.

Stark half nodded and half shrugged. “We believe they’re with the ship.”

“No one knows this mission took place?”

“Just us, and them,” Stark said. “Our best guess is there may have been a recent intelligence leak among the mission participants, or within the agencies involved. We hate to think that, but Poseidon Research has operated out in the open for two decades, and there has never been any indication that its security was breached before.”

An odd thought occurred to David Barrett then.

What’s the problem?

It was a secret mission. The newspapers didn’t know anything about it. And the men involved well knew the risks they were taking. The CIA knew the risks. The Pentagon brass knew the risks. On some level, they must have known how foolish it was. Certainly, no one had asked the president of the United States for permission to carry out the mission. He was only hearing about it after disaster had struck.

That was one of his least favorite aspects of dealing with the so-called intelligence community. They tended to tell you things after it was already too late to do anything about them.

For an instant, he felt like an angry dad who has just learned his teenage son was arrested for vandalism by the local town cops. Let the kid rot in jail for the night. I’ll pick him up in the morning.

“Can we leave them there?” he said.

Stark raised an eyebrow. “Sir?”

Barrett looked around the room. All eyes were on him. He was acutely sensitive to the two dozen pairs of eyes. Young eyes in the back rows, wizened eyes with crow’s feet around the table, owlish eyes behind glasses. But the eyes, which normally showed such deference, now seemed to look at him with something else. That something might be confusion, and it might be the beginning of…