Page 75 of Enemy Within

Welby nodded.

Pete gnawed on his lip, staring at Welby. “I’ve got a person,” he finally said slowly. “It’s not, you know,entirelylegal. But I’ve used them in the past to track down sources. People I need to find when they’ve gone to ground. If I need them for a story, or if I need them to shut their mouth.”

Welby’s eyebrows skyrocketed.

“You think being press secretary is just throwing press junkets all the time?” Pete scoffed. “This is one of the dirtier offices in the West Wing. And I’ve never been afraid of getting into the mud.” He swallowed. “Not for Jack.”

“I don’t need to hear any more.” Standing, Welby smoothed his tie and headed for the door. “I’d hate to have to arrest you because of something I overheard.” Never mind the treason he just committed himself.

He turned the doorknob. “But, I expect you’ll let me know?”

HIS CELL PHONE BUZZED a few hours later. Welby glanced down at the screen. A text from Pete had popped up.Get here asap.

Welby pocketed his cell phone and turned back to the shift brief. Levi was talking through the elevated threat assessments, and what they all needed to watch out for. Tasking agents rotating off shift with intel work in Horsepower. Reassigning other agents, and moving their posts around. Changing the West Wing procedures. It was a big shake-up, and Welby couldn’t see the reason why. Why move agents? Why have them hunting for intelligence? That was H Street’s job, for the intel desk jockeys at Headquarters.

He escaped as soon as the brief ended, slipping out the back. On the way out, he saw the confusion on the other agents’ faces, too. What was up with Levi? Why these changes?

Unease slid down his spine, drumming along each one of his vertebrae with a deeper, darker worry.

He pushed his gnawing anxieties away as he slipped into Pete’s office. Pete stood at his desk, his back to the door, on the phone. As Welby entered, he waved him in, thanked whoever he was talking to, and hung up.

“What did you get?” Welby crossed his arms and hovered in front of Pete’s desk.

“A few things.” Pete pulled his keyboard close and started pounding at the keys. “Okay, first, my guy looked up Adam Cooper. Turns out, he’s been using his civilian ID to move around. Him and a bunch of other MAMs flying on the same route.”

“Military age males?” Welby frowned. “That’s not unusual. That’s anyone from fifteen to fifty. About half the population of airline travel is in that range.”

“Not on this route.” Pete spun his monitor toward Welby. A flight route lit up, one red line bouncing from Riyadh to London, London to Seattle, Seattle to Anchorage, Anchorage to Nome, in the far reaches of western Alaska, and then to Sevoukuk, a tiny village on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. “Only eight men flew this itinerary, and all together, all on the same day. Adam Cooper, six other American men, all in the Marine Corps, and one Saudi national.”

“A Saudi?”

“Faisal al-Saud. His passport was flagged in Seattle. Someone came forward and said al-Saud and he were getting married in the States, and the immigration officer let them through.”

“Who the hell is Faisal al-Saud? Why is he connected to Lieutenant Cooper?” Welby’s brow furrowed, and he stared at the red lines on the monitor as if he could read the lieutenant’s intentions in each hop.

“Dunno.” Pete shrugged. “I looked up what I could. He’s an orphan. His parents were killed in those big bombings the Kingdom had twenty years ago. His uncle adopted him, raised him. He’s a quiet prince in the royal family. The only thing that stands out is that he’s reported to be the royal head of the Saudi Intelligence Directorate.”

“Shit…” Welby cursed and leaned forward, bracing his palms on the edge of Pete’s desk. “Is that good news or bad news for us? These flights originated from Riyadh. What the hell was Lieutenant Cooper doing in Saudi Arabia anyway?”

Pete shrugged again. “The only thing we know for sure is that Lieutenant Adam Cooper landed on St. Lawrence Island yesterday. And Ethan wasn’t with him.”

“Did you track Ethan’s passport? Find out where he was?”

“No.” Pete shook his head. “He must have been using a burner. Irwin could have gotten him one from the CIA. Ethan’s most recent passport scan was his last official trip with the Secret Service. Ethiopia.”

A shiver crawled up the back of Welby’s neck, ringing his throat until his scar burned. Ethiopia. He remembered gasping for breath as his throat filled with blood. Hands holding him down on the conference table in Air Force One as the surgeon leaned over him, shouting at him to keep still. He swore one of those hands had belonged to Jeff Gottschalk. He’d held Jeff’s hand, clenched so hard he thought he broke it. He thought he was going to die on that table, bleed out at thirty thousand feet, all over the seal of the United States.

He took a breath, but Pete jumped in, speaking first. “So. Lieutenant Cooper is in Alaska. Hanging out in the Bering Sea. Moroshkin is invading Canada. You think he’s making a move against Moroshkin?”

“He’s headed the wrong way for that. He’s thirty miles off the coast of Russia. Canada is a long way from Lieutenant Cooper right now. No, he’s pointed at Russia.”

A light went on in Pete’s eyes, an almost mad gleam. He spun his monitor back around as he pounded at his keyboard again. “Take a look at this.” He spun the monitor back.

A gaudy, flashing webpage blinked back at Welby, a mess of translation protocols converting Russian web text to broken English. “Looks like… a message board?”

“Yes. A Russian conspiracy theorists’ website. They run a message board and yak about all the same things our conspiracy nuts do. Aliens. Government cover-ups. Secret military installations. HAARP. Chemtrails. All of it.”

Welby stared at Pete. “Why do we care what Russian nuts are talking about on some badly managed website?”