Line in the Shadow

by Clancy Nacht

  The security procedures to access Rex’s floor of the building were beyond Hawthorne’s clearance. If Rex could get there without incident, he could shake Hawthorne. Right now the guards at the reception desk might just be bored enough to pick a fight.

  As Rex scanned his ID and chose his floor, he felt a moment’s panic that the data drive in his pocket might fall out without his fingers clutching it in place. The tiny object felt heavy and willful, like the One Ring in the fantasy movies he’d watched with Piper, as if it would call out for a new owner from its secret place in Rex’s pocket. Hawthorne was much too close. The elevator was too small.

  Smiling faintly, Rex stepped back from the control panel and kept the hip bearing his prize pressed against the wall. “How was your holiday, anyway? Thought you had a big clan to keep you home.” He adopted a sympathetic expression. “Escaping the wife?”

  Hawthorne’s brows knitted together for a moment as he looked Rex over, then he smiled. “No, no real family. Not with field ops to tend to. Job gets in the way. I guess you’d know a little something about that, what with you and Heather splitting up. What’s your little girl’s name? Piper? Pretty cute. Guess you can hope for a reconciliation. Holidays do tend to bring families closer.”

  Misdirection is a spy’s best friend.

  “Actually, I just came from there. Got Piper a new computer for Christmas. Major points for that.” Rex laughed softly. “Things are still up in the air, a little awkward, but there’s hope, right? A new year is right around the corner, and Heather’s giving off the right signals.”

  Rex noticed Hawthorne hadn’t entered his floor choice and gestured. “Don’t forget your coat!”

  “Right.” Hawthorne pressed his floor and scanned his card. He studied Rex’s face and posture, appearing frustrated despite his efforts to hide it. “That’s great news. Really. So I guess you’re getting things back on track. Heard about you recovering al-Ahmad. Good for you.”

  The elevator dinged for Hawthorne’s floor. For a moment, he appeared truly irritated. “You sure I can’t interest you in dinner? I’d like to talk to you more about your recovery and what you’ve got going on downstairs.”

  “Sorry, sir, I’m trying to catch up on some reports for Masters. Planning to surprise Heather later tonight, need to get things done before then.” Rex noted the annoyance with private satisfaction but kept his manner engaging if somewhat reticent. “I hope you enjoy your meal. Stay warm.”

  Hawthorne had little choice but to exit on his floor as Rex continued upward. Rex watched him expectantly.

  The man stepped out of the elevator. He turned and gave Rex a final quick once-over. It was clear Hawthorne wanted to ask more, but he couldn’t seem to come up with anything. His jaw worked, but before words came out, the doors started to close. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Rex gave a little wave as Hawthorne disappeared from sight, then instantly shoved his hands back in his pockets to make sure the drive was safe. It wasn’t until his fingers closed around it that he could breathe again; he’d been half-convinced Hawthorne had stolen it somehow.

  While Rex’s hypervigilance and considerable skills made that impossible, they did nothing to allay his paranoias. The sad truth of his career was that the better he became at his job and the longer he survived, the more he realized his worst fears were inadequate in scope. The only human response to the real state of the world was unrelenting anxiety, and an agent’s only defense was careful management of emotional resources.

  And that was so much easier before I lost Ike.

  It was the thought of reuniting with Ike that made Rex will the elevator faster, that made him break into a sprint the moment the doors opened. At his cubicle, he logged on to his desktop computer, inserted the drive, and tried to boot it. He realized suddenly that Whitman had to have been sent by Ike.

  He wouldn’t go to that much trouble for me to hear a damn song.

  Then Rex realized that the name had been a clue to the source of the information. Sylvia’s song. A swansong? Her last message to the Company? And zip... Ike’s file had been a zip file. That’s why it wouldn’t play.

  Rex’s thoughts raced as he navigated the file tree. The file names made his heart pound faster. He felt as if he was moving in slow motion while the world sped up around him and only his mind and his pulse were keeping pace with its mad rush. Broekner. Turner. Rebelski.

