CI: Homeland Threat

by David DeBatto, Pete Nelson

Genres: Literary Fiction; War & Military; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

In the fourth novel of this thrilling series, the Pentagon suspects that the brutal murder of the daughter of a revered Army general is tied to a string of deadly assassinations of U.S. military personnel. Counterintelligence Staff Sergeant David DeLuca and his CI team of specialists are brought in to investigate.

Release date: May 9, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 353

Sample

“Nobody in Holland has a short game,” the man in the bunker off the tenth green said as he addressed his ball. He waggled
his sand wedge above the Titleist, making sure the club head didn’t touch the sand. “The short game is all about playing lies
with the ball above or below your feet. But there are no hills in Holland. Did you ever get a chance to play a Dutch course
when you were with NATO, General?”


Alexander Wagner had made a career out of suffering fools, but there was something particularly difficult to bear about this
fool from Amsterdam. He talked too much. He thought he was cleverer than he was. He’d also lost six balls already and hadn’t
taken a penalty for one of them. Wagner couldn’t abide men who ignored the rules, in golf or anywhere else.


“Never had the time,” he replied.

“General Wagner’s dropped his handicap by eight strokes since he started working for us,” Wagner’s partner, Dennis Stirling,
said. Stirling was CEO at Trans-Delphi Electronics. Stirling was in the habit of improving his lie whenever he thought nobody
was looking. Wagner’s wife had urged him not to say anything about it. He also despised Stirling for the ridiculous amount
of money he’d spent on his custom-made Japanese Yonex clubs, but again, his wife had counseled silence on the matter. “If
we’re not careful,” Stirling told the Dutchman, “we’re gonna lose him to the Senior Tour.”


“Wally gets all the credit,” Wagner said, referring to the club pro, who’d joined them for the back nine. Wally was a good
man who did his job and didn’t initiate idiotic banter or drop names, though he’d played with all the greats, including Nicklaus
and Palmer, when he’d been on the PGA Tour. He kept his mouth shut when you hit a bad shot and didn’t correct you unless you
asked. He’d make a good aide, Wagner thought.


The Dutchman hit his wedge, skulling it to the right, where it smacked the lip of the bunker and rolled back down the sand.
Wally shot Wagner a quick glance.


“You see?” the Dutchman said. “No short game. I have told you.”

“We give visitors one mulligan per nine,” the general heard himself saying. He hated mulligans. He hated people who took mulligans,
and he hated it when a golf partner offered him one. He wondered if TDE was paying him enough to compromise his integrity
this way. He smiled. Actually, they were. They were here because Stirling wanted the Dutchman to buy $40 million worth of
guidance systems for the Dutch air force. Officially, Wagner was here so that the idiot from Holland could say he’d played
golf with someone famous. Privately, he was here to beat the 82 he’d scored the last time he’d played the course. If the Dutchman
wanted to degrade himself by cheating, that was up to him. Wagner had never held the Dutch military in high regard anyway.
“Dutch military” was virtually an oxymoron.


The Dutchman’s next shot flew over the green and rolled into a bunker on the opposite side. Everyone waited, because he was
still farthest from the pin.


“Somebody forget something in the clubhouse?” Wally said, eyeing a golf cart approaching from the tenth tee. “Count your head
covers.”


Wagner saw the golf cart approaching as well. He reached in his pocket and took out his cell phone to make sure he was receiving
a signal, wondering if somebody was trying to reach him and couldn’t get through. He had plenty of reception. He’d informed
his office as to his schedule and had asked not to be disturbed unless it was important. Perhaps whoever it was had a message
for Stirling.


There were two men in the cart, both dressed in the white coveralls of the groundskeeping crew. They had a cooler behind them
on the cart. Maybe it was the bar cart, bringing Bloody Marys, though usually the bar cart was driven by attractive young
women in tank tops and short shorts.


The two men appeared to be Mexicans, Wagner noticed. Odd, because all the other groundskeepers he’d seen were black. He noticed,
at the last moment, and too late, as the cart suddenly veered and headed straight for him, that the men were Arabs, young,
with oddly ecstatic expressions on their faces. He didn’t run, instead wielding his putter like a baseball bat, though he
doubted he’d have a chance to use it.


The cart was ten feet away when the bomb went off.

When the Dutchman rose from the bunker on the far side of the green, he found only a crater in the green fifteen feet deep,
the titanium-carbon-boron composite head of Stirling’s custom-made Yonex driver, and a human foot wearing a brown-and-white
saddle-shoe-style FootJoy golf shoe he recognized as belonging to Wally, the pro.


