End of Enemies (5 page)

She came out of the bathroom, placed her kit in the bag, then closed it. She leaned over and kissed him. “I wish you could come,” she said.

“As do I. As soon as I finish my business, I will join you.” He traced the line of her jaw with his fingertip. “I think I'll have a hard time waiting.”

She giggled. “Hard? Did you say hard?”

He kissed her again. “Don't tempt me. You'll miss your flight.”

She was a pretty woman, if slightly overweight, and he'd had no trouble orchestrating their whirlwind romance. To his practiced eye, she was the perfect target: Just the right mix of low self-esteem and neediness. All it had taken was some attention and well-rehearsed passion.

There had been a surprise with this one, however. In the past he'd been able to use the skills with a certain detachment, not unlike the skill a golfer uses to assess a putting green. But this time … He couldn't put his finger on it. He wrote if off to weariness. He needed rest.

The woman stroked his shirtfront. “We have time. …”

“When I'm with you, there is never enough time. Now go, before I lose control.”

She beamed. “All right. You'll call me with your flight number?”

“Of course.”

He hefted the green checkered suitcase off the bed, guided her to the front door, and opened it A yellow taxi waited at the end of the path.

They embraced again. Her eyes were wet, and he dabbed them with his handkerchief. Abruptly, the feeling returned.
What is this
?
he thought.
She is nothing.
A tool,
nothing more.
Get on with it
!

He walked her to the cab, put her bag in the trunk, and closed the car door behind her. “I already miss you,” she murmured.

“Travel safe.” He patted the taxi's roof, and it pulled away.

Beirut

Bound and blindfolded, Marcus felt himself shoved from behind. He fell to his knees. The floor was made of stone, damp and cold. He could feel the chill seeping into his bare feet.

They led him down some steps, then turned left at the bottom. Now he could hear water lapping. He caught the smell of tar and rotting wood.
Docks,
he thought. Where, though? It could be anywhere in the city—anywhere in the country, for that matter. His heart sank. How were they going to rescue him if they didn't know where he was?

Another turn. Down another corridor, this one longer. He heard a crackling noise to the left. It sounded like a welder's torch. An acrid stench filled the air. A man's scream echoed down the corridor.
Oh,
God,
oh God
…

He was jerked to a stop. He felt cold steel at his throat. The blade paused, then ripped downward, cutting away his shirt and pants. The blindfold was torn away, and he was shoved forward. The door slammed behind him.

Marcus blinked his eyes clear and found himself standing in a windowless stone cell.

Shiono Misaki,
Japan

Tanner showered, ordered coffee from room service, and sat on his balcony. The day was sunny and warm with a slight breeze. He had half an hour before breakfast with Camille, and there was a lot to think about.

Lying in bed the night before, images of the shooting kept-playing in his mind.
Umako Ohira.
Irrational as it was, Tanner couldn't help feeling he'd failed the man. In those brief seconds before the fatal shot had come, could he have done something different?

The figure below his window was also a curiosity. It could have been anyone—hotel staff, a guest—but long ago he'd developed a healthy suspicion of coincidence. This counted, he felt.

Though now a civilian, Tanner had spent almost a third of his life in the U.S. military. After graduating from the University of Colorado, he enrolled in Navy Officer Candidate School, after which came four years in the Naval Special Warfare community, followed by four more years with SEAL Team Six, the Navy's counterterrorist group, and a final four attached to a multiservice hybrid experiment called the Intelligence Support Activity Group, or ISAG.

In the inner circles of the Pentagon, ISAG members had been called “the new breed of elite warrior/spies,” the world's elite special operators. Their training made them unsurpassed in unconventional warfare and covert intelligence gathering deep inside contested territory, in myriad cultures, environments, and situations. Two years after Tanner left ISAG, it was disbanded, a victim of a budgetary turf war between the Pentagon and the CIA. He'd been one of only sixty graduates.

After resigning his commission, Tanner forced himself to take a sabbatical. He'd forgotten what it felt like to simply do nothing—to just
be.
No training, no midnight planes bound for cold waters or humid jungles. It took him most of that year to realize he would never be happy in a nine-to-five job. Luckily, it never came to that.

Tanner's mentor, former IS AG instructor, chief tormentor, and friend, Master Chief Boatswain's Mate Ned Billings, made him an offer he couldn't refuse, and again he found himself part of an experimental group. The group's official designator was NSCD (“Knee-sid”) 1202, named for the National Security Council Directive from which it was born. The plaque on the door to the group's Chesapeake Bay office read Holystone, Shiverick.

In the tradecraft jargon, Holystone was a “fix-it company.” It worked outside normal channels, silent, unacknowledged, and answerable only to the Oval Office. Where the CIA was a shovel, Holystone was a pair of tweezers. Most importantly, Holystone provided the president plausible deniability. In other words, Holystone and its people did not exist. It was called working on the raw. No cover, no backup.

