Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  “Do you know this place?” asked Flynn.

  “Yes. It’s not that far from here. About thirty miles north and east, straight up the Saw Mill. It’s a stop on the Metro North rail line. A commuter town for Manhattan. But not for janitors. It’s money.”

  Flynn stepped back and sat down on the bed. “That’s where they are.”

  “Whoever they are.”

  “No, you sold me. It’s Dennison. It fits. Think about it. In Baghdad, what was his MO? He liked to hide in the suburbs, such as they were. The place I met him, the first time.”

  “That place looked like a war zone. Katonah is where Manhattanites go to breed.”

  “It’s all relative. Baghdad was a war zone. The coalition bombed the hell out it—twice. Our driver, Yusuf, told us as much. He said it had been where rich people lived. People who could afford to flee. But it was as close to a nice suburb as you got outside the green zone. And Dennison wasn’t going to do business in the GZ, or anywhere near Camp Victory. That suburb was as safe and settled as it got. Close but not too close. Where regular people came and went. Sometime in the past, it was a nice suburb. Maybe a commuter suburb for downtown Baghdad.”

  “Like Katonah.”

  Flynn nodded.

  “Okay, that narrows it some. But Katonah is still a decent-sized place. And the surrounding areas probably count, as far as reaching a cell tower is concerned. We’ve found the right field, but not the right haystack.”

  “Think about the MO,” said Flynn. “What did Dennison do in Iraq? He didn’t rent. He didn’t take over a warehouse.”

  “It was a residential property. Someone’s home.”

  “Right, but an empty one.”

  “So he’s in an empty residence in Katonah?”

  “Not just any empty residence. There was something else important about the place in Baghdad. It was abandoned. The owners weren’t coming back.”

  “A house for sale?”

  Flynn shrugged. “Close, but it still doesn’t feel right. Properties on the market can be visited, right? By prospective buyers.”

  “And lookie-loos.”

  “Lookie-loos?”

  “People who look at real estate with no intention of buying it.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Sometimes just to see the inside of someone else’s house,” said Hutton. “To compare a neighboring house to yours. You haven’t done that?”

  “I’ve never owned a house. I’ve never needed to buy one.”

  “What about in San Francisco?”

  “It was Beth’s place. She had it when we met.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s something normal people do.”

  “Okay. But that’s additional traffic. Not an ideal place to hide.”

  “Right. So we’re looking for a residential property, vacant but not on the open market. Not likely to be visited.”

  “Abandoned would be best,” said Flynn.

  “I don’t think there’s too many abandoned houses in Katonah. It’s not that kind of place.”

  “Okay.”

  Hutton put her finger in the air like she’d just had an epiphany. “Abandoned, but not completely. For a fixed period of time.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “REO properties.”

  Flynn shook his head.

  Hutton smiled. “You really didn’t pick up a lot of the civilian world in the past few years, did you?”

  “I got a smartphone.”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “No. I like to walk.”

  “In Manhattan, I get that. But Marin County?”

  “We lived in downtown San Rafael. Walking distance to everything. Even the bus depot.”

  “Did Beth have a car?”

  “Of course. You want to explain the REO thing?”

  “Real estate owned. It means owned by the lender who has the lien on the property. In layman’s terms—the bank. If the homeowner doesn’t pay their mortgage, eventually they default on the loan. The lender calls in the loan and takes possession of the property. Sometimes the owners get evicted, sometimes they leave. But often the houses sit vacant while the bank processes everything. There’s a whole legal process they have to go through, with the city or the county. And it doesn’t always move fast. It can take months.”

  “But is the property on the market?”

  “No. Not until the legal process is finished. Then the place is often put up for auction. Often sold sight unseen. No visit. Sometimes by developers or flippers.”

  “Flippers?”

  “People buy the houses cheap at auction and fix them, paint or whatever. Sometimes the old owner is angry when they get kicked out and they do damage to the place. Flippers fix it and sell for a profit. But the point is, the date the legal process is finalized is a known date. No one will visit until then. Maybe a drive-by, but nothing more, and maybe not even that. And then the auction date is set, and that’s a known date too.”

  “So how would Dennison know which properties are REO and what those dates are?”

  “Easy. He’d ask a real estate agent.”

  “Okay. I’m assuming those guys aren’t at their desks at midnight.”

  “No. Strictly regular people hours.”

  “Can we find that stuff on the internet?”

  “Not really. Limited information, maybe. They like to keep that stuff close to their chest. We should visit an office, first thing.”

  “In that case, we should sleep. Then get a good breakfast.”

  Hutton closed her laptop and spun her chair around and looked at the bed. “So we’re staying after all?”

  “I’ll take the floor,” said Flynn.

  “Don’t be silly. I think we can be grown up enough to share a bed.”

