Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  She closed the door and leaned against it. Flynn looked out the window at the park below.

  "Who's Hedstrom?" said Flynn.

  "Hedstrom is my partner."

  “Partner?” Flynn asked, turning from the window.

  “Business partner. Former US Marine and NYPD.”

  "Seems like a slick operation. I never pegged you for a bodyguard."

  "I'm not." She walked past him and stood by the window. "I run the investigations division. Corporate theft, celebrity stalkers. That sort of thing. Hedstrom handles the events and personal protection side."

  "How many bodies?"

  "Full-time, about a hundred. That many again on the books for temp jobs."

  "You've done well."

  "Yes." She waited for him to speak again. He didn't. "So, you. Of all the gin joints in all the world, and all that."

  "Yeah.” He smiled. As quickly it was gone. "I need your help."

  "What kind of trouble are you in?"

  "I'm not in any. I'm about to make some."

  "And what is it that I can do after all these years?"

  "I need someone I can trust. To walk through some things."

  "Are these things legal?"

  “Someone I know has been kidnapped.”

  “Someone you know?”

  “My girlfriend.”

  Hutton nodded but said nothing. Then she pushed off the windowsill and moved around the office and sat behind her desk.

  “You call the cops?”

  “No.”

  “Where did this take place?”

  “DC.”

  “And you came all the way to New York to spitball with me?”

  “I have reason to believe they brought her here.”

  “So they crossed state lines. Did you call the FBI?”

  “No. I came to you.”

  “FBI is better resourced than me. If anyone can find her, they can.”

  “There’s a complication.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They want a shipment.”

  “A shipment of what?”

  Flynn didn’t answer. He just looked at Hutton. Her mouth fell open.

  “Iraq?”

  He nodded.

  Hutton leaned back in her office chair and looked up at the ceiling. Her lips were moving again. Then she leaned forward.

  “You better take a seat. Tell me what happened.”

  Chapter Seven

  Flynn told Hutton what he knew. About the trip to DC. and the hotel meeting and the phone app and following the pulsing blue dot to New York. Hutton made some notes on a yellow pad. When he was done he waited as she played the information back through her mind. She tapped her pen on the pad and looked at her notes, and then up at Flynn.

  “So, initial impressions,” she said. “They’re amateurs. No pro would let themselves be tracked by a phone app. They’d turn it off, or trash it altogether. After the first message. Getting the first message from her phone is a good move. It makes it real. It proves they have her, in a fashion.”

  “Unless it’s a decoy. Leading me away from her.”

  “Doesn’t make sense. They’re gambling that you’d even think to look at the app to track the phone in the first place. They’re gambling you even have the means to do that. Odds are against that, which makes the trek to New York pointless. No, they didn’t know. Probably still don’t.”

  “The trail went dead last night.”

  “Phone might have gone dead.”

  They sat in silence for a while with Hutton’s last word reverberating around the room.

  “So we wait until they call again,” she said. “In the meantime, the question is, can you find the shipment?”

  “You don’t really think they’ll keep her alive that long.”

  “No, I don’t. But it’s leverage you might need. You never know. And what else are you going to do?”

  “Find them.”

  “But as of last night, that trail is dead, so until they call again, there’s nothing there. You can’t work what you don’t know.”

  “So what do we know?” Flynn asked.

  “We know it’s linked to Iraq, so somewhere in the chain, someone knows what happened. And that someone was probably there.”

  “All right.” Flynn stood and opened his new daypack and took out Beth’s tablet. The battery had gone dead while sitting in the McDonald’s. Flynn looked at it like it held state secrets.

  “Do you have a charger for this? Just in case they come back online.”

  Hutton looked at the tablet and nodded and moved to a bureau on the other side of her office and pulled open a drawer. From inside, she selected a cable and plugged one end into the tablet and the other into the outlet. She gently placed the tablet on top of the bureau and turned to Flynn.

  “So now what?” she asked.

  “So now let’s get another one of your espressos and you can tell me what happened after I died.”

  They refilled their coffees with more hissing and gurgling and steam and then took them back to Hutton’s office. Flynn paused again to look out at the cold light across the park. Hutton told her assistant to hold her calls, and they sat quietly at the round meeting table by the window. When Flynn’s mind snapped back, he found her there.

  “So tell me,” he said.

  “It was the strangest thing I ever saw.” She sipped her coffee before continuing. “Last thing we did in Iraq—we went out to oil fields in Rumaila, you remember?”

  Flynn nodded and tasted his coffee. It was as good as the first.

  Hutton continued. “I had to wait for a couple of hours to get a ride back to Basra. When I arrived at the hotel, there were NATO MPs asking lots of questions about you.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “The truth. I told them I didn’t know where you were. Beyond that, I wasn’t in their chain of command, so I had nothing else to say.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing. You know what MPs are like. They don’t give anything away. But they didn’t get anything either. So I went out to search for you. After what happened to Babar, I was concerned. There was radio silence. I heard nothing. Not from you, not from your guys. Then it got weird.”

