Motive ; One Last Day ; Going Viral

by Dustin Stevens

  The day was supposed to have been a victory lap, or as close to one as a man that was being unceremoniously dumped on his behind could have.

  The morning was supposed to be a photo op, followed by a nice lunch with colleagues, and an afternoon of glad-handing and reminiscing. From there, he would take the staff out for a nice meal, everybody smiling and pretending they weren’t on the cusp of unemployment, before coming back the next day for a few perfunctory exercises and another farewell meal.

  A couple of days to close his affairs in Washington, and then he was headed back to Wyoming, where he would hunt and fish and occasionally charge exorbitant fees for speaking engagements and consulting gigs.

  Instead, he was sitting behind his desk well after quitting time, already feeling the effects of working harder than he had in a long time.

  Feeling the concentrated events of the day rise like bile in the back of his throat, Ridge let his hands fall away, his palms slapping heavily against his thighs. Opening his eyes, he blinked away the flashing lights that appeared before them, his vision eventually settling onto the scrap of paper waiting for his attention.

  “Christ,” he muttered, raising his bottom a few inches from his seat and sliding his phone from his pocket, the device getting extended use on a day when he had almost left it at home.

  Flipping it open, he punched in the digits Beckwith had provided, leaning back in his chair and listening as ringing was replaced by the sound of a song Ridge had never heard before, only the use of a slide guitar and the occasional twang in the singer’s voice letting him know it was supposed to be country.

  Just one more thing that had changed immensely in the time since he first took office.

  “Golding,” a voice with a similar drawl responded after several seconds, the sound of loud and persistent wind pushing through the mouthpiece.

  Leaning up in his seat, Ridge said, “Uh, yeah, yes, is this Harold Golding with CID?”

  All traces of the previous southern accent fell away as the man replied, “It is. Who is this?”

  “This is Senator Jackson Ridge from Wyoming, former Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

  For a moment there was no response, nothing but the sound of the wind.

  “Hello? Golding?” Ridge asked.

  “I’ll call you back in five,” Golding replied, his tone indicating all business. “907 area code.”

  Just as fast as the call had started it was over, the line cutting out, the sound of the wind dying away.

  It took a moment for Ridge to realize the conversation was over before slowly pulling the phone away from his face. Flipping it shut, he crossed his right leg over his left, staring off, still trying to make sense of everything that was going on around him.

  All he wanted was to determine what had happened to Josh Tarby, a task that should have been as simple as pulling his file and reading the narrative.

  What had ensued instead seemed like something he would read late at night from the pages of Tom Clancy.

  Still locked on that thought, his focus on the desktop, his phone began to ring in his hand. Without glancing at the screen, he flipped it open and brought it back to his cheek, blinking rapidly to pull himself back to fully aware.

  “Ridge.”

  “I thought you should know, you’re being followed.”

  The voice in no way matched Golding’s, Ridge’s eyebrows rising as he jerked the phone away and stared down at the screen, a wave of palpitations rising through his chest as he stared at what he saw on the caller ID.

  Whitner.

  “Black SUV, bogus plates,” Whitner said. “Followed you to Mulligan’s, pulled away right after you left.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jackson Ridge was standing along the back wall of his office, his shoulder flush against the heavy maroon curtains lining either side of the picture window behind him. With his body perpendicular to the outside of the building, he peered out into the darkness, trying to imagine who might be out there, lurking, watching.

  The call from Whitner had him shook, a fact he was not proud to admit, the feeling filling him with disgust, both at himself and the situation.

  There was a time – which he would like to believe wasn’t all that long ago – when there was no way he would have been so foolish, so consumed with his thoughts that he forgot who he was or what he was doing. Now, he had allowed himself to become preoccupied, solely focused on some sort of hero’s quest that was making him foolhardy, rushing forward headlong.

  At the same time, he couldn’t help but feel like this was also a validation of sorts for what he was doing. He had no way of knowing who it was that had taken it upon themselves to follow him for a quick run to the corner bar, but clearly, his asking questions had rattled somebody to the point that they felt it necessary to do so.

  Which only solidified his desire to keep going, even if he needed to be a little more careful about things.

  There was no way Murray would have tipped anybody about what he was doing, even less McVey, who let it be known that he didn’t want to be associated in any way.

  Double that for Whitner, who made a career out of being invisible, and had even gone the extra length of alerting him as to what was going on.

  Who that left as the leak in the chain, Ridge had no idea. He also knew that given the time constraints he was under, there were only so many things he could deal with at a given moment.

  Which might be exactly what whoever was out there wanted, to slow him down just enough so that the clock ran out before he got where he needed to be.

  The thoughts were all swirling in his head, one shifting mass of ideas and concerns, when the phone on his desk began to buzz. For several moments he merely left it there, the sound barely penetrating his consciousness, his thoughts on the call from Whitner and what it might represent.

  Just as fast, what he was doing right before it came in sprang back to mind, the name Harold Golding flitting across the front of his psyche.

