Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  “And he’s the only one who knew?”

  “No. I asked him to send it somewhere. Then someone else was going to make it truly lost.”

  “So make another call.”

  “That one’s a bit tougher. Whoever answers the phone is not going to tell me what I need to know without me telling them who I am, and they think I’m dead.”

  “Is there another way to contact this person?”

  “There is. But it’s not as easy as a phone call. I need to leave a message. Someone may or may not get back.”

  “So one location problem is cold. That leaves your girl. Beth?”

  Flynn nodded.

  “And we’re still waiting for contact, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So in the meantime, let’s refuel.”

  Flynn walked over to Hutton’s bureau and tapped the button that lit up Beth’s tablet. The dot representing her phone’s last known location was still gray, and it was still in the East Village, near the Con Edison plant. He left the tablet and followed Hutton out of the building, the clock in his head still ticking.

  The flight landed at Washington Executive Airpark at 0800. They saw the strip at Andrews Air Force Base on approach, but touched down at the private Hyde Field about eight miles away. The Gulfstream wasn’t new, but it wasn’t old, and it was a hell of a lot nicer than anything the men were used to flying in. They had received the message that the flag had been tripped, but after so long they doubted it. But then the flag was confirmed and the aircraft was routed out of Ankara, Turkey, to collect them.

  The unit leader didn’t like DC. It was one of those towns full of people who never said what they meant and never meant what they said. But it was better than where they had flown in from—there was going to be a big steak in his future, once he finished his business here. The unit rolled off the aircraft and into a waiting Suburban. There was no passport control, no TSA. That had been arranged.

  The Suburban came to a stop under a building on L Street, a handful of blocks north of the White House. The building featured no corporate branding on its exterior, no tenant list in the lobby. The organizations in the building were the kind that preferred to keep a low profile, except in the circles in which they mixed. The unit leader got out and waited. A man in a bespoke suit came down in the elevator. He frowned when he saw the unit leader dressed in a black paramilitary uniform. The man had no idea who the unit leader was or why he had been asked to report to him. But he told the unit leader what he knew. The meeting was due for 8:30 a.m. The lawyer from San Francisco had not shown up. They had called her cell phone and her hotel and heard nothing. That was all he knew.

  “You hear from her, I need to know,” the team leader barked.

  “I don’t have contact details for you,” replied the man in the suit, not impressed with the team leader’s tone.

  The team leader stepped forward so quickly that the man in the suit took an involuntary step back.

  “Someone called your sorry carcass down here. That’s my contact details.”

  The unit leader dismissed the man, who was not used to being dismissed, and then directed his driver to get back on the road, where his secure phone would work better. As the Suburban cruised out toward Dupont Circle, the unit leader called in. He heard what he had expected to hear. His contact had an appointment with the woman lawyer at the company’s office and had no idea why she hadn’t appeared. His contact told him to hang tight. The unit leader hung up. He had been hanging tight for a long time. Years, in fact. He was done hanging tight.

  The unit leader directed everyone on his team to call in their favors. Do whatever they had to. Find the woman. Then he did the same. His first contact knew nothing. But he had others. The unit leader knew more about the eight than most. He knew that it wasn’t a club. They didn’t sit around a round table with cigars or have a secret handshake. They were like a cellular network. There might have been eight, but any one only knew two others. No more, no less. Terrorist organizations had often tried to replicate a similar structure with mixed success. The problem with terrorists was there was always a leader somewhere, an ideological or political head who had to know more than anyone else. The very presence of such a figurehead destined the system to failure. The unit leader knew this for a fact. He knew the eight had no leader, and it was firmly agreed that no such leader should emerge. One had emerged, once. That member was no longer of this earth. The team leader knew that for a fact too.

  The nature of a cellular network was that each hub in the network gave birth to its own network. It was the secondary networks that the team leader tapped into. He was even part of one or more himself. It meant that he had people he could call. He knew the lawyer had booked into the Watergate Hotel. It took him ten minutes to learn that she had not slept in her bed. She had not checked out. She had not used her keycard for any in-house purchases.

  “I need to see the hotel security video,” he said.

  The voice on the line said, “Our man doesn’t work today.”

  “Get him in. This is priority.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  The team leader ended his call and looked to his second-in-command—his 2IC—beside him. “We need a base.”

  “Done,” said the man, dressed in the same black tactical gear. He leaned forward to the guy who was driving. “P Street, between Dupont and Logan.”

  He got a curt nod. The Suburban headed around Dupont Circle and east on P Street. The area was mixed residential—row houses, apartment buildings and retail—with a range of offices and smaller embassies. They pulled in behind a run of row houses and stopped behind one. It was vacant, a lockbox to which the 2IC had the code. Inside there were empty desks and a handful of chairs on casters. It looked like a failed dot-com had recently vacated. There was no power and no heat, but the team required neither.

  The team leader said, “Keep on it. I don’t need to tell you how much we need this done. Unless any of you feel like going back to Iraq?”

  He got no answer.