  “Weird?”

  “I found nothing, so I went back to the hotel the next morning. The lobby was crawling with private security contractors.”

  “There weren’t any PSCs staying in the hotel.”

  “No, there weren’t. And these guys I’d never seen. They started throwing their weight around, demanding to know where you were.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t report to any private grunts, either, so I told them they could take their attitudes elsewhere.”

  Flynn smiled.

  “So the PSCs left. I waited for a while in the lounge, and then I went to my room. Gorecki was waiting for me. He said the PSCs were still watching the place. He told me you had issued a get-out code and that the other guys had left. He wanted to let me know before he disappeared.”

  “He’s very considerate.”

  “He said you’d want me to know.”

  “I would have.”

  Hutton looked at him. “But you didn’t. You didn’t let me know.”

  “Did you expect me to?”

  “No. I guess what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me.”

  “Right. So Gorecki disappeared?”

  “Yes. The hotel manager said you had been there and that you’d met someone in the lounge. The description sounded like Staff Sergeant Dennison, but that’s as far as I got.”

  “That’s as far as you got?”

  “You disappointed?”

  “Surprised. I know you. You’re dogged.”

  “Well, that’s where things got really strange. I got a call. From my agent-in-charge in Baghdad. I got called back with urgency. When I got there, he told me Quantico was calling me back in. He didn’t know why. First I spent twelve
hours in a hot room with no windows, getting questions thrown at me by some guy who flew in just to talk to me.”

  “The FBI interrogated you?”

  Hutton shook her head. “This guy wasn’t FBI. I was ordered to offer full cooperation. You don’t get ordered to cooperate with your superiors in the Bureau. You just do it. This guy was something else. CIA, NSA maybe.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wanted you.”

  She paused and sipped her coffee. It had gone cold, so she gave it a frown, and then she swallowed it down in one shot.

  “More specifically, he wanted to know about the shipment.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him what I knew. I had been ordered to cooperate. I said we suspected arms were being smuggled in, possibly from Afghanistan or Pakistan via Iran. That someone was arming insurgents. I told him we suspected a quartermaster from Camp Victory.”

  “Is that what we thought?”

  “That’s what I was investigating. That’s what went in my report.”

  “Okay.”

  “I told him that you had disappeared. He told me that Dennison had also disappeared. Then the guy left, and nine hours later I was in Turkey. The next day I was back in Virginia. I was told it was part of the pullout. I was reassigned to Minneapolis-St. Paul.”

  “Minneapolis?”

  “Uh-huh. You ever been?”

  Flynn shook his head.

  “Lovely in the spring. But you’ve got to be Nordic to enjoy the winter.”

  “That could be a shock after Iraq.”

  “Twin Cities is a big office, looks after a huge geographical area. But before Iraq, I was here in New York. A move from the New York City office to Minneapolis is no kind of career move. It was pretty clear that a black mark had been put on my file, and I didn’t really know why.” She glanced out the window. “Except that, I did know why.”

  Flynn said nothing.

  Hutton turned back to him. “I ended up investigating irregularities in the fishing quotas on Lac La Croix with the state department of natural resources. You know where that is, Lac La Croix?”

  “Canada?”

  “On the border. Half Minnesota, half Ontario. In the middle of winter you leave Minneapolis, drive way the hell north to Duluth, get some gas and drive even more the hell north to a frozen lake where guys are cutting holes in the ice to fish.”

  “Sounds relaxing,” Flynn said.

  “You’re not normal, you know that?”

  “I was never working under that assumption.”

  “Well, whatever it was, it was my new Bureau career, writ large.”

  “You didn’t see that coming after the interrogation in Baghdad?”

  “Of course I did. The whole thing reeked of a cover-up. Not that I cared about a cover-up. Sometimes for national security we need to do these things. But I could see who they were lining up as the scapegoat. So I kept copies of every file I ever made of the case.”

  “Clever girl.”

  “Gee, thanks, Dad.”

  “But how did you get out of Minnesota?”

  Hutton sat back in her chair. “Hedstrom.”

  “Now that sounds like a guy who would go ice fishing.”

  “He would. He’s quite the outdoorsman. You remember back in Iraq, I had a New York PD contact, ran the ID of the Iranian guy that Dennison met?”

  “That was Hedstrom?”

  “Uh-huh. He left the NYPD and started doing personal security. Got a few jobs, nothing major. Then some Wall Street guy he’s protecting gets a death threat. Nothing abnormal, but Hedstrom saw something in it, and he called me in Minnesota. We worked it through together and he found the guy. Found him in the woods behind this Wall Street guy’s estate in Pound Ridge, with an assault rifle and enough ammo to take Belgium.”

  Flynn frowned.

