The Collective

by Jack Rogan

  “That would be good,” Josh said.

  “Hang on,” Bryce replied.

  As he waited, Josh pulled out his pad and pen. He watched up and down the alley as more cops showed up and began to spread out, starting to search Dumpsters and doorways. Some of them found another opening in the fence down behind the Chinese restaurant and went through to the river’s edge.

  The sergeant came back and rattled off the numbers. Phone caught between his ear and shoulder, Josh scribbled them down.

  “Thanks, Sergeant,” he said. “I don’t have any real reason to think there’s a connection, but I figured it was worth a call. Do you have descriptions of the suspects?”

  “Good descriptions, actually,” Bryce replied.

  He rattled them off, probably reading from a BOLO—a Be-on-the-Lookout Order—issued for the would-be abductors. Josh frowned as he listened. Two men, one Caucasian, one African-American. White guy had scruffy hair and blue eyes, African-American had a crew cut and a scar on his face.

  “Thanks for that,” he told the sergeant. “Doesn’t sound like our guys at all.”

  “No problem,” Bryce replied. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  Josh ended the call, clutching his phone in his hand. He stuffed the pad and pen back into his pocket, trying to decide if he was relieved or frustrated that the McCandless case didn’t have any connection to his. If the abductors had been Middle Eastern, they would at least have had somewhere else to start looking for al-Din. Right now, they were turning up nothing in Florida and Maine.

  “Shit,” he whispered.

  Then he heard his name being called. He turned to see Chang approaching the cut in the fence from the river side. He started toward her, meaning to join her in the search, but as he got closer, he saw the expression on her face, the tightness around her eyes and lips.

  At the fence, he reached up and pushed his fingers through the chain link, knowing without Chang saying a word. From the other side, she took his hand through the metal mesh, fingers sliding through the links above his.

  “He threw her in the river?” Josh asked.

  Chang nodded, her features turned to stone. “She’s downstream. Not very far at all. Still wearing the plastic bracelet from the hospital.”

  Josh hung his head, tamping down his rage. When he could force his face to be as impassive as Chang’s, he climbed through the hole in the fence.

  In his career he had not only seen monstrous things, but encountered monsters. Gharib al-Din had just made himself the worst of them.

  “We’ve got to find this son of a bitch,” Chang muttered.

  Josh reached out a hand and touched the small of her back. “We will,” he said, knowing that he and Chang were both silently finishing the thought in the same way.

  Before he does it again.

  Herc stood in the office of his supervisor, Roger Boyce, studying the man’s face, searching his eyes for some evidence that there was something Boyce was not telling him. The problem, he knew, was that Boyce had been a professional liar—working amongst the best professional liars in the world—for twenty-seven years. The man had a ruddy face caused by high blood pressure and snow white hair, along with a smile that might have belonged to Santa Claus, or Jeffrey Dahmer.

  Boyce’s eyes appeared blue thanks to colored contact lenses. In truth, they were brown. The eyes, people always said, were the windows to the soul, but for Roger Boyce, even those were covered in secrets and lies.

  “Do you know anything about this business with Sean’s niece?” Herc asked.

  Boyce frowned. He did not like his subordinates asking questions that weren’t pertinent to an assignment. There were, in fact, a whole host of behaviors that Boyce frowned upon. Normally, Herc attempted to avoid pissing his boss off, but today his natural sense of self-preservation had been overridden.

  “You know as much as I do, Mr. Herskowitz.”

  Herc nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Boyce had been sitting at his desk while Herc had placed the call to Cait McCandless on an anonymous secure line from within Boyce’s office.

  “When the girl contacts you to arrange a date for her brother’s memorial service, inform me immediately,” Boyce said, smoothing his purple tie. “Otherwise, return to your station.”

  “Yes, sir,” Herc said again, not even trying to hide how unsatisfied this made him.

  “You have something else to add?”

