At West Falls Church, a small crowd of students got on, groups and pairs returning to Marymount University from Fairfax’s restaurants and bars. Most had the same reaction as the woman with the baby. But one girl lingered despite the urgings of a friend. Small. Korean, if Ben could guess by the urgent whispers of the girl tugging at her elbow.
The one who’d lingered responded to her friend in an even tone and gently pulled her arm free. She carried a cane but never let it touch the car floor as she crossed the aisle and took the seat next to Ben—on his right, not his good side. No hood could hide the blotches there.
He turned his face away lest he frighten her and make her regret her choice, masking the move by pretending to sip from his paper coffee cup.
The doors closed. The car moved on in silence, and another stop went by. More students boarded, murmuring to each other and avoiding Ben to join the growing crowd at the car’s rear. After a while, curiosity got the better of him. “You’re not scared?” he asked his seatmate in a rasp. He hardly recognized his own voice.
“My friend says I should be. But she worries too much. Most people do.” The girl didn’t turn her head when she spoke. Her gaze remained level, unfixed.
Ben risked a closer look.
“Yes. It’s true. You’re sitting next to a blind woman. So now, are you scared?”
He laughed, descending into a coughing fit, and buried his head in his arm. “I’m sorry.”
“No problem. I’ve already had the virus.”
“Different disease.”
“Drug addiction? This is what my friend Seo-yun assumed.”
“No.” Ben shook his head, as if she could see him in their reflections in the car window. “I didn’t do this to myself.”
“Thus, the opposite must be true, or so your tone implies. This was done to you. An injustice.”
He faced her directly. She couldn’t see his Day of the Dead mask anyway. “You sound like a philosophy major. At Rice, I used to hate talking to the philosophy majors.”
“Psychology.”
“Even better. Are you charging me for this talk?”
“Not tonight. The first hour is free.”
Ben managed a smile. He liked this young woman. In a different time, he might have tried to recruit her for the Company.
She didn’t let up. The girl planted her cane on the floor and rested her small arms on the head. “Back to you . . .”
“Ben.”
“Thank you. And I’m Ha-eun. Please, Ben, tell me more about this injustice you suffered.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Ben’s woes, substantial as they were, faded in the serene face of a blind girl. “How did you lose your sight?”
“A birth defect. I’ve never known a sunset except for the coolness in the air when the light is gone. I’ve never seen the leaves change in fall. Those things are abstract to me.”
“And isn’t that an . . . an injustice, as you say? Don’t you deserve better?”
“What, truly, do any of us deserve?” She laid three fingers on his knee.
A simple touch, a gesture to emphasize her words, but Ben had not imagined anyone ever touching him again. Not even Tess had been willing to touch him.
“I battled anger for many years,” Ha-eun said. “I raged against the injustice of my life, until finally my mother begged me to stop. I will tell you what she told me. Stop asking what you deserve, Ben. Try asking, ‘What is my purpose?’”
Ben waited, but she didn’t continue. And despite the danger, death, and nation-ending threat that should have dominated his thoughts, he found himself pushing her to go on for fear they might reach her stop before she gave him the answer. “So, what is your purpose, Ha-eun?”
“I don’t know yet. But I keep busy by seeking that purpose each day. For instance, tonight I think my purpose is to sit beside a wronged man on a train.”
A robotic voice announced their arrival at Ballston-MU Station, and the car slowed to a stop. Ha-eun pushed herself up with the cane and felt for Ben’s hood. Tentatively, he guided her hand, and she peeled the hood back to rest her delicate fingers in his hair.
“Be well, Ben,” she said, then joined her friends and left.
67
No thief or spy ever broke into Arlington National Cemetery. There’d never been a need. The walls were too low. Ben tossed his paper cup at a street receptacle and stepped over an eighteen-inch stone barrier, then wandered southwest into the graves. He knew the place well. He’d buried two friends there, men whose military service was a matter of public record. Their Company service—not so much.
