Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  The words brought the laugh he’d been trolling for. “Truer words,” she said. She indicated the chairs as if they belonged to her—and at one level he supposed they did. “Let’s sit down for a little devotional.”

  Irene led the way to a spot as far away as possible from the threshold and sat. She crossed her legs and somehow managed to look comfortable. Jonathan had always found something undeniably hot about Wolverine, and it wasn’t just the fact that as FBI director she still kicked the occasional door. He knew better than to guess her age, but he suspected that she was older than she looked. The strawberry blond hair looked natural enough to his eye, and she had terrific legs. Unfortunately for her, cameras deeply disliked her, projecting the image of a nineteenth-century schoolmarm, cursed with whatever is the obverse of hotness.

  He selected a chair two away from hers and twisted ninety degrees so that he could speak to her directly.

  “So, tell me,” Irene said, taking the lead. “When did you start drinking on the job?” A harsh question delivered with a twinkle of humor.

  “Excuse me?”

  The twinkle grew to a smirk. “Of course. Plausible deniability. Well suffice to say that a certain congressman is wildly impressed and deeply grateful to have his daughter back.”

  Jonathan kept his poker face.

  “He wanted me to tell whoever this Scorpion guy is, the congressman considers himself indebted, and both willing and anxious to confer whatever repayment he can offer.”

  “If I had any idea what you were talking about, I would of course be thrilled to hear the news,” Jonathan said.

  Irene leaned in closer. “Would it have killed you to clue me in?” she whispered. “Hypothetically, of course. He’s a congressman, for heaven’s sake.”

  “One who hypothetically does not trust the Bureau,” Jonathan said. “Rules are rules, Madam Director.”

  “You put me in a very awkward position, Digger. Good thing this had a happy ending.”

  “My hypothetical operations always deliver happy endings. You know that.” Jonathan shifted his position in his chair. “How did you know it was me?”

  Irene rolled her eyes with a dramatic flourish. “Oh, please. A guy named Scorpion who has a friend the size of a sequoia. Some dots are easy to connect.” She glanced at her watch. “I believe this is your meeting.”

  “I believe you’re right,” Jonathan said. “Did Mother Hen send you a name and a picture?”

  “Indeed she did.”

  “And what did you discover when you ran him?”

  Irene inhaled noisily through her nose and glanced to the floor. Jonathan sensed that she’d been searching for a way to say what was on her mind, but hadn’t yet decided on a strategy.

  “Tell you what,” she said at last. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for specifically?”

  “Is that really better than just dealing the cards from the top of the deck?” Jonathan’s tolerance for bullshit was limited on a good day. When it came to government-sponsored bullshit, his reservoir had overflowed years ago.

  “In this case, yes,” Irene said. He saw a flash of anger. “And friendship notwithstanding, it wouldn’t hurt you from time to remember just who the hell you’re talking to.”

  Jonathan reared back in his seat. “Whoa. Where did that come from? We’re always on the same side, you know.”

  “No, we’re not,” she snapped. “Your world is vastly less complicated than mine. While you’re venturing the save the world one injustice at a time, I’m balancing about a million of them every second of every day. The fact is that I am entitled to know things that I can never share with you or anyone else.”

  This was new territory for the two of them. Jonathan had for a while been questioning Irene’s wisdom when agreeing to a second ten-year stint as FBI director, and now it seemed that his concerns were justified. It was not in his nature to cower, however. “So, why are we here? You knew what I wanted to talk about, but you could have blown me off to Dom over the phone.”

  Her back stiffened as he drew in another big breath, and gathered herself. “Jonathan Grave, we have known each other for a very, very long time. You ask me over and over again to trust you. And I do. How about you return the favor this once and trust me? Tell me why you need to have information on Mr. James Stepahin.”

  Fair enough. “He was the focus of an op we conducted over a decade ago—”

  “You mean a hypothetical op, right?” Her eyes danced.

  Jonathan smiled. The previous tension had been defused. “Yes, of course. He showed up on our radar again, and when I try to run his background, we find that he literally never existed. That feels to me like the involvement of your shop.”

  Irene stood and rubbed a spot on the small of her back. “These chairs are killers,” she said. She was looking up at the Blessed Virgin when she asked, “In what context did the alleged Mr. Stepahin appear on your radar?”

  It felt ungentlemanly to sit while a lady stood, but he sensed that she preferred it this way. The lack of eye contact was another tell. “Well, let’s start with the fact that he’s dead.”

  Irene’s head whipped around. “What? Where?”

  “A little south and west of here. In Braddock County. He’s a John Doe. Killed yesterday in what the local PD is calling a murder.”

  Irene opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it. The furrow in her brow spoke of multiple levels of confusion. “Who killed him?”

  “A kid. Twenty-three.”

  “Was it a professional job?”

  Now there’s a clue to what she’s not telling me. “Hardly. The killer is a coffee shop barista.”

  Irene stifled a laugh, brought a hand to her forehead. Whatever pieces she was waiting for were apparently not falling into place. “Wait. How do you know the identity of a John Doe? Especially if he, as you say, never existed?”

  “That’s complicated.”

  “I imagine it is.”