  Hutton kicked off her shoes and padded to the bathroom. Flynn heard the shower running. He stepped out of the room and onto the landing that ran the length of the building. He could hear distant traffic noise. An artery to the city that never sleeps. The air was cold and he was in his shirtsleeves, but he liked the feeling. Brisk, his mother would have called it, on a morning in Brussels, decades ago. He watched the bare trees sway just so, in time with the silent rhythms of nature.

  When he came back inside, Hutton was in bed, in a T-shirt. Her hair was still damp.

  “Mind if I have this side?”

  “Not at all.” He used the bathroom and then turned the room light off and slipped out of his trousers and shirt and laid them out on the floor. The sheets felt cold and crisp. The bed was just large enough to lie side by side. Hutton had her hands up behind her head. Flynn did the same. They touched at the elbows.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Sure. Why not. We’re making progress.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You mean Beth? Yes, I’m okay. We’re making progress.”

  “You’re an emotional fountain.”

  “Falling apart won’t bring her back.”

  “Neither will vengeance. You know that, right?”

  “I know.”

  “And it probably won’t make you feel any better.”

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that point.”

  “Does it usually make you feel better? Catching the bad guys?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Really?” She shifted her weight, turned to face him in the dark.

  “Yes, but not how you think. It’s not about vengeance. It’s much more simple than that. My dad always said that he served because he could. Because there were many good folks who couldn’t, and it was his responsibility to keep those people from harm.”

  “That’s noble.”

  “He was. He believed all that Semper Fi stuff.”

  “What happened?”

  “When?”

  “To your dad. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

  Flynn shifted his weight but not his position. “I don’t know. Not exactly. Dad was doing a stint in I
raq and I’d just finished my senior year of high school in Brussels. We were in the United Arab Emirates. On vacation at a resort, just outside of Abu Dhabi. There was an explosion. A terrorist attack.”

  They lay listening to the sound of distant traffic for a time. Then Hutton spoke.

  “Is that why you wanted to track down terrorists?”

  “I was assigned that job.”

  “Ordered?”

  “Asked more than ordered. My CO was tasked with putting together a unit to track down enemies of the state. I had been assigned for the previous couple of years to a unit that tracked down deserters from the Legion, and he thought I was good at it.”

  “Was that a big problem, deserters?”

  “It’s a problem in any army. A PR problem.”

  “How so?”

  “Guys go AWOL for a lot of reasons, but it pretty much boils down to the fact that they don’t want to be there. In a conscription army, that’s a manpower problem. But in a volunteer force, you really don’t want those guys there. No one wants to go into battle with a guy who has deserted before. There’s no trust, and trust is everything.”

  “So why bother finding them?”

  “That’s why it’s a PR problem. In the Legion you sign a contract for five years. And then they do their best to kick you out. The training is brutal. It’s like special forces training. It’s the methodology. How do you take a bunch of guys from different countries, speaking different languages, with different motivations for being there, and turn them into a cohesive force? You break them. You strip away their individuality and then build them back up as a team. It’s complete mental and physical disintegration. Most guys fail. Most guys who make it say they would never have joined if they really knew how hard it would be. Every military force does a version of it. But in the Legion it’s harder to do, so the training is harder. The breaking is harder. The rebuild is more important. And once it’s done, if you’re in, you’re in. They put a lot of time and money into you. And that’s the PR problem. If guys know they don’t have to honor their contract, if they believe they can walk away whenever they choose, you don’t have an army anymore. You can’t plan around that. So they have to make a point of hunting down the guys that desert.”

  “Did you find many?”

  “More than we should have. Because it’s a PR problem, not a real problem, so they don’t resource it. If you want to get away, you can. If you use your brains a little. A lot of guys didn’t though. They followed certain patterns. Armies love patterns, they love procedure. They can teach procedure to anyone. So guys who’ve been in the army, especially the low-level grunts, aren’t taught to think. They’re taught to follow procedure. So when they go AWOL, they often follow procedure subconsciously.”

  “So you were like a military cop?”

  “More like a bounty hunter.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I didn’t dislike it.”

  “Not quite the same thing.”

  “Ultimately it was pointless. Deserters didn’t want to be there and the Legion didn’t want them back.”

  “So you were asked to find terrorists instead.”

  “More or less.”

  “Did you find them or eliminate them?”

  “Sometimes one, sometimes both.”

  “You don’t like rule of law?”

  “You know I do. It’s important. But life isn’t so black and white. Real life is shades of gray.”

  “But you could have caught them. Put them on trial.”

  “Sometimes we did. But sometimes that’s not practical. Sometimes bringing a bad guy in only serves to give his buddies a recruitment tool, something to get angry about.”

  “They don’t get angry when a guy ends up dead?”

  “Sure. But it’s not as effective for them. There’s no evidence, no video to show around. A guy’s just gone.”

  “Was the rumor about bin Laden true? Was that really you?”

