by Sean Parnell
“Okay, sport.” She rubbed her hands together. “What are we making?”
“It’s already done, Mom.” Steele walked over to his BlueStar forty-eight-inch range, an appliance made in Reading, Pennsylvania, because he tried hard not to buy anything manufactured in China. He donned a quilted red oven glove and pulled open the door. “Couple of sirloins, baked potatoes, sautéed asparagus. Good?”
“Excellent! I knew I smelled something good, but didn’t want to presume.”
“Choose your wine, Madame,” Steele said as he plated the food and delivered it to the granite strip.
His mom walked over to a slim wooden wine rack beside the Sub-Zero refrigerator and twisted some bottles to inspect the labels.
“What’s Egri Bikavér?”
“It’s Hungarian, very robust. You’ll like it.”
“Is that the name of the winery?”
“No. It means ‘bull’s blood.’”
“Matches the day I had. That client was so stubborn I almost had to kill him to get him to sign.”
She found a corkscrew in a drawer, sliced the wine bottle collar, dragged the cork out, waved the bottle through the air rather than letting it settle to breathe, and poured two hefty glasses. They sat down on stools across from each other, clinked to “cheers,” sipped the wine, and tucked into the food.
“You’re growing a beard,” Susan said as she chewed demurely and looked at her son. “I like it, but I haven’t seen you do that since Afghanistan, and only then in pictures.”
“Well, somebody suggested it’d make me look a little less . . . aggressive,” Steele lied.
“Liar. Some girl likes you scruffy. Is it Meg?”
Steele stiffened internally, but showed nothing on his face and kept on chewing.
“Nope.”
“I don’t know, son.” Susan sipped her wine and inspected his eyes. “A beard, a Toyota hybrid. It’s all very Woodstock. Are you planning on opening a weed shop?”
Steele grinned at that but kept on chewing his food. At least his mother had quickly gotten away from the subject of Meg Harden.
“So, speaking of Meg Harden,” she said. “Have you seen her at all lately?”
Steele swallowed a piece of meat, drank a good slug of the Egri, and said, “Well, actually . . .”
And then he was right back there on Meg’s balcony in Falls Church, where they’d stood together just a few days before. They were looking south toward the glistening waters and greenery of Lake Barcroft, though neither of them was seeing the scenery, and Steele was aware that off to his left and eastward, the white spindle of the Washington Monument jabbed at his temple as if to say, Keep in mind who you are.
“I seriously considered ending it, Eric,” Meg had said.
He knew she didn’t mean her life. She meant the baby. He looked over at her perfect profile, her sleek small nose and crystal-blue eyes, and that mink-black hair that often swept his face when they were breathing each other’s breaths. She was wearing one of his old dress shirts, the one with the blue pinstripes, sleeves rolled up—he wondered for a moment if she’d done that on purpose—and a pair of black leggings and sandals. Her body was still as athletic as ever, with the only evidence of her pregnancy a large bump, as if she’d tucked a soccer ball under the shirt.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said.
“We’re not married, Eric. It wasn’t a mutual decision. It was mine.”
She was right. He’d had his chance to change all that and had chosen the mission first.
“We could change all that,” he said.
Meg turned her face and smiled, but in a way that someone regards an alcoholic when he promises, for the twentieth time, to quit. She slid her small hand along the balcony’s balustrade and covered his larger one, but she didn’t squeeze.
“He’s going to be our son,” she said, “but we’re not going to be a family. I’ve been working as a consultant for Homeland Security, right from here, and it’s going to stay that way. No more crazy adventures for Meg. And you’ve got to do what you do. So, he might know you as someone who cares about him, if you want, but no more than that. I’m not going to be one of those special operations widows who gets a house and a mortgage from Tunnels to Towers.”
He couldn’t really speak after that. It all stuck in his throat. The Program had just come off life support. He was back in the game, and he wasn’t going to pretend he’d quit if he didn’t mean it, or want it. So instead he reached out, pulled her close, kissed her hair and held her while they gazed at the sunlight fading away.
