by S L Shelton
Eric’s eyes opened wide with shock as I took another bite of overdone ground beef. “Synthetic biologic—”
“Shhh,” I hissed quickly, placing my finger to my lips. I looked both directions as I took the memo note away from him. “I only told you because you’re my roommate.”
“Why would that make a difference?” he asked as a suspicious grin began to spread.
“Because when I’m in sleep cycle, you can hear the gears in my chest and brain sometimes… I didn’t want you to freak out.”
His grin broadened. “Ah…so you’re an android.”
“Quiet!” I whispered, setting my fork down. “Dude, don’t blow my cover.”
I then proceeded to stuff the note into my mouth and swallow it. Eric looked at me with a suspicious grin. “That doesn’t seem healthy.”
“What?” I asked.
“Eating paper,” he replied smiling.
“What paper?” I asked quietly, looking to the side as I began to eat again.
He laughed.
“It’s not funny,” I said with a very serious expression. “I’m starting to worry about you.”
He laughed again, so hard that I thought he might spit up some of his lunch. I just grinned and finished my meal.
I was slowly building my list of acceptable “cover” friends while at camp. Eric was definitely on the list as was Leyla, if I could get past her suspicion of me. I wasn’t sure about anyone else, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to waste resources trying to be “pals” with Paul—he was far too quick to elbow his way through others when he wanted something.
After lunch, I did as instructed, following the rest of the class to weapons training. I sandbagged a little on the firing range, not wanting to stand out too much, but I still managed to score in the top three. The second best score came from Paul—Paul Farling. He was an “alpha” male. Captain of the football team at VMI, track team… He was one of the few military types in the class: Army Ranger, an officer, and a real jackass. He was quite different from the other military personnel I had been exposed to—Paul was all ego.
The top firing range score belonged to Dylan Pritchett. Dylan was a nice guy. He was athletic, smart, and the helpful Ying to Paul’s asinine Yang. He was probably the most-liked member of the group—and the one I trusted the least. Something about his personality did not match his carriage though I was careful not to let on that I saw the discrepancy.
“How’d you do?” Eric asked me as we cleared our weapons and lined up to place them in the lock box.
“I did okay,” I muttered.
“Good enough to hit the barn from the inside,” Paul said snidely from ahead of us.
I just shook my head. So high school, I thought.
To be honest, it seemed like he was jealous. I’m almost certain he was the most “interesting” guy here before I arrived—any challenge to his notion of being the center of the universe would probably create friction.
“How’d you do, Joiner?” Paul asked roommate Eric, referring to him by the nickname the class had assigned him. Eric the “joiner”, tagged as such because of his tendency to insert himself into every activity and conversation.
Eric tilted his head to the side and shrugged. “Twenty-one out of thirty,” he replied quietly.
Paul laughed loudly. “Jesus, Joiner! You should be training with the housekeeping staff.”
“Lighten up, Paul,” Dylan said with agitation. “Field techs don’t have to shoot the eye out of a hummingbird at a hundred meters, and not everyone sleeps with a weapon tucked under their pillow like you do.”
I knew it had been a supposedly ridiculous taunt at Paul’s obsession with guns, but I smiled inwardly at the comment—I had been sleeping with a Glock under my pillow since the Baynebridge thugs broke into my condo over the summer. However, I kept that tidbit to myself.
Paul just shot a sneer at Dylan, silenced, no doubt, by Dylan’s higher score.
**
Later, as a small crowd of students gathered in the day room in the dorm/barracks, I continued to try to filter through the personalities of the people I’d be spending the next year with. Dylan was someone I’d have to be friendly with even if I didn’t trust him; he had everyone fooled, and it was clear that if I made him an enemy, I’d alienate everyone else. I smiled easily at his jokes, laughed when the rest of the crowd laughed, accepted his help when he offered it, and even played pool with him in the day room that evening. We all sat back and listened to him wax poetically about a girl he knew who drove a car through the wall of his dorm in college.
“She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” he said, holding his pool cue between his legs as he sat, waiting for his next run at the table. “I didn’t even mind that I had drywall and cinderblock all over my bed.”
“She drove right into your dorm room?” Eric asked.
Dylan smiled. “Yeah. But it took another three weeks for me to get her back into my room through the door,” he said with a sly grin and a wink at Eric.
He got up and walked to the rail of the table. “Damn! I miss that girl,” he muttered before looking up at me. “What about you, Scott? Is there a girl crying herself to sleep at night because you ran off to the Farm?”
“Nope,” I replied as I lined up my shot. “But my house plants are probably pretty thirsty right about now.”
“Ha!” Paul scoffed. “I figured you for a homo…but you aren’t even man enough for that.”
That was a bit personal, I thought.
I smiled and was about to say something when Dylan chimed in.
“You seem to have a keen eye for homosexuals, Paul,” Dylan said as he turned his back on Paul to take his shot at the table. “But that shouldn’t surprise anyone, since you’ve been sleeping in the company of men, for what? The last six years?”
“Fuck you, Dylan,” Paul snarled.