Peter Masland was in his garden, picking tomatoes for his omelet. When he popped one into his mouth to test its ripeness,
a Red Sweetie cherry tomato the size of a Ping-Pong ball, the flavor burst across his tongue, powerful enough to make his
cheeks pucker. He filled the stainless steel colander to the halfway mark, discarding the tomatoes that were cracked or discolored.


He eyed the new bed he’d prepared at the southeastern corner of his property, near the fence, and wondered if it was too soon
to call Lieutenant Colonel DeSilva. DeSilva never seemed to mind the calls from his old boss, and Masland was wary of abusing
the privilege, but after relying on DeSilva to answer his questions and address his needs for over twenty years, it was hard
to stop. He wanted to grow his own tea, nothing fancy, one English or Irish breakfast tea and one green, an oolong or Darjeeling.
He’d asked the woman at the garden center why it was that nobody grew their own tea, and she didn’t know, suggesting it had
something to do with Camellia sinensis not liking certain climates. But you could grow anything in Florida. He’d called DeSilva and asked him if he could find the
answer. The lieutenant colonel said he’d put somebody on it and get back to him. “I hope it’s not too much trouble,” Masland
had said. “Not at all, General,” DeSilva had said, but Masland knew DeSilva would never complain.


He went down to the dock, to make certain everything was ready. His friend Thomas was coming over later that afternoon. The
two men planned on spending the day on the water. Masland had served with Thomas in Turkey, years ago, before Thomas took
early retirement, passed over for promotion after pissing off the Pentagon and able to read the writing on the wall. “Join
me in Florida when you’re ready,” Thomas had said. “They’ve got bonefish down there that’ll pull your arms right out of their
sockets.”


He stood on the end of the pier. Seagulls squawked from his neighbor’s dock. The water lapped at the shore. High overhead,
he heard the drone of a small private plane.


His cell phone chortled. He answered it. It was his wife.

“Onion or garlic?” she asked him. “They’re out of raisin.”

“Do they have sesame?”

“Onion, garlic, plain, and whole wheat,” she said. “That’s it.”

“Onion,” he said.

“Do you want a coffee?” she asked. “Hazelnut or French roast?”

“Hazelnut.”

“Decaf.”

“Regular.”

“Peter,” his wife said. “I shouldn’t have to be the one reminding you of what the doctor said.”

“Decaf,” he agreed.

He was walking back to the house, feeling the pain in his right hip that he’d felt, off and on, since taking a piece of shrapnel
there as a young captain in Vietnam, defending the perimeter of Landing Zone X-Ray at la Drang Valley during evac, November
14, 1965, waiting for 1st Air Cav to arrive. He could still remember the day, the smell of cordite, the noise, and perhaps
because he was lost in memory, he noticed too late that the small private plane he’d seen overhead had circled back, flying
in low, as if about to land, though to Masland’s knowledge there wasn’t an airfield nearby. Strange. When it reappeared from
where a grove of palm trees obscured his view, he looked to see if it was an amphibious plane, but the aircraft lacked landing
pontoons, nor did it have the shape or girth to indicate the ability to belly-land on water.


Strange again.

Was he lost? In trouble? Making an emergency landing?

He pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911, prepared to notify the authorities, but waited to hit the send button on his
phone.


He watched again as the plane turned, corrected its course, turned once more, and then leveled off, coming in lower and lower,
headed, he realized, straight for him.


He felt frozen, unable to move, grasping only at the last moment what was actually happening. Due to the angle of the sun,
he couldn’t see, through the windshield of the plane, who was flying it.


Time slowed, then seemed to stand still, and then he took the full force of the collision with his body as the plane smashed
into the ground, obliterating itself in a massive fireball.


