Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  Flynn pulled the scope back and sat with his back against the parapet. Hedstrom was already there.

  “Nothing?” asked Hedstrom.

  “If they’re pros, we could take all day to find them. If ever. They could be in a building opposite, with a chase car down the street out of view.”

  “But you don’t think they’re pros.”

  “Which means they could be limited in manpower. Maybe they can’t do full-time surveillance. Maybe they’re tracking the tablet, not watching the building.”

  Hedstrom considered this but was interrupted before responding by a call from the hutch leading to the stairwell.

  “What are you boys doing up here?” called Hutton.

  “It’s a great day for fishing,” said Hedstrom.

  “It’s a great day to curl up under a blanket with a good book,” she said, crouching down.

  Hedstrom grunted. “There’s something I don’t get.” He glanced at Flynn. “You say this all leads back to Iraq. But the French weren’t involved in Iraq. They were against the whole thing. Remember freedom fries?”

  “Sure. The Legion is handy that way. It’s French, but not really. That leaves a lot of wiggle room. The government can claim that France is not involved in something, or French lives are not in danger, because the soldiers they are sending in are technically foreign. My team was tasked with tracking down what you might call ennemis de l’etat. Enemies of the state.”

  “Terrorists,” said Hutton.

  “If you prefer,” said Flynn. “Like the Legion in general, we mostly operated in places like North Africa and South America.”

  “Mostly,” said Hedstrom.

  “The Legion had a unit in Afghanistan, coordinating with NATO command.”

  “That was you?”

  “No. We flew a little further under the radar.”

  “Black ops.”

  “Something like that. We were in Afghanistan, and we were ordered into Iraq to trace a network that was believed to be arming insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “Yes and no. Going into territories where France had no footprint was nothing new. And we figured the network would lead to some bad guys, and that’s what we did. But in hindsight, it was odd. Our remit was to find those committing acts of terror against France, not allies. In Iraq, we seemed to be cracking a small-time gun runner, and one who was in the US Army.”

  “Your guy,” Hedstrom said to Hutton.

  “Dennison,” she said. “That’s where our paths crossed. As you know, I was with the FBI in-country, training local law enforcement. We got wind of a movement of arms. As much as anything, I saw it as a training op. Teaching the locals how we investigate such things. But when I got closer, I realized that army personnel were involved. We didn’t like showing our ugly side to the Iraqis, so I followed it up alone.”

  “And found a quartermaster dealing in everything from M9s to heroin,” said Flynn.

  “Right,” said Hutton. “But he also seemed to be getting into some bigger shipments. It was the drawdown. The military was shipping a lot of stuff home and leaving a lot of stuff behind.”

  “The military is pretty good about keeping track of its stuff,” said Hedstrom.

  “But a crate here, a container there?” Hutton said. “It was a massive undertaking, logistically speaking. So we—John’s team and I—witnessed a meet between Staff Sergeant Dennison and the man you later identified as Iranian military, Ahmad Kirmani.”

  “I remember,” said Hedstrom.

  Hutton continued. “The Iranian left a container on a truck and then crossed back into Iran.”

  “And you said you intercepted the container?” asked Hedstrom. “What happened to it?”

  Hedstrom and Hutton looked at Flynn.

  “My guys placed a decoy on the truck and then took the target container to a rendezvous near the airport. I then made it disappear.”

  “Why? What was in it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Flynn. “The whole place went to hell. NATO MPs, an officer from the regular French Army, the US Army, CIA. Everybody got really interested and we were the ones left holding the bag. So I made it lost.”

  “But it was evidence,” said Hedstrom.

  “Against who? Dennison was dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He shot me, but I shot him too. His hideout was a disused building in the desert outside of Baghdad. The sand had covered most of it, so the US sats couldn’t see it. Dennison used it as a stockpile for fuel and who knows what else. But it was the fuel that blew up.”

  “You got out,” said Hedstrom. “How do you know he didn’t?”

  “My driver pulled me out. No one was there to do Dennison any such favors.”

  “All right.”

  “And now someone has taken your lady. But the guy is dead.”

  “Clearly he wasn’t the only one involved,” said Hutton. “What about the guy who drove the general?”

  “Who?” asked Hedstrom.

  Flynn said, “A general not in my chain of command came to Iraq to order me out. He had a driver who told me he was a private.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “What’s the first thing you learn at basic training?”

  “To shoot,” said Hedstrom.

  “Before that.”

  “That your drill sergeant works for a living but his word is gospel.”

  “Right. You get a hard lesson in manners. This guy never once referred to me by my rank. He was no private.”

  “And he was still there after the general left,” said Hutton. “You saw him, remember?”

  “I remember,” said Flynn.

  “Was the dead sergeant an amateur or a professional?” asked Hedstrom.

  “He was a professional hustler,” Flynn said, “but in every other way he was an amateur.”

  “And the fake private?”

  “Professional.”