“I’m going to see the Program JAG,” he said quietly. “Have the beneficiaries changed on my will.”
“Don’t die for us,” Meg whispered. “Live, if you can. So he can meet you, and you can meet him. . . .”
Steele returned to the moment. His mother had put her fork down and was staring at him. Then he told her the story, and everything that had been said. Susan listened, then pushed her plate away, leaned back, and focused on her wine instead. She turned the balloon glass and looked at the swirling bull’s blood.
“I spent an awful lot of years blaming your father for lots of things, Eric,” she said. “But I knew who he was when I married him, and I knew what might happen, and I did it anyway. Love has no logic. Love has no cure. I was just like hundreds of other wives, of fighter pilots, spies, and SEALs. And now, may God forgive us, there are so many women in combat, and their husbands and kids are just like me, and you.” She smiled, but it didn’t touch her eyes. “Remind me what that postcard said.”
“It had palm trees on it,” Steele said quietly. “He wrote on the back. ‘Wish you were here. I love you. I hope someday that you will understand. HS.’”
Susan Steele nodded. “If that’s all that you ever get from your father, it will have to be enough. I’ve moved on, and you should too.”
He saw that her eyes were glistening, and knew that none of that was possible, or true. She reached across the granite and touched his hand.
“Don’t marry Meg, Eric,” she said. “But don’t be like Hank, either. Be a father to your son, and I’ll be his grandma too.”
Steele’s mother left not long after that. They pretended to enjoy a dessert of coffee ice cream, walnuts, and chocolate syrup, but the clouds of the past and the present hung low in the house, and at last she grinned and teased him some more about his car, and hugged him and left.
He locked everything up, set the sensors and alarms, went down from the kitchen interior stairwell to the garage, and looked at his gleaming GTO. But he didn’t stay long because it made him feel like Batman after having his wings clipped, so he switched off the light and went back upstairs to his bedroom suite and the bathroom.
He looked at himself in the mirror, at his burgeoning scruffy beard, and he opened the medicine cabinet, removed the new box of tinted contact lenses, and worked them into his eyeballs. His jade-green eyes were gone, obscured by mud brown. He reached for the carpet cutter he’d bought at Home Depot, then decided against it and put it back.
He leaned across the sink, closer to the mirror, and with his left fingers he stretched the flesh of his left cheek. Then he pulled a Benchmade folding blade from his jeans pocket, and flicked it open.
“If you’re gonna have a knife scar,” he said to himself. “Use a fucking knife.”
Chapter 24
No Acknowledged Location
EYES ONLY
SAP (Alphas/Support/Off Stations - FLASH)
From: SAWTOOTH MAIN
To: All CONUS PAX
Subj: Muster
Source: Staff Ops/Duty Officer
Confidence: High
All CONUS PAX, inc ALPHAS, KEEPERS, SUPPORT, TECH, SEC PERS, ARMORERS, OTC INSTRUCTORS, AIR:
TOTAL RECALL
Emphasis, No Exceptions.
STATUS: DEFCON Amber.
Operational window: Immediate Execute
Chapter 25
Q Street, Washington, D.C.
&
nbsp; Steele barreled through the double glass doors on the ground floor of Sawtooth Main, and already he wasn’t happy.
At two o’clock in the morning, the Program-encrypted app had flashed and buzzed on his government iPhone clone, right in the middle of a dream about Meg when things were still hot and heavy. He’d jumped out of bed, only to discover that his self-inflicted cheek wound had bled right through the bandage and all over his brand-new MyPillow, so that went into the garbage. From there he’d hopped in a cold shower, toweled off, replaced the bloody bandage with two butterflies and a long wide Band-Aid, gotten dressed and armed, grabbed a travel mug of coffee and a stale croissant, and had driven all night down to D.C. in that fugly car.