The debate had gone well, Admiral McNulty thought, but he’d known it would. The students at the Oxford Union debating society
had been bright and attractive, and in particular the girl, Hannah, who’d been assigned to escort him to dinner at the Three
Castles Inn, and then to the Oxford Union, where he’d taken a position on the podium opposite a young fellow named Ian Leofranc
Engraham, the president of the debating society and a formidable opponent. Engraham was articulate, well-informed, charming,
and glib, and the admiral had pounded him into the ground, arguing against the proposition, “Resolved: That the United States
Should Get Out of Iraq Immediately and Should Never Have Invaded in the First Place,” and winning by a vote three-quarters
in favor of his position, from a crowd he knew was predominantly antiwar going in. His speaker’s bureau told him the fee they’d
offered wasn’t worth the bother, but his political action committee told him Oxford was huge—if you scored big there, they
said, the whole world sat up and paid attention, and he’d scored big. He’d taken a briefing from Barnett at the War College
in Newport on the newest global policies, and he’d rehearsed his talking points with a focus group the PAC put together, and
he’d even flown to CENTCOM in Tampa to make sure he had the latest data. At the reception in the Union bar afterwards, a don
from Christchurch College had asked him if he’d be interested in teaching a course in military history, but the admiral told
the don he had other plans for the long term. When Hannah got him a drink and whispered in his ear, “My God, I do believe
you have to be the sexiest man in England tonight,” he knew his short-term plans were set as well. She’d suggested her place.
What happened on tour of duty stayed on tour of duty—that didn’t change when he made admiral, and it didn’t have to change,
now that he was retired. The only difference was that this time, he’d brought his wife along, but she’d begged off attending
the reception, saying she had a migraine, and walked back to the hotel.


He saw the taillights from the girl’s sports car flare up ahead as she rounded a curve.

“She’s speeding,” his driver said, smiling in the rearview mirror. “I think she’s in a hurry, Admiral.”

“Youth will be served,” the admiral said. “Don’t follow too closely. I want to play hard-to-get.”

He reached into his pocket, found his pillbox, and slipped a Viagra into his mouth, coughing first and pretending it was a
throat lozenge.


The road led up Hinksey Hill, past a manse called Woodside, and another called Abingdon Cottage, a third called Aubreyston,
each estate with stone posts marking the gated drives. Hannah had said she’d rented a country house with a friend, rather
than live in college, but the friend was away for the weekend. “She’ll be sorry she missed out,” Hannah had said. “And I’m
not talking about the bloody debate.”


A rich girl. Irish. McNulty liked rich girls, and especially rich girls who talked dirty, and looked like Hannah did, red-haired
and built, with a sense of utter confidence, so certain that she knew what she was doing. There was nothing sexier. She’d
said only that her father worked in government. McNulty hoped he didn’t know the man, but there was a chance he did. He’d
served in London for twelve years as the Pentagon’s chief liaison with MI6. Anybody in Parliament he hadn’t met, he’d probably
at least read a dossier about them. It didn’t matter, but it was good to be careful (after what happened to Clinton, his political
adviser had warned him about keeping his sexual adventurism in check), so he’d made a call before leaving the reception to
an old friend from the ministry, a man he knew he could trust for his discretion, and asked him to pull the girl’s file. He
was hoping the friend would contact him before he got busy with Hannah, because after that, he wouldn’t be taking any calls.
If the man didn’t reach him, it was all right. He’d get the information later.


They rounded a corner and saw where Hannah’s red sports car had stopped at the top of the hill, her hazard lights flashing.

The driver slowed, pulling up behind her.

“Something wrong?” the admiral said.

“I can’t tell,” the driver said. “Do you want me to get out?”

“No no,” the admiral said. “Just wait.”

They were in the middle of nowhere, stone walls and hedgerows edging the fields to either side. The sky was overcast, and
a slight drizzle had begun to fall, typical English weather, McNulty knew. Perhaps she’d stopped to use her cell phone, before
driving out of range.


Then he saw it, a dead deer lying at the side of the road. Back home, the damn things were a nuisance, overpopulating the
countryside thanks to all the goddamn Bambi-people who’d been passing restrictions on hunting. She must have hit the animal,
and that was why she’d stopped.


He got out of the car, meaning to speak to her and console her. He hoped this wasn’t going to blow his chances of getting
laid.


He’d walked five paces and was standing in the headlights of the big Jaguar sedan, when suddenly the red sports car took off
at top speed.


“What’s wrong with her?” the driver said, getting out of the car and standing in the opened door.

“I think she’s upset,” McNulty said, watching the taillights fade into the night. He looked again at the deer. Only then did
he notice a length of wire, about a foot, protruding from the dead animal’s anus.


“What’s that doing there?” he thought.

It was his last thought. The bomb inside the carcass went off, blowing the admiral’s car twenty feet into the sky, killing
him and his driver instantly. Police called to the scene later found pieces of the car blown a hundred meters from the scene
of the explosion and traces of C4 in the residue.


Retired U.S. Marine general Mike O’Hara was fishing when the first shot knocked him into the water. As he fell overboard,
the wooden canoe it had taken him nearly twenty years to build in his “spare time” flipped.