He passed the fourteen-foot Greek obelisk memorializing Howard Taft and passed JFK’s giant circle. Neither of his friends’ graves was near these monuments. The foot soldiers of America were lost in the great ordered sea of white stones farther south. Ben altered his course to join them.
The wide swath of grass and graves where Ben stopped to wait offered plenty of visibility, and the patches of dogwoods and magnolias provided enough cover to keep the Director’s security detail happy. Ben didn’t concern himself with the cemetery’s roving guards. If one appeared from the trees to challenge him, he’d know the Director hadn’t come, and there’d be little point in going on with his journey. None did. The only guard in sight marched in slow, even time before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier a hundred fifty meters away.
The moon had reached its peak, giving the gravestones their own luminescence. Ben scanned the rows. The night, the stones, the tomb sentinel reaching the limit of his post—all stood still.
“Calix!” The voice rolled from the dogwoods like thunder. The Director followed, still shouting. “Who do you think you are?”
Men and women in dark suits and overcoats emerged from the trees to the north, south, and east—seven that Ben could see, all carrying Swiss APC9 submachine guns and not shy about letting them show. They formed a circle around him.
Ben felt the weight of the SIG in his waistband holster, but he kept his hands well clear, out in the open despite the biting cold. He’d hate to get riddled with lead before speaking his piece.
The Director turned up the collar of his gray wool coat, breath fogging as he spoke. “Son, when I ask you a question, you answer. Who do you think you are, summoning me in the middle of night?”
“Sir, there’s—”
“Speak up!”
Ben coughed, fighting to recover at least a portion of his voice. “There’s . . . there’s been a mistake. My severance. It’s . . .” He faltered again, and the Director’s glare threatened to shove every rasping word back into his mouth, but he had to get it out. “It’s wrong, sir.”
“I see. Well, why didn’t you say so before?” The Director paced the circle of his detail, matching cadence with the sentinel at the tomb. As he passed Ben’s shoulder, he barked, “Stand up straight and face me like a man. Or have you forgotten all your training?”
Ben turned.
So did the Director. “You’re leveling quite an accusation, son.”
“No, sir. I didn’t mean to—”
“Oh, yes.” The Director pressed his lips together, cocking his head. “I think you did. The words you used were clear. Mistake. Wrong. You’ve questioned my actions, not just to my face but to several of my subordinates. So, now I’m here. Let’s hash this out.” He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, weighing it down about his shoulders, and thrust his chin at Ben. “Think of me as a walking suggestion box. No consequences. File your complaint.”
No consequences? That didn’t sound right. But what else could the Director do to him?
“I . . .” The words refused to come. All that time—begging Sensen, Hale, Tess, and Dylan to get him this meeting—and now the disease eating Ben’s body and clouding his mind robbed him of his last words.
“Clock’s ticking, son.” The Director tapped a wrist with no watch. “Spit it out.”
“Unjust.”
“Couldn’t hear you. Louder, please.
”
Ben raised his eyes to meet his boss’s hard glare. “I said, it’s unjust, sir. This whole thing is unjust.” He gained speed and clarity as the argument he’d been preparing for days fell into place. “The severance, hounding me when all I’m trying to do is serve the Company, my country—it’s wrong. Massir tricked me, and Rome went bad, I know, but not bad enough to merit a severance. I’m a good spy, sir. Why are you doing this to me? I deserve an answer.”
“Mm.” The Director gave him a sage nod. “Good speech. But you’ve got some flaws in your logic. Let me ask something. Are you on the Company’s oversight committee?”
“No.”
“No . . .”
“No, sir. I am not. The Company has no oversight.”
The Director returned his hands to his pockets and started pacing again. “No oversight. Sustained for decades. An unprecedented achievement in the history of America’s intelligence forces. Impressive. And is that your achievement? You aren’t oversight, but you’re determining this severance’s justness or unjustness, so you must have founded this Company, right?”
