by Sean Parnell
“Comme vous le souhaitez,” he said. As you wish.
“So formal!” She laughed and chided him. “And I wish to have dessert.”
She ordered a healthy fruit plate, and Raines a crème brûlée. He’d barely finished one glass of the Bruno Paillard, but she signaled the waiter and asked him to fill their glasses again. The young man couldn’t help but glance down at her long legs, and as if she had a moment of self-consciousness, she turned to the side and crossed them. Raines couldn’t help looking either. She reached out with her full glass and clinked it against his.
“You are not drinking, Jonathan,” she said in her lovely French tones. “Are you afraid that I might take advantage?”
“I accept your challenge,” he said. Against his better judgment, he downed half the glass as she grinned and did the same. She could have finished half the bottle and it wouldn’t have had any effect. She’d popped a powerful amphetamine just before dinner precisely for that reason.
“So, where are you flying off to, after me?” she asked as she sat back and stretched her spine, and he was all but forced to scan her cleavage. “And when are you coming back?”
“I’m not sure yet, Geneviève.” For this evening, he’d chosen his airline executive cover, because it would give him an excuse to return to Paris in the near future. Was he already falling for this woman? He’d barely spent two hours with her, yet she was totally magnetic, almost intoxicating. Her eyes burned into his and those lips looked like they could swallow him whole.
She pouted. “You are going to be one of those men who . . . How do you say? Loves them and leaves them, no?”
“No. And as I recall, you made it very clear that this would be dinner and nothing more.”
She tilted her head and ran one glossy fingernail slowly down her dress, between her breasts.
“Well, since it appears to be late, and I must be at the museum in the morning . . . perhaps you should escort me home.”
Raines called for the check.
She killed him in an alleyway just off the River Seine.
They had walked in the dark, from the café on Rue de Rivoli, past the Carousel Gardens down to the water, then northwest astride the glistening waves on Quai François Mitterrand.
They chatted quietly and didn’t touch until they reached the Pont Royal bridge, and she took his hand and smiled at him, with her fingernails flirtatiously tickling his inner palm, as if already showing him how she wanted to be touched.
They crossed the bridge. It began to drizzle. She said she was cold. He took off his jacket, snuggled it over her bare shoulders, and pulled her close as they walked and her heels clicked on the pavement stones. On the other side of the river, they turned northwest again along Quai Anatole France, and the rain picked up and the few other people who were out and about quickly popped open umbrellas or chased after cabs.
Soon they were all alone, clipping along and laughing past the Caisse des Dépôts federal bank buildings, which were silent so late at night, and between that and the Musée d’Orsay, Lila Kalidi stopped him at the entrance to a slim alleyway and said, “I like being wet. Come kiss me.”
She pulled him into the darkness. They both were soaked when she pushed him up against the heavy stone walls of the bank and kissed him deeply, with all of her tongue, and one stiletto heel cocked up behind her in the air.
He gripped her slim waist and swirled her tongue with his own, thinking how impossibly lucky he’d gotten.
She kneed him straight up into his groin.
Even with the shock of it thundering up to his head, Raines tried to fight. His arms came up and he slashed knife-hand strikes at her head, but she blocked both blows with her forearms and, driving her left hand up from below, palm-struck his jaw, smashing his skull against stone. Then her fingernails dug into his eye sockets as she gripped him there, reached under her skirt for a dirk that was strapped hilt-down on her thigh, and drove it up under his chin and into his brain.
“Merde,” she cursed as she yanked the blade out and a thin spray of blood spurted onto her dress. His body slid to the ground, and she kicked him once to make sure he was gone. She planted her heels on both sides of his head, bent over, sliced off his left ear with her knife, and let the rain wash it clean in her open palm before stuffing it into her purse. His jacket had fallen off her shoulders, and she picked it up, pulled out his cell phone, tossed the soaked blazer over his head, and walked off.
She was two blocks away when his cell phone rang. She answered it and a voice said, “Code in.”
