by Gabby Grant
Albert hung his head.
“Mooney had a theory about this intelligence scare. And I’m damn well afraid,” Albert said, looking up, “he’s right.”
CHAPTER 15
Tom Mooney returned from the water cooler and sat at his desk, studying the beige and brown map of the Rub Al Khali Desert. Somewhere out there, Joe McFadden had disappeared, filtering into the landscape like one more feckless grain of sand. Somewhere out there, Tom’s only nephew and the only family he had, had characteristically taken things into his own hands and unwittingly placed himself in grave danger.
Tom’s fist tightened around the paper cup, sending water sloshing over its reverberating sides.
More than a decade ago, the three of them had devised a plan. Twelve years ago exactly Tom, his old intelligence corps buddy Albert Kane, and Tom’s long-term liaison from his “Flying Tigers” days in China, Au Yang, had been directed by the Bush Administration to concoct a scenario that would guarantee US Intelligence supremacy around the globe.
It had been December 1989 and the Brandenburg Gate had just reopened to the West. But while the joy of fallen communism resonated from rooftops world-wide, it’s euphoria did not settle on the White House. Following in his predecessor’s footsteps, President Bush worried over communism’s ever-pervasive threat. Now that the Berlin Wall had fallen, the West was expected to let down its guard and tighten the belt on the burgeoning military budget that had been given free reign during the previous administration. Not if DOD could help it. And a couple of boys at the Pentagon had the perfect plan. The perfect plan involving a little-known agency on the East bank of the Potomac whose resources were at the Commander-in-Chief’s beck and call.
All it took was a series of plausibly deniable meetings no one could trace back to the President. When the order funneled down the pipeline to the DOS, seasoned specialist Albert Kane, then a supposed college professor in Delaware, was put in charge of a special task force. It was an elite team, only the three of them: Albert Kane, Tom Mooney and Tom’s old Chinese blood brother Au Yang, who’d recently escaped incarceration in China.
While the newly-commissioned World War II OSS officer Albert Kane had been masterminding covert operations in Spain, the man he would meet two years later and who would become his best friend for life, Tom Mooney, was spiriting into China with the 14th Army Air Force under the auspices of a covert mission to aid the Chinese against their Japanese invaders. Because they were among the best of the best, both Kane and Mooney had been snagged by the DOS near the end of the war. They’d been put through the DOS clearinghouse in Puerto Rico together and there had formed an irrefutable bond. They were cut from the same cloth, Mooney and Albert Kane. Vain, spirited, ambitious, and dyed-in-the wool loyalists to the USA. They’d gone on to marry equally dynamic women, but in spite of their friendship- or perhaps, more aptly, because of it- the DOS had seen fit to keep Tom and Albert apart.
Au Yang, Tom had later learned, had been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Chinese for his work as a double-agent during the War. It didn’t matter that his work for the Americans had in fact benefitted China. What mattered was that he’d seized the open opportunity on his own, without express permission from his commanders or his regime. For over forty years, Au Yang had wasted away in a red block cell until he’d been granted that unexpected break for freedom and defected instantly to the United States, where’d he’d sought out his old American ally Tom Mooney.
Tom’s recruitment of Au Yang to the Defense Operations Service had garnered him many kudos, yet still not enough for Tom to out-pace his friend Albert Kane’s rise to power within the top-secret organization. When it had been the DOS commander’s brainstorm in 1989 to hand-pick those three for their highly classified operation, kingpin Albert Kane had naturally been put in charge. Though he’d never told Albert so, Tom had secretly hoped to head up that project. It had been Tom, not Albert after all, who’d had the Chinese connection. Tom, not Albert, who’d initially recruited Au Yang to the DOS and could therefore most notably influence his Chinese friend into participation in their plan.
