by Chuck Logan
She turns from the mirror, shuffles across the room, and sits cross-legged on the bed to test the stiffness in her knee. Every movement is an effort because the drugs they’re giving her have turned her blood to sluggish, lead-based syrup.
As best she can, she focuses her attention on the doorway and tries to make Marge and Toby and Laura appear and walk through it.
When waiting doesn’t work, she tries hope. Failing that, she employs a kind of bargaining that in childhood passed for prayer. The hospital’s a big place. They gotta be here somewhere. There are flickers of aching memory—these acoustic, visual shadows that swirl up, sharply etched in the fog. All of them together, joking on the flight line, gearing up. Toby bitching about taking estrogen pills . . .
Slowly she appreciates the dimensions of a new fear, almost as if the more lucid she becomes the more she rubs up against something more terrifying than the hallucinations. Compared to this new fear, the seizures were like grotesque bubbles detaching and floating away. This is the opposite and obeys the laws of gravity, like a crippled helicopter crashing to earth. It’s a permanent seizure.
It’s reality. And reality comes with a raw, ferrous dirt aftertaste that coats her mouth and tells her they won’t be coming through the door. But she can’t remember exactly why. And then it hits her full-force. Did she screw up? Is it her fault Marge and Laura and Toby can’t walk through the door? Is that what they’re keeping from her?
A new sensation clamps her chest and stops her breath and punches right through the drugged grief and shoots past panic or mere fear or civilan clichés about right and wrong. For one pure, insane moment, Jesse dangles, all alone, in deep space on the meat hook of the ultimate military sin. Did you let your buddies down? When no one’s watching, she turns into her pillow and sobs.
The notion has a black, bottomless quality that could swallow her forever, and the only thing that pulls her back from the brink is noticing her finger compulsively tracing on the bedsheet—over and over—the shape of a five-pointed star. And it occurs to her . . .
Gotta fight back, gotta work the problem. Gotta steal a pen and some paper.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Thirteen miles southwest of Baltimore, Joe Davis guides his government-car-pool Crown Vic off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway onto the exit marked NSA Employees Only, then cruises down Route 32 toward the gleaming glass-walled headquarters building of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade.
His eyes look like he rinsed them in V8 juice behind his sunglasses because he was up too late meditating with a bottle and his mouth is parched because he’s been smoking too much.
His conversation with Mr. Jack Daniel’s concerned the phone call he’d made to special agent Bobby Appert’s personal cell right after he returned from Memphis. To his voice mail, actually. Calling Appert was going off the reservation; Mouse would not approve. Besides, his parting with Appert had cast a cryptic shadow in the 100-degree sauna of a Baghdad afternoon more than a month ago.
The farewell handshake had been pro forma. Appert, being old-time and uptight, probably believed the stories going round that Davis was dirty. The message he’d left inquired whether it was normal procedure for an Agent Mueller out of the Memphis office to question Richard Noland’s ex-wife about receiving communication from drive-by kidnappers in Iraq. Did the Bureau really think Noland was still alive? That was five days ago, and total radio silence reigns on his cell phone and in his email.
Mouse wouldn’t approve because Davis had no official status to initiate contact with a federal agency. His carefully crafted deep-cover persona was supposed to look “dirty” and Sphinx-like and indistinguishable from the sewage he sometimes swam in. And Mouse thought the blowout at Turmar was a nonstarter anyway.
Davis didn’t.
After talking to Sally Noland he was encouraged in his suspicion that something was going on.
Waiting on Appert to call, he’d made a check at Walter Reed, where a receptionist informed him that Captain Kraig was no longer on the neurology ward. She had been kicked down the VA pipeline, and her whereabouts were a matter of patient confidentiality to non–family members. The information was not unexpected but still hit him like a leftover pail of cold Tennessee rain.
