The Sam Prichard Series - Books 9-12 (Sam Prichard Boxed Set 3)

by David Archer

  Sam slipped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “That we can, my love,” he said. “That we can.”

  BOOK 12

  ACES AND EIGHTS

  PROLOGUE

  The halls of Washington DC are often full of twists and turns, no matter how straight the architects may have meant them to be. The ones in the Nebraska Avenue Complex, where the Department of Homeland Security still rested in the “temporary headquarters” it was assigned when it was created by President Bush, were often the most convoluted of all.

  Harry Winslow mused about those convolutions as he walked up the hall to the office of the current director. This would be the last time he would make this walk, he knew, and even though his old bones wouldn’t miss the hard marble floor, he knew he was going to feel a loss when he had to get up in the morning and not come to work here.

  Or anywhere else, for that matter. Harry was being forced into retirement.

  Well, he figured, what could you really expect from these new upstarts who run the world nowadays? Before, when DHS and NSA and CIA and the rest were run by former military and intelligence people who knew what it was like to put their own lives on the line, a guy like Harry was always there in the background, always the one that got called in when things got too messy for the “public persona” to handle. Donovan, Hoover, Bush Sr.—almost every leader since the formation of the FBI and the other alphabet soups had called on Harry, or someone like him, at one time or another.

  Sometimes it takes the guy who knows where the bodies are buried to make things work. Especially if he’s the same guy who put some of them there, and everyone knows it in an “unofficial” sort of way. Over the span of his long career, Harry had buried an awful lot of them, so when one group had a problem with another one, he was often the one called upon to smooth things over.

  But that wasn’t why he was on his way to see Danuel Doherty, stomping through the halls for what he was sure would be the very last time. Callie, the girl who served as his office assistant down there in the dungeons they’d tried to bury him in, had come in that morning with a copy of a memo that had gone from personnel to building security, letting them know that Harry was being retired and that his access codes would need to be deleted after the end of the day. She’d been fighting back tears as she showed it to him, even though she knew she could be fired and possibly even imprisoned for possessing a classified interoffice memo.

  Harry had read through it, then set it afire with his cigar lighter and dropped it into the dirt that held the fake potted tree some idiot had put in his office. Then he’d called upstairs and told Doherty he needed to see him. Doherty had told him to come up around ten, but Harry didn’t like to set appointments.

  “Classified Interoffice Memo!” Harry snorted at the very thought that such a thing could ever exist. How the hell could you work with people that you wouldn’t trust to know who was being fired and who wasn’t? Since when did retiring an old guy come under the heading of National Security?

  Since they started using social media as a means of obtaining intel, that’s when. Who during the 70s and 80s would ever have believed that the country would consider something like Facebook to be a reliable source of anti-terrorism intelligence? Not Harry Winslow, that’s for sure!

  Doherty’s secretary saw Harry as he entered the office and looked up at him with her smile in place. “Mr. Winslow,” she said, “you’re a little early. Have a seat and I’ll let the director know you’re here.”

  “Why?” Harry demanded in his slow, southern drawl. “He got a girl in there he don’t want me to know about?” He walked past her desk as her face took on the expression he liked to call “befloozled” and opened the big oak door into The Inner Sanctum.

  Doherty was behind his desk, speaking into a telephone, and looked up at Harry with what actually looked like amusement in his eyes. “What’d I tell you?” he asked. “Just came barging in without even being announced, and he’s more than an hour early. I’ll call you back.”

  He set the cordless handset on its base and pointed at a chair in front of his desk. “Harry,” he said, “to what do I owe...”

  “Cut the bull crap, Danuel,” Harry said. “I bounced you on my knee when your momma was in my analysis unit forty years ago, remember? There ain’t any pleasure in this and we both know it. I want to know why you’re kicking me out on my ass, boy, and I think I’m entitled to an explanation.”

  There, he’d said it. Harry felt the tiniest bit better as he sat in the chair Doherty had offered.

  The director smiled at him. “Harry, I haven’t forgotten, and just in case you didn’t know, I learned an awful lot from you during those years. You and mom were always talking, ignoring little Danny on the floor, but I was listening. Why do you think she used to say I was destined to become a spy? Any idea what kind of hell I put her through during my teens, using tricks I picked up from you?”

  “I ain’t got time for reminiscences, boy,” Harry said. “I want to know why I’m...”

  “You’re being retired, Harry,” Doherty said, “because we finally figured out that you’ve been getting someone to manipulate your personnel file for the past fifteen years. That’s the only way a man could serve with SEAL Team One more than four years before he supposedly enlisted in the Navy. Did it never occur to you that just changing your birthdate wouldn’t hide the fact you’ve been active in one way or another since before you officially joined up?”

  Harry didn’t miss a beat. “That’s ridiculous, Danuel,” he said. “One of your clerks has made an error, that’s all. I’m not ready to retire yet, and you still need me, so let’s forget all this and go back to work, shall we?”

