by Don Hoesel
Still, his seeing the humor of the situation did little to mitigate the sense of betrayal he felt. In the last three days he’d slept for perhaps six hours—fitful sleep from which he awoke wearier than when he’d closed his eyes. With the end of the project just days away, he suspected those six hours were a good deal more than he’d get—until his boss pushed the button that would separate the ice shelf from Antarctica. And to find out that he’d be taking the blame for it all was a hard thing for him to swallow.
Perhaps it was karma. While engaged in the project, he’d made decisions resulting in the deaths of more people than he cared to consider. Once December 21 came and went, would Van Camp be wrong for sending death after him?
He knew the answer to that.
The problem was that self-preservation, as a general rule, took precedence over a balancing of the karmic scale. Which meant he had to make another phone call.
The phone rang just once.
“There’s been a little snag with the Antarctica project,” Canfield said. “It appears that one of our drillers was injured and flown out early in the drilling.”
He paused to listen to the response.
“No, the drill super didn’t file a report on it. So now we have a loose end asking about workman’s comp checks and threatening to call his congressman.”
Canfield listened again and had to laugh at the colorful response coming from the other end of the line.
“Just take care of it,” he said, reining in his mirth. “And do it quickly—before he can compromise us more than he already has.”
After ending the call, Canfield started the BMW and pulled out into traffic, pointing the car toward the office.
—
“Hello, doll,” Abby said. “Miss me yet?”
“More than anything,” Brent replied. “Are you holding things together for me?”
“Sweetie, I am the glue that keeps you gainfully employed.”
Brent couldn’t help but laugh at the familiarity of the exchange. It was nice to know he could count on at least something to remain constant while his life was going in a hundred different directions.
“Speaking of which, when are you going to wrap things up and get back here? I can only keep your boss off your back for so long.”
“I may need you to keep the heat off for a while longer. It looks like this job could go another week.”
Abby’s response was silence, which was something he seldom heard from his admin, but considering the circumstances it didn’t feel like much of a victory.
“You do realize that part of teaching is actually being here to teach, right?” she asked.
“Funny how that works. Listen, Abby, I know how much extra this puts on you. When I finish up with this job I won’t even consider another offer for a semester or two. I promise.”
“Don’t toy with me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Brent said.
He knew Abby well enough to understand that she was only mildly put out by his extended absence. Were she truly upset, the conversation would have a whole different feel. He thought she was about to end the call, satisfied that she’d let him know who really occupied the driver’s seat in the relationship, when he heard a quick intake of breath through the phone.
“Oh, I remember why I called now,” Abby said.
“It wasn’t just to harass me?”
“That was just a bonus. No, are you working on anything for the AJS? Because there was a guy in here yesterday talking to Dr. Hathaway and it sounded like he was getting some background on you for a journal article.”
Brent had to think about that for a few seconds. It was conceivable that he had an article in the works for the American Journal of Sociology. Just because he couldn’t remember it right now didn’t necessarily mean anything. But he couldn’t pull anything like it from the recesses of his brain.
“No, I’m pretty sure I’m not,” he answered.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Because I know pretty much everything you’re working on, and that’s not one of them.”
“Okay, so if we both agree that I’m not writing an article, then who was this guy?”
“Excellent question, my dear Mr. Watson, which is why I offered him a glass of water.”
Brent understood the sentence but failed to grasp the significance, or the smugness in Abby’s voice.
“I don’t follow.”
“For fingerprints.”
“You took fingerprints?”
“I thought he was creepy. And sometimes you just have to follow your gut.”
“Even if you got his prints on a glass, how are you . . . ? Wait a minute, you’re dating that cop, aren’t you?”
“Ick, no,” she said. “Where have you been? That’s been over for weeks.”
“But I’m assuming you at least ended things nicely?”
“Sure. In fact, I’m watching his dog next week when he goes out of town.”
“And?”
“And it’s a mixed breed. Mostly chow, I think.”
“The fingerprints, Abby?”
“Oh. Well, they seem to belong to a guy named Gregory Hickett. One domestic violence charge, which was why he was in the database, but nothing other than that.”
Brent’s thoughts were going in a dozen places, the most important of which was why some guy masquerading as an employee for the AJS would be trying to dig up information about him. He was a boring old college professor. It took a few steps down that line of reasoning before he even thought to connect this mysterious visit to his present job. And when he made that connection a line of cold worked its way up his spine.
“Are you there, doll?”
“I’m here, Abby. Look, I need you to do me a favor. Can your cop find out everything he can about this guy and send it on to me?”
When his admin answered, her voice held concern. “Done. Is there something I should know about?”
Brent tried to infuse his response with his customary nonchalance.
“It’s probably nothing. For all I know, it really was a footwork guy for the AJS.”
