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Because Rhett didn’t give a shit about O’Donnell or the Darkwater guy. The real game was to make Kaiser look bad, but at the same time not so bad that it became obvious that someone was setting the whole thing up to bring Kaiser down.
It was a delicate dance to find that balance between just messy enough to be believable andtoomessy to be true. The immediate risk was that Benson’s Darkwater man would put O’Donnell downtooquietly, clean up things so efficiently that none of it would stick to Kaiser and the CIA.
Sending in that wet-team pretty much wiped away that risk.
But it introduced a new risk.
Because now Kaiser and Benson both knew that someone else was pulling the strings. Someone higher up in the Agency.
Of course, that was always going to come out, Rhett reminded himself as he strode to the window and pulled the drapes closed. After all, one low-level analyst sending classified files to the Chinese and Pakistanis and Indians might not be enough to bring Kaiser all the way down. The Director still had Robinson’s ear, still had decades of solid results backing him up.
So eventually it would have to become known that someone high up in Langley had turned traitor on Kaiser’s watch. Of course, with one of the CIA’s top hackers in Rhett’s pocket, the trail would never lead back to Rhett himself, and eventually Kaiser would have had to take the fall for what amounted to a double failure.
So yeah, that had always been Rhett’s end game.
Benson’s involvement just accelerated that part of the game.
But it had also changed the game.
Changed it in a way that was both thrilling and worrisome.
Thrilling because it gave Rhett a chance to bring down not just Martin Kaiser but John Benson as well.
Worrisome because it was John fucking Benson.
11
John fucking Benson.
Diego Vargas adjusted the scope, zooming in on the front lawn of Senator Marcus Robinson’s townhouse. It was late morning in the upscale Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, and Diego knew the Senator was on the campaign trail with his entire picture-perfect family, glowing pregnant wife front and center.
Diego had watched the Robinsons on TV last night from his hole-in-the-wall studio apartment in Southeast Baltimore. The Senator and his wife on stage somewhere in Ohio or Idaho or Iowa, holding hands and flashing beaming white smiles like headlamps. Delilah wore a white dress that showed off her swollen pregnant belly, and the sight had made Diego’s gut churn with the bitter memory of another pregnant woman, her beautiful body carrying a part of him within her. The memory sickened him, and he gritted his teeth and forced that dark energy back into the psychic channels he’d created with blood and violence, the only way he could handle the rage of what had happened, the despair of what might have been, of what had almost been, of what had been right there before it was taken from his arms, torn from his grasp, ripped from his very soul.
His soul which had turned dark all those years ago, when Diego had last held hands with his pregnant wife, last kissed his young daughter, last looked into their pretty brown eyes, last prayed to the God who had forsaken him that night in Mexico City when they took his family from him, turned the flame that burned in that proud young Mexican Marine from light to dark.
Diego swallowed the bitter lump in his throat, forcing away the memories that had been bubbling up more and more in the three months since he’d swum ashore from theRivington, just barely escaping with his life.
He’d hidden beneath the dark waters and watched Kyle Northrup’s broken body drift past him, stared as that tattooed beast Hogan had somehow survived the two-hundred-foot drop from theRivington’s foredeck to the water, saved that damn nanny Hannah like a fucking hero.
Of course, with both the Northrup brothers dead it mattered little whether the nanny lived or died. Diego had other things to worry about back then.
One of which was this silver-haired, wolf-eyed man who was now standing outside the Senator’s empty home and talking to a couple of hard-looking men who were almost certainly part of this off-the-books outfit that Diego had recently learned was called Darkwater.
“John fucking Benson,” Diego muttered from his perch atop an apartment building around the block from the Senator’s Georgetown townhome. He took another long look at the man, then pulled his scope down and shoved it into the battered metal toolbox that was part of his current disguise as a maintenance man.
He crept away from the roof edge, then stood and dusted off his generic gray uniform. He’d grown out his hair and beard over the past three months, lost maybe ten pounds of weight, replacing it with lean muscle. On theRivingtonhe’d been buzzed bald and shaved clean, and right now even his fellow Zetas wouldn’t recognize him through the hair and beard. Add to it the uniform and the toolbox and Diego was almost invisible, both in the Hispanic neighborhoods of Baltimore and in the whitewashed streets of Georgetown, where he was just another Mexican maintenance man going about his minimum-wage business.
Diego glanced down into his open toolbox. The polished black metal of a silenced Glock 17 handgun gleamed back at him. It was merely a precaution, of course. He was too far away to take a shot.
Though he desperately wanted to take a shot at John Benson. How sweet would it be to get that meddlingcabrón. Diego remembered enough about the man from those early days down in Guatemala, when the American CIA and the Mexican Special Forces started those training camps to build an anti-Cartel off-the-books team trained by U.S. Special Forces.
A team that eventually became the Zetas.
Strange how intentions and results could end up so far apart.
Stayed focused on your own intentions, Diego reminded himself now as he forced himself to turn away from Benson. He snapped the toolbox shut, walked silently to the metal roof-door in his rubber-soled canvas shoes, stepped into the cool stairwell, padding his way silently down six flights of stairs like a cat.
He tried again to put Benson out of his mind, but seeing the man had awakened some festering rage which would not die easy. Diego had seen Benson clearly on that floodlit lifeboat after theRivingtonmess, recognized him immediately even though it had been twenty years. At the time Diego had chalked it up to coincidence, but now he understood that there were no such things as coincidences when it came to John fucking Benson.