  “Nice try, Harry,” Doherty said, “but you’re busted, old man. We found the original birth certificate you used the day you joined, showing when you were actually born! You’re not going on sixty, Harry, you’re already almost seventy-six years old!” He sighed and leaned forward, softening his voice. “Harry, don’t make this harder than it has to be. You’ve served your country for far longer than you should have had to, and I know that we’d have ended up in a world of hurts more than once if it wasn’t for you, but this is a younger man’s game, nowadays. There was a time when you’d have given James Bond a run for his money, but I’ve got dozens now who could have run rings around you even then. Don’t be bitter about being put out to pasture, Harry; think of it as being able to finally take time for yourself. Let the rest of us shoulder the responsibility, while you go out and enjoy the years you have left.”

  Harry stared at him for a long moment. “Enjoy the years I have left? Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound? Danuel, if you had actually read through my file, you’d know why retirement is the last thing I could ever want. What the hell could I do with myself? What is there in this world for me outside of this job?”

  Doherty sighed deeply. “Harry, Harry,” he said. “Of course I read your file, but there was nothing in it I didn’t already know. No one is immune to tragedy, Harry. You were talking about Mom a few minutes ago? Were you even aware that she and my father were on flight eleven when it crashed into the World Trade Center? We all suffer loss, Harry, it’s part of living. It’s terrible, it sucks, but we still go on.”

  And that’s how it happens, Harry thought later that day, as he cleaned out his desk and packed up the few things that really mattered to him. He had the photo of him and Ian Fleming, taken during a chance meeting at Heathrow Airport a few weeks before the author’s death, and another taken with Ronald Reagan during his presidency, but there was little else he might have considered mementos of his career. Those were mostly in his memory, and consisted of faces and names of those he had worked alongside.

  Callie couldn’t stop sniffling as she tried to help.

  “I think it’s just so unfair,” she said. “These past few months, working with you, they’ve been fantastic. I love hearing the stories you tell, of all the adventures you had and the things you accomplish
ed. It won’t be the same with you gone.”

  “Well, my dear, just try to make do with whoever replaces me,” Harry said. “I'm sure it’ll be someone who has stories of his own to tell.”

  And then it was time to go. Harry picked up the small box he was taking with him and started out his office door, but a young man took it from him and offered to carry it down to his car. Harry only sighed, and gave Callie a smile as he walked down the hallway for the very last time.

  He surrendered his badges and keys to the security desk, and the officer there was kind enough to say he was going to miss him. Harry made a point of getting his name—David Wells—and promising to mention him if he ever got around to writing his memoirs, but he thought they all knew that wouldn’t happen. He’d have to let CIA go through the manuscript, and by the time they got done redacting parts of it that would reveal things better kept secret, there wouldn’t be anything left!

  He got into his car, a 1969 Lincoln Mark III that he had found for sale on a collector car website and bought on a whim. It was one of the very few flights of fancy he’d ever taken, but there was something about the car that reminded him of when things were most right in his world. He’d driven one like it when he had been transferred from the SEALs to Naval Intelligence in 1979, and that had been one of the best times he could remember.

  He’d been a ladies’ man, back then, and was always dating one beautiful woman or another, always had what his friends called “arm candy” hanging off him. They were all superficial relationships, though, not one of them lasting more than a few dates, until he’d met Kathleen. She’d first noticed him because of that car, that Lincoln, telling him that it seemed to be some sort of compensatory possession for a man who didn’t have everything he wanted out of life, and it had dawned on him that she was correct. He’d always thought he was doing fine, but her words made him take personal stock, and he realized that he was, to put it bluntly, quite lonely.

  Kathleen was only twenty-two, a secretary who had managed to get a high enough clearance to allow her to sit in on the highest-level meetings of the command. Harry’s own clearance was just as high, but there was a very strict policy that prohibited dating between employees of the National Maritime Intelligence Center. Still, despite the age difference—Harry was thirty-eight—they carried on a flirtation for most of the first six months they knew one another. But Harry wanted more. One night, when she had to stay late, Harry disabled her car so that it wouldn’t start. Then, of course, he “just happened” to be leaving the parking area at the right moment to offer her a ride home.

  She’d climbed into the car with a smile, and started looking through his glove box as soon as they left the parking lot.

  “Looking for something?” Harry asked her.

  “The rotor from my distributor,” she said without looking up. “Where did you hide it?”

  Never one to avoid the truth, Harry grinned. “Inside the air filter housing on your engine. Figured me out that fast, did you?”

  She looked at him and smiled. “Harry, I’ve been waiting two months for you to get up the nerve to try something like this. I was starting to wonder if I was gonna have to be the one to seduce you.”

  That had led to a clandestine relationship that lasted three years, culminating in their marriage when Harry was finally transferred to the Joint Military Intelligence Training Center as an instructor, removing the prohibition. Harry knew full well that his superiors had been aware that he spent many of his nights at her apartment, and that she spent equally as many at his, but that was just another area where knowing where the bodies were buried came in handy. As long as they made at least a moderate effort to keep it hidden, nobody wanted to risk having Harry Winslow pissed at them.

