by AJ Tata
“I missed you too, Regina,” Ballantine said, squeezing her back, wincing at the pain in his rib and thigh.
Regina was about five and a half feet tall and a bit heavier than she wanted to be, but not by much. She had a cute face framed by a bob cut of straight black hair that fell to her shoulders. She was wearing a UVM sweatshirt and blue denim pants.
Walking up the steps with a slight limp, he noticed a folded newspaper on the end table next to the rocking chair. He slowly opened the front fold, scanning the headlines and pictures quickly.
“I haven’t had time to read it, yet. Since you cut the satellite off two weeks ago, I haven’t had any news. Thought it’d be nice to know what was going on in the world when you got back.”
“Did you go into town?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, sheepishly.
“And?”
“I was only there a few minutes. I took the old station wagon, bought some groceries, and picked up the newspaper on the way out.”
He grimaced from the pain throbbing along his left clavicle. She naturally responded as if he was angry with her, as he had been a few other times. He had tamed her, in every sense of the word, to be an obedient wife. She had adopted Islam as her religion, or at least his version of the religion, believing she was to minimize her contact with the outer world and that no one else could be trusted. He had taken her to Canada to be married.
Chasteen had presided over the “ceremony,” dressed in ceremonial Muslim garb. They had stayed two nights at the cabin and then flown back to Vermont, where she purchased, in her maiden name, the apple farm from an elderly gentleman who was moving to a nursing home. Of course, the marriage was not legitimate, but she believed it was, and that was all that mattered.
“Please, Jacques, understand,” she whispered, fear shrouding her words. She took a step back and tripped on the door jamb leading from the porch to the front door.
Ballantine looked at her leaning back against the storm door. Another time he might have smashed her through the glass panel simply for violating his order to never go into town without him. But his primary concern was with whether to kill her or not. Had she seen anything? He had purposefully scrambled the satellite code and removed the fuse from the television so that she could not watch any cable or network television.
“Regina, what did I tell you about going into town?”
“To never do it alone. . . . I swear to Allah I will not let it happen again.” She was nearly hysterical.
“And what did you see? Any bad people, any television, any radio?” His eyes were black coals burning through her.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I just needed some groceries and wanted to be able to catch up with you.” Her hands were pressed firmly into the glass, which was fogging around her sweating fingertips.
He grimaced with pain as he raised his right hand and slapped her across the face with the back of his wrist. “Don’t ever do that again. Get inside,” he ordered.
Regina’s head had snapped back, tears spraying against the glass. “Thank you, thank you. I’ll never do it again, I promise,” she cried, opening the door, trembling. She was thankful he had not gone mad.
They dragged the limp, bleeding body of Zachary Garrett into the house. She operated on him, removing a bullet from his left scapula. She stitched him up and gave him a shot of morphine to ease the pain.
“How are his vital signs?” Ballantine asked, still in pain himself.
“He’s weak but hanging in there,” she said. Her voice was calm and focused. She knew what she was doing. She was busy picking up used medical supplies and gauze.
Ballantine secured Garrett tightly to the bed and then handcuffed both his hands and feet.
“He will try to escape if we don’t do this,” he said, looking at Regina.
She didn’t respond but poked an intravenous fluid needle in Zachary Garrett’s arm to attempt to hydrate him.
“What are his chances?” Ballantine asked.
She grabbed a new scalpel and held it in front of him as she pushed Ballantine onto a single bed with a white sheet.
“Fifty-fifty. He’s lost a lot of blood. I can tell this happened several hours ago. At some point, I would like to know what really happened, Jacques.” The gleaming scalpel in her hand perhaps had given her some confidence to speak her mind to the man that she believed to be her husband.
She administered some anesthesia and began to carve away at Ballantine. The process took nearly an hour, but she finally pried the bullet from his left clavicle. He had nearly passed out from the pain, but the morphine sustained him. He lay back on the white sheets, now stained with blood, his arm laid atop his chest in a desert-sand-colored sling. His head hit the pillow, and his mind quickly spiraled toward sleep, trusting completely that Regina would clean up the mess and obediently go about her business.
As he drifted away, his last conscious thoughts were that the plan would be okay. He had survived and would live to fight another day. Images of Zachary Garrett blowing Henri’s face to pieces briefly replayed in his mind, causing a weak adrenaline surge that was suppressed by the sheer exhaustion of the last forty-eight hours.
He was reassured by the simplicity of his new plan.
He was going to kill Matt Garrett and let Zachary Garrett watch.
Chapter 36
The distant ring of the phone clawed at the back of his mind like a dredge raking across the sand. It was too soon to wake up, his mind was telling him. He attempted to move in one direction, then another, causing pain to rocket unimpeded through his body as if through fiber optic lines.
He glanced at the alarm clock, not believing that he had slept for ten hours, his body making a very convincing case otherwise. His left arm and shoulder were completely immobilized, causing him to lose balance as he sat up.
He picked up the cell phone and clumsily pushed the encryption button.
“Yes?”
“We have a problem.”
“We? Thought you went solo, Wood? Didn’t we just talk?” Ballantine coughed, still not fully alert.
