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Cooke talked about baseball and postage stamps and the particularly American pursuit of reinventing oneself. But it wasn’t reinvention that Eatwell was interested in when he took the radio from the table with his wet hands and placed it in the tub with him. He had no intention of coming back as anything. There wasn’t much dignity in dying in the bathtub, but that’s where they would find him – naked, wet and full of electricity.

The intercept in Yemen that Bill Tully had originally passed on to Benbow had come from a house in Sanaa that Tully affectionately called “Starbucks,” in honor of Yemen’s coffee history. This is where Nabil and Hassan were doing their damage.

The Delta force was now in place. It was led by Captain Robbie Duran and filled out by guys named Velaquez, Polen, Agee and Sheridan.

Benbow and Hayden were together back in Virginia, connected by satellite feed into the Delta Team’s ear pieces. Duran’s call sign for this mission was “Osprey39.” Benbow’s call sign was “Gopher10.”

“Gopher10, this is Osprey39. We can hear you.” The Delta guys were on the ground floor of Starbucks.

“What the hell was that?” one of the soldiers said in the mic.

“A horse, sir.”

It was Tulsa, the horse that Nabil and Hassan kept on the ground floor of Starbucks. Just then, another one of the soldiers chimed in. He and two others were on higher floors of the house.

“No one is here, sir.”

“Osprey39, this is Gopher 10. What, pray tell?” Benbow said in disbelief.

“Somebody must have tipped them off. It looks like they left in a hurry.”

“Are the computers still there?” Benbow asked, frustrated.

“They are.”

“Proceed. Get in there.”

Two PCs sat side-by-side on a wooden table. Captain Duran put down his gun and sat at the table. He was a gifted computer guy, and he was about to demonstrate why.

Not too far away, in the diwan of a house within eyesight of Starbucks, a small boy drank tea and ate dates with his father and brothers, never speaking a word of the two strangers who gave him a handful of rials to keep watch for foreigners around Starbucks while playing with his friends in the street.

“I don’t like it,” Duran said.

“Me neither,” barked Benbow. “Get to that keyboard.” Polen walked into the room. He looked Duran in the eye and

gave the thumbs up. Apparently they had found a sniper on the roof.

The sniper was now dead.

“There’s a back door,” someone said through the ear pieces. Duran started pointing. “Take posts.”

Duran stared at the screen. It was hard to know where to begin.

He cleared his throat to speak.

“Gopher10, Opsrey39. Ready?” Duran asked.

“Roger that, Osprey39.”

“Give me a minute to take a look at this,” Duran said. They had rehearsed this. Duran had neither the time nor the ability to single-handedly undo what Nabil and Hassan had done. His instructions were clear: uncover the computer files that were affecting Cheyenne’s satellite, FTP the files to Langley’s servers and get the hell out of there. Once the download was complete, the Agency programmers would then handle the backbreaking work of slicing and dicing the code, and fixing what was broken.

Benbow turned the line over to the programmers. “Go ahead,

Osprey39.”

Duran began identifying and batching the relevant files in the directories. He scrolled through folders and subfolders with names like cmd_ctrl_propulsion, cmd_ctrl_attitude and cmd_ctrl_comm. Polen kept peering out the window. Agee looked around downstairs. Velaquez was on the roof. Sheridan remained on the perimeter somewhere around the house.

Duran typed in ftp.hermit.gov. The computer paused until connected to ftp.hermit.gov appeared on the screen. Duran typed in his login: “Osprey39,” and then the password: “JerryAb2Jeff.” Again, there was another pause until “User Osprey Logged In” appeared on the screen.

“Alright,” Duran said out loud, somewhat surprised that it was actually working. “One more step,” he said in his microphone.

“Good stuff, Ospey39. Just FTP us the batched files and you’ll be on your way.”

Duran saw the FTP prompt, cracked his knuckles, typed in the string and hit Return. An hourglass appeared on the screen.

“Hang tight, Osprey39. It’s gonna take a few minutes for the download to complete.”

“No problem,” Duran said.

Just then, Velaquez heard what sounded like a piece of fruit smacking against the stone next to him on the roof. It was no fruit. It was a Russian grenade. Velaquez’s eyes widened. He ran to the other side of the small roof. The blast occurred just as he flung himself onto the rope that he had used to climb up.