  Chapter Eight

  Flynn and Hutton ate pastrami sandwiches at a deli off Broadway. Combined it was a pound of meat, enough stores for the winter. Flynn had learned to eat when food presented itself. Hunger was always a distinct possibility later, so best to get your calories in while you could. Flynn sipped an espresso and Hutton took a regular coffee.

  “You really don’t like normal coffee, do you?” Hutton asked.

  “Define normal.”

  She held up her cup. It was thick industrial-strength china.

  “That was a point of contention when I was a kid.”

  “With who?”

  Flynn sipped his coffee. “My dad. I grew in an American household with American traditions. Big carafes of coffee and football on Sundays and Thanksgiving turkey. The only thing was, none of it happened in America.”

  Hutton put her cup down. “You know, that’s the first thing you’ve ever told me about your past.”

  “It’s our way. We don’t talk about the past.”

  “You’re not in, anymore.”

  Flynn shrugged.

  “But you don’t have to tell me. It’s okay,” she added.

  “You know why I trusted you, back in Iraq.”

  “I was closer to the bomb.”

  “Right. That was proof. But I already trusted you before then. I trusted you because you were an investigator and you didn’t hit me up with questions about who I was or where I came from.”

  “You didn’t offer any information, and that told me you’d rather not talk about it. And it didn’t feel relevant to solving the case.”

  “That’s what I mean. Most people ask too many questions, as if that’s the way to earn trust.”

  “So I earned your trust by keeping quiet?”

  “No. Your silence was a by-product. You earned my trust by focusing on your job.”

  Hutton nodded and sipped her coffee.

  Flynn reached for his cup but didn’t
pick it up. “But I never figured out why you trusted me.”

  “Was that important to you?” Hutton asked.

  “No. Not initially. I’ve worked with plenty of people I didn’t trust. But I guess it did eventually matter to me. We still could have gotten the job done, either way. But I thought about it. I had a lot of time to think about it later.”

  “And you want to know?”

  Flynn shrugged.

  “I didn’t trust you. Not to start. But you were hell-bent on finding out what I wanted to know, so I went with it.”

  Flynn nodded again and sipped his coffee.

  Hutton continued. “But then I did trust you. When the guy came. The French general. Clearly, someone wanted you gone. And you didn’t care. None of you did. You all wanted to find that shipment of guns more than you wanted to keep on the right side of your superiors. Actions imply character.”

  “You sound like my old CO.”

  “He must have been wise.” She smiled. “But you’re right. I am an investigator. I do want to know things. I do like answers.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes, about you.”

  “Ask me.”

  “You’ll tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  Hutton nodded. “Are you really American?”

  “Born in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

  “So you said you had an American childhood but not in America?”

  “Not an American childhood. An American household. We had the Stars and Stripes in the front garden. From the age of five, I was taught to raise the flag first thing every morning and take it down at sunset.”

  “Sounds more American than Mayberry.”

  “It was. All of it. Except for the fact that most of it was in Belgium.”

  “Belgium?”

  “My father was a Marine. He was based in South Carolina when I was born. But my mother wanted to have me among her family, so I was born in Ohio. Then my dad got posted to Germany, when I was a couple of months old. We went with him. My brother was born in Stuttgart. We did stints in Darwin, Australia, and in Japan. Later my dad got assigned to a role as liaison with NATO, and we moved to Brussels. That’s where I went to school.”

  “And learned to drink coffee,” said Hutton.

  “That was later, but, yes. It was a bipolar way to grow up. We watched the Bengals play American football on the Armed Forces Network, but on the streets, we played soccer. We went to international schools and studied a US curriculum, but we spoke French around town.”

  “That would be weird.”

  “At the time it was normal. What you do is what you do. You don’t know that it’s different. It was only later, when compared to other people, that it looked different.”

  Hutton nodded and finished her coffee. Flynn paid the bill with cash. They stepped out onto the street and braced against the cold wind funneling down Broadway.

  “So what now?” Hutton asked.

  “I need internet access.”

  “I have computers at my office.”

  “I want one not associated with us.”

  “Like an internet cafe? I don’t even know if they still exist. Everyone has the internet on their phone.”

  But internet cafes came in all shapes and sizes. Flynn wandered back toward the East River. With each block, the apparent wealth of the residents dropped. Million-dollar properties on Broadway gave way to tenements. Groups of youths sat on stoops whiling their time away.

  The storefront Flynn chose was filled with posters for low-cost cell phone providers. Inside, a range of dummy phones and tablets, their insides removed, hung from white pegboard that was most commonly found in garage workshops. Worn gray carpet covered the floors. Ancient fluorescent tubes gave the store an institutional quality. At the far end, a counter separated the shop floor from the rear office. A young guy with a dark complexion sat behind the counter. He was slouched over, tapping the screen of a phone. Playing some sort of game, if the sounds it was emitting were any guide. He didn’t look up. Flynn crossed the room and stood before him. He glanced at Flynn, and then back at his phone. Then he looked up again.

