The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  He wasn’t a big man, but he was undeniably larger than life. Bombastic. Outspoken. A lover of opera. A hater of all enemies, foreign and domestic. Recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, numerous Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts. He was as loyal a friend and as tough a warfighter as you’d find anywhere, one you wouldn’t want to meet in a firefight, let alone that proverbial dark alley. He was ordinarily given to loose-fitting camp shirts and baggy paratrooper pants, which was why I was more than a little surprised to see him decked out in a well-tailored, conservative gray business suit and glossy black wingtips.

  “Never figured you for a Brooks Brothers man, Buzz.”

  “I’m management now, if you can believe that bullshit. Gotta look the part, right?”

  “I suppose so.” I followed him to the elevator. “Cleveland? What’s up with that?”

  Buzz punched the up button. “Low rent and plausible deniability.”

  “Deniability of what?”

  The elevator doors slid open. A FedEx deliveryman got out pushing an empty handcart and headed for his van. Buzz nodded to him politely and waited until he and I were safely alone inside the lift.

  “Are you asking me from a hypothetical perspective?”

  “I could be,” I said.

  “Good, because hypothetically, let’s just say that it’s a lot easier for the White House to deny running its own direct-action operation in Cleveland than it would be, say, Inside the Beltway where nobody can keep a secret.”

  “You’re working for the White House?”

  “Who said anything about the White House? I was talking hypothetically.”

  “Roger that.”

  He jabbed a button with the second knuckle of his right middle finger, the tip of which was missing. The doors slid shut. The elevator began moving. Buzz watched the floor numbers light up. “We need to get you read in and get this candle lit. We don’t have much time.”

  I knew enough not to ask any more questions until we got upstairs.

  V

  The sign on the office door said, “General Motors Employee Relations, Midwestern Operations.” Actually, it didn’t say that. It said, “United Airlines Support Services.” Okay, it didn’t say that, either. The name of the corporation on the door can’t be revealed for security reasons. Let’s just say it’s one you’d instantly recognize. And let’s also say that what goes on inside the place has nothing to do with that corporation.

  Buzz tapped a code into a digital keypad and the door clicked open. The first thing I noticed as we walked in were the two plain-faced women sitting behind a reception counter. Short hair. Tight, angular jaws. Humorless eyes that missed nothing. Both were ex-military police officers. That was my guess. I’d dated one or two MPs back in the day. A lot of fun on Saturday nights, once you got past all that girls-will-be-boys macho.

  Filling the wall behind the receptionists was a large mural that advertised the operation’s aforesaid corporate cover name and provided a visual representation of the work ostensibly done there—images of workers on automobile assembly lines, or of a United 747 in flight. Or neither of those. You get the picture.

  One of the receptionists requested my photo ID while Buzz stood by and looked on. She scanned my driver’s license into an electronic card reader like those the TSA relies on at the airport to make sure you’re not cozy with the Taliban. Then she typed something on her computer and handed me a laminated pass, orange with a big blue “V” on it, which I clipped to my shirt.

  Buzz tapped code into another digital keypad.

  “After you,” he said, holding the solid core wooden door open for me.

  Glancing over my shoulder as I walked into his inner sanctum, I noticed the collapsible stock of a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun within easy reach underneath the receptionists’ desk.

  General Motors, indeed.

  THREE

  In movies and on television shows featuring classified intelligence agencies, the nerve center is almost always some glassed-in, ultramodern beehive of activity where quirky but brilliant analysts can instantly access even the most obscure facts using state-of-the-art technology. Buzz’s Cleveland-based operation was more true-to-real-life. In other words, it was nothing like that. Twenty or so casually dressed, mostly young people sat in cubicles, peering intently at flat panel computer screens while talking in hushed tones on telephone headsets. The atmosphere was about as Jason Bourne-like as a telemarketing bullpen, only without all the noise.

  “Don’t let looks deceive you,” he said, pausing to proudly survey his domain. “These kiddies know what they’re doing.”

  “What are they doing, Buzz?”

  “Whatever the president tells us to.”

  “Hypothetically speaking, you mean.”

  “Touché.”