  Jonathan stood and joined Wolverine at the feet of the Virgin. “I told you that Stepahin was the focus of an op eleven years ago. Well, as it turns out, his killer—the kid’s name is Ethan Falk—was Stepahin’s victim. Ethan’s father was our client. Stepahin ran away, and we didn’t chase him because we had our PC.” He paused to let the details sink in, and for Irene’s memory to be triggered. “You should remember the case. It was during the period of your transition into the directorship. That was a sex ring—”

  “I remember it,” Irene snapped.

  “We rescued Ethan before he could be sold,” Jonathan said. “When he was arrested for the murder—which he committed in a friggin’ parking lot in front of countless witnesses—he tried to tell the story of this guy being his abuser, but of course—”

  “There’s no record of anything because you were the rescuer.” Irene was already ahead of him.

  “Exactly,” Jonathan said. He lowered his voice. “If I can’t figure out a way make Stepahin real again, this kid won’t have a chance. This is a death penalty case.”

  “It most definitely is,” Irene agreed. “I’ve dealt with the prosecutor down there before—a jackass named Petrelli. He goes for the death penalty on jaywalking cases. But the public keeps reelecting him.”

  “So now you understand my dilemma,” Jonathan said.

  “You killed people during that op, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “So stepping forward isn’t an option.”

  “Well, for me, maybe,” he joked, “but you know how Big Guy hates tight spaces.”

  “And lethal injections.”

  “Those, too.” Most of what Jonathan did carried a death penalty if he was ever caught, but that algebra worked for him. What was the point of living a safe life if endangered people went unprotected? “The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been for me personally, Wolfie. What can you do to help? I’ll take anything you can give me.”

  Something changed in Irene when he asked that question. Her demeanor relaxed, her fe
atures softened. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

  * * *

  Avenues rarely crossed in Washington. Numbered streets ran north and south, and lettered streets ran east and west. Avenues, on the other hand, were granted the freedom to go wherever the hell they wanted to, and it just so happened that Rhode Island Avenue, where Saint Matthew’s resided, lay only a couple hundred feet east of Connecticut Avenue. Irene led Jonathan down the stairs of the cathedral, and then made the right-hand turn onto Connecticut. This was a huge breach of security as far as Jonathan was concerned, and Irene’s detail seemed to share his interpretation. And just in case the world wasn’t paying close enough attention to the movements of the FBI director, they were tailed by a caravan of two massive armored SUVs.

  “I need to breathe fresh air as I dig into the places where I’m about to go,” Irene said, answering Jonathan’s question before he could ask it.

  Her words tugged at Jonathan. He put his hand on her arm. “Hey, are you okay?”

  She turned to look him in the eye. “If I could unlearn half the things I know, and un-see three-quarters of what I’ve seen since taking this job, I’d be one happy camper.”

  “So, why did you re-up? You put in your ten years. You could’ve just walked away and lived off your retirement.”

  “Because I love it,” she said. Then she smiled. “Color me a blind patriot.”

  “That’s exactly the reason why I like you so much,” Jonathan said.

  “James Stepahin,” Irene said through a forced smile. She looked to the sky. “Not my finest hour, I’m afraid.” They walked together another ten paces. “We never knew him to be a sex offender.” More silence.

  More, in fact, than Jonathan could tolerate. “We?”

  “Okay, I,” Irene said. “The standard profile for a pedophile is a man who believes that his obsession with children—whether boys or girls—is a form of love. When they hug them or fondle them, or . . . worse, they think their actions are about compassion and caring. They don’t see the violence in it.” As she spoke, she frequently looked skyward, as if searching for a source of strength.

  She nodded to the approaching intersection. “We’ll go Eighteenth Street and avoid the Circle.” The lunch crowd had thinned, but the early-departure bar crowd had started to form, making DuPont Circle a place to avoid. Certainly, the guys in the SUV would be happy.

  “On the other end of the spectrum are the serial killers who victimize children just for the thrill of it, the release.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re telling me this,” Jonathan said.

  “I’m answering your question,” Irene said. “Under the specialness of this circumstance, I’m breaking my personal rule about sharing shit that you don’t need to know.”

  His feathers appropriately singed, Jonathan backed off, committed to let her take her time and bear as much of her soul as she felt necessary.

  “Both of those personality types—whether organized or disorganized—tend to be focused on their purpose. James Stepahin was apparently the rare exception. I didn’t know that when I hired him.”

  Chapter Eight

  “You’ll recall that the wreckage of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was still warm when I took on the job of director,” Irene explained as they crossed N Street, Northwest. “A lot of things needed doing that we didn’t have the legal authority to do. I won’t say we shredded the Constitution, but it got pretty heavily creased. The good news is that the folks at Langley took most of the heat, and God bless them, they never ratted us out.”

  “About what?” Jonathan asked. So much for staying quiet and letting her talk.

  “You remember those black site prisons the agency created all over the world?”

  “I do.” He resisted the urge to tell her that he’d delivered more than a few of their occupants.