  And then had come the best news of all: that Kathy was pregnant. No one paid any attention to the fact that Harold David Winslow, Jr. was born only seven-and-a-half months after his parents were married, and Harry couldn’t have been a prouder papa. Harry, Jr.’s sister Elizabeth was born the following year, and the family lived happily and comfortably in a suburb of Arlington.

  In 1986, only three weeks after their second anniversary, Harry was called up for a special mission into Cambodia. Intel had come across information indicating that there were at least eighteen former American soldiers still being held as POWs in the country, and Harry would lead a mission to go and find out if it was true. The mission would last a month, and he kissed his family goodbye as he left to go and rescue those good American boys who deserved to come home.

  The mission was a bust, because it turned out the only American ex-soldiers there were those who had remained after deserting. They were living together in a rural area encompassing several villages, where they’d set themselves up as tin bosses over the people. Harry was so disgusted that he almost killed them, but he called it in and waited for the MPs to arrive from Germany to arrest them all. He couldn’t wait to get home to his wife and kids, but while he was waiting to board the transport plane that would start him on the journey home, he was called to the field office and handed a telephone receiver.

  “Harry?” said a voice he recognized. It was his best friend, Michael Watkins, another former SEAL who worked as an instructor at the Training Center. “Harry, it’s Michael.”

  There was something in Michael’s voice that told him the news wasn’t good, and the sensation that went down Harry’s spine felt cold, but it wasn’t like a chill. It was more of a sudden knowing, a sudden hunch that life as he knew it was about to be over.

  “Harry—Listen, they said I should be the one to call you because of what we’ve been through together, y’know?”

  “Is it Kathleen, or one of the kids?” Harry asked.

  There was a moment of silence on the line, and then Michael cleared his throat. “Harry, it’s all of them. There was a fire, Harry, it looks like something went wrong with your wiring and a short caused a fire...”

  He made it home without falling apart, and the funeral was handled quickly with Michael’s help. The coffins were all closed, of course, because the bodies were terribly burned, but he’d known that they would be. The only weakness Harry Winslow had ever allowed himself came then, when he looked at the closed caskets and told himself that they weren’t really in there, that Kathleen had actually taken the kids and run away for reasons of her own. The bodies inside them weren’t his wife and children, they were someone else, just corpses shoved into the burning house to make it appear that his family was dead.

  Of course, that only lasted a few days before he got past denial and into acceptance and grief. After that, Harry just didn’t talk about them, didn’t even think about them if he could avoid it. Michael got transferred to someplace overseas, Harry buried himself in his work and built a name for himself, and when he was tapped in the 1990s to form a new department to watch some upstart terrorist group called “Al Qaeda,” he dedicated himself to his duties with every fiber of his being.

  Now, on the day of his retirement, Harry let all the memories come back in, and he couldn’t help wondering if Kathy and the kids would have been proud of all he’d accomplished. Sure, there were things he’d have never wanted them to know about—every intelligence agent had things he wasn’t proud of—but in general? Would they have been proud of the times he’d saved lives, or even helped save the world?

  Harry shoved those thoughts aside and came back to the present as he pulled into the parking garage of his apartment building in Annapolis. None of that would help him, now. He had to think of what to do next, and how he was going to make his moments continue to count, or else he’d be one of those who merely wasted away after retirement.

  And Harry Winslow didn’t like to waste anything.

  He carried the box up to his apartment and let himself in, dropping it on the couch and walking on to the kitchen to get a glass and some ice. The whiskey was on the table beside his chair where it always was, the same bottle that had been untouched since the day he’d buried his family
. He’d kept it to remind himself that he didn’t want to drink and forget, he wanted to always remember them, but today he had decided it was time to get himself rip-roaring drunk.

  That ancient bottle of Jim Beam was about to become his best friend. He fetched the glass and added ice, then went into the living room again and picked it up.

  The envelope that fell over had been leaning against the bottle, and Harry knew it hadn’t been there when he’d left that morning. He set the bottle back down and picked it up, then reached into the drawer of the table and took out the Colt .45 he always kept there. Another pass through the apartment convinced him he was alone, so he sat down on the sofa and looked over the envelope.

  It was gray, and obviously old. The only words on it were handwritten, and even after all these years, Harry knew the handwriting was Kathy’s. This envelope had been written a long time before and been stored somewhere ever since, but for some reason it had been delivered to him at this time, on this day. What possible cruelty could have been behind such a plot, he wondered?

  He stared at it for more than five minutes, but then he had to know what it would mean. He took out the Swiss Army Knife that Kathy had given him as a gift on their anniversary, only a few weeks before he left on that mission, and slid its blade under the edge of the flap. The glue was so old and dry that it popped free instantly, and he opened it to take out the contents.

  There were three photos inside, along with a single sheet of paper. He looked at the photos first, and his breath caught when he realized that the first one showed Harry, Jr. He looked at the second and saw Elizabeth, and the third, of course, was Kathleen herself—but something was wrong, because Harry Jr. looked like he must have been at least seven or eight, and Lizzie was around six or so, and Kathy…

  Kathleen was sitting on a beach, and there was another man beside her. She had also aged, though it wasn’t so obvious in her case. The look on her face said that she was happy, and Harry looked closely at the man beside her.