Free Girl of Lies by Charles Sheehan-Miles Page A

He often wished none of this had ever happened.
    But since it had, he had no choice but to see it to the bitter end. He took a sip of his Dewar’s and Soda, breaking yet another of his own informal rules. He didn’t drink in the middle of the day. But then again, he’d never ordered the kidnap and murder of a teenage girl before, either. No matter what most Americans thought—especially the liberals and conspiracy theorists—his agency was scrupulous about law virtually all of the time. Unfortunately, this was one of those times when extraordinary measures became necessary.
    Filner seethed as he scanned the headlines on his tablet. Daughter of Secretary of Defense escapes abduction attempt. That was the front page of the Washington Post. The New York Times said Police Identify Suspect in Kidnap Attempt. This was a real shit-show, one that had been turning Collins’s stomach all morning. It took the feds no more than an hour to identify Tariq Koury. One hour. His identification was bound to lead to plenty of uncomfortable questions to several agencies in Washington Koury had freelanced for at one time or another. Not to mention the private military contractor where he’d found a home.
    Collins was relatively sure nothing would find its way back to him. But relatively sure wasn’t good enough. Too much rested on Wakhan staying buried forever. Anything threatening to bring it out in the open needed to be dealt with.
    Mitch Filner arrived fifteen minutes late. Collins spotted him walking up the street from the direction of the Apple Store, then crossing Bethesda Avenue behind a gaggle of mothers with drooling and bubbling children in their strollers. When Filner crossed the street, he was hidden from view for a moment, but Collins knew he would reappear.
    Collins mentally catalogued once again the people who knew about Wakhan. Thompson… soon to be Secretary of Defense. Roshan al Saud, the head of the Saudi Arabian Intelligence Agency and brother to the King. George-Phillip Windsor, the appallingly nosy busybody who saw himself as an intelligence professional and found himself in a game he couldn’t have imagined. Windsor was a dilettante, a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth who owed his position as Chief of the Special Intelligence Service to his family name. Senator Chuck Rainsley, retired Marine Corps Colonel and now Senior Senator from Texas. Before the Marines had their heads handed to them in Beirut in 1983, he’d been a nobody, an obscure man assigned to an obscure position. Somehow he’d turned the massacre of his own troops into political capital that fueled his powerful career in Washington. Finally, there was Vasily Karatygin, who had disappeared for much of the 90s, only to turn up as a prominent “businessman” after the Northern Alliance swept the Taliban out of Kabul.
    Karatygin could be eliminated without anyone knowing or caring. But the rest were prominent in their own countries and agencies. With the exception of George-Phillip, they all owed their careers to maintaining their secrecy. And Windsor knew the consequences of letting the secret out would be especially dire.
    Another variable he couldn’t control was Thompson’s children. The moment Collins received the report that all of the children were getting genetic testing to find a match for the baby, he scrambled. The results of those genetic tests were going to raise questions that might fuck everything up. If Collins could have gone back in time and retroactively sterilized Thompson’s slut of a wife, he would have done so without hesitation.
    Filner appeared in the doorway and made his way through the restaurant, scanning everyone in the crowd. An Army veteran, he’d been with the CIA Directorate of Operations through most of the 90s and into the early part of the 2000s. Filner was a bit of a roughneck and didn’t fit in well with the buttoned-down Ivy League culture at CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But he’d been an ace