  Hawthorne.

  A chill ran down Rex’s spine, a cold trickle like a single drop of ice water that set his teeth on edge. This was why they’d tried to murder Ike. It had nothing to do with Rex, or only peripherally. They’d believed Ike had knowledge of his sister’s work, and when Rex came on the scene, they’d assumed he was after the files.

  As the decryption program converted the files to readable status, Rex texted Masters. His message said only “Sunday I go to church,” another code phrase from an old blues song to let Masters know he was at HQ and something was going down. Then a digital tone alerted Rex that the first file was ready to go.

  These were basic personnel files that Rex’s clearance should have granted him ages ago. They’d been locked not by confidentiality, but due to IT problems… At least, that’s what he’d been told. Mysteriously no one in IT seemed interested in helping Rex resolve the issue. He’d never found IT so resistant to fixing a technical problem before, but the past few weeks, he’d been passed from tech to tech.

  Now, looking at them, Rex saw why someone locked them. Initially they’d been flagged when one after the other of Hawthorne’s team had fallen out of contact during the Israel-Hezbollah War. Three men were killed; two were captured and taken to southern Lebanon. Though Israel gave chase, their efforts were thwarted with an explosive that seemed suspiciously American in origin. Hezbollah’s militia was much better trained than expected, arousing suspicions of collusion from Iran and, though no one would say it out loud, someone trained by Americans.

  Military and political fumbles aside, the United Nations brought Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah to the table for a cease-fire at the end of summer. By October, each member of Hawthorne’s team had gotten back into contact with the CIA, claiming that during the war they couldn’t find a safe way to make contact.

  Suspicious as that sounded, Rex knew that working in a hot region made communication difficult. If they were in Lebanon when things went down, good tradecraft dictated that they err on the side of caution.

  As much as Rex wanted that to be the answer, there wasn’t enough information for an arrest. Had he been too hasty in calling Masters?

  Then he noticed someone—Sylvia?—had highlighted other portions of the files. Their start dates with the company were all shortly after 9/11. Not a surprise, since the tragedy prompted many to join the cause. At the start, the CIA had gone on lockdown, not taking any new people. Then, as the demand for intelligence increased and as Homeland Security scooped up the most promising of the new recruits, the CIA’s standards and background checks became more lax.

  Each of the men were brought in within a month or two of each other, each hired by the same recruiter. Also not unheard of. On finding a promising recruit, pulling in their talented and sympathetic friends was common at the time.

  But, as Rex delved deeper into their history, another strange commonality became evident. Each man was hired for their knowledge of Lebanon—knowledge that they each had from living in Lebanon with their families in the ‘90s.

  Many families had moved to Lebanon to participate in the post-war reconstruction then, and lots of Americans made a lot of money there. However, the tensions between Israel and Hezbollah were heightened around 1996. Many from the US fled in the explosion of tensions, including these men’s families.

  Individually, the evidence was inconclusive. Taken as a whole, Rex assembled a quick-and-dirty narrative of four young men coming of age in a foreign land. Perhaps they knew some of the displaced families and sympathized with Hezbollah. Rex could see the wrong and right on both
sides of the question and, though privately he felt Hezbollah poked the bear in the hopes of Israel’s habitually Draconian reactions, it was the civilians who ultimately suffered.

  So, Hezbollah sympathizers return to America, are recruited together into the CIA, where they receive training and knowledge, and then they possibly aided Hezbollah during the war.

  But what since then?

  After their disappearance in Lebanon, the men were assigned at different stateside posts. Simon Rebelski was moved to Sylvia’s area, even though it would’ve been a significant demotion for him. That was apparently also a red flag to Sylvia. Attached to his file were reports to Human Resources about Rebelski’s inappropriate behavior. He was attempting to seduce Sylvia into complicity; all the while she kept records and made reports.

  Smart woman. If these were less ruthless people, she would’ve had her case built for her. Evidently, she began to realize that things weren’t working up the chain of command, because she’d locked the files and took them offline.