Dylan threw his hands up. “Dude. Though I’m flattered, I don’t like my guys as butch as you.” He puckered up to blow a kiss at him.
Paul stood abruptly and stormed out of the room, garnering a few chuckles from the group that remained. I shook my head, grinning as I sank the eight ball and won the game. I suspected Dylan had let me win, leaving me wondering why he felt it important to be my friend.
three
September
11:15 a.m. on Friday, September 17th—Langley, Virginia
JOHN TEMPLE looked up from his computer when Carrie Cantor knocked on his door.
“Ms. Cantor!” John exclaimed warmly. “It’s been a while.”
“Agent Temple,” she replied with a thin smile, reaching out to shake his hand. “How have you been?”
“I’m doing okay. Though I’d be sleeping better at night if you’d go ahead and take custody of Mark Gaines,” he said with a crooked grin. “I don’t mind telling you we’re nervous that he’s still in limbo.”
She shook her head. “That’s not up to me,” she replied as John gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Homeland isn’t giving him up that easily. I can’t understand it. They’ve sunk their teeth in like—”
John waited a second for her to finish her thought before finishing it for her. “Like sharks smelling blood?”
She nodded and sighed before reaching into her folio-style briefcase.
“What can I do for the Department of Justice today?” John asked as she pulled out a manila folder.
“I have bad news,” Cantor said. “The FISA judge rejected the warrant request on the account and transaction numbers Scott Wolfe got from Gaines.”
John raised his eyebrow in surprise. “Did he give a reason?”
“She said that the account and transaction numbers alone weren’t enough to justify accessing US Bank information,” she replied as she placed the folder on his desk. “She said there’s no reason to suspect that the receipt of funds, foreign or otherwise, is cause enough to violate privacy.”
“Did you mention the connection to the gunman in the alleyway,
who was also spotted in the Middle East while attempting to gain access to nuclear devices?” John asked as he flipped the folder open and began scanning its contents.
“She said it was circumstantial,” Cantor replied. “Unless you want to produce Scott Wolfe to testify to that fact with one-hundred percent certainty, it won’t make any difference in the ruling.” She rubbed her eyes with her fingers as John continued to read. “Hell…it might not make a difference either way. The connection is flimsy.”
John dropped the folder on his desk and shook his head. “If Scott said he saw the same guy, then it was the same guy.”
“What I need is for Gaines to cooperate,” she replied pleadingly, ignoring John’s faith in Wolfe. “Twin sightings of hired muscle are no grounds for investigating members of Congress and White House officials.”
John’s eyebrows knitted together in incredulity. “Congress and White House?”
She shook her head in startled realization. “Shit,” she muttered.
“Ms. Cantor—Carrie,” he said in a low voice, leaning forward. “Are you in over your head?”
Her face contorted in a brief display of anger before regaining her composure. “I’m quite capable of doing my job. And the Judge was right…it’s not enough evidence to justify prying into their accounts.”
John sat back and measured her for a few seconds, noticing the lack of confidence in her face despite the strong tone of her voice. He nodded to pacify her though he knew she was struggling; she seemed lost.
“I need access to Gaines,” she said finally.
“You won’t get him to talk,” John replied with mock regret. “He doesn’t trust anyone at this point. And if members of Congress and White House officials are on that payoff list, I can’t really blame him.”
“Then he’ll sit in the brig at Norfolk until either DOJ or Homeland gets custody of him.”
John shook his head. “I don’t think he cares. He’s safe there.”
Cantor sighed again, letting the frustration shape her face into a deep frown. “Can you convince him?”
John tipped his head to the side. “It’s gonna take more than a plea deal on the bombings,” he said. “If you trust him enough to get the payoff information, then you have to trust him enough to believe he wasn’t responsible for killing all those people.”
She shook her head. “Not even the three guys who killed his sister?”
“Oh yeah,” John said quickly. “He did that, guaranteed.”
“And we’re just supposed to overlook that?” she asked, incredulous. “What do we say? ‘Hey, Mark. We know you tortured, butchered, and burned three guys alive, but we’re willing to overlook that if you’ll tell us where the account data came from and who made the payments’.”
John smiled. “Yeah,” he replied plainly. “If you want the scoop on the upstream money… Alternatively, you can go back and try your FISA judge again. She might change her mind. You never know.”
Cantor huffed in disgust but didn’t reply.
“Look,” John said as he rose from behind his desk and pulled his jacket from the back of his chair. “They killed his sister and her family. He knew it was related to his investigation. He just went too far getting the information from them before he killed them.”
“You make it sound like that’s some sort of excuse!” she exclaimed.
John shrugged. “We trained him,” he replied, pulling his jacket on. “Honestly, it was textbook information extraction under extremely time-sensitive crisis conditions.”
Disbelief washed over Cantor’s face.
“Don’t look so shocked, Ms. Cantor. Even with his time-saving methods, the bombings took place anyway.”
“I can’t believe you are condoning what he did!” she said.
