by Thomas Locke
She turned on her real phone, coded into the built-in scrambler, and listened to the series of pings confirming that the line was now secure. Instantly her phone rang. “Clawson.”
“I’ve been phoning you for hours.”
“I’m here now, Patel.”
“Somebody is tracking you.”
Patel Singh was the best techie Reese had ever worked with. But his verbal gyrations left her tired. “Strang’s in-house people?”
“Of course not. You think I’d be panicked over a company clone?”
“Patel.”
“What.”
“Lose the histrionics.”
“Well, he rattled me.”
Reese tended to sigh a lot when dealing with this man. “What do you have?”
“Somebody ran through the Harbor firewall like it was smoke. I mean it took him less than a minute.”
At a knock on her door, Reese said, “Hold one.” She hit the switch on the desk’s underside, and the door’s electronic lock clicked. Weldon Hawkins and their chief of security entered. Reese waited until the door was locked once more, then said to her phone, “But you checked and there’s nothing on me for them to find, right, Patel?”
Weldon slid into the seat opposite her. Trace, the security chief, took up station by the door. Weldon said, “Can Patel wait?”
Reese replied, “There’s been a breach.”
Trace came to full alert. “Of the Combine’s security, or here?”
“We’re not sure.” She hit the phone’s speaker button and set it on the desk. “Go ahead, Patel. We’re all listening.”
“I’ve gone all through Harbor Petroleum’s system. Their file on you is empty. That’s not the point.”
Weldon nodded agreement. “The breach has to be tied to Strang’s visit. Patel, who was the hacker?”
“That’s the next problem. I can’t find him. I lost him in Kuala Lumpur. The guy almost trapped me. His cutout was the Malay intelligence agency’s personnel system. I heard the alarm bells in California.”
“That all?”
“I wish. When your man Hazard left headquarters, he made two calls. One was to Glenda Gleeson. The star. The other was to a number in Alaska. A number that doesn’t exist anywhere.”
Trace said, “So Hazard walks outside, calls the source you used to confirm what we know about him. Then he contacts an outsider, somebody not on Strang’s payroll. And we get breached.”
Reese nodded agreement. “Patel, I’ll get back to you.” She cut the connection.
Weldon said, “Your cover’s blown.”
“Shredded, more like.” She recalled the way Charlie Hazard had watched her play with the seat between them and said, “I thought I had the guy hooked.”
“Maybe you can convince Hazard to ignore the evidence.”
“Doubtful. If he already has an outside tracker hunting us, something alerted him to our hidden agenda.”
Weldon shrugged. “So we up the ante. Offer him more money and anything else that might—”
The phone rang. Not her purse phone. The one on her desk. The one through the company switchboard.
Weldon said, “Answer it.”
Reese did so. “Clawson.”
The operator said, “Mr. Hawkins has an urgent call. I was told he might be with you.”
Reese said to her boss, “It’s for you.”
“Put it on the speaker.”
Reese punched the speaker button and said, “Go ahead.”
There were a series of clicks, then a voice demanded, “Am I through?”
“This is Weldon Hawkins.”
“Strang here. I wanted to thank you for the meet.”
“Do we have a deal?”
“Absolutely. But it doesn’t include Hazard.”
“Those weren’t my terms, General.”
“Now, you listen up. You know as well as I do, these Ranger types are all cowboys. That’s why we have them. They’ll scale whatever wall stands between them and their target. But sooner or later the civilized polish wears off and you’re left with nothing but extreme risk. I hired Hazard to be an asset. He’s just crossed the line and become a liability. So he’s been deleted from my portfolio. I’ll bring in my best men and do the job right. That’s all you need to know.”
Weldon hesitated a fraction, then said, “Clawson will be in touch next week. We’ll let you know our decision.”
“Roger that. Strang out.”
Weldon hit the button and said, “Toss Strang enough crumbs to make sure he doesn’t squawk.”
Trace, still stationed by the door, said, “Hazard was Ranger?”
Reese did not need to check Charlie Hazard’s file to verify. “He did a month-long tour in Iraq. Less. His first trip up-country, he took a hit. When he got out of rehab he spent three years at Fort Benning and another two at FLETC.”
Trace looked worried. “Nobody said anything about the guy being Ranger.”
Weldon said, “What’s the issue here?”
“For one thing, it was a total waste of time, sending some no-brain bikers up against him.”
“We had an hour’s notice,” Reese replied. “We did the best we could. All they had to do was slow them down. They failed. We’re dealing with it. End of story.”
“Not if he connects us to the attack.”
“We had a firewall. Several. There’s no way he can uncover our involvement.”
“But you want me to take him out, right?”
“Absolutely,” Weldon replied. “He’s walked away from the offer. We can’t leave him out there to cause us trouble.”
“We don’t know that he will,” Reese said.
“We’ve been through all that. There’s no other reason for Gabriella’s team to have brought him in.”
