by Scott Blade
To her, right then, it was no different than her selling information to a newspaper, like the New York Times. That would have been a fireable offense, since they were a competitor to her organization. But it wasn’t illegal.
Lu listened and took it all down.
She asked about payment. Which, normally, she would’ve done upfront, but that’s not how the Chinese government does business. They want to know the information first, know if it’s valuable, and they decide the amount of payment based on that.
They were good for it. She knew that. She had sold them information in the past. Just a way to make extra money. Living in DC was very expensive.
They never used any of her information anyway, she figured.
Lu told her the payment was being sent. Then he paused a long, long beat. It was so long she had to ask if he was still there.
He answered that he was and then he did something out of the ordinary.
He said, “Don’t ever call me again. Good luck to you.”
And he hung up the phone.
She took the cell phone away from her ear and stared at it.
That was odd, she thought.
CHAPTER 11
AN HOUR LATER the local time was fifteen past midnight when the woman got off a plane in Dublin International. She had flown with China Southern from Beijing with a layover in Amsterdam, which pissed her off because it was only two hours and she had never been to Amsterdam. She’d caught her connecting flight with KLM and had just landed without delays.
She walked softly across the linoleum floors in the terminal like it was carpet and she was gliding on bare feet. She stepped lightly because she was light. Her hair was pulled back, a no-nonsense ponytail, and she wore no makeup. Not on a flight. She flew a lot for her occupation and had learned long ago to not wear makeup when she didn’t have to. To the men in her profession, it sounded like a meaningless topic. But among the few women who worked at the high level that she worked, it was a topic of heated debate.
Wear makeup, get noticed for being attractive by men. Don’t wear makeup, get noticed by women for not following the rules of engagement deemed by society norms.
Ultimately, it was a case-by-case kind of decision to make. In this case, she chose not to. Mostly, she chose not to because she had to endure thirteen-hour, fifty-minute flights over eight countries, with commercial carriers. At least she flew first class. That made things a little easier. A little more bearable. At least she could sleep since they had reclining seats with one hundred percent horizontal tilt capabilities.
Which was good. She got to sleep on a portion of the flight. Enough to make her appear to be awake enough when she met with her Irish counterparts.
The only thing about flying first class was that, even though she could skip putting on the makeup, she had to dress the part. She couldn’t wear comfortable, workout clothes. She had to look like she belonged. Official policy from China was to not draw attention to herself needlessly.
She stepped off the plane wearing a dark green pantsuit with a Chinese collar, notched. She believed the fabric was part bamboo and part cotton. It was comfortable. The single-breasted jacket had sleeves hastily pushed up over her elbows. Part of the Western style. She had been told it’d be fashionable in the UK.
She hauled a carry-on behind her. It was a small thing with a long, extended arm for pulling along the ground. Unlike the Air Force steward, her wheels weren’t jerking.
She walked out through the local customs area, where she had shown her passport and been given a stern look over. Partially because she was a foreigner with a Chinese passport. Not a lot of Chinese people in Dublin, she figured.
She stopped at the last point of international land, before she was officially on Irish soil. And she glanced down at the official line in the airport. It was one of those “you’re crossing over into a new country” lines.
A frown came over her face because she had suddenly expected it to be green. But it was a red line. She stepped over it and out into the general population, into Ireland.
After following the signs to arrivals and taxis and passing the baggage claim area, she walked out to the front doors where normally there would be a line of limo and taxi drivers waiting to pick up arriving passengers. But this time of night meant that there was only one guy standing there.
He was one of the other people in Dublin with a Chinese passport.
The only difference between them was that she was not Chinese. Not by birth. Only by citizenship. Although, most people couldn’t tell. She was Asian by birth and from one of China’s neighbors. She looked Chinese enough.
No one in her adopted country ever guessed that she wasn’t. Why should anyone in Ireland be any different.
The man wore an all-black suit. Black jacket. Black pants. That was the first thing she noticed, naturally. The second was that he was armed. He had a Glock 17 holstered in a pancake holster at his right hip. It was well concealed, but not to her. She had been trained. She knew what to look for.
The last thing she noticed was that he held up a sign with her name on it. It was her real name. No need to use aliases. Not here. Not when the name was written in Chinese.
Who the hell here was going to read that?
She stopped, out in front of him. He smiled at her, gave a nod, and spoke Chinese.
They made introductions. They shook hands. And then he told her she was going to her hotel first. Nothing they could do tonight. They’d have to take another flight, first thing in the morning, to a city called Cork.
She had no idea why she was there. Not yet. In Beijing, they hadn’t told her anything. She just knew that she was going to Dublin first because there was a Chinese embassy there. That’s where they would update her.
That’s where she’d learn that her assignment wasn’t a normal assignment. That’s where she’d learn that it was personal.