She smiled. “I don’t know your code,” she said. “And the man who knew it is dead.”
“Who the hell is this?” said the frantic male voice on the other end.
She ignored the question.
“Your Program is just like a cat,” she said. “But now you have only eight lives left.”
Chapter 5
Washington, D.C.
By the time Eric Steele showed up at the White House, all the cherry blossoms were dead and clogging the Potomac River like the bloody scales of slaughtered fish. Steele wasn’t much for signs or superstitions, but there was no way to avoid the visual metaphor of thousands of Japanese trees, their gnarled black limbs clawing at the sky, their lifeless flowers piled on the ground.
Spring was over, the summer was imminent, and Washington summers were always a bitch.
Standard Operating Procedure in the Program held that after any direct-action mission, Alphas were given ten days’ leave. Steele had lasted three days, nursing a few of his Aleppo bruises, fending off fussiness from his mother, and consulting a contractor about resurrecting his burned-down house. He was supposed to recharge his mental batteries and get some decent sleep, but he kept waking up at dawn in his mother’s spare bedroom and reaching for his 1911 under his pillow. That classic Colt Government handgun was the only legacy he’d inherited from his father, and just touching the weathered frame triggered desperate thoughts about chucking it all and going off to find out what had happened to him. There was scant hope of going back to sleep after that.
On the third morning he heard in his head the voice of Demo, his departed keeper. You can sleep when you’re dead, mano.
He’d packed it in and headed back to HQ.
His new 1967 GTO was a throaty beast, and already he’d felt better, cruising south on I-95 and cranking some old AC/DC tunes like “Hells Bells.” His replacement ride was much like the one that had suffered a machine-gun fate, except he’d chosen an emerald-green skin so it wouldn’t look too thuggy, and avoided the tinted windows because they often piqued the interest of state highway cops. His encrypted cell on the seat beside him was quiet. Cutlass Main had him slated as TDY and the thing wouldn’t buzz unless the world was on fire. There were, after all, eight other Alphas on round-the-clock duty.
He parked in a municipal lot on K Street. No one in the Program used government lots, because the intelligence division of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had scores of spooks throughout the capital area whose only task was to slip into those lots, record license plate numbers, then hack into the Department of Motor Vehicles and find out which cars belonged to whom. The parking receipts made the Program comptroller nuts, which was probably why she looked like Dr. Ruth having a perpetual nervous breakdown. He made sure his pistol was secure in the steel box under his driver’s seat, locked up the car, and walked.
Washington in May was already steamy and oppressive, much like the politicians who inhabited the place. Steele wore a pair of desert boots, Gustin jeans, an open-collar dress shirt, and a navy-blue blazer, with no lapel pins of any kind, not even an American flag. The double-thick jeans seemed a weird choice in the heat, but Alphas chose their wardrobes for tactical reasons—if one of your hands was mangled, you could still cock a pistol slide against the rough denim, one-handed. And his blazer had small lead weights sewn into the bottom hem. If you were using a waist holster, you could flick the jacket open and it would stay behind your hip whi
le you drew your piece. Of course, he never went armed to the White House. It made him feel naked, but those were the regs.
He cut down Sixteenth Street NW through Lafayette Square, where the usual kooks were out banging drums and railing against “The Man.” Black Lives Matter faced off against Blue Lives Matter, and a bunch of college kids in pink pussy hats pumped signs claiming that newly installed President Rockford was a Russian dupe. In truth, Steele harbored no animus toward any of these people. They were all Americans and could say whatever the hell they wanted, and that’s why his country was great. But he did have the fleeting thought, Try doing that in Tehran.
At the northwest corner of the compound fence, he got on the line with all the other press people and tourists and approached the white shack and Entry Control Point where uniformed Secret Service officers eyed everyone like Dobermans. A pretty coed in front of him turned around, looked him over, and smiled.
“Are you taking the tour too?”
“No.” Steele smirked down at her. “I just want to see the bust of Winston Churchill.”
“Who’s that?” She stared at his dreamy green eyes.