Holystone had unrestricted access to the U.S. intelligence loop without the accompanying squabbles and political infighting. Its budget—a fraction of the size of the CIA's annual cafeteria allotment—came directly from the president's covert ops fund and was therefore off-limits to both the General Accounting Office and congressional oversight.

How long had he been with Holystone? Tanner thought. Six years. Cliché or not, time did, in fact, fly. In that time, he'd found a home with Holystone and its people. He'd also lost his wife on a mountain in Colorado and his mentor Ned Billings during a project in the Caribbean—the very same ordeal that had reunited him with his finest friend, Ian Cahil.

And now this. A simple vacation turned murder mystery.
So what
?
he thought. He was witness to a murder. He'd picked up a key Ohira had carried in his hand. It was an impulse—an unwise one at that—but he could turn it in to the police and be done with it.

But try as he might, Tanner couldn't shake the image of Ohira's panic-stricken face. And then the shot … the head exploding … Who was Ohira, and why was he worth murdering?

It was one of his many failings, he knew. As a child, the surest way to get Briggs to take on a challenge was to tell him it was either impossible or the answer was a mystery. This same character quirk had pushed him toward the SEALs, where only one in four candidates graduate, then to the ISAG, where the attrition rate exceeded 90 percent. Now, that same quirk—though tempered with hard-earned wisdom—was pushing him toward the mystery of why a man was executed before his very eyes.

Camille saw Briggs walking across the pool patio. She felt her heart skip.
Stop it,
Camille.
He was handsome, yes, but it was more than that. Approaching him last night was so unlike her, but she'd felt lonely and out of place. And then, as if on cue, he'd appeared.

Tanner stood about two inches over six feet, 185 pounds. He carried himself with a sureness, an economy of motion. He was comfortable in his own skin. His hair was coffee brown, his face well tanned—probably from more time spent out-of-doors than in—and his smile was easy. His eyes were ocean-blue, their corners laugh-lined.
The eyes,
she thought. Yes, they were warm, but there was something else there, a hardness. It was as if they were constantly dissecting and categorizing everything they took in.

She hadn't slept well the night before. The incident had shaken her, but more than that, she was troubled by the way Briggs had reacted to the shooting. She'd seen such reactions before—usually in soldiers—but in other kinds of men as well, and that's what worried her. And what about the key? He had palmed and pocketed it smoothly, without hesitation. Was he somehow involved in what had happened?

“Sorry I'm late,” he said, taking a seat under the umbrella. “Have you ordered?”

“Not yet.”

The waiter appeared. They both ordered a fruit salad, wheat toast, and coffee.

“How did you sleep?” Tanner asked.

Camille shrugged. “You?”

“The same.”

A bellman approached the table and offered Tanner a small tray with a receipt and bill. “The item you requested, sir. The concierge is holding it.”

“Thank you,” Tanner signed the slip and handed the man a tip.

“What's that about?” asked Camille.

“A gift for a friend I met yesterday.”

Breakfast came, and they ate in silence, enjoying the sun. A pair of finches landed beside their table, and Camille dropped them some bread crumbs.

“So,” said Camille. “I never asked. Are you on vacation or business?”

“Vacation. And you?”

“The same. Though last night, it didn't seem like much of one. May I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Why did you do it? Jump over the fence, I mean. They had guns, yes? How did you know you wouldn't get shot yourself?”

“I didn't. It was stupid.”

Perhaps,
thought Camille,
but probably more considered than the average person's impulse.
“Well, I'll tell you this, Mr. Tanner: If this thing between us is to go any further, it just wouldn't do to get yourself killed.”

“This thing?” he said with a smile. “What makes you think there will be anything between us?”

“Women know. It's in your eyes.”

“Really.”

“Oh yes. It's a gift we have. So, your curiosity: What did it get you?” she asked. “What great mystery did you find in the car?”

“No mystery. I was mostly concerned about other passengers. Now you: What kind of work do you do?”

“I'm an attorney—immigration law. In fact, I do a lot of work in America.”

“I didn't realize that many Ukrainians wanted to emigrate.”

“Quite a few, really, but also to Israel, Canada, Great Britain. Camille sipped her coffee. “I'm sunbathing this morning, I think. Will you join me?”

“Maybe later. I'm going to take a run, do some diving.”

“Diving where, for what?”

“Up the coast a bit … for fun.”

“You have a strange idea of vacation, I think, running and swimming.”

“So I've been told.”

“You'll be careful?”

“Always. I'd hate to miss our dinner date tonight.”

Camille smiled. “How do you know we're having dinner tonight?”

“Men know. It's a gift.”

Camille laughed. “I accept. On two conditions. One, we make it tomorrow night. I must take the shuttle to Tokyo tonight for a meeting. I'll be back in the morning. And two, over dinner you tell me your life story.”

