by Sean Parnell
She had curly red hair.
Just hold it together, Steele demanded of himself. Special Forces soldiers don’t cry.
Most of the funeral itself was a blur for Steele. They carried Collins Austin through the glass doors, past the row of federal flags, and down the pale gray staircase into a gloomy corridor where signs pointed to the Bethlehem Chapel to the left, and to the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea to the right. The Bethlehem Chapel was bright, airy, spacious, and even had its own pair of stained glass windows behind the podium, which was the lowest apex of the cathedral above, much like windows beneath a sailing ship’s bowsprit. On the other hand, the St. Joseph chapel was set in the very middle of the limestone acreage, directly under the cathedral’s intersecting “floor cross” above, but another whole story underground. It had no windows, scant light, one dreary mural behind the small podium, and a couple of dozen scratched old pew chairs. Wide slate staircases led down to its sunken floor from both side corridors, giving it all the architectural grace of a slop sink. It smelled of wet stone and felt like a tomb.
Only about twenty Program personnel were there. You couldn’t clear out Cutlass II for a funeral, and besides, they were all back there going crazy and recalling everyone in from the field. Jonathan Raines’s murder hadn’t raised undue alarm bells, and even the attempt on Steele in Paris hadn’t set anyone’s hair on fire. But the killing of Austin, with a matching MO to Raines’s death, had cinched it.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.” It was an old Ian Fleming quote that Steele often remembered, but hell, he’d known it from the moment he’d heard about Raines. Not only was there some murdering banshee on the loose out there, but someone was also helping her from the inside, and she might even have support from one or more of the United States’ arch enemies.
Steele hadn’t taken a seat in a pew but was standing off to one side of the chapel on the third row of one set of wide-slab stairs. Half of him was listening to the meanderings of an Anglican priest who was standing behind Collins’s coffin and talking about her as if they’d been buddies on the same high school swim team, while the other half of his brain was slinging out accusatory pinballs at every potential traitor in the room—and just as quickly decrying the suspicions.
Wylie?
Oh, for Christ’s sake, it couldn’t be Shane Wylie. The guy looks like he’s about to collapse from grief. If he was responsible in any way for Collins’s death he would have offed himself already.
Goodhill?
He’s a hard-assed sonuvabitch, but he’s been battling bad guys for this country since the freakin’ Ice Age. He’s new to the Program. Not likely that he came over to Cutlass to destroy it.
Pitts?
Oh, please. Mike Pitts has given his entire adult life to selfless service, not to mention half a leg. He’s got two kids, Katherine’s pregnant again, and he could easily go into private contracting instead of taking a lousy G-16 salary. Guy’s a pure patriot.
Persko?
Yeah, right. If Ralphy was a traitor he’d be pissing down his pants leg every time he saw me, ’cause he knows what I’d do to him.
Meg?
Don’t even go there. She probably knew about that stiletto that was used on Raines from some other rumor, or maybe from a flash file that came across her desk. She’s the daughter of General “Black Jack” Harden and was raised on the Pledge of Allegiance and apple pie. She’s clean . . . right?
Then he considered that it could easily be someone else, even higher up, like Lansky, or maybe some nameless baby analyst who’d just come over from NSA. On the other hand, his instincts were to protect his friends from the worst of all possible accusations, so maybe he just wasn’t looking at them clearly enough. And instantly, he began suspecting each one of them again, including Meg.
Shit. That’s why the counterintel guys are all paranoid and nuts.
He heard a soft sob and his stomach turned over, and he looked to the right at the first row of pews, where Mrs. Austin was holding a trembling handkerchief to her nose and Meg was holding her hand. That poor old woman from Iowa was probably totally confused, wondering why her gorgeous young daughter, who’d said she was super happy in D.C. working as an import-export salesperson and keeping up with her dance lessons at night, was suddenly dead, and being buried by all these strangers who looked nothing like salesmen or dancers. Two months from now, she’d be getting a letter from the president. How the hell were they going to explain that?
Steele felt Stalker Two, Martin Farro, nudging up beside him. Farro was a big man, a former Ranger and SOCOM operator, with black curly hair, glasses, and shoulders like kettle bells. He was busting out of his suit, and not due to overeating.
“I hate this place,” Farro whispered. “Feels like we were just here for Jonathan.”
“We were, and so do I,” Steele muttered back.
“Why the hell do we have to do these things here?”
“Security?” Steele shrugged. “Control issues?”
“It’s bullshit,” Farro hissed. “The place is depressing.” He jutted his big chin across the chapel to a small bronze plaque mounted on the far wall. “Did you know that Helen Keller is buried here? Right under the floor.”
“Well, she was blind,” Steele said. “So she couldn't see how ugly it was.”
Farro snickered softly and then dropped his voice even lower. “Sorry for you, bro. I know you and Col were close.”
“We’re all close,” Steele said. “Hurts me no more than you.”
“Right.” Farro squeezed Steele’s shoulder and walked away.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. . . .”