  Did she know that she would be murdered? No. If she’d known that, she would’ve sent the files somewhere, not simply stashed them.

  Not that any of that really mattered now.

  Rebelski had shortly been moved back into the field, along with the rest of the team, who had reformed after Sylvia’s death. To what end?

  Rex’s breath caught. Realization overwhelmed him.

  It was staring him in the face all along.

  Hezbollah claimed to have an anti-spy unit working in America, and now Rex knew exactly who comprised that unit.

  As Rex waited for Masters to arrive, he reread key points of data as he pieced together the motivations and timeline for presentation. Judging by the years during which the men were growing up in Lebanon, it was a safe guess the radical Al-Manar television network in their perceptions of the country. With opportunistic capitalists for parents, the boys’ natural teenage rebellion had perhaps taken the form of going native. It was a common enough temptation for even the best trained agent; a teenager couldn’t be expected to resist, especially when their parents were exploiting the boys’ war-torn neighbors and friends and the local news was telling them daily how wrong their parents were.

  While most Americans might find it difficult to understand how these men could ally themselves with militant Islam and the Hezbollah terrorist organization, Rex understood too well. In his time in the Middle East, he’d been struck constantly by the sense of order their society imposed, the certainty of their faith, the beauty of the people, their forbidding lands, and their dramatic architecture. For those who had never experienced it first hand, it might seem that it was a wasteland with nothing going for it but oil, but Rex could picture exactly what young Oliver, Simon, and Turner had felt there, their awe at an ancient land and its strong, unyielding people.

  Their role in this made perfect sense to Rex. To the Company, they’d have appeared ideal candidates for field agents. They knew the territory, the language, the customs, and their families were solid American businesspeople. What Rex didn’t understand was how Hawthorne had allowed these young people to become so twisted. The team had been hand-picked and carefully positioned, pawns on Hawthorne’s chess board.

  So who was moving Hawthorne, and why?

  Agents bore the weight of the world on their shoulders. It was they who paid the price in conscience and risk to bring balance to the world’s secret machinery. It was their willingness to assassinate, infiltrate, sabotage, and extract that ensured soldiers didn’t need to be deployed, that wars could be deferred, that civilians could carry on with their petty bullshit priorities undisturbed. They committed sins no other citizen could imagine, and they learned to bear the weight of those sins and the accompanying loneliness. No one else could ever understand the burden; an agent could only count on their handler to know the strain they labored under. That Hawthorne and his team were selling out their own sickened Rex like nothing he’d ever experienced.

  And not only had they given up their own overseas, letting Hezbollah capture other CIA spies, they had likely murdered Sylvia in Connecticut. It was appalling. Barnes would have murdered Ike—an innocent civilian, a Company analyst’s family—just a few miles from NYC HQ if Rex hadn’t stopped him.

  Rex had never felt so old.

  “Damnit!” Masters snapped.

  Rex looked up to see Masters rushing through the cube farm toward him, phone held to his face.

  “Fuck that. There’s cameras all around the building and you’re telling me you can’t even pin down which direction he went in?” A pause. “Then start in the probable vector and move out from there. Do you need instructions on ass wiping too?”

  Masters ended the call with his thumb. “Fucking cell phone age. Can’t even properly slam the fucking thing in its cradle anymore.”

  Rex nodded. There was no point in arguing or even adding to Masters’s rants. They were to be endured, not answered.

  Masters huffed and then led the way to his office. Once they were inside with the door closed, Masters took a seat. “Hawthorne and his team are in the wind. Asshole dumped his hard drive in the toilet. Forensics thinks they can recover it. Not that it matters at this point. We got plenty for detention of an indefinite term.”

  As raw as Rex felt about “indefinite detention” in general, he had to admit that this was the kind of scenario when it might be called for. “Do we have a plan, sir? Hawthorne tried to get me alone once I took delivery of the data. I don’t know what he planned, but it can’t be good.”

