by Jeff Gunhus
When one was planning on the destruction of ninety-five percent of the world’s population in order to save an entire planet, a delay of a year or two wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. Still, he hoped for the best and for the Director’s safe return.
The sooner he could save the world from itself the better.
CHAPTER 31
Hawthorn hoped the plan was airtight, but he couldn’t stop second-guessing himself. Too many missions under his belt to believe there wasn’t a curveball he hadn’t foreseen looming on the horizon. His mantra through his professional life was that no battle plan survived first contact with the enemy. And it had served him well.
But he couldn’t think of any way to make the plan better.
At the heart of the problem was not knowing who to trust. Omega had its tentacles reaching throughout the national security apparatus, or at least they’d done so enough that it gave the appearance that their eyes were everywhere. He wasn’t sure who to trust in his own shop, let alone reaching out interagency. He’d spent the last twelve hours racking his brain for some angle he hadn’t spotted yet, and had come up with nothing.
And that scared him.
He sat at his desk, thinking through the lifetime of experience leading up to that point. He’d done battle both with and against presidents, kings, and the heads of foreign intelligence services in his time. There’d been more victories than defeats, but those were the ones that came to him now. The missed opportunities. The lives he didn’t save were the ones that haunted him most of all.
But those weren’t the only ghosts that haunted him as he counted down the time to his rendezvous.
“It’s me,” he said into the phone.
“Hello, me,” his daughter Anne said. “Where in the world are you today?”
“In DC. Got back this morning.”
A pause. “This morning?”
“Yeah.”
“How bad?” Anne had been through the trenches with him for too many years. In her forties, she had taken over his wife’s role as the family’s matriarch. She knew there weren’t many things that could have kept him away from at least a quick stop to say hi to his two grandkids.
“You know how it goes. There’s never much good news around here.”
“Do you want me to cancel my trip up to Bangor?”
“No, of course not. Megan needs you there.”
“More like Travis needs me. The twins are more than he can handle. I got a video today of them running through the house. Looked just like two pigs had gotten loose in a peach orchard.”
He smiled and closed his eyes. It was one of his late wife’s sayings. He pictured the twenty-five-year-old version of Margery, one hundred percent Southern girl, a debutante armed with a thousand homespun sayings that she dished out with abandon. They always brought a chuckle and a comment from him, but not today. Today he felt a sting in his eyes as tears rose there unexpectedly.
“Is that right?” He let out a short cough to mask the tightness in his throat, but he knew she was too sharp for that.
After another pause, Anne’s voice was lower, the tone she took with him when he didn’t take his medicine or ordered a cheeseburger instead of the rabbit food she was always forcing on him. “Are you being careful?”
“As careful as I can,” he said, not happy a lie had snuck into what might be his last conversation with his daughter. “You know me.”
“That’s why I’m worried.”
“There’s something else I can tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“That I love you. I love the family your mother gave me. And I couldn’t imagine a version of life without all of you.”
“Oh, Dad,” she said, now her turn to grow emotional. “What did Mom used to say? Don’t bullshit a bullshitter? What’s really going on?”
He smiled. His wife had said the same thing the night he’d proposed to her. The response had taken him so off guard that they’d laughed about it for a half hour together. And then another four-plus decades after that.
“I’ve got to go. I’m going to call Megan before this meeting I have coming up.”
A long pause this time, both of them breathing softly into the phone. He closed his eyes again, knowing she would find the call suspicious, hoping she would leave it alone. He imagined her sitting on the edge of her bed, phone cradled in the crook of her neck, looking out the window into the English-style garden, where she spent most of her mornings.
“They’d like to hear from you,” she said finally.
“Goodbye, Anne,” he said.
“Mom felt the same way,” she said, catching him as he was about to hang up. “You were the great love of her life. Remember that.”
“I do,” he said. “Thank you.”
They said their final goodbyes and hung up the phone. He sat at his desk a few minutes to collect himself. This wasn’t the first time he’d made these types of calls to the girls—the just in case insurance policy. If something did happen, if the contact that night was an ambush, he didn’t want his last conversation with Anne to be about which of them was going to pick up the dry cleaning.
But when he’d made that type of call before he’d been a younger man, going into danger for his country with a clear mission and the firepower to back it up.
This felt different.
These calls felt like saying goodbye.
He picked up the phone and dialed the first number from memory. “Hey-a kid,” he said. “Heard you’re about to pop any minute.”
CHAPTER 32
“We have four hours,” Mara said as they pulled onto Interstate 495, the Washington Beltway. “I say we get Joey’s location from Hawthorn and I get him while you cover the meet.”
Her dad dug into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. He hesitated, then handed it to Mara.
“What’s this?”
“The address where Joey’s being held.” He pointed north. “He’s in a basement holding area. Three guards. We’re less than thirty minutes away.”
