Threatcon Delta (4 page)

She recognized the look of a broken man. She knew he had given her all he had. Her intuition was satisfied. She ordered the soldiers to lead him away.

Alone, Dina exhaled. Only now she realized how much she had perspired, how uncomfortable she truly was, how tense that session had been. She never doubted that she would get the information she wanted; now that she had it, though, she could relax. She alerted Homeland Security’s Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement about any Iranian doctors who might be involved in the opium trade; they would get the message to all other agencies. Then she shut down her laptop, planning on finding a shower and some anti-itch ointment.

The phone on the desk pinged. Two seconds and she would have been out the door. She sighed and picked it up. It was Lt. Gen. Alan Sutter, commander of the American army units that were conducting, so they said, training missions in Iraq. It wasn’t his aide or a lower-ranking officer, but the lieutenant general himself.

“Ma’am, since we have the good fortune of entertaining you here a little longer, might we trouble you with one more matter?”

They sure were polite when they wanted to skip protocol and ask a favor of Homeland Security.

But before she could decide whether to wiggle out of it, he said, “We’ve picked up an American soldier who’s been lost in Iraq for sixteen years.”

R
yan Kealey stood on the windswept hillside looking out across gently moving treetops. This mild weather on the East Coast seemed more an extension of fall than the beginning of winter, so he was dressed in a tweed blazer, his black hair nearly to the collar—though it was not touching the collar just now. It was blowing gently to the left. Beside him was a slender, older woman with deeply wrinkled skin and eyes younger than his.

“See that blue ridge out there?” Ellie Lammer asked him.

Kealey followed her bony finger. Behind the green hills was a faint line of cliffs against the pale blue sky. “I see it.”

“Those are the Catskills.”

“In New York State?” he said.

Her head nodded beneath the long, blowing expanse of her white hair. “It’s the Taconic Range.”

“Wow.” He smiled. Every night, wherever you were, most of the Earth’s population could see light-years into space. Yet to see something closer, just a few hundred miles distant, seemed exceptional. Maybe because from here, the view was unique. You owned it.

Kealey had seen the
FOR SALE
sign while he was driving south on Route 7, on his way back from forty-eight hours in Boston. Something about the road leading up and up called to him. Maybe it was because it was a Saturday morning, an ideal time for wandering. Or maybe it was the idea of home. The longest Kealey had ever been anywhere was when he left the CIA, got a teaching gig, and bought a three-story house in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He spent three years there with Katie Donovan. Unlike this fine Connecticut home from the 1980s with its iron columns and hand-hewn wood beams, that old place in Maine defined
fixer-upper.
He had enjoyed doing the work himself, for himself and Katie. When that ended—

“You didn’t say where you’re from,” Ellie remarked.

“D.C.,” he said.

“Ah,” Ellie smiled. “The hub of things.”

“Yeah, it’s the hub of the world all right,” he said with more than a trace of irony. “At least, that’s what they think. Most of them have no idea what it really means to be plugged into something big. I had a house in Maine, once. That was nice. But it was more a case of me taking pity on it and giving myself something to do with my hands.” He looked at the little lady who was a head shorter than his athletic five foot eleven. “Tell me—you’ve been here thirty years. What have you learned from this place?”

“That I am something big,” she replied. “I am a part of all this. We have fifty acres here and the land behind us was my late husband’s airstrip. He built bridges. He would fly to a job site, then fly home. Even though he was up there in his plane with the clouds and hawks, he said he never felt better than when he was on this ground with the little hummingbirds at eye level. When I flew with him I got—oh, I guess you’d call it some kind of perspective. But it’s like an iron, the kind you use for clothes. It has weight and it has potential but until the wire goes in the wall it’s not really active.”

Kealey had perspective, too. He’d been around the world, in more places of natural beauty and ancient hostility than he cared to remember, from South Africa to Iran. All those journeys left him with was a severe case of dark, clinging cynicism.

“Why are you leaving, then?” Kealey asked. “Memories?”

“No,” she said. “Snow. I can’t work the damn plow and on social security I can’t afford to have someone do it or help keep up the half mile of dirt road. I won’t lie to you, it gets rutted and the gravel rolls away when there are gully washers. I’m going to Sedona, Arizona, to join my younger sister in her New Age shop.” She glanced at his hand. “If I’m not prying—well, I am—I don’t see a ring. You got a girl . . . or a guy? I guess you have to ask that now.”