“I know you’re drugged, but that wasn’t me you talked to. Anyway, someone is alive who we both thought was dead. His presence complicates matters extensively. I want you to . . .”—the voice searched for a word—“ . . . handle the problem rather quickly.”
“I know about the problem. I will handle it while we execute the rest of the mission,” Ballantine responded, more clearly this time.
He was confused though, certain that only hours ago he had communicated with Ronnie Wood, his contact. There was one phone number he called. The encryption technology masked the voice sufficiently to give him pause. Was he talking to the same person? He had received this call, though. He checked his cell phone display window: Private Number. Ballantine scratched his beard, his mind still swooning from the surgery and Regina’s drugs.
“Operations may be in jeopardy if we don’t act now. This individual may know, or worse yet, remember something from his past that very quickly could get in our way.”
Ballantine decided to press ahead despite his curiosity. “Why didn’t you know he was alive? You have access to everything.”
“I have less access than you might imagine, especially from my new location. Even so, the special operations files are sometimes so secretive one section doesn’t know what the other is doing. Never in my wildest dreams did I envision this possibility,” said the man who called himself Ronnie Wood.
“It is your job to think of such things. It is my job to execute,” Ballantine said. What he was really thinking was that Wood did not sound too believable.
Ballantine understood that his acquaintance on the phone already knew that he had been shot. He figured the phone call was as much to gauge his status as it was to give him the information about Zachary Garrett.
“We need to fix the problem in the next forty-eight hours,” Wood said, trying to focus Ballantine.
“Right. Are we still on track for the
full plan?”
“Full scale. Is there a problem with that?”
“I need to check the equipment,” Ballantine said. “I haven’t had time since I got back.”
“Check the equipment, and get on with it. But you know your base camp is compromised, right?”
“I know,” Ballantine said, expressing some frustration. “Let me ask, have operations so far had the effects you desired?”
“It’s like Orson Welles all over again, only this time the spacemen are real. If anyone ever doubted U.S. intentions to attack your country, they surely will be convinced soon that preemptive war was the best option.”
“This is a dangerous game you are playing, Mr. Wood. My intentions are to do as much damage to your country as possible,” Ballantine said, wheezing at the pain.
“Have at it,” Wood said. “The more aggressive, the more convincing.”
“Let me ask. Were there any survivors from the camp?”
Wood hesitated and said, “Yes, one. Too bad. Quite the looker.”
Ballantine thought about Virginia and all that she had meant to him. He knew what had to be done, and he surprised himself when he felt a flutter in his chest. A symptom of sorrow? He had left those senses for dead a long time ago. Poor Virginia. He was stuck here with moronic Regina, and he wished there was something he could do, some way he could save Virginia. He understood, though, that the voice on the other end of the secure wireless connection would help Virginia meet an untimely death. She knew too much. Way too much.
“Are you there?” Wood asked.
“Yes, I am here,” Ballantine said.
“Good. For a moment I thought you were going soft on me.”
Ballantine lay back on his bed and rode the wave of sadness. “Never. I will take care of your problem.”
“Good. Now, do you have the operative? Rumor has it that you might.”
Ballantine hesitated. “Not at this time.”
“That’s a problem.”
“I know.”
“A big problem if he goes public.”
“I know. If he remembers.” Ballantine had seen the confusion on Garrett’s face. He seemed . . . different. “In which case you will have a problem.”
“Then we’re both screwed,” Wood said.
“I understand. I’m leaving tonight,” Ballantine said.
“You know you missed him,” Wood said.
“Missed who?”
“Matt Garrett. I put him there in your base camp, and he’s still alive. I delivered as you requested.”
“I know . . . I know. But he will be dead soon.”
Ballantine shut off his phone and closed his eyes. Yes, he would keep the fact of his possession of Zachary Garrett from his contact for now, primarily because he now had questions about the real identity of Ronnie Wood.
Or were there two, playing off each other?
He pressed his one free hand against the mattress and then paused. He heard voices.
Standing slowly, he remembered he had tucked his pistol between the mattress and box springs. Pain stymied him on his first attempt to remove the weapon from its ready position. Gritting his teeth, he used his opposite arm to secure the pistol. He moved quietly to his door, which was cracked slightly. Leaning forward, he listened intently. It was a woman’s voice, but not Regina’s.
He peered around the corner and saw an elderly woman holding a small poodle in one arm. What got Ballantine’s attention, though, was the newspaper she held in her opposite hand. He watched as Regina looked to where the woman was pointing at the newspaper. Then he saw Regina hold her hand to her mouth and begin to shudder.
Without hesitation, he walked from his bedroom door into the foyer of the home. “Good afternoon, ladies.”
Ballantine was practically catatonic as he pulled the trigger of his pistol exactly twice. Both women dropped to the floor with bullet wounds to the head, the poodle jumping nervously from its owner’s arms.
Where cell phones and e-mail ruled the day, Ballantine had already risked too much by trusting Regina. Her limited contact with her customers had been her undoing, and he had known it would only be a matter of time before he killed her.
Just to stop the yapping, Ballantine shot the poodle as well.
He walked back into his bedroom and kicked Zachary Garrett in the ribs. “Get up. We’re moving.”