He took refuge beneath it, collecting his wits, breathing the air trapped inside the turtled boat. At first he thought some
sort of rock had fallen on him, though that was impossible. It soon occurred to him that he’d been shot. He assessed the damage.
It appeared to be superficial, a flesh wound that had torn across the surface of his left shoulder, painful, but not enough
to put him down.


He slowed his thinking, to summarize and extrapolate.

He’d been fishing, casting in the weeds for bass. The sun had set half an hour earlier, the sky a deep purplish pink in the
west. He’d told himself he’d give it three more casts before paddling back to his cabin, where Emily was waiting to clean
his catch and cook it for dinner. Emily probably had a pitcher of martinis ready. He’d been fishing off the point at the eastern
end of the property, and the shot had come from somewhere to the west, either from the cabin or from the shore along the opposing
peninsula. If the shot came from the cabin, it meant that Emily was already dead. If it came from the far point, she could
still be alive.


Then two more rounds crashed into the boat, splintering the bow, and neither time did he hear the crack of a rifle. That meant
the shooter was a professional, using a weapon prepared with a silencer and probably a flash suppressor. The two shots had
blown the bow clean off the boat, indicating a large-caliber weapon, maybe even a sniper’s rifle. That meant a powerful scope,
and probably night vision capabilities.


He was not defenseless. Beneath what remained of his boat, he found his floating tackle box, opened it (experience had taught
him to keep the box locked and closed after dumping a canoe once and losing all his gear), and took out the .45 Colt automatic
he kept in it, sealed in a plastic bag, the weapon used to drive off marauding bears, which were plentiful in these deep woods
along the Canadian border, a wild unpopulated country, and that was the problem—the closest neighbor was four miles down lake.
There was no one to swim to for help.


It meant he was going to have to handle this alone.

He took a deep breath, dived underwater, and swam to shore, just as two more shots splintered what remained of his beloved
wooden canoe. There were large rocks along the shore that made for good cover, along with the reeds and lily pads in the shallows
sheltering the bass he’d been trying to catch.


He surfaced, hiding behind a rock, and turned. Where his boat had been, he saw only his tackle box floating, and then a final
round hit and sank it.


The shooter was a marksman, he now understood, but a cocky one, taking shots that weren’t certain, and in doing so, giving
away his position. O’Hara now had a pretty good fix as to where the shots were coming from. The eastern promontory, dubbed
Gilly’s Point, after his grandfather, who’d built the cabin, ended at a solid granite ledge that rose eight feet from the
water, Em’s favorite place for picnics, with an old Ojibwa pictograph on the ledge that tourists sometimes anchored off and
photographed. He moved furtively through the snakegrass, then took a deep breath and dived underwater again, swimming around
the ledge until he’d made it to the far side, where it was safe to emerge.


He moved deep into the woods and circled toward the cabin, running. Emily had made fun of him for wearing camo when he fished,
even though he’d shown her a study in Bassmaster magazine that said fishermen in bright colors caught fewer fish than fishermen who wore more concealing attire. Now he was
glad for it.


He moved quickly, keeping to the darkening woods, certain that the assassin was moving too, but where? Closer, to take another
shot? Or was he done for the day, in retreat, thinking his job was finished? The sniper had seen a body fall. O’Hara doubted
the sniper saw him once he’d hit the water. For all the sniper knew, O’Hara was dead. Perhaps he was breaking down his weapon
even now, hiking out, back to his boat or his ATV—or maybe he wasn’t finished. A horrible thought occurred to O’Hara. Maybe,
now that his primary target was eliminated, the shooter was moving more leisurely on his secondary target—Emily.


O’Hara doubled his pace, racing to reach the cabin. He was a strong man who stayed in shape by running marathons and Ironman
competitions. His wound hurt, but it wasn’t enough to slow him. He felt the adrenaline rising within him—the fuel of battle,
someone once described it. He considered firing three warning shots, but Emily wouldn’t know what that meant. She was so innocent,
not naïve, but inexperienced, certainly in all things military, and she rarely asked him about the things he’d done as a marine,
not that there was much he could comfortably tell her. They’d only been dating for two years, since he’d got back from Afghanistan,
but he knew she was the best thing ever to happen to him.


When he got within view of the cabin, he saw her. She was standing on the porch, gazing out on the lake, enjoying the first
stars of the evening. She was wearing a bright yellow fleece vest against the evening chill, and a white Irish cable-knit
sweater, blue jeans, a white headband. He saw her lift her coffee to her lips. Cream, two Sweet’N Lows. He saw her take a
sip.