Tanner stood and pushed in his chair. “Conditions accepted. Tomorrow night, seven o'clock?”

As Tanner walked away, Camille thought,
What in God's name are you doing
?
It was silly; nothing could come of it. She shrugged, deciding she didn't give a damn.

Tanner took the two-mile run slowly, but with the twenty-five-pound bag of rice over one shoulder and his rucksack over the other, it turned out to be a fair workout. The time passed quickly as he thought of Camille.

Though she'd covered it well, she'd been probing him. Was it simple curiosity? Or perhaps she was wary of him, thinking he wasn't what
he
claimed to be—which he wasn't, of course. Whatever her reasons, a part of his brain was telling him to tread carefully. Another part, however, was hoping she was exactly what she seemed.
Careful,
Briggs,
he told himself.

He found Mitsu sitting on the front steps of the family's hut. The boy was engrossed with a quarter-sized beetle that was crawling up his forearm.

“Good morning,” Tanner said.

Mitsu looked up and smiled. “Oh, hello.”

“Who's your friend?”

“He lives under the house.”

“A good place for him. Is your mother home?”

Mitsu nodded, ran into the hut, and returned with his mother.

Tanner laid the bag of rice on the porch. “Mitsu, please tell your mother I enjoyed dinner very much, and I would be honored if she would accept this gift.”

Mitsu translated, and the mother smiled and bowed several times. Tanner asked Mitsu, “How would you like to take a short trip with me?”

“I would like that very much.”

With Mother's blessing, they climbed into the family skiff and began rowing into the breakers. Mitsu would have made a fine addition to any crewing team; his stroke was steady and strong, and within minutes they were a quarter mile off the beach. “Here,” Mitsu said, handing Tanner a small oilskin bag with a cork stopper.

“What's this?”

“Air. When you run out on the bottom, you breathe.”

“Good idea. I'll be back in five minutes.”

Briggs adjusted his mask, slipped on his fins, and rolled over the side.

He hung motionless in the cloud of bubbles for a moment, then turned over, finned to the bottom, and started swimming. He wound his way around and through the coral outcrops and sea grass, watching fish and crabs and even an occasional octopus dart along the bottom. Here and there he stopped to drop a shell into his bag.

After three minutes, his lungs began to burn, so he stopped and took a lungful of air from the bag. He swam for another three minutes, then headed for the surface. He climbed aboard the skiff.

“Did the bag work for you?” Mitsu asked.

“Like a charm. You're a smart man, Mitsu-san. You know these waters well?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I found a warm spot yesterday, but I couldn't find it today….”

“The oyster beds. Over that way,” Mitsu said. “Do you want to go?”

“No, I was just curious.”

“We can go if you like.”

“No, that's okay—”

Something caught Tanner's eye. On the beach, hidden among the trees, he saw a glimmer, like sun on glass. The breeze shifted the limbs, and he saw it again.

“How about tomorrow?” Tanner said.

“Okay.”

“Mitsu, does anyone in your village have a car?”

“An automobile? Oh, no.”

“Okay, let's go back.”

As they neared the shore, Tanner was able to make out a front fender, but as if on cue, the vehicle began creeping back into the trees. When only the windshield was again visible, it stopped.

The skiff's hull scraped the sand, and they climbed out, pulled the skiff ashore, and tied it to a nearby palm. Tanner pulled a shell from his bag and handed it to Mitsu. “For your rowing skills.”

“Thank you! We go again tomorrow?”

“We'll see. Go on home now.”

Mitsu nodded and ran off.

Tanner loaded his gear into his rucksack, hefted it over his shoulder, and started jogging back toward the hotel. After a hundred yards, he dropped the rucksack, veered into the tree line, and turned again, circling back. After fifty yards he stopped, crouched down.

Thirty feet across a dirt track he could see the vehicle's rear bumper jutting from the foliage. He crawled ahead until he was within arm's reach of it, only then realizing it was a dark blue pickup truck, almost identical to the one Ohira's killers had used the night before. The license plate was missing.

The driver's side door opened. Tanner froze. Footsteps crunched through the undergrowth, moving toward the front of the truck. Tanner peeked over the tailgate. One man sat in the passenger seat, and through the windshield Briggs could see the driver standing near the tree line, scanning the beach with a pair of binoculars.

Looking for me
?
Briggs wondered.
If so,
why
?
Because of what he'd seen, or because of the key? Or was it something he hadn't yet considered?

The footsteps were returning.

Tanner risked another glance over the tailgate. The driver was Japanese, a bull of a man with a thick neck, square face, and heavy brows. Tanner committed the face to memory, then ducked down and crawled out of sight.

The truck's engine growled to life. After a moment it backed out, turned onto the road, and drove off, disappearing into the trees. Tanner watched it go, thinking hard.