  Pushing himself away from the wall, Ridge covered the ground to the desk in two quick bounds, snapping the phone up, this time checking the caller ID and seeing the 907 area code he’d been alerted to look for.

  “Ridge,” he said, remaining standing as he accepted the call.

  “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for you to give me a call.”

  Much like the last line in their previous conversation, any trace of an accent was gone from Golding’s voice, his tone a mixture of exhaustion and bitterness.

  “Me?” Ridge gasped, his eyes growing a bit wider.

  “Not you you,” Golding corrected, “but somebody from your committee, or Washington, or hell, just somebody in general.”

  Feeling his heart rate rise a bit, Ridge slowly rotated in place and lowered himself against his desk, the top fitting just beneath his hips. Crossing his left arm over his chest, he rested his right elbow atop it and said, “So you know what this is about?”

  “Afghanistan,” Golding replied, very much a statement and not a question.

  “So you saw the news, too?” Ridge asked.

  “The news?” Golding replied, his voice betraying a hint of confusion. “No, that I don’t know anything about. What I do know is that was the damn screwiest situation I ever handled, and it’s the reason I’m standing up here in twenty-two hours a day of darkness freezing my ass off.”

  Again raising his gaze to the windows behind him, Ridge attempted to look out into the gloom, almost imagining somebody standing there with a sound bubble, trying to hear every word that was being exchanged.

  In reality, all he could see was his own reflection and the office around him, the darkness outside turning the place into a fish bowl.

  “Start at the beginning, tell me everything,” Ridge said.

  Pushing himself up from the desk, he went to the window on his right and jerked the curtains shut, the rollers making a loud noise as they slid into place. Moving straight across, he went to eac
h successive window in turn, doing the same.

  A small measure for sure, but at the very least it would keep anybody from having a direct visual.

  As he did so, a long sigh could be heard, followed by a pause, the man collecting himself before launching forward with his narrative. When he finally did speak, the words came out fast, as if prepared a long time before, just waiting for any opportunity to release them.

  “I’m assuming that you calling me like this,” Golding said, “after hours in D.C. and all, means that you’ve been digging at this for a while.”

  Notwithstanding the fact that it had only been a number of hours, the number of conversations and favors that had been exchanged on the topic was already becoming quite exhaustive.

  “Yes.”

  “So then you also probably know how the investigative process works, how I ended up on the case,” Golding said.

  Resuming his place against the front of his desk, Ridge said, “The first part yes, but not the rest. I’m aware of CID and the role they play.

  “No offense, but I had never heard your name until about an hour ago.”

  “None taken,” Golding replied, “because there would be no reason for you to. I was a civilian investigator with the CID, brought onboard after twenty years as an MP.

  “They wanted me to stay in, keep climbing the ladder when I got out, but as a Carolina boy, the prospect of coming home and working out of Virginia was too appealing to pass up.”

  Just days from returning to Wyoming, Ridge knew the feeling well.

  “I bet.”

  “Worked right down the road there from you,” Golding said, bypassing the comment. “Was housed at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, sharing space and the occasional resource with the boys in blue.”

  It had been a while since Ridge had heard the reference, knowing that he was alluding to the FBI, the organization that was headquartered on the same grounds as the base, a joint operation that provided mutual support, to say nothing of the occasional friction.

  “Okay,” Ridge said, the full background not really necessary, though he wanted no part of derailing the story, hoping Golding would be getting to the pertinent portions sooner rather than later.

  “Being based there,” Golding continued, “meant that most of the time I was in Virginia working cold cases or putting meat on the bones of open investigations, but from time to time we did get pulled out into the field.”

  “For instances like Afghanistan,” Ridge inserted.

  “Exactly,” Golding replied, “for things that rose above the pay scale of the general MPs.”

  “And that’s what happened over there?” Ridge asked.

  For the first time since he began talking, Golding paused, long enough that Ridge was almost sorry he’d asked anything, his last intention being to interrupt the flow of information, especially just as it was on the cusp of becoming pertinent.

  Wincing slightly, folds of skin appearing around his eyes, he found himself holding his breath, waiting for Golding to continue.

  When he did – almost a full minute later – a hint of the earlier bitterness was back.

  “I’ll tell you right up front, I don’t know what the hell happened over there,” Golding said, “but here’s what went down.

  “On April 14th of last year, the incident in question took place. The scale back was just getting under way and a lot of supplies were starting to flow out of the city, meaning that the usual convoy routes were now running twice a day, the real big ticket items moving out under the cover of darkness.

  “The idea was that any insurgents that might be watching may feel extra emboldened, knowing that there was a ton of goods moving through, this being their last chance to get their hands on them.”

  His thoughts thousands of miles away, Ridge nodded. While on the surface whatever was leaving would seem to be the same exact things that had previously entered, in most cases their condition a little worse for the wear, he had discounted the timeframe.

