by Glen Robins
After the departure of the four men who had grabbed him and driven him out into the outer reaches, all Lukas could hear was the faint nocturnal noises of nature, muffled as they penetrated the walls and windows. Then, down the hallway to his right, he heard talking and supposed there was a closed door or two between himself and the voice. It was apparently a one-way conversation as he never heard a second voice.
Lukas strained to understand what was being said or if he could recognize the voice. He could do neither. All of the unknowns were driving him crazy. Being held captive in restraints was also mind numbing. He had never realized how much he loved his freedom before this day had gone sideways.
Fortunately for Lukas, he had never been one to just meekly accept the bad cards life dealt. He had become quite good at using his intellectual resources to solve problems and find his way out of trouble. During the ride in the van, he had figured out the straps that held him down. While they were tight enough to hold him in place, they were not cinched. Although he had no way of knowing how long he had been alone in the front room of this cabin or whatever it was, he had been able to loosen the bands by exerting upward pressure against them. Slowly, the straps slackened around his chest. He had managed to push his arms downward back in the interrogation room while the two men were busily strapping him down. That meant that they had clamped the restraints on his lower forearms, not on his wrists. Once his chest strap was loosened, Lukas was able to maneuver his torso better and move his shoulders. This allowed him to slide his body up an inch or two toward the head of the bed. Because the straps around his forearms were secured to the gurney, inching his body upward changed the position of the straps from his forearm to his much thinner wrists and thus gain some mobility with his hands. With some straining and contorting, Lukas was able to pull his right hand through the strap.
After freeing his right hand, Lukas held his breath and listened. All of the exertion had increased his pulse, so all he could hear at first was the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears. After a minute, the thumping in his ears subsided and he could hear the voice again, still soft and unintelligible, and still in one of the back rooms.
Lukas slowly moved his right hand under the sheet to the strap on his left hand, loosened it, and waited again. No sounds and no movement could be detected in the house other than his own. Focusing on not making any sound, he removed the other straps, then pulled the sheet from his face and sat up.
Just as he suspected, Lukas found himself in some sort of rustic cabin. The floors and walls were wooden. It looked and smelled old. Soft yellow light emanated from a single lamp in the far corner of the room. Two tired-looking sitting chairs and a dinged-up reading table were pushed against the wall to his left and a wood-framed loveseat with hunting motif upholstery sat against the wall to his right.
He undid the leather belt-like straps from his ankles and climbed off the gurney, testing his weight on the dark stained wooden floor. He crept carefully to avoid bumping into anything. The last thing he wanted now was to make noise and alert his captors to the fact that he was mobile.
As he moved to the head of the bed, he looked in each direction. He was maybe eight feet from the front door, which was straight ahead. To the right, through an open archway, was a kitchen with a cast iron stove and a breakfast table that looked like something out of a previous century. He froze as the voice started up again from the hallway to the left. Another small room sat between his current position and the door that separated it from the hall. A stone fireplace took up most of the wall between the two rooms. Two brass candlesticks and two china plates adorned a rough-hewn wooden mantel that clung to the rocks above the mouth of the fireplace on his side of the wall.
In a different circumstance, Lukas would have enjoyed exploring the place and learning of the antiques that decorated it. But his focus now was on leaving as quickly and quietly as possible. From a crouched position, he took three quick steps and was at the door, turning the knob, when he heard a door open and the voice grow louder from down the hallway.
Without hesitation, Lukas turned the knob, pulled the door open just far enough to slip through the crack, then closed it gently behind him. Worried about making noise, he tiptoed as quietly as possible across the porch and down the steps. Only the light of the stars and a quarter moon helped him see where to go.
He leapt off the second step from the bottom. As soon as his feet hit the soft ground, he was ready to take off at a full sprint. He had no idea where he was or which way to go. The police had taken his phone, so he couldn’t call anyone. He had no map, no compass, and no clue. All he knew was that he wanted and needed to get as far away from that cabin as possible and he had to do it quickly, before the voice discovered he was missing.
Before Lukas could take his first running steps, two set of headlights flooded the whole front yard of the little house. Lukas froze. His breath caught in his chest. He was paralyzed. Abject fear instinctively stopped him in his tracks, preventing any movement that might trigger the killer instincts of the predator who had corned him.
Chapter Sixteen
Green Mountain National Forest, Vermont
Day after Graduation
With the house and the trees and the gravel patch that served as a driveway bathed in light, Lukas was able to see the house behind him and its surroundings but nothing else. He was blinded by the lights in front of him, so he couldn’t tell what kind of cars had their headlights pointed at him or how many people were out there.
He heard car doors open and the crunch of gravel under feet. There was rustling beyond the light; coordinated, synchronized movements. He imagined a small army of thugs with rifles pointed at him lined up behind the cars, like they do in the movies, using the vehicles’ doors as shields as if they needed to protect themselves from this unarmed captive.
This is it, he thought. They’re going to kill me right here and bury me in these woods where no one will ever find me. Damn that Penh!
A sickening feeling gripped him as he thought about his parents losing their only child. “Don’t shoot,” he yelled. “I haven’t done anything.” The tone of his voice carried every ounce of the fear and desperation that had welled up inside.