The priest was intoning the twenty-third psalm, which to Steele’s relief meant that the thing was almost over. But then he felt a pang of guilt for wanting it to be so. He’d been to so many funerals, of so many people he cared for, had been responsible for, had led in battle or been led by in combat both official and covert. He should have been used to it by now, but he knew he’d never get used to it. Nothing ever actually healed, it all just added one more layer to the scar tissue squeezing his heart.
Collins Austin. A beautiful, talented, fiery, combative, hard-charging, and fearless woman. He’d seen her once on a playground with her college roommate’s young daughters, laughing and playing as if she herself were once again seven years old, and he’d had a flash-forward moment, picturing Collins happily married, raising her own brood of tough, smart girls, a woman with a history she’d never be able to tell them, but somehow they’d know who their mother was.
Now that was gone, forever, and suddenly a line from an old Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, sprang into Steele’s head.
“It’s a helluva thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”
Then he thought he was going to lose it, and quickly decided there was enough muscle down there to carry Collins out, and he turned and walked back out through the catacombs to the rain.
Twenty minutes later, they’d loaded Collins Austin’s coffin into the hearse for her final trip to Arlington. She was one of the only Alphas who’d never served in the U.S. military, so she’d needed special dispensation to be buried at a United States military cemetery, which Mike Pitts was able to easily obtain from Ted Lansky. Once the secret procession crossed over into Virginia, there was going to be a full military honor guard, including a rifle salute and taps, and Pitts would present the folded flag to Mrs. Austin under a terrible brew of tears and rain. Steele desperately wanted to skip it. He couldn’t, but he stalled for a minute with his car keys in his hand as the downpour soaked his hair.
Ralphy Persko waddled over to Steele from where his pallbearer duties were done at the hearse. He was carrying a tartan-patterned umbrella and his big glasses were totally fogged up. Steele looked down at him.
“I cracked it,” Ralphy said.
“English, Ralphy,�
�� Steele said.
Persko looked around to make sure no one else was in earshot.
“The microdot. I cracked the encryption, decoded it.”
Steele seemed to emerge from his gloomy stupor with that bit of news. He scanned Ralphy’s rumpled, rain-stained suit. “You going to give me the readout?”
“It’s short. You’ll remember it.” Then, like a sidewalk magician, Ralphy slipped Steele the challenge coin, which he didn’t need anymore.
“Shoot,” Steele said.
“It had only two items on it. The rest was chaff, just camouflage. It said ‘Cole Knows,’ and after that were two sets of numbers, 62, 46, 3.19 and 106, 14, 7.05.”
Steele looked up at the purple spitting sky.
“Is that the Cole I think it is?” Ralphy asked.
“Yeah, I’m guessing our former president.”
“And those numbers. Lats and longs, right?”
“Right,” Steele said. “Map coordinates.”
“So, what do you think Cole knows, Seven?” Ralphy asked.
“No idea, but I’m going to find out.” Steele looked down again and put a hand on Ralphy’s shoulder. “Thanks, Ralphy. You’re an ace. But do me a favor and text me those coords. I’m foggy today.”
“Yeah, you bet. Aren’t we all.”
Ralphy walked away to find his ride to the cemetery, and suddenly Meg was standing right there in his place. She had no hat or umbrella and her raven hair was soaking wet, but the rain seemed to only enhance the color of her pale blue eyes, and her full lips glistened with tiny droplets of water. She was wearing a dark blue trench coat, the belt tied at her slim waist. She looked up at Steele and their eyes locked, but even though both of them desperately needed to comfort each other in a crushing embrace, the Program frowned upon such PDAs.
Meg searched Steele’s drawn and lined face, the pain behind his eyes, and she reached up and smoothed his suit lapel.
“Eric,” she said, “I really think what you need is some serious downtime.”
“I think what I really need, Meg,” he said, “is some serious kill time.”
Chapter 20
Green Bank Medical Facility, West Virginia
Former president Denton Cole was dying, and everyone around him knew it. But he’d be damned if he was going to admit it.
Nearly a year and a half prior, Cole had suffered a debilitating stroke while delivering his State of the Union address. Six months later, Vice President John Rockford had assumed the presidential mantle, yet for many months thereafter, Denton Cole’s family, administration, staff, and fervent supporters all hoped and prayed he’d recover and be able to reoccupy the Oval Office.
In fact, Cole had recovered from the stroke, and with the best rehabilitation experts summoned over from both the Bethesda Naval Hospital and the National Institutes of Health, the symptoms of his neural debacle were barely noticeable. However, just as he was about to be discharged from the government’s most highly secure medical facility in West Virginia, a routine PET scan had revealed a suspicious shadow on his liver.
He’d never returned to Washington, and the only thing he occupied now was the presidential suite at Green Bank.
Eric Steele drove out there in his GTO on the same afternoon as Collins Austin’s burial at Arlington. His heart was still gripped by that fist of sorrow and fury, but he went. It was a three-hour drive in the rain, during which he kept scanning for a radio station that might lift his mood, but when WJLS, “the Big Dawg” on 99.5, played Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance,” he just gave up and let it ride. The long black ribbon of highway wound through rolling hills and valleys of lush emerald green, all misted in steam from the cool rain striking the warm macadam, and he knew that soon it would all be stunningly tainted by autumn, but his eyes weren’t seeing much beauty.
