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  Payback

  ( Deep Black - 4 )

  Stephen Coonts

  Jim Defelice

  RECRUITED:

  A crack team of cover agents.

  Word is out to ex-Marine sniper Charlie Dean and his team of the National Security Agency: Infiltrate the highest stratum of Peruvian political power and derail a renegade general from acing an election. All Dean has to do is find a way inside an impenetrable bank vault protected by armed guards round the clock — it’s all in a day’s work for the men and women of Deep Black.

  ENGAGED:

  A violent political coup.

  But things get complicated when Dean and company discover the renegade general’s second plot. The military madman’s ruse — a nuclear weapon he claims is in the hands of Marxist guerillas, a bomb that only he can rescue…and control.

  IGNITED:

  A devastating terrorist plot.

  When the general and his plot are exposed, the NSA concludes the greatest threat is over. But in fact, it’s only just beginning…

  Stephen Coonts, Jim DeFelice

  Payback

  Authors’ Note

  The National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Space Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Council, and Marines are, of course, real. While based on an actual organization affiliated with the NSA and CIA, Desk Three and all of the people associated with it in this book are fiction. The technology depicted here either exists or is being developed.

  Some liberties have been taken in describing actual places and procedures to facilitate the telling of the tale. Details of some security procedures and apparatus at real places have been omitted or recast as a matter of the public interest.

  1

  Charles Dean glanced toward the sky as he stepped away from the building, noting the direction and speed of the clouds as they moved. It was an old sniper’s trick, a habit burned into his being long ago, so ancient he did it unconsciously. And yet if he had to use the information — if he were sighting a target at five hundred yards across a hill obscured by thick vegetation — his eyes and upper body would adjust to the light breeze as automatically and easily as his feet adjusted to the uneven sidewalk.

  “How’s it lookin’, pardner?” boomed a voice in his head.

  Dean pulled a satellite phone from his pocket, fussed with it for a few seconds, then held it to his ear. The phone was just a cover — like all Deep Black field ops, he communicated through a device implanted in his skull behind his ear. A tiny microphone sewn into his clothes picked up his voice; his belt held the rest of the unit, which transmitted through a satellite system.

  “Same as yesterday afternoon,” he told Kjartan “Tommy” Magnor-Karr. “Two guards outside. I just finished setting up the video bugs.”

  “Booster transmitter is set.”

  “Signals are strong,” said a third voice. Though the other words were as loud as Karr’s, the man who said them — Jeff Rockman — was sitting in an underground bunker some five thousand miles to the north.

  The video bugs were miniature video cameras about the size and shape of a button. Their signals went to the booster Karr had planted. The booster uploaded the video stream to a satellite, which then relayed it to Rockman in the Deep Black nerve center known as the Art Room.

  “We have sharp visuals all around,” said Rockman. “You’re good to go. Lia’s plane is on schedule. Estimated time of arrival at Lima airport just over two hours.”

  “Rockman, you sound like you’re an air traffic controller,” said Karr.

  “Is that supposed to be an insult or a compliment?”

  Dean turned and began walking down the street as Karr bantered good-naturedly with Rockman, who was their mission “runner.” During a mission, the runner maintained communications and coordinated operational support for the team in the field. The runner could access a wide array of intelligence, ranging from radio intercepts to satellite imagery, in real time.

  He could also be a bit of a noodge.

  “You guys ought to get hopping if you’re going to make the airport in time,” said Rockman.

  “Plenty of time,” said Karr.

  As Rockman began lecturing the other agent about the notoriously heavy Lima traffic, Dean stopped at a small news-stand and bought a newspaper. The headlines shouted about a car bombing in the city the night before, the work of terrorists the government had claimed were stamped out months ago. Dean considered practicing his Spanish with the vendor, but the man’s somber face warned him off.

  Karr was waiting in the rented car around the corner.

  “What do you say to a little breakfast, Charlie?”

  “At the airport, sure.”

  “Airport food? Aw, come on.”

  “We don’t want to be late.”

  “We won’t be. I’m driving.”

  “We also want to get there in one piece.”

  “Always,” said Karr, squealing the tires as he lurched into traffic.

  2

  The crisp, late May air of the northeastern Andes stung Stephan Babin’s face as he looked out across the valley. Natives would think the brilliant sky a harbinger of a grand, dry day; they would welcome the beautiful chill as a sign of good fortune. But Babin was a foreigner here, a prisoner, though not bound by bars. The mountains would never seem hospitable, and as clear as the sky might be, it would never portend anything for him but bitterness and death.

  He pushed himself forward on his crutches. To most of the world beyond this tiny patch of northern Peru, Stephan Babin was a dead man, killed in a plane crash three years before. There were many days when he thought of himself as a ghost, a spirit haunting the earth.

  If he wasn’t a ghost, Babin was certainly less than a physical man, his body a diminished wraith of what it had been before the crash. Most days he had so little feeling in his legs he might just as well not have them. What he could feel, hurt. His back alternately felt numb and screamed out in pain. Only his shoulders, strengthened by his need to use the crutches to walk or even balance consistently, were as they had been before the accident.