In the Program’s underground parking lot, the formerly officious uniformed attendant with the Bermuda accent, Charles—who kept a MAC-10 submachine gun in his cash drawer—had nearly remarked on Steele’s amusing mode of conveyance but saw his expression and thought better of it. Steele, wearing Redwing oxfords, jeans, a white dress shirt, dark blue blazer, and Oakley sunglasses, stomped up the ramp to the sidewalk, then stopped short and frowned at the new nameplate above the building’s doors. graceland import exports had been replaced by schmidt & hearthstone, llc.
Seriously? What are we, a freakin’ furniture store now?
Inside the lobby, the white leather sofas had been subsumed by a muddy Naugahyde set from Price Busters, and on the north wall the Robert Salmon painting of a merchant schooner had surrendered to a cheap canvas print of a Hunter Wood. But at least the big desk was still there, and to Steele’s surprise, so was Merry. The comely, blonde, twenty-something girl had apparently found no better employment between Program iterations, and since it was easier to vet someone who’d already been through the clearance ringer, they’d put her back into play again.
“Nice to see you again, Merry,” he said as he walked up to the desk.
“Sir?” She clearly didn’t recognize him with the beard.
“Formerly Max Sands.” His smile was unconvincing, and the Band-Aid array didn’t help.
“Oh.” She pointed at the tripod with the electronic eyeball on top. “Retina scan, please.”
He took off his Oakleys and bent his left eye to the Cyclops, but Merry’s computer made a sound like a belching frog, and he remembered he still had his brown contacts in. “Dammit,” he muttered as he peeled his eyelid back with his right hand, reached into his eyeball with his left digit and thumb, and Merry flinched as he plucked the contact out and the reader made the appropriate ding. But then she was staring at a bearded man who had one luminous green eye, one mud brown, a freshly bandaged face wound, and looked half like the former Stalker Seven and half like something from The Terminator.
“Um, I think I should call someone—” she started to say.
“Merry, I’m low on caffeine, I just drove four hours in a shitty car, and I’m having some PTS issues today.”
“I’m sorry, but you know, it’s standard procedure.”
He started to lean across the counter. She gulped and pressed a button under her desk, and across the lobby, the elevator door opened.
“Thank you,” Steele said. “Wise choice.”
He emerged on the second floor onto Sawtooth Main and a hive of buzzing activity. Everything was blinding white, but the main screen across the floor was up and running, with all eight of its modules occupied by an interactive map of central Asia. Ralphy, Frankie, and four other newly recruited geeks were all at their stations at two banks of computers on the left quadrant, while a mirror quadrant on the right was occupied by four intel analysts and two comms people. They were all wearing casual civilian clothes, headsets that made them look like customer support at a credit card call center, and each station had a small flagpole and tags marked with things like psyops, cover, crypto, and persec, so you wouldn’t have to always ask who was who. Penny Amdursky had her own station with a tag that said simply s, and Miles Turner’s security goons—all former special operators—watched the proceedings from four corners, wearing blazers concealing Glock 19s and hammerless backup .38s. Steele saw Mrs. Darnstein, wearing a frumpy flowered dress, her white hair all crazy and a pair of big glasses hanging from a beaded chain, bending over Ralphy’s station and wagging a finger at him. “Never order from Staples, Mr. Persko. We can get these things much cheaper through the GSA.”
“What the hell happened to you now, kid?”
Steele turned to Dalton Goodhill, who’d emerged from the kitchen carrying two mugs of coffee and handed him one. He was wearing his motorcycle jacket, open in front, with his short shotgun gleaming under his armpit.
“I was ordered to foil FR.” Steele took his coffee and sipped.
“You think a scar and a beard’s gonna do it?” Goodhill sneered. “You should have let Kalidi cut off your ear. And what’s with the cat’s eyes?”
“Don’t start.”
“Okay, but your modeling career’s in the shitter. So what did Garland say?”
“POTUS got another call from Casino. Told us to stand by for a possible extract, but there was nothing actionable yet.”
“Well, there sure as hell is now.”
A recessed speaker crackled from somewhere and Ted Lansky’s voice boomed, “SCIF. Now.”