  “You lost?”

  The guy was of Middle Eastern heritage of some description. He could have been anything from Palestinian to Iranian. His accent was all New York.

  “I need a computer,” said Flynn.

  “Look around. Phone store.” The guy’s phone bleeped and he looked down at it, annoyed. Clearly, he had lost the game.

  “I don’t want to buy one. Just use it. For a couple of minutes.”

  “This look like the New York Public Library to you?”

  Flynn assessed the guy. He was young and tough. But more young than tough. He had the false sense of bravado that young men have the world over. Especially those that grew up somewhere that offered the veneer of menace, like the Lower East Side of New York. But this guy had seen nothing. He hadn’t been to Africa. He hadn’t seen tribal warlords enter villages with machetes and leave a trail of limbs in their wake. So Flynn had two options. The easy way, or the hard way. The hard way would be fast and cheap. Smash the guy’s head into the counter once, twice, three times. Then use the computer that sat on the counter.

  He chose the easy way. Easier for the guy. Flynn remembered young and stupid. It wasn’t the guy’s fault. Not the first time.

  “Five minutes.” He slammed a hundred-dollar bill down on the counter and slid it toward the guy. It got his attention. He sat up. Looked at the bill and then looked at Flynn.

  “Two hundred,” he said.

  Flynn withdrew the bill and returned it to his pocket.

  “How about I break your nose with your phone and use the computer for free?”

  The guy snarled and began to say something but stopped. He was smarter than the average bear. He saw the look in Flynn’s eyes and made the right choice.

  “A hundred. Five minutes.”

  Flynn pulled the bill out again and slammed it back on the counter. He kept his hand on it. “You got a machine in the back?”

  The guy nodded.

  Flynn lifted his hand. The guy slipped the bill away with practiced skill and spun off his stool. He flipped the end of the countertop over itself on small hinges to let Flynn and Hutton through. Then he dropped the countertop down and led them back to a small room. It was part office and part storeroom. Boxes of all kinds of phones and SIM cards and cables and cases. There was a flatscreen monitor on a desk attached to a tower system that sat underneath. The guy leaned down and hit a button, and the machine whirred and clunked and then offered a proprietary arpeggio, and the screen came to life. The guy stood back and Flynn dropped into the seat.

  “Five minutes,” said Flynn.

  “You’re on the clock,” said the guy as he leaned back against the shelving behind him.

  Flynn spun in the chair. “A little privacy.”

  The guy frowned and then looked at Hutton. He bumped his hips away from the shelves and stepped out of the office. Hutton closed the door.

  Flynn opened a browser. Typed in an address and waited for a page to load. It was some kind of message board. He selected a private board and typed in a password, and the board opened up. There were numerous threads. Each thread was like a separate conversation, starting with an initial question. Below each question, a number told him how many replies there were to each thread. All of the questions seemed to be related to the collection in the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

  With a click, Flynn opened a new dialog box to begin his own thread. He titled it African collection. Then he typed in his message. Hutton watched him ask something about ancient warrior masks. Then he hit enter and the screen refreshed with his question at the top. Zero replies.

  Flynn closed the browser window and then opened the computer settings. He deleted the session history and the browser history and the cookies. Then he deleted the browser application itself. He clicked on the wastebasket icon and clicked Empty Trash. Then he typed in a command, and a black window a
ppeared on the screen. It looked like an old-fashioned computer terminal. The on-screen font looked like a typewriter. Flynn entered an FTP command and the computer told him it was downloading. He waited sixty seconds and then closed the black screen. He clicked again and the screen told him it was installing a new browser application. Replacing the one he had deleted. It took a couple of minutes and the computer restarted and a screen appeared that said Welcome! as if they had landed at a resort in Hawaii.

  Flynn stood and left the welcome for someone else. Hutton opened the door and led Flynn out. She flipped the countertop over itself and walked out. As he passed through the counter, Flynn glanced at the young guy.

  “Thanks, kid.”

  “You better not have given me a virus.”

  “No such luck.”

  Flynn left the countertop open and strode back onto the street.

  Hutton was waiting. “You’re cautious.”

  “It pays to be, don’t you think?”

  “You know NSA tracks all internet traffic.”

  “No, they don’t. They track some. There’s too much traffic in the world, even for them. So they look for suspicious sources, which, I grant you, this place might be. Cell phones get used by terrorists, so this store would be on the hot list. But then they look for trigger words. I didn’t use any.”

  “They can crack codes. They do work pretty hard on it.”

  “The secret to cracking a code is in knowing the key. The secret to knowing the key is in the repetition. Reading the patterns. Computers are good at that. But I don’t repeat, so there’s no pattern.”

  “Okay. When will you hear?”

  “Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.”

  They walked back to Hutton’s office. Flynn sat at the conference table and looked at his phone and then out the window at the leaves blowing from the trees. He thought about Iraq and France and the United States and Beth. Hutton answered emails. The sun decided its short winter day was done and started its descent toward the horizon.