Then her head disintegrated in a spray of blood as sniper’s round tore through it at 3,000 feet per second.

He’d seen people die before, men he cared about, but this was different.

This was no war zone.

This couldn’t be happening.

He knew better, knew he should have held, but instead he ran for Emily, as if to catch her before her body fell, as if that
would matter or make a difference—as if he could still save her, and as he ran, he screamed the word “No,” filled with a mindless
rage that was absolute. He didn’t care if he drew fire—he wanted the shooter to show himself, and fight him, man to man. .
.


The first shell caught him in the gut. As he staggered, a second round caught him in the neck, dropping him to the ground.
It must have done some nerve damage, he concluded, because he could no longer feel his legs or his arms. He couldn’t move.


He saw a figure emerge from the woods in the distance, a man, dressed in hunting gear. He saw the man raise a rifle and aim
it at him.


It was the last thing he would ever see.

And in Boston, Massachusetts, in an underground parking garage, a woman crossed to her car.

Shots rang out.

A body fell.

DELUCA WAS ABLE TO GRAB THE RINGING telephone at his bedside before it woke his wife. He slept more lightly than she did,
a habit he’d picked up in Iraq, if not before then. He glanced at the clock on his bedstand. It was twenty minutes after five.
Nobody calling at that hour would be calling with good news.


“DeLuca,” he said.

“Good morning,” the voice said. “Captain Martin with General LeDoux’s office.”

DeLuca had spoken with Martin a hundred times before, but Martin was the sort of guy who needed to give himself a full introduction
each time he called, a formal military sort who followed the book at all times, but an okay guy.


“What can I do for you, Captain?” DeLuca said. He took the mobile handset into his study. The sky was becoming light in the
east, overcast after a night of rain, the air coming through the window screen fresh and damp and full of ozone. Glancing
out the window, he saw a pair of deer, sniffing at the tulips his wife had planted in the garden. He’d made a slurry from
raw eggs and painted the flowers, upon the advice of his friend Walter, who knew about such things. The slurry was working—the
deer turned away. Some people thought they were cute. He thought of them more like rats on steroids.


“Bad news, I’m afraid,” Martin said. “There’s been some activity. All in the last twelve hours or so.”

“What kind of activity?” he said. “Where?”

“Minnesota, South Carolina, Florida, and England,” Martin said. “Three retired generals and an admiral have been attacked.
And possibly something in your neighborhood. I can’t really give you a full briefing, right at this moment. We’re still gathering
intel, but we’ve only just got wind of it. General LeDoux wanted to schedule something for later in the day, but it looks
like some of our retired stars are being targeted. And/or their families.”


“In my neighborhood?” he asked. “In Boston?”

“We’re not sure,” Martin said. “There’s been a homicide. No details yet. We were hoping you could look into it.”

“A homicide?” he said. “Why are you calling me?”

“It’s military,” Martin said.

“The MPs handle crimes by military personnel.”

“We don’t know the killer,” Martin said, “or killers, but it appears to be a terrorist attack on U.S. soil against a military
target. Global coordination has been suggested. The Pentagon wants to get CI involved. They’re still discussing to what extent,
but they want you to scramble.”


“Okay,” DeLuca said. “Who and where?”

“Boston Common parking garage,” Captain Martin said. “It’s Katie Quinn. General Joe Quinn’s daughter. We can tell you more
at the briefing but right now, we’d like to get you on the scene ASAP. We just picked it up a little while ago, so it’s pretty
fresh.”


“I’m about twenty minutes away,” DeLuca said.

“We’ll talk to you after you’ve had a look,” Martin said. “We sent a car to General Quinn’s house too. We might want you there
as well, but we’ll let you know. First things first. Sorry to have to wake you.”


“It’s all right,” DeLuca said. “I had to answer the phone anyway.”

DeLuca grabbed an armful of clothes, dressed quietly in the downstairs bathroom, and left his wife a note on the kitchen table
to tell her something had come up and to call him on his cell.


He found his B’s and C’s in the drawer of his desk where he kept them, then took his service Beretta from underneath his mattress
and donned his shoulder holster, the weapon concealed beneath his jacket. A familiar feeling came over him. In the fifteen
years between getting out of the army the first time and reenlisting after 9/11, he’d served with the Boston Police Department.
He knew the drill, too well.


He was on the road minutes after hang. . .