Just as he was about to abandon himself to his certain fate, the door behind him closed and a familiar voice caught his attention. “Don’t worry, Lukas. No one’s going to shoot you. You’re safe.”
Lukas spun on his heels to confirm that the voice matched the identity of the man he expected to see. “You?” he said. “You did this?”
“No, Lukas. You did it. And I’m very proud of you.” It was Mahoney, the NSA section chief.
Lukas was dumbfounded. He had no words. He just stood there, bathed in yellow light, and shook his head, the shock just starting to wear off.
“You’re probably wondering what’s going on, aren’t you? Well, let me tell you, we have never gone to such great lengths for a civilian before. Never. At least, not in all my years in the Agency.”
Lukas’s face contorted as he stood and stared at Mahoney in disbelief. He stammered. “I thought … I thought Penh had done this. I thought I was dead. I thought—”
Mahoney walked to the edge of the porch and descended one step at a time as he spoke. “We weren’t about to let Penh get to you. That’s why we had the cops keep you in jail. That’s why you were all alone on the third floor. That’s why we waited until the eleven o’clock shift change.”
“Why? Why me?”
“We believe in you, son. Now more than ever. You’ve just proven to us that you have what it takes to be a premier operator in this business.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen. It’s not very often a guy gets thrown into the kind of hot mess you just got thrown into. With everything you had to deal with over the past several days … Most people would’ve caved. I know you struggled to keep it together, but you did. And when the pressure was greatest, you kept your cool and figured out how to get o
ut of the situation. Bravo. Well done. You deserve a round of applause. Now come on inside. Let’s eat while we talk.”
Convinced that he was in a dream, Lukas kicked the dirt, then slapped his hand against his thigh. Yep, he was awake and feeling.
“Come on,” Mahoney urged. “Don’t make me wait. I’m starving.”
Lukas hesitated, then took the first step. Mahoney kept motioning for Lukas to follow him up the stairs, so he did. When Mahoney gestured for Lukas to enter first, the lights from the vehicles went out and the outside of the place was plunged back into darkness.
“Where are we?” Lukas asked, still uncertain.
“This is a safe house the NSA has owned for years. It’s in the Green Mountains, just across the Vermont state line. Not another house around for miles. Discreet, secluded, and completely off the grid. It’s a great place to bring those we want to keep out of the public eye, know what I mean?”
Lukas nodded absently as he made his way into the antiquated kitchen. He took it all in, surveying every detail to make sure it all fit together. Everything felt so old that it almost seemed new. Like one of those retro stylists had recreated it for a hit home makeover reality show. Only they had gone to an antique shop, not Pottery Barn, for the furnishings and hardware. Hand-carved accents on the cabinets, spotted brass handles on the doors, aged wood block countertops. A single bulb in an ornate glass and brass fixture in the middle of the ceiling provided the only light in the room until Mahoney opened the refrigerator and pulled out the fixings for sandwiches.
“You hungry?”
“Starved.”
Mahoney set to work on the sandwiches, piling on meat and cheese per Lukas’s requests. He even sliced a tomato and washed a few leaves of lettuce.
“What happens now?” Lukas asked, still dazed but starting to process the situation.
“Now you have a choice. You’re a graduate from one of America’s top universities, with honors, I might add. That means you’re smart and valuable. Your technical skills are top-notch, and you’ve gained some valuable experience. You could get yourself a good job anywhere you wanted. Probably make a lot of money somewhere doing something well within your capabilities.”
Lukas sensed an alternative coming. “Or?”
“Or, you could take on a real challenge and accept our offer.”
“A real challenge?”
“Yeah, a real challenge—like protecting your fellow law-abiding citizens from the likes of Pho Nam Penh. Like helping your country stay a step ahead of bad guys like him. This is the kind of stuff that takes more than just skill and knowledge. It takes heart. It takes guts. It takes a cool head when the pressure gets turned up. It takes character. You’ve demonstrated all of those things, especially over the past few days.”
Lukas stared past Mahoney at a picture of a moose on the wall beyond him. The moose stood proud and undaunted, staring at the camera with not a trace of fear, water dripping from its mouth. His hooves were at the edge of a placid pond surrounded by greenery. In the distance, a tree-covered mountain loomed. Above the mountain, an azure sky held two strips of white clouds in place on either side of the peak. There was a certain majesty to the lone bull in its element, standing tall and unafraid.
Mahoney watched Lukas out of the corner of his eye, stealing furtive glances at him while he worked. Time stretched out between them. He put the sandwiches on plates and walked to a small table under the window across the room and set them down. “It also means having the ability and the resources and the green light to exact revenge on that slithery scumbag for murdering your girlfriend.”
Lukas raised an eyebrow as this last statement hit its mark. A million thoughts flooded his mind. He tried to keep his expression impassive as he studied the framed photo, but a wry smile spread across his face anyhow. Things had definitely taken an unexpected turn. His feelings had changed now that Theresa was gone. Every goal and plan for his future had been overturned in the past week. While the vengeance part provided some motivation, the idea of out-foxing a fox like Penh appealed to Lukas more than the allure of a high-paying corporate job. Tediously working his way up from a cubical to a small office to a corner suite in some soulless company had lost its attraction. Expending his best efforts over a number of years just so he could earn the right to sit around in board meetings or answering to investors seemed far less fulfilling in light of what Mahoney had just said.