The hospital didn’t have a lot of patients. Green Bank was reserved for government officials with extremely high security clearances, and that didn’t mean your average senator sitting on an Intelligence Oversight Committee. If a CIA deputy director got into a nasty car crash, that’s where she went. If the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suffered a compound fracture while skiing, he wound up at Green Bank too. On occasion, the head of state of a foreign ally would be secretly whisked over to Green Bank after landing at Dover in the dead of night. Such patients could be released to other facilities, such as Bethesda, once they were in the latter stages of rehab, but not before.
People talk in their sleep, and they definitely chatter while anesthetized. All the medical staff had top secret clearances. Most of the doctors had served tours at Landstuhl in Germany or Craig in Afghanistan. They were all scalpel sharp, and tight-lipped.
It took Steele a little while to get through the hospital’s Entry Control Point. The ECP was the standard, military base, hardened steel structure with bulletproof glass, but in order to approach it he had to first get through a rolling gate in a twenty-foot-high fence, then wind through a maze of orange water-filled barriers. The guards were uniformed federal agents carrying M4s, and they perused his ID carefully, but spent much more time admiring his car.
Then there was another rolling gate, and two Suburbans bracing the long driveway, from which a trio of subgun-hefting Secret Service agents spilled. He told them he was there to see President Cole. They raised their eyebrows, spoke into their cufflink mics, and waved him through, after he assured them that he wasn’t carrying, and they frisked him anyway and had a working dog sniff the GTO.
He parked, signed in at the front desk, left his cell phone in exchange for a numbered ticket, and took the elevator two stories underground.
The long gray hallway leading to Cole’s suite was quiet and empty, except for one more Secret Service agent posted outside the door. Nancy Cole came out to meet Steele in the corridor. The former First Lady was a tall, handsome woman with Texas grace, and she still had that schoolteacher smile that must have encouraged and comforted thousands of kids. But she’d obviously lost some weight, and her gray skirt and cream cable sweater seemed to hang on her frame, and her green eyes were dim and showed the strain. She was carrying a pencil and a book of crossword puzzles. She and Cole often passed the time that way, and they still laughed a lot over their silliest vocabulary guesses.
“How are you, Eric?” She hugged him briefly, then stood back and looked at him.
“Just fine, ma’am.”
“And your mom?”
“She’s fine too, thanks to you and the president getting her into this place after our . . . incident.”
“That’s a cute way to say it.” Mrs. Cole cocked her head and smiled. She knew exactly what Steele did for a living, but the fact that his profession had nearly cost his mother her life didn’t seem to faze the former First Lady. She was used to that sort of thing.
“And how are you doing, Mrs. Cole?”
She shrugged. “We’re bearing up, Eric. I suppose everyone reaches this point in their lives, but I just can’t picture it all without him, you know?”
“I know, ma’am,” Steele said, though he really didn’t, because he hadn’t spent a whole lifetime with someone who he couldn’t imagine living without.
“Would you like to see Denton alone?” she asked.
“If you don’t mind, ma’am.”
“Good.” She grinned. “Gives me a chance to get out of here for a while.” Then she reached up and patted his cheek. “And take all the time you want. He’ll tell you when he’s had enough.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and he watched her march off down the hallway. He knew there was a commissary up on the main floor, but he imagined it would be empty and he felt terribly sorry for her. It was that sort of day.
Steele pushed his way quietly into the room. It wasn’t the usual hospital suite, not even of the kind you’d find on the very top floors of the most expensive facilities in Manhattan. This was expansive, with finely carpeted floors, heavy walnut dressers and French closets, an L-shaped mustard leather
couch and recliner, brocade curtains hiding phony windows, and a hallway leading to a guest bedroom and a bathroom suite that could rival the Waldorf Astoria. The only thing that gave it away as a hospital room was the high-tech Stryker pneumatic bed on which Cole was lying and the headboard of muffled beeping monitors.
But the former president didn’t stir when Steele entered the room. He was lying there wearing a pair of beige chinos, boat shoes, and a light yellow sweater, looking as though he was about to go out for a nice sail on the lake or some putting practice. Except his face was pale, his thick gray hair had grown wispy, and his eyes were completely closed. For a moment, Steele wondered if while he’d been chatting in the hallway with the former First Lady, the president had taken his last breath.
“You can stop standing there like some West Point plebe and have a seat, Eric,” Cole suddenly said. “I’m no longer your commander in chief. I’m just some old fart in a hospital bed.”
Steele smirked. “Roger that, sir,” he said as he walked to the large leather couch and sat. “But you’re still the C in C to me, and always will be.”
“Sentimental softy,” Cole said as he sat straight up like an electrocuted corpse and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His eyes were fully open now, and though ringed with the ravages of the cancer that was consuming his organs, they were still sharp and bright and deeply blue.
“I’ve been called lots of things, sir,” Steele said. “That one’s a first.”