“I’m sort of seeing someone,” he said. “She’s a psychiatrist but she doesn’t want to leave Washington.”

“Good business to be in there, I guess.”

“Very.”

“You want to leave.”

“I already have,” he said. “I just don’t know where I’m going.”

“This is a good place to find yourself,” she said. “I’m not trying to sell you on it. That’s just a fact.”

Kealey couldn’t disagree. The woods in front of him were vital and nurturing. The house behind him, a boxy contemporary, reminded him of the pillboxes on Normandy Beach, built to keep trouble at bay without making you feel like you were a prisoner. And the airstrip behind the house, though overgrown from neglect, was a long stretch of calm. He had not gone over to the hangar, which reminded him of one of those old airship shelters from the age of the zeppelin. This was the kind of place where, he was sure, if he closed his eyes he would hear the hum of long-silent propeller engines.. . .

“I desperately want to leave D.C.,” he said. “I was interviewing for a teaching job in Boston, but I realized I don’t want to go from one bureaucracy to another. I need to find something else.”

“What kind of work did you do there?”

“Intelligence.”

“We could use a good home security store in town,” she said. “Not that you need anything up here. I’ve got a shotgun but I’ve never had to chase anyone off. Hell, I’ve never even locked my door.”

Kealey took his cell phone from his shirt pocket to take photos.

“Reception’s pretty good here,” Ellie said.

“You’re close enough to orbiting satellites,” Kealey joked.

“I’m told I could see them if I knew where to look,” she said. “I have broadband and a TV dish on the roof. All the modern whatnots. I also have chipmunks, deer, and you can see thunderstorms coming from up here like no one’s business!”

“Yin and yang,” Kealey said with a grin.

The breeze and morning sun felt good on his face and scalp. It was strange. The last time he talked to anyone about the Maine house was with Allison Dearborn. They were out at the aquarium at the harbor in Baltimore when the convention center became the epicenter of a terrorist attack. He came alive then, too, but in a different way—prepared to enter a crime scene, weaponed-up, ready to take down terrorists and free hostages.

This way, breathing wondrously clean air, was preferable. It had nothing to do with feeling physically safe. He never expected to be injured when he went into combat; his brain was too adrenaline-pumped for that. It didn’t have to do with being in his early forties and feeling a little stiffer after each run through a burning building or wheel-wrenching drive through a kill zone.

Being here even for—what had it been, a half hour?—wasn’t about a life lived in response to some monstrous act that a demented soul had perpetrated. It had to do with being in the presence of something larger, as Ellie had said. It had to do with being nourished instead of drained.

Could he stand that? Allison had told him—when they were shrink and patient instead of lovers—that he needed extreme challenges. He didn’t know if he needed them but he certainly thrived in that environment. He liked it more than dealing with the directors, deputy directors, assistant directors, secretaries, and undersecretaries in the nation’s capital, all of whom were grabbing people and glory as if national security were a game of jacks. It was about power first and the populace second. And then there was the lame-duck administration that had only a few months left of its spotty eight years. Everyone was busy networking for new jobs on a grand scale, looking for work instead of doing it. The district was politically calm but structurally chaotic, like a corpse full of maggots that would suddenly erupt—

He focused on clouds that were changing the light and color on the trees below them. He wanted to think about that right now, not about the mausoleum to the south.

He liked Allison a lot and enjoyed being with her. He liked the work he did because he had just enough ego to appreciate having the fate of a major metropolis or somebody’s loved one resting on his shoulders. But after a score of years on the job he was out of gas. And he didn’t know where a refill was coming from.

“Would you like coffee?” Ellie asked.

“Yes, thank you,” he said. “I also want to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“Can I look at the hangar?”

“Of course. Do you fly?”

“Not a bit,” he said. “But I’m thinking this would be the time and place to learn.”

They had coffee on the stone patio overlooking the Housatonic Valley and talked about her husband, Douglas, who had died in a fall from a bridge in Tennessee.

“Going that way would have pleased him, if he hadn’t hit his head first and been unconscious all the way down,” she said without remorse. “We had fifty-two glorious years, partly because he was away so much. I don’t say that to be flip or derogatory. We never had a chance to get tired of each other. A few months together and then, bam! He was off somewhere else.”

“No children?” Kealey asked.