Now it’s time to slow for the gate guard, and so he pulls out his temporary NSA ID card that describes him as a “special consultant.” The guard waves him through, and he drives to the nondescript building at the back of the campus and parks. With a large triple-espresso Black Eye for company, he rides the elevator to the subbasement and angles between cubicles occupied by mathematicians staring at video screens. There’s just a conventional lock on the temporary office door, and Davis is convinced it used to be a laundry room. He turns his key and goes in, removes his sunglasses and his sports jacket, and slings his shoulder holster on the corner of the chair.
He sits down and is taking his second sip of coffee when a tentative tap sounds on his door jam. This roundish fellow wearing rimless spectacles stands in the doorway peering at him. “Ah, Mr. Davis, if you’re going to leave your door open, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t leave the, ah, gun hanging there. It, ah, distracts some of my colleagues.”
“Sure,” Davis says, grabbing the holstered .45 and shoving it in a desk drawer. “And I’d appreciate it especially this morning if you boys didn’t plunk the keyboards so hard. I had a rough night.”
The gnomish crypy withdraws, pulling the door shut behind him.
For a moment he puzzles over his email queue, which is totally empty, then he leans back in his swivel chair trying to read his future in a water stain on the ceiling.
He twirls the chair and studies a poster on the wall that he calls his tongue-in-cheek “mission statement.” It portrays a skinny, spectacled man in uniform who resembles Congressman Ron Paul from Texas. The paragraph underneath the picture proclaims in bold type:
I spent 33 years and four months in military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business. For Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interest in 1914 . . . .
The last three sentences read:
Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his rackets in three districts. I operated on three continents.
War Is a Racket, 1935
—Major General Smedley Butler, former Commandant, United States Marine Corps, recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor.
He raises his Black Eye in a toast to Butler—two ex-jarheads who’ve reached similar conclusions—and then glances at the silent cell phone laying open on his desk. It goes without saying that Special Agent Appert would not approve.
And he wonders if, down deep, Mouse harbors the same sentiments. Then, hearing the door crack open, he looks up and sees Mouse standing in the doorway looking truly scary in a dark-blue three-piece pinstripe suit and polished Allen Edmonds.
“Mouse? Damn, man; I was just thinking of you.”
“Yeah, it’s a burden, this psychic thing.”
“What’s up?”
“Not much, just somebody did a search of your records. All your records. So I shit-canned your emails as a precaution.”
“I noticed. I thought my emails were encrypted?”
“Exactly. Meet me in the parking lot. And Joey, bring your stuff.” Then Mouse saunters off down the row of cubicles.
Davis spins his chair. Bring your stuff. He retrieves his gun from the drawer and straps it on and bids farewell to his spiritual mentor, Smedley.
Across the grounds, the main building’s window glass scintillates like a square blue bonfire in the morning heat. Maury the Mouse stands in the sun fifty feet from the front door like the No Smoking sign on Davis’ outbuilding specifies. “Act natural,” he says as he peels the wrapper on a Snickers.
“Why are we standing out here in the open?”
“I got some guys I trust watching to see who may be watching us.”
“Great. Who’s digging around in my file?”
“No clue. Relax.”
So he relaxes and takes out his American Spirits.
“Those things will kill you,” Mouse says as he pushes half the candy bar into his mouth.
“And that stuff won’t?” Davis points at the gooey chocolate. “These are natural tobacco, no additives, like health food.” His eyes are sectioning and tracking around the lot.
“I said relax,” Mouse says. Another reason Maury got his nickname “Mouse” is because of his large ears—a foreshadowing of his future as an international and now domestic eavesdropper. Mouse has the junk-food pallor of a kid who was in the basement playing Dungeons and Dragons and taking apart computers when his peers where learning to swing a baseball bat. He runs one of the top floors in the big building.
“So how was your vacation?” After they exchange frank stares, Mouse says, “You know if I can track your flight reservations off your MasterCard, so can anybody. I’m going to need your badge after you leave the reservation. You’re going away, Joey.”
“How far away?” Davis asks.
“Whole-new-identity away. Presto-chango. Tap of a key. Governments fall. Task forces melt away. Those on the outs are now on the in,” Mouse says with an enigmatic grin.