  Babin was also as single-minded and bitter as any spirit haunting the earth. He existed only for revenge against the people who had crippled him — who’d betrayed him and left him for dead. His plan to extract it had taken shape slowly over the past eighteen months, but his hatred seemed to have existed forever. It was as deep as the nearby mountains were tall, as cold and vicious as the wind howling at their peaks.

  “Señor Stephan, what are you doing without a coat?”

  Babin turned and looked at Rosalina, the housekeeper General Atahualpa Túcume had installed here to watch after him.

  “The general would not want you to catch a cold,” said the old woman gently. “He would blame me — he worries about you constantly, like a father.”

  “General Túcume is not my father.”

  “Senor Stephan, he has been like a father to you. That you cannot deny.”

  No, that he could not deny, not at all. Túcume had saved his life and kept him alive. Babin had repaid him handsomely, and by any measure the debt would be completely requited within the next few weeks. Then, like a son, Babin would strike out on his own, fulfilling his own dream of revenge. The American CIA had shot down his plane; their countrymen would burn for it, burn in the most fearsome fire the world had ever known.

  “Señor Stephan?”

  “Rosalina, you are always right.” Babin worked his crutches backward. “I’ll come inside. The general is counting on me after all, is he not?”

  3

  Lia DeFrancesca handed her passport over to the customs officer, watching as he squinted and held it up to the light.

  �
��Name?” he asked in English.

  “Li Shanken.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Business.”

  He frowned. Before he could ask any more questions, Lia handed him a letter on fancy UN letterhead explaining in Spanish that she was an employee of Complete Computing on loan to the U.S.-based election consultant firm FairPlay International, which had been retained to assist the election commission overseeing Peru’s presidential election this coming Sunday. The man read the letter twice, then shook his head.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Go,” he told her, mumbling something under his breath as he handed the documents back.

  “Hello, Lia,” said Rockman in her ear. “We can see you through the airport’s security system. Your UN escort is waiting at the end of the hall. We think he’s Julio Fernandez, the security liaison for the election committee, but we haven’t gotten a good shot of him yet. Make sure to verify his identity with the retina scan.”

  Lia spotted a twenty-something man holding a sign with her name on it a few yards away.

  “I’m Li Shanken,” she told him in English, pointing to the sign. “From FairPlay.”

  He blinked twice, his wire-rimmed glasses nearly falling off his nose. Tall and thin, he towered over Lia, though he probably weighed less than she did.

  “Yes,” he said. “Oh.”

  “You were expecting a man?”

  “Well, no.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose.

  “Not all computer experts are men,” said Lia.

  “No, I knew — t thought you would be an older woman, not one so beautiful.”

  “He covered that well,” snickered Rockman.

  “Where’s your car?” asked Lia.

  “I came by taxi,” he said, starting for the door.

  “Please get a retina scan to confirm his identity,” said Rockman. “And listen, with the taxis, use the official ones at the kiosk. The independents can’t always be trusted.”

  That was the thing with the Art Room. They were always looking over your shoulder, playing mother hen.

  Of course, the one time she’d actually needed them to help her, they were nowhere to be found.

  Not entirely true and definitely not fair, she thought as she followed Fernandez outside. But being raped tended to change your perspective on both truth and fairness.

  The UN official waded out onto the pavement, ducking a succession of vehicles. He waved at an empty taxi, which ignored him, then practically stood in the middle of the road for another. It didn’t stop because it already had a passenger.

  “Let’s try over here,” said Lia, starting to the right.

  “Lia, what happened to the retina scan?” asked Rockman. “Don’t get into the cab with him until you’re sure. One hundred percent sure.”

  As Fernandez walked to a car that had just pulled up, Lia feinted for it, then sprinted to the one stuck behind it.

  “Oh, wait,” she said, ducking away and going to a third car, which was back by the curb. Her maneuver would not only cross up any arrangement Fernandez had with an accomplice waiting to kidnap her, but it also allowed her to see how he reacted.

  His confused look and shrug told her more than the retina scan ever could. She did the scan anyway, opening the case and seeing to her makeup as Fernandez slid in next to her.

  “So what do you think?” Lia asked him, tilting the faux mirror toward him. “We should be at National Trust in what, two hours, give or take, depending on traffic?”

  “You want to get right to work?”

  “No sense dallying. We can drop off the luggage at the hotel on the way.”

  “Dean and Tommy are right behind you,” said Rockman.

  “Next time, though, stick with the program, OK? Some of these taxi drivers are scam artists.”

  “Don’t worry,” sighed Lia, leaning back against the seat.

  “Worry?” said Fernandez.

  “What is there to worry about, except the traffic?” Lia said to him. “Do you mind if I practice my Spanish? It’s rusty. Your English is so good.”

  His face brightened. “As I come from Spain, my Spanish here is too stiff,” he said. “Between American Spanish and peninsular Spanish, there is a difference.”