  Herc blinked, surprised that Boyce had given him an opening. He pondered the question for several moments, considering the consequences that might come from answering it honestly. He held Sean McCandless’s cell phone in his hands, turning it over and over almost unconsciously, as though it were a key to an unknown door he might open, if only he could find it.

  The window in Boyce’s office looked out onto acres of parking lot, a small duck pond, and then green woods as far as he could see. Above the trees in the distance there were cell phone towers and a white church steeple that thrust up from the heart of Croydon, Virginia, several miles away.

  The sprawling complex with its enormous satellite dishes had been a fixture in Croydon for seventeen years—long enough for people to stop wondering what actually went on there. All anyone really cared about was that the facility provided a number of jobs for local people, even if they were mostly plant management and clerical positions.

  The sign at the end of the long drive from the main road warned that it was private property, but the real sign—and the gate—was a quarter mile up the curving street, out of sight of people driving by. There, the warnings were more explicit, and the guard at the gate was armed. The complex was one of half a dozen major facilities run by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Once upon a time, it had been called the National “Imagery and Mapping” Agency, which Herc had always believed a far more useful name. He was of the opinion that things should carry names that indicated their true purpose, and if “Imagery and Mapping” did not give a clear picture of the agency’s duties, it did at least imply the basics.

  But they were the NGA now. Someone had obviously decided getting the word intelligence into the mix lent their work the appropriate air of gravitas, meant to put them on a par with other divisions of the Department of Defense that were jockeying for the same budget dollars. And Boyce, for one, clearly loved the idea of being part of the “intelligence community.”

  Sean McCandless had liked to say there was no such thing as intelligence in the community, or community in the field of intelligence. And he had known better than most. The guy had been incapable of setting his alarm clock, but his ability to interpret topographical images—to pinpoint the location of caves and gulleys and to identify man-made camouflage, no matter how artful—had been uncanny. The NGA had recruited him out of the Marine Corps’s own intelligence division, and for more than two years, Herc had taught Sean everything he knew about satellite surveillance and the collection of geospatial intelligence.

  And then the DoD had seen an opportunity. When the NGA identified areas of the mountainous regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan as possible al Qaeda bolt-holes, who better to insert into the region to infiltrate the enemy, investigate, and then lead a Special Ops attack squad, if it came to that, than a man who could tell just from looking at the side of a mountain where the caves and tunnels might be, how deep they would go, and where to plant the explosives to bring it all down?

  Who better than Sean McCandless?

  Herc and Sean had remained partners, in a sense, though they no longer reported to the same supervisor. They did the mapping together, made their reports together, and Herc was always in the mission control center, watching all the satellite and camera feeds, when Sean led a team into the shit. Sometimes they consulted Herc during the op, and sometimes they didn’t, but he would be there, whether they needed him or not, because Sean McCandless had asked for him.

  But now Sean McCandless was dead.

  The hospital records would say that he had a rare he
art defect that had gone unnoticed his entire life. Since his body had been cremated, no one would ever be able to call that data into question. No one outside of the NGA and the DoD would ever know that Sean McCandless had been poisoned, or the pain he had endured while lying on the sidewalk down the street from his favorite café in a puddle of his own vomit.

  Up until now, Herc had just assumed that al Qaeda had taken him out. Not al Qaeda, really, because they were a bunch of mad-eyed zealots who had never been very good at blending in for very long. Sure, sometimes it was long enough … but not long enough to get that close to Sean McCandless. Herc figured they had hired a professional to punch Sean’s ticket, and he had already started using back-channel relationships to try to find out who had done the job.

  Boyce would fire him if he found out. Herc didn’t care. Sean had been worth a hundred Roger Boyces.

  Herc stood in Boyce’s office, staring out the window. Maybe five seconds had passed since the white-haired Viagra addict had asked him if he had anything else he wanted to say.

  Herc tore his gaze from the window. He made his expression as neutral as possible.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I guess I’m having a difficult time with the size of this coincidence,” he said.