Ben kept silent.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
A man in the security detail suppressed a snicker, doing a poor job of it. The Director, still pacing, smacked him in the chest with the back of his hand. “Stow it, Mardel.” He came to a stop with the spotlight from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier splitting the mist behind him. He thrust a thumb over his shoulder. “Can you hear them?”
“Sir?”
“The whines and complaints. All those warriors, dumped into holes on muddy battlefields, burned into oblivion, ashes scattered to the four winds. Anonymous. Forgotten.” The Director put a hand to his ear. “Listen. Can’t you hear their cries? ‘Unjust! Unfair!’”
“No, sir.”
“No. No you can’t. They gave it all. Good soldiers, every one.” The Director looked back, as if seeing them—as if he’d recognize the Unknowns by their faces and the name tags on their uniforms. He returned his attention to Ben. “And what are you, son?”
Ben knew the answer his boss wanted. Hale had asked him the same question a thousand times at the schoolhouse. “I am a soldier, sir.”
“Correct. Like the Unknowns, although many of them were drafted.” He raised a finger. “Here’s a significant difference. You volunteered.” The Director drew in the air with an imaginary pen. “You signed your life over to me, so I could create something new. And for my part, I housed you. I fed you. I trained you.” He stopped face-to-face with Ben and leaned to within an inch of Ben’s diseased, puss-oozing, blackened nose. “I made you, son. And I will unmake you at my pleasure.”
Ben swallowed.
The Director huffed and walked around him, catching him hard with a shoulder and stopping a half step past his ear. “Now that we’ve settled the pecking order. Do you have anything else to say?”
A soldier. A cog. Just as Giselle said. That was all Ben had ever been to this man. Ben let out a quiet laugh. “Okay.” He dropped the sir. “What about the Behemoth?”
“You mean the cargo ship resting comfortably in the shade of a Spanish dry dock?”
“She’s not in dry dock. I’m telling you, the Behemoth is coming to Baltimore—the biggest bioweapon the world has ever seen, enough to make the last pandemic look like a mild flu season.”
“Or,” the Director said, keeping his voice low, “a ship called the Clementine is coming to Baltimore, carrying tanktainers full of ammonia, pesticides, and cheap wine. Think, Calix. You’ve now become the king of red herring intelligence. You fell for Massir’s lie about a sale of CRTX chemicals, getting your team ambushed in Rome. And the case you sent us after that debacle ate up our HUMINT and analytical resources while we tried to determine if anything about it could lead us to Leviathan.”
“I know, but—”
“And here you go again. Leviathan fed you the perfect story about a plague ship booby-trapped with a nuke’s-worth of CRTX.” The Director walked on toward the circle’s edge. “They want us to expose our water assault tactics, then burn thousands of man-hours inspecting every tanktainer on board and tracking any cargo that slips past us. Meanwhile Jupiter detonates a dirty bomb in Miami or sets the Houston refineries ablaze.” He shook his head. “I’m not going to let that happen. I’m done with you, Calix. Thanks for wasting my night.”
The detail parted, allowing the Director to walk through.
Ben drew his gun. “No!”
With a rippling clatter, six APC9s came to shoulder height.
The Director raised a hand. The detail held their fire.
“You can’t leave,” Ben said, keeping the SIG level, fighting back the blur in his eyes and mind. “I won’t let you leave without giving me an answer. I signed my life away. Fine. And now it’s gone. But at least tell me why. Why me? Why the severance? It can’t be all about Rome. Tell me, sir. You owe me that much.”
The Director kept walking. “I don’t owe you a thing.” He snapped his fingers, and the detail followed him toward the dogwoods.
“I deserve better! Do you hear me?” Ben held the Director in his sights until he disappeared, then fell to his knees among the graves and cried.
68
“Ben.” A soft hand touched his face. “Are you still with me?”
He kept his eyes closed. No more hallucinations. He didn’t want to hear Hale anymore. He didn’t want to see Clara again. Why wouldn’t the disease just take him and leave his body here with the other dead cogs?
But this hallucination looped an arm under his elbow and hauled him to his feet. “You’re not dead, mamour. I can see your breath, yes? Get up.”