  “But you’re sure the amateur is dead.”

  “I believe so.”

  “And the private?”

  “Dead.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely,” said Flynn.

  “Well, someone took your girl,” said Hedstrom. “And they’re down there somewhere.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Hedstrom held up the spotting scope. “I think you kids should go grab some dinner.”

  The whole operation was amateur hour. The driver knew it. They needed a team; even four guys would have done. But he had two. Himself, and his twitchy little friend. Not that they were really friends. More work colleagues. Former roommates, of a sort. And the driver knew the twitchy little guy was good for some things, but not for others. Like watching. He couldn’t sit still. Even his eyes didn’t work that way. They bounced around in his head. Side to side, up and down and back again. Always moving. Which might have been useful if they were actually watching. But they weren’t. Looking was not the same as watching. Most people didn’t pay attention. And most people fell in the normal part of a bell curve when it came to attention. His twitchy little friend was firmly at the far end of the attention curve. An outlier. Probably ADHD or ADD or one of those things that kids got diagnosed with these days. Back in his day, those kids were just dumb or lacked discipline. They ended up at the back of the room, where they caused the least grief to their teachers, and they slid down the curve until they dropped out of school altogether. Unskilled and untrainable, they found legitimate work difficult to find and more difficult to hold down. So that left them with illegitimate work.

  The driver knew a lot of guys like that. Useful to a point. But not for surveillance. His twitchy friend was driving him crazy. His constant tapping and squiggling and shifting in his seat made it hard to watch and harder to think. It was like being a one-man team. But a one-man team didn’t work. Not without advance notice. If he’d known ahead of time, he might have secured a post in an unused office opposite the target’s
location. Or found a studio apartment left vacant while its tenant was away working in Europe or Asia or somewhere. But he’d had no such notice. So he was left watching while his partner tapped and squiggled and shifted and talked constantly.

  He had made a mistake. Or more precisely, he had taken a gamble and lost. It was cold, too cold to sit on a park bench or don a green vest and pretend to dig in the park gardens. So he had brought the Yukon. It wasn’t the most inconspicuous vehicle in Manhattan. A stretch limo would hide easier. But he didn’t want to sit downtown in a stolen vehicle. That was asking for trouble. So he stopped on Park Avenue in his own ride, and as he suspected, he was moved on by the NYPD. Nothing for it but to drive around the block.

  He could drive around the block all day. But that would give him line of sight for about ten percent of the time. Close to useless. So he left his twitchy little friend on the sidewalk. It was a gamble. The guy would see almost nothing. His head and eyes and body were moving in place, but it would be a miracle if he actually saw the target, and an even bigger miracle if he could follow him without being spotted himself. But it was a better option than giving him the wheel of the Yukon. New York City driving was not for the likes of his twitchy little friend.

  Manhattan was a good place to hide in plain sight, however, even for a twitchy guy. A needle in a constantly moving haystack. It was even better at night. He knew from experience. People searched for the light and shied from the shadows. And that left a lot of scope for a guy like him. And, he figured, a guy like the target. The target knew how to fall back into the shadows. The target liked the dark.

  The whole thing was amateur hour anyway, and a lottery at best. So he drove a series of right-hand turns and came back down Park Ave, pulling up where his twitchy little friend stood with his hands in his pockets, swaying to a beat that only he could hear.

  The driver liked being right. He was smart, he knew that. He saw things, figured things. Getting caught in the act by the cops—twice—had been bad luck, not bad judgment. He was confident of that. So as the sun fell behind the columns of towers and evening rush hour gushed by, he collected his twitchy little friend, and as they paused on Park Avenue, just north and east of Union Square Park, the target came out of the building with the woman. Under the cover of darkness. Just as he had predicted. The driver smiled to himself and pulled away from the curb.

  Chapter Eleven

  The sun fell quickly and the cold air got colder. The wind dropped and then picked up again, a change in direction, now crossing the island from the Hudson River. They walked with their collars up, Flynn’s hands deep in his pockets, Hutton with thick gloves. The streetlights played an orange glow over the city as people rushed from one warm bunker to another. Hutton led Flynn along the northeast side of Union Square Park, west along East 17th Street. At Fifth Avenue it changed to West 17th, and they walked on four more blocks into the teeth of the wind, before cutting down a block to Chelsea Market.

  Inside the historic old building wasn’t much warmer than outside, but the break in the wind made it feel almost tropical. They walked along the aisles of food stalls and restaurants. Through old brick arches and along thick plank hardwood floors. The market was busy with the after-work crowd, taking refuge from the cold before braving a dash to the subway and the long trip to Queens or Long Island or New Jersey.

  They selected a seafood place and both ordered chowder and bread. Hutton ordered a dark beer and Flynn took tap water.

  “So do your guys know that you’re alive?” asked Hutton.

  “Yes. My CO told them.”

  “Do they know where you are?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Because someone found you. Someone from back then.”

