by Richard Fox
A nuke and a cruise missile were in the Caliban Program’s possession. Deep down, Ritter didn’t feel like the world was a safer place for it.
Chapter 9
There was no good way to look debonair with one’s arm in a sling, Ritter decided. Dressing himself without his dominant arm was a challenge, and he’d had to wear his suit jacket over his right shoulder like it was a shawl. The staples holding the bullet wound on his shoulder together nagged at him, as much for the itching as for the reminder of how close he’d come to getting killed. Again.
Eisen Meer kept a number of doctors on retainer, all well known for their respect of patient confidentiality. An elderly Austrian doctor had tut-tutted over him as he sealed the cut on his face with skin adhesive. Gluing a wound shut struck him like something infantrymen would do, not a doctor with a wall full of diplomas.
The same doctor had cleaned out the rest of his wounds and given him prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics. He took only the latter. The doctor promised Ritter’s arm would heal completely in short order as long as he didn’t pop his staples or “have another workplace accident,” as the doctor so gently put it.
Ritter shifted from foot to foot as the elevator hummed upward. Shannon gave him a day to get patched up, then ordered him back to the office immediately afterward. Vienna wasn’t the same place for him anymore. There had always been a threat from foreign intelligence agencies against him and the office, but after the bloody mess with Moshe and his team, he had a new enemy. If Mossad and the Israelis decided to retaliate, the action would be swift and brutal.
Ritter felt useless in the city. His sling made him stand out like a sore thumb, and ditching a tail was nearly impossible for him now. He wouldn’t favor himself in a fight with a common mugger, much less one of Mossad’s assassins.
The elevator to the Eisen Meer office opened, and Ritter stepped past a pile of boxes and packing material outside the reception desk. Through the Plexiglas walls, Ritter saw more boxes taped up and labeled for shipping. Office workers were clearing out their desks and packing their contents away. A man in overalls was scraping away the company’s name from the wall with a painter’s spatula.
“Hello, Mr. Ritter,” Pfennig said from her desk.
“What did I miss?”
She frowned and buzzed the door open. “Ms. Martel is waiting for you in the vault.”
Ritter pushed through the first door, and all the offices in the back, where the real work of the team was done, were vacant. Even the pile of spent juice boxes and empty potato chip bags from Tony’s office was absent.
The vault door was ajar. Shannon sat with her back to the door; it was a horrible bit of tradecraft that would have earned him a slap on the back of the head from Carlos or Mike. The only other things in the room were a table with a teleconference speaker and an empty chair. He pulled the door open with a grunt and stepped inside.
“Shut it,” Shannon said.
Ritter complied, and the door locked itself with a pair of heavy clicks. A red light on the ceiling switched to pale green.
Shannon wrapped her arms around Ritter and hugged him close, careful not to touch his injured shoulder. Ritter, surprised by this sudden display of affection from her, managed to pat her on the back. Her hair smelled like vanilla and lilacs.
She leaned back and ran a finger down the side of Ritter’s injured face.
“It adds character, but…no. We’ll have a plastic surgeon look it over. Can’t have you with a scar there, now can we?” she said.
“I’m building up a collection,” Ritter said.
“Sit, sit.” She tapped perfectly manicured fingernails on the empty chair seat. Ritter eased himself into the chair. Everything hurt today.
Shannon smoothed her skirt and nibbled on her bottom lip.
“I’m sorry. We didn’t know the Israelis were the buyers for the Korean weapon. That they’d turn on you wasn’t part of our risk calculus either. We should have pieced it together, and you and Mike almost died for my mistake,” she said.
“If we had perfect knowledge, we’d play the lottery, not the spy game,” Ritter said. “What do we do about Mossad? They coming for us? Brontislava won’t be happy with the loss of the security team.”
Shannon sighed.
“Israel is why we’re relocating to the Reston office. The local Mossad contact, Ari—”
“The scumbag?”
“Ari was arrested in Slovenia with a kilo of cocaine in his trunk. Anonymous tip—most unfortunate for him. I called in a few favors, and known and suspected Mossad agents will have a hell of a time getting into Europe for another week at least. Enough time for us to get back to the States and regroup,” she said.