“Giselle?” Ben’s voice had grown so weak, he doubted she’d hear the question.
“Correct, mon rêve. My dream. I’m here. I will always be here.”
Reluctant, he gave up on death and opened his eyes. She stood before him, strong, blonde once again, and Photoshop perfect, as if they had walked out of Rome together the day before.
“How did you find me?”
She showed Ben a picture of himself on her phone, resting his head back in a taxi. “Your cabdriver called the police. He gave them your picture.”
“Rayan. Nice guy. Not his fault. He thought he was doing me a favor.”
Giselle swiped to another image of Ben, this time from a Metro station security camera.
His illness had made him incautious. “So why haven’t the cops snatched me up? You can’t tell me they didn’t track me to my motel after I hid out in the woods or figure out I left the Metro at the cemetery.”
“Don’t you see? You are under Jupiter’s protection. He still has hope for you.” Giselle lifted his arm over her shoulder and helped him walk between the graves. “Remember the police and SWAT teams in Paris, Rotterdam, Zürich? The Director cast you out into the cold. Now, Jupiter has wrapped you in his warm embrace.”
“The Director. He met me here. You must have seen him.” Ben lolled his head over to meet her eye. “You could have taken him out. Isn’t that what your Jupiter wants?”
She laughed, leaning her temple against his forehead. “I am no superwoman. The Director casts a wide protective shield of operatives and surveillance wherever he walks—so inaccessible. But not Jupiter. You may come to him freely.”
A coughing fit caused him to stumble, and Ben let Giselle lift him up again. They had reached the outer wall. “That’s why you’re here. You want me to go to him, trade my loyalty for my life.”
“For your dignity, mamour.”
“There’s no dignity in being Jupiter’s trophy.”
“There is dignity in being valued. And if not for dignity, do it for justice, Ben. Aren’t you ready for justice?”
They crested a low hill. A black sedan idled on a road at the bottom. The rear passenger door stood open. Ben stopped at the hillcrest.
Giselle didn’t push him, not physically. She let her head rest against his and whispered into his ear. “You’ve s
uffered enough. It’s time, Ben—time to see Jupiter. Aren’t you ready to end this?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’m ready for the end.”
Consciousness darted away from him like a fox hunted in the woods, always in reach but never in hand. The hum of the tires and Giselle’s familiar perfume tumbled together in a white noise of sound and scent. Blurred highway signs flew by. The sedan rolled to a stop.
“We’re here, mamour.”
“Where?”
“Wait and see.”
She helped him rise from his seat into the dim echoing gray of a parking garage and once again draped his arm over her shoulder to help him walk. “Come. The elevators are over here.”
The driver stayed with the car. Clearly Ben was no threat to these people.
The elevator smelled like vinegar, a sign of fresh caulk between the brushed steel panels. “New building?” he asked in a quiet rasp, wondering how much longer he’d have a voice at all.
“Yes. Brand new.” Giselle passed a finger over the touchless control. “This skyscraper is not open yet. One of Jupiter’s child corporations started the project three years ago, a measure of his foresight.” She glanced up at the rolling floor numbers, rocketing through thirty. “He built the tallest structure in Norfolk.”
Norfolk. A burst of cortisol, the body’s fear hormone, heightened Ben’s awareness. He stared at Giselle. “We’re in Norfolk?”
“Oops. I wanted to surprise you when we reached the roof, but the cat is now out of the bag, yes?” Giselle shrugged, raising her hands palms up. “Oh well. But isn’t it wonderful? We’ll be able to see Behemoth from here.”
Norfolk. Not Baltimore.
Ben had expected skepticism from the Director, but he also expected the Company to follow up on his reports as a matter of risk management—maybe even call in a team to check things out. But he’d pointed them to Baltimore. The papers in the envelope—the thumb drive—all fake, and Ben bought it, just like Massir and the case. He really had become the king of red herrings.
The Paris Betrayal Page 27