“We both didn’t think it was fair, with him being away so much,” she said. “And I didn’t mind. The animals in the forest were my babies, just like in a Disney cartoon. I can’t tell you how many generations of rabbits I fed in the warren behind the house. Left the dead ones for predators.” She shrugged. “They have to eat, too. That also left me free to go with Douglas when it was a place I wanted to visit. I loved taking pictures, scrapbooking—though it wasn’t called that, then. It was just putting photos in an album with other keepsakes and labeling them.”

That kind of verbal bloat was true in his business, too, Kealey thought. When he came to the CIA, the words
spy
and
spook,
not
intelligence agent
and
surveillance specialist,
were still the common vernacular. He missed those days when people were tracked by eye and not by a GPS in their cell phone. It was also more efficient, then. People on the ground were trained to observe. They came back with more data, more detail, not just an individual’s location. The overwhelming reliance on ELINT, electronic intelligence, covered more ground and let fewer people watch more people—like the government did through e-mails and social networking sites. But it lost nuance. Only the Israelis did both in equal measure, ELINT and HUMINT, making sure the faces of trackers were seen so they could become trusted, even embraced by their targets. Terror cells could be broken that way, or by blasting them with a drone missile. The Israeli way made sure there was little or no collateral damage.

Kealey was about to tell the woman he wanted to buy the place when his phone beeped.

“Well, at least you’ve got reception,” Ellie grinned.

“Not sure I want it,” Kealey said as he glanced at the name. It was Jonathan Harper, deputy director of the CIA. Kealey’s mood darkened and his brain mumbled something about leaving him the hell alone. But he stepped away from Ellie until she wouldn’t be able to hear him and pressed Answer just the same, with his bloody damn sense of responsibility.

He suddenly, fervently wished that he was not about to hear the word
situation
used in a sentence. If Harper said that, it meant his call was about something grave, something he did not want to discuss over an unsecured line.

“Hello, Jonathan.”

“Morning, Ryan. How’re things?”

“I’ve had a good few weeks,” he replied. “How’s Julie?”

Juliette Harper, Jon’s wife, was seriously injured in the convention center explosion in Baltimore.

“Recovering nicely,” Harper said. “She’s got a cane but she’s walking on her own.”

“Glad for her,” Kealey said sincerely. “What can I do for you?”

“I need to talk to you about a situation,” Harper said.

Kealey inwardly cursed. Outwardly, he said, “I’m retired. For real, this time. I’m about to buy a house.”

“Do you remember Victor Yerby?” Harper asked.

“Yeah. He got reprimanded for frying a warlord’s opium field in Bawri, Afghanistan,” Kealey said with a proud half smile. The man had guts. “Please don’t tell me something’s happened—”

“Let’s have a face-to-face,” Harper said.

Crap. Kealey had been assigned to Yerby as an instructor for a week once, to hone his sharpshooting skills. He’d liked and admired the man so much, he took ten days of vacation to train Yerby in return, taking him through all the black-ops tactics a formal, advanced course would have provided, plus a number of secrets it wouldn’t. He knew Yerby was a lone-wolf kind of guy, like Kealey himself, and never expected to hear much news of him after that, but rejoiced when he did. The opium field story was one of his favorites.

But Kealey knew lone wolves had limited futures. Ultimately they were always arrested, taken hostage, or killed. There was never any other kind of life. Since DHS wasn’t Harper’s bailiwick, Kealey was guessing it was either a hostage situation or the murder of Yerby, something that had international repercussions involving the intelligence community.

“I’ll be in your office tomorrow morning,” Kealey said.

“Not soon enough,” Harper replied. “Where’s the nearest airfield?”

Kealey looked behind him. “About fifty yards from where I’m sitting. Small plane or chopper?”

“Whichever you like.”

He surveyed the weedy landing strip and surrounding trees. “I think a chopper will have a better time of it.”

“I’ll arrange it.”

“I’ll get the details and send them over,” Kealey told him.

Kealey was frustrated as he clicked off. A crisis, he could probably ignore. But not the plight of a brother agent. Too many people had helped Kealey, saved his life over the years, for him to be callous.

He walked back to Ellie. “I would like to buy this place.”

She smiled.

“But,” he continued, “it’s going to have to wait a few hours. And I need to borrow your airstrip. Can you give me the address here so I can Google Earth a map to my colleague? And can I leave my car?”