She couldn’t decide if she was thankful he’d given in to her or pissed that he’d had the address in his pocket the whole time. “How long have you had that information?”
He hesitated, and she knew she wasn’t going to like the answer. “Hawthorn slipped it to me back at the farm.”
Mara yanked on the wheel, cut off two lanes of traffic, and turned north.
“You know we can’t get him right now,” he said.
She pressed the nav button on the car’s dash. “Give me directions to—”
He slapped his hand on the nav button, resetting it. She glared at him. “Don’t try to stop me.”
“Think, Mara,” he said. “You’re better than this.”
“I’m warning you.”
“The second you use the navigation system to get you to that address, alarms go off at NSA, and this car might as well be a tracking beacon. You know that.”
She took a deep breath. He was right, if it was a CIA safe house, then any search would get flagged.
“At least pull over, for Chrissake,” he said. “Let’s take a minute.”
Mara hammered the gas and they sped through traffic. “We’re getting him now. I don’t care about the meet tonight.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “Because if you get Joey now, they’ll know Hawthorn is working against them and we lose the head of Omega. Not to mention they’d kill Hawthorn. These people won’t stop. They’ll track you and Joey down no matter where you take him to hide just to get at you. Is that what you want? Is that what Lucy would have wanted?”
She slowed the car down. She hated the idea of Joey alone and afraid, but she knew he was right.
“Hawthorn told me he has Joey handled. That he’ll be safe.”
“You might trust him, but I don’t. Not with Joey’s life. I’m going. I’ll wait until the meet is happening before I move in, but I’m not waiting.”
He stared out the window, thinking through it. “Yo
u’re as stubborn as your mom.”
“I’m starting to get the feeling she was only that way from being around you all the time.”
That made him laugh, releasing the tension in the car. “You might be right about that. I have two conditions.”
She gave him a hard look.
“Okay, two favors to ask.”
“Better.”
“First, that you don’t kill everyone at the house. Some of those guys, maybe all of them, are friendlies posted there by Hawthorn.”
“That seems reasonable. What’s the second favor?”
“That we eat at Ben’s Chili Bowl. On the off chance things go wrong, I don’t want my last meal to be a microwave burrito from Bob’s Trucking Center.”
* * *
Ben’s Chili Bowl was a local spot that’d been serving up hot dogs and chili since the forties. It wasn’t much to look at, but every president since Nixon had been there, along with every senator and congressman who gave two licks about food and tradition.
The place was too popular to risk one of them being recognized, so they parked down the street and found a teenager on the street willing to make a food run for twenty bucks. They got the food and then parked on a side street and dove into the split hot dogs smothered in chili and cheese. Mara didn’t think she’d be able to eat anything, but once it was in the car, that all changed. She had to admit it’d been an inspired choice.
“Your mom loved Ben’s Chili,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Would have eaten it every day if she could.”
Mara choked down the bite she was chewing and sipped her drink. “How can you do that?”
“What?”
“Talk about her like that?”
“Like how?”
“You know, like she was actually the person she pretended to be.”
He lowered his food and studied her. “She pretended to be a State Department official who worked with the Swedish embassy. She pretended to be a CIA case officer. She pretended to be an American patriot. But she didn’t pretend to be your mother, Mara. That was real.”
“How about being a wife?”
His expression changed at the question. He put down his food as if his appetite was gone. “I like to think that wasn’t part of the act either. At least she said that much at the end. She didn’t have to tell me that, but she did.”
“And that’s supposed to be enough?” she said, feeling the anger rise in her. “Enough to make up for what she did to you? What she did to us?”
He wrapped up the last of the hot dog and fries, stuffing them in the bag. “Nothing can take away the betrayal. But there was so much good, you know? So many moments that . . . that can’t be faked. Like when you and Lucy were born. The nights your mom and I stayed up late together when one of you were sick. The mix of pride and fear we felt when you deployed overseas as a Marine. There’s a depth to those emotions that only a parent can feel. And they were all real. I know they were.”
“Or maybe you just want them to be real.”
“Yeah, I need them to be real,” he whispered. “Besides, last time I checked my trophy case there weren’t any medals for Dad of the Year in it.”
“You did okay.”
“I wasn’t there as much as I wanted.”
“As a little girl, I hated when you were gone,” she said. “When you were home it felt like vacation, though. A thousand miles an hour, activity after activity.”
“And a lot of ice cream,” he added. “The guilty dad’s secret weapon.”
“Then when I was older, when I understood why you were gone, you’d think that would have helped. But it didn’t. It actually made it worse.” Her dad adjusted himself in the passenger seat so he faced her more. “You’d think that knowing my dad was out saving the world, protecting America from her worst enemies, would have made me proud. All it did was make me jealous.”
“Mara . . .”
“I couldn’t figure out why all of those strangers were more important to you than your family. More important than me.”