“Christ, are we being monitored right now?” Davis wonders.
Mouse stabs a pudgy finger at the sky and says, “Hundred-fifty miles thataway we got a satellite that can watch flies copulate under the morning dew.”
“So you gonna tell me?” Davis asks.
Mouse shrugs. “No rush, but if I were you, I’d start repacking my parachute, like in about an hour, because somebody is fucking with our thing . . .” He winks, mouthing the words like a Mafia don, which, in a way, he is. “I suggest you relocate your ass, posthaste, to someplace that does not fit your daily travel pattern.” Mouse swipes a dollop of chocolate from the corner of his mouth with a finger. “So just finish your smoke, then let’s walk to your car, drive through the gate, and hand over your ID card. I get out, and you head for a black hole. Ditch the wheels, don’t go back to the place.” He hands Davis a cell phone with a car and wall charger.
“What’s this?”
“Cold phone, so we can communicate.” Then he hands over a key with a numbered fob and the address of a Baltimore storage company. “I’m throwing this together kind of fast, but it’s time for you to reinvent yourself and lay low. But hang on to your wallet for the time being. Clear?”
Davis narrows his eyes, “Clear. What’s going down?”
“What’s going down is I can be wrong. I overlooked your take on getting booted out of the Sandbox, but you poking around in Memphis stirred up some kind of hornet’s nest. So what exactly did you pull out of Noland’s old lady?”
“Only that he was hungry to score, and before he vanished he told her he was on to something really big.”
“Really big, huh? The day after you talked to her, this trip wire I built into your bio data lit up. Somebody really big is checking you out, Joey.”
“Define ‘really big.’”
“Like hiding behind counterterror encryption I’ve never seen before. Which means they could be checking us out, what we do.” He pauses. “Oh, and they gave you the runaround at Reed about the pilot? She’s been sent to Minneapolis.”
“You have been monitoring my calls.”
“I’ve been monitoring your breathing.”
“So?”
“So, like I said, could be you stumbled into something at Turmar and they don’t like you going around like a loose cannon with the questions. Now these fuckers think they can brush us off, so we’re gonna find out who’s better in the black, them or us.” He winks again. “You’re gonna start earning your pay. Like General Crook said, takes an Apache to catch an Apache, huh, Joey?”
“Sure, boss, but when you get right down to it, there’s like . . .” Davis looks around, “. . . just you and me and maybe Appert.”
“Yeah,” Mouse smiles. “I already feel sorry for the poor dumb bastards who are after us.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sometimes, like now, Morgon Jump almost believes he has insomniac goblins on patrol in his sleep, who “heard” the lights go on in the Rivard mansion across the lawn from his carriage-house apartment. He sits up in bed carefully, so as not to disturb Amanda Rivard, who curls at his side. But she stirs at his movement and wonders in a foggy voice, “What is it?”
“Shhh. Nothing,” he says. “Go back to sleep.”
As she sinks to her pillow, he gets out of bed, pulls on a robe, and picks his way to the balcony door. Outside, he pulls the robe tighter around his chest. It was unseasonably cold last night in Rivard County on the Michigan shore of Lake Huron, so this May morning the grass and shrubs shimmer with a faint patina of frost.
The Rivard mansion grins in the dark like a broken-toothed jack-o’-lantern as lights pop on helter skelter—John’s upstairs bedroom, Kelly’s room, the stairway, the downstairs hall, the kitchen. Morgon’s first concern is that the old man is having a medical emergency. Then he hears John’s voice carry through the chilly air. The rhythm of the coded profanity suggests he’s yelling into a phone. Morgon checks his watch. Calls at quarter after four in the morning are not supposed to happen in John Rivard’s carefully scripted world.
And helicopters aren’t supposed to appear out of nowhere and crash in the middle of Morgon’s missions.
Not “nothing,” like he had told Amanda. Something’s wrong.