“Oh. I’m not. It was wrong. Illegal. Reprehensible,” he replied, gesturing that he was leaving his office. “But if it had been my sister, and I wasn’t constrained by time, I would have set up camp in that garage and taken them on a long, slow road of pain until I worked through my grief.”
John saw a perceptible shiver work its way down her back as she walked with him to the door. After a moment of walking together in silence, she spoke. “So immunity is what Gaines wants in exchange for the information he has?”
John shook his head. “Mark doesn’t even know there’s a conversation going on about him,” he replied quietly as they approached the elevators. “He was ready for prison and lethal injection before he even walked into that garage. No…this is what I’m offering in exchange for getting information from Gaines.”
Her eyebrows rose so high, John thought they would disappear beneath her hairline. “You? Do you even know if he’ll cooperate if we get him the deal?”
“No,” John said with a sly grin. “But I won’t even try to get him to cooperate until I know I can have him back here with us…if that’s what he wants.”
“Then why are we even bothering to talk?” Cantor asked, a frown tugging at the corners of her lips. “You’re just feathering your nest.”
“He’s got information on a conspiracy that goes all the way to the White House and Congress,” he said simply before turning to walk away. “You have to decide what’s more important: protecting a couple of murdering redneck rapists or protecting the very fabric of the Republic.”
He was halfway down the hall when he heard the elevator doors open. He listened to them close before they abruptly opened again. “I’ll need to get it cleared,” Cantor yelled at his back.
John stopped and turned. “Neither of us is going anywhere.”
He watched the doors close again, Cantor’s troubled face staring at him until the metal panels broke their eye contact. He continued looking at the elevator for several seconds before resuming his trip down the hall to the analysts’ offices.
He strode into the office block and Ruth, one of the analysts looked up before running to meet him in the center.
“I need to talk to you,” she said in a whisper.
He nodded his head sideways to a small conference room to the side. She followed behind him and closed the door once inside, pulling the blinds closed on the glass wall before stepping right up to his face.
“I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise not to ask where the information came from,” she whispered.
He nodded.
“Baynebridge changed the employment records on the two guys Scott Wolfe killed at his condo in July,” she said in a voice so quiet that John barely heard her. “But more than that, on the day that it happened, they were detached from their regular duty and tasked with a special security detail for Homeland Security.”
John stared at her for a few beats, his mind whirring with the implications.
“I take it that the source of the information wasn’t legal and that we can’t use it for a warrant if we were to pass it off to DOJ,” he said finally.
Ruth nodded.
John turned his head to the side and closed his eyes, trying to formulate a path forward. After a moment, he looked back to Ruth. “Well, at least we know who not to trust.”
Ruth took a couple of steps back. “How much shit does this put us in?” she asked quietly.
John smiled. “Only the normal amount,” he replied ironically.
Ruth shook her head slowly. “That bad, huh?”
“Go back to work on the source of the Cayman bank accounts for the payoffs,” John said as he opened the conference room door, letting her walk past him. “And Ruth,” she turned and looked at him, “next time you get a windfall of information from Scott, come to me before going through it. I might be able to help make it legal.”
Through her troubled expression, she nodded and smiled before going back to her workstation. John closed the door on the conference room again and picked up the phone in the center of the table, dialing an extension after sitting on the edge.
“Burgess,” came the reply from Mathew Burgess, Director of the National Clandestine Service and D
eputy Director of the CIA.
“Sir, we need to discretely isolate our exposure to Baynebridge,” John said plainly and softly after seeing the secure conference light was on.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line before the Director replied. “Understood. I’ll have legal look at their contract.”
“Yes, sir,” John replied.
“John,” Burgess said after a couple of beats. “How much shit are we in?”
“Up to our necks, sir…at least.”
“Good to know,” Burgess replied. “Thanks.”
“Yes, sir.” John said and ended the call. He sat on the edge of the table, staring at the phone for several seconds before he picked it up again and dialed an outside line using the secure function. He wanted an update on Scott down at Camp Peary.
“Horiatis,” came Nick’s voice from the other end.
“How’s it going at the Farm?”
“I wondered how long it would take you to call and check in,” Nick replied with amusement in his tone.
“I wanted to let you guys settle in a bit,” John replied dismissively, though in truth, he would have liked to have daily updates, since Scott’s presence at the Farm wasn’t just about his training.
“He’s doing real well,” Nick said. “Though we’re finding it difficult to challenge him enough to make things believable.”
“He’s too smart for his own good sometimes,” John replied with a little agitation.
“We fooled him with the containment and interrogation though…he thought that was real enough.”
“Good! How long did it take for him to give his name?”
“He didn’t,” Nick replied with a chuckle. “After being waterboarded and tenderized for three days, he got Ray’s name and then proceeded to escape…breaking Ray’s arm and stealing his weapon in the process.”
“You have got to be shitting me!” John exclaimed. “How the hell did he manage that?”
“Faked a heart attack… We’re still scratching our heads over that.”
“Son of a bitch,” John muttered. “We need him in the field.”
“About that,” Nick said with a more serious tone. “I know he’s good, but if I can’t teach him the basics, real-world threats are going to end him pretty fast.”