Having Au Yang’s input was critical to the group’s success. In order to tackle a global infrastructure, the team would need a non-western perspective- something Au Yang could quite astutely supply. Particularly as he was eager to seek revenge against a regime that had held him captive so long his hair had grown snowy white without him having had the opportunity to observe that change in a mirror. Not only had he been denied the privilege of his own reflection, as ghastly as it must have looked at times, Au Yang had also been prohibited from engaging in human contact with others. Unjustly, he’d been branded a traitor. And, as such, kept in solitary confinement for more years than he could count on his fingers and toes two times over. Then came that fateful night of the fire and the wild rampage down the hall by fleeing prisoners, one of whom had had the good grace to throw open wide the door to Au Yang’s cell along his own barreling path to freedom.
It was a sacred miracle Au Yang had not entirely lost his mind. But during that time, he’d later told Tom, he’d used the empty hours as occasions to restudy his mental lessons. Retrain his mind in the art of Manchurian warfare. Retrace, in his head, each sacred passage. For, as Buddha would have it, Au Yang had been gifted, from an early age, with a photographic memory. So, what once had come as a curse in cluttering the mind Au Yang often struggled to keep free in peaceful harmony, had effectively become Au Yang’s salvation in prison. And the prolonged study had served him well. When Au Yang was drafted onto Tom and Albert’s task force, he’d had a number of ready suggestions as to how they should proceed with their plan and conquer not only the Far East but the crumbling Eastern European Bloc as well.
For it was the group’s unanimous suspicion that the Soviets, as dissipated as they’d become, still housed an unarticulated agenda against the West. An agenda that, rather than evaporating, had merely gone underground. And over time, Tom thought with a shake of his head, had found more and more ways of seeping out in weed-lie sproutings in the Middle East, an area ripe for the taking by opportunistic Soviet supporters...
Au Yang’s plan had been classic. Right back to Section Thirteen in Sun-tzu’s strategic Art of War: The Use of Spies. Au Yang’s proposal involved the positioning of an internal threat to intelligence. Some sort of global scare, that would make those in key analytical positions less apt to do their jobs leaving a giant vacuum in the national defense mechanism of every targeted government. It was Kane who had envisioned the utility of a systems invasion. Even at the dawn of the computer age, Kane had foreseen the important application of computers toward the collection and dissemination of intelligence. By 1989, the DOS had become quite accomplished at wide-spread computer warfare waged against the Soviets. Now, if the United States could only concoct a way to infiltrate the intelligence gathering machinery of other nations on a grander scale.
But Mooney had insisted that information warfare alone would never be enough. It was Mooney, in fact, who had proposed and insisted upon the complimentary escalation of violence. While Kane and Au Yang had inclined toward the basic Chinese model, which minimized bloodshed, Mooney had countered that without a basic level of brutality, idol threats would ultimately prove ineffective.
Tom took a final swallow from his cup and crushed the soggy mass into a weeping ball. God dammit, if things just hadn’t taken this turn. If Joe, for once in his God-forsaken life, had simply stayed in place and done what he was told to do...
But Joe hadn’t stayed put, Tom thought, chucking his mangled cup into the trash can. And now, one AWOL operative Joe McFadden was in just as much danger as the rest of them- if not more. And there was not one goddamned thing the head of INR, Tom Mooney, could do about it.
***
“So, you’re saying,” Mark said, gripping the wheel. “All this is an old US intelligence plan turned back in on itself?”
“Precisely,” Albert said, biting into his top lip. “The similarities are
just too uncanny.”
“Who else knew about this?” Mark asked, studying his father-in-law.
“Only the three of us: me, Tom and Au Yang. Plus the President, the top brass at the Pentagon and the DOS.”
“Bush’s aides? Anyone still around who might remember anything?”
Albert shook his head. “There were no official briefings.”
Mark slumped back against his seat. “Where’s Au Yang now?”
Kane looked out his window. “Last I heard he’d gone back to China.”
“...in?” Mark asked.
“Nineteen-ninety-nine.”
Mark pummeled the wheel with his fist. “Back to Chinese Intelligence?! Oh that’s rich! And when, pray tell, were you planning to advise people of this threat?”