  “Mine is basically from high school,” said Lia, skipping the months of intense language training she’d taken in the Army. “¡Hola, Julio!”

  “¡Hola, Li!” Fernandez laughed. “My first lesson in English was ‘Hello’ as well.”

  “All right, he checks out,” said Rockman.

  “Gracias.”

  “Muy bien,” said Fernandez, thinking she was talking to him. “As you wish.”

  4

  General Atahualpa Túcume paused for a moment as he turned the comer on the trail, catching sight of the valley and the soaring mountains beyond. Though he had been born here in the foothills of the Andes, each time he saw them he was filled with awe. Lush and warm here in the north because of the proximity to the equator, the mountains towered over green plateaus and lakes so pure they looked like the tears of the sun god, crying for his lost people. Trees seemed to explode from solid rock. Water tumbled down in clear streams that glowed with a light stolen from the sun, not merely reflected.

  A thousand years before, one of the world’s great civilizations had ruled these mountains and their valleys, the nearby jungle, and the exotic desert coast to the west. They built massive temples that rivaled those of Egypt, constructed elaborate forts and luxurious villas, studied the sun with the precision of the Greeks and Arabs, and talked to the gods who ruled the universe. A few of these men were gods themselves, passing among the living so that destiny could be fulfilled. Only the arrival of European diseases they could neither see nor fight brought them down.

  Some saw their decline as the way of the universe, with its endless cycles, its rising and setting sun, its ever-changing moon. Others saw it as the result of grave sins that had to be expiated in the blood of the people, a stain on the soul of the mountains themselves. A few thought it temporary, a mere night in the long day of existence, the passage of a dark moment in an hour of great achievement.

  General Atahualpa Túcume was one of the latter. A modem man, he had been educated in the finest schools of Spain and the United States. But it was no accident that General Atahualpa Túcume’s first name was that of a great Inca ruler or that his last recalled a regional capital during the Inca reign. The general was the rarest of rare Peruvians — a modem man wholly of Inca blood, whose ancestors had not been polluted by compromise with the Spanish conquerors.

  Technically, the word “Inca” referred to the aristocratic family of rulers who presided over the empire of the Four Quarters, called Tahuantinsuyu in Quechua, the empire’s official language. The empire included a large number of tribes of different backgrounds; at its height in 1500, the Great Inca governed a population of 10 million from his capital at Cusco in the Andean mountains. His domain stretched to modem Bolivia and down to what is now Chile, from the Pacific to the headwaters of the Amazonian river. Túcume’s ancestor, according to carefully handed down traditions, had been a great ruler in the north at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival. Sometime after Pizarro beheaded the Inca ruler Atahualpa in 1533, Túcume’s direct ancestor fled the approaching conquistadors and took shelter with an eastern tribe. There the family bided its time, telling stories of past glories and dreaming of future ones.

  Túcume had been raised on the stories. Long before he attended Madrid and Miami University, he had memorized the oral poem commemorating the legend of his namesake, Atahualpa. The entire epic was a thing of beauty, but especially poignant were the lines of his beheading. Atahualpa predicted that he would return to avenge his people as Inkarri, the messiah of the earth. Túcume knew in his heart that these words were not fiction but the strongest truth.

  But as a thoroughly modem man, Túcume knew better than to rely on stories or even religion for his power. Power came from the ability t
o destroy, and he alone among the Incas, among the Peruvians, possessed the modern equivalent of the sun god’s arrow: a small nuclear warhead hidden not too far from here.

  It might be said that obtaining it had been a matter of luck, rather than fate. Certainly the circumstances argued that. The bomb fell almost literally at the general’s feet. But the tangled weave of events that had brought the warhead to him was so improbable that Túcume was convinced his ancestors had taken a hand. The Incas, and all natives of the land, would rise again, and Túcume, selected by luck or fate, was the man who would lead them.

  He began walking again, turning another corner on the path. The man Túcume had come to meet was standing amid a knot of bodyguards about twenty meters away.

  “Mr. President!” shouted Túcume, greeting Hernando Aznar as he drew close.

  “Still only a candidate,” said Aznar. “And a distant one at that. With a short week to go.”

  “A long week,” said Túcume, who knew what it would include.

  “You take a huge risk meeting me.”

  “Here? Never. This is not Lima, where spies are everywhere.”

  “A risk for me.”

  “Nonsense. Is it against the law for a candidate to speak to a general? No. Absolutely not.”

  “Your contributions—”

  “Ah.” Túcume waved his hand. “You are doing extremely well. Extremely well.”

  “The papers all say I won’t finish above third.”

  This was why they had had to meet; Aznar had become defeatist and needed propping up.

  “All of the journalists are on the government’s payroll,” Túcume assured him. “Who else would call the vice president a man of the people? Ramon Ortez, who owns an armor-plated Mercedes and whose wife shops three times a year in Madrid, a man of the people? Victor Imbecile — who votes for a communist anymore?”