  His new command, Buzz explained, was code-named Acme, which sounded suspiciously similar to Alpha, our former employer. Both agencies were off the books, meaning neither officially existed. But unlike Alpha, which was deemed a hunterkiller operation, Acme’s mandate was more hunter than killer.

  “Our mission is generating actionable intelligence,” Buzz said. “We leave the throat-cutting to others. In theory, at least.”

  “That’s so antithetical to a knuckle-dragger like you.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. Hey, it was a three-grade pay jump from my DIA billet. So I ain’t exactly complaining, except now I spend half my time here in Ohio, wearing a suit and being slowly killed by PowerPoint presentations. The old lady doesn’t seem to mind too much, though. Gets me out of the house. She can’t stand living with me anyway. Says I would’ve been better off living in a cave, chasing mastodons.”

  “That certainly would be my take.”

  He saluted me with a single upraised finger.

  “How many guys like me do you have working for you, Buzz? Any other alums from Alpha?”

  “Better off you didn’t know that, Logan. Compartmentalization. All that.”

  “Roger.”

  I followed him through the warren of work cubicles. The view out the window was of Lake Erie and FirstEnergy Stadium, home of the Cleveland Browns.

  A huge man with blue Scandinavian eyes and ruddy cheeks, a bushy yellow beard streaked with gray, and blond hair down to his shoulders stood up as we entered Buzz’s corner office, smoothing the trousers of his pin-striped, navy blue suit. The guy looked like a Viking banker. He was clutching a manila file folder that was stamped in red, “TS-SCI—Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.”

  “Cordell Logan, Arvid Hauksson,” Buzz said by way of introductions. “Arvid’s my X-O. He’s from the teams.”

  “Your executive officer’s a SEAL? Wow, Buzz, you must’ve really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. I’ll try not to hold that against you—or him.”

  Hauksson grinned. “I’ve heard good things about you, Logan. You’ve got quite the reputation in the community.”

  Commandos and government-sanctioned assassins tend to know each other, or of each other. As they say at Disneyland, it’s a small world.

  “Nice to be loved,” I said.

  He shook my hand like he was trying to break it. I guessed him to be about my age, but at six foot four and pushing two fifty, he had a good three inches and sixty pounds on me.

  “There’s one of those food trucks parked down the block,” Buzz said. “Dude makes one badass breakfast burrito. Who’s in?”

  “Music to my ears,” I said.

  “You want extra chorizo on it?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “Arvid, burrito?”

  “Not for me, thanks. The wife says I gotta drop ten pounds.”

  “And you listen to that noise?” Buzz was incredulous. “Did your wife drop into Pakistan and help grease bin Laden, too?”

  “She cares about my well-being, Buzz.”

  “Your well-being? If she cared about your well-being, Arvid, she’d let you have a goddamned burrito
once in a while. I swear to god, I’m calling Little Creek when we’re done here. Your fellow frogmen, they’re gonna want to hear about this.”

  Hauksson stared up at the ceiling and exhaled like he knew he couldn’t win. “Fine. Gimme a burrito. Extra chorizo.”

  Buzz leaned out the door, ordered somebody to go get us three burritos with extra chorizo, closed the door, told us to sit, then dropped into his high-back leather chair behind his big executive desk. He propped up his feet and eyed me over the toes of his glossy black wingtips.

  “So, Logan, I’m assuming you’ve heard of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam?”

  “The name rings a vague bell.”

  He opened the belly drawer of his desk, got out a nail clipper, and began working on his fingernails. “What about the Hanoi Hilton? Ever heard of that?”

  “By Hanoi Hilton, I’m assuming you mean the prison camp in Hanoi where the North Vietnamese tortured our downed pilots, not the actual hotel run by Paris Hilton.”

  “Paris Hilton doesn’t run Hilton Hotels, Logan. She’s like a model or something.”

  “Actually,” Hauksson said, “no one’s really sure what she is.”

  “I was being facetious,” I said.

  “Facetious?” Buzz clipped his right thumbnail. “What is that, Logan, one of your fancy air force words? Too bad you zoomies can’t fight as well as you sip coffee and vocabularize.”