So Morgon sits on the balcony stairs and lights a Camel and watches the stages of alarm play out. Kelly Ortiz jogs down the front steps, fires up the golf cart, and putts off across the estate lawn toward the hangar where he keeps his Bell helicopter. In minutes Morgon hears the turbines whine and props start to turn. Kelly is rushing his preflight checks. Minutes later he’s back with the cart as John stumps down the stairs punctuating every step with a frustrated stab of his cane. He gets in the cart, they bump off into the night, and a few minutes later the chopper’s landing lights rise above the hangar and rotor off to the west, in the direction of the Traverse City Airport.
Morgon shifts on the cold balcony steps and takes a meditative drag on his smoke. John’s sense of privacy predates the plummy nostalgia of gentlemen who didn’t read each other’s mail. No one reads John’s mail because he doesn’t allow anything to be written down. Or be spoken on insecure or even—ideally—secure voice communication. All business is conducted strictly face-to-face.
Morgon can visualize what will happen. A nondescript man waits at a flimsy table in a food court at the Traverse City Airport. He comes from an office hidden in a subbasement below CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Morgon has never seen one of these couriers or the office he comes from. The joke in the Agency’s Special Activities Division used to be that if the office had a designation it would be called the Bureau of Perfect Crimes. It’s where they pick Morgon’s targets.
Worrying about it won’t speed John’s return, so Morgon goes down the stairs, enters the garage below the carriage house, and selects his work clothes from a locker. Once dressed, he walks across the sweep of manicured lawn and mist-jeweled shrubs to the three-story Victorian with a wraparound veranda. Now there’s a hush of ocher in the purple mist, enough light for the house to strike a Gothic silhouette spiked with gables and turrets and frets of gingerbread.
As John is fond of saying, “After my grandfather had his fill of killing Rebels, he came home from the war and proceeded to kill all the trees in northern Michigan. By 1880 he was timber-rich enough to build this Queen Anne monstrosity.”
And Morgon, who started out barefoot wearing hand-me-downs in Greenwood, Mississippi, muses that some of those Rebels were undoubtedly his wretched-ass ancestors.
Irony is one of the concepts he didn’t really learn to appreciate until the Agency attached
him to old John Rivard as his personal bodyguard, which is cover employment for his real job of carrying out the lethal wishes of that nonexistent office in Langley, Virginia.
He goes in and finds half a pot of hurried coffee remaining in the kitchen, so he pours a thermos cup full and goes back outside to watch a gloomy sunrise smudge the wall of mist that rolls in off the lake. Sipping his coffee, he watches a Chevy Suburban ease up the driveway. Martha Mundt gets out. She’s a cheerful, stout woman who has kept house for the Rivard family for the last ten years. Her white-haired husband, Carl, waves from behind the wheel. Carl maintains the grounds.
“The bird’s gone,” Carl says, nodding toward the hangar.
“John was called away,” Morgon explains. Then to Martha, he says, “I’m sure he’ll appreciate some strong coffee when he gets back.”
Carl leans out the driver’s-side window and nods to Amanda, who has appeared on the carriage-house balcony drawing a brush through the sable hair that falls past her shoulders. She wears a red silk kimono Morgon picked up years ago in Manila that, on her, looks like a prop in an ad for something expensive. Carl’s smile is differential as he turns back to Morgon and muses, “The way you’re settling in here, you might have found a home.”
“Could be.” Morgon won’t argue the point.
Then Carl points at Morgon’s steel-toed boots. “You thinking of getting back on your rock pile?”
“Yes, sir. Soon as there’s enough light.”
Working with stone is the only release he truly enjoys. Feeling the weight and heft in his hands is like touching centuries of permanence and deep silence. Stone is what’s left standing after everything else dies.
There’s enough nip in the air for Morgon to see his breath ghost out in a white blur and dissolve into the pewter mist. He’s panting in rhythm with the rolling surf as he lifts a chunk of limestone. A cubic foot of limestone weighs around 160 pounds, and this stone rectangle is close to twice that size. The weight sings in the flat muscles of his arms and shoulders and gut and legs and tests the limits of his strength.