Reese looked from one man to the other. Sometimes she felt their male aggression led from one absurdly belligerent action to another. But this time she sensed they were genuinely worried. “Hazard is just one man. And we still don’t have confirmation that he’s agreed to help Gabriella out. Why are we getting so worked up?”
“Because he’s Ranger,” Trace replied.
Weldon asked the security chief, “Can you still do the job?”
“You find Hazard for me. Fast as you can. We want to strike before he gets any confirmation we’re involved.” Trace frowned at the heat beyond the window and added, “I’ll need my entire team.”
11
Charlie rented a car at the Fort Myers airport and followed the state map to Lake City, a charmless low-rent sprawl about sixty miles inland from Tampa. From there he headed another twenty miles east, along a road so flat it looked ironed. The scenery was pure Florida wilderness, scrub pine and brush and cattle and humidity. He pulled into a tiny lakeside community at sunset, rented a motel room, and ate a solitary meal in the town’s only diner. The mattress was ancient and the springs noisy, so Charlie pulled the covers onto the floor and slept soundly.
He awoke in the dark hour before dawn and was the diner’s first client. He then drove to his destination, parked on the street, walked around the house, and settled onto the lakeside dock.
The home of Colonel Donovan Field was unpretentious in the extreme. The colonel had never much cared for what other people considered elements of the good life. He had lived for duty, service, loyalty, patriotism. The more these components became unpopular, the less the colonel had to say about anything.
Donovan Field had run the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, known as FLETC among the intelligence trade. All field agents with DEA, CIA, and State, as well as every Homeland division except the FBI, trained there. Many city antiterrorism divisions also sent their detectives. Defense intel, which constituted more than sixty percent of the nation’s total intel budget, used FLETC for advanced training.
Twenty minutes after Charlie arrived, he heard a screen door slam. The last time he had seen the colonel was at his own wedding, when Donovan had given his secretary away. Charlie recalled
that day as the colonel tottered across the lawn to where he sat on the lakeside dock. Donovan had needed to lean heavily upon the bride’s arm. That day, as now, his legs had seemed impossibly frail for carrying such a massive upper body. The colonel had been badly wounded in the first Iraq war. He did not speak about it. Charlie knew a number of other old warriors who treated their injuries in the same careless manner. The world was not perfect, their silence said. Deal with it.
A truly ancient terrier panted at the colonel’s feet. Donovan limped over and offered Charlie his hand. “How are you, son?”
“Fine, sir.” Charlie watched the terrier slump onto the dock and stare at the water. “I don’t remember a dog.”
“My sister-in-law passed away last year. I agreed to give him a home. The old boy has arthritis, a bad heart, cataracts, and no sense of smell. He’s been exactly the same way for twelve years. Probably will outlive us both.” The colonel settled onto the bench beside Charlie, bent over stiffly, and scratched the terrier between his ears. “I heard through the network you lost your wife.”
Charlie gave the colonel the raw truth. “About nine months before she died.”
“I’m sorry, son. Is that why you’re here?”
“No.” He stretched out his legs and watched the morning mist drift over the water. “Nice place.”
“Libby thought so. But she’s gone, and I find it lonely here by myself.” Donovan grunted and settled back on the bench. “Are you ready to tell me why we’re having this conversation at dawn on the end of my dock?”
Donovan had several qualities rare in officers and men. One of them was the ability to set the world aside and listen. He sat and stared out over the water as Charlie described the meeting with Gabriella, the highway attack, the experience at the hospital, the telephone conversation, the trip with Strang, the meeting at Harbor Petroleum, the ultimatum. Charlie finished with, “If you can make sense out of that, sir, you’re better off than I am.”
The dog growled from his position at the colonel’s feet and gave the empty waters a hoarse bark. The colonel slipped his foot out of the shoe and stroked the pup’s side. For the first time, Charlie saw the stubs where the colonel’s toes should have been.
Donovan said, “Sounds to me like you’re facing your very own breakout.”
The words took Charlie straight back. The colonel had often started his toughest conversations that way. A breakout was military speak for an event that shattered all existing parameters, such as when the enemy introduced utterly new tactics, or the Pentagon sliced budgets in half and demanded the same operative capacity. The colonel had been known throughout the country’s intel divisions for being the best there was at preparing agents for breakout events.
Donovan continued, “What you need to decide is whether you’re ready and able to grow beyond your current mind-set.”
“Absolutely.”
“Don’t respond too hastily. Growth means change. Change of this kind can bring gut-wrenching challenges.”
A grey-winged crane swept over Charlie’s head. The morning was so quiet he could hear the air filter through its wings. The crane flapped twice and came in for a landing in the reeds to their left.
Charlie said, “After the accident when my wife died, I spent six weeks lost in a fog of painkillers. Finally the doctors stopped offering refills and I switched to booze. I hated both, but it was easier than facing what I had inside, which was nothing at all.”
The crane moved with impossible grace for such an ungainly beast. It lifted one leg like a ballerina caught in the amber of dawn, settling it down so carefully the water was not disturbed. It took another step, shifting through the reeds, hunting.