Steele and Goodhill walked over to the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, followed closely by Ralphy, who hustled with a laptop across the floor. The seal on the pneumatic door hissed, Betsy Roth pulled it open from the inside, and the three men walked in to find more blinding decor. The long white marble conference table slab was surrounded by matching leather task chairs, and at the far end sat Ted Lansky at the “helm,” looking like he’d been up all night, which was probably true. His tie was flipped over one shoulder, his sleeves were rolled up, and his dry pipe was stuck in his teeth, which he’d never bothered to whiten even after thirty years of tobacco, coffee, and wine.
Steele quickly assessed the participants. Penny Amdursky was seated on the far-left side of the table near Lansky, which meant that whatever was coming would require gear. Next to her was Miles Turner, which revealed nothing, because security was always part of the game. Next to Turner was Allie Whirly, which meant someone would be flying somewhere—Steele’s stinging eyes stopped right there for a second because Allie was wearing an unzipped A-2 flight jacket that looked like a butter soft Bloomingdale’s version, and underneath that, a very snug, horizontally striped, blue and white top. Past her was Shane Wiley, a keeper without a trained Alpha as yet, so that was curious. Betsy was cruising the room, dropping Eyes Only briefing packets with diagonal red tape seals in front of each chair.
“Looks like an aircraft carrier for UFOs,” Goodhill said about the white marble table slab.
“Shut up and sit, Blade,” Lansky said as he perused a thick briefing book.
“Top of the morning to you too, sir,” Goodhill muttered.
Betsy Roth shut the door, punched a keypad lock, a bolt chunked home, and the shades rolled down over the double-paned glass walls, obscuring the conference room from the rest of the TOC floor. Steele, Goodhill, and Persko took their seats across from their comrades.
“You three open your packets,” Lansky said. He was still reading something and didn’t look up. “You’ve all got new covers and legends.”
Ralphy’s eyes went wide and he whispered to Steele, “I’ve never had a cover. Why do I need a cover? I like my name.”
Steele found Betsy leaning over his left shoulder.
“Yours is Matthew Schneider,” she said. She was wearing some kind of heady perfume.
“Schneider?” Steele pulled his chin back. “What the hell kind of name is that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Betsy whispered in his ear. “I’d screw you even if it was Gooseberry.” She looked up to see Allie glaring at her across the table, blew her a kiss, and said, “And you too, flygirl. I’m ecumenical.”
“Schneider,” Goodhill snickered.
“Laugh it up, Blade
,” Betsy said to him. “Yours is Samuel Katz.”
“All right, people,” Lansky said as he closed his briefing book. “Listen up.” He clicked a smart tablet in front of him and its mirror image appeared on a large flat screen behind his head. It was an interactive map of north-central China and the Mongolian border, and wherever he tapped on his tablet a glowing red marker appeared on the map. “Approximately two weeks back, we think a CCP level four or five biowarfare research lab was destroyed right here. Persko spotted it first, NRO confirmed, then a KH-11 Keyhole was tasked. Found a smoking hole in a mountaintop. All the alphabets thought it was an accident.” He meant the various intelligence agencies around the Beltway. He looked up at his audience. “With me so far?”
They all made affirmative noises. Allie Whirly touched Steele’s shoe under the table with her boot, pointed at his cheek, and cocked her head. He mimed a shaving mishap and focused back on Lansky.
“Right after that,” the director went on, “an alleged Chinese informant reached out to the White House, claiming that the CCP is about to draw us into a war.”
“Oh no,” Penny Amdursky whispered.
“Don’t get your panties in a wad yet, S,” Lansky said. “There’s more.”
And the political correctness award goes to . . . not you, Steele warned Lansky in his head.
“A few days ago, this source made contact again and claimed to be ready to share concrete intel on his claim, but only if we’d pick him up . . . here.” Lansky tapped his tablet again, and the map on the wall switched to a view of a small atoll off of Miyako-jima, two hundred kilometers east of Taiwan. “However, last night, SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One deployed from a sub out there, reconned the atoll, and found NAFT.”