Ballantine led the shackled Garrett to the barn, where they would wait for darkness.
Chapter 37
Fort Sherman, Panama
Frank Lantini stared at his satellite phone as he leaned back against a palm tree on the perimeter of Fort Sherman, Panama. Hundreds of thoughts cycling through his mind, he stuffed the phone in his shirt pocket and looked over the minor waves that lapped almost noiselessly against the sand. He could hear just a slight curl of the 12-inch breaker that rolled with a zipping sound into the shore. The bay beyond Fort Sherman was glassy smooth, the small breakers a function of the tide shifting. His Chris Craft was not far.
Lantini was a slight man who had served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force for many years, transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency as a brigadier general and, then upon retirement, was selected by President Davis as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had “seen combat,” as he referred to it, during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 as a lieutenant colonel. With the plethora of prisoners of war—called detainees in politically correct circles—Lantini was deployed from his soft assignment as a State Department Fellow in Foggy Bottom to Saudi Arabia to assist with the massive interrogation efforts. Not only did the Department of Defense and CIA have a need to question as many prisoners as possible, but they also needed to develop a database of those who had been captured. The general feeling was that the Middle East was going to be the center of attention for quite some time and that cataloguing the enemy prisoners of war might bear fruit as the region continued to unfurl from the rigidity of the Cold War.
Last year he had discreetly allied himself with Taiku Taikishi, a Japanese businessman, Bart Rathburn, a former assistant secretary of defense, and Bob Stone, the current secretary of defense. They had used the moniker Rolling Stones to provide cover to their conversations as they diverted forces and intelligence assets from the Iraq buildup to the Philippines in an erstwhile attempt to derail the single-minded drive toward Iraq. To a man, the Rolling Stones believed the country had veered away too quickly from Afghanistan and, more importantly, Islamic Extremism. Instead of focusing on crushing bin Laden and his thugs, the military found itself straddling the Middle East, without clear focus in either locale or on either enemy.
Lantini watched the harmless waves lap near his boots as he pulled on a Sol.
“Shitty beer,” he said to himself.
His mind spun back again to the video feed piped through the Predator drone that fateful December 2001 day. This time with more clarity. He could see Matt Garrett’s team well camouflaged in their white parkas as they nestled in the snow overlooking a nondescript Pakistani village nearly 15 kilometers from the Afghanistan border. Through Matt’s fiber optic snipercam he could pipe his sight picture up to the drone, which could relay back to whoever could access the downlink. The ultimate 8,000-mile screwdriver.
Lantini, as CIA Director, was the primary recipient of the feed.
And what he had seen was a short Egyptian man with a prayer callous on his forehead just above his spectacles directing a team of AK-47-toting Arabs carrying a wounded six-and-a-half-foot Arab with a gray beard.
He had invited Stone and Rathburn to join him by secure video-teleconference as they all watched the snipercam. Lantini knew that Colonel Jack Rampert from special operations and several in the White House Situation Room were also watching the feed. “Kill TV,” they had called it. The ultimate in reality television.
Garrett’s improper incursion into Pakistan had put the Rolling Stones on the horns of a dilemma. Do they let him kill al Qaeda senior leadership, whom Garrett clearly h
ad in his sights? Or do they allow the transnational henchmen to go free, preserving their strategic flexibility?
“If he kills him,” Stone had said, “we can’t do jack shit about stopping the buildup for Iraq. It’s going to be tough as it is.”
“Takishi has an idea,” Rathburn had said. Meanwhile, Matt Garrett’s voice could be heard, a mere whisper through a small microphone 9,000 miles away, “Request kill chain.”
And so they had, in harried fashion, as Garrett laid his finger on the trigger of his sniper rifle, discussed the pros and cons of letting the operative take the shot.
Ultimately, they had determined that it was best to let al Qaeda live to fight another day so that they, the Rolling Stones, would stand a chance, however slight, of keeping the nation focused on Islamic extremism as opposed to whatever the causus belli in Iraq was purported to be.
“Should’ve taken the shot,” Lantini lamented, sitting in Fort Sherman, Panama, tantamount to a traitor. “Should’ve taken the damn shot!” he added and hurled the beer bottle into the yawning bay.
He grabbed his AK-47 and walked toward the cinderblock hut where Sung had recently held his meeting.
What to do? Lantini mused. What to do?
Interrupting his reverie was a vibration on his satellite phone.
“Wood,” he said.
“Wood,” came the response.
“Yes?”
“You tracking?”
“I am.”
“Good. More to follow.”
“Roger, out.”
Lantini closed his phone and turned back toward the bay. The moon was a bit higher, casting a yellow carpet onto the tranquil water. Lantini thought about Secretary of Defense Bob Stone, Dave Palmer, the national security advisor, Trip Hellerman, the vice president, and Colonel Jack Rampert, who had performed many sensitive missions for him as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command. All good men, he thought, trying to do the right thing.
Now, in hiding, he had to carry out his mission vicariously through cut outs and third parties. Patriot or traitor? That was the most bothersome question. Put it up to a vote, he thought, and it would be 51%-49% one way or the other. Regardless, he had to proceed.
