The Enemies of My Country

by Jason Kasper

  “Two more weeks?”

  “Seventeen days, but who’s counting? Let’s just say I’m glad you’re home. By the time I pick up Langley from day care, I’m ready for bed. And after my parents begged me to move here, I should sue them for false advertising.”

  I smiled, swirling the ice in my glass. Half the reason she’d jostled for a pediatric residency at the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital was because her mother and stepfather lived in Charlottesville, where they’d spent years running a successful metalworking business.

  But they’d recently received an acquisition offer from a corporate chain. After selling the business, they decided to use the substantial proceeds to buy a brown brick townhouse in Alexandria, just over two hours away.

  Now, when I was gone for training or operations—two so far, the first in the Philippines—Laila was forced to juggle her job requirements with summer day care and babysitter schedules to ensure Langley was looked after.

  Nodding, I said, “Well, I’ll be able to help out there. Why don’t I take her out this weekend? I’ll make a day of it, and you can have some time to yourself.”

  “No, I’ll go—I haven’t seen you in a week. Last thing I need is time to myself.”

  That much suddenly seemed obvious. But I was new to being a parent and even newer to being a husband, and still felt like I was in a constant cycle of trying to figure out where and how to draw the lines.

  “Right,” I agreed, “it’s a date, then. We can take her to Bumble Brews in the morning, then go walking downtown. Find a nice place for lunch and get her ice cream at Chaps.”

  “We’re going to Chaps?”

  I pushed back my chair and stood, locating my daughter standing in the shadows by the stairs. I could always hear Laila moving throughout the house; Langley, however, was still small enough at age six to creep around undetected.

  “Hey, sweetie!” I approached and knelt before her, pulling her into a tight embrace. “Have you been good for Mommy?”

  “Uh-huh,” Langley replied. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you too. Want to see what Daddy got you?”

  I felt her nodding against my shoulder, and carried her over to the front door where I’d set down my bag. Unzipping it, I procured a stuffed pink rabbit and handed it to her. She accepted it and pulled it into a hug between us.

  “Is this from Jordan?” she murmured sleepily.

  “Yes, from the Amman Airport.”

  “I love it.”

  I rubbed her back, feeling a mild sense of self-disgust. As much as I hated lying to my wife, I hated lying to Langley even more. The truth was, I’d picked up the toy at a truck stop on the way home, my one and only chance to procure a souvenir for her.

  Setting her down, I remained kneeling and looked into her tired face. Her curly brunette hair and brown eyes were in stark contrast to Laila and me—which was just as well, because she wasn’t biologically related to either of us.

  I looked up to see Laila standing in the lamplight, her expression sterner than I ever seemed to manage in front of our daughter. Langley had me wrapped around her finger, and she knew it better than anyone.

  Laila said, “Sweetie, you’re supposed to be asleep.”

  “I know,” Langley replied. “I just heard you guys talking and wanted to see Daddy.”

  Laila shot me a raised eyebrow, and I hoisted Langley against my side to carry her upstairs.

  Laila and I put her back to bed, her face going slack as she fell back asleep. Leaving her room and quietly closing the door, I turned to Laila.

  “So, how tired are you?”

  “Not that tired,” she answered. “Let’s go.”

  Taking my hand, she led me to our room.

  3

  CIA Headquarters

  Special Activities Center

  Kimberly Bannister deposited the teabag in the trash and added a double measure of honey to her steaming mug. After stirring the contents, she tapped the spoon against the rim and placed it back in its porcelain holder.

  Then she returned to her leather chair with the mug, letting her gaze slip across the photographs on her desk.

  She’d long ago stopped hanging pictures on her office walls. The first reason was privacy—yes, she was a very successful black woman in the Agency, but she’d built her career long before affirmative action and incentivized diversity were a consideration for anyone selecting the next generation of leadership. But she had simply tired of watching analysts’ eyes darting to her walls when they thought she wasn’t looking, trying to discern some secret for her success beyond simply being good at her job. By the time she’d been promoted to station chief, no one even called her Kimberly anymore. Instead, they used her old callsign as a term of respect: Duchess.

  The second reason she didn’t hang photos was that she’d kept being promoted too damn fast to maintain one office for long.

  She kept her most treasured pictures in frames that faced her alone—and they were, without exception, photographs of children. Mostly her grandbabies, one third-grade photograph of her son. That was taken around the time he’d begun to resent her frequent absences from his life, a shift that occurred right around the time her now ex-husband came to the same conclusion.

  The personal sacrifices had been steep over her decades of service, and long after the excitement of the job wore off, she was left with the brutal bureaucratic grind. Duchess was feeling her age in this game, close to the pinnacle of her career as she worked to get the current program off the ground.

  A double knock on her office door.

  “Enter,” she called.

  The door swung open to reveal Jo Ann Brown, a white woman in her early forties. She was tall, solidly built, and looked like she’d grown up on a dairy farm, because she had. Duchess looked to the file folder in Jo Ann’s grasp before making eye contact with her colleague.