CHAPTER 12
SUTHERLAND AND TILLER finished their sales pitch with Widow and wrapped everything up. Tiller took the steak, handed it back to Swan, who must’ve thought to return it to the freezer right then, because she got up and walked out of the room.
Sutherland scratched his belly over his uniform shirt, moving his gun hand out of drawing distance for the first time. Widow noticed, but said nothing. Did nothing.
“I want to remind you of a couple things. First, you report to Tiller. Second, we don’t need any collateral damage. Got that?”
Widow nodded.
“Third, remember you were granted top security clearance, once upon a time.”
Widow nodded again. He remembered.
“Remember the paperwork that you had to sign to get that security clearance?”
“That was like a hundred years ago.”
“But do you remember?”
“I remember it. How could I forget? Two lawyers came to see me. Made me sign a book worth of documents.”
“In that book, there are clauses that grant us the right to have you locked up until you turn old and gray if you violate any of the stipulations in that agreement.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It means you can’t tell anyone about what we have told you here or what happens in this investigation.”
Widow said, “That agreement still hold water?
“It does.”
Widow nodded.
“Lastly, don’t get caught. If you get arrested in a foreign country, we can’t help you.”
“Am I going to another country?”
“Of course.”
Tiller said, “Lenny was a Brit. Shot in Ireland. As far as we know the Rainmaker is still there.”
“I won’t get caught.”
“Good,” Sutherland said, and closed the MacBook.
“Tiller will take it from here.”
Widow nodded and watched the general walk to the door, heading off in the opposite direction that Widow had come from. He paused in the doorway, turned and looked back. He was contemplating
whether to leave Widow alone with Tiller. That was obvious.
In the end, he did.
“What now?”
Tiller said, “We get started. Let’s get out of here.”
They left down the same elevator that Widow had come up in. The whole time Widow couldn’t help but have thoughts of doing more damage to Tiller, but he held back.
They left down the same corridor, passed the same guard station and passed under the same security cameras on the way out.
This time, there was a black Escalade parked on the street. Engine running. Two men inside. A driver and another guy in the backseat.
The guy in the backseat got out and waited for Tiller to step up. He opened the front passenger door for him, like a chauffeur. Only the guy looked more like a Secret Service agent. He was not.
He did not open the door for Widow. Widow got in the backseat on his own, one-handed all the way. He could feel the warmth.
Tiller introduced the two guys as part of his team. Widow forgot their names two seconds after learning them. His impression of them was that they were the muscle and nothing else.
After everyone was in and buckled up, the driver took off and the Escalade was on the road. Five minutes later, they were back at the runways. Thirty seconds after that, they were parking at a jet hangar. Not the same one that Widow had come in on.
“What are we doing here?”
Tiller turned around from the front seat and looked at him.
“We’re going to Ireland. You got your passport, right?”
Widow dug in his pocket, pulled it out.
Tiller looked at it, shrugged.
“You won’t need it anyway.”
“I will in a foreign country.”
Tiller said nothing to that. Instead, he swung back around and got out of the Escalade. The muscle got out after him. Widow followed.
He followed them out onto the tarmac. There was a Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey parked around the corner, on the edge of the tarmac, in what used to be grass and was later covered with gravel and then repurposed with filled-in concrete.
The engines were on.
It had dual rotor blades. One on each wing. They were massive and violent and all metal. They whopped and whopped, in fast circles.
The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey was designed to operate like a cargo plane with the mobility of a helicopter. The rotor blades rose and fell accordingly. These were pointed up, above the wings. In the horizontal position, they allowed the plane to hover and ascend and descend like a helicopter.
Widow followed Tiller and the two muscle guys board the plane. They climbed up wobbly portable jet steps and entered.
They fumbled in past the cockpit and into the belly. They stopped just before the cargo area. There were four seats, stacked and plain and all metal. No cushions. They folded out of the wall like the jump seat that Widow had already seen the Air Force steward sit on.
In the cockpit, Widow saw two pilots and an airman, who was set to fly with the plane to watch over the cargo.
In the back of the plane, there were stacked crates and boxes and various packages. There was one military Humvee, locked in place by tire boots, jacked into the floor on a track. The Humvee was empty.
Tiller sat in a jump seat, followed by both muscle guys. They were just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that were so indistinguishable from each other that Hamlet was always confusing them. Only these guys were worse because they were like puppets who followed Tiller around with no original thought between them.
In Hamlet, the Prince ended up leading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, but only because they were supposed to trick him and betray him and lead him to his execution. He outsmarted them.
The thought of tricking them into stepping into their own executions crossed his mind.
Widow looked at the last seat with disdain. He didn’t want to seat next to Tiller and he didn’t want to sit on a metal seat, taking off in an overstuffed metal box. The days that he had to fly barebones were long in his past. He had hoped.
In that instant, Tiller saw him eyeballing the jump seat. He put a hand up and spoke.