  “You think it was my men?”

  “No, I don’t. But I’d want to check them off the list, all the same.”

  “They don’t know. That was important. People were going to ask. Maybe they were going to ask hard. It was better they didn’t know.”

  “Okay, so who else is on the list?”

  “I don’t know,” said Flynn as their chowder arrived. It was thick and creamy and smelled faintly of the sea.

  Flynn watched her eat. She did it analytically. She looked at the food as if calculating its calories and nutrients and assessing its value to her body, and then she took a spoonful and ate it as if it were the last meal she would ever have. She chewed and put her spoon down on her napkin.

  “Who knew what you were doing back then?” she asked.

  “My unit, my CO. You. Dennison clearly knew. I got orders to leave from a general not in my chain of command, so that suggests the list is bigger than the known players. Could be a few, could be thousands.”

  “Okay, but who could link to you now? It’s been years. It’s hard to believe they’re still after a shipment of guns.”

  “I dumped the gun theory a long time ago.”

  “So what, then?”

  “I don’t know. Something bigger. Something more important. The container had biological waste placards. That might have been a ruse to keep anyone from looking inside. But it might have been a double bluff.”

  “Biological weapons?”

  Flynn shrugged and ate. “But even something like that, you give it up, after a while. What do companies call them? Bad and doubtful debts? Surely after a few years something like that drops from the doubtful column to the bad column and you write it off and move on. Especially since most of the players would have left anyway. The US Army pulled out only a few months after we were there. Anyone who replaced Dennison would have been temporary.”

  “So there’s something more. Tell me. I know you’ve thought about it.”

  “I have. In the beginning that’s all I thought about. What about you? You didn’t win out of this. You must have worked it through.”

  “Of course. Best I could come up with was there was something that could be traced. Somehow whatever was in the container could have been linked back to them. I figured it wasn’t the thing in the container they were worried about. It was the link back that they were worried about.”

  “Exactly. That’s where I landed too. But you’re right, there is more. Dennison mentioned something about the eight.”

  “The eight? Eight what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Eight countries? Eight people?”

  “I never came up with a solid answer.”

  “The G8 maybe? The US is part of that. So is France.”

  “But most of the G8 countries weren’t in Iraq. Just the US and Britain.”

  “What about NATO?”

  “Way more than eight. Twenty-eight, in fact, as of our time in Iraq.”

  Hutton said nothing. She ate some chowder and stared at her bowl.

  “From the way he said it, I got the impression they were people,” said Flynn. “Individuals. That makes at least eight more people with an interest.”

  “Unless Dennison was one of those people.”

  “He wasn’t. The way he said it, it was more deferential. Like he was even scared of them.”

  “All right. So, eight. And these eight, somehow they found you.”

  Flynn nodded and glanced away. The wind was howling now, filling the streets outside the window with flying paper and trash, like a ticker-tape parade.

  “I think Beth was the link. Everything about this went through her. I think somehow they linked her to me.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She was a lawyer. Sort of. In practice she was more like a forensic accountant. If a company wanted to put money offshore, she could advise on how to do it. How to keep it legal but keep it away from the tax man, or whomever else they wanted to keep it away from.”

  “Sounds shady.”

  “It was a law firm.” Flynn shrugged.

  “So how does that relate to you?”

  Flynn stirred a chunk of clam around his bowl. “I don’t know. Yet. But they’re going to tell me. You can bet on that
.”

  Hutton put her spoon down and crossed her hands on the table. “Are you okay?”

  “Okay? Sure. Why not?”

  “Why not? Because you just learned your girlfriend was killed, that’s why not.”

  For the first time since he’d left the hotel room in DC., he thought about the little box in his pack that held the ring that he no longer had any need for. He wondered if he should return it. He wondered if he could do such a thing.

  Hutton’s face didn’t change, as if she were holding it in place on purpose. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  They finished their meal and hovered over the table for a while. The wind beat against the windows. It sounded like rain, but the sky was clear and cold. Then they retraced their steps back toward the office, watching the streets for anyone out of place. Flynn saw a hundred possibles. People waiting on street corners, huddled at the top of stoops in doorways. Cars driving slowly and vans parked on the roadside. New York was a great place to hide. If you were watching someone, it made it hard to be discovered. If you were being watched, it made it easy to melt away. It all depended on what you knew, and what you assumed the other guy knew.

  They stopped at a convenience store. Not a chain, or at least not a brand recognizable to Flynn. The aisles were packed with everything from toiletries to hardware. Boxes of products were shelved right to the ceiling. A long pole with a hook sat behind the counter to hoist the boxes down when a customer needed a less common item, like toddlers’ rain boots or plastic cutlery. Flynn didn’t want any such items. What he wanted was behind the counter. A young Chinese man was on the phone, firing truncated syllables like machine-gun fire. He didn’t stop talking, but he nodded to Flynn. Flynn nodded back at the collection of bottles behind the man.