“Who can’t find out what he needs over the phone instead of coming all the way here to spend thirty minutes with your colleagues and to glance at a few of your papers?”
“You never know with the academic sorts,” Brent said.
When a minute later he ended the call, he found that the chill was still there.
—
While the last few years were not without their anxious moments, Arthur Van Camp could not remember a time when he felt as if the entire project were teetering on the edge of a cliff. He suspected that was normal—that any large scale endeavor hurtling toward its culmination brought out the dormant fears of colossal failure. He also understood that he wouldn’t feel that way if he knew what Alan was thinking.
One mistake his rogue vice-president continued to make was to believe that just because the cleanup team was his to command for the duration of Night House, they reported only to him. Van Camp knew that Alan was on task, that Shackleton was prepared, that more than a dozen additional global hot spots were being worked appropriately, and that the Russians were ready to announce a total freeze on wheat exports. With each domino that fell, Van Camp moved closer to achieving the objective he had laid out for himself in a Sunday school class so very long ago.
All of it told him that Alan had been the right man for the job.
It also told him that the man’s endgame did not involve cutting and running. He was intent on finishing the project. After that, Van Camp could only guess.
It was a rare afternoon in that he wasn’t in the office. Instead, he sat near Alan’s wife in her private room, watching the monitor mirror the steady beat of the woman’s heart. It was interesting to him how the line on the monitor seemed so strong. He suspected Phyllis’s heartbeat had the steady regularity of a healthy woman. However, whatever was happening in her mind was keeping her from engaging with the rest of the world.
The seat he occupied, and the hospital room in which it sat, struck a chord in him whose origins were no mystery. When his own wife lay dying, he lost track of the hours he spent at her bedside, holding her hand as she readied to pass. According to the nurses, Alan had done much the same, although his presence did not seem to be as frequent as had Van Camp’s just a couple of years before. It was further proof that Alan was still invested in the project.
Van Camp had already resolved to pay for the woman’s hospital bills, even if her condition warranted an extended stay somewhere. It was the least he could do—a last gesture for a man who had given so much to the company. It was a pity Alan would not be around to reap the rewards of such meritorious service.
December 15, 2012, 3:48 P.M.
“No one would fault you for calling it,” Maddy said. “Like the colonel said, you’ve more than fulfilled your obligation.”
“I can,” Brent said. “I can quit and go back to the classroom and worry until December twenty-first comes and goes, or I can stay here and do what you folks brought me here to do.”
They were in the Pentagon mess. Brent was finishing up an exceptional Philly cheesesteak, after telling Maddy about the call from Abby.
“If I go home now, I’ll just spend the next six days looking over my shoulder. And I’ll probably just keep working on this on my own anyway. If you let me keep my computer.”
Maddy didn’t answer right away. She’d pushed the rest of her lunch away and let her eyes play over the other tables and the men and women, civilian or uniformed, who occupied them.
“I keep forgetting that you haven’t been here very long,” she said. “You slipped right in and it’s almost like you’re a real member of the team. I have to keep reminding myself that you’re a sociology professor. You’re not an anti-terrorism expert, or a spy. So when you get shot at in Afghanistan, and have some guy snooping around your workplace, it’s probably not quite what you were expecting.”
“You’re right. It’s not. But I’m having fun.”
That drew a smile from the concerned army captain, which was what Brent wanted, but he also thought he owed her an honest answer.
“I know you’re not expecting anything from me,” he said. “This is just something I have to do. If I walk away now and someone else dies and I could have done something to help you prevent it, I’m not sure I’d be able to live with that.”
That was the kind of answer he thought Maddy would appreciate, and from the look on her face it appeared to have hit home.
“Besides, you never know when you’re going to need me to save you again.”
She aimed a glare at him in response, and Brent accepted it with a grin.
“And there’s something else,” he said. “Say we don’t find out who’s behind this and the polarizing event happens and they reap whatever profit they expected to gain from it. Do you think that’ll be the end of it? That they won’t start trying to clean up some loose ends?”
He saw her take that in and roll it around, saw the look that came to her eyes as she did so.
“If nothing else, we have to get some security for you,” Maddy said. “If they’re bold enough to show up at your office, they won’t be shy about showing up at your hotel.”
“You mean if the man Abby saw even has anything to do with this.”
“I guess we’ll know more about that when you get the report you asked for.”
“Until then I say we just keep plowing ahead.”
“Fair enough,” she said.
Brent rolled up his napkin and set it on his empty plate. He pushed his seat back, expecting Maddy to follow suit, when he realized that she hadn’t moved.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What did the colonel drag you into his office for?”