“I didn’t think there’d be one, Mark,” Albert said, his voice rising a decibel.
“Right,” Mark said, cranking the ignition with a jerk of his wrist. “And the code name?” he asked, swinging the car back onto the highway without even turning to look at his father-in-law.
“Volcano,” Albert said, his voice a low rumble.
CHAPTER 16
Ana huddled her arms around herself and shuddered against the tree that served as her single backdrop from the cold. All around her, December winds hollered, clawing with witch-like fingers at her ineffectual clothing. She had no way of knowing whether Hay Long had survived; she’d left him for dead in his own pool of sickly blood, sirens just starting to bellow outside the window. Someone at the hotel must have heard the gunfire and called the police. Fortunately for Ana, she’d managed to slip out the door and back her way down the fire escape unnoticed.
Though why she was running from the police, Ana wasn’t certain. All she had left on this bitter moonless night was her burning love for Isabel and an instinct that told her she’d done the right thing. Confronting the police would have somehow brought trouble. Either to Joe or the DOS as a whole. And, despite what she’d gone through- everything she’d gone through, including three years ago in Spain- Ana wasn’t ready to sacrifice the top-secret intelligence organization to her personal need. There was too much good that came from the work there, too much that was being accomplished on such a subversive level and that even those being benefitted by certain operations were kept effectively unaware.
Ana stared through a thicket of pines, trying to get her bearings. She’d run from sunup to sundown, but the charcoal winter sky had done little to dry her drenched clothing. Ana shivered and mentally tried to calculate the distance she’d gone, hoping her sense of direction hadn’t failed her. All she wanted to do was get home. Home to her chalet-styled house in the woods where she’d be able to find Mark. The only one she could trust to somehow make things right.
Ana thought again of Isabel and something agonizing twisted inside her. She knew her baby girl was being taken care of. Mark would have ensured it. But still, she ached to hold her, to feel that baby soft breath upon her neck.
And Mark. What would he be thinking all this time? Had he been contacted? Would he have been told she was dead, in accordance with the order Joe had failed to carry out? Ana clutched herself around her middle, her brutal two days’ hunger fleeing her in an instant. Had Mark been right to discourage her from getting so intimately involved in DOS affairs? Because of her own bullheadedness, had she now endangered her family?
Ana Kane was a strong woman, strong because she had to be. The only time she’d ever allowed herself to feel weakness was when she’d been embraced in the security of Mark Neal’s arms. She’d felt it from that very first touch, known it from their telling walk in Santiago, when Mark, in all his wisdom, had pulled a shattered Ana into his arms. No man had ever made her feel so vulnerable, yet so completely at peace. She needed him and needed him desperately. But, in these past few months, she’d given him reason to doubt that. Given him cause to call into question the solidity of all that existed between them.
Especially now, Ana had to believe that any troubles they’d been experiencing were only temporary.
Ana hadn’t been lying when she’d told her father she loved Mark. Nor had she sought to deceive when she’d claimed the feeling was mutual. But sometimes, as she’d often heard from divorced friends, love just wasn’t enough. When people grew, people changed, and far too often that change led to a fork in the road rather than a continued convergence of paths.
Ana was sure now, as sure as God gave her breath, that the course she and Mark had taken wasn’t irrevocable. Yet, that hadn’t been the impression she’d been giving him. As of late, how could Mark have interpreted her behavior as anything less than her having one foot out the door?
But the truth was, Ana didn’t want to go...didn’t want to run anywhere except for straight into Mark’s arms and the promise they had once held.
Ana turned at the sound pelting through the leaves and realized it was raining. She needed to go on, but was weakened by hunger, disoriented in the woods, bruised and battered from her alarming altercation with Hay Long... And cold. Never in her entire life, had Ana felt so very cold. And it was more than the wind and the rain and her terror. It was in knowing she might never again see her baby daughter, in the realization that, if she were to die here and now, she’d leave Mark with the false illusion she’d no longer cared.