The house shook. Velaquez clung to the rope. He checked himself out. He was fine, at least until the bullet from a Kalashnikov ripped into his thigh. He lost his grip and fell about 10 feet to the ground in a heap of pain.

The explosion had blown a hole in the roof of the fourth story, but it hadn’t damaged the ceiling of the third floor where Duran was working the computers. There was an eerie pause, then a hail of bullets. Duran hit the floor. Polen was in the corner near the window barking something into his mic. Duran positioned himself behind a chair.

The bullets seemed to come from multiple directions. They zipped through the air, ricocheting off the stone walls. As suddenly as it had started, the volley stopped.

The download!
Hayden thought. He spoke into his mic. His call sign for the mission was Corona17. “Osprey39, Osprey39, this is Corona17, are you there?”

“Affirmative.”

“Get that download!”

“Working on it.” Duran crept up from the floor to see the hourglass on the screen.
A third full. Dammit.

“Velaquez is hit, sir,” Hayden could hear one of the soldiers – Sheridan he thought – telling Duran.

“Gopher 10, we have one down.”

Duran could hear Sheridan’s M4 from the perimeter of the house. He could also hear men shouting in Arabic. Once again, he inched up the table to the PCs to check the hourglass.
Half full
.
Shit, this thing is slow.

Another hail of bullets. None of this was supposed to be happening. It was a first-class set-up.

Polen was getting instructions from someone about a sniper’s whereabouts outside. He put on his night vision goggles and rolled onto the floor under the window sill. He moved up the wall until his head was just beneath the window, pausing to find the right moment. He inched the barrel of his M4 out the open window, paused again, then fired.

“No more sniper,” Hayden could hear Polen say. Duran typed furiously, trying his best to speed up the hourglass.

“How we doing, Ospey39?” Benbow asked Duran.

“Hourglass is three quarters full.”

Benbow looked at Hayden in the command room at Langley as if to say, “What do you think?” Hayden shook his head.

“Done!” Duran shouted. “We’re out of here. Gopher10, we are evacuating. Repeat. We are evacuating.”

The shooting started again. Duran hit the floor. Polen and the others returned fire. There was a long pause in all of their headsets.

“Roger that. Pull out,” Hayden could hear someone saying to Duran.

As Duran and Polen descended the stairs in the house, Agee rushed, knocking them backwards. Someone had tossed a grenade through the main floor window. The explosion blew the front doors of the house off. Hayden could hear some of the soldiers choking on the dust. Duran spoke to Sheridan on his headset.

“Okay guys. We’re going out the back.”

They would pick up Velaquez on the way out. He was still pinned down behind some trash. Polen went out first. He kept low, and then dove next to Velaquez on the ground. Velaquez’s leg was a mess. No way could he walk. Agee went out next, bee-lined straight up a small hill and hid behind the crumbling wall of a nearby house. Duran was still inside the house. He counted to three, then sprinted to help Polen with Velaquez. Duran crouched over Velaquez, his back to the house. Agee could see a figure slowly appear in the doorway. The man would have taken out Duran, Polen and Velaquez if Agee hadn’t pumped five rounds into the man’s chest. The figure slumped to the ground.

Duran pulled Velaquez over his shoulder and made a run for it while Polen covered his rear. The return fire weakened. It was hard to tell how many people were shooting at them.

“I count four of theirs down,” Hayden could hear Sheridan say over the headset. He was near the front door. “Possibly four left.” Duran leaned Velaquez against the wall. Their Toyota pickup was parked across the street.

“Agee, you and Polen get Velaquez into the truck,” Duran was shouting. “Gentlemen, hold fire for a moment. Let’s see how cocky these guys are.”

Duran could just make out their shapes in the interior of the house. He steadied his gun. “Come on … come on …” he said, waiting for the right moment. He fired. Two more dead guys.

Sheridan quickly made his way to Duran and the others in the back of the house. They caught their breath and then bolted for the truck. Agee fired up the engine. They piled in and drove off as quickly as they had come. Hayden could only imagine the relief that the team was feeling as they drove away.

A group of kids threw snowballs as Hayden emerged from the subway exit.