  “So all of a sudden he’s the flavor of the month. Lots of work. New York celebs started calling. Most of them don’t need protecting, but it looks cool to have the suits around you like you’re the president. But administration is not his strong suit. Like you say, he’d rather be fishing. So he called me again. He knew my situation. Asked me to help him. So I did. I left the Bureau, came back to New York, and did all the legwork to get this place up and running. Got a recruitment plan in place, and then when it was all done, I opened our investigation division.”

  “And got your name first on the letterhead.”

  “Hedstrom doesn’t care about that stuff. We tossed a coin.”

  Flynn nodded.

  “But you already knew all about my business,” Hutton said.

  Flynn nodded again.

  “But you didn’t call.”

  He shook his head.

  “Better that way,” she said.

  “Until now.”

  “So you want to know what the rumor was?”

  “Hit me.”

  She resettled herself in her seat. The pale light shone on one side of her face, making her features look angular and serious.

  “The word from Quantico and Langley was that you were the link with the terrorists. They tried to position it that you hadn’t been finding terrorists all that time, that you had actually been working with them.”

  “Nice theory. But we did catch some pretty big, bad fish.”

  “They tried to rewrite that. They started claiming they did that. That’s the downside of black ops. You’re easily erased from the record because you weren’t there to begin with.”

  “I wasn’t asking for a parade.”

  “I know. But here’s the thing. You were put on a watch list. I don’t know how you entered the US, but it wasn’t through a conventional channel.”

  “No, it wasn’t. But they don’t have anything on me. No fingerprints, almost no records.”

  “There’s technology. It’s not foolproof, but it’s good. But that’s moot.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were pulled. Just before I left the Bureau. One day Jacques Fontaine is on the list, the next day he’s not. No reason given, just gone.”

  “That’s interesting. Why would they do that?”

  “I thought about that for a long time. There was only one explanation that made any sense.”

  “Which was?”

  “They had reason to believe you were dead.”

  Flynn said, “And they’d be right. Jacques Fontaine is dead. He died in the Iraqi desert.”

  “So what do I call you?”

  “My name is John. John Flynn.”

  “That’s what you came up with? John Flynn?”

  “That’s what I was born with, more or less.”

  A small crease formed between Hutton’s eyes, and she did her thing where she analyzed his face again. Not staring. Deeper.

  “Is that the first real thing I know about you?”

  Flynn didn’t take his eyes from her. “No. Pretty much everything I told you back then was true. We didn’t create intricate backstories. We just didn’t talk about our pasts.”

  “In the French Foreign Legion.”

  Flynn nodded. “That’s right.”

  “So that was true.”

  “Yes. We weren’t under orders to lie about it, but we didn’t make it public knowledge either. I knew you’d figure it out.”

  “Give me some credit, you guys did speak an awful lot of French. So how did you come up with Jacques Fontaine?”

  “I didn’t. When you sign up, you’re asked if you want to use an assumed name. Most guys do. But you don’t choose it. The guy doing the paperwork comes up with it.”

  “Wow, that must be fun. Did he come up with Babar?”

  “Someone did. And only one guy ever brought up the cartoon elephant on the parade ground. He had to have his face reconstructed with steel pins.”

  “He was a good guy, Babar. I miss him.”

  “Me too.”

  She nodded, her analysis complete. “So, we have two problems. Both location problems.”


  “Where is the shipment, and where is Beth.”

  “Right.”

  “The shipment, I have no idea.”

  “Neither did your team. Gorecki went back to the truck. It disappeared.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “You made it happen?”

  Flynn nodded.

  “Did you try to find it?”

  “No,” said Flynn. “It was gone and that was all that mattered. Trying to find it might raise red flags, and that could have endangered everyone.”

  “I could have told somebody you weren’t dead.”

  “Yes. Or that someone else was investigating.”

  “Like me.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I think someone knows you’re alive now.”

  “Yes.”

  Hutton nodded. “So, can you find it?”

  “There’s a guy I can call.”

  “Use the phone on my desk. I’ll get more coffee.”

  Flynn sat in Hutton’s chair. It was tight at the sides, as if it were designed for a woman. He had always assumed chairs were unisex, like desks or lamps or doors. He used Hutton’s phone and made a series of calls.

  The first link in the chain started across the pond. It was still morning in New York, but afternoon in London, so all the desks had bodies at them and all the phones were answered promptly. His inquiries were treated with suspicion, as he had expected they would be. But he knew the language and the cadence of these things, so he worked his way through the chain for an hour until he landed with a woman in personnel and records. It was an impersonal-sounding department for a private company, but exactly what Flynn expected from a company that was essentially a private army. Flynn told her all that he knew, which she matched against their records, and once she was convinced he knew what he claimed he knew, she broke the bad news. Flynn was watching the last of the leaves get blown from the branches of the trees out the window when Hutton came back in.

  “Anything?”

  “Dead end. Literally.”

  Hutton frowned.

  “He was a military contractor. We had served together a few years before. He died in a car accident in Paris two years ago. No obvious connection to our thing.”