“Do we have to go to ground for this?” Ritter said. Getting a new identity and spending a year or more masquerading as an intelligence contractor in Arizona wouldn’t contribute to the war against al-Qaeda.
“No, just need to let the passions die down. We have the nuke, and we’ll intone that we have proof they were the buyer. The threat of going public will keep them in check. We can drink mai tais on a Haifa beach this time next year.”
“I’d rather not poke the bear, if that’s all right with you.” Ritter shifted in his chair. “Israel has nukes. Good ones. Why do they want one from North Korea?”
“All nuclear material has a signature. During the Cold War we picked up residue from Russian nuclear tests and traced the uranium back to a single mine in Siberia. One industrial accident later, and Russian nuke production came to a sudden halt. Measurement and signature intelligence, MASINT—amazing stuff.
“If the Israelis had used their own nuke on the Club K, the world could have traced it back to Israel. A Korean nuke is a wild card. They haven’t done enough nuke tests to establish a signature. Their weapon is untraceable,” she said.
“Is that why we want it?” he asked.
Shannon stiffened. If it was anyone else, Ritter would have known a lie was coming.
“I don’t know why we want it,” she said. Ritter’s face tightened in confusion.
“We all have our orders. Even me. Which brings us here. You weren’t cleared for that operation after the initial attempt to secure the device. Circumstances dictated that you stay in play, and I made the call.” Shannon’s hand went to her shoulder, to touch a phantom wound that was all too real for Ritter.
“I need you to tell me if you can remain silent about the device. Forever.”
Why? Why obtain a nuke and not expose all the guilty parties for their crimes? The questions burned in Ritter’s heart and danced on his tongue. To ask was futile—he knew that. The Caliban Program was a need-to-know organization. Curiosity was a trait that would get you fired—or worse. If he kept his head down and his mouth shut, the answers might come to him.
“It’s better we have it than anyone else. I’ll stay quiet,” he said.
Shannon nodded, her eyes sad.
“Then I have a word for you: Caius. When the Caius protocol is in use, anyone who comes across anything associated with that word is either marginalized…or eliminated. The nuke is Caius. Do you understand?”
Ritter had seen “Caius” on the message she’d sent Mike. The pieces fell into place quickly. That message had told Mike that the Israelis had to die but that Ritter must be spared. Why? Why was he so special?
“Caius,” Ritter said.
“Thank you, Eric. That’s done. Can you do me a favor with Natalie?” she said.
Shannon gave Ritter his instructions and shut the vault door behind him after he left.
She grabbed the teleconference speaker and spun it around. The green light showing an open line was still on.
“Well done,” a twisted voice said.
The light snapped off.
Shannon buried her face in her hands and wept.
Natalie opened the Styrofoam packs and guided the jaeger schnitzel onto plates with a butter knife. A side of tart-smelling, warm potato salad went on each pla
te.
“This is the closest I’ve come to cooking in months,” she said loudly enough for Ritter to hear. She heard him laugh from his bedroom.
She carried the plates to the little table and set them down. A dusty pack rested on one of the seats. She grabbed the carry handle, thinking it weighed only a few pounds. Her first tug at the pack told her something heavy, very heavy, was inside it.
“What the hell?” she said. She unzipped the pack and did a double take. She picked up a gold bar, almost the size of her forearm, loose gold coins covered the bottom of the pack.
“Eric?”
Ritter came out of the bedroom, his bad arm swinging loosely at his side.
“Oops, forgot about that,” he said. “I’ll drop it in a deposit box tomorrow. Worry about it later,” he said.
“This is almost”—she tested the weight of the gold in the bag against the weight of the bar in her hand—“a million dollars in gold.”
“Just put it on the couch, please.” He sat at the table and tried to open a bottle of Perrier water one handed.
Natalie left the gold and a slew of questions on the couch and grabbed the bottle from Ritter. She twisted the cap off and poured for both of them.
“Okay, the fortune in gold aside, what’s our plan?” she asked.
“We fly back to the States tomorrow and move to the company’s office in Reston, northern Virginia. Pack light. Anything you leave behind will get sent on later. And…we’re married,” he said.
