Search and Destroy by JT Sawyer (top non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

car, heading for two miles to a drop box outside a FedEx facility, where she deposited the eight tablets. Afterwards, she drove north of Alexandria on the interstate, stopping briefly at a roadside park to drop the laptop into the swift-moving waters of the Potomac River.

19

Langley

Neil Patterson was awaiting Shepard’s arrival for their 10 a.m. meeting as he scrolled through his emails, his mind barely focusing on the subject lines as his thoughts drifted over the catastrophic events of the past few days followed by Cassie’s funeral.

The sweet-natured woman had been a dear friend and someone that Patterson checked in on whenever Cal was deployed, even taking her out for lunch on occasion.

Now she’s in a box in the ground, goddammit.

With thirty-plus years working at the agency, Patterson had never had the time or inclination for being a father, and Cassie and Cal had become like a surrogate family.

Patterson knew that the loss he had suffered with Cassie’s death paled in comparison to the soul-shredding experience that Shepard was going through.

He’s beyond devastated. What will come of his life now? What a fucking waste.

Beyond the grief and anguish, he also knew that Shepard had to be questioning what had gone wrong and who was behind the explosion.

All the senior staff at Burke’s being killed in one spot on the completion of their research…this was no fucking gas leak. He had spent enough of his career orchestrating killings to look like coincidences to know that this was a staged attack.

He had his own team of analysts looking into the forensics at the crater that had been Burke’s home, but he already knew what the answer would be.

It had to be a surgical strike to take out everyone who worked on Perseus before the software could go live. But only a handful of people knew what Perseus was really about, and most of them are dead now. Did Burke’s discovery with the simulated run over Caracas this week cause this, or were there events already set in motion before that? Is there some kind of covert strike that is about to unfold abroad amongst our troops or embassies or in Venezuela itself?

He swallowed hard, his gaze turning towards the skyline outside the window.

Or here, God help us.

He heard a knock on his office door, followed by the sight of Shepard entering. The man looked emaciated, the bags under his eyes accentuated by his pale skin, as if he’d just emerged from a month in a cave.

“Mornin’, Cal. Thanks for coming in. I’m sure this is the last place you want to be right now.” Patterson stood up, patting him on the shoulder as he walked to the small table near the window and grabbed a pitcher of water and two glasses.

It was a far cry from the celebratory drink of bourbon they’d had at their last meeting when toasting the completion of the Perseus project.

Shepard put his helmet on the desk then slumped down into the leather chair. “Sure beats staring at the walls in my living room right now. I feel like hopping on a plane and disappearing…flying to some undiscovered mountain valley and shacking up in a cabin for the rest of my days. To be honest, that’d be just fine with me.”

He took the glass of chilled water from Patterson, sipping on it then cradling it in his hands. “So, have you uncovered anything about what happened at Burke’s?”

“My team has been shadowing the FBI agent in charge, Amanda Carter, and her forensic investigators out there, and so far the only thing that turned up was the presence of Symtex residue in the kitchen.”

Cal gave a knowing nod. “I wondered how a gas explosion could turn a place into a volcano like that. Symtex was my first thought as well.” He leaned back in his seat. “That means that whoever did it wasn’t too worried about completely covering their tracks. They just needed Burke and everyone else out of the way long enough…but long enough for what?”

Patterson sat on the edge of the desk. “At Burke’s meeting with us at the Pentagon that afternoon, he indicated that the test run he put Perseus through a week earlier had turned up an anomaly. It was connected with satellite footage over Caracas and the presence of a former death-squad commander, Carlos Montoya, who had emerged after a long time being off-grid. Burke thought this might all be related to an upcoming presidential election in Venezuela. Our case officer down there, who joined the briefing, Milo Gardner, also indicated that two political journalists were killed in recent months.”

“This sounds like Project 284 all over—remember that scenario that was put together by the joint DOD-CIA think tank a few years back to simulate a non-invasive overthrow of a South American government?”

“Yeah, I was on the advisory panel, since I spent my first five years with the agency down in Chile.”

“Slowly eliminate the dissenting journalists and mid-level political opposition using hidden-hand mercs from outside the area of operation while trickling in funds to aid groups, then use sleeper agents to disperse the majority of funds to the media supporting the puppet we wanted in charge of the country.”

“Nothing new, really—that’s been the SOP for a century or longer with the dominant nations of the world, but the network has just gotten larger and more complex with geopolitical entanglements.”

“Not to mention the expansion of the internet and the reach of social media and the dark web.”

Cal leaned forward. “I wonder if Burke fed the data for Project 284 into Perseus? Some of that was open-source material. All the things you mentioned happening in Venezuela…Perseus was designed to identify and form connections with intel like that.”

He set his glass on the desk, standing up and walking to the window. “But now you’re telling me Symtex was found at Burke’s… Who was in the know on what he was doing?”

“Only a handful of people at the highest levels in our clandestine agencies and anyone Burke brought