“Never mind. You’re too young.”
He passed through the metal detector and showed his CAC card to an officer, who raised an eyebrow, then selected a press pass on a lanyard and gave it to Steele. He was grateful the guy didn’t wink. The tourist group was summoned to the left. Steele turned to the right and headed down the gleaming floor of the West Colonnade toward Cutlass Main, an office that, technically, didn’t exist.
The door was on the right at the end of the colonnade, just before the West Wing suites where the president and his advisors hustled around trying to run the country. It wasn’t much of a door, but Steele knew that its gleaming silver veneer was made of battleship iron. A single close protection officer tasked over from DIA was posted there, but he looked just like the Secret Service guys in their dark suits, specially tailored so they wouldn’t “print” their handguns. He nodded at Steele and stepped aside as Eric tapped his CAC card on the numerical reader, which glowed yellow at the top of its reactive bar, and then above that an orb that looked like a tenement peephole blinked, and Steele raised his left brow and matched it eye-for-eye. The door buzzed, the pistolero pushed it open, Steele went inside and closed it behind him.
Cutlass Main’s Tactical Operations Center always struck Steele as weirdly magical. From the outside, the White House appeared to be large and spacious with endless great rooms and conference centers, but those who worked there knew that aside from the president’s Oval and attached offices, most of the working areas were cramped, albeit impeccably designed. Yet somehow, Cutlass Main’s TOC seemed to occupy a space that looked much larger than architecturally possible. It couldn’t, of course, compare to the TOCs at CIA or Central Command, but it had a dozen workstations with superquick, multiterabyte computers, a huge flat screen that occupied the entire northern wall, and four additional workspaces called isolation cells, or “tanks,” defended by further steel doors like the one he’d just walked through. He could never quite figure out how the whole thing was shoehorned inside the White House. He had a feeling that if the wrong person somehow opened the main door after midnight, he’d find nothing but a janitor’s closet.
He stood just inside the main entrance and perused the place for a minute. The usual bustle of tracking worldwide bad actors was in play, but something else was going on as well. There were urgent whispers among analysts. Today’s atmosphere reminded him of videos he’d seen of NASA mission control right after the space shuttle had burned up on reentry. He glanced at one of the side tanks that secured a secondary operation called Keyhole, where Meg worked these days on a DARPA project that involved virtual reality target analysis. He hadn’t seen her yet since Aleppo, and his thighs tingled at the thought of her walking through that door, in which case they’d both have to be cool. PDAs, or Public Displays of Affection, were totally verboten at Cutlass Main.
“Stalker Seven, what the heck are you doing here?”
Steele looked down to see Ralph Persko, one of the Program’s top geeks, staring up at him as if Steele were an atheist crashing a church. Persko was twenty-eight and chubby, with wild, curly brown hair, Elvis Costello glasses, and taco drips on his yellow golf shirt.
“First of all, Ralphy, I told you before. Don’t use my handle unless it’s on secure comms.”
Persko slapped himself on the head. “Oh right, I forgot.”
“You’re going to slip one day when we’re out at Starbucks, and every Russian spook in the joint’s going to whip out a notepad.”
“Sorry, Eric. But aren’t you still on leave?”
“I got lonely. What’s going on down here? Somebody lose a nuke?”
“Your keeper didn’t tell you?”
Steele turned and glared down at Persko, who seemed to shrivel one full suit size.
“Oh God, I’m sorry.” Persko groaned. “I forgot about Demo. It’s just not real yet, ya know? To any of us. . . .”
“It’s okay, Ralphy.” Steele patted him on the shoulder. “But it’s still too damn real for me.”
Persko raised his palms apologetically. “I just can’t brief you is all.”
“I know. Go do some geek stuff and I’ll catch you later.”