  He waited for me to fire back some equally insulting remark about the army, but I was long used to his incessant teasing and let it slide. Grizzled ground pounders like Buzz relish taking potshots at the air force—a “country club with airplanes,” they like to call it. All of that name-calling ceases, of course, the minute they’re being overrun by enemy infantry and screaming into their field radios for someone, anyone, to please come save them. On those occasions, as far as army infantrymen are concerned, the air force is the greatest invention since strip joints and chewing tobacco.

  Buzz looked over at his second-in-command. “Okay, Arvid. Give him the dump.”

  Hauksson opened the file folder he was clutching and handed me a briefing paper. “Four days ago,” he said, “a former guard from the Hanoi Hilton was murdered. His name was Pham Huu Chi, except our guys, the ones he guarded, didn’t call him that. They called him Mr. Wonderful. Some civilians found his body floating in a lake in downtown Hanoi, stabbed to death. He’d been with three former American prisoners of war the night before. All three were pilots who’d spent time at the Hilton.”

  “The Vietnamese consider all three suspects in the murder,” Buzz said.

  I wanted to know what they were doing in Hanoi to begin with.

  “Washington arranged a big, ceremonial ‘kiss and make-up’ dinner,” Hauksson said. The administration wants to expand a multibillion-dollar, bilateral trade agreement with the Vietnamese. The hope is that both sides will sit down and negotiate revisions in import quotas and export restraints. Then, factoring in prevailing market pressures in the major commodity exchanges—”

  “Arvid, for Chrissake, this isn’t Econ 101,” Buzz said, focused on his clipping. “We’re burning daylight. Get to it.”

  Hauksson went on. “None of the POWs had seen the guard, Mr. Wonderful, since 1973, when the war ended and they were repatriated stateside. The dude had a reputation for being more sadistic than any other guard at the Hilton. He liked to beat ’em half to death with a tire iron just for fun. Hence the moniker, ‘Mr. Wonderful.’ The deal was they’d all meet for dinner in Hanoi with toasts and speeches, etc., etc., in the furtherance of international commerce.”

  “Old adversaries letting bygones be bygones, all that happy horseshit,” Buzz said. He gathered up his nail clippings and dumped them in a trash can. “Things apparently were going along peachy keen until Mr. Wonderful showed up in that lake.”

  Two of the former prisoners, Hauksson said, were being held under house arrest at a hotel in Hanoi. The third had left Vietnam shortly after the guard’s body was discovered and before he could be detained. Upon his return to the United States, he’d been briefly questioned by Defense Department investigators and had denied any knowledge of the murder. Vietnamese authorities were demanding his extradition, threatening to rescind the trade deal unless he was returned forthwith. The problem was that the United States has no extradition treaty with Vietnam. Both sides had been able to keep the story out of the press, but for how long no one could predict. Washington feared that once word of Mr. Wonderful’s murder was made public, the trade deal would quickly unravel.

  “We need boots on the ground over there,” Buzz said, “somebody who can get in there quick and quiet, who can think on his feet and generate accurate assessments as to who might’ve stuck this asshole so that the White House can know how to respond appropriately. The other concern is the health of our two guys they’re holding. The president’s worried about them having to relive being in captivity, the whole POW experience. We know the name of the hotel in Hanoi where they are being held—the Yellow Flower. We think they’ve cordoned off an entire floor. If we can find a slick way to get them out of there before the whole thing turns into a bigger shit sandwich, so much the better. That’s where you come in, doctor.”

  I looked at him, not fully understanding.

  “You’re going in as a psychologist,” Buzz said.

  As a humanitarian gesture, Vietnamese officials had agreed to let an American mental health expert into their country to assess and help manage the emotional well-being of the Americans being held there. I was to play that expert. The plan called for me to fly to the Vietnamese capital where I would pretend to be a psychologist while attempting to determine who really was responsible for Mr. Wonderful’s murder and ideally figure out a way to get the two former POWs out of the country. Buzz and his crew had constructed an elaborate cover story for me, replete with faked credentials and an impressively extensive online history designed to counter any suspicions that I was anyone other than “Dr. Bob Barker, PhD.”