  “Well, we had them here, too,” Irene said. “And I’ll tell you right now that at the time, I was a big supporter of them. There were a lot more cells of bad guys here on U.S. soil than the press ever knew—even more than congressional overseers knew. Frankly, when the news broke about the foreign black sites, I was shocked that no one connected the dots domestically.”

  “Do we still have them?”

  She gave him a glare.

  “Chalk that question up to stuff I have no need to know,” Jonathan said. Though he could name at least two off the top of his head. He just wanted to see how far this walking confession had weakened her walls. Answer: not a bit.

  “Well, just as you helped to fill sites abroad, we needed similar help stateside, and that was one job for which we had no takers. Overseas, at the end of the day, SF and Agency people had cover back home if things went wrong. Here, that was not the case. I could not ask sworn agents to break the law, and if I tried and worked leaked out, it would have been a disaster.”

  “So you turned to contractors,” Jonathan guessed aloud. Ahead and to the left, on the opposite side of the street, stood the beige-brick Federal-style town house that was the Albanian Embassy, situated unobtrusively next to a café that sported outdoor seating shaded by beer-sponsored umbrellas.

  “Exactly. About that time, Mister James Stepahin was arrested for a drug infraction that barely cracked the floor of a felony. I don’t remember precisely how his name came all the way up the ladder to my desk, but I recognized him from the heads-up you gave me after your rescue operation. It turned out that his job was to kidnap people.”

  “For sex rings.”

  “For the highest bidder,” Irene corrected. “And he was good at it. After he lawyered up, we made a deal. And as I explained before, it never occurred to me that a professional criminal and a child molester would be two sides of a single personality. Maybe I was rationalizing, but what’s done is done.”

  Jonathan of all people had no business casting stones at others whose best intentions had turned out to be misguided. If a book were to be written on the subject, it would be his autobiography.

  “You might not like to hear this,” Irene continued, “but he was really, really good at what he did. He found the people we wanted him to, and he brought them in.”

  “Was it wet work?” Jonathan asked, knowing that she would understand his question.

  “Nope, not an assassin, though God forgive me, we have a few of those as well.” She gave him a friendly poke in the ribs with her elbow. “Don’t be jealous now. You’ll always be my favorite felon-contractor.”

  He knew a joke when he heard it.

  “Because Stepahin delivered everyone we asked for, Uncle Sam officially forgot that he was ever a criminal.”

  “Is that when you scrubbed his file?”

  Irene coughed out a bitter laugh. “I wish. All we did was expunge his criminal record. Stepahin did the rest. I always figured it had something to do with the frenzy over the black sites overseas. The media was calling for criminal prosecutions for the soldiers and contractors who staffed those sites, but thank God Darmond wasn’t in the White House yet to give them up. If I were Stepahin at the time, though, I think I would have begun to feel awfully lonely and exposed.”

  “Shouldn’t he have?” It went unsaid that everything Jonathan did for Uncle Sam these days was done under a veil of one hundred percent deniability.

  “Of course he should have. That’s why you guys get the big bucks. And as I said before, I was shocked that the domestic sites were never revealed. Anyway, one day, he just ceased to exist. No birth records, no anything. Just poof.”

  “Did you ever try to trace him down?”

  Irene wrinkled her nose as she shook her head. “Nah. What would be the point? The post-nine-eleven frenzy was calming down by then, and he’d done everything we’d asked him to do. Deep inside, I think I figured maybe he’d earned an anonymous retirement.” She drilled him with a glare. “So have you, you know.”

  Jonathan chuckled. “I’m living the dream.” They turned right onto Massachusetts Avenue, and Jonathan glanced over his shoulder to
see if the security guys were still there. He’d been in their spot enough times to feel sorry for them. If they’d fallen back, he’d have waited for them, but they were right where they were supposed to be.

  “Do you really mean that?” Irene asked. “Living the dream?”

  Jonathan scowled. “I did when I said it, but that look in your eye makes me want to take it back.”

  “Perhaps you just know me too well,” she said.

  “Are you going to make me ask? And before you answer, how in the world does Uzbekistan rate a cooler building than Albania?” Just ahead, the Uzbek embassy looked like an old-money mansion, with a sculptured edifice and a circular driveway in front.

  “Open the index of things I don’t give a crap about,” Irene said. “You’ll find that one there.”

  Jonathan laughed. Irene’s no-bullshit persona vastly magnified her inherent hotness as a woman.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” Irene said. “In recent weeks, we’ve heard a lot of chatter over the scary channels. Have you ever heard of al-Amin? It means ‘the trustworthy.’”

  “No. But it sounds jihadist.”

  Irene explained, “They’re the current crop of terrorists to grow out of the Muddled East. One group on a list that keeps getting bigger. Building on the success of the Mexican model of terror-funding, al-Amin’s revenue stream comes largely through ransoms paid for high-profile kidnappings. The basic theme is that you pay to get your loved one back, or you get to watch a video on the Internet of his head being sawed off with a butter knife.”

  Jonathan inhaled sharply. He’d seen too many such videos, and in each case, wished that he could un-see them.

  “The thing with al-Amin, from everything we can figure out, is that they’re pissed that the US government still won’t bargain for hostages.”

  “Except we do,” Jonathan corrected. “In fact, we just did.”