Persko nodded and headed back to his workstation, just as the Keyhole door opened and Meg stepped out into the TOC. She was wearing a short black skirt, nylons, dark flats, and a prim, blue tucked-in blouse, but none of that could hide her athletic figure or the sheen of her tight black ponytail and stunning eyes. She stopped short when she saw Steele and he saw her. Their gazes locked across the large space, then she took a deep breath, looked at the ceiling, and silently thanked heaven. But that was all. She walked to a workstation and dropped a Special Access Program file on someone’s desk, and when she turned to walk back to Keyhole she nearly tripped over a snaking cable on the floor. That’s when Steele noticed there were three technicians in white Tyvek coveralls crawling around, unplugging computers and wrapping them up for a move. Then he spotted another one with a handcart piled with padlocked steel file boxes.
What the hell? Are we being evicted? Did somebody forget to pay the rent?
“Steele, you know you’re not getting double overtime for showing up here when you’re TDY, right?”
Steele turned and saw Mike Pitts, stalking his way toward him from his overwatch desk in the middle of the floor. Pitts was the Program’s director of operations and had been so for more than a decade, starting a year after he’d lost a leg in Fallujah in 2006. A former infantry major, he wore his high-and-tight blond hair a little longer now for reasons of cover, but he couldn’t hide the shrapnel scar that punctuated his grin, or the prosthetic left leg that ended in an incongruous brown loafer. Whenever he worked too much, which was often, he’d use a Fred Astaire cane. Steele liked Pitts a lot and he matched his smile.
“Morning, Mike. I realized after my post-Aleppo brief that I forgot to turn in some receipts.”
“Really? Did you buy anything work related in Syria?”
“I had lunch on the objective,” Steele quipped. “Nothing fancy, though. Hummus and a salad.”
Pitts jerked a thumb toward one of the other four doors. “Well, you can go see Mrs. Darnstein, if you don’t mind losing your head.” He meant the harried Program comptroller. “She’s got the sense of humor of a cadaver.”
“I think I’ll pass and just eat it. And what’s going on here, sir? Are we expanding, contracting, or just getting our asses kicked out?”
“The latter, I’m afraid. Lansky’s decided to move us.”
Pitts meant the president’s chief of staff, Ted Lansky, who’d worked for President Rockford when Rockford was still VP, and he had retained that title since President Cole had been forced to withdraw because of his terminal cancer and Rockford had assumed the office. Lansky was a former director of clandestine services at CIA, and while pleasant enough, he expected all
of his directives to be obeyed without question.
“Did we screw something up?” Steele asked.
Pitts pulled a red felt-tip marker from his pocket, twirled it in his fingers, and jammed the end in his teeth like a cigar. He had a large whiteboard in his battle captain office on which he planned and tracked operations using multicolored markers, because unlike computers, whiteboards couldn’t be hacked.
“Negative, at least as far as I’m concerned,” Pitts said. “But Lansky feels that our profile’s getting just a bit too large.”
“Nobody ever complained before.” Steele frowned. “And we’ve been here since the Nuremberg trials.”
“Nineteen forty-six was a long, long time ago, Eric. The good news is, we’re getting larger digs over on Q Street, not far from Dupont Circle.”
“I hate moving,” Steele said and felt his shoulders slump. But it was more than that. Being headquartered at the White House had always made him feel somewhat special, even though he spent most of his time in the field. And the Program’s missions were always tasked directly by the president. Now there would be layers in between, which was never a good thing.
“I’m afraid there’s another piece of bad news,” Pitts said as he jabbed his marker at the head-down, whispering analysts. “We lost an Alpha yesterday.”
Steele had been standing there with his hands in his jeans pockets, but now he slipped them out reflexively and his fingers curled into fists.
“Who was it?”
“Raines.”
“Stalker Six?”
“Affirmative. In Paris.”
Steele suddenly saw Raines laughing hysterically, when they’d both gotten lost together during assessment and selection at Fort Bragg while trying to sprint through a land nav course, at night, in the middle of a driving rainstorm. Jonathan Raines was the classiest of all the Alphas—highly educated, dressed like a GQ model, spoke multiple languages. But he was also a stone-cold hand-to-hand killer. He wouldn’t have gone down easy.