“Not here. This is for the crewman.”
Widow looked over at the third airman and back at Tiller.
“You serious?”
“Sorry.”
The airman walked out of the cockpit toward the jump seat.
“Am I supposed to sit on the floor?”
The airman reached out to touch Widow’s arm but decided not to.
He said, “Sir, you can sit in the Humvee.”
Widow looked over at the Humvee.
“Are you serious?”
He looked at Tiller.
“Is that legal?”
Tiller said, “This isn’t LAX, Widow.”
The rotor blades echoed throughout the hull and the fuselage and the nose, loud and brassy. The vibrations and the noise rattled through the metal and through Widow’s legs and his bones and his broken arm and his skull.
He remembered being in Humvees. Hundreds. Maybe thousands of different ones in his past. Not one specific memory came to mind. It was more of a military blur.
Widow shrugged and walked back past more metal and cargo nets and stacked boxes and various Air Force equipment. All of it boxed up or stowed away in containers. And all of it strapped into countless pockets and netting.
The airman was right behind him, offering a hand getting into the Humvee. Widow shoved it off and maneuvered around strapped-down cargo and the hood and two of the big tires and opened the passenger door to the vehicle. He pulled himself up and dumped himself down on the seat.
He decided not to get behind the steering wheel. The passenger seat offered more leg room.
“Buckle your seatbelt.”
Widow wasn’t used to doing that in a Humvee. The Navy didn’t require it. The Army did. The Marines, he was pretty sure, did not. He didn’t know the policy of the Air Force regarding wearing a seatbelt in a Humvee.
He buckled in and nodded at the airman. The guy nodded back and walked away.
At least Widow didn’t have to sit next to Tiller on the flight over the pond. And at least he was in a cushioned chair instead of a crappy jump seat. So, he smiled.
A few moments later, the Osprey was up and off the ground and airborne. About five minutes into the flight, the captain came over the intercom, which was blasted out of back speakers behind the cockpit.
The crew wore crash helmets with headphones in their ears. The speakers were only for non-Air force members’ benefits.
The captain introduced himself, announced the flight time of five hours and some change, and said they were flying to an American Air Force base in the UK called Lakenheath.
Widow had heard of it. Never been there. He wasn’t sure how it worked. Was it a British installation, with an American unit? Did the US Air Force have a continuing contract with the government? Or was it US soil, kept after World War Two?
He wasn’t sure.
The whopping of the rotor blades never got any better. The vibrations rattled around in his head. Eventually, he got used to it.
He had no window view, only military ordinance and the inside of the cargo plane and Tiller’s group, whom he really didn’t want to look at or think about.
Widow stared at the lifeless dash on the Humvee for the first twenty minutes. Never moving his gaze. He did this until he closed his eyes and drifted away into a nightmarish sleep. A memory that he had locked away had been rattled loose by a train crash and a concussion. Like he had had it all squared away in a lockbox in his mind, but now someone had broken the lock.
He thought back to a pair of volcanic eyes he would never forgot.
CHAPTER 13
HER VOLCANIC EYES stared up at him. She held his hand, tight. He could feel her grip through the Navy-issued tactical glove. Which were white and thin and tough and durable. The best material. It protected against harsh weather conditions
and overheating from firing rounds from any assault rifle or submachine gun systems.
Widow had needed them. They did their job. Protection against anything.
Only there were some things in the world that they couldn’t protect him from.
One was those volcanic eyes.
He held her hand.
She was the last one alive. The last man standing. Minus himself.
He stared into those volcanic eyes. He watched the life slip away. She was out in the snow. The mist hung around her like dust settling, only it never did.
The snow around her had been white only seconds before. Now, it had turned to a deep, deep red. The way he imagined a giant vat of ruby red lipstick would look at first in a huge metal container on the factory floor of a lipstick company.
The red was blood. She was bleeding out. Shot. She wasn’t going to make it. No way.
He moved his eyes to her lips. They faded to pink and then to gray.
He stared into those volcanic eyes.
He watched her die.
CHAPTER 14
THE NAVY SPARED no expense when it came to the men who crossed through BUD/S training, or Basic Underwater Demolition/Seal training, and had delivered more than twenty-five missions by that point.
Twenty-five covert missions were in one of Jack Widow’s files, locked away in Virginia, at the Department of the Navy. But another dozen or more were locked away offsite in Quantico. In the secret basement offices of Unit Ten.
His double life.
The border between China and North Korea was primarily composed of two rivers, fused together as one. As well as rugged mountain terrain.
During the warm months, the dangers for defectors came from the North Korean patrolling guards. And if any made it across the rivers to freedom, they had to deal with two truths. The Chinese guards were only better in the fact that they may not shoot them on sight, but it was common to expect being interrogated and pushed for bribes. If none of that worked, the women would be sold into sex slavery. As well, as any boys of a certain age.