While Brent could hear the casual tone of the question, he also picked up on the nervousness behind it. He wasn’t sure how she’d picked up on the topic of the conversation, but she obviously knew something. It left him with a decision to make, and he decided to choose the path that someone with her ethical standards would appreciate: honesty.
“He asked me what my intentions were as far as you’re concerned,” he said, unable to keep the gleam from his eye.
The candid admission set Maddy back in her chair, eyes wide. “He didn’t.”
“Oh, but he did,” Brent said. “The colonel thinks you’re taking a shine to me, and I think he’s worried that I’m not as good a catch as you deserve.”
He enjoyed seeing how the news affected her. To her credit, she recovered quickly.
“He didn’t actually say ‘taking a shine,’ did he?”
“No, I believe his exact words were that you and I ‘have become close’ during my time with you and the team,” Brent said in his best imitation of the colonel.
Maddy couldn’t help but chuckle, but she still appeared taken aback by the forwardness of her superior officer. Brent, always willing to add fuel to a good fire, decided to make her squirm a bit longer.
“So have we?”
“Have we what?” Maddy asked.
“Have we become close during my stay here?”
The question served a dual purpose. The first was to have some fun at her expense. The second, though, was to use the banter to see if the colonel might have been right. Brent was well aware that he’d thought a lot about Maddy over the last week and a half. It would be nice to know where she fell on the subject.
What he didn’t expect was for the light atmosphere that had settled around the table to vanish. When she answered, after a pause long enough for Brent to have eaten another half of a cheesesteak, both her face and voice were without humor.
“Since you were honest with me, I’ll return the favor. Am I attracted to you? Yes. You’re smart, funny, and not too bad looking. In fact, you’re probably just the kind of guy that I could see myself getting serious about.” She stopped and allowed Brent time to process what she’d said. “But there’s one big problem,” she went on. “And I think you know what it is.”
“You can’t date someone who doesn’t share your religious beliefs.”
Maddy answered with a sad smile. “We’re not talking a different denomination, or even a big point of theology that we can fight about. You don’t believe in God at all, and for me that’s a deal breaker.”
Brent had no answer to that, because she was right. He’d considered and rejected the concept of a god a long time ago and he’d never found sufficient cause to revisit the topic. He was glad that Maddy’s belief helped her, perhaps gave her life more meaning than it might have had, but he wouldn’t cop to something he didn’t believe in, even for someone he was interested in.
Maddy was the first to break the extended silence.
“The colonel’s right about one thing, though,” she said.
“What’s that?” Brent asked.
“You’re nowhere near as good a catch as I deserve.”
And with that she picked up her tray, winked at the professor, and then left him there to think about it.
—
Dabir’s mastery of English was a source of pride for him, but he had to admit to struggling with idioms. Some things did not translate well, lacking the proper context for a nonnative speaker. Tonight, though, he thought he was doing something called stirring the pot. What struck him as amusing was that in his country, a person stirred the pot to blend all of its elements, while what he was in the process of doing seemed more like taking a stick to a hornet’s nest. That too might be an idiom, although he supposed such knowledge was not important for his current task.
The copy business, where he stood watching a stack of documents wind through a scanner, was six blocks away from his hotel. At least three such shops were closer, but he’d chosen this one because, as far as he could tell, there were no security cameras. Still, he kept his hat pulled down and avoided raising his head any more than was necessary to complete the transaction with the youth behind the counter.
&n
bsp; He still was not sure what he hoped to gain from this act. Beyond the assignments he’d carried out for Alan Canfield, his knowledge of the man’s other operations—if such existed—eluded him. Nor could he be certain that anything the man had ordered Dabir to do was connected to the company for which he worked. He thought it a reasonable assumption and yet he preferred dealing with facts.
If nothing else, the recipients of these pages would be able to make Dabir’s former employer uncomfortable. But he would not make it easy—even for those who would face with him a common enemy. They had spilled the blood of his men at Afar and so he would give them no names. Only a picture. They would do the work themselves, or Dabir would move forward without them.
When the scanner finished its job, Dabir accepted his disk and walked out into the street.
December 16, 2012, 5:47 A.M.
Richards seldom arrived at the office before Maddy or Rawlings. The others, the ones more reluctant to greet the morning, would stagger in an hour or so after those two. The problem was that Maddy and Rawlings also stayed later than most. He suspected he would have to talk to them before too long, and remind them of the importance of a work/life balance.
He’d lived the life of the workaholic for too long and had only been preserved against its deleterious effects on his marriage by the saintly qualities possessed by his wife. Neither Maddy nor Rawlings was married, but the colonel understood that life existed beyond these walls. The worst part was that extended workdays were not requirements for a promotion. Richards would sign the papers recommending rank and transfer to just about anywhere either of them would want to go—and both of them knew that. Yet they kept coming in early and staying late.