  As he said it, panic seized him. He swallowed it down, bitter and acidic, and said, “Do you think they’ll go after Ike?” Rex realized his mistake the moment the words were out of his mouth, but he kept going. “Mr. Graves may be in danger, and I am certain he is the one to whom we owe this wealth of information. We should dispatch appropriate personnel to ensure his continued safety.”

  Rex wanted to go himself, but he restrained the urge to beg; he was demanding enough already. Instead, he asked, “Do you need me here to coordinate efforts or did you want me on the ground?”

  Masters checked his watch, then looked over his shoulder and out the window. “Graves. Only reason to go after him at this point would be for spite. I don’t think Hawthorne’s the type to cry over spilled milk, but if it makes you feel better, you can make a run by his place, tuck him in.”

  Rex wished he could do just that: show up at Ike’s door, take him to bed, pull the blanket up around him and kiss him goodnight knowing he’d be safe. Despite the fact Rex no longer had a right to do anything of the kind, he wanted to hug Masters for giving him leeway. “Thank you, sir. I will maintain contact with HQ awaiting further guidance.”

  Masters’s office seemed more like a cage the longer Rex sat in it. He hesitated only another moment before rising and glancing at the door. Without waiting to be dismissed, he started toward it, the muscles between his shoulder blades tensing in anticipation of some parting shot.

  “Good job, Carver. I’ll be in touch if there’s any cause for you or yours to worry.” The way Masters said it seemed to imply so much, but if he looked at the man, he wouldn’t be able to read his expression, so he just kept going.

  Armed with a gun, knife, and smartphone, Rex parked his car across the street from Ike’s building. Hawthorne or his team could be anywhere, waiting, as bent on revenge as movie villains. Rex tried to discipline his thoughts and failed. He couldn’t stand the idea that something might happen to Ike before Rex could make things right with him.

  Is that even possible?

  A flash of movement captured Rex’s attention. He looked over in time to see Nate walk into the building. Jealousy like acid churned in Rex’s stomach, so powerful it supplanted fear, paranoia, and anger. His hatred toward the traitor-terrorist moles was dwarfed by his hatred toward Nate as Rex’s mind conjured any number of explicit scenarios playing out between Ike and his former bandmate.

  Minutes passed. An hour. Longer. Rex fought
the urge to storm up to Ike’s place and break down the door. Since he and Ike had parted ways, Rex had never seen him with a single prospective boyfriend or fucktoy. Now this joker was back in the picture.

  He’s mine, you slimy dickbag.

  It was irrational, but Rex couldn’t help it. With every breath, the clarion chant sounded between his ears: mine, mine, mine.

  Rex dozed in his car. It was early morning when time caught up with him. He checked his phone, but there were no messages. No word from Masters.

  He stared at the shadows surrounding the entrance to Ike’s place and wondered whether Nate had any idea what he was missing. Nate insisted he be “the man” in that relationship, but Rex doubted he realized how good Ike could be. Though it turned his stomach and made his chest ache, Rex tried to picture Nate surrendering to the same irresistible animal pull that had captured Rex.

  Something about Ike compelled it, Rex thought. How could anyone else fight what Rex couldn’t? He’d been trained to resist that kind of stuff, after all. Ordinary people should be stripping naked and falling at Ike’s feet, begging to be taken. As Rex thought that, he half-expected a crowd to form below Ike’s windows, yowling like cats in heat. In his half-awake state, it seemed strange to Rex that they didn’t.

  “Ugh, pull it together,” he muttered as he fumbled in the glove compartment for some pills to help him stay alert. He should have taken them the night before. Now he didn’t even know when or if Nate had left.

  This is supposed to be about Hawthorne.

  But Masters was right. Ike wouldn’t be Hawthorne’s objective. Rex frowned, tensing up as the chemicals infiltrated his brain. After a bit, he could formulate plans, articulate complex thoughts, focus. He picked up the phone to call Masters with his own update.

  I’m going to find that asshole Hawthorne, and when I do...