  Jo Ann Brown stepped forward, handing the file to Duchess before helping herself to an open chair.

  “DIA got another hit.” She spoke with a lilt that most would consider Canadian, but was in truth reminiscent of all true northerners in the Western Hemisphere: Jo Ann, bless her heart, was from Almond, Wisconsin. Duchess had looked it up once, out of sheer morbid curiosity, and found it lived up to every possible stereotype that the town name suggested. The population was 334 people, and their claim to fame was existing within spitting distance of the killing grounds for a murderer-slash-gravedigger whose exploits served as fodder for Alfred Hitchcock’s villain in the movie Psycho.

  Accepting the folder, Duchess flipped it open as Jo Ann continued, “This gives us independent corroboration between SIGINT, ELINT, and two HUMINT sources.”

  Duchess tried not to scoff as Jo Ann rattled off the number and type of intelligence indicators as if they meant something. But this wasn’t some military operation with clearly delineated thresholds for mission execution, and while the nebulous boundaries should have been liberating for people trying to dispose of their nation’s enemies, they were anything but.

  The truth was, there were no defined protocols because this was all new and, perhaps just as importantly, they had no idea what they were doing. There was no existing playbook for Agency targeted killing operations—instead, Duchess was writing it one page at a time, and her efficacy or lack thereof bore dire consequences for everyone concerned, herself least among them.

  Duchess scanned the first page, then the second, before her eyes halted abruptly on a single grid location. Then she began flipping the pages more quickly, analyzing the key points with increasing speed. In the end it was the target’s location that concerned her the most, the one glaring inconsistency in otherwise logical intelligence reporting, and Duchess realized with a growing sense of unease that she was on a tighter timeline than she thought.

  She snapped the file shut, setting it on her desk.

  “This is enough to move on.”

  “Concur.” Jo Ann hesitated a moment. “Universal consensus on my
end is a drone strike, and I concur with that, too.”

  Duchess shook her head. “While the Agency would like to move forward as quickly as possible, we consider on-the-ground intelligence of sufficient value to rule out a drone strike in favor of a ground raid.”

  “Exactly what intelligence are you expecting to find?”

  Now it was Duchess’s turn to hesitate, to choose her words carefully.

  “The Agency considers a Chinese dissident with full ISIS support a matter of grave concern. Since he’s reacting how he is—or should I say, how he isn’t—it’s doubly concerning.”

  “How so?”

  Duchess raised the mug to her lips, breathing the scent of lemon, ginger, and honey as she played a memory in her mind.

  Then she set the mug down without taking a sip and pushed it away from her. “I’ve seen something like this once before, when I was station chief in Yemen.”

  “Well, what was the explanation in that case?”

  “A story for another time.” Duchess gave a mirthless grin that faded as she said, “All that matters at the moment is that we move at the soonest opportunity, and we use a ground team to do it. My people are ready to move on this if yours are.”

  Jo Ann’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you have to ask your man?”

  Duchess almost cringed at the use of that phrase. Jo Ann’s left hand still bore a wedding ring—yellow gold, battered through decades of wear, with a small chip of a diamond that represented the best her husband could afford in their small-town youth.

  Her right hand bore a class ring, a detail that Duchess found only slightly less irritating.

  But Duchess replied softly, “I chose the type of people who don’t say no to an opportunity like this. I can have the team wheels-up to Incirlik within seventy-two hours. But I’ll need help with the route.”

  “Infil or exfil?”

  “After the last attempt, the Agency is out of ratlines into that AO. We can provide the ‘out,’ but that’s it. We’ll need military infil, and it’s going to have to be the air option.”

  Jo Ann gave a soft grunt. “Deferring on a drone strike is going to tax my connections at JSOC. Playing the air option will be far worse, especially after the last attempt failed. If your team doesn’t deliver results this time, it’s going to expend what credibility I’ve got left.”

  “If they don’t deliver results this time,” Duchess replied, “Gossweiler is going to shitcan our entire program. Can you get it done?”

  A silence ensued, broken when Jo Ann swept both hands down her thighs and rose from the chair, speaking a single word that confirmed both her understanding and her departure.

  “Duchess.”

  “Jo Ann.”

  Then she was gone, leaving the file and closing the door behind her.

  Duchess lifted her phone from the receiver, waiting to hear a man’s voice before she said, “Get me David Rivers on the secure relay.”

  She hung up the phone, and then lapsed into a deep and focused stream of concentration. Her thoughts danced across the memories of Yemen, the failed operation to kill a target and the subsequent confusion about his location after they picked up his trail again.

  Her desk phone chimed twice.

  She lifted the receiver to her ear, pivoting her chair toward the wall. “Duchess here.”

  David’s voice was calm, level.

  “Hello, Duchess. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “We’ve located our mutual friend.”

  He sounded excited. “Really—has he left the country yet?”

  “Not in the least.” She gripped the receiver a bit more tightly. “He’s in the same town as before.”

  A long silence followed.

  Then David said, “I’m sorry, our connection must have broken up. It sounded like you said, ‘he’s in the same town as before.’”

