by Brad Taylor
They ordered their pizza and struck up a conversation with a couple of foreign backpackers new to the island. On their way to Australia, they had only a day to spend but had still managed to find the little slice of heaven at the top of Okinawa. They asked for further things to explore and McKinley was more than willing to play tour guide. While paying the bill, he agreed to lead them to the Okinawa Aquarium just fifteen minutes away.
They never made it.
Captain McKinley Clute’s car wasn’t found for two days, lodged in a ditch on a winding dirt road. The Okinawan police and Camp Butler Provost Marshal questioned everyone in the surrounding area but came up with nothing. The Clute twins had disappeared without a trace. The only lead was a couple of Irishmen who had been seen talking to them at a pizza joint a mile away.
All attempts to locate them for questioning failed.
* * *
Governor Rachel Deleon speed-walked to her car to get out of the crisp winter air. The driver, a sergeant in the Texas Department of Public Safety, opened her door. She said, “Bill, take the long way in. I’m expecting a call.”
He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and closed the door.
As the governor of Texas, she had a mansion within spitting distance of the capitol, but instead of a convenience, the closeness made her feel as if the job never left. In reality, it didn’t leave no matter where she went, but she preferred her house on West Lake.
As the most powerful person in one of the largest states, she had defied the odds to achieve the position. Right off the bat, she was a female fighting in a man’s world. To make matters worse, she wasn’t classically beautiful. In fact, she was downright homely, something that every campaign manager she’d ever known said made her dead on arrival. She had fought a vicious campaign on the usual issues separating the parties and would have lost handily, but she had a couple of assets that nobody else in the running could tear down.
For one, she was Hispanic in heritage, which in Texas could do quite a bit to counterbalance her less than telegenic appearance. But it wasn’t enough. She needed the dyed-in-the-wool conservative vote from the people who were scared of that very heritage. People who might believe she had an agenda related to the immigrants swimming across the Rio Grande, which is where her husband came in.
A fifth-generation Texan, he was also a lieutenant colonel in the Texas Army National Guard. A veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Never mind that his military specialty was public affairs, and that he’d not once heard a shot fired in anger. Not once left the perimeter of Balad and Bagram Air Bases. The fact that his job was no more dangerous than a publicist at a corporation was irrelevant. He was a war hero. A veteran. And that title had proved decisive.
Currently, he was on temporary duty with the Texas Adjutant General at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, helping craft some deployment schedule or other thing. He’d promised to call at lunch, and given the seven-hour time difference, that meant she could take it on her way to work.
They turned onto Guadalupe Street, the dome of the capitol coming into view, and she began to wonder if she was going to miss the call. Paralleling the University of Texas, she started to tell her driver to turn onto MLK Boulevard and circle the school when her phone rang.
She said, “Finally! I thought I was going to miss you. Headed into work?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, the general bumped up a meeting, so I’ve only got a second. How’s life in the music capital?”
“Still ticking. Usual fights. That asshole Reese is talking about investigating our stock purchase into Dell again. Nothing I can’t handle.”
She heard him say, “What the hell,” then, “Hang on, honey, there’s some sort of accident. These cops are death on cells while driving.”
The phone went silent, then she heard her husband’s voice as if spoken from a distance. The other party was muffled and inaudible.
—“Officer, you speak English?”
—“Huh. Sorry about that. No insult intended. I never expected to hear that accent. Can I get through here?”
Her husband’s voice grew strident, the cell signal strong enough for Rachel to sense the fear.
—“Hey, what the hell are you doing? Don’t . . . no, wait!”
She heard him scream and she began shouting into the phone, causing her driver to whip his head toward the backseat.
Her husband didn’t respond. The only sound coming over the line was a car door slamming.
* * *
Airman First Class Curtis Oglethorpe bounced his beat-up jeep down the road, pushing it faster than was safe. Well, safe for the jeep, that is. As for Curtis, he needed to get off the lonely highway leading from Soto Cano Air Base to Tegucigalpa, the nearest city to his miserable station.
An air traffic controller for Joint Task Force–Bravo, he’d paid his roommate to take his shift, which wasn’t exactly kosher as far as the chain of command went. But then again, Curtis never found the rules worth following. Far from it, he was what was known in military parlance as a shitbag. The guy who could always be depended on to disappear whenever extra duty came around. Which gave his father no small amount of fits.
The son of the current secretary of defense, Curtis had been given everything—the proverbial silver spoon jammed up his ass from birth—and had done everything in his power to reject it. Not out of any pride in making his way on his own, but simply out of laziness. When he’d failed out of Dartmouth—a school that had been no mean feat to get him into in the first place—his father had had enough. He’d told Curtis in no uncertain terms he was joining the military or getting cut off.
Being a little bit of a coward at heart, Curtis had agreed, searching out the least “military” occupational specialty he could find, eventually settling for air traffic controller in the Air Force. The recruiter had told him it was all gravy, with nothing but stateside assignments and nine-to-five work, then he’d been shipped off to JTF–Bravo in the stinking jungles of Honduras, controlling flights targeted against the drug trade, along with a multitude of other taskings.