  Boyce narrowed his eyes. “What coincidence is that?”

  Herc tried not to clench his fists, knowing that Boyce would notice. The guy might not be able to look in the mirror and see what an asshole he was—or maybe he could, and didn’t care—but he knew how to read just about everyone else, and prided himself on it.

  “You heard the conversation, sir. Someone driving a car with blind plates tried to abduct McCandless’s niece the same morning McCandless himself is killed? Sergeant McCandless—”

  “Sergeant?” Boyce asked.

  “Caitlin, sir. She was a sergeant in the Guard.”

  Boyce held up a hand to silence him, lips pressed together so tightly it looked like he might spit. “What kind of connection are you suggesting?”

  Herc let out a short breath. “I don’t know, sir. I only know I have a hard time believing there isn’t one.”

  “You think someone hated McCandless so badly they tried to snatch his sister’s child?”

  “Maybe there’s more to it,” Herc said. “The aunt was beaten. Maybe they wanted the child as leverage over McCandless somehow, and killed him when the abduction attempt failed.”

  Boyce scoffed. “And who is they?”

  Herc flushed, suddenly realizing how he sounded. “I don’t know.”

  “Haven’t I told you to stop reading those fucking spy novels?”

  Herc could not hide how irritated this made him, nor could Boyce hide his smile of satisfaction at the sting.

  “Look, Brian,” Boyce said, patronizing him by using his first name, “you’re very good at your job, but we both know you’re no Sean McCandless. Neither one of us is an action hero, my friend. What happened to McCandless is tragic, and you better damn well believe there’s going to be hell to pay. Hopefully, we’ll play a part in that. But it isn’t our area. All of that is going to be looked into, I’m sure. Until then, you need to return to your station.”

  Nodding slowly, Herc turned to leave the room.

  “Herskowitz,” Boyce said. “Leave McCandless’s phone.”

  Herc glanced back at him. “If Caitlin calls …”

  Boyce nodded, reaching out and gesturing for the phone. “If the sister calls to set up a date for her brother’s memorial service, I’ll deal with her. She needed a friendly voice to deliver the news, but you’re too close to this. I’ll handle any contact with her from now on. And if she attempts to get in touch with you via other channels, just refer her to me.”

  Herc hesitated.

  “Herskowitz? Are you hearing me?”

  “Loud and clear, sir,” Herc said. “Loud and clear.”

  Leyla sat up on the carpet, playing with the rubber animals spread around her. She loved the panda the most, and smiled and beat her heels on the floor whenever she managed to knock it over. There were other toys, too—the big plastic car keys and the weird snake whose segments were different textures, each making a different sound—and she seemed content to play on her own, at least for the moment.

  Cait sat tucked in a corner of her sofa, legs folded beneath her, and sipped at a glass of iced tea to which she had added too much lemon and not enough sugar. The modest flat-screen on the wall revealed CNN talking heads and scrolling headlines that crawled along the bottom of the screen like ants marching to a picnic.

  The phone remained silent—both a taunt and a temptation. She had come home to more than twenty messages, some from friends teasing her about A-Train and others from newspapers and TV news producers trying to interview her about the incident. Cait had erased them all to free up space on the machine, but hadn’t called anyone back.

  Now the news had moved on. Washington politicians squabbled, undermining one another and the nation. A D-list Hollywood skank had survived an overdose that no one dared refer to as a cry for attention. Fires raged in California, consuming thousands of acres and millions of dollars’ worth of real estate.

  Worst of all were the two stories that involved children—the infant stolen from a hospital up in Maine and the string of crib deaths in the Midwest that Jordan had told her about, which the authorities were now admitting might actually have been murders. On weekends, the news seemed more than ever like an endless loop, and she had seen each report at least twice already. Add to those the family—including three-year-old twin boys—who had been killed in Fort Myers, Florida, and it had been a horrifying week in America.