  “No. That was SEAL Team Six.”

  “So you weren’t there.”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t there.”

  “You found him?”

  Flynn shrugged.

  “So why didn’t you take him out?”

  “Politics. The way I figured it, there was still bad blood between France and the US after the second Iraq war. The French didn’t think it was justified. And the US knew that Europe’s position made the US look bad. They asked questions the administration didn’t want asked. But later, when the rebuild started happening, it was just like after World War Two. It was US companies that were invited in, it was the US that put the government back together. The French had done a lot of business in Iraq historically—with Saddam and before—and they were losing a lot of that business.”

  “So they made a deal?”

  “The particulars were above my pay grade, but I don’t think it was an exact quid pro quo—this for that. It was more like they were establishing the relationship again, opening doors for French interests to at least get a look in.”

  “So you passed bin Laden to the SEALs?”

  “The CIA came first. We watched the CIA watching bin Laden’s compound for a long time. I think they were keen to glean any intel they could before they took him out, because there were not going to be any long conversations later.”

  “You don’t think they ever planned to capture him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you agree with that?”

  “Cent pour cent. One hundred percent.”

  Hutton released a long slow breath. “What would your dad have thought?”

  “My dad was a Marine. He worked at NATO. Diplomacy was his business. But he was a believer in the big stick method. He would have said that when you have the chance to cut off the snake’s head, you don’t mess around with the tail.”

  “So after Abu Dhabi, why did you join the French Foreign Legion? Why not follow your dad into the Marines?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “It’s not that. I’ve just never verbalized it.”

  “You didn’t tell Beth?”

  Silence, then: “No. Jacques Fontaine was dead. I figured it was better that way.”

  “You don’t have to verbalize it now. It’s okay.”

  “I joined the Legion because the Legion was there when I needed it, and the Marines weren’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Flynn let out a breath. “I was a teenager, remember. I guess I wanted to carve my own path or something like that. I applied to West Point and got in.”

  “The army? That wouldn’t have been popular with a Marine.”

  “It wasn’t. My dad didn’t see my side at all. And I probably didn’t explain it very well. We argued over it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hutton said. “So why didn’t you join the army?”

  “On the day it happened, we argued about West Point. After the argument I stormed off. Went for a walk. While I was gone, a suicide bomber drove a sedan full of Semtex into the resort.”

  “You got lucky.”

  “Luckier than some. Eighteen people were killed, including my parents and my brother, who were eating lunch without me.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Nothing you can do about it. But in the mess that followed, I kind of slipped through the cracks. I got interviewed by some guys from the State Department. I was in shock and they didn’t have the greatest bedside manner, so I gave them a false name. They asked a bunch of questions that I realized were about my dad. They were suggesting he was involved in the bombing.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No. Then a guy from my dad’s unit arrived. He was my dad’s CO, more or less. He found me and told me the government was trying to position my dad as the brains behind the bombing.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. You don’t blow yourself up as part of the plot.”

  “Making sense didn’t seem very high on thei
r list of priorities. Placing blame seemed to be very important though. And if they couldn’t get him, they were happy to get me. So my dad’s CO helped me get out. He managed to get my passport from the resort, and he gave me some money and arranged passage through Saudi Arabia to Egypt. I got a fishing boat to Marseilles. He had a villa there, a vacation place. He told me I’d be safe, until the smoke cleared.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got cabin fever. So I went to a bar. I met a guy there, started talking. I met him again and again, over the course of a week. It turned out he was an officer in the Legion. I didn’t tell him exactly what happened, but I told him I had been interested in the military, but maybe it wasn’t an option anymore. He said if I was interested, and if I didn’t have any criminal record on file with Interpol, I could try out for the Legion.”

  “And you did.”

  “I did.”

  “And what happened?”

  “I got broken down to my constituent parts and then rebuilt. Exactly what I needed.”

  Hutton said nothing. She rolled over, put her hand on Flynn’s chest, and fell asleep.

  The team leader was dozing when his phone buzzed. The call logs for the lawyer’s office had been obtained from the telephone company, and the extension for the woman had been isolated and all the calls to her between the time of the San Francisco meeting and her leaving for DC. had been isolated. The numbers were checked and cross-checked. They came from corporations and lobbyists and banks in Washington and Los Angeles and New York. One number stood out. It was from an unregistered pay-as-you-go phone, bought from a cell shack in Manhattan, New York. The team leader took the number of the PAYG phone and hung up. He punched in the numbers and waited. It was early. There was traffic outside, but the sun was barely there. The call rang on, that familiar electronic pattern.

  “Hello?” The voice was alert, as if it belonged to someone who rose early rather than someone who had stayed up late.

  “Do you recognize my voice?” asked the team leader.

  There was a pause. “I do.”

  “You’ve been at the Watergate.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Let me guess. You got a call from Baghdad?”

  There was no answer.