“Come on,” they said, pleading with him to play. He put his backpack down, made a couple of snowballs and let them have it. The kids went wild. Hayden smiled. He was tired, too tired to sleep, so he decided to get some air. The walk across the Brooklyn Bridge gave him time to readjust to the sounds and smells of New York. He felt at home in a way that his life had never allowed him to feel about a place.

Midway across the bridge, he paused to look at the Statue of Liberty. His gaze drifted to the right toward the place once known as Ground Zero. He breathed in deeply – a mixture of salt air and gasoline from the cars buzzing beneath him. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, it was as if something had clicked. The images of the powdered faces running north, of the gaping hole in the South Tower, of bodies raining down on the pavement were gone. Surprisingly, what remained was the color of the sky – the brilliant blue of that crisp September morning.

Hayden had thought that the benevolence of the sky had been stripped away from him – that the menace that lurked high among the clouds, behind the cloak of blue, would linger forever. But it hadn’t. It all depended on the light in which you viewed it. His thoughts turned to what he’d do next. He had a lead in Washington with the senior senator from North Carolina. He had also received a call from one of the leading diplomats at the UN. But what he really wanted to do for the time being was nothing at all.

He took a cab back to his apartment. He threw his things down, went to the kitchen sink, turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on his face. He flicked on his CD player and put in an old Neil Young album that he hadn’t listened to in ages. He smiled as he heard the first few chords of “Emperor of Wyoming.” It made him wonder if Peter had made it out to Wyoming yet — out there in the fresh air and open space and streams brimming with fish.

He grabbed an Amstel Light out of the refrigerator and turned on the TV to find some news. When he got to C-Span, he grinned a knowing grin. Standing there, delivering a speech before a packed crowd at the St. Francis in San Francisco, was Aaron. The audience was hypnotized. Despite the headlines and the scandals, they still wanted to hear what the sixth richest man in the world had to say.

Hayden noticed an entranced guy in the front row. A woman to the side nodded her head in agreement. They were his. Aaron had them. And for a brief moment in time, he’d had Hayden, too.

End

Cheyenne imploded — another casualty of an American economy that had increasingly become reliant on wing walking from bubble to bubble to sustain itself. Hayden couldn’t help but wonder if anyone at Cheyenne had thought to call the guy who had shown up at one of Aaron’s parties — the guy who bought used office furniture and equipment from failed start-ups.

***

Jagmetti didn’t spend any time in jail. Neither the U.S. nor the Swiss authorities were able to make a strong case regarding his tenuous relationship with the Egyptian, who had disappeared. Jagmetti reunited with his clients. He still has lunch at Cantinella Antinori in the old town near St. Peter’s Church in Zurich, and he still orders the veal.

***

Graham Eatwell’s death was eventually deemed a suicide. Despite his vast network of friends and contacts, his funeral was not well attended. Derek sat in the back of the church, tears in his eyes, keeping his distance for fear of outing Graham even after his death. The European Commission put up a plaque in Eatwell’s honor. “For his incalculable efforts in fashioning a Europe prosperous and at peace,” it said.

***

Timmermans and Michelle were found guilty of securities fraud. They sit in male and female prisons 60 kilometers from each other in the Netherlands. Michelle’s boat,
Bandwidth
, is still docked in Amsterdam. A friend lives on it. Timmermans’ wife divorced him. When he can get them, he still smokes Dunhill blues.

***

Braun’s reputation was nicked, but he was not severely injured. The financial press beat him up a bit for his positive treatment of Cheyenne. Federal regulators, consumed with other matters, didn’t pile on the way they had earlier in this decade. The speculation was that they didn’t want to play that movie reel again, and that they viewed Cheyenne as merely a delayed, Dutch version of the dot.com fiasco in the U.S. Teestone didn’t fare as well. It had fines slapped on it. Vaughn retired to North Carolina.

***

Volskov’s military peers were angry that he had drawn undue attention the fact that many of them were moonlighting to make money on the side. A couple of them agreed not to make his life difficult if he cut them in on future satellite deals. Zlotnikov and Tebelis were never fingered for Kuipers’ death. Zlotnikov was on his own now. Tebelis had been found in one of his nightclubs, shot through the head assassination style – a victim of Russian mob turf wars.