  She knew that such things happened all too often, but now that she was a mother, they cut her more deeply than ever. And yet she allowed the hideous news to wash over her in a constant drone. Whenever one of those stories came on, she sipped her iced tea and looked at Leyla, playing on the floor, and her heart clenched with fear and a love so ferocious that sometimes she thought the two emotions might really be just one.

  Cait glanced at the time in the corner of the TV screen. Jordan and Sarah Lin ought to be arriving soon. That would be good. Being interviewed, telling the story of the attempted abduction—and of her brother’s sudden death—would make her feel like she was doing something. She needed that. Reaching out to the television audience would be sort of like recruiting allies to her cause, and she needed allies right now.

  Lynette’s question from earlier in the day resonated. She had insisted that she had people she could call, and there certainly were such people, but what comfort could they possibly provide? The people closest to her in the world were Auntie Jane and Uncle George, who had dealt with enough today, and Sean.

  Don’t think about Sean.

  Her friend Ronnie had left a message asking if she would be willing to beat him up, somehow making sexual innuendo out of the whole thing. Take away innuendo and Ronnie wouldn’t have any conversational skills at all, but he was a good man. She and Jordan and Ronnie had been the Three Musketeers while serving in the Guard—one for all and all for one—and he had been one of the few who had never teased her about her relationship with Nizam. A blond tank of a kid named Stu Chadbourn had been the one to tell her about Nizam’s death, though Ronnie was the first to say he was sorry.

  But she’d see Jordan soon enough, and she didn’t want to go through the process of explaining it all to Ronnie over the phone.

  Then there were her two best friends from high school. Miranda and Nick were polar opposites still, one aloof and conservative and the other a portrait of laissez-faire, yet she had realized over the years that both had managed to set themselves apart from the world of ordinary people. Miranda had been privileged from birth and had crafted herself a life as both a prominent corporate lawyer and a Boston socialite. Nick Pulaski lived in a room over his divorced mother’s garage and did just enough carpentry to keep himself in pot, beer, and gas.

  She didn’t really know them anymore. Or, perhaps mo
re accurately, she knew them too well. But either of them would come if she called, even if only for old time’s sake. Cait knew there was power in shared experience. She herself cherished the best of her childhood memories so fiercely that she would have been willing to do almost anything for Nick or Miranda if they needed her, not because they meant anything to her now but because of how much they had once meant to her.

  There were others, from before, during, and after Iraq. Even Upstairs David would have offered her a shoulder to cry on and a sympathetic ear.

  But what would she say if she called them? How insane would it all sound? Could she tell Miranda Russo that she thought her brother might actually be a spy, and that she feared he might have been killed because of it? Ronnie and Jordan would believe that, but Cait was not sure even she believed it. Sean vanished from the world for weeks at a time, his movements veiled in secrecy. Wasn’t it possible all of this was another feint, a part of his work? She hadn’t seen a body, and wondered if Herc had. This morning, her brother had been a voice on the phone, and now he was ashes in a jar, and his government employers wanted her to think those had been Sean’s wishes?

  Bullshit. He would never have wanted to hurt her, to deprive her of a chance to say good-bye, and that left only two possibilities. Either the whole story had been a lie and Sean was still alive somewhere, or he had been cremated so quickly in order to prevent an independent autopsy that would reveal the true cause of death.

  Cait hated how much easier it was to believe the latter. After all of the hints Sean had dropped and the jokes he had made, it seemed all too likely. But the idea that he was gone, that she would never see him again, alive or dead, was too surreal for her to accept.

  On the floor, Leyla began to fuss. She had flopped over and pushed herself up, as if she might start to crawl. Most of the time she seemed too lazy to put much effort into learning. Even now, she was trying to reach the plastic keys, which were her favorite thing to gnaw on, without actually crawling. The keys were just out of reach and the baby’s face turned red with irritation.