  “Bob Barker? Are you serious?” I tried not to laugh.

  “What’s wrong with Bob Barker?”

  “Buzz, Bob Barker hosted The Price is Right for, like, two hundred years.”

  “The price is what?”

  “It’s a game show,” Hauksson said. “On TV. Contestants guess the price of toasters and shit.”

  Buzz turned to his executive officer with an accusatory look. “Bob Barker’s a game show host? Why didn’t I know about this?”

  Hauksson shrugged. “Do I look like I have time to watch game shows? I liked the name, that’s all. It just came to me, boss. It was a coincidence, that’s all.”

  Buzz looked away, thinking, exhaled, then turned toward me. “Well, it’s too late to change it, anyway. We’ve already built the infrastructure online, your backstory. We’ll just have to make it work, that’s all. My guess is that nobody in Vietnam has ever heard of this show, anyway—what was it called again?”

  “The Price is Right,” Hauksson said. “It’s still on.”

  “The Price is Right. And they guess how much toasters cost? This is what passes for entertainment these days?” Buzz shook his head. “Ridiculous.”

  “There are a hundred guys out there who could do a better job than me on this op,” I said. “I pulled triggers, Buzz. I wasn’t exactly a primo undercover operator.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Logan. You operated undercover plenty. And you fly by the seat of your pants better than any operator I’ve ever known—except, of course, me.” Buzz got up, leaned out his office door, and barked at one of his staffers to put a rush order on our burritos.

  “But I don’t know the first thing about how to play a psychologist, Buzz. I’d probably be better off seeing one on a regular basis, not pretending being one.”

  Buzz scoffed. “Like there’s anything you really have to know to be a psychologist.” He sat back down at his desk. “You wear sweater vests. You talk softly. You ask sympathetic questions. ‘When did you
decide you hated your mother?’ ‘If you were a tree, what kind would you be?’ You’ll be fine, Logan. Trust me. Piece of cake.”

  I told him about the commercial with Kiddiot that had found its way onto YouTube, how I’d achieved a certain degree of international notoriety because of it, and how I was concerned that such celebrity might blow my cover.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “They don’t watch cats over there. They eat ’em.”

  “Actually,” Hauksson said, “it’s dogs the Vietnamese eat—in the north, anyway. It’s considered a delicacy. In the south, they prefer rats.”

  Like I really needed to know that.

  “Why wasn’t the FBI assigned this mission,” I asked, “or the State Department?”

  “The State Department?” Buzz grunted. “State’s a bunch of inept weenies. They couldn’t investigate their way out of a lighted broom closet. And the FBI? Christ, Logan, the last thing the White House needs is a bunch of lawyers and accountants with guns who think they’re real cops going in there big-footing everybody like they always do and pissing off the Vietnamese government even more than it already is.”

  “What about Langley?”

  “Vietnam’s been a backwater for those guys since we pulled out forty years ago,” Buzz said. “Whatever human intelligence assets they maintain in-country are marginal at best. Under ordinary circumstances, believe me, the CIA could give a giant flying crap about what goes on in Hanoi.”

  My involvement in the operation, Buzz said, was expected to take no more than a week. Get in, find out what I could, and get out. That was my mission. He told me how much I could expect to be paid for my services. I didn’t quibble. The money was more than generous, especially compared to my old government service salary with Alpha.

  “There’s something else you need to know,” Buzz said, his tone turning somber. “One of the men they’re holding is an old acquaintance of yours.”

  As if on cue, Hauksson pulled a three-by-five-inch color photo from the file and handed it to me.

  The gaunt, dark-haired man in the picture wore the blue dress uniform of a United States Air Force lieutenant colonel, his blouse festooned with silver command pilot’s wings and seven rows of ribbons, among them the Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross. He was sitting at an angle to the camera, posing for an official portrait shot with the American and air force flags behind him. His smile, which seemed pained, revealed stained, uneven teeth. His long thin nose looked as if it had been broken more than once, and his watery blue eyes radiated a tangible sadness. I recognized him instantly as Steven Cohen, my brilliant former philosophy professor from the Air Force Academy.