Charlie went on, “I started attending AA at a church down the block from my empty apartment. I went back to my job with the insurance company. I got out of bed and I put on my tie and I drove to the office and I came home and I watched whatever sport was on television. I joined a gym. I knew I was coasting, but I told myself this was the best a guy like me could ever ask for. And a lot better than I deserved.”
The colonel might have waved the words aside as not worthy, or he might have been swatting a fly. At his feet the dog kept up his hoarse panting.
“Then General Strang showed up and offered me a job. Afterward it felt like I had returned to the only thing I would ever be good at. There’s never been any real satisfaction to the work, not then and not now. More like, everybody’s got to do something to fill the void. I might as well do this. Then Gabriella showed up, zapped me with those harmonics, zinged me out of my body . . .” Charlie shook his head. “I can’t believe I actually said those words. But ever since waking up that next morning in the passenger seat of a stranger’s car, I’ve carried the feeling that everything has changed. If I want. If I’m ready.”
The crane struck the water and emerged with a fish flapping silver in the daylight. The bird lifted its head and swallowed. The fish shivered hard enough to be visible as it slid down the crane’s gullet. The bird froze once more, quiet as the reeds, quiet as the water.
“The luckiest of us reach a moment when we wake up one day and discover what we want to do with our lives.” Donovan’s foot continued to rub the dog’s scruffy chest. “I wish I could say it’s all downhill from there, but I can’t. What I can say is, if you don’t take hold of that chance when it comes, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
Charlie tasted the truth, retreated, then forced himself to ask, “What if I don’t have what it takes anymore?”
Donovan looked at Charlie for the first time. “The life well lived is a search for identity, priorities, peace, wholeness. I’m not saying you’ll ever find them. But having the courage to even speak the words puts you ahead of the crowd. Then one day, the fortunate few discover something they can give their total allegiance to. They identify a purpose that creates harmony from all the impossible elements and all the past pains. Even speaking that desire aloud is terrifying. What if you’re wrong? What if you get halfway down that road and find you’ve been fooled by life again? What about everything you’re giving up? The risks are huge. Of course you’re scared.”
Donovan grunted as he bent over and covered his stub of a foot with his shoe. “Too many people coast through life, Charlie. They keep waiting for that perfect solution to all their problems. Until their calling arrives risk-free and tied in a lovely blue ribbon, they have their safe little excuse for not moving at all. They never grow beyond the delusion that life should deliver dreams on comfortable terms.”
He grunted again as he hoisted himself to his feet. The dog rose with him and panted off the dock. “Don’t make that mistake, son. You can’t attach a dollar value to truth. If you run from a lifetime chance just because the price is high, you’ll drown in shadows or cynicism or both. You grab hold with both hands. And you get ready for the fight of your life.”
12
If Reese did not actually work here, she would have considered the Reserve the scariest place on earth. Forget Kabul at midnight. Skip the Kurdish borderlands between Iraq and Syria. Knowing what she did, she would rather march through Tehran wearing nothing but an American flag than take on the Reserve.
But since this was her own personal enclave, Reese’s secret name for the Reserve was Power Center.
“The founders had three models in mind when they designed the Reserve. The first was a high-tech retreat center called Jason’s, where each summer the nation’s top fifty physicists are brought together and given a problem the Department of Defense cannot solve. Jason’s was originally run by the Stanford Research Institute, but when the California university system started its leftist drift, the project was taken over by the Mitre Group out of Washington. The name originated from the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, in which the Golden Fleece offers total protection from the gods of destruction.”
Reese was midway through the part of her job that she most detested. Once each quarter, every corporate member of the Combine could send
their new reps on a tour of Reese’s world.
The Reserve was the headquarters for a group that did not exist. But it had to have a name, so some bright individual had come up with the idea of calling it the Combine. Each corporate member appointed three senior executives who attended the Combine meetings and acted as point men. These executives were the only ones who could visit the Reserve. Just three. New corporate members often complained this was not much in return for a joining fee of fifty million dollars and annual dues of another five. But all such comments died away the first time they sought the Reserve’s help.
Reese went on, “The second model used in structuring the Reserve was STRATFOR, where twenty futurologists make initial design concepts for so-called impossible tasks. Stealth technology was a direct result of their work. The third model was DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which made its name with advances in anti–submarine warfare known as MADs, for Magnetic Anomaly Detectors.”
Every three months, Reese did this little go-round for new Combine execs. Weldon flatly refused to have anything to do with them. The trouble with most corporate power guys was, they couldn’t keep up. They were all cloned from the same gene pool—conservative, old, stodgy. They resented change because change threatened the company’s bottom line and their own grip on power. Their talk centered on risk management and hedging bets. Given the chance, they would lock the future in a cage.
Thankfully, Reese was almost done with this ordeal. They had dined in the residence and attended their first power talk in the main conference center. They had met the current team of live-in brains, brought together from a variety of fields. Four of the execs had slept right through the brains’ summary of future trends. Reese had brought them outside for a breath of fresh air before the final act. They were fully alert now, waiting for what Reese secretly called the big bang.