  “He is.”

  “Your information must be wrong.”

  “My information isn’t.”

  Another pause, shorter this time, before David replied, “Why would that be?”

  “I have my suspicions. And if I’m right, it’s doubly important that we move ASAP. Do you want the op?”

  No hesitation. “We’ll finish the job this time.”

  “I’ll be in touch with the particulars. Please notify your team.”

  “I will. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to a tea party with my daughter.”

  Duchess felt a sad smile cross her face, her eyes drifting across the dated picture of her son. “David?”

  “Yes,” he replied, with a touch of irritation in his voice.

  “Can I give you some free advice on raising your daughter?”

  “Sure.” David sounded mildly confused. “I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  “There’s really only one thing you need to know about parenting.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Duchess felt her breath hitch in her throat, then she swallowed and said, “Two words: don’t blink.”

  She returned the phone to its cradle before he could respond.

  Then, pivoting her chair to face the computer, she began constructing her next mission brief.

  4

  Charlottesville, Virginia

  I pushed open the glass door, holding it for Laila and Langley to leave Chaps Ice Cream and join me in the late June sunshine.

  The historic Charlottesville downtown was packed today, the weather warm but not oppressively so. Laila was in a sundress, Langley in a princess dress with sneakers, holding my hand while using her other to devour an ice cream cone that I knew from experience would begin melting long before she finished it.

  We merged with the crowds strolling the walkway, continuing our relaxed afternoon together.

  Langley looked up at me and asked, “Daddy, is it beer-thirty yet?”

  I solemnly checked my watch.

  “You know what? We’re getting close. Maybe we can stop in at Jack Brown’s up ahead. What do you say, Mom?”

  Laila gave me a smile. “Sounds good. I’m just happy to have some time off with my two favorite people.”

  This was very often our weekend routine—lazily walk the downtown strip, get ice cream for Langley, and follow Laila as she ducked into various boutiques. And, of course, periodic beers for Dad. That part was key.

  Any number of historic American downtown areas boasted restaurants, breweries, shopping, and local flavor. But the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville was special—one of the longest pedestrian malls in the country, with over a hundred venues lining a brick-paved walkway teeming with trees, flowers, and fountains.

  Walking Charlottesville’s historic Downtown Mall was the living embodiment of everything I wanted for my family. All around us, outdoor cafes were filled with families, couples, and groups of university students.

  This was the American dream, indeed the dream of all civilized people no matter where they lived. To spend time with their family and friends in peace and abundance, absent the fear of a bomb going off or gunfire erupting at any moment. Preventing internal threats was the purview of law enforcement, and preventing external threats the job of the military—as well as the vast national intelligence complex and its attendant paramilitary assets, of which my team was now a part. I’d seen some horrific things overseas and would, if my current career continued, see many more—but no price was too high to keep those dangers eliminated or confined to foreign shores, to keep my family and countrymen safe.

  I’d initially found Charlottesville far too yuppie for my tastes—it was difficult to come from my background and immediately adjust to the peaceful normality of eco-conscious local stores and hybrid vehicles.

  And yet I’d come to embrace that yuppiness, at least somewhat. I knew this change had occurred in me when Laila asked me to get the milk out of the fridge and I cheerfully responded, “Almond or soy?”

  I glanced over at my wife, her sundress swishing as she walked, her face content.

  Then I l
ooked down at Langley, who was growing unbelievably fast—each morning she seemed an inch taller than when we’d put her to bed. I always assumed that parenting would require some monumental effort on my part; instead, Langley had her own distinct personality that seemed to have been in place from her birth, and all I could—or should—do was be a constant supporting presence.

  Licking her cone, Langley asked, “When can we go hiking again? I still need to see a bear.”

  Considering the timing, I replied, “How about we go camping in a few weeks? No better way to celebrate Mom finishing residency than hiking and continuing the search for black bears.”

  Laila offered, “Just what every girl dreams of. Count me in.”

  Langley nodded with delight—her memory was razor sharp, and she’d later recite this conversation down to the word in the event Laila and I forgot we ever agreed to the excursion.

  I pointed to the ice cream dripping down her hand and said, “You don’t have to finish that whole thing, you know. At this point the sidewalk is getting more ice cream than you are.”

  “I know. I’m done.”

  “Go put it in the trash over there.”

  She jogged to the trash can and deposited it, then ran back to take my hand again as we continued walking. When we came abreast of a water fountain, Langley tugged at my hand.

  “Can I have some change?”

  “Sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket for the coins I always brought for this purpose. “If you can tell me how much is here.”

  I deposited a small handful of coins into her sticky palm, and watched her move them around with one finger.

  She looked up and said, “One dollar and fifty-two cents.”

  Then she turned to the fountain until I stopped her. “Whoa, whoa. Hold it right there, hotshot—that was way too fast. Let’s have Mom confirm, because Dad’s math is...well, suspect at best.”

  My wife looked down at the coins.

  “She’s right. Two quarters, seven dimes, four nickels, and twelve pennies. Buck fifty-two.”