  Just as he was now doing things that he wouldn’t normally while faced with a looming deadline, it bore to reason the enemies in Afghanistan would feel the same way.

  “The night runs had started only a week earlier, and up to that point everything had been going fine, not even a shot fired,” Golding said. “But on that night...”

  “All hell broke loose,” Ridge murmured.

  “And then some,” Golding replied. “Eighteen miles outside of Kabul, almost exactly between the city and the airfield, in a spot where there was no earthly reason for it to have occurred.”

  Feeling his eyes narrow again, Ridge asked, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’m sure you’ve read information briefings on the Armed Services Committee, are familiar with Afghanistan being a rugged, mountainous terrain.”

  “Sure,” Ridge replied.

  “So then you know what that kind of country normally looks like. Narrow passes, winding roads, you name it, this route had it all.”

  “Which is why the convoy was armed to begin with,” Ridge said.

  “Well, they’re all armed, but the ones going in and out of the city were heavily armed,” Golding said. “And with good reason. There was rock solid data telling them that hostiles were holed up in those spots.

  “Our guys had seen them on more than one occasion. Ground support had even had a few skirmishes with them.”

  Grunting softly, Ridge felt himself nodding, visually confirming what he was being told. Earlier in the day, he had looked at the map, seeing the very route Golding was now speaking of, having examined it a dozen times or more in his previous work on the committee, the winding red line of the road now standing out in his mind.

  “Okay,” he nudged.

  “Despite all that,” Golding said, “none of those places is where it went down. Instead, it happened right out in the open, on a flat patch of ground with no cover for miles.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Ridge said, the words out and gone before he even realized it, the look of confusion that had started around his eyes now grown to encompass all of his features.

  “Nope,” Golding said. “And let me tell you, this isn’t like Iraq, where they could have dug some hides into the soft sand and holed up. That ground is hard and rocky.

  “The amount of time it would have taken them to get into position...well, somebody would have noticed. Like I said, they’d been running through there twice a day.”

  “Right,” Ridge said, releasing his left hand from over his torso and bringing it to his forehead, for the first time realizing that he was warm, his skin damp to the touch.

  Thinking on what had been shared for a moment, superimposing it onto the data he already had, Ridge said, “So this was a late night run that got hit?”

  “It was,” Golding said. “Two forty-eight in the morning, local time.”

  “Damn,” Ridge said.

  “Yeah,” Golding agreed, his voice lowered to match Ridge’s.

  Again the two men fell silent for a moment, chewing on things, before Ridge asked, “So what was taken?”

  “I don’t know,” Golding said.

  “You don’t know?” Ridge said, his voice rising just as fast as it had faded, his facial expression matching it in kind.

  “I don’t know,” Golding repeated. “In fact, what I just shared with you is everything I do know, because fewer than thirty-six hours after arriving in Afghanistan, we were jerked off the case and sent back home.

  “Week later, I was shipped up here.”

  Standing alone in his office, Ridge’s jaw fell, his face hanging, so much packed into the last few sentences he didn’t know where to begin, how to best unfurl the information he’d just been handed.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Yeah,” Golding replied, dragging the word out, the previous bitterness back in full. “They took me out of Virginia, flew me to the other side of the world, had me there basically long enough to see the site, to collect a couple of vague
accounts of what happened, and then brought me back.”

  “And right after?” Ridge asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Were you expecting a transfer? Your time at Quantico coming to an end?” Ridge prodded.

  “No,” Golding answered, “and that’s not even how it works. I’m a civilian, I don’t have enlistment terms.”

  “And I didn’t realize the CID would even have a presence in Alaska,” Ridge added.

  “We don’t,” Golding said, “or at least we didn’t.”

  To that he added nothing more, the insinuation clear. Whatever he had been doing in the mountains a week earlier was something that nobody wanted to be delved into too deeply, his newest outpost being an obvious hiding place, somewhere to stash him indefinitely.

  “If they wanted you out of the way,” Ridge said, “why not just fire you? Why go to all that trouble?”

  To that a sigh was the first response, the sound drawn out several seconds, the weight behind them clear.

  “Senator, I have asked myself that question a hundred times a day, and the only thing I can figure is because it was easier for them to keep tabs on me this way. If they’d fired me, they knew I’d have stayed in the area. That’s where I’m from, where my friends and family are. This way, they could ship me off to Siberia here, know exactly where I was and what I was doing all the time.”

  Though he wasn’t sure why, Ridge almost felt the need to apologize to the man, even if he had never actually met him.

  The situation that was being described was abhorrent, it now clear that Clara Tarby was far from the only person that had gotten a raw deal in the proceedings.

  “Who is they?” Ridge asked.

  “Good question,” Golding answered. “I would assume somebody either on-site there in Afghanistan or pretty high up back here, someone that would stand to get a black eye from whatever I found.”

  “Which was what?” Ridge asked. “Why were they so afraid of you being there?”