Not his idea of the cush life promised by the recruiter.
The work was grinding, and the base grew tiresome within a month. He’d spent every waking moment he could haunting the bars in Tegucigalpa, searching for some companionship. In that, he’d failed, with the women seeming to smell the broken promises in his DNA. He’d started hunting Honduran women in Internet chat rooms and had found one who had taken a liking to him. So much so she’d agreed to meet him in Tegucigalpa at a place called the Bull Bar. The catch was he had to come tonight. Which meant he had to get out of his shift. Which also meant he had to get off the two-lane highway that led to the city.
JTF–Bravo was a small place, and if he passed anyone coming back from Tegucigalpa, they’d recognize his jeep. Then realize he was supposed to be on duty right now. And that wouldn’t be a good thing.
The old jeep groaned down the road, the suspension complaining at every pothole, the rusted holes in the body whistling with the wind. Curtis fought the vehicle, straining to keep the four wheels on the rutted blacktop at a speed that caused the jeep to become nearly unstable. He began to pass houses, then side streets, then entered the city itself, breathing a sigh of relief.
He wound through the small town to his rendezvous at the Bull Bar, the fear of getting caught now replaced with the hormones of getting laid. He parked out front and took a quick look in the mirror, smoothing back his longer-than-regulation hair, then sauntered inside.
It was fairly early, the sun still in the sky, and the bar looked old and worn without the cloak of darkness. But Curtis cared little about ambiance. His head on a swivel, he looked from the bar to the tables, finally settling his eyes on the mechanical bull in the corner. He saw nothing but a couple of males at the bar sipping whiskey out of highball glasses.
He approached and took a seat on a stool, seeing the men wer
e inebriated. He turned back to the door, and one leaned over to him, saying, “Where you from, bud?”
He heard the accent but couldn’t place it. He said, “America. You?”
“America! Land of the free! Home of the brave! We just came from there. We’re from Dublin, on the great Emerald Isle.”
“Emerald Isle?”
“Ireland, friend, Ireland. The land of the leprechauns. Let me buy you a drink.”
Curtis took another glance around the bar, still not seeing what he wanted. He said, “Sure. Whatever you’re having.”
“Irish whiskey. What else? Although the bog down here isn’t exactly pedigreed.”
The bartender poured and his new friend picked it up, turning a complete circle to hand it to him, staggering as he did so. Curtis took a sip and nodded. “Good stuff.”
The Irishman clinked his glass and said, “Who are you here to meet?”
“Supposed to hook up with a girl here.”
“A horny little lass? Some hot Honduran gee?” He gave a drunken wink, and Curtis took another sip, wondering how he was going to break contact from the sots when his date showed up.
Curtis said, “Well, I just met her online . . .” He stopped, unable to continue his train of thought, his head beginning to swim. What the hell? I only had two sips.
He focused on the Irishman and saw double, the room starting to swim. The Irishman said, “What’s the girl’s name? Is it Esmeralda?”
His head was spinning, and he was fighting the bar stool as if he was riding the mechanical bull in the corner. The only thing that penetrated was the name.
Woozily, he said, “You know her?”
“Yes. I do.” The Irishman smiled, not looking nearly as drunk as he had a moment ago. “Sorry, bud. She’s not coming.”
Curtis started to slide off the stool and felt someone grab both of his arms. Then he felt nothing.
DAY FOUR
The Panic
5
Colonel Kurt Hale could barely make out the words through the sobbing in the phone, the hitches of his sister’s voice making her incoherent.
“Kathy, calm down. Take a deep breath. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
He heard sniffling and looked at his watch. Running out of time.
“Kathy, listen, I have a meeting I have to be at in thirty minutes and it’s all the way across town. I’ll give you a call back when I’m done.”
The hitches stopped and he felt the heat through the phone. “Meeting? I’m talking about your niece. She could be lying in a ditch or dead. Jesus Christ, she loves you better than her own father, and you’re not even giving her the time of day.”
“Okay, okay, calm down. What’s he doing about it? Did you call him?”
He knew the answer before she even spoke. Kathy’s ex-husband, a Wall Street bond trader, was a philandering, narcissistic jerk. Kurt had always wanted to punch the smirk off his face, but it had taken Kathy five years to figure out his true stripes. Kathy now used him only to provide for her daughter, like paying for Kylie’s student exchange to England.
“That asshole just offered money. He can’t do anything anyway.”
“Kathy, neither can I.”
“Bullshit! You work for the CIA or something. You can find her. You’re the only person I know. Nobody else cares. Maybe you don’t either.”
He rolled his eyes up in frustration. He loved his sister dearly, but her views on how the world worked were distinctly different from his. She was a pacifist, to the point that it had taken seven long years before she’d even speak to him again after he’d joined the Army. When he started working in classified assignments, she naturally defaulted to thinking he was some Black Ops assassin and—even when he told her he was in a Special Forces unit—she believed it to be the CIA. She believed everything was the CIA. For twenty years he’d listened to her conspiracy theories, and, ironically, if he told her what he was doing now, all her fears would be realized.
He deflected the line of discussion, saying, “Kathy, look, it’s only been twenty-four hours. There’s probably a simple explanation. Maybe she’s just out partying. Shit, she’s grown up now. A college kid. You remember what that was like.”
“Kurt, that line of BS would work when we were her age, but not now. She’s got a cell phone, Instagram, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Lord knows how many other means of communication. All of them have been stagnant. Her cell phone goes straight to voice mail, and she’s not posted a thing when she usually does that four or five times a day.”
Which were the first words his sister had said that made Kurt pause. The first clear signal that this wasn’t a college drunken blackout.
Kathy spoke again, the rage gone, replaced by fear. “Kurt, I don’t know anyone else to call. She’s not important enough for anyone to care. She’s just another lost American. And she’s in trouble. I know it as a mother. You’ve got to help me. I have no one else.”
He said nothing for a moment, then: “Okay, Kathy. Send me an email with all of her information. Don’t forget all that social media stuff. Let me get this meeting over with and I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
Driving across the Key Bridge, George Wolffe finally broke the silence. “Hey, you going to let me in on what’s going through that head? You thinking about those missing soldiers, or are you finally accepting what happened to Pike? Still time to change your mind on this brief.”
Interrupted from his trance, Kurt faked a grin and said, “No, nothing like that. Just some personal stuff.”
“Personal? Last I saw you had no life outside of this organization. You seeing someone? After my forty-two attempts at a setup? Marge is going to be pissed.”
This time Kurt grinned for real. Wolffe was the deputy commander of the Taskforce—Kurt Hale’s number two. Like Kurt, he’d basically torpedoed his career to create and help command Project Prometheus, the thrill of the mission much more attractive than the potential future rank. Unlike Kurt, he had a family to come home to, complete with a wife who took pity on the vaunted Taskforce Commander, trying to set him up with every middle-aged divorcée she could find.
Kurt said, “It’s not like that. It’s some trouble with my sister. Nothing like the trouble Pike is in.”
George continued in silence for a moment, weaving through the downtown DC traffic, then said, “You know, falling on your sword is so 1990s. The nobility of sticking to your convictions doesn’t fly anymore.”
Kurt said, “Tough shit. It flies in our organization. It’s what makes our organization what it is.”
“Kurt, I get the military code, but you don’t know this place like I do. That code is fine on the battlefield, when bullets are flying. This battlefield is all about what have you done for me lately.”
Unlike Kurt—who’d grown up in special-mission units in the Department of Defense—George was CIA. As such, he had lived through quite a few purges and witch hunts, all looking to hang good men for a petty political edge.
George turned from the wheel and caught Kurt’s eye. “This isn’t going anywhere. All you’ll do is cause a lack of trust in your judgment. You defend Pike and they’re going to think you agree with what he did. Agree that ignoring their orders is okay. Which will cause them to question you on everything you bring forward. Think about that.”
Kurt reflected a moment, then said, “Trust is the cornerstone of our organization. Faith is how we operate. Faith that the Operator will do the right thing. Pike was the man on the ground. We were a thousand miles away. He ignored Oversight Council orders and made a call. It ended up being correct. He saved tens of thousands of lives at great risk to himself. I will not destroy him because a bunch of political animals now find it expedient.”
“Kurt, he went on the warpath over Decoy’s death. He lucked into the thread of the WMD by hunting
the Russians. He wanted to kill those men, and he did. You have to see that. He cannot be controlled. Even you couldn’t control him.”
“He didn’t luck into shit.”
“What’s that mean?”
Kurt looked at his trusted friend and said what he thought would never be uttered. “I let him off the chain.”
“What? Are you saying you gave him permission?”
Kurt sagged in the seat and said, “No. Not in so many words. But I knew what he would do, and I didn’t stop him. He would have listened to me. I let him go. Hell, I gave him assets to do so.”
“Jesus. Kurt, you can’t say that. That is not a defense. That will destroy the Taskforce.”
Kurt smiled. “Calm down. I never thought I’d say those words out loud, and I’m certainly not going to tell the Council. I’m not even sure Pike realizes how I felt. Look, the Oversight Council is a necessary thing to keep us in check, but he’s what’s right in our organization. And I’ll defend what’s right.”
6
They rolled into the security checkpoint for the West Wing of the White House, the granite monolith of the Old Executive Office Building off to the left. Alexander Palmer, the president’s national security advisor—one of about a dozen read onto the Taskforce—had been promising for years to get the Oversight Council a permanent home, but so far the Council members still trekked inside the same building like a multitude of other government employees. It made Kurt skittish, because sooner or later someone was going to ask what the hell the top secret meetings were about. All it would take was one NSC staffer to speculate, and The Washington Post would go into a frenzy.
Trudging up the stairs, Kurt began to rehearse what he was going to say. George had said Kurt was naïve to the ways inside the Beltway, but that wasn’t the case. He understood completely what he was facing, including who was an ally and who was an enemy. He needed to massage both.