“They weren’t,” he said. “All those missions were about making a world where my little girls could grow up safe. So that my grandkids would live in an America that I still recognized.”
Mara looked out the window, not trusting herself to meet his eyes. “I know that now. I’m talking when I was growing up. I loved you, but sometimes I wanted to hate you, too. For all the times I looked in the stands at my basketball games and didn’t see you there. For the activities at school where other kids brought their dads and I had my grandpa. For the father-daughter dance in ninth grade where you left an hour before it started. I had my hair and nails done. I was so goddamn excited. My dress was . . .” Her voice cracked and she tried to cover it by clearing her throat. “This is ridiculous . . . Why are we even talking about this?” She stuffed the debris from her lunch into one of the bags, as if having a clean car was suddenly of vital importance.
He reached out and put his hand on her forearm. “No, it’s okay. I learned the hard way with your mom. You can’t keep it in. You have to say the stuff that’s inside. Otherwise, one day, you realize you missed your chance.”
She stopped, took a deep breath. “When you killed . . . when you made it seem like you killed Mom and betrayed your country. . . there was hate waiting for you. For what you did, but also because if what they said about you was true, then all that time away from us hadn’t been for some greater good. It’d all been a lie.”
“And now you know it wasn’t a lie,” he said. “I was doing it all for you. And your sister.” He looked out the window and an uncomfortable silence stretched between them. “Your dress was yellow,” he finally said. “For that dance. I drove all over town with it to match the color perfectly for my tie. When the call came right before, I did everything I could to at least take you for a little bit. Even just one dance. But men’s lives were at stake. I knew some of those men wouldn’t have seen their own daughters ever again unless I went and did my job.”
“I know that,” she said. “I even knew it then, but it still hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For all of it. This wasn’t the life I wanted for our family.”
She wiped a tear from her cheek. She turned and looked him in the eye. “When this is all over, you owe me a dance.”
“As many as you want, kid. I’m all yours.”
CHAPTER 33
Night in DC. For the casual observer, the nation’s capital accomplishes the goal the architects set out for themselves. Monuments of white marble bathed in light give a sense of pedigree and permanence for a nation still an infant by history’s measuring stick. The pillared edifices and grand neoclassical pediments purposefully recalled the great Greek and Roman civilizations, as if the American Empire were a natural continuation of these traditions. The clear intention was that two thousand years into the future, people would still walk among the buildings. And not as ruins, but as the center of a proud and powerful nation.
Even for those who lived in DC, the sight of the National Mall at night was enough to bring up a memory of their less cynical selves. The person who had sought out government service out of a sense of honor, responsibility, and patriotism.
As Mara walked down the graveled walkway toward the Washington Monument, the U.S. Capitol lit up behind her, she felt the power of those ideas. But she felt the sense of responsibility to Joey even more strongly.
She thought about the conversation with her dad earlier. About the balance between the desire to be with your family and the sacrifice needed to do what was necessary to protect them. To protect the world they would one day inherit.
These were the same ideals that had driven her to serve in the Marines. That and a healthy dose of wanting to impress her dad. Only she discovered quickly that the world was more complicated than good guys and bad guys. The battle lines of yesterday’s wars were replaced by confusing layers of shifting alliances and hidden enemies. By the time she’d been medivacked off the battlefield for th
e last time, ending the tour right before she was recruited in the CIA, she carried wounds that were deeper than physical from her time spent protecting America.
Like most soldiers, in the end she was fighting for the man next to her more than anything else. That at least always had a purity to it, even when it felt that everything else was subject to interpretation.
The desire to save Joey held that same level of pure intention. But it was clouded by the fact that she’d be leaving her dad with his flank exposed.
She was second-guessing her plan to part ways with her dad. The operative they’d seen in Iowa was likely still in the field. Or a dozen others like him. If she left her dad to take down the leader of Omega on his own and he failed, then where would that leave them? She’d have Joey, assuming the three men at the house wouldn’t be a problem for her, but then they’d be on the run. And her dad and Hawthorn would likely be dead.
“How much do you trust Hawthorn?” she asked.
Her dad, wearing a ball cap to thwart the facial recognition software that might be at work in the area, gave her a side glance. “I trusted him not to tell you about me, even though he thought it was the wrong call. He never gave me up. Not even to the president.”
“And he helped you escape after Prague.”
“He cracked open a door, but it was all I needed.”
She worked through the calculus. There was no reason for Hawthorn to do any of that unless he could be trusted. They couldn’t contact him prior to the meet, so anything he had lined up to secure Joey couldn’t be changed. There was the possibility that she might even make it worse by injecting herself in his plan without coordination. Or kill an innocent man if one of Hawthorn’s men got between her and Joey.
“I’m staying with you,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“No,” she said. “But I want this to end. So leaving it up to a couple of old farts like you and Hawthorn seems risky.”