Lukas turned his eyes to Mahoney, who met his gaze. “I’m in.”
Chapter Seventeen
Fort Benning, Georgia
Three Weeks after Graduation
Three days after Lukas was reunited with his parents, he attended Theresa’s funeral. The FBI had informed her parents of the circumstances surrounding her death, thus exonerating Lukas. The day after the funeral, Lukas and his parents left for Austria. The day after their return to Boston from their eighteen-day vacation, Lukas received a call from Section Chief Mahoney.
“You ready?” he asked.
“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess,” said Lukas. He knew he had not had enough time to recover emotionally from the loss of Theresa, but he knew it would just take time.
“Officer Candidate School, as we discussed, is the first step in your training. All of our operators and agents go through it. You’ll be at Fort Benning, Georgia, for twelve weeks. I don’t want to say, ‘good luck’ cause making it through has nothing to do with luck, but good luck.”
Although Lukas didn’t feel altogether comfortable nor prepared, his desire to make the world a better, safer place overcame his desire to sulk and wallow. “I’ll be alright.”
Officer Candidate training was rigorous and taxing on all levels. Each day started early, often before five o’clock—oh five hundred in the parlance—and ended at twenty-two hundred. Every morning started with a test to make sure each candidate had made his bed properly. Lukas managed to get it right on the third try, but never grew entirely accustomed to the quarter bouncing drill first thing in the morning. If the bed wasn’t made tightly enough to bounce a quarter, the candidate had to do twenty-five push-ups.
Most days included physically demanding tasks, such as a five-mile run through a muddy bog followed by a rope course or an eight-mile hike with a sixty-pound pack. The mental challenges were equally as demanding. They usually consisted of complex mathematical problems that had to be solved in very short timelines while a senior officer barked right in his face about what an inept and worthless scum bucket of a boot licker he was.
Even mealtimes were stressful. Each bite of food could only be chewed seven times and the whole meal had to be completed in seven minutes.
Once his training as an officer was completed, he moved on to the more mentally challenging Information Technology Specialist Training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. He spent the next twenty-one weeks there certifying through each of the five phases of program, passing each test at the top of his class. Discipline, order, knowledge, and skill were emphasized more vigorously as he and his classmates phased up right on schedule.
In addition to the classroom work, Lukas and his cohorts were walked through additional drills, both physical and academic. It seemed ironic that his government, after teaching him to design, code, and test computer programs, then taught him how to hack into a wide variety of systems, embed malicious software, and monitor the manipulations that malware unleashed. Essentially, he was trained to be an expert hacker so that he could think like one enough to thwart one.
Mahoney checked in with him from time to time. “Have you given any thought to what to do in your spare time?”
“There’s not much of that, you know,” said Lukas. “But I think I’d like to get good at weapons. I think marksmanship would be helpful. That and explosives, electronic triggers, and things like that. It’d be cool to know how to build a bomb that’s both undetectable and able to blow up a skyscraper. They tell us we need to know that stuff so we can diffuse them. Seems like something Penh could try to use in his quest
to destroy the West. After murdering two people, seems like mass murderer might be the next logical step.”
Lukas had fully embraced the challenge to track, impede, and potentially put an end to any reign of terror Penh might try to initiate.
Although he suffered privations of every kind during his long months of training, including multiple nights without sleep, long stints without food or water, and standing at attention for over an hour in a blinding rainstorm, Lukas didn’t flinch. His resolve stayed strong. Whether it was trudging through the oppressive heat of the Georgian summer on long meaningless marches or laying still in the grass in full Ghillie suit camouflage as the oppressive summer heat made it hard to breathe, his will powered him through each challenge. Blisters, dehydration, muscle cramping, and sheer exhaustion were only part of the course. The mental and emotional fatigue equaled, if not surpassed, any physical discomfort he was forced to endure.
Lukas’s parents and friends were told that he was overseas working for a small IT consulting firm and would have limited communication with them. He made sure he sent texts and emails periodically. Although he felt deceptive, he knew it was necessary to keep them believing that he was living the life his degree had prepared him for.
At the end of his training, Lukas was asked to complete a tour of duty in Afghanistan. The thinking of his superiors was that he needed to see military operators in action. H needed to taste war and witness heroics as well as difficulties. His tour would win him respect among the men he would lead, and he would gain first-hand experience that would make him a far more effective operations leader than if he remained sequestered in an office somewhere, far removed from the action.
Lukas willingly agreed and found himself, sixteen months after graduating near the top of his class at MIT with a Computer Science degree, driving down a dirt road near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the blazing heat, with a group of bomb detail soldiers sent to check out a potentially catastrophic IED found near a family’s home in a densely populated part of town. What neither he nor his commanding officer ever suspected was that they were rushing headlong into a trap. The desire among the NATO commanders to serve the citizenry and be seen as a force for good exceeded their need for extreme caution at times.