by Bob Mayer
“Why am I getting a survivor’s benefit? I wasn’t married last I checked.”
“Never married,” Bill said. “Not that you didn’t get offers.”
Even Mrs. Sanchez’s daughter stopped typing for at least two seconds before going to work.
Bill reached out and Mrs. Sanchez handed him the folder, with the appropriate page open. He frowned as he read. “Well. I’m afraid we can’t tell you. Compartmentalization and all that. You don’t have to be married to get a survivor’s benefit,” he added as he flipped the folder shut and handed it back to Mrs. Sanchez. “You know all those forms you fill out before a major deployment? The one for the benefit? You just list the people you want to get a slice of the pie and we get that slice to them.”
That made Moms think about whom she’d listed on her form when she’d in-processed at Area 51.
Mrs. Sanchez slid the folder back into her desk.
“What kind of benefit is it? A gratuity spread out?” Congress, as the first combat casualties were being carted out of planes at Dover after 9/11, had initiated a “death gratuity” one-time payment of $100,000.
How one could put a price on a life was beyond Moms.
“No,” Mrs. Sanchez said.
“When will it run out?” Moms asked.
“It won’t,” she said. “As long as you’re alive, you get it.” She cocked her head. “Your benefactors get the same. Didn’t you read the form?”
Moms shook her head. “I thought it was the same as the army.”
Bill laughed. “Is your unit the same as the army?”
“No.”
“Why would you think your benefits are?” Bill asked.
“It’s the best our government can do for those of you in the field,” Mrs. Sanchez said.
Her daughter spoke up. “Black Ops survivor benefits account for less than point zero-zero-zero-zero-eight of the entire Black Ops budget. Statistically almost insignificant.” She paused, seeing the reaction, then quickly added, “But only in terms of numbers.”
“Is there anything else we can do for you?” Mrs. Sanchez asked, and Moms realized that while Bill wore the uniform and held the title of comptroller, she was the person in charge down here. Then, sliding into a Nada Yada, she wondered if Bill worked here at all and whether he was really the comptroller. Or if, as she went through the various layers of security, they’d found someone who shared a past link with her and brought him in to divert attention from Mrs. Sanchez and what was really going on.
Moms wondered how Nada could stand to get through the day with his paranoia.
Moms stood. “I just wanted to make sure everything was legitimate.”
“You can count on us,” Mrs. Sanchez said.
And at that moment, Moms’s cell phone began to play “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”
She snatched it from her belt and looked at the text message. Then at Mrs. Sanchez. “Can I get to the White House from here?”
* * *
Neeley was doing her best to ignore the family. The steady rumble of the C-130 turboprop engines was a sound she was more than familiar with, but the excited Pakistani voices still bitching were getting on her nerves. They’d been in the air for a day, stopping briefly at Rhein-Main in Germany and were now somewhere over the North Atlantic. The pill had run out hours ago and all Neeley wanted to do was sleep.
Some people were never satisfied that you’d saved their lives.
The woman was now at the forefront, waving her arms and shouting at the interpreter.
“Enough!” Neeley finally yelled.
“You speak Pashto?” the wife asked, stunned. Neeley ranked the question up there with asking whether she was breathing oxygen, since she’d just done it.
“It’s been over a decade we’ve been at war there,” Neeley said. “I could’ve learned Latin and Greek in that time.”
“Why did you not speak to us?” the wife asked.
“All you do is argue. I didn’t have time for it on the ground and I don’t want to listen to it now.”
The words were like water breaking on rock. Ignored. “Where are you taking us?” the wife demanded. “What will happen to us?”
Neeley sighed. She hated dealing with amateurs. “What exactly did you think would happen when you gave up bin Laden’s location?”
The man finally spoke up. “They said we were safe. That they had a, how do you call it, a cover story.”
“Yeah,” Neeley agreed. “They even made movies about it. Better than admitting a pissed-off garbageman gave up the world’s most wanted terrorist simply because the asshole was using proper tradecraft technique and burning all his trash and not paying the local to haul it off. He didn’t think that one through. Should have paid you off not to get his trash.”
“I have a noble profession—” the man began, but Neeley didn’t have the patience for it.
“What did you think you were going to do with twenty-five million in Abbottabad?”
“We have received only a very small portion of it,” the wife argued. “We have been waiting—”
“You bought the nice fridge,” Neeley said. “You didn’t think people would notice? Didn’t you ever see Goodfellas?”
The little girl spoke for the first time. “What is Goodfellas?”
Neeley didn’t have the time or inclination to fill the girl in on the Lufthansa heist and what happened after. She’d have a chance to see the movie in the States.
“But we had no refrigerator,” the wife argued. “It was just a small one. We have been waiting very, very patiently.”
“Your new place will have one, I’m sure,” Neeley said. They didn’t understand the fundamental truth that the only thing that had kept this family alive so far was the cover story and the dribbled-out payment. And the only thing that kept the CIA looking good was projecting that its hard work had located bin Laden’s compound, not this wreck of a man. The combination had forced the case officer handling the informant and his family to keep them in place, trying to gain as much time as possible.
Neeley, having spent many years in Black Ops, also suspected, deep down, that the CIA was hoping the bad guys would find out about the informant and wipe him and his family out. Save money on the reward, and they could still maintain the cover story: Yeah right. A garbageman gave up bin Laden? She could hear the laughter now if the bad guys tried to publicize it. And they’d get laughed at too. All in all, these three were a loose end and an embarrassment to everyone involved. Which also might explain why the mission had obviously been compromised. It would not be the first time the CIA had given up an asset they considered expendable after the fact. If that were the case, and Hannah found out the identity of the person who did it, they would not be long for this earth.
And this family still didn’t get it.
“And the rest of our money?” the man asked.
Neeley glanced at her watch. “The money is gone.”
The man stood, swaying with the plane. “What do you mean it is gone? We did our part! I was the one! It was me!”
“And I’m sure the United States will forever be grateful, even though no one will ever know.” Neeley shook her head. “I wouldn’t be telling anyone else what you did, even in the States.”
“You are cheating me!”
“Not me. I saved you.” Neeley spread her hands, indicating the plane. “You think this was free? I’m sure the balance of the twenty-five million is being sucked out of an offshore account right now by Mrs. Sanchez. It might just pay for the cost of running this op, which means the books will be balanced and by golly, she’s going to balance those damn books. The government might run on a deficit but not Black Ops.”
“That is not fair!” the wife screeched.
Neeley reached in her pocket and pulled out some gum and handed it to the girl, tuning the parents out as they turned on each other, screaming, as if the one who went louder would be righter.
Neeley knelt and looked the girl in the eyes. “They’re lear
ning the only fair in life has a Ferris wheel and cotton candy.”
The girl was confused. “What does that mean? How is cotton candy? Whose wheel?”
Neeley pressed a hand against the side of her head, sensing a headache coming on from the parents arguing. She wondered how people could stand to raise children. She’d never gotten that memo and it hadn’t been in Gant’s set of rules. She’d rather run an op.
“Don’t worry,” Neeley told the girl. “You’ll be fine. Just not rich and not so close to getting your heads chopped off every day. Things are actually turning out as well as they possibly could for you and your parents.”
“I told you this would happen!” The wife was shaking her husband’s shoulders. “Did I not tell you this would happen? That CIA man you trusted kept telling us wait, wait. And we waited. You said trust him. Trust the CIA. Trust the Americans. And now? See? See? Why do you never listen to me? Why do you swallow your mother’s words as if they were gold, but you throw mine out like they are the garbage you collect? You should have said nothing! Nothing!”
The husband sat down, head in hands, as his wife continued to berate him.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to listen to this for a long time,” Neeley told the frightened girl. “I can just save your life. I can’t save you from your family.” Neeley put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, trying to conjure up something she’d never experienced on the other end as a child. “It will all be fine.”
She looked past the girl as the crew chief came down the cargo bay. He held out a headset as he plugged it in an outlet. “Priority message for you, ma’am.”
Neeley turned away from the girl and her distraught family. She put on the headset. “Neeley.”
She recognized Hannah’s voice. “I’m diverting your 130 to the closest airbase where there will be a chopper waiting to get you back here ASAP. You’ve got a new mission. There seems to be a window of opportunity. Are you aware of Deep Six?”
“Yes.”
“There’s someone in there. General Riggs’s science adviser, named Brennan. He’s being held there. There’s been an accident with a DORKA experiment and he’s infected.”
“That’s Nightstalker territory,” Neeley said.
“They’ve been alerted,” Hannah said. “But I want you to get to Brennan and ask him some questions.”
“Break into Deep Six?”
“It is designed primarily to keep people out,” Hannah said.
“Is this a Sanction?” Neeley asked, which meant she had permission to use deadly force at her own discretion.
There was a moment of silence, then the reply. “It is a Sanction. I think Brennan knows about Pinnacle. As much as anyone knows. We can finally end this.”
“Roger that.”
Neeley expected to hear the click, meaning the transmission was over, but static lingered. “Hannah?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s going on?”
“The accident at DORKA. It’s some sort of truth serum called Cherry Tree. It hasn’t been contained yet. It’s gotten loose in the White House and is spreading. I’m not sure how or what the long-term effect is, but this could get out of control. And when things get out of control…”
“Murphy’s Law,” Neeley said, a maxim that was more ancient than Gant’s rules. What can fuck up, will.
“Be prepared to move to the White House on an adjunct mission as needed after you get to Brennan and find out as much as you can from him.” Hannah made it sound like breaking into a highly secure, underground facility was a fait accompli.
“Roger that.”
“Be careful.” And then the click.
* * *
Doc looked at the menu, trying to find something he would be willing to eat and could afford. The woman hadn’t shown up yet and part of him hoped she wouldn’t. The place was way too expensive for him by his lonesome, never mind with a date. Not that he wanted to call her a date, but it was obvious that’s what she thought when they talked on the phone, so splitting the check probably wasn’t an option. He wondered why he let his sister do this to him. He always agreed when she set him up and it always turned out badly. She always said this next one was perfect, the one, and he had a growing suspicion that there was no one. That his job, his passion for knowledge, was and would forever be his first and only love.
But one has to humor a sister, especially when she is the only family one has left.
Still. Sixty-nine bucks for a steak? This was Vegas. One could get a steak for two dollars with ten dollars’ worth of chips at most of the lower-class casinos and they might even throw in the start of a lap dance. Doc only knew because Roland had dragged him out one night, and Doc had had the honor of watching Roland wolf down fourteen bucks’ worth of steaks at seven different places.
Besides the base pay, combat pay, danger pay, Black Ops pay, jump pay (not worth it), and various other streams of income as a Nightstalker, it was barely making a dent in the student loans required to get the four PhDs he boasted about so much.
Even with those PhDs, including one in physics, Doc had no idea what fusion meant when it came to food. Why would anyone want to fuse sushi and Indian food? Could that even be fused? He mused on that for a moment, as Roland had mused on spear vs. arrow. Wasn’t the point of sushi the opposite of Indian food?
Doc sighed. He’d have to order something and push it around. Doc ate for energy and he understood very much how calories translated into force. He had never understood eating for the flavor, especially when the flavors were so weird. He was so caught up in the energy trail from food to calories to energy to how much energy the brain required that he failed to notice the woman until she sat down across from him.
She was a bit older than he had expected, but other than that, exactly what he anticipated when he’d walked into her favorite restaurant and scoped it out, the way Nada had taught him to “scope it out.” For most men that meant checking out the women, but for a Nightstalker it meant first assessing the potential threats, the security, then the emergency exits, both marked and those other avenues that could be made into an exit with a little bit of ingenuity. Then for things that could be used as field-expedient weapons and cover; Roland had taught him that, constantly pointing what could be used to burn, impale, explode, maim, slash, and otherwise damage the human body. Roland had also explained what a table could be composed of and the depth needed to stop various caliber rounds when you flipped it up for cover. It had all been rather complicated and confusing but also intriguing, even for Doc, with all his PhDs. Roland was only good with certain numbers, but on those, he was worth listening to. He was an encyclopedia of calibers and armor and entry wounds and exit wounds and ricochet angles that would make the best quant on Wall Street run screaming to Hell’s Kitchen.
But it was Nada who’d said you can judge people by the surroundings they chose. Like the woman. The restaurant was too polished, meaning the food wasn’t going to be that great and neither was she. The food was going to be art, not sustenance, like some people.
“Doctor Ghatar,” the woman said, nodding her head in greeting, her expensive earrings glittering in the candlelight.
For a moment he wondered who she was referring to, then he realized she only had his last name from his sister. A name that was fading away from him with every year in the Nightstalkers.
“Yes. And you must be Gay.” He did not phrase it as a question, but the name got his mind going. Having a name that projected a mood meant you rarely lived in one. (Frasier, Ms. Jones’s one-eyed shrink, had told him that.) But still, Doc had to cut her some slack. Applying Nightstalkers’ templates to civilians might not be fair. For all he knew Gay could be a fun and lively person who was straightforward and down to earth and laughed off gentle criticisms and accepted compliments gracefully.
But he doubted it. She looked too perfect, like the restaurant. It was why Roland never went to those top-tier strip clubs. He said the women’s bodies were too per
fect and that they’d cut you. Doc had never quite grasped that last part.
“You are as your sister said you were,” Gay said. She too was Indian. Despite their years in the States, his sister could not imagine marrying outside of the home country.
One part of Doc’s brain worked on trying to untwist the meaning in that statement while he evaluated the net worth she was covered with. He thought it ironic that people spent so much time and money on things in an attempt to show others who they were. She had perfect hair, expensive clothes, and a watch that cost more than his car. But one could buy all that with a loan, or from an ex-husband’s alimony. Or they could all be fake, which is the first conclusion he knew Nada would jump to, and then it really bothered him to be channeling Nada.
Real things that no one could take a loan on and buy seemed to have little value. Doc knew he was overthinking this, but the last mission, time running out, had brought him a bit too close to the black void. Like most who gazed over into that chasm, one tended to get a little introspective.
Or they were a psychopath and never thought of it again.
“As are you,” Doc finally replied.
“Do you have a first name?” she asked.
Doc lied.
“And what do you do for a living?” she asked. “Your sister was very vague.”
That’s because his sister had no clue. Doc told her a very elaborate lie, the same one he’d been telling ever since joining the Nightstalkers and getting his cover for status. Which was different than cover for action, Nada had patiently explained to him during his in-processing.
The good thing was there were no student loans tied to all the training the Nightstalkers had given him in tradecraft and fieldcraft.
The bad thing was there was a high probability of getting killed being a member of the team even if one were perfect with tradecraft and fieldcraft. Murphy was always waiting to screw things up.
She asked more questions. He was beginning to miss Ms. Jones’s in-briefing and “why we are here” speech because he had no clue why he was here. He batted back the conversational shuttlecock and asked her all the required questions in return.