Ana huddled forward and let the tears come. For not even the driving force of the rain, or the fire in her rapidly breaking heart, could stop them now.
***
Major Carolyn Walker picked up the phone on the secured line then set it back in its cradle for the fourth time. If she told Neal the truth, he would kill her. But if she didn’t, he’d make certain her life within Defense Intelligence was worth nothing anyway.
Carolyn had been given an assignment and promised to handle it. And so far, when she cut herself some slack, she saw, she’d been doing reasonably well. Maria’s indiscretions hadn’t been Carolyn’s doing after all.
All blast. Carolyn rammed a fist into the desk, knowing that was a lie.
What Maria had done before she’d been Carolyn’s charge had certainly been out of Carolyn’s control. But the nanny’s last communication, and potentially her most damaging one, had, dammit all, been made on Carolyn’s watch. And if she were half the officer she pretended to be, Carolyn Walker would make no excuses, suck it up and face the music!
But, did facing the music mean making an already dismal holiday abysmal by calling her boss now? How much difference could two days make? Maria was already in DOS custody, would be restrained from making further calls or contacts with the outside world. The damage that had been done, was done.
Mark was sure to be beyond grief over Ana. Why add fuel to that fire?
Because if she didn’t, Carolyn realized, picking up the receiver for the fifth and final time, and somehow the information she withheld could have led to the solving of the case sooner, Mark Neal and the DOS would never forgive her.
***
Ana sucked in her breath and stopped crying. As rain beat heavy streams down her forehead, she heard a crackle in the darkness.
Then another.
Ana’s eyes frantically searched the night, weighing her options: run or stay hidden.
Another crackle, this one weightier- crushing through fallen brambles.
Could be an animal...
Another. Closer.
Rain streaked and an overhead curtains of leaves collapsed under pressure.
A rustle in a nearby tree.
Ana’s heart rose in her throat, as she summoned the courage to run. Move, she told her paralyzed legs. Move, dammit!
Another rustle- closer still. This time close enough to see thinly-veiled movement through a nearby tree.
Ana futilely dug her fingernails into her thighs, willing her novocained legs to cooperate.
Nothing.
Tears blistered her cheeks and water rushed from her nostrils, as his shadowy form emerged from the underbrush.
Maybe if she stayed
very still.
An outline...a head turning in her direction.
Ana’s heartbeat hammered her to the tree behind her.
A slow, steady perusal panned in her direction.
No, not here, Ana begged silently, as the form appeared to scan the edge of the clearing near her feet.
Then, it stopped: a sinister shadow angling toward her.
And Ana’s legs finally did something; they gave way beneath her, hurtling her into an even blacker darkness.
CHAPTER 17
Mark stared out the large, plate glass window into the blinding night. Outside, rain pounded, streaking the pane with its fury. In the distance, the hazy bubble of the illuminated Capitol dome was little more a vague sketch in the night. Christmas Eve and all of Washington was melting. But not half as fast as Mark’s rapidly drowning heart. Major Walker had advised him of the situation and he was furious. Not at Carolyn, but at himself for becoming so reckless. There was a day when even the minutest of details couldn’t pass him by without notice. But now this. This, and every indication that Ana had been telling the truth these past several weeks when she’d said she’d no idea why the house had been so disorganized, no clue as to who’d left open the doors, have moved things about, misplaced, reset and tampered with appliances...
He’d played the lunatic, fairly railed at his wife for her inefficiencies. And when she’d looked at him with that blank stare, he’d found himself beginning to doubt so many things. Not just her competency at home, but the essence...Mark felt his slackened jaw tremble...of who she was.
Mark pressed his palms to his temples and cradled his head in his hands, elbows down on his desk. In the blur of time that had clipped past since Isabel’s birth, Mark had scarcely slowed down enough to notice the change. Though Ana, he now saw, had tried to tell him, he’d been oblivious to the welling darkness around them. Oblivious, or purposely ignorant, Mark wondered, feeling the shame break over him like a wave over the bow of a sinking ship.