“Come again?”
“Couples attract less scrutiny, and I need some help on account of my workplace accident. Shannon’s idea. I have our passports somewhere, Mrs. Chesterfield.”
Natalie gave Ritter a wry smile. “Not the worst thing I’ve had to do this week. So much for Salzburg, huh?”
“To misquote my favorite Austrian, we’ll be back. Someday,” he said.
Ritter tried mashing his jaeger schnitzel with the side of his fork with little success. Natalie pulled his plate closer and cut up his entire plate of food for him.
“Thanks, honey.”
“Is this how it’s going to be in our marriage? Me doing all the work?” she said.
“Only after I get shot.”
She pushed the plate back to him. The veneer of calm she’d held up to that moment fell away. Ritter watched as her face darkened and she drew her arms in to wrap them around her stomach.
“Is it always like this?” she asked quietly. “I got used to the life and death risks when we in Iraq. At least there I knew who the bad guys were, our mission, our priorities. Black and white. Now I don’t know who is on whose side. The Russian arms dealer is our friend. Mossad is our friend until they aren’t and they stab you in the back. Everything is…gray.
“No. This was”—he took a bite of potato salad and considered his next words carefully—“a special kind of miserable. Everything we do is in that gray area. Just the nature of the game.
“You’re OK with that?”
“I accept it. We had ideals in the Army, standards. Brontislava, Mossad…don’t. If we try and do things by our old standards we will lose, and you can imagine the consequence. If I had the chance to go back in uniform and do things on the up and up, I wouldn’t. My way of thinking has been set free,” he said, his interest in dinner gone.
“You think we’re ‘free.’ Someone is pulling our strings. Shannon may be an ice queen but I know she wasn’t on board with sending you and Mike out there with Mossad,” Davis said.
“Strings…Are we puppets if we play our parts willingly?”
“You aren’t at all curious who those,” she lowered her voice “directors are?”
“Ever since I joined, our mission has been to protect the country, make the terrorists pay for what they’ve done. I have faith in that.”
“Speaking of faith. Do you know what happened to…it?”
“It’s safe,” he said. Once the nuke was handed off to the other team, his need to know went away. The fact that he hadn’t been called in to find it since then was of some comfort. The nuke was Caius, and he couldn’t have Natalie asking about it further. Time to change the subject.
“You finally took care of Suleiman?”
“It wasn’t intentional,” she said. Natalie recounted the whole ordeal in Beirut for Ritter. Her posture changed as she spoke; her shoulders slouched forward, and her head lowered. “Carlos debriefed me when I got back, and things were quiet—I mean, things were quiet in the office, not for you—until Shannon walks out of the vault and says we’re closing down.” She looked away.
“He was a bad man. He—” Ritter caught himself. Not because Suleiman’s history was classified. The man had forced his daughter, Baida, into marrying a jihadist to curry favor with al-Qaeda. After his daughter died in a drone attack in Pakistan, he’d used her martyr status to build even more clout with the organization’s financiers in Saudi Arabia. Ritter didn’t want to explain his relationship to Baida, his involvement in her death, and the final resolution with her husband, Haider, years later in Iraq.
“I wish I’d been the one to do it,” Ritter said.
“Is it always like this? The killing. The manipulation…The giant pile of gold on your couch,” she said.
“Not always. The gold is definitely an oddity. Do you want to stay on? We can transfer you anywhere you want if this isn’t for you. Even back to the army,” he said.
“Is the world a better place because of what we’ve done?” she asked.
“It may not feel like it, but I think so.” Ritter could believe that, in time. The deaths, suffering, and betrayal were still raw wounds in his mind and on his body.
“I’ll stay on, if Shannon will let me. I think I did nothing but screw up this whole time,” she said.
“You made it work in the end. We’re much more about the ends than the means,” Ritter said.
Natalie chuckled.
“Ends,” she half whispered.
Ritter nodded. Part of him railed against what he was about to do. He could stop her from taking the path into darkness he’d chosen years ago. Stop her from ever becoming like him. But it wasn’t his choice to make.
“I have a word for you, Natalie